Victim

by Gary Kinder

  The next morning Kelly skipped his first two classes for an appointment with the orthodontist. While he was sitting in the chair, the dental assistant asked him if he knew the Naisbitt family. Kelly said sure he knew the Naisbitts, Cortney was his good friend. What the assistant said next made Kelly sit up so quickly, he came right out of the chair. Mrs. Naisbitt had been murdered, she said, and Cortney was in critical condition, not expected to live.

  “It really shocked me,” Kelly remembered later. “I just kinda went blank.”

  By the time he arrived at Ogden High that morning, disbelief over the Hi-Fi Murders had escalated into one rumor affirming another. The “official word” on the murders and on Cortney circulated through the halls with an authority that perpetuated itself. There was talk of nothing else. But even after the horror had become familiar and the students understood what had happened, few of them wanted to believe it. Kelly wouldn’t accept the “official word” until he had heard it from Cortney’s father. The official word was that Cortney had died.

  “It was like looking through the back end of binoculars,” Kelly later said, describing the walk down the hall toward Intensive Care. “You know, you’re looking through and you see it smaller? I remember, I was walking down that hall and I was feeling awful that day and you got an armed cop sitting out in front of the door and the door’s closed and ‘No Smoking—Oxygen’ and stuff like that, and you walk in and see just nurses running back and forth, and then you walk into Cort’s room, the curtains are pulled, and you walk in there and there he is, he’s got tubes running through him and the nurses are whispering in his ear, ‘Keep going!’ He was all burned up inside. I remember looking at his lips, you could see inside the skin, all this white ... it was just all white inside of his mouth, all burned in there. The nurses were just waiting around for him to … they were kind of keeping him alive, but they didn’t have any hope at all for him. I could see that on everybody. They were just kinda waiting for the time to come.”

  In the tiny ICU cubicle four or five nurses hovered over Cortney. One was changing the bottles of IV fluid, one was checking and rechecking the machines for Cortney’s vital signs, one was charting, one was suctioning. In the midst of all of this Cortney lay per-fecdy still. To Kelly he looked dead, “like they were pumping juice into a slab of meat on the table.” But what stood out in Kelly’s mind was not Cortney or the nurses; it was the noise. Every piece of hospital equipment he had ever seen in the movies was blipping and hissing in the tiny room. Cortney’s chest was rising and falling with the Aqua-lung sounds of the respirator, and the long seconds between each breath caused Kelly to hold his own.

  Kelly stood at the foot of Cortney’s bed on the left side, afraid to advance any farther. He could see the reddish scrapes from the rope burns around Cortney’s wrists. And from his wrists and seemingly every other part of his body, Cortney had tubes and wires curling away into the noisy machines. The head that Kelly had imagined would be blown apart was intact and wrapped tightly in a white bandage. The lips too were there, but they were surrounded by raw, open sores.

  Neither Claire nor Kelly should have been in the room with a patient as critical as Cortney. Claire knew it; the nurses knew it. But from the beginning the rules regarding Cortney seemed to have been abandoned. As Kelly stood behind Claire and stared at his friend, the nurses worked around them as though they weren’t there.

  Claire took hold of Cortney’s hand and bent down close to his ear. “Hi, Cort,” she said. “How are you?” She held onto his hand and looked into his face. “I brought someone to see you. Kelly came up with me to visit.”

  She turned back to Kelly. “Why don’t you say something to him, Kelly,” she said softly. “I know he can hear you.”

  The two exchanged places, and Kelly put his left hand on the pillow next to Cortney’s head and slipped his right hand in among the wires and tubes in an awkward grasp of Cortney’s forearm.

  “Cort, how you doing?” he said.

  Cortney’s eyes remained closed, and the tracheostomy tube protruding from his neck gurgled.

  “Listen, buddy, I’m really sorry about what happened, you know. I mean, if there’s anything I can do for you, you just let me know. Anything at all.”

  He could think of nothing else to say, but just then Claire took hold of Cortney’s hand again and whispered to Kelly, “Maybe we better go.”

