Ogden Hi-Fi Murders

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Downtown Ogden (2010)

The hi-fi murders of Ogden in the northern US state of Utah were a criminal case that shocked the spring of 1974, the American public because of the cruelty of this crime. The three airmen Dale Pierre Selby , William Andrews and Keith Roberts , members of the US Air Force , attacked a hi-fi shop in Ogden on April 22nd of this year , taking five hostages , three of whom were killed. A female hostage had previously been raped several times .

The raid

The first hostages

With their pistols drawn, Selby and Andrews walked into the hi-fi store on Washington Boulevard in the late afternoon of April 22, 1974, just before the store closed. The third party, Keith Roberts, was waiting outside in the car. At this point, the two employees, 20-year-old Stanley Walker and 19-year-old Michelle Ansley, were in the store. Selby and Andrews took them to the basement of the business premises, where they were handcuffed and gagged . After that, they began to search the store.

Sixteen-year-old Cortney Naisbitt, who was running an errand for his mother nearby, stopped by to thank Stanley Walker for allowing him to park his vehicle in the customer parking lot. Cortney surprised the perpetrators and became the third hostage. He was taken to the other two in the basement and also handcuffed.

The fourth hostage was Orren Walker, 43, Stanley's father. When he was worried about his son's whereabouts in the early evening, he went to the hi-fi shop to see if everything was going well. When he entered the store, he was also captured. After being shown into the basement, Selby asked Andrews to get a bottle wrapped in a paper bag from the car. After Andrews returned with the bag, Selby opened the bottle and filled a mug with the blue liquid. He handed the cup to Orren Walker and told him to give the other hostages the liquid. When Orren resisted, he was handcuffed and gagged and left face down on the floor.

At that moment, 52-year-old Carol Naisbitt, wife of the locally known doctor Byron Naisbitt and the mother of Cortney, walked into the store to see where her worried son was. Carol was the last to be taken to the basement, handcuffed and gagged. Since the perpetrators now had five hostages, they decided to lock the doors of the store.

The murders

Selby and Andrews then went back to the basement and brought the hostages lying on the floor into an upright sitting position. Then they tried to force their victims to drink the blue liquid. They claimed it was vodka with sleeping pills dissolved . In truth, however, it was drain cleaner . Michelle Ansley was the only hostage who wasn't forced to drink the liquid.

Selby and Andrews tried to use duct tape to prevent the liquid from leaking out of the mouths of the victims, at the same time trying to suppress their loud cries of pain. However, due to the pus escaping and the blistering caused by the severe burns in the mouth area, this project failed because the adhesive tape did not stick.

Orren Walker was last given the drain cleaner. However, since he had seen the consequences with the other hostages, he let the drain cleaner flow out of his mouth and then simulated the screams of pain and seizures of the other victims. Selby was getting increasingly angry because the hostages were taking too long to die and it was so loud and chaotic. So he shot Carol Naisbitt and Cortney Naisbitt in the neck and fired at Orren Walker, but missed it. Then he shot and killed employee Stan Walker. Another shot only grazed Orren's head, causing Orren to pretend to be dead.

Selby then took Michelle Ansley to a remote corner of the basement and forced her to undress at gunpoint. Andrews watched Michelle Ansley be brutally raped several times by Selby. When he was done, he allowed Michelle to use the toilet while he was watching. Then he dragged the still naked back to the others, threw her face down on the floor, and murdered her with a shot in the neck.

When Andrews and Selby noticed at this point that Orren was still alive and out of ammunition, they pulled him up, wrapped a wire around his neck and tried to strangle him. However, they did not succeed. Then the perpetrators tried to ram a ballpoint pen into the ear of Orren, who was lying on the ground. Selby trampled Orren's head so often and so hard that the ballpoint pen pierced the eardrum, broke it off, and came out again in the mouth.

Escape

After that, Selby and Andrews went back upstairs, took $ 25,000 worth of stereo equipment, and fled.

The investigations

discovery

The victims were discovered just under an hour later when Orren's wife came to the store with their second son. Upon entering the shop, the son heard noises from the basement and broke the door open while Mrs. Walker called the police.

At the time of discovery, Stanley Walker and Michelle Ansley were already dead. Carol Naisbitt was still alive when she was loaded into the ambulance , but only her death could be determined on arrival at the hospital. Although Cortney Naisbitt's chances of survival were slim, he survived, albeit with severe and irreparable brain damage. Orren Walker sustained severe burns to his mouth and chin and irreparable damage to his ear.

First clues

A few hours after the gruesome crime became known in the media, an aviation officer called the Ogden police and said that a few months earlier Andrews had confided in him, “Someday I will rob this hi-fi business and whoever gets in the way , I'll kill him ” . Hours after that call, two youths found the victims' wallets and driver's licenses in containers near Hill Air Force Base where Selby and Andrews were stationed.

Based on the news in the media and the assumption that the perpetrators themselves could possibly be from the air force base, a group of Air Force members formed within the base who wanted to contribute to the investigation and exposure of the perpetrators. Selby and Andrews were among them.

The police officer handling the case assumed the murderers would be among the crowd. He then gave the group of men a police psychological performance by beginning to speak dramatically, fishing the evidence out of the garbage can with a pair of holding tongs and waving them through the air, gesticulating wildly. In his later report, the police officer stated that of all the airmen gathered around the container, despite the dramatic display of evidence at the location, most of the men did not allow themselves to be infected by his hectic pace, but rather appeared calm. Exceptions were two men who were upset, talking loudly, and behaving frantically. The officer later identified these two soldiers as Dale Pierre Selby and William Andrews.

The police officer subsequently received an award from the US Department of Justice's Utah branch for applying proactive criminalist strategies.

Arrest and transfer

Based on the statement of the flight officer, who incriminated Andrews, as well as because of the behavior of Selby and Andrews at the place where the papers were found, an arrest warrant was issued for both of them and a search warrant for their accommodation in the barracks was obtained. Here the police found leaflets from the hi-fi shop and a contract for a rental unit in a rental warehouse . After another search warrant was issued for the latter, several stereos were found there, which could be identified by the serial numbers as booty from the raid on the shop. When the seized stolen property was being transported away, the officers also found the bottle with the drain cleaner that had been given to the victims.

The process

Because of all these clues and items Selby, Andrews and third offenders were Keith Roberts for murder ( first degree murder ) and robbery accused. Selby and Andrews were found guilty of all charges and sentenced to death . Roberts was sentenced to prison for robbery and was paroled in 1987.

At the trial it was revealed that Selby and Andrews had raided the store with the direct intent of killing people. Months before the attack, the two were already thinking about how the murders could be carried out quietly and cleanly. Andrews and Selby then watched the film Dirty Harry II - Calahan over and over again , which shows a scene in which a prostitute is forced to drink liquid drain cleaner and falls dead shortly afterwards. Afterwards, both agreed that this would be the most effective way of carrying out their plan.

The executions

Dale Pierre Selby was on 28 August 1987 in a state prison Utah with the lethal injection executed, William Andrews nearly five years later, on July 30, the 1,992th

Others

On June 4, 2002, Cortney Naisbitt died in Seattle at the age of 44 as a result of a long and unnamed illness.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Gary Kinder: Victim: The Other Side of Murder. Dell Publishin, 1982, ISBN 0-38529-105-1 .
  2. ↑ Hi-fi shop murders in ogden utah - www.essortment.com
  3. ↑ John Douglas, Mark Olshaker: The Anatomy of Motive: The FBI's Legendary Mind Hunter Explores the Key to Understanding and Catching Violent Criminals , 1999, Scribner, ISBN 0-68484-598-9

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