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Summer, 1980

For servicemen, there is good duty and bad duty. They are at the mercy of superiors who dispatch them around the globe, but few navy men would deny the many benefits of being stationed at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Oak Harbor, Washington. There is also a U.S. Marine detachment stationed on the island. With Deception Pass to the west and Skagit Bay to the east, the setting is idyllic, a virtual vacation spot. Sailors—civilian and navy alike—anchor pleasure craft in Oak Harbor, and it has a small-town atmosphere: friendly, welcoming. Like most small communities, there are few secrets. Neighbors know neighbors' business, and gossip flourishes. Love triangles are rarely as clandestine as the participants believe they are. Most sexual straying there is uneventful, but the scandal and shock waves that reverberated throughout Oak Harbor in mid-July 1980 were of a magnitude seldom seen. When the dust settled, those involved and onlookers hoped devoutly that nothing like it would happen ever again.

Because of what happened shortly after ten PM on that sultry Sunday night of July 13, 1980, four lives that had come together from widely scattered parts of the world were irrevocably changed. One man died instantly in a barrage of bullets from a .357 Magnum. The other three principals would tell divergent stories during a lengthy trial in Judge H. Joseph Coleman's courtroom in Seattle as the 1980 Christmas season approached. There was no question of holding the trial in Island County; there had been too much pretrial publicity, and there probably wasn't a citizen in the whole county who hadn't heard of the murder of Lieutenant Commander Dennis Archer.

I attended that trial. Much of the convoluted narrative that follows is either directly from court records or from my conversations with close associates of the principals and from detectives' precise recall. Some of it is from my own observation.

The testimony that was elicited in Judge Coleman's courtroom was so explosive that spectators lined up for hours to get in, content to sit packed into the rows of hard benches in the overheated room, eager to listen to the almost unbelievable sequence of events that led up to the brutal slaying of the high-ranking naval officer.

One of the defendants on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy was Dennis Archer's widow, Maria Elena, 32, an exquisitely beautiful woman of petite stature. She could not have been more than five feet tall, and she wore her long dark hair pulled back from her face and loosely braided in shining waves. Once released from its braids, her hair would make a shimmering cascade reaching below her waist. She didn't look like a cold-blooded murderess. Her voice was soft and her clothing was feminine and demure.

But then, most murderers don't look the part.

The second defendant was a man Maria claimed she had never met. He was, she said, a complete stranger to her. His name was Steven Guidry. He was 26, a short man with a slight build, rather attractive with his sideburns and handlebar mustache. Guidry had come to Oak Harbor from his home outside New Orleans on the fatal weekend Dennis Archer was killed. But he had stayed a very brief time, unusual after traveling such a distance.

The third figure in an alleged plot to kill Maria's husband was not on trial. He would be a witness, but he had already confessed to conspiracy to commit murder. He was Roland Pitre, 27, and was also originally from Cajun country near New Orleans. Pitre was a Marine Corps staff sergeant and Maria's admitted ex-lover. To save himself, he had agreed to turn state's evidence and promised to take the witness stand to bolster the prosecution's case.

Roland Augustin Pitre Jr. was a good-looking man. He looked every inch the Marine, although he no longer wore the uniform. He wasn't much over five feet ten inches tall, but he was extremely muscular. He carried himself as a longtime military man is expected to. His part in this puzzling murder was clouded. Was it possible that he was admitting guilt to protect someone else? No one doubted that he and Maria Archer had enjoyed a consuming and passionate affair so intense, both of their marriages had been teetering on the edge of divorce. Murder made divorce unnecessary.

Just what part Roland Pitre might have played in Archer's murder no one but the investigators and the attorneys yet knew.

What happened to make this man turn on both the woman he swore he loved and the man who had been his best friend since their boyhood? The first overt betrayal on Pitre's part proved to be only the onset of a quarter of a century's worth of crimes to come, tumbling down one after the other until justice began to seem not only blind but deaf, too.

Of course, none of us sitting in that courtroom could know that then. All we knew was that the engrossing trial was certainly not a slam-dunk case for either side. Nevertheless, observers expected it all to be over before the holidays so that the lawyers, jurors, reporters, and the judge's staff could enjoy Christmas and then move into the New Year and the next newsworthy case.

The female defendant, Maria Elena Archer, was born in Oruro, Bolivia. She had three older sisters and a younger brother, and her wealthy family could well afford to send her to private schools in Bolivia. When she left Bolivia in 1966, Maria had already completed the equivalent of two years of college; she was as brilliant as she was beautiful. And beautiful she surely was.

Maria went first to Ohio State University in Columbus, but the campus and the city were just too big and overwhelming for the 18-year-old, and she moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where she attended Oregon State University. Although even at trial some fourteen years later Maria still spoke with a lilting Hispanic accent, her grasp of languages was excellent. Indeed, she majored in languages, business administration, and psychology at Oregon State. She attended college there for almost three years, excelling in her studies and attracting the eye of more than a few male students.

It was Dennis Archer who won her love after they met in class and began dating. Dennis was a handsome, solid young man about to graduate with a degree in electrical engineering, which would make him a sought-after candidate for a career in the navy. The husky American and the flowerlike girl from Bolivia made a storybook kind of couple when they married in Corvallis on December 27, 1969.

Dennis's first duty station took them to Pensacola, Florida, for four months. Home of the Blue Angels, the navy's incredibly synchronized jet flying squad, Pensacola had charming old houses and white-sugar-sand beaches. They were lucky, too, when Dennis was assigned to a naval base in Corpus Christi, Texas. Again, they stayed just four months before another transfer.

The first permanent home the Archers ever had was in Oak Harbor, Washington, where Dennis was a Navy Air Arm navigator.

Oak Harbor and the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station became a true home base for the Archers. Their first child, a girl, Denise, was born there ten months later. Maria was saved the arduous chore of packing up, moving, settling in again every year or so, and the Archers remained in Oak Harbor for ten years, although Dennis was often away on deployment. Maria estimated later that Dennis's duties kept him away from home for at least four of their ten and a half years of marriage. Service wives have to accept that. When they cannot, their marriages usually end in divorce.

Copyright © 2005 by Ann Rule