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the female defendant, transfixed the crowd and had the jury’s full attention for four days as he laid out a story of passion and conspiracy to commit murder.
    Pitre maintained that he had been totally in love with Maria and that it was she—not he—who had convinced him that the only way they could ever hope to marry was to have her husband killed.
    He testified that Maria was terrified that she would lose custody of her children if Dennis divorced her and that she couldn’t bear that. According to him, she begged and nagged him to help her until he finally agreed. “I was doing something that I didn’t want to do. I knew it was wrong,” Pitre earnestly told the jury.
    He described how the pressure from Maria to kill her husband built during the last days before Archer’s murder. “I felt I was losing my grip on things.” Pitre said he thought about seeing a psychiatrist and that he spent some time reading I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (a book then popular about a young woman institutionalized for schizophrenia). Try as he might, he testified, he was unable to stop the inexorable progress toward murder. He sighed as he said that he himself could not bear the thought of murder, but then he couldn’t stand to lose Maria, either.
    Pitre recalled that Maria had first brought up the matter of killing her husband a few weeks before the murder. They were making love on the floor of his apartment when she initially broached the idea after he asked her, “How can I really make you mine?” He told the jurors that she had answered quickly: “The only way I can really belong to you is if you kill Dennis.”
    He was shocked, he said sadly, to hear her say that.
    The witness said he tried at first to suggest the demise of Dennis Archer in a nonviolent way. Pitre admitted that he purchased three bottles of Sominex—an over-the-counter sleep aid—and gave them to Maria, hoping that she would believe they might poison her husband and therefore trust that he, Pitre, was sincere in helping her. That didn’t work. She told him he’d better find a more effective way to kill Dennis.
    Killing Dennis had to be a sure thing, not just something that would give him a stomachache or put him to sleep for a day. It needed to be death by gunshot or knifing or bludgeoning.
    Because the community knew of his affair with Maria, the couple realized that neither of them could actually carry out the act of murder. They had to find someone totally unconnected to Dennis Archer, someone no one would recognize or remember who could do the killing. Stranger to stranger, the most difficult kind of homicide for detectives to solve.
    The jurors, transfixed, watched Roland Pitre as he glibly told them a story that sounded as though it had come out of a film noir.
    The plan had been refined, Pitre testified, to the point where he and Maria decided that he would contact his old friend, Steven Guidry, in Louisiana and fly him up to Washington, furnish him with plans of the Archers’ house layout, give him a gun, and send him off to do the job. Guidry would have firm instructions to make Archer’s murder look like the by-product of a burglary that he had interrupted. If this had been a forties movie, the plan would surely have called for Guidry to die, too, after he had accomplished his deadly assignment.
    Pitre said he had contacted Guidry and offered him $5,000 to do the killing. Guidry countered by saying he would do it for nothing. This was very hard for the jury and the gallery to swallow.
    Pitre testified that he picked up his old friend around noon on Saturday at the airport south of Seattle. He immediately drove him to the Whidbey Island ferry and then to his apartment. There he gave Guidry a key to the Archer residence and the gun, explaining that he and Maria would be miles away from the murder location. After Guidry had determined that Dennis Archer was indeed dead, he was to call Pitre and give him the code words “Bernie Garcia.”
    The