Victim

by Gary Kinder

  Asa, a Japanese woman who had worked for the Naisbitts part-time since Cortney was ten years old, had prepared a big chow mein dinner for everyone except Cortney. While Cortney’s friends ate chow mein, Byron made jokes about the special dinner he had fixed for the birthday boy: a liquid formula to pour down the rubber tube sticking out of Cortney’s stomach.

  After dinner Cortney got some help opening his presents, and Claire brought out the cake she had baked for him: an airplane in white icing, with yellow Life Savers for windows. Everyone had a piece of cake, and either shot pool for a while or talked to Cortney and looked at his presents. Then they thanked Dr. Naisbitt, Claire, and Asa for the party, said good-bye to Cortney, and went home to get ready for school the next day. When they had gone, Byron drove Cortney back to the hospital.

  On October 2, Claire and Scott were married in the Mormon temple in Salt Lake City, Claire wearing the same dress her mother had worn when she and Byron were married in the same temple thirty-two years before. The wedding ceremony was in the morning, with the reception held later in the evening at the Ogden Golf and Country Club. With the help of her father, Claire had planned everything: the decorations and flowers with accents of peach and green, a buffet for the seven hundred guests, a band playing dance music. But it was not as much fun as she had once envisioned it would be.

  It would have been more fun if Mother had been there. She would have loved to address the invitations and make sure everything was done just right. Looking for the wedding dress and all that stuff. You know, she always kept asking me all the time: “Are you and Scott getting married? Do you think you will? Well, what does he say? Does he say nice things to you?” She always liked to know every detail. And I’d just go, “Oh, yes, Mother, he says nice things to me.” When we were buying furniture and stuff, she’d say, “Well, do you think Scott would like this?” And I’d say, “Yeah, yeah, I think he’d like that okay.” And she’d say, “Well, if you don’t think he’d like it, maybe you shouldn’t get it.” She’d say stuff like that. And this was a year before. No, a year and a half! We’d only been going out for a year. So she’d say stuff like that, and we’d kinda chuckle about it. And she’d say: “Of course, we don’t really know if anything will ever happen. And probably nothing ever will.” Then she’d say, “But if it does.” And I’d say, “Yeah, Mom, I know, if it does.” So anyway Scott told me not to tell her that we were going to get engaged. He said, “No, let’s make it a big surprise.” So I just said, “Okay.” But I always wanted to tell her.

  I think Scott and I had started talking about it like in February. And then while Mom and Dad were in Hong Kong … did we get the diamond then? I think that Brett had just found the diamond. And Scott decided to go ahead and get it. But he said: “Now, don’t tell ‘em. Don’t tell ‘em yet.” And I said, “Okay.” I wasn’t going to tell anybody for a while. Because we hadn’t decided what we were going to do yet. And Scott hadn’t decided when he was going to give it to me. We didn’t have the ring anyway. Just the diamond. Mom kept asking me but I hadn’t told her anything. And here she and I had gone and done all these things years before, china, crystal, furniture, getting all these things together. It was just really crazy. And the thing is, I know this is what she wanted all her life: to have the excitement of getting all set and ready to go for the big day. But I never told her. And then she wasn’t there.

  Claire was in the receiving line with Scott, greeting the guests when Cortney appeared at the doorway in his wheelchair, his two brothers standing behind him. That day he had had the last of the needles removed from his arms, and he was dressed like one of the wedding ushers.

  We went up and got him dressed for Claire’s wedding and took him down to the country club, Gary and I did. Put him in his tux, boutonniere, and a fluffy shirt and cummerbund. He was pretty sore all over, had no stamina. Just was all he could do to get up and get his clothes on and go down and sit in the chair. It was kind of a struggle getting him dressed. His belly hurt and he had the gastrostomy tube poking out just below his sternum with a little clip on the end. We tucked it in, but it was still poking out a little. Of course he couldn’t eat anything. Could hardly get ice down. I think that’s about all he could handle. Anyway, getting him dressed, everything hurt him and he still couldn’t walk very well. He spent most of the time sitting down and wanting to go home early.