  Kelly nodded.

  Looking back at Cortney, Claire said in a louder voice: “Kelly and I are going now, Cortney. I’ll be back tonight to see you.” She squeezed his hand and moved away from the bed.

  “Talk to you later, Cort,” said Kelly. “Take it easy.”

  As they turned to leave the room, nurses filled their places at Cortney’s bedside as though they had never been there. Kelly looked at Cortney a last time and Cortney’s body still lay motionless. Then the respirator hissed again, and Cortney’s chest swelled quickly and collapsed.

  It was now four o’clock in the afternoon. A few detectives were sitting around a table at the police station discussing the Hi-Fi case, when Chief Leroy Jacobsen walked into the detective office with the latest news: a call had just been received from the Office of Special Investigations at Hill Field, where several items belonging to the victims had been found in a Dumpster adjacent to Barracks 351. When he heard the barracks number, Glen Judkins snapped his fingers. Three months earlier, in January, he had arrested an airman living in Barracks 351 for car theft. Then he had returned to the same barracks for a second car theft, and a third, and another arrest. All in the same week. All the same airman. The case was still vivid in his mind because the airman who had stolen the cars always returned to the car lot the next day pretending he was ready to buy the car he had stolen the night before.

  “I really think he felt it was a cover-up,” Judkins explained later. “Like I’ve been in and tried that car out and I come back real indignant because my car’s gone. And if I’m indignant enough, someone’s not going to come up to me and say, ‘Hey, did you rip off the car down there?’ I think that was part of his master plan.”

  For Judkins, the case unfolded as follows:

  On January 23 the airman took a yellow 1973 Corvette for a test drive at Lyle’s House of Hardtops, a used car lot in west Ogden. The next morning, when the owner arrived and discovered the same Corvette missing, he called the police. But before the police could answer the call, the airman himself appeared back at Lyle’s. He was driving the same car he had driven the day before, a green 1970 Buick Riviera, the car he wanted to trade in on the Corvette. When the owner told him the Corvette had been stolen, the airman insisted he have that car. The owner called the police.

  When Judkins pulled onto the Lyle’s lot, the first thing he noticed was that the green Riviera parked next to the office had New York license plates front and rear, and a Utah inspection sticker in the corner of the windshield. He went inside the office and talked to the airman, but now he wasn’t interested in the Corvette so much as he was curious about the Riviera parked out front.

  “Go ahead,” the airman waved, “take a look at it.”

  Judkins recorded the car’s serial number and a description of the car, and called it in to the dispatcher, who ran the information through the national crime computer. In a few minutes Judkins learned that the green Riviera the airman had driven onto the Lyle’s lot to trade in on the stolen Corvette was also stolen.

  The airman denied stealing either of the cars, but offered no resistance. After searching beneath the driver’s seat of the Riviera and finding a loaded South American-made Colt .45, Judkins read the airman his rights, shook him down, placed him in handcuffs, and drove him to the station. In his pocket the airman had three sets of keys, one of which fitted the green Riviera. The next day his bail was set at the standard $5,000, then halved, and he posted bond after a week in jail and was set free.

  Shortly after the airman was released on bail, the yellow Corvette and a red Riviera missing from another car lot we
re located on the base not far from Barracks 351. The two remaining sets of keys that Judkins had found on the airman a week earlier fitted the two stolen cars. Judkins swore out the necessary warrants and complaints, went to the base, and placed the airman under arrest for the second time in a week, this time on two counts of grand theft auto. He tried to interrogate the airman, but when he asked about the stolen cars, the airman stopped talking and glared at him as though he were in some sort of trance.

  “You’ve seen a dead man with his eyes open?” Judkins said later. “That’s what he looked like.”

  On both of the new counts the airman was unable to post bond, and spent nearly six weeks in jail before he was released. He was still incarcerated at the time of his preliminary hearing, when the weight of the evidence against him was sufficient to have all three cases bound over for trial. But the judge agreed to consolidate the cases and apply his previously posted bond of $2,500 to all three counts of auto theft. On March 20 he was again set free on bail, free to return to his room in the barracks and his life in the Air Force. Today, April 23, the man was still out on bail, awaiting trial. His name, recalled Judkins, was Dale Pierre.

