Victim

by Gary Kinder

  Commander Hall had determined that the search warrants drawn by Prosecutor Newey and signed by a county judge were valid and could legally be executed on the base. With Pierre and Andrews in custody Greenwood assigned three officers to ride in the squad car transporting Andrews back to the station, and two others to accompany him and Pierre. The remaining detectives and Tac Squad personnel broke into teams of four or five and began searching the three rooms, Pierre’s, Andrews’s, and the one in which Pierre was arrested. The crime-scene technicians, who had been at the base processing evidence since the first items were recovered from the Dumpster, joined in the searches. Shortly after the searches began, the two squad cars bearing Pierre and Andrews departed from the barracks parking lot.

  On the way back to the station, a fifteen-minute drive, Pierre spoke once. Greenwood had been making small talk since the car had pulled away from the crowds gathering in front of the barracks. He was asking Pierre where he was from, how he liked the Air Force, what he did all day on the flight line. Pierre sat facing forward, not speaking, seemingly not hearing. The base was dark and the driver of the car, Jerry Burnett, was smoking a cigarette in the front seat, while Greenwood sat in the back asking question after question of Pierre and hearing nothing from Pierre’s corner of the car but silence. Burnett was not familiar with the roads at Hill Field. As he approached a darkened intersection, he slowed to consider the three possibilities, wondering aloud, “Now how the hell do you get off this base?”

  Greenwood was looking out the window to see if he recognized any landmarks, when from the other corner of the backseat he heard, “Turn left here, sir.”

  Pierre was giving directions. Burnett turned left and proceeded along another dark road. As he approached the next intersection, Pierre spoke again.

  “Turn right here.”

  Burnett and Greenwood later described the tone of Pierre’s voice as “polite.” At every turn, until they arrived at the base gate, Pierre “politely” directed his captors across the sprawling air base. But once they had cleared the gate and were on the open highway headed for Ogden, Pierre resumed his placid expression, staring straight ahead, mute.

  * * *

  Word of the capture of Pierre and Andrews already had got out, and though it was nearly midnight, the squad cars transporting them to the station were greeted by a crowd of some two hundred Ogden citizens. The two cars edged through the crowd and into the police garage at the center of the building. While Pierre remained seated and still in the backseat, Greenwood got out of the car, walked around, and opened the door for him to get out. As the two men passed the elevator at the end of the garage, news photographers and cameramen gathered in the hallway opened up with bright lights and flashes. Pierre would appear in the paper the next day, his eyes closed and his face bunched up in a wince of annoyance. Behind him in a coat and striped tie would appear Greenwood, one eye and the flat corner of his mouth visible to the right of Pierre’s cocked head.

  A minute later Fisher guided Andrews through the crowd by a grip on his triceps. Andrews was snapped with a glint in his eye and a smirk across his face.

  No one even attempted to interrogate Pierre. No one asked him where he had been the night before or what he had been doing from six to ten. Once inside the station, no one spoke a word to him. As Greenwood came into the hallway with Pierre, Chief Jacobsen pulled the Tac Squad leader aside and asked him to address the crowd waiting outside. “Just make a statement about the arrests and the charges against these guys,” he told Greenwood. Another officer took hold of Pierre and ushered him onto the elevator and up to the ninth floor to be booked. Neither of them said a word on the elevator. When Pierre was booked, the officer locked him in a holding cell alone until morning and left.

  It was now one o’clock. Downstairs, on the first floor, Andrews was taken to a small room used by the city meter-maids and seated in a chair, his manacled hands dropped down behind the chair back. The officer who stood next to him was a powerfully built man of thirty-nine, with blond hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a ruddy face. R. E. “Pete” Peterson taught classes in interrogation techniques to other officers, and he was ready to begin the tentative questioning of Andrews. Peterson had two gray eyes, one real and one glass. On hard cases he had been known to pop that glass orb out of his head and aim what remained of the skin-flapped hole at the suspect.

