How Many Victims Did The Hