by Gary Kinder
“It’s seven thirty in the morning. You’ve been in the hospital a little over two weeks today. Connie the nurse is here and she’s taking good care of the Duke. So you’ve got nothing to fret about.”
As he talked, Byron sometimes would lift Cortney’s legs a little and move them left or right, trying to revive the feeling of motion in his son. As always, he examined Cortney carefully, looking for signs of new complications.
“I talked to the Terrys next door and the Rubens, and they all said to give a big howdy to my sick partner. Said they can’t wait for the Duke to get back in the neighborhood. Course, Kelly’s been up here to see you every afternoon. And guess who called? Wolfgang! Wanted to know when you’d be ready to solo that Cessna Skyhawk again.”
While Byron was touching him and talking to him, Cortney occasionally would open his eyes and stare at the ceiling or blink if his father asked him to, but mosdy he lay still, his eyes closed, his mouth slacked open, his body slightly feverish. Sometimes, his father would ask: “Cortney, do you remember what happened to you? Do you remember going to the store?” After that one episode when Cortney spoke to his father during the first few days he was in the hospital, these questions never received any kind of response. Byron asked them because he was afraid that Cortney would relate his present surroundings with what had happened in the basement.
“You’re in the hospital now, St. Ben’s,” he would say. “You were hurt at the store, but you’re okay now. There’s no one here to hurt you and you’re safe.”
Byron touched Cortney and talked to him the whole time he was in the room, but he didn’t know if Cortney felt his touch or understood even a word he was saying.
While Cortney lay in coma at St. Benedict’s Hospital, Pierre sat in the Weber County Jail, awaiting his trial for murder. During the time he sat there little happened. He read a few books, leafed through some hot rod and motorcycle magazines, and listened to incoming calls over the police radio down the hall. There was a jailbreak in May and six prisoners escaped, but Pierre and Andrews were not among them. One Sunday, Pierre threw a supper tray at a guard when the guard served him a fried chicken drumstick instead of the wing Pierre had requested. Later, Pierre tried to sue the sheriff for $300,000 for not allowing him to take an afternoon nap.
In those first weeks Pierre’s mail was full of threats from people who wanted to do to him what he had done to his victims. The letters came from various states across the country, typical hate mail in the aftermath of a mass murder. They arrived with other typical letters from people who were praying for his soul. One elderly woman from Missouri wanted to take Pierre into her home when he was released from prison.
Pierre, Andrews, and Roberts finally were arraigned, all on charges of aggravated robbery and first-degree murder. Their lawyers then began a series of hearings to suppress evidence and to determine whether trials for the three men would be joined or separate, in Ogden or elsewhere, open or closed to the press.
Rita James had resigned as Pierre’s attorney, a decision inevitable from the moment she had read of Pierre’s arrest in the small-town Georgia newspaper. As she explained later, the community pressure that would have been on her, or any other local attorney defending Pierre, would not have been in his best interest. “It wasn’t exacdy that everybody wanted to avoid the heat,” she said. “We’ve all had people upset at us before, but if Dale was going to have what he obviously had to have, which was really top-notch representation, then it had to be somebody who wasn’t going to be subjected to that sort of heat, and that meant going to Salt Lake for lawyers.” Perhaps more important, the other reason that Rita could not effectively represent Pierre was personal: Byron Naisbitt was her gynecologist.
Rita had visited Pierre at the county jail and explained to him why she could no longer serve as his attorney. He said that he wanted a private attorney and not a public defender, and Rita agreed that the magnitude of the case probably required more experience than could be found in the public defender’s office. There were other reasons she felt that Pierre should seek private counsel: the head of the public defender’s office in Ogden lived three doors from the Naisbitts and might be subjected to the same community pressure that had influenced Rita’s resignation. Then too, while Roberts had secured a lawyer from out of state, Andrews already had agreed to be represented by a public defender. With future conflicts likely between the cases of Pierre and Andrews, ethics would make it difficult to represent both defendants out of the same office.
