by Gary Kinder
After the Furman decision was handed down, the legislatures of most states, including Utah, revamped their old death penalty statutes, using as a guideline the sum of the reasoning in Furman. In Utah the new death penalty statute provided that if the defendant during the phase of the trial establishing guilt or innocence was convicted of murder in the first degree, then a separate, or bifurcated, hearing was to be held in which the judge or jury would listen to evidence, mitigating and aggravating, to determine whether the defendant would serve a life term or be sentenced to death for the crime. Circumstances that the jury were to consider as mitigating were listed in the statute and included the absence of a prior criminal record, extreme mental or emotional disturbance, mental disease, intoxication, influence of drugs, and the youth of the defendant. At the time of the murder, if the defendant committed another murder, or was engaged in the commission of rape or aggravated robbery, or killed for pecuniary profit or other personal gain, or for the purpose of preventing a witness from testifying, such factors were to be weighed by the judge or jury in favor of imposing the death sentence. Utah’s statute had been newly drafted to reflect the recent changes dictated by the Furman decision, and Newey told reporters gathered in the hallway outside the courtroom that, assuming the evidence was sufficient for conviction, the new Utah death penalty would be given its first test by Hi-Fi murder suspects Dale Pierre and William Andrews.
In the same building a few floors below, Greenwood’s command post had been dismantled and D. K. White had taken over the investigation. On Friday a third airman who voluntarily had been talking to police since the night Pierre and Andrews were arrested was himself charged with carrying a concealed weapon and tampering with evidence. The airman was Keith Roberts, a tall, thin black who wore gold-rimmed glasses. Roberts fit the description of the third airman given by Jean Hamre, the woman who had seen three blacks arguing near her home as she was washing windows Tuesday evening. Another woman who worked in a lingerie store just down from the Hi-Fi Shop had seen Roberts in a maroon coat walking back and forth in front of the shop from seven to nine the night of the murders. Roberts also had been seen just prior to six o’clock that same night, dropping Pierre and Andrews a half block from the Hi-Fi Shop, then driving off in a light-blue van. As more evidence involving Roberts was gathered, the charges against him were changed from carrying a concealed weapon and tampering with evidence to aggravated robbery and first-degree murder.
In these first few days after the murders citizens continued to call the station offering information they thought might be of help to the police. The young girl who had talked with Pierre in the alley behind the Hi-Fi Shop while her mother was picking up the day’s receipts from the Kandy Korn next door was being hidden by her parents at a friend’s house west of town. She was only thirteen, and when her parents discovered that she had talked to one of the killers while the victims were tied up in the basement, they feared the man would try to find her. When the police located her first, she told them the man had a funny way of talking, and she pointed to his picture in the mug file. It was Pierre.
A teen-age boy who had been in the Hi-Fi Shop the Saturday before the murders told the police that that afternoon he had seen two black men in the store discussing stereo equipment with Stan Walker. While the tall one had stayed in the sound room talking to Stan, the short one had walked toward the front of the store, looking around and writing something on a piece of paper he held on top of an eight-track tape. The short man had asked the boy if he worked in the store and the boy had said no. Then the man had walked back through the sound room to the back door, turned to his right, and peered down the stairs into the basement. Hours before Pierre and Andrews were captured, the boy had identified the short man who had peered down the back stairs as Dale Pierre.
Perhaps the most interesting piece of information received by the police came from a sergeant employed in the evenings at the Hill Air Force Base theater as a ticket taker. In a statement to the OSI the sergeant said that on the second of April he had been doorman at the movie house when he sold a ticket to a black airman wearing fatigues with the name “Pierre” sewn above the shirt pocket. (The name had caught the sergeant’s eye because two days earlier, working his daytime job as military locator, he had received a phone call for an Airman Pierre and found that there were only two Pierres living on the whole base.) The movie showing that night had been Clint Eastwood’s Magnum Force, and a particular scene in the movie was now of great interest to the Ogden Police.
