"OGDEN Utah (ABC 4 News) - A man who lost his wife and eventually his son says he never paid attention to what happened to the killers. He had other important things to do, mainly keep his son alive and live his own life."
This is one of the few horrors of this kind in which the perpetrators have been executed. The victims were forced to drink Drano. The perps took the time to rape the 18-year old girl before killing her.
I obtained the DVD of the Richard Chamberlain TV movie based on the crime and saw it last night. The murders were shown, but were toned down somewhat for understandable reasons. The race of the killers was shown accurately, for once. The main focus of the movie was a family's recovery.
The Utah NAACP demanded the killers receive "life with the chance of parole" instead of death. This isn't in the movie.
Ogden Hi-Fi murders
revisited
By Marcos Ortiz06/28/2012 04:56 P.M.
06/29/2012 07:17 P.M.
4Utah
Ogden Hi-Fi murders (ABC 4 News)
OGDEN Utah (ABC 4 News) - A man who lost his wife and eventually his son says he never paid attention to what happened to the killers. He had other important things to do, mainly keep his son alive and live his own life.
OGDEN Utah (ABC 4 News) – It was a horrible crime in 1974 that is still affecting the families of victims today.
The Ogden Hi-Fi murders were a case of a robbery that went bad. [Ugh. PC cliché alert! But it’s also a race alert.] The crime involved torture, rape, and murder. Some of the victims survived but were never the same.
It happened on April 22, 1974 and Ogden police come across a grisly scene.
“There was police down there and everything and I had no idea what was going on,” recalls Byron Naisbitt who lost his wife Carol and eventually his son Cortney.
When police arrived to the music shop there are three dead bodies and two other victims were fighting to stay alive.
“She got caught down there,” Naisbitt told ABC 4 News. “She was there when they broke in."
Naisbitt says his wife went to the music shop looking for their son.
But Cortney was caught in the middle of the robbery when Carol walked in.
"I was surprised she was alive at all," says Naisbitt.
In a 1987 commutation hearing before convicted killer Pierre Dale Selby was put to death, he described the horrible deaths.
“I just continued shooting,” Selby says. “I figured I had shot Naisbitt so I just started shooting everybody else. When I was using the bathroom I saw the Drano in there."
All the victims including Carol and Cortney were tortured, forced to drink Drano before eventually being shot in the head.
“I remember the noise they were making, the sound of pain really,” Selby told the commutation board.
Carol Naisbitt died at the hospital.
18-year old Michelle Ansley was raped and killed.
20-year old Stanley Walker also died, but his father, Orrin Walker, and Cortney survived the brutal attacks.
“They found a bottle of Drano down there they forced to take it, figuring it would kill him,” Naisbitt told ABC 4 News. “My hell I'd hate to take a teaspoon of that.”
Fearing the worst Naisbitt says he went to the hospital looking for his wife and son.
“I went down in the morgue to identify her and I can still see her,” he says. “That's amazing I think and she was dead.”
Cortney was in a coma. Doctors feared he wouldn’t make it. So did his father.
“So I knew my life had changed right there,” he says.
Cortney did pull through. But his father says he was never the same.
“He was still bright,” Naisbitt says. “(He had) A different kind of brilliance, different kind of brilliance.”
As for the killers, Naisbitt says there was no thought of revenge or hate.
“I had none of that,” he says. “I figured right off the bat that they were going to be taken care of and I didn't give them one thought.”
The justice system did take care of it. In 1987 Selby was put to death by lethal injection. Five years later, William Andrews who also participated in the crime was also executed at the Utah state prison.
A third man, Keith Roberts who was waiting in the getaway car, was convicted of robbery and was sent to prison. He was released in 1987.
“I didn't give it a thought,” Naisbitt says. “They had their choice on how to die. I didn't follow it that close.”
Naisbitt’s son Cortney lived twenty-eight more years. Despite his injuries, Cortney was able to work and get married but later died a mysterious death at an early age of 44.
“They couldn't find anything,” his father says. “(There was) Nothing in the brain nothing in his body. He just died.”
As for Byron Naisbitt, he remarried and finally retired from his medical practice after delivering thousands of babies in Ogden.
April 22nd 1974 changed his life forever. But his resolve to move on helped him live life to the fullest still remembering his murdered wife and son and not allowing the heinous acts of two men to guide him on his path in life.
"My life is going to go on,” he says. “Hey nobody's going to change that but me, nobody."
In 1984, the Ogden Hi-Fi murders were turned into a book; “Victim: The Other Side of Murder by Gary Kinder.
It profiled the Naisbitt family, Cortney's struggle to live and a father's determination to keep him alive.
It was the first time the focus was on the victim of a violent crime.
Later in 1992, Hollywood turned the Naisbitt’s story into a movie: “Aftermath, A Test of Love.”
8 comments:
"...no thought of revenge or hate..."? That seems humanly impossible to me, yet it explains everything that's gone wrong in our society. What aberration causes such emotional malfunction, leading ultimately to civilizational suicide?
It was not a robbery gone bad. They "stayed a while", raped and tortured.
Those two thugs were from the nearby air force base and were connected to two other previous homicides but never even arrested, only suspects.
To Saturday, December 28, 2013 at 5:48:00 P.M. EST,
Socialism?
To Sunday, December 29, 2013 at 7:46:00 p.m. est
With all due respect for Dr. Naisbitt, the black devils did not force their white victims to drink Drano, in order to kill them. They had guns for that job. The Drano was to torture the whites. This has proven to be a popular form of black-on-white torture.
Clearly, robbery was not their motive, but rather an afterthought. As you noted, had they been there to rob the store, they would have been in and out in three minutes or less. Instead, they stayed for hours.
I wasn’t aware that they were suspected of committing two other murders. Are you from Utah? Are you going on memory from way back when, or do you have any sources you can direct me to?
NO, I am not from UT. But recall very well that the two thugs were enlisted men on the nearby air base and were strong suspects in two other murders. But never enough evidence to arrest or obviously convict.
Besides the three men convicted, three others were thought to be involved. And the one man, Pierre, is believed to have killed another airman. Whether that was on base or off base it not clear. Pierre never charged for the alleged murder of the other airman.
Dr. Naisbitt is confused about one point. Carol was not there when the robbers "broke in"; she arrived some time later, looking for Cortney.
Cortney later married. This was detailed in the book "Victim" but her name was not mentioned in his obituary. I wonder how long it lasted?
Dr. Naisbitt remarried a few years after Carol's death. His second wife died a couple of years ago.
Nicholas,
I just found out the REELZ Channel is showing a program on the Utah Hi-Fi Murders. It premiered last year, but I missed it then. It is an episode of their "CopyCat Killers" series, "Dirty Harry: Magnum Force."
The idea is murderers inspired by movies. The perps in the Hi-Fi Murders got the idea of pouring Drano down the throat of the victims from Magnum Force (1973).
The REELZ Channel is repeating the episode three times on Tuesday, April 10, at 9 am, 12 pm, 3 pm, all ET.
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