  But having him there was kind of a big deal to Claire, you know. They had a line that stretched on forever, and Claire left the line and everything stopped and everyone talked to him. Kind of a big deal. And then we just sat him down and let him enjoy it. I don’t think he did, too much. I think he was hurting too bad. He just sat in the chair kind of humped over.

  Course, Claire was beaming from ear to ear, and Dad was beaming. It was a nice affair, but I think there were still some bad thoughts about it. It was kind of tragic that Mother wasn’t there. Mother liked to entertain. Everything had to be just perfect. Not that the affair would have been any different. But she would have been out buzzing around and going a mile a minute, and making sure everything was just so. And it would have been. She would have had it scheduled right down to the last second or the last chicken wing or whatever. She would have really enjoyed that.

  In early October Cortney was transferred again, this time to the rehabilitation wing, where doctors started him on a program to teach him again how to care for himself: how to dress himself; how to feed himself; how to get in and out of bed; how to get through the day physically with help from no one. But Cortney had been in Intensive Care so long he had come to rely on the nurses for everything, and no one seemed able to motivate him to learn otherwise. He would shave his face or bathe not because it made him feel better, but because a nurse would badger him if he didn’t. Often it required three nurses an entire hour just to coax him out of bed. He preferred to lie there all day, watching television and napping. Sometimes, when he was supposed to be in a session working hard with a therapist, he would simply walk away and wander down the halls or over to the nurses’s desk, where he would sit in a chair wanting to be mothered.

  As far back as St. Benedict’s, a physical therapist had been taking Cortney’s limbs through passive range-of-motion exercises to keep his muscles from becoming too contracted. But Cortney was so opposed to even being touched that a consistent therapy program had not been maintained. Now, he couldn’t raise his right arm above his head, extend his right elbow, or straighten his right knee. His right hand was virtually useless. Underlying his problem with contractures from being immobilized so long was the partial paralysis of his right side resulting from the gunshot wound in his head.

  While on the rehab wing Cortney became the patient of physical therapist Steve Spencer, whose job was to stretch and strengthen Cortney’s muscles, teach him to walk again, and eventually to develop more dexterity in his hands.

  “God, I saw that kid for the first time,” remembered Spencer, “and I thought he was on death’s door. He knew that, and his dad knew that, everybody knew that. While we were treating him, he could have developed an infection and died on us any time. So we were being real careful with him. But wow! Was he ever a tyrant! Wild, yelling ‘GOD DAMN IT! Get out of here! GOD…’That’s the word he’d say over and over, he’d say that word probably five hundred times during the course of a half hour while I was working with him. He was really out of touch with reality. He’d go into these fits of rage, flailing and fighting around almost as if someone was trying to apprehend him and bodily drag him to his death. He’d literally pull us around the department, and we’d be holding onto him, one of us on each side, and he’d just be screaming ‘GOD DAMN IT!’ the whole time. I broke horses that were more cooperative than Cortney. I was bent over stretching on his leg one time, and he reached out and slapped me on the side of the head. I came up madder than a hornet. ‘You touch me again and I will smash your face on the wall!’ And he tried to slap me again. He just didn’t understand what was going on.

  “
Cortney wouldn’t cooperate, he wouldn’t get out of bed and go eat his breakfast in the dining room. Part of his therapy was to get him going on his own, get him to accept that the nurses are not going to wait on him hand and foot, and that he’s going to get up, get dressed and go into the dining room, have his dinner and participate in physical therapy. Boy, he wouldn’t do that at all. Nothing ever worked. You’d say, ‘I want you to go down and work real hard,’ and it was always, ‘Let’s play with my computer,’ or ‘Let’s talk about school.’ I couldn’t ever get him to understand that if he didn’t exercise it every day, three times a day, that that hand would get worse, that it would get stiffer, less functional, more contracted.

  “He was scared to death, though. He was depressed to think that he couldn’t see. I think he was fearful of a lot of things, and in spite of all that, he coped with it the best that he could. He didn’t cope with it maybe as good as I wanted him to, but he hurt like crazy for a long time. He had this tube sticking out of his stomach. He couldn’t even swallow anything. He drooled and had a lot of distasteful acid and stuff regurgitating up into his mouth all the time, and he was sick. He contracted a couple of infections. So throughout all of this it wasn’t that he was real healthy and just being an obstinate brat, he was sick and weak. Some days he’d come in here, and I’d swear the guy was going to … . He just really looked bad. And in spite of all of that he kept coming in and doing what his dad wanted him to, so I feel that he was making a pretty maximal effort as far as he could see. The only thing that I wish I could have done with Cortney is motivate him.