In the scene a hooker is sitting in the backseat of a taxicab counting a roll of money and laughing. The cabdriver stops in front of a building and a tall man, the woman’s pimp, jumps into the backseat with her. He is wearing a thick, floor-length fur coat and wants to know where she’s been. She appears terrified and immediately begins to plead with him, saying that she’s been working a convention, and she was just now looking for him to give him his cut. The pimp starts hitting her, and the driver suddenly stops the cab and runs away. The pimp then pulls a can of liquid Drano out of a pocket in the fur coat and forces some of the caustic down the hooker’s throat. She tries to claw and kick at the pimp, but in a matter of seconds she begins to weaken and the pimp pushes her to the floor. She is coughing and choking as the pimp alights from the car. In the movie the hooker dies within less than a minute of ingesting the Drano, her hand falling limply out of the open car door.
* * *
At Byron Naisbitt’s request Dr. Richard Iverson, a psychiatrist and friend of the Naisbitt family, examined Cortney one evening near the end of Cortney’s first week in the hospital. The night before, Byron had been alone in the room with Cortney, talking to him as he always did, when suddenly Cortney had opened his eyes and looked at his father. What had happened next Byron did not understand and none of the other doctors had been able to explain it to him. He wanted a psychiatrist to examine Cortney and give his opinion.
Iverson stood at Cortney’s bedside, testing certain reflexes, watching Cortney closely, talking to him. Cortney lay still. “I was looking at a boy with obvious paralysis, his eyes semiclosed, a bandage on his head,” remembered Iverson. “My initial impression was a boy in a coma, but after I looked at him I decided to ask him some questions. At one time, our home was next to the Naisbitt home and we had a swimming pool, and Cortney used to come over and swim in our pool, as well as play with my two sons. So I started talking about our swimming pool and some other things we did, and suddenly I noticed a slight twitch of Cortney’s mouth, a little blink of the eye, and maybe a little movement of the forehead. This indicated to me that what I said had some type of emotional impact on him. But that was all I got, and then things were turned off.”
Byron’s experience the night before had been different, and this is what he could not understand.
He spoke, see. When he was up in Benedict’s Hospital, Cortney spoke to me. Then I don’t know what the hell happened, and no one was able to explain it. I was questioning him, and I was trying to find out if he knew anything or could testify or whatever. Hell, everybody was interested. The police wanted to know if he could talk. The family wanted to know what had happened. Everybody thought he was going to be blind, because of where he was shot, and I was anxious to know if he could see, or hear. But he talked to me, and I can’t remember what night it was. I remember he nodded yes, that he recognized me and could hear me. Then I asked him if he remembered what happened to him, and he shook his head that he knew, and then he started to say what had happened to him. I don’t know how that worked with the trache in. I can’t get the sequence on that. You can talk if the trache’s covered, but maybe I was just asking him the questions and he signed back… . No, he talked to me. Cortney talked early. I wouldn’t forget that. The sequence is all shot, but just right within the first few days he regained consciousness and he could hear and he could talk. And I asked him if he remembered what happened, and he shook his head yeah he knew. So I said, “How many were there?” And he said, “T
here were three and two had guns.” And then he said that they grabbed him and kicked him in the gonads and punched him in the stomach and took him downstairs and tied him up and forced him to drink this stuff and then said that they were going to kill him, going to shoot him. And I said, “Who were they going to shoot, all of you?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Who do you mean by all of you?” And you could just see him think who the hell was down there. He was thinking and thinking, and then it looked like here is this picture of his mother getting shot in the head. And then all of a sudden, he let out this little squeaky moan, his eyes kinda glazed over and he just fell back and never said another word. I thought he had just put it out of his mind right then and there. That’s the way it looked to me, because he was talking until he came to the point that he remembered that his mother was killed. There’s no reason why he wouldn’t be able to talk again, except that he just couldn’t face the scene of his mother’s death. He made that little screamy noise and sank back in the bed and then he laid there just kind of catatonic. He didn’t respond after that, so I just figured that he couldn’t handle it, it was so painful for him. At least that’s what I thought. Because they couldn’t explain it, see. They did scans on his brain, an arteriogram and all that kind of stuff, to see if he’d had a hemorrhage or what the hell had happened to him. But they still didn’t know. I figured he just shut it all out and went into his own little world.