  Peterson gave Andrews his rights and asked him if he understood them. Andrews said yes. Then Peterson explained them again, this time in greater detail. Andrews again indicated that he understood. Peterson began his questioning, Andrews answering slowly, thinking long about each question before saying a word. When asked where he had been Monday night, the night of the murders, he told Peterson that he and Pierre had been at the movies watching a picture called Blackbelt Jones. Peterson himself had talked with one of the airmen at the barracks when Pierre and Andrews were arrested. The airman had told him that he had seen Pierre and Andrews at the base movie house together on Sunday night watching the same Blackbelt Jones. Peterson stopped Andrews and told him that he and Pierre had been seen at the movies not Monday night, but Sunday night. That’s right, they had, said Andrews, they had gone to the same movie together two nights in a row.

  Andrews then surprised Peterson by volunteering that he had been in the Hi-Fi Shop the previous Saturday afternoon. Andrews said that if they found his fingerprints on any of the stolen property, it was because he had handled all of the merchandise in the store that day.

  Peterson was easy on Andrews, treated him “delicately” so there was no chance of “dirtying up” the case. “But you could see he was boiling inside,” he said of Andrews later. “Until we had him arrested and down here, I don’t think he fully realized what he had done. He reminded me of a guy who was trying to play it as cool as possible, but he wasn’t a cool character. When I confronted him with a piece of evidence, he would just stare at the wall and I’d have to bring him back again. Then he seemed to remember and he would talk and then suddenly he would seem to go ‘Oh, my God’ as realization came back. I think he wanted to talk about it, to get it off his chest, but he just wouldn’t let himself. I was looking for him to blame it all on Pierre. But he was scared to death of him. Whenever I asked him about Pierre, he would tighten up. I think he would have talked if he hadn’t had so damn much fear of Pierre.”

  After thirty or forty minutes Andrews finally said that he could not help them anymore. Peterson said, “Cannot or will not?”

  “Both,” said Andrews.

  * * *

  Pierre and Andrews were in custody, and the victims’ personal belongings had been found in the Dumpster just outside their barracks. But still unaccounted for was twenty-four thousand dollars in stereo equipment. Back at the base, officers from Detectives, the Tac Squad, and Tech Services continued to search.

  Moore, Empey, White, Varley, and a crime-scene analyst named George Throckmorton had been assigned to Pierre’s room. The previous night until almost daybreak Throckmorton had been in the Hi-Fi Shop basement, sketching the scene, measuring, photographing, gathering evidence. In seven years of police work it was the first time he had found himself silent, concentrating on technical questions just to bend back his emotions. It was the first time, too, that he would refer to the atmosphere of a crime scene as “sacred.” The mood was different now. Where he and the others had been careful not to disturb anything in the basement, and had even spoken in hushed tones, everything in Pierre’s room was to be torn apart.

  The room was austere: two writing desks, two dressers, two lamps, two bunks. It was designed as living quarters for two men, but Pierre was the sole occupant. The walls were beige, and unlike the rooms of other airmen they were clean of all posters and pinups. On one wall hung a single framed picture of Pierre sitting in his uniform next to an American flag, affecting a valedictorian pose. Stacked on the floor were karate magazines, a few pornographic directories with black-and-white snapshots of naked women, and a whorehouse guide to the
neighboring state of Nevada. Under it all stretched a plain, gray-brown carpet.

  The bunks were taken down and the mattresses pulled apart. The footlockers and wall lockers were emptied. The lamps were studied, a small refrigerator was examined, all drawers in the desks and dressers were opened and turned upside down. Pierre’s closet was ransacked and the contents spread across the floor. The ceiling was checked for removable tiles. When an area of the room had been scoured by one officer, another came along behind him and did the same again. And then a third officer, and a fourth, until the room had been searched five times over. But other than a blue parka spattered with a white chemical residue and a substance that looked like dark blood, the only evidence they found were brochures of stereo equipment. On the back of one brochure was a list of three Ogden stereo stores. Beneath the name of each store was a checklist of stereo components and their makers. The Hi-Fi Shop was first on the list.