After her meeting with Pierre, Rita contacted a number of criminal lawyers in Salt Lake City, afterward submitting to the judge a list of those lawyers willing to represent Pierre in the Hi-Fi Murders. From the list the judge had appointed two attorneys, one of whom had tried a dozen cases of first-degree murder and had never had a jury impose the death penalty on one of his clients. The public defender’s office allocated a portion of its budget to paying for Pierre’s private counsel, and the Weber County commissioners agreed to negotiate additional fees and legal expenses for Pierre.
One of the first steps Pierre’s new attorneys took to build their defense was to make an appointment for Pierre with a prominent Salt Lake City psychiatrist, Dr. Louis G. Moench. They wanted to know if Pierre was legally sane.
“Yes,” said Dr. Moench, “I think it’s probably the most gruesome crime that’s ever occurred in this state, in my memory. Although I’ve heard of some pretty bad ones, I think it’s the worst. The sadistic quality here, the unmitigated and unnecessary cruelty, the ingenuity and variety of indignities to the people, I think this is the worst.
“As a psychiatrist, I see quite a few people for the court. In this case I was appointed to examine Pierre to see if he was legally sane to stand trial. The determination of his sanity or insanity is all that was done, and that’s pretty crude, really a legal exam and not a medical one. So the things that are most important about this man, about finding out why, and what his problems are, and his thinking patterns, the dynamic mechanisms, were unfortunately not part of my examination.
“He was a cooperative person at the time, reasonably placid, reasonably amiable, freely talked about some of his background and answered my questions. I had the impression that he really wasn’t informing me of anything though, just going through the motions of answering questions and not helping me very much.
“He was born in Tobago, what they call Mason Hall, I assume that’s a city. Was raised in Trinidad and moved to Brooklyn at the age of seventeen. There’s a problem with his parents, but I didn’t explore it. He said he finished three and a half years of college in Trinidad majoring in physical science, got a C-plus average, and then had three months’ additional college at Long Island University. He said he and his family are active Seventh-Day Adventists, and that he attended church until his incarceration. He said he worked as an institutional aid in a children’s service department in New York as a counselor for children for about a year. He didn’t give any more detail on it. He said he worked as a service clerk for the phone company for three years and had a short time in a restaurant cooking during a strike by the phone company. He joined the Air Force as a volunteer in May of 1973.
“I don’t think all of this time adds up correcdy.
“He said he’d never been in any other legal trouble except that he was charged with car theft in January ‘seventy-four and had not been tried for that. Said his home life in Trinidad was average. Spent most of his time at home. His father worked off and on. Said he didn’t feel deprived. He was disciplined by whipping, but he said he deserved it. He and his family often attended church. He said on moving to New York he didn’t join any street gangs, he didn’t drink, he didn’t take any drugs, and got along well with his siblings. I got the feeling he was presenting himself as Mr. Clean. He didn’t fulfill the criteria for insanity to the extent that he couldn’t stand trial. I had the impression that there hadn’t been any difference between his mental state at the time of the crime and the day I saw him.
<
br /> “It would have been very helpful to pursue the interview to try to find some of the dynamics involved. He did say he was injured in a motorcycle accident in about 1965 at age fifteen or sixteen. He had a head injury, said he required twenty-five stitches, spent two months in the hospital, denies any episode of coma or unconsciousness, although he said subsequently he’d had transitory blackouts lasting a few minutes several times a week. He said no one observed him in these, so he couldn’t say, but he didn’t think he had any convulsions or lost his urine and there was no residual amnesia. So this wouldn’t be a classical seizure. This is important because some people disposed to behavior disorders have the behavior disorder instead of a convulsion. They act out during that time, and then generally have amnesia for what they’ve done just the same as someone else has amnesia for a seizure.