  Judkins later wrote in his Hi-Fi report: “As soon as the Chief mentioned the barracks number, I was aware that this was the barracks that is occupied by Dale S. Pierre. Having arrested Pierre on prior occasions, I was familiar with his description, which seemed to closely match that of one of the suspects involved in the homicide.” Chief Jacobsen assigned Judkins, Detective Lee Varley, and the homicide investigator, Deloy White, to respond to Hill Field and investigate the finding of the items belonging to the victims.

  In the records room down the hall Greenwood’s command post had not received word of the discovery in the Dumpster. A half hour before the call from Hill Field had come in to the detective division, Greenwood and Fisher had been tipped by the informant that the men they were looking for were named Dale Pierre and William Andrews. They were still being advised by the prosecutor how to proceed with this first break in the case. While the prosecutor’s office was preparing the complaint and arrest warrants, Greenwood had sent one of his men to the McKay-Dee Hospital with the mug files to show to Mr. Walker. The police had no pictures of Andrews, but out of the pages of other faces Walker tentatively identified Dale Pierre as the short man of the two, the one who had pulled the trigger on all five of the victims in the basement. He added that the man who had shot them had spoken with a distinct and peculiar accent.

  With Pierre tentatively identified, and an informant willing to testify to Pierre’s and Andrew’s involvement in the murders, Greenwood notified the base commander at Hill Field that the Ogden Police were preparing warrants for the arrest of two airmen, and that in the meantime, with the commander’s permission, they would be sending out police officers to observe the suspects. The commander’s reply surprised Greenwood, who later recalled his reaction.

  “Unbeknownst to me, the call on those wallets had come to the detective division rather than the command post. And Deloy White had been assigned to go out and get that evidence. But he didn’t know what we had on the names. He had no idea. You see. That we already had the names. And we didn’t know that he had been assigned to go out and get the wallets. I guess he was already there before I ever heard that those wallets had been found. So we had the names that were given to us by the confidential informant, you know, and I’m ecstatic. But you’ve got to have corroboration, a mere suspect is no good. You’ve got to have something to tie that suspect into the crime. Anyhow, I’m preparing to send people out, and before I can get them out there, I find out that White’s already there and searching through the Dumpster. Well then, that’s when I jumped straight in the air and clicked my heels, because right there I knew we had ‘em.”

  The Dumpster had been cordoned off by the air police, and Varley stood outside while Judkins and White waded around inside, sifting through the trash one piece at a time. Items taken from the murder scene were scattered all through the trash, and as each was discovered, Judkins or White handed it out to Varley who placed it in a separate evidence bag and sealed and labeled the bag for safekeeping by the evidence officer. Before the afternoon was over, Judkins and White had discovered, and Varley had bagged, a dark blue ballpoint pen imprinted with “Hi-Fi Shop,” one white pullover shirt, two leather purses, a pair of white lady’s-gloves, a temporary driver’s license of Carol Naisbitt, a single .38 caliber casing, eleven .25-caliber casings, two key rings with fifteen keys, and sixteen charge cards in the name of Dr. Byron H. Naisbitt.

  The three detectives still were unaware that an informant had called the command post and identified two airmen, Dale Pierre and William Andrews, as the murderers. Nor did they know that the suspects’ quarters had been given as Barracks 351, just thirty feet away. While they worked their way through the Dumpster, they watched the wall of windows along the north side of the barracks. Before long they noticed consistent activity in a particular window on the second floor at the east side of the building. The shade was pulled back and they were being watched.