  “There were times when he was very mellow. After he’d gone for his walk and he was back in bed, he kinda liked you to stay around. He’d say, ‘Don’t leave, just stay and talk to me or play with my computer or listen to my records.’ He was lonesome. He understood that he had a lot of disability, and he was scared. He had to adjust to the fact that his mom was dead, and he couldn’t see out of his right eye, and he couldn’t use his right arm. It’s a miracle that guy lived. I thought it was great, I thought it was fantastic the recovery Cortney made. To think how damaged he was, shot right in the head at point-blank range. I just can’t believe shooting in the head with a twenty-five. Of course, the acid in the esophagus came closer to killing him than the shot in the head. Yeah, Cortney had to overcome a lot of things that I’m sure I didn’t even perceive.”

  After a change of venue to Farmington, Utah, in Davis County, twenty miles south of Ogden, the trial of the Hi-Fi Murders began October 15 and lasted for one month. The jury selection alone required nearly two weeks. When defense attorneys attempted to force Cortney to appear as a witness, Dr. Iverson testified that Cortney was a victim of retrograde amnesia and could remember nothing about the incident. He said that he had never seen and probably never would see a patient who had gone through that kind of trauma. He added that it was doubtful Cortney would ever recover.

  Lighted by a soft fluorescence, the ivory walls of the courtroom were wainscoted in dark paneling, and a copper clock imbedded in one wall silently kept time. The prosecutor, Robert Newey, was composed and methodical, speaking in a soft voice as he developed chains of evidence with over three hundred exhibits and sixty witnesses. At one point the entire forward area of the courtroom was filled with the 120 items that had been taken from the Hi-Fi Shop, twenty-four thousand dollars’ worth of receivers, turntables, amplifiers, and speakers recovered from Pierre’s rented garage.

  Newey or the four defense attorneys sometimes would raise objections, and once a shouting match erupted when Newey’s assistant allegedly caught Roberts’s attorney coaching his alibi witnesses as they testified from the stand. But mostly the atmosphere of the courtroom was subdued. At lunch one day, halfway through the trial, a juror unfolded his napkin to find a crude drawing of a gallows and the inscription, “Hang those niggers.” When polled by the judge, the jurors stated that the incident had not influenced them, and a motion for mistrial by all defense attorneys was denied.

  Day after day, as Newey called to the stand officers who had collected the evidence at the scene, technical experts who had examined and photographed the evidence, and witnesses who had seen Pierre or Andrews or Roberts near the Hi-Fi Shop the night of the murders, the three defendants sat quietly with their attorneys. Pierre was at the defense table a few feet from Newey, most days dressed in a loose-fitting black and white shirt with large, billowy sleeves.

  As the trial proceeded, Pierre took notes, making what appeared to be ink blots or doodles in the margins, notations he later claimed were actually a special code to remind him of important points to be brought up on appeal. Between periods of writing he often looked up to stare at members of the eleven-man, one-woman jury, as though he were taking notes on them, but his note taking consisted merely of a summary of the facts as he heard them come from the witness stand. Other than claiming to perceive an obvious prejudice in nearly all of the 140 prospective jurors questioned by the court, and noting that there were no blacks on the jury, Pierre made almost no comment on his thoughts or what was happening around him. At the bottom of one page he berated a police officer: “Today I’ve seen something that really hurt me, a patrolman brought in a woman with her baby on her shoulders and booked her into jail for a traffic ticket. I don’t care what the circumstances were but any officer who can bring a woman and her baby to jail and book her ‘for a ticket’ has got to be a dog, I mean a real dog.”

  Pierre had two attorneys, Gil Athay and Robert Van Sciver, but Van Sciver had laryngitis during most of the trial, and Athay conducted Pierre’s defense.

