Victim

by Gary Kinder

  It has helped me in another way too. It is very hard (at times, impossible) for me to cry out my pain and rage. If you can find something to start the process, it isn’t long before you can just let go and pour it out! I found myself rereading parts of Victim that bring my pain and empathy with you and your dad to the breaking point. It sets me free from my confinement. I thaw. It’s sort of like draining an abscess, I suppose.

  You know, Cortney, three years ago one of the sisters at St. James Cathedral, here in Seattle, said something to me and I’ve put it forth as a goal to overcome some of my self-hatred. I was relating how useless I’ve felt as a woman since the hysterectomy. She told me that giving birth to a baby is only one way of giving life! You have really helped me understand much more fully what she meant. You and your dad, your whole family, have given life to me in a way no one else ever has. You can’t imagine what that means to me! My case is not like other abuse cases, of which I’ve met many. But I don’t feel so alone with all of it anymore, because of you and your fight to live. You really are there and I can hold the book in my arms and it’s solid and real. I have hope and progress because you and your family opened up that tragic, emotionally agonizing part of yourselves, and I could hear and speak it too. Cortney, you’ve given me life! I use the book with Jane, with my church counselor, my doctors, and now even my priest! You’ve helped lead me to a new and healthier life through your pain and rage. That’s the greatest gift one could ever give another. It’s also the hardest, and most painful. I don’t think there’s any way I can possibly thank you enough. You’ve helped me make such great changes… .

  For me to uncover you and your family, who, like me, have had to look at and deal with this terrible violence and not run or tried to hide, is a blessing, ironically. The fact you didn’t die for it, Cortney, gives me a special kind of hope too. Thank you for being there and having the courage, strength, heart, and soul to reach out for people like me! I will forever be grateful and respect your nobility. I was lost and terrified and you gave me a voice! I will always love and appreciate you for that. You’re an answered prayer… .

  Please feel free to write or call me anytime. Because of my phobias, I only go outside when I must. And I can certainly understand not getting much motivation to sit down and try to put your thoughts on paper. I, too, have trouble with that. I would like to write once in a while and see how you’re doing and let you know I’m still out here, alive and caring. But do let me hear from you (my phone # is at the bottom of this letter). Please do continue to take good care of yourself. You really aren’t alone. Once again, thank you. May God bless and be with you always.

  When Cortney read the letter he thought, Finally, someone who knows how I feel. He called Kathy’s number, and they talked for four and a half hours. The next day they talked for nearly three hours. Over the next six weeks the two of them talked almost daily. Finally, Cortney, who was still working at Hill Air Force Base and had little annual leave remaining that year, persuaded Kathy to visit him in Ogden. At the end of a week of nearly incessant talking, they were married by a justice of the peace in Ogden on November 15,1985. Two years later they moved to Seattle, where both of them receive counseling and Cortney attends catechism classes for his conversion to Catholicism. In 1991 they will be married again in the Catholic Church.

  Cortney has now lived more of his life as a victim of the Hi-Fi murders than he lived before becoming a victim. Kathy told me recently, “Cortney keeps seeing more and more of the world, and the more he sees it, the more he likes it. He has more energy than he’s ever had before. He’s slowly coming out of his shell, and he’s thinking beyond the Hi-Fi murders.”

  I did not attend Pierre’s execution, nor did anyone from the three families. I forgot it was about to take place, until friends sent me clippings from the newspaper. I did not talk to Byron about it afterward, though I asked him recently if he could remember how he felt that day, and he said what I thought he would.

  It was just another day, so far as I was concerned. My only thought was, well, the sentence has been carried out after all this fooling around.

  He feels as I do that the moral dilemma should be not over the death penalty but over the emphasis placed on the murderer’s welfare at the expense of the victim. His recent comments echo his sentiments from over ten years ago, when he spoke the words that became my coda for the epilogue. His feelings have not changed; nor have the laws in Utah.