  Down the hall in Andrews’s room another team uncovered a pair of rubber surgical gloves hidden on a closet shelf between two pillowcases and a T-shirt. A brown paper bag was wadded up inside the wastebacket and contained several clear plastic album covers with the Hi-Fi Shop label. But as with Pierre’s room there were no weapons and no sign of the dozens of large speakers, amplifiers, and turntables taken from the Hi-Fi Shop.

  When Pierre’s room had been thoroughly searched, Throckmorton said that only one thing remained to be done, and that was look under the carpet. It was after one in the morning, and most of the men had been without sleep for almost two days. The carpet covered the entire floor, and the only way to look under it was to shift the bunk beds, dressers, and other furniture around the room, each time peeling back the free corner of the carpet. That meant moving all of the furniture at least twice, some of it four times. After the furniture was wrestled across the room the first time and piled in the southeast corner, Throckmorton ripped up the flap of carpeting in the opposite corner and found nothing. Everyone but Throckmorton and Empey left the room. On his way out Varley turned to Throckmorton and said, “You can’t hide a stereo under a rug.”

  Twice more Throckmorton and Empey dragged furniture from one corner to another, but each time they lifted the carpet and pulled it back, they found nothing. After the third corner had been looked under with no results, Empey left to join up with his partner, Moore, and return to the station. Throckmorton continued to work alone, finally going out into the hall to ask an OSI agent there to help him move the last piece of furniture, a dresser, off the southeast corner of the carpet. As the agent tilted the dresser back, Throckmorton reached down and pulled the carpet out from under it and then began stretching it back toward the center of the room. But before he had raised it far, there appeared between the carpet and the padding a white envelope.

  “Well look what I found,” said Throckmorton.

  He picked up the envelope and opened it. Inside was a rental agreement between Dale Pierre and Wasatch Storage. Wasatch Storage was a maze of garagelike units at the corner of Twenty-sixth and Wall, only a few blocks from the Hi-Fi Shop. Pierre had rented Unit 2 the previous day, April 22, the day of the murders.

  “That has got to be where all the equipment is,” Throckmorton said to the agent. Then he stepped out of the room and yelled down the hall to White. “Bingo! Deloy, we got ‘em!”

  Sometime after two in the morning Deloy White went back to the station and got a search warrant for Unit 2, Wasatch Storage. By now all of the officers who had remained at the barracks to search the rooms of Pierre and Andrews had returned to Ogden. Most of them knew that the rental agreement had been found, and they were waiting, filling out their reports, until the search warrant had been obtained and it was time to serve it. They all wanted to be there when the door to the storage shed was lifted.

  As late as it was, the search warrant was quickly granted. Then, led by Deloy White, a procession of police from all departments headed out the back of the station and drove the three blocks to Wasatch Storage. Unit 2 had a military padlock on it. With thirty to forty police waiting in front of the unit, White produced a key chain he had taken from Pierre at the time Pierre was arrested. One of the keys fit the lock. White sprang it open and slid the door up.

  Half a dozen flashlights flickered into the small garage. It was piled like a treasure trove with expensive stereo components. When they saw the glistening metal stacked in front of them, the officers cheered, and the mass of them took about three steps forward, but then they stopped.

  “Let’s everybody get back,” one of the captains was saying. “We know it’s here, we can’t process it all tonight. Let’s come back in the morning when we can all think straight.”

  When the shed was closed again, White put on his own padlock and the crowd of officers dispersed, slapping each other on the back and offering congratulations. But even before they had got back to the station, the good feelings had begun to disappear. Mike Empey later recalled the mood when he returned from the storage shed. “There were comments from several officers that even though the case was pretty much wrapped up, that the evidence had been found and the property recovered, there were still all these people whose lives were ruined, and no matter what we did there really wasn’t much to change that.”

