Read Worth More Dead for Free Online Page B

arrived from Louisiana wearing only rubber thongs as footwear seemed one of the more minor oddities in a case already so strange. But then what are the rules of dress for someone contemplating murder? Suit and tie? Trench coat? Hip boots? Whether Guidry wore thongs or sneakers didn’t seem to have much to do with his guilt.
    Now Gil Mullen smiled sardonically as he pointed out that Pitre’s insistence that Guidry was such a loyal friend that he offered to be the triggerman for nothing, refusing $5,000, money he needed badly, defied credulity.
    And what are the limitless bounds of friendship? The jury was considering these peculiarities when counselor Mullen hit on an area that shocked most of the gallery.
    Mullen elicited an admission from Roland Pitre that he had considered murdering his 20-month-old daughter earlier in the summer of 1980. For profit. Pitre admitted that he had insured Bébé’s life for as much as he could, an amount the State estimated at $45,000. He said the thought of killing little Bébé, who had been entrusted to him in temporary custody, had seized his mind—but for only a day or so. Then he said he dismissed the idea.
    “But the thought did occur while I was putting Bébé to sleep for her nap,” Pitre testified. “I said ‘Nothing better happen to you, or I’ll be a rich man.’ ”
    “What method did you consider when you thought of killing your daughter?” Mullen probed.
    Pitre said he had considered killing the child with a drug overdose by giving her access to his medicine cabinet or maybe stuffing her into a plastic garbage bag so that she would suffocate or throwing her from his moving van. He hastened to add that Maria had known nothing of these dark thoughts.
    Pitre was asked about various statements he had made about Dennis Archer’s killing, with Mullen often pointing out discrepancies. Pitre answered that everything he said in each statement was “true at the time.”
    Targan, the evil being, was blamed for the murder in a statement Pitre gave on August 28.
    “Is Targan still with us today?” Mullen asked.
    “No, he’s not.”
    “Targan had nothing to do with it?” Mullen probed.
    “No, but at that time, I thought he did.”
    “You once claimed to be a hit man for organized crime in New Orleans. Was that true?”
    “I was making a joke,” Pitre said with a smirk, as if it were laughable.
    Pitre maintained in court that he felt overwhelming guilt about Dennis Archer’s murder. He said that there were times when he found it was difficult even to look at himself in the mirror to shave. But he was resolute about his testimony that Maria Archer had been the one who pushed and prodded him into arranging her husband’s killing.
    “I was used,” he said flatly.
    As the trial moved into its second week, Maria Archer herself took the witness stand, seemingly undisturbed by the television and still cameras that recorded her every movement. She appeared to have no stage fright in a courtroom filled to overflowing with the curious. It was easy to believe Maria. She perched on the edge of the witness chair, looking almost childlike, so tiny that her feet hardly touched the floor. She wore a plaid pleated skirt, a dark blazer, and a ruffle of white at her neck, and she smiled often, although it was a subdued smile, one suitable for a young widow.
    Her voice was so soft that even with the amplification of a microphone, it didn’t reach to the rear of the courtroom. The jurors leaned forward in their chairs, straining to understand her words.
    By testifying in her own defense, Maria opened herself up to cross-examination, but she seemed prepared for that. Her own attorney asked her many of the “tough” questions, aware that they would be forthcoming from the prosecutor, David Thiele, on cross. Mullen used this effective technique to defuse any of her answers that might make the jury think badly of her. If he asked them first, they wouldn’t have as much impact when the