  Barracks 351 housed part of the 1550th Organizational Maintenance Squadron, 475 men assigned to maintain the helicopters used in training airborne paramedics. When evidence recovered from the Dumpster out front was linked with two airmen from the 1550th residing in the barracks, the squadron’s first sergeant, James Stevens, was summoned to advise Air Force security and the Ogden Police on the suspects. Was Pierre short? they wanted to know. How tall was Andrews? Could he confirm that the two men had been spending a lot of time together recently? That Pierre spoke with an accent? That Andrews owned a light-blue van? Could he fill them in on the suspects’ habits, their room numbers, the nearest exits? Stevens could tell them all of this and more. He wasn’t surprised that Pierre had murdered three, maybe four, maybe five people. For months now he had been trying to get Pierre out of his squadron and out of the Air Force.

  A career noncommissioned officer with eighteen years in the Air Force, Stevens had been brought in from a racially troubled squadron in Korea to restore discipline in the 1550th. He had arrived at Hill a month after the Jefferson murder the previous October, and the commanding officer of the 1550th, Colonel John Neubauer, had briefed him on Pierre and the facts of the Jefferson case. They had discussed Pierre frequently. Based on information from the Air Force investigators and the Ogden Police, both had concluded that Pierre was a killer, that he lacked the same conscience, the fear of retribution, possessed by the other airmen. On more than one occasion Neubauer had confessed to Stevens: “I lie awake at night worrying about that guy. I just wonder who he’s going to kill next.”

  Stevens had a voice of megaphone intensity and eyes greatly magnified by thick glasses. He smoked cigars. When dressing down a cocky airman, he would first crowd the airman with his potbelly and glare at him with his magnified eyes, and then out of his mouth would blast a cloud of cigar smoke and a salvo of orders and threats peppered with “Do you hear me, boy!” and “Is that clear, son!” It worked on everyone but Pierre.

  “I got the impression that whatever happened to him was just che sarà,” said Stevens, “like a fatalistic approach. But it was something you sensed more than you really knew. I could stick that cigar in my mouth and try to look mean, hit him up one side and down the other, but I just wasn’t getting through to him. The other guys I’d do that to I could see a little tremor, or some kind of reaction, hatred or fear or something. But with Pierre it just rolled off him like water off a duck’s back.”

  Their problem was that Pierre had officially done nothing to violate the provisions for separation from the Air Force. Not until late January, when Pierre was arrested for auto theft by the Ogden Police, did Stevens and Neubauer feel they had grounds to begin processing him for an early “undesirable” discharge. Though they had to await a conviction before Pierre could be discharged, Stevens and Neubauer had begun the paper work for his separation while Pierre was still in jail. However, when Pierre was
released on bail on March 20, still awaiting trial, he surprised them by requesting an early out under a new regulation, which provided for the resignation of an airman who was unable to adjust to military life. Under this regulation he would receive an honorable discharge. Though Stevens and Neubauer wanted Pierre separated from the Air Force with an “undesirable,” even more than that they wanted him out of the Air Force as soon as possible. Under the new regulation no conviction was required. Pierre immediately had been taken off the flight line and assigned to permanent bay orderly duties in the barracks. Stevens called it “hang-fire status” which was to apply until he could have Pierre separated from the Air Force.

  Two days after Pierre had gone to Stevens with his resignation request, Andrews had also asked to be separated from the Air Force. Andrews was a different case, Stevens felt. He would have been “a darn good trooper.” Andrews, though, seemed never to act on his own, drifting with whatever was happening around him. In a crowd he could be tough. As Stevens remembered, “You could get him to be really scared to death until he got out and talked to some of his buddies.”

  Stevens began processing Andrews’s separation papers and assigned him to bay orderly duties with Pierre. The two of them reported to the TV room five days a week at seven thirty in the morning to learn whether they would be mopping and vacuuming one end of a hall or another, or policing the grounds around the three-story building and the Dumpster out front. And at the end of the day Pierre and Andrews had still more janitorial duties to perform. Each of them had received an Article 15 for failing twice to report for duty on the flight line. As punishment the two men had been reduced to the grade of airman basic and ordered to serve two penalty hours each afternoon from four o’clock to six o’clock for the thirty days of April. During these two hours Stevens had them GI the floors, clean the latrine, and perform other janitorial details around the barracks orderly room.