  Kevin Youngberg, now with thirty-three days’ experience in police work, was assigned to guard the storage shed. Across the street from Wasatch Storage was an alley next to the old, abandoned Ranch Cafe. Youngberg backed a patrol car into the alley where he had a clear view of Unit 2. It was early Wednesday morning; everyone else left, went home to sleep, some for the first time since Sunday night. Later, they would learn what was in the shed, and the doctors and nurses at St. Benedict’s would finally know what had caused the burns around Cortney’s mouth and the bloody foam spilling from his lungs. None of the police had seen anything specific, just a maze of stereo equipment illuminated by flashlight. No one had noticed the stereo dust cover resting upside down in the middle of the pile. Nestled in the dust cover was a black and yellow car mat, and wrapped in the car mat was a small green drinking cup. Next to the cup was a large bottle, only half-full, with a label that read, “Tough on Clogs, Won’t Hurt Pipes.” It was liquid Drano.

  Youngberg sat in his patrol car alone watching the shed for the rest of the night.

  FUNERAL

  That was a mistake to go down to the police station. Lynn wanted to go down and see them, and he didn’t think he could get in unless I went. So I thought, Well, I’ll go down and just look at ’em. That was the one thing I regret doing.

  Shortly after Pierre and Andrews were captured late Tuesday night, radio and television stations broadcast news of the arrests, and local newspapers featured the story with front page headlines Wednesday morning. The panic that had been mounting in Ogden during the twenty-four hours following the murders now was turning to anger, and one angry citizen was Byron Naisbitt’s brother-in-law, Lynn Richardson, father of Hi-Fi Shop owner Brent Richardson.

  When Lynn learned that Pierre and Andrews had been captured at Hill Field, he telephoned Byron. The two suspects were locked up on the ninth floor of the Municipal Building in downtown Ogden, and Lynn wanted to look at them. He wanted to go down to the courthouse, up to the ninth floor, “and look the bastards in the eye,” he said later. “It was such a hideous, senseless crime, I wanted to see if they walked on four legs or not.” He called Pierre a “yellow mad dog,” and added: “They both were cowards, you know, they could be nothing but cowards to act like that. Talk about them being black, they can’t be black, they’re yellow. We wanted to see who could be that completely yellow.”

  Byron doubted that the police would allow them in to see Pierre and Andrews, but he agreed to meet his brother-in-law at the station. The police were holding Carol’s jewelry, which Byron had to claim at the station anyway, and though he wasn’t sure why, he too wanted to look at the alleged killers, especially Pierre. He wanted “to see what kind of a person could do this type of thing to another hu
man being.”

  When the two men arrived at the police station, Lynn was directed to Police Chief Jacobsen’s office and Byron to the sergeant’s desk, where he identified and collected Carol’s jewelry. After signing a release, he then joined his brother-in-law, who was already talking with the chief. As the office door closed behind him, Byron held out his hand so the other two men could see what the killers had overlooked. In his palm lay three rings and a watch.

  “I’m glad they didn’t get these, too,” he said. “They’d be hard to trace probably.”

  The watch was a 14-karat gold Rolex. One of the rings was set with jade and a diamond, and the other two were plain gold bands, one bearing a large diamond solitaire that Byron had given to Carol for a recent anniversary.

  “There was probably more on her fingers here,” Byron sighed, “than all of the stuff they hauled out into that truck.”

  Lynn kept looking at the jewelry in Bryon’s hand and shaking his head. He had been enraged when he first entered the chief’s office, but now he had begun to cool down.

  “They didn’t care what they got,” he said. “They had such a lust to kill that that was the main thing in their minds, was to kill.”

  Jacobsen agreed with Byron that the jewelry would have been difficult to recover, and for a few more minutes the three men wondered aloud how it could have been overlooked. But the police chief doubted that Byron Naisbitt and Lynn Richardson had come to his office to discuss why the killers had not taken more than they had. He saw in Byron’s face a familiar look, “like he’d had his guts ripped out,” the same look he’d seen three or four times in the past, when the family of a rape or a murder victim had come to the station wanting to confront the perpetrator. Jacobsen was waiting for the question, and he didn’t have to wait long. When the discussion of the jewelry ended, Byron said, “What’s the possibility of seeing them?”