Cortney hadn’t spoken since. He hadn’t opened his eyes or moved his arms or moaned or stuck out his tongue or done anything to respond to his surroundings. Having made contact once, Byron couldn’t understand how Cortney could shut off so suddenly and completely. The night Dr. Iverson came to observe Cortney, Byron told him what had happened during that single episode. He wanted to know how Cortney could speak for those few minutes then, and now would not even open his eyes.
“This sudden withdrawal is a very complicated issue,” said Iverson later, “and I don’t know if anyone has the answer. It could have been due to some acute intracranial pathology caused by the bullet, or by the effects of cerebral edema. Some people might call it acute psychotic withdrawal. I’ve seen a lot of brain-damaged people—trauma, drugs, tumors—but Cortney’s unique in terms of having had brain trauma coupled with severe emotional trauma. I’m not sure that we even have a word for it. I think we have to diagnose him: posttraumatic stress disorder manifest by avoidance of activities or talking or contact that arouse recollections of the traumatic event.
“I remember after I saw Cortney I went out and read his chart, and the other doctors were just wondering when he was going to die. That I can remember very vividly, because when I walked in there, I even had to ask myself: ‘Hey, are you being objective? You know this boy, you’re good friends with his father. Do these things you’re seeing in him really exist?’ My impression still was that, yeah, this young man has an injury that’s going to leave some brain damage, but I felt that his withdrawal and not talking was not due to that. When he talked to his dad, he thought about what happened, and remembered what happened to his mother, and the feelings that were generated built to a head, and then suddenly the emotions were so strong that he just shut off thinking and talking and withdrew from reality. Whereas physical damage to his brain would be more or less permanent, there was always a chance he would eventually learn to deal with these emotions. So I told the other doctors, ‘Sure, he’s had some brain trauma, he’s had some surgery, but I think the reason he isn’t talking, and the reason for this withdrawal that makes him look like’s he’s going to die, is due to an overwhelming reaction to having been there, to having seen what happened to his mother and the other people, and then the trauma to himself.’ Cortney’s the only case like that I’ve ever seen.”
A month earlier Byron Naisbitt had buried his mother. Carol had helped plan the funeral and had told Byron and the children then that when she died she did not want to be displayed in an open casket. She liked the African mahogany, she had said, with the beige, satiny interior, but she wanted no one to see her lying inside of it. Byron himself had said that when he died, at his funeral he did not want the casket to be open. Now, one month later, he was burying Carol and these decisions had to be made.
Carol would be buried in her temple clothes: a white veil, a small green apron, and a white robe that would be draped over one shoulder. But the dress she would wear Byron was to choose. Though the mortuary offered a selection of burial dresses, Byron wanted something different. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, but he had been shopping with Carol often enough that he knew what he liked on her and what he didn’t, and nothing at the mortuary looked right. He wanted something brighter, something happier for her. On Wednesday morning, after he left the police station, he found Claire and said to her, “Come on, we’re going to go buy a dress.”
In downtown Ogden, Byron and Claire went from store to store, shopping for the final dress that Carol would wear. While Byron waited outside the dressing rooms, Claire modeled dress after dress for him, as Carol had always done before. Claire was so much like her mother that just by watching her twirl slowly in the various styles, Byron could feel what would be right for Carol.
“My dad likes to pick out clothes,” remembered Claire. “For my mom, we’d go through and I’d try them all on, and he’d say, ‘No I don’t like that,’ or ‘Yes. I like that.’”
