by Gary Kinder
At five o’clock in the morning the jury returned with a verdict. Pierre was found guilty on all five counts, three for first-degree murder, two for aggravated robbery. For Andrews the verdict was the same. On Roberts, the jury hung on the three counts of murder, but he was convicted on the two counts of robbery. The jury was polled to assure that this was the true and correct verdict of each juror; then the second phase of the trial, the penalty phase, was discussed by the judge and attorneys. Under the new Utah death penalty statute, if the defendant is found guilty of first-degree murder during the guilt phase, then a separate hearing is held to determine whether the defendant is to serve a life sentence for his crime or be executed. The penalty phase was set for the following Wednesday, November 20.
In the penalty phase of a trial for first-degree murder in Utah, the strict rules of evidence are relaxed and the judge will allow the jury to hear any argument he deems relevant to the sentence of the defendant. Most information presented can be divided into two categories: the character and background of the defendant, and whether the interest of society is best served by the defendant spending a lifetime in prison or giving up his life before a firing squad.
Throughout Utah’s history 140 persons had been found guilty of first-degree murder. Of these 79 had been given a sentence of life imprisonment, 61 had received the death penalty, and 31 had actually been executed. The last execution had taken place on March 30, 1960.
On Wednesday morning, November 20, the courtroom was not as crowded as it had been during previous weeks of the trial. Pierre, Andrews, and their attorneys once again occupied the defense tables; Roberts and his attorney were now gone. Throughout the day Newey reiterated the heinousness of the murders and referred to the precise language of the Utah death penalty statute, which gave power to the jury to sentence the perpetrators to execution. Newey said that only a sentence of death would be commensurate with the crime these two men had committed. Refuting Newey’s contentions, defense attorneys called to the stand sociologists, criminologists, psychologists, and clergymen armed with statistics and Bible quotes to prove that a lifetime in prison was just recompense for the acts of Pierre and Andrews, and in the best interest of society.
When defense witnesses sought to prove that the death penalty was not a deterrent to violent crime, they quoted from studies in which one state with a death penalty was found to have a greater homicide rate than a contiguous state without a death penalty. A doctor of criminology stated that the death penalty leads to sensationalism, an incentive for some murderers. The Protestant chaplain at the Utah State Prison talked of the concept of vengeance as found in the Bible.
Testifying for the prosecution, a clinical psychologist from the prison stated that during the preceding eight years ten persons serving life sentences for first-degree murder had been released. The ten men had served an average of just over thirteen years. The longest time served had been seventeen years, and the shortest, nine years and one month. Of the ten released, three had again committed murder.
During his closing argument Pierre’s attorney described to the jury what would happen on the day of execution if they imposed the death penalty on his client: the sun rising, the chains rattling, the defendant drugged and crying, being dragged to the chair where he would be tied down, a heart sewn to the front of his shirt, the six rifles that would be aimed at the heart.
Newey was the last to address the jury. He spoke of the three young people who had pleaded for their lives that night in the basement, of Mr. Walker being asked to execute his own son by administering the Drano, the retching and vomiting that had followed the brown bag with the bottle around the room, the bullets fired into the victims’ heads one at a time, many seconds or even minutes between each shot, the rape of Michelle. Execution for the perpetrators of that crime, said Newey, would be quick and painless, not the prolonged torture the victims had suffered.
“How humane was their executioner?” he asked the jury.
Though the trial had lasted for a month, the penalty phase had taken but one day, and the day was over. Now the courtroom was empty, and the jurors were sequestered at dinner, after which they would begin their deliberation on whether Pierre and Andrews would be executed. After the jury had left the courtroom and Pierre had been returned to his cell, Athay and Van Sciver visited him, joking with him, telling him that he’d probably still make it as the first black president of the Mormon Church. Pierre grunted. At seven o’clock the two attorneys left for dinner.
Talking to an acquaintance in his cell after his attorneys had departed, Pierre paced from the riveted yellow door with the meal slot back to the riveted yellow wall with the lone light bulb, a distance of about four steps. He liked to affect an air of intelligence and dignity.
“I like to consider myself as knowledgeable,” he said. “I like to know a little bit of everything. I often feel that I am white, but I don’t feel bad being black. I consider myself superior to most blacks. I don’t trust them. They’re boisterous, not well-mannered, and they have habits like smoking and blaspheming that I was not brought up with. And I don’t get all dressed up and go flashing around like other blacks. I got my own unique way of carrying myself.”
Pierre was obviously strong through his chest, arms, and shoulders, but not physically intimidating. For a short man, he was hefty, weighing 145; seven months in jail had dropped those pounds into a potbelly. As he strutted in black pants and a white T-shirt from one end of his cell to the other, he pontificated on various subjects, covering his mouth and saying, “Sorry,” each time he coughed or cleared his throat.
Pierre said that he hadn’t shot any of the people in the Hi-Fi Shop, because while the crime was being committed he was back at the base watching a movie called Blackbelt Jones.