“I didn’t try to elaborate on the discrepancies in his story because I didn’t think he indicated any legal defense of insanity. But I thought he was conning me. In his serial subtraction for instance—this is pretty elementary—he kept making mistakes: a hundred minus seven equals ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-seven, sixty-one, fifty-four, forty-four… If these were all repetitive mistakes, it would be more consistent with brain damage. But his random errors were not that consistent. He ought to have neurological work, though. Legally, it wouldn’t change anything, he’s legally sane, but these things show up and it’s of interest.
“Usually by the time an interview is about half over, the person will tell me pretty much the details of what happened during the crime. But when Pierre was talking about the day of the murders, he simply claims he doesn’t remember much about it. He’d been given some money by his friends to rent them a garage for their van. And he said he did rent the garage. He was sitting with the guys, as he says, while they, not he, popped pills, ‘reds’—I assume that would be Seconal, I’m not sure. He gave me the impression he was always the innocent victim of something, that somebody else always got him into trouble.
“They did go to the garage and then they left. They drove him to a friend’s place where they could get speed, where they could rather than he, then stopped at a gas station to get gas for the van. He went to a grocery store for Excedrin for a headache, Seven Up, and a Coke for Andrews, one of the other defendants. Then they went to a park, the other two smoked weed, and everything took place from there. He wouldn’t elaborate on what took place. He said that later he was putting some stuff in the garage, apparently speakers, and blacked out for a couple of minutes. He said he didn’t know where the speakers came from. It was my impression that he was not telling me everything he knew. I thought he was trying to keep control over some of his private information and wouldn’t let me get inside of it, which I’m still convinced is true.
“Basically, I think Pierre’s a very inferior person, that is, he has a tremendous sense of inferiority, and at the same time he goes through the process of denying it. Then it becomes a sense of power. His feelings of wanting power, I think, represent his feelings of inferiority. It’s an attempt at compensation.”
* * *
Cortney’s weight continued to fall. On May 8 two nurses slid a metal tray beneath him and pumped it upward until Cortney’s body hung free of the bed. He weighed 110 pounds. For the first two weeks after he was shot Cortney’s nourishment had not been critical to his survival, but now it was becoming a serious problem. After fighting infection and trauma without benefit of food, Cortney’s body was beginning to break down its own muscle tissue and feed upon itself. To avoid this, he required six thousand calories a day, a diet equivalent to that of an active lumberjack. But Cortney was not even alert enough to swallow water.
The only way the doctors could feed Cortney the quantity of food he now needed was by a relatively new and difficult to regulate procedure called hyperalimentation. Despite the difficulties, Johnson started the feedings immediately, pumping massive amounts of calories and protein directly into Cortney’s veins.
On May 10, two days after Dr. Johnson started hyperalimenting Cortney, Dr. Hauser examined the boy and made the following notation on his chart:
Remains comatose (18th day) and responsive only when vigorously aroused… . Atrophy upper right extremity is pronounced… . He no longer fixes gaze on examiner even with stimulation. I feel chances of functional recovery lessen with each day of persistent coma.
The next day a nurse was taking Cortney’s vital signs when she noticed a slight twitching just below Cortney’s left eye. Cortney’s eyes were closed, and except for the small area of twitching, his body was still. As the nurse watched his face, suddenly at the corner of each eye appeared tears which quickly overflowed and coursed down his temples into the sterile wrapping still around his head. The nurse touched him and tried to turn him gently onto his side, but at her touch Cortney’s body became rigid, his thin muscles taut and vibrating.
The nurses continued talking to Cortney, but he did not utter a word, or even moan. If commanded to open his eyes, sometimes he would open them slighdy. If the nurses asked him a question, with his eyes still closed he might nod his head, or even squeeze their hand weakly. Most of the time he did nothing. After he cried that day the second week in May, tears frequendy came to his eyes when the nurses talked to him and reassured him that he was safe and everything would be all right. The tears were one of the few contacts they had with him.
