Victim

by Gary Kinder

  “Pierre played games with the facts to justify some of his behavior,” recalled Dorius, “which was outrageous. He tried to make it appear that he was provoked by Mrs. Naisbitt, when in fact she’d already had Drano poured down her throat and couldn’t speak: her mouth was taped at the time he said she said that. He said he was under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and there was no evidence at all. They didn’t even smell any alcohol on him: Orren Walker verified that. He tried to say that they found the Drano there. He was playing fast and loose with the facts. We were expecting him to mainly testify as to his childhood, but we sensed that he might want to testify as to the crime itself, and that’s why we invited Orren Walker to be there, to rebut that.”

  Dorius calls Orren Walker the Silent Saint, a man who has endured the unimaginable both physically and psychologically, and tried to learn and to grow so he could use his experience to help others. As he had on the witness stand thirteen years earlier, Walker told the panel that Pierre took his time, a long time, to shoot everyone, that he pranced as he moved as if he were enjoying himself, that he, Walker, could smell no beer on Pierre’s breath. Pierre’s story also failed to explain the rape, the kicking of the ballpoint pen, the use of two guns, the talk about German cocktails.

  Dorius asked me to testify at the hearing, because I was the only one who knew Pierre’s background, his life in Trinidad. After Pierre’s testimony, Dorius wanted me to talk about two things: racial prejudice in Trinidad and Pierre’s attitude about alcohol and other drugs.

  I sat at a small table facing the three-member panel. Behind me and to my left, two or three feet away, sat Pierre. I hadn’t seen him since January of 1980, when, sensing our relationship was about to end and being unable to think of anything else to discuss with him, I asked him the question we had so lightly skipped over all those years: how could he have done to those people what he had done? He acted disgusted and said only, “What I do is my business,” and I left.

  In the interim, Pierre had read Victim. When a reporter from The Miami Herald wrote to him to ask about the book, Pierre wrote back that, yes, he had read it; someone seeking his autograph on the inside cover had sent him a copy to sign. He wrote to the reporter that while he had the book in his possession, he “took the liberty of reading it.” Pierre told the reporter that the book was “amateurish.”

  To answer the lawyers’ and the panel’s questions, I talked and read from my notes about the tension I had witnessed between the East Indians and the Africans on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. While researching there, I had heard many stories of teachers favoring Indian children, and of at least one Indian father who murdered his own daughter for marrying as African. As for Pierre’s use of drugs, I had several letters from him and quotes in his interviews where he professed to disdain drugs and alcohol, except for an occasional beer. At the request of the government lawyers, I read from these.

  In a tearful announcement a week later, the head of the Board of Pardons, Vicky Palacios, announced that the board refused to stay Pierre’s execution. Since Pierre was sentenced to die in 1974, the state of Utah had repealed its old death penalty statute that gave the condemned a choice between the gallows and the firing squad. Pierre would be put to sleep with a needle.

  When Dorius entered the execution chamber, Pierre paid no attention to him. “I could just see him talking to himself and staring up,” remembered Dorius, “and he had an IV that had been started in his arm. His arms were wrapped tightly to the gurney, his legs were strapped to the gurney.

  “This execution chamber was a square room. There was a room along the south wall of the chamber for the media, and there was a wall that divided them from another room on the south side for the guests of Pierre. Then on the west side of the room is where the executioner was. We could not see into that area, but there was like a oneway mirror on that side, and I noticed there were tubes leading out of that area that came through a little hole and ended up in Pierre’s arm for the IV tubes. As I recall, there were maybe two or three of those. On the east side of the execution chamber there was nothing; that was just a solid wall. The north side was for all the government officials, and the only way for us to take our place was to walk through the execution chamber, and then back out again on the other side. I had not been advised of that, so when I walked in there I didn’t realize I was walking into the chamber. I started to carry on this Hi-how-ya-doin’-old-friend conversation, and Gerry had this real strained look on his face, like, We shouldn’t be talking. Then I looked to my left, and that’s when I first saw Pierre, so I immediately quit talking. Although he was at somewhat of a diagonal, so that his head, as I recall, was facing right at me, he was preoccupied with his prayers. I don’t know that he noticed me, again because he’s strapped to the gurney, and there might have been a neck strap as well strapping him down. So all I saw was him talking, facing directly up to the ceiling. Anyway, I went to the other side and looked back and observed.”

  Outside, on a barren rise overlooking the prison, Dorius’s adversary all those years, Pierre’s attorney Gil Athay, stood among 150 death penalty opponents holding lighted candles in silent protest. Only a few feet away, another 50 people had gathered to ring in the execution and to mock death penalty opponents with chants and laughter. Before Pierre, Athay had never had the death sentence imposed on a client, and he had fought to have this one overturned. Along the way he had lost his bid for Utah Attorney General because he refused to compromise his beliefs, which made him an easy target for his opponent. During my research I encountered people who said they would have been just as happy to see Athay in front of a firing squad as they would Pierre.