“I still don’t know where that shop is,” he said.
A trusty approached the door to Pierre’s cell and placed a simmering cup of coffee on the narrow shelf just below the slot. Pierre picked up the cup, looked into it, and set it back on the shelf.
“Hey!” he yelled through the slot. “More cream!”
His pacing continued.
“I intend to sue later,” he said. “For now, I’m just going to lie low, then come back and prove my innocence. I wanted to take the stand to clear myself, but I feel I can beat it on appeal, and then everybody will get off. I think that three, maybe four years from now the state’s witnesses will forget what actually happened, maybe some will die, and the state will not be able to put on a good case against me then.”
Pierre explained that the only reason he did not take the stand on his own behalf was because to clear himself he would have had to implicate the others who actually had been responsible for the murders, and such testimony was prohibited by the Bible.
“The Bible specifically prohibits testifying against someone where they will lose their life,” he said.
Since he had begun talking, Pierre had been holding a prisoner’s three-inch toothbrush in his hand, raking absentmindedly at his sparse sideburns and moustache. Now he stopped and rummaged through a cardboard box at the rear of his cell, pulling out a white Bible with a faded red ribbon. He flipped through the Bible, saying he was looking for Numbers 35:30. When he couldn’t find it, he placed the Bible back in the cardboard box.
The passage Pierre was looking for reads, “Whoso killeth any person, the murderer shall be put to death by the mouth of witnesses: but one witness shall not testify against any person to cause him to die.” The chapter continues, “Moreover, ye shall take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer, which is guilty of death: but he shall be surely put to death.”
“I can only speculate, mon,” said Pierre, “but I figure five years before I am free. In that time I want to get a degree so I can be a linguist. I already speak a little Spanish and some French.”
He paused for a moment, continuing to step off the four paces in the cell. Then he said: “When I get out, l‘m going to change my name. But don’t tell anybody
that. Then maybe I will buy a little chicken ranch somewhere in California and go into the egg business.”
At nine fifteen there was a knuckle rap at the door and the jailer said, “Pierre, get ready.”
The jury had decided how Pierre should pay for his crime. Now the bailiff was notifying all parties to assemble in the courtroom to hear the decision.
As Pierre was waiting for the jailer to open the door, he predicted that he would get the death penalty and that Andrews would be given a life sentence.
Back in the courtroom the judge read the decision of the jury. Pierre was sentenced to die three times for the three lives he had taken. Andrews also was sentenced to die. They were the first men sentenced to die under Utah’s new death penalty statute.
The announcement of the jury’s decision took but a few minutes. The courtroom was soon cleared again, and in the hall outside, reporters were interviewing the various participants in the trial. Their hands shackled to their waists, Pierre and Andrews were escorted by a squad of police back to their cells. Once they were locked up again, the jail was quiet. In the morning the two condemned murderers would be transported to the Utah State Prison to await their sentence. Alone in his cell, Andrews lay on his bunk sobbing. Across from the jailer’s desk, Pierre peered out from the small slot in his cell door. He was eating a bag of potato chips.
RETURN
The day Pierre was sentenced to die was Cortney’s first day out of the hospital. When he walked, he could take but a single step, then bounce slightly as he dragged his right foot forward. His right eye still stared blindly off to the side, and his right hand tucked tightly into his chest. Cortney’s only nourishment was either formula or food liquified in a blender and poured down his gastrostomy tube.
Byron was advised by psychiatrists that for Cortney’s own good he should be placed in a special treatment center where he would receive intensive therapy for his physical and emotional disabilities. But Byron decided against that. I babied him quite a little bit, probably more than I really should have. Just mothered him, and put up with his immaturity and stuff like that. I figured he’d had enough stress and I wasn’t going to push him that hard. He’d get over it sooner or later. I don’t think the psychiatrists agreed with that, but I’m not concerned what the hell they think. They felt that he’d be better quicker if we moved him right out of this house and down to an intensive rehabilitation center. And he loves his house. This is where he was most comfortable. They felt that being around here alone, with no mother, would bring back all this stuff and he’d get depressed and fool around. But they don’t know him. They don’t know him a bit. What makes him tick. They wanted to take him out of all this, take him away from me and just put him where he was on his own and had to start from scratch. Which probably was a good idea, but I’m not sure that would have been the best for him, and it sure as hell wouldn’t have been the best for me. After watching him through all that, I wasn’t about to ship him out. So right or wrong, he stayed right here.
On weekends Byron would take Cortney up to the family cabin in Big Cottonwood Canyon. They would build a fire in the fireplace, and Byron would try to get Cortney out for short hikes. Mostly, they stayed inside and played chess, or Cortney would punch at his calculator and they would talk. One weekend at Thanksgiving they went pheasant hunting in Idaho with Cortney’s cousins. Cortney was so weak he couldn’t walk the grain fields, so his father propped him on the hood of a car with a 20-gauge shotgun in his hand, and told him to watch for birds that the rest of the party flushed up. In the evenings back home they watched TV together until Cortney fell asleep.