Upon returning to school the day after her mother’s funeral, Claire had broken out in a rash. In her apartment at night, when she had tried to sleep, she had shaken uncontrollably and awakened in the morning unable to pull herself out of bed. For the first few days, she had had difficulty getting dressed and driving a car. She had missed her morning classes each day, and when she finally had forced herself to attend an advanced chemistry lab, she found that she could not read simple numbers on a digital readout. But final exams covering her course work for the entire year were to begin the second week of May, and she still had to prepare for them. She kept saying to herself that her father would want it that way.
During these last two weeks of school Claire had made several trips back to Ogden to visit Cortney, and she and Scott finally had talked to her father about their engagement. When she completed her exams, she moved home with her father and Gary to begin planning her wedding and to spend as much time with Cortney as possible.
We’d go over and we’d visit every day, several times a day. Usually we’d try to work it out in shifts, so that not everybody was there all at once. Even though … oh, I don’t know. It was hard to sit there because you were neurotic, you wanted action now. But we did that. We’d go over and we’d just sit and we’d hold his hand and we’d talk to him and stroke his hair and tell him we loved him. We’d just tell him everything was okay. Everything’s just fine and he’s, he’s doing okay. But he looked terrible. Just lying there so long and skinny. And he was yellow all over. And still just kinda had crusty things on him. You know, like blood and stuff, from his trache. And they were always pumping gunk out of his stomach and his lungs and everywhere else. Just dried up blood, because I’m sure he kept oozing and it’d coagulate. I remember he’d kinda convulse all the time too, you know. And when he’d get raspy, the nurses would come in and suction out his lungs. You could tell he was trying to cough. He would jiggle all over. I mean his chest would just kind of come up, like he was trying to cough, but he couldn’t because he had this trache in. I remember how horrible that was. I just thought, Can’t they help you cough? This is probably the way it is all the time with patients like that. But to me it just … I don’t know.
The nurses were really nice. They’d come in and work around us, changing his bottles and all that stuff. It would be like just me and Brett maybe would go over, or else I’d go over and relieve whoever was there for a while. I guess we really were there a lot. I’d rub his arms if he was cold. It seemed like he was always cold because they had him on an ice blanket, and he was always shivering and shaking. Of course, Cortney was o
ut of it. It seemed like an awful long time he just lay there. I don’t know how long. And his eyes had this stuff on them, kind of like grease or something. I don’t know what they put on them, and I don’t know why they put it on. But his eyes were kind of dark and blackish, and greasy for some reason. And, like I say, he was yellow all over. He looked so sick, you just can’t believe it. His hands … his fingernails were all really dry and corroded off. You know? I mean it was just … I don’t know. He had stuff running off of his face, I guess where the acid, or the Drano, had burned it all to pieces. It was all crusty. It was amazing to me that he was really alive. I couldn’t believe that you could look like that and still be alive. He had all these tubes and wires from every place, going down his nose, in his throat, he had them everywhere, every orifice, you know. And then his head was bandaged up. That made him look a little better, I think. Maybe not. But he just looked … he looked kinda like a … what did he look like? He looked just like a dead person. Only with all these wires and things in. ‘Cause he never moved or anything. Sometimes, I remember, he would kinda move his fingers, just a little bit. This wasn’t right at first. And he would wiggle his feet occasionally. I guess maybe his toes were first. This was after a long while it seemed like. And I mean everybody just went crazy. You know? “He moved!”
After less than a week of hyperalimenting Cortney intravenously, the doctors discovered that Cortney’s kidneys were not “recognizing” and redirecting the nutrients where they were needed, but passing them out of his body with the excess water. He was still losing weight, and the doctors agreed that they would have to find another method of feeding him.
They now had two alternatives. They could cut a hole through Cortney’s abdominal wall directly into his stomach and place a gastrostomy tube. Or they could try to take advantage of a new development in Cortney’s condition: he seemed to be showing the first faint signs of stirring from coma. Even the skeptical Dr. Hauser had noted, “There very definitely appears to be attempts to follow verbal commands.”