  Thirteen years later the sentence was finally being carried out, and Earl Dorius was inside the new prison warehouse, witnessing Pierre’s final moments. “The warden was given the assignment to stay in the execution chamber and ask Pierre for his last words. I couldn’t hear any of this. I watched him go over to Pierre and talk to him a little bit, and then he stepped back and gave a nod or some signal and that started the process. With respect to Pierre, I have to say, I think he was ready to die. There was no indication of any resistance at all from the time that I first saw him. He knew it was going to happen.

  “The only noticeable change I saw is that first he went to sleep. Then I saw his chest heave, I believe once, like a crippling effect, a reaction to the drugs. And then again as if he were asleep. Other than that, the only way I knew he was dead was that I could tell from the reflection in the glass opposite me. I noticed that the soles of his feet turned from a pink color to an ashen gray. Apparently it’s protocol for a doctor to take the vital signs and then wait five minutes and take them again, but she indicated that there never were any, so I’m sure that he was dead in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. Not a bit of pain. In fact, as the county attorney and I drove back over we discussed the fact that it was almost clinical. It’s just as if they were sedating a patient to prepare them for surgery. That’s the best way I can describe it. It’s the most painless-appearing form of execution imaginable.

  “I was later asked by a member of the media what some of my thoughts were, and I had to confess that my focus was on his feet, because of the way his body was angled. And the thought occurred to me as I was watching his execution, How could those little feet—and they were very small, they looked like they might be a size 6 or 7—do so much damage. I thought of the kicking of the ballpoint pen into Orren’s ear, and that sort of thing, and it was almost like I fixed on his feet. And then there was the part of the trial transcript that talked about those feet walking up stairs—you know, the pattern of his footsteps, as if he were in a frenzy, running up and down the stairs and across the floorboards of the upstairs. That’s how Orren kind of knew his whereabouts and remembered the difference between Pierre’s footsteps and Andrew’s. All I could think of was the pattern of the feet and the damage they’d done.”

  Pierre had been injected with three drugs to put him to slee
p, to paralyze his lungs, and to arrest his heart. A little after 1:00 A.M., he was pronounced dead. His execution was the first in Utah since Gary Gilmore’s death by firing squad in January of 1977, an execution that had ended a ten-year death penalty moratorium in the United States. Between Gilmore’s execution and Pierre’s, eighty-eight men had been put to death for their crimes. Pierre was the forty-eighth person executed in Utah, the second black man; the first black man was executed in 1926.

  Poboi Enterprises never experienced the phenomenal growth Pierre had envisioned, nor did Pierre achieve his personal goal of owning a smaller version of the Playboy mansion. Just before he was executed, he bequeathed all of his money to Andrews, who suddenly became richer by $29. Of the 2,300 inmates now on death row in the United States, Andrews has been there longer than anyone.

  I completed the manuscript for Victim in the fall of 1981. When it had undergone my and my editor’s final review, I sent a copy as a courtesy to Byron Naisbitt. A few days later my phone rang, and when I picked up the receiver, I heard Cortney crying on the other end. I had to sort of “con” the manuscript out of my father’s hands because I wanted to read it and know what happened that night and about the four months in the hospital before I woke up. Everything was in there, everything Byron had tried to tell him that day on the way back from the fish hatchery. But until he read the book you have just read, Cortney knew almost nothing about the murders or about his first four months in the hospital. Now he had read it all, and I listened while he cried about what he had read. When he could speak, he said, “I didn’t know my family loved me so much.”

  When the book was published in the late summer of 1982, Cortney was almost twenty-five. But the young women he met through church groups and friends were still in their teens, most of them already engaged or promised to young men away on missions for the church. Once, at the urging of a nurse who worked for his father, Cortney went to the home of a young woman and talked for two hours with her mother, the young woman never speaking a word: she was under psychiatric care for a crippling shyness. Cortney called me one day in early 1985 to talk about some of his experiences. “Call it my imagination,” he said, “but every time I meet a girl and I ask her her name and tell her mine, I can see her thinking and thinking, and then I can tell the exact moment she figures out where she’s heard my name before, and I know she’s going, ‘Oh, you’re some kind of freak, you’re supposed to be dead.’”

  About that time, Cortney received a letter from a young woman named Nancy, who lived in Boston. Nancy had read Victim and had been so moved by the story she wanted to correspond with Cortney. She wrote to Cortney, and even visited him in Ogden, and Cortney flew back to meet her family in Boston. But the relationship ended quickly after that.

  I received many letters like Nancy’s, some from as far away as New Zealand and Sweden. The letters were like little windows into the collective mind of the reading public, a public that all writers know exists, but only as a vague notion that rarely takes form inside the tiny cubicle where most of them work. Once in a while, when the mail arrives, the shade on one little window goes up. The most revealing peek I had, the one that made me realize that while I sat alone working on other projects, people were out there reading and being moved by the story, came through a letter from a thirty-two-year-old woman living in Seattle. The letter arrived in early September 1985. I have tried to paraphrase its contents, but I cannot, so I quote it here, only a few sentences short of its entirety:

  I’ve read your book Victim. I read it over a year ago and have pondered over it a great deal all this time. I’ve been wanting to write to you for a long time, but I’m not exactly sure what I want or need, perhaps, to say. I will try because it is important to me. I hope you will understand if it takes me a while to put this into words.