While his father was at work during the day, Cortney sat on a couch in the corner of the den that soon became known as Cortney’s Corner. He slept and watched TV and did little else. Asa looked after him and made sure he was comfortable. A tutor from the school board’s home and hospital program came each day for an hour to instruct him in English and history, but Cortney never read any of his assignments, and finally the tutor decided to read the chapters aloud to him during her visits and hope that Cortney would listen. Even when Kelly and Chris and other friends visited in the afternoons, Cortney usually just sat and listened to them talk about what was happening at school.
Cortney missed being in the hospital. He had no nurses to ring for when he needed something, no one to talk to whenever he felt like talking. There were relatives and family friends and Asa, but Cortney had no one to rely on to do everything for him, as he had had in the hospital. He even had to learn to feed himself: to work the clamps in his gastrostomy, to measure the ingredients for the formula and then to fill and to place the syringe in the tube. Claire helped him at first but tried to make him do as much as possible.
Dad kept trying to tell us: “Don’t do it for him, because he’s going to have to learn to do it himself. He’s going to have to be self-sufficient.”
Despite his weak condition and forgetfulness, Cortney decided in early January that he wanted to return to Ogden High, almost nine months after the murders. The decision seemed unrealistic to his father, but none of the doctors could tell him what Cortney was capable or not capable of doing. If Cortney felt that he was ready to return to school, his father had to let him try.
Though Cortney had missed the last month of his sophomore year the previous spring, he had been passed to his junior year with his class. But even Cortney conceded that he did not have the stamina to attempt a full schedule of classes, so it was arranged that he would attend two hours a day, the two hours to be in the morning on one day and in the afternoon the next. Every day at home he would continue to be tutored for one hour.
Prior to the murders Cortney was not well-known among Ogden High’s fifteen hundred students. His brothers had played football and wrestled, and Claire had been a class officer and cheerleader, but Cortney was more of a loner, friendly and easy to approach but socially awkward. Other than being on the swim team, he associated little with groups, his constant companion and trademark being the small calculator he wore clipped to his belt.
“Before the accident we’d go to his house,” remembered Chris. “‘Hey Cort, let’s go to the Circle for a burger,’ or ‘Let’s go to a show,’ but Cortney just wasn’t the kinda guy that liked to do those things. He enjoyed staying home and working on his airplanes or inventing something. Cortney was really a smart guy in those things, in scientific things and electronic things. He really got deep into that kinda stuff.”
Perhaps because they had not known him before, some students did not recognize Cortney his first day back at school. When they did discover who he was, many of them had ambivalent feelings about seeing him in the hallways. They were surprised to know that he was even out of coma, and yet they were shocked at how sick he still looked. He was gray and gaunt, his body bent forward, his eyes wide and glassy. He seemed distant. Often he failed to respond when someone spoke to him, and sometimes didn’t recognize students who had been friends before.
“Haunted,” said one student, “that’s the best way to describe Cortney then. Haunted.”
The gastrostomy tube remained in his stomach, hardly concealed beneath his clothes. It still was the only way he could eat. If he talked, his speech was slow, and frequendy he would pause to lick his lips. Walking upstairs, he grasped the railing with his left hand, stepped up with his left foot, then swung the right one up next to it, one step at a time. His right eye stared away from those students who tried to talk to him.
Most of the students had read of the murders and the arrests the previous spring, and they had followed the trial in the fall. They knew as well as Cortney, maybe better, what had transpired in the basement of the Hi-Fi Shop. When Cortney finally returned to school, his survival of all they had read about made him something of a hero. Despite his appearance they went up) to him and talked with him, encouraged him and supported him. They tried to make him feel missed and welcome again. But much of their feeling was pity.
“Some people would go out of
their way just to talk to him and be nice to him,” remembered Kelly, “and Cort noticed that. In ways he liked getting the attention, but in other ways he didn’t like how people that had never really known him before and stuff would put on an act, like they’d been buddy-buddy with him since he’s been born, you know. Some of the girls would do that. I noticed girls that’d sit there and they’d go, ‘Hiiii, Corrrtney,’ real slow like he can’t hear or anything. Cort knew. Cort knew pretty good what was going on.”
Cortney had been attending school two hours each day for nearly a week when the news media called his father. A reporter from the Associated Press wanted an interview and a television news crew asked permission to film and talk with Cortney at the high school.
They had some pictures of him going back to school and one of his teachers on TV. I guess they had a camera take him walking up the steps or something. But we didn’t do too much of that. I thought that everyone should know that he was getting better enough to at least attempt to go back to school, because everybody had so many different ideas as to what his problems were. People were really concerned about him. I used to get calls and letters and people would ask other people close to me, you know. So I talked it over with the family and it was thought that it might be a wise idea to let it be known just what his progress had been up to that point. So they did a little article in the paper and put him on TV going to school.
