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witness said he explained to Guidry that the gun was to be dropped off the Deception Pass bridge as they drove to Sea-Tac airport after the murder. The water below was so deep that no one would ever find it.
    The plot to murder Maria’s husband sounded so cold-blooded as Roland Pitre spun it out. Cold-blooded it was and planned to the minute. On Sunday night, July 13, Pitre testified, he took his sister over to the Brocks’ home to visit as he planned. He had been very careful that no one in Oak Harbor saw Steve Guidry and kept him hidden in his van until the moment came for him to leave for the Archers’ house. Maria would not be there, of course, because they had planned for her to leave her home well before Guidry got there. The children were not to be hurt; they were to be shut up in the basement so they would not witness their father’s murder.
    After Pitre dispatched Guidry to commit murder, he said, he spent his time waiting for Maria, “frying fish, and watching Mork and Mindy.”
    The judo expert then described to the jury a Maria Archer who was completely different from the loving mother and penitent unfaithful wife that she portrayed herself to be in her statements and testimony.
    “She got there, and we sat on a sofa for a while,” Roland Pitre told the jurors. They gazed at Maria Archer as she sat at the defense table, her head slightly bowed, her hands clasped in her lap.
    “I was laying down with my head in her lap, and she asked me to make love to her,” Pitre continued. “That was about twenty minutes after she got there. We went upstairs. During the time we were upstairs, she asked several times what time it was and whether I thought it had happened yet. I told her I didn’t know. It was supposed to happen when it was dark. But the time wasn’t specific.”
    Pitre recalled that Maria rose from the bed, began to get dressed, and was brushing her long, dark hair about 10:30. She had then made a couple of phone calls, including one to her friend, Lola Sanchez.
    “Maria told me that Lola had told her she shouldn’t be seeing me and that Dennis was going to find out about us and she was going to lose everything,” Pitre testified. “Then she said, ‘You know, she’s right.’ Maria said it would be better for me and my daughter and for her and her kids if we not see each other anymore.”
    “I said, ‘You know, Maria, Dennis is probably dead now.’ ”
    “She said, ‘I know,’ and then she left.”
    Roland Pitre said he had realized suddenly at that point that he had been “tricked” and “manipulated” into arranging his lover’s husband’s murder and that Maria had never intended to marry him at all. He had been duped. The thought of what he had done for a love that didn’t really exist ate at his mind like acid. Not surprisingly, he said his mental problems had grown worse after his arrest, that he had stopped eating and drinking and that he even lost his memory for long periods of time. He actually began to believe that it was an evil being named Targan who made him do the bad things he did to keep Maria’s love.
    Still, he recalled that Maria came to visit him once in jail and that she mouthed the words “I love you” during that visit.
    But she never came back.
    Roland Pitre was supremely convincing as the betrayed lover, who was now facing years in prison because he had been seduced by a wanton woman and used to carry out her murderous desires. On the witness stand, he managed to hide the muscles of a trained judo expert and looked like the pathetic loser he claimed to be.
     
    Now it was time for the defense. Maria Archer’s lawyer, Gil Mullen, one of Seattle’s most effective criminal defense lawyers, tore into Roland Pitre during cross-examination. Mullen aimed at Pitre’s credibility as a witness, which he showed was highly suspect by quoting lies in several statements Pitre gave to the Island County lawmen since his arrest. Pitre’s statement that Steven Guidry