  I imagine you’ve gotten many letters from other victims of crime since the release of your book. I, too, am a victim. Not only of crimes committed by strangers, but from those who everyone expects and deserves love from.

  The next paragraph contained a list of so much torture, abuse, and loss, so many rapes, beatings, and broken bones, that I thought for certain the woman was writing to ask if I was interested in telling her story for my next book. But she continued in another vein.

  I have been in therapy for the last three years and probably will remain so for years to come. I understand Cortney Naisbitt’s mind. I am a could-have-been, too. I know the pain, fear, loss, misunderstanding, rejections, confusion, hatred, and rage. I know what it’s like to have someone—several someones—actually want you dead. I suffer from so many phobias and all in the extreme, that I can’t function in society without medication. I know the nightmares and the panicky awakening that accompanies it. Sleepwalking. Wanting to go outside and enjoy the day like most everybody else and be unable to. Spending every waking moment trying to stop yourself from suicide and forever asking yourself and God why you lived through the unlivable. Yes. I understand Cortney Naisbitt. I know how nearly impossible it is to find yourself a “safe” place and fit in, never really able to forget the very things you forced yourself to forget in the past when it was happening.

  Cortney is a survivor and for that reason I’ve often thought of writing to him to say “I know.” But we victims often have too much of our own pain and problems to be able to feel anything for anyone except ourselves. The aftermath of violence seems to last forever with us. I doubt Cortney would be comforted by or even want to hear from another victim. I’m not so sure I would be able to make him feel any better, anyway.

  I guess that’s where you come in. You took the time and the care and effort to write down clearly what no one who has never been a victim wants to hear and, yet, they must hear in order to face it and change it. Posttraumatic stress disorder is not something people should be turning away from. Victims need more than anything else support and people who identify and understand them. Once violated, a person’s body is never going to completely heal. Victims lose an important part of themselves and you can’t get it back. You spoke for us, for all of us, not just Cortney Naisbitt, in your book, and it means everything to me (for one). I often have a difficult time putting into words to my therapist, counselors, and doctors what I’m feeling, what is happening inside my head and/or body, but with your book I can turn to a certain page and say, “Listen to this, you know, ‘cause it says what I’m feeling.” Like Cortney, I get lost inside my head. Unless I can find something to identify my thoughts and feelings with, I can’t communicate them to get help. I stay lost and unreachable.

  At about the same time I bought and read your book last year, I also started “awakening” from my traumatized state, and your book was such a help to me in relating to others, including my therapist. That “awakening” is hell in its own way (my near-waist-length auburn hair fell out, I got/get overwhelmed by rage and emotional pain, the panic attacks escalated horribly, etc.), and I spent hours rereading parts of your book, telling myself that all I was feeling was appropriate for what I’d lived through. At times I’d call up my therapist and say, “I’ve found what I’ve been trying to say! Let me read this to you!” And I made a lot of “breakthroughs” because of the things you helped me to say so I could be understood and reached.

  I’d like to thank you for writing Victim and saying for so many of us that who we are and what happens to us is important too. Because we survive, the rest of the world seems to be of the opinion that we’re miracles of strength; however, we are just people. People who break in the midst of our own survival. We are due help and respect and sensitivity to our plight. We need to be heard. We need to feel safe, which only comes from being heard.

  I’d like to thank the Naisbitt family, too, for caring and giving some light and life out of their pain and sorrow. It must have been one of the biggest “labors of love” in modern days, to say the least! And thanks to Cortney for surviving for people like me.

  The letter was signed “Kathy.”

  When I rec
eived similar letters, I always made copies and sent them to Byron and to Cortney. I mailed a copy of Kathy’s letter to Cortney, and I sent Cortney’s address to Kathy. She wrote to Cortney, and he saved the letter. Here are some things she said:

  There is a problem that I’d had all of my life, especially three and a half years ago when I got into therapy. I couldn’t put things—thoughts, experiences, problems, differences, feelings—into words. I did not know how to express myself. I can’t tell normal sensations and feelings from abnormal. And try as she has, Jane (my therapist) could only do so much. So I began to search for books that could say what I had to and couldn’t… .

  That’s where you and your family and Victim came in. As I read the book, there it all was in front of me! Past and present! The thoughts, the torment, the fears, panic, shock, depression, loss. Everything! Somebody else knew and had put it down for me to read and communicate with! I began to use the book in therapy. I still do. I’ll excitedly call up my therapist and say, “Hey! Jane! Listen to this! I’m feeling like this, again, or felt like that!” I mean, what is therapy if you can’t communicate? If you can’t or don’t know how to say what’s happening to you? My case, from what I’ve witnessed and understand from others, is relatively rare, because not only did I survive but I’ve put my guts and soul into changing it. There’s been no violence in my life in four years. I am in drug therapy and I suffer many severe phobias, but I can talk, relate to those who are here to help me, in a world I’ve never known before. Your story was the greatest single source of help I’ve found.