  “We had to go basically on an identity defense,” said Athay. “Orren Walker’s testimony and his description of Dale Pierre just wasn’t enough, in my opinion, to put him there. His initial description was a guy, you know, five foot ten. Pierre is five five. Walker never recognized the scar on the forehead. And nobody ever talked about a foreign accent or having difficulty understanding the guy. And that’s what we flew with. That’s all we could do. We looked at all other aspects. We ran the possible psychiatric defense, but to no avail. I think in this kind of a case you’ve got to run a psychiatric evaluation. I mean, you’ve got heinous facts, you’ve got a girl raped, you’ve got people with caustic soda poured down their throats, you got people strangled, you got pens kicked in the ear, you got all the ugly elements. And Pierre comes across as very quiet, mellow, somewhat of a loner, but never had any prior history of violence other than ... I have to concede the ‘Other than’ is the airman who was found stabbed in the eye with an ice pick or whatever, but that was such a nebulous tie-in. He did well in school. I think he liked school. He won some inter-island competition at the age of seven, some educational testing program, I don’t know what it was. But he was something of an honor student in Trinidad at the age of seven. Everything he told me about the place was a pleasant experience. He liked Trinidad. He liked being there. He was accepted. He wasn’t the minority, he wasn’t an outcast, he wasn’t different. He denied being in any trouble while he was down there. You know, of any kind. He was a very religious young kid. And that was pretty much the way his life was. You know, he was the choirboy, the kid who sang in the Sunday choir.”

  On the witness stand nearly two weeks into the trial, Orren Walker relived the details of what transpired in the Hi-Fi Shop basement from the time he arrived at eight o’clock. With his arm outstretched, he pointed at Pierre sitting at the defense table and said that he was the man who had met him with a gun at the top of the stairs. He pointed at Andrews and identified him as the man who had held the revolver on him from the bottom. For one whole day and part of another he told and retold of Carol Naisbitt’s arrival, the Drano, the shootings, the rape of Michelle, and how he had played dead as Pierre had tried to strangle him with electrical cord, then had kicked a ball-point pen three times into his ear. He showed the jury the scar on his shoulder where the Drano dripping from his mouth had burned the skin. Another scar on his forehead had been treated
with plastic surgery. As he spoke of his son, Walker cried but refused to leave the stand.

  Byron Naisbitt also took the stand to testify as to the injuries sustained by his son.

  “I can’t even remember Naisbitt’s testimony in detail,” Pierre said later. “It made me mad the way he was obviously playing the jury for sympathy. In his voice and characterizations. It was obviously rehearsed. He’d stop and take a big swallow in the middle of a sentence and bow his head. I think he talked about his son couldn’t eat or something, and he’d pause on just the right words while he was talking. Two or three of the jurors were looking at me hard like they were going to kick my ass or something. It was obviously rehearsed, you could tell it. Any novice in the courtroom could tell. I thought it was gross myself. But then I was on that Valium, and I had an I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude. That’s the way I felt. I thought it was disgusting, the details he was going into.

  “The part that really made me sick where I had to get another Valium was the pictures of the place. I felt faint. They had about forty or fifty pictures in color of burns on people’s faces, and where the Drano came down on their shoulders. And the girl was naked and they showed a close-up of the bullet in her, I think. I can’t remember exacdy where it was at. It was generally gross. They had pictures of the whole room down there. The court broke about then for lunch. I told Athay I was sick and he asked for the doctor.”

  Friday evening, November 15, the jury heard the last of the summations from the attorneys and the instructions from the judge. At six forty-five they were adjourned to have dinner and begin deliberations. The courtroom cleared, and the prisoners were escorted back to their cells under armed guard.

  Most of the major participants in the trial stayed the night in the courtroom. Deloy White, the detective from the Ogden Police in charge of the investigation, had his coat off, the butt of his revolver sticking out from under his armpit. Newey was in his vest and shirt sleeves. At the defense table Andrews’s attorney, John Caine, played hearts with Pierre, Andrews, and a reporter from The Salt Lake Tribune, the game watched closely by security guards with their sleeves rolled up. In a small room next to the courtroom, Detective White, Orren Walker’s son Lynn, the assistant prosecutor, and a television news reporter were engaged in another game of hearts. Roberts was giggling with his wife in the front spectator row. His wife was smoking a Tiparillo. The court reporter was reading a book.