  Let’s make a statement if you want to do it. We talk about justice. The only thing I can see that would be justice is if there was some way Cortney could be taken care of, even on the same basis this guy in jail is taken care of They’ve spent several million dollars on these guys’ trials and retrials and all that sort of thing. But nobody cares what the hell happens to the victim. No one has given Cortney a thought. His rights have never been discussed, his problems have never been discussed, from a government standpoint. I’ve had people all the time ask how he is, but I’m talking about people who could really help. It makes me wonder what happens to people who are the victims of violent crime who can’t take care of themselves. And he can’t. I’ve decided that he’s probably damaged a little more than I thought. At least under the circumstances, he’s limited. If they’d put twenty-five cents on the dollar into a fund and just let him live off the interest and then put the money back into a general fund, that might have been justice to a person who’s perfectly innocent in all of this. And they spend all this dough trying to prove whatever to these courts, and no one’s given a pinch to what’s ever happened to the victims. If you want to make a statement, that would be my feeling about justice—to make sure the victim of a violent crime is at least looked after somewhat. I don’t know what is so important about all this appeal stuff, there hasn’t been one single iota changed in this whole case. It just keeps going back and forth. I don’t know how many judges have seen this now. Last time it was forty-eight; that’s when what’s-his-name was given the shot, and there’s been a bunch more since. And then, see, assuming his sentence is commuted and he spends his life in prison, this other guy’s guaranteed food, shelter, clothing, and medical care for the rest of his life. Nothing’s guaranteed to Cortney. I mean nothing.

  It costs, I understand, about thirty-five or forty thousand a year to keep someone in maximum security. And he’s been there now sixteen, seventeen years [laugh], that’s crazy, plus all of this ricky-tick, oh boy. That’s the only thing that rassles me. It’s not the sentence, they can turn him loose. I’ll tell you what I did, I called the state’s attorney general or whatever the hell they call them down there, and I said, “Listen, I want to make a deal with you. You turn that guy loose, just turn him back on the street, and instead of paying for him the rest of his life, pay Cortney what it would take to keep the guy in prison for the rest of Cort’s life, which is going to be shorter anyway. You could save that much money.” Thought I was crazy. “Why, we can’t turn him loose.” I figured what in the hell can I lose by doing it. I knew they’d just laugh. But I thought it might start someone thinking. I’d be glad to do that. Geez, if they’d do that I’d take that in two seconds. Turn that sucker loose and just pay Cortney for the rest of his life. I’m talking about Andrews. Hell, I’d’ve even done it with Pierre. I would really have done it, because I’m that much concerned. I would love to have made that deal. Turn that mother loose on the street. They’re willing to spend millions of dollars on all this bullshit, but they’re not willing to spend anything to take care of the people that were damaged.

  I don’t know. This has changed my life, there’s no questions about it, for hell’s sake. But I could be really comfortable if I knew that he was taken care of without it being a stress to him. I wish they cared as much about him as they do about that guy in prison.

  A writer of nonfiction, of stories that dig deeply into human emotions, faces a constant dilemma: he must seek the truth, yet the source of that truth must be made to suffer again in the process; the writer must for
ce his way past the pain. To draw the experience out, to make it real, he has to make people hurt, and while these people are hurting he has to tell himself that what he is doing is necessary to get at the truth, and that somehow if truth is set free, pain is justified. But there are times when truth itself seems trivial next to the pain you can imagine you are causing.

  I met Byron Naisbitt one night in early May of 1975. That evening, during an hour of intense questioning by his brother-in-law Lynn Richardson and his nephew Brent Richardson, Byron only listened. I told the three men that I wanted to write a book about what had happened, that to do that I had to write about Pierre, I hoped they understood that, but I was there to try to convince the family to talk to me, to tell me the victims’ side of crime, because to my knowledge no one had ever portrayed that in a book. I wanted to know, if they could tell me, how they dealt with this tragedy in their lives. At the end of that hour, Byron walked up to the front of the room and quietly shook my hand. He gave me two phone numbers, his office and his home, and then he said to me, “As long as Cort agrees, if you think that hearing his story will help someone else down the road, I’ll do it.”

  Even now, I’m only beginning to understand that commitment.