The night a stereo shop errand became a massacre

Robbers forced hostages to drink drain cleaner

Several men walked into the Hi-Fi Shop on Washington Boulevard shortly before closing time. It was a home audio store. People came in for a new speaker or a repair. Four of them went inside with handguns. Two clerks were there: Stanley Walker and Sherry Michelle Ansley. Dale Selby Pierre and an accomplice took them to the basement and tied them up.

The robbery went on for an hour. A 16-year-old named Cortney Naisbitt walked in during it. He had only stopped by to thank Walker for letting him use the parking lot earlier that day. He was tied up with the others. Then Orren Walker, Stanley's father, came looking for his son when he did not come home. He was bound too. Carol Naisbitt, Cortney's mother, arrived next, searching for her own son. Five people were now held in the basement.

Pierre told Orren Walker to force the drain cleaner on the others. Walker refused. They gagged him and left him face down on the floor. The drain cleaner burned the hostages' mouths and throats. It did not kill them fast enough. Pierre grew angry at the noise and shot Carol Naisbitt in the head. He shot her son Cortney in the head. Carol died. Cortney survived, though the injuries changed his life permanently. Pierre shot at Orren Walker and missed. Then he killed Stanley Walker. Then he grazed Orren's skull with another shot.

Pierre took Sherry Ansley to a corner of the basement and raped her. He let her use the bathroom. Then he dragged her back and shot her in the back of the head. Orren Walker was still alive. Pierre and his accomplice tried to strangle him with wire. They forced a pen into his ear and stomped it. It broke through his eardrum. Then they finished loading stolen equipment into their van and left.

Police built a case against three Air Force airmen. Pierre and William Andrews were convicted of murder and aggravated robbery and sentenced to death. Both were executed. A third man, Keith Roberts, had stayed with the getaway vehicle and was convicted only of robbery. Three others who took part were never caught. Orren Walker lived. He testified against the men who tortured his son and killed his friends, carrying the scars of that basement for the rest of his life.

A lawman and gunman died here in 1890

Violence on Ogden's streets did not start with the Hi-Fi Shop. Pat Desmond worked both sides of the law, a lawman and a gunman, before he died here in 1890. His death is one of the few Ogden endings from that era with a name and a date attached to it. The record of it survives in city rolls. Those same rolls later recorded three murders in a basement a mile away. Downtown had barely finished growing up by then.

A fur trader's fort grew into a railroad city

The trapper Miles Goodyear built Fort Buenaventura here in 1846. It was the first permanent settlement by people of European descent in what is now Utah. Captain James Brown bought the land and the fort that November for $3,000. The settlement took his name, Brownsville. It was later renamed for the fur trader Peter Skene Ogden. The railroads found it soon after. Ogden grew into a freight hub. Its downtown filled with the ordinary storefronts a growing city needs. One of them, decades later, would be a home audio shop on Washington Boulevard.

A temple rose a mile from the murder scene

The Salt Lake, Manti and Logan temples were overcrowded. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced a new one for Ogden in 1967. Workers broke ground in 1969 on a ten-acre lot the church had held since the town was settled. Joseph Fielding Smith dedicated the finished building over three days in January 1972. Two years later, the Hi-Fi Shop's basement became a crime scene less than a mile away. The temple stood among the same offices and businesses that lined downtown Ogden. Sacred ground and ordinary commerce were a short walk apart.

A small brick apartment block earned historic listing

The contractor Charles J. Humphris put up the Helms Apartments between 1916 and 1919. It was a two-and-a-half-story brick building with two units to a floor. It drew no violence and no infamy. It just held tenants, decade after decade. In 1987 the National Register of Historic Places listed it. It was one of the smallest and most visually interesting of Ogden's pre-Depression apartment buildings.

A modest house has stood since 1909

The lot at Monroe Boulevard carries its own quiet record. A one-story wood-framed house went up there in 1909. It was 468 square feet on a fifth of an acre. Weber County's own books still list it as residential ground. No fire, no trial, no name attached to a headline. It passed from one household to the next, as small houses do. Its only surviving story is the year it was built and the fact that it kept standing.