The one that finally seemed right to Byron was long and white with a high collar and a sprinkling of daisies. It was a wedding dress.
Once the dress was selected, Byron and Claire ordered Carol’s casket in the African mahogany with the beige interior. Next they had to decide whether to leave the casket open, fulfilling an obligation they felt toward those who came to pay their final respects, or close it in keeping with Carol’s wishes. Because of the autopsy there were noticeable lines across Carol’s forehead, and the morticians could not conceal the swelling in her face and neck or the chemical burns around her mouth. Byron felt that given the circumstances of his wife’s death, she looked good, but an autopsy unavoidably changes the countenance, and considering that, he doubted that Carol would want to be viewed. Still, he wasn’t sure the right decision was to close the casket.
“If it’s closed,” he said to Claire, “people might think it’s because she doesn’t look very good.”
“But she does,” said Claire. “And besides, I don’t care what people think.”
“Neither do I,” said her father.
Byron talked with Gary and Brett about it too, and finally decided that the casket would remain open, but only for family. Friends who came to offer their condolences would not see Carol as she lay in the casket.
Carol’s viewing was at lindquist and Sons Colonial Chapel, from six to eight o’clock Friday evening. Byron had asked his children to be at the chapel earlier that afternoon, so he could speak to each of them alone, and they could spend the last few moments with their mother quietly.
Brett and Diane were the first to arrive. When they walked in, Byron was sitting next to the casket at the front of the chapel, where he had been sitting since midmorning. In the ICU a few nights before, Byron had also talked with Brett and Diane privately and had said something Diane never forgot, because thereafter her father-in-law never again mentioned his own feelings.
Brett’s dad had asked us to come into the side room, in case Cortney could hear us. And he said: “I know I seem strong but it’s only because I have to. You’re married, and you know what it’s like, the relationship of the marriage, so you’ll understand more than anyone in the family how I feel, what I’ve lost.”
For the viewing on Friday, Diane hadn’t known whether the casket would be open or closed. Only when her father-in-law asked them to be at the chapel early did she learn that the casket would be open for the family and that she would have to view her mother-in-law.
I’m afraid to look at dead people, but Brett’s dad was very comforting. It was the day of the viewing, and he called us on
the phone and told us to come and say our good-byes. He said, “I’ve been talking to her for several hours, and …” He called her Shorty, it was always Shorty, and the kids called her Mums. And he said, “Come say good-bye to Mums.” And I said, “I can’t.” He said, “There’s nothing mysterious about death, it’s a natural thing.” He said: “Shorty’s here and she understands and she’s happy. We’ve been talking for several hours.” It was comforting to me because I felt that he really had been talking to her and that everything was all right. He said, “She doesn’t want us to be unhappy, she wants us to be strong.” That made me feel better. I mean, I looked at her differently. When I looked at her later, I felt that maybe she was really there and she could see us.
As Brett and Diane walked down the center aisle of the chapel, Byron stood and came over to them and the three of them embraced.
“Everything’s all right,” he said. “Just go on up and spend a few minutes with her and say your good-byes.”
The chapel was large with many gold-cushioned pews on either side of the aisle. Chandeliers hung from the cathedral ceiling, and the afternoon sun was filtering through amber windows. At the front of the chapel, floral arrangements lined the shelves and then surrounded Carol’s casket as it sat upon a hardwood bier at the entrance to a side room joining the chapel from the left. During the funeral the family alone would be seated in the side room with the casket.
Diane walked at Brett’s side, clinging to his arm. When they reached the casket, Brett looked down at his mother in her white dress with the high collar and the daisies. The white veil had been pulled back from her face, and she was wearing small diamond earrings. On her left hand Byron had replaced the large diamond ring he had retrieved from the police station a few mornings before. Although it had been four days since his mother had been murdered, none of it yet seemed real to Brett. He still felt that he could leave the mortuary and find her at home. Or that if he called the phone number at his father’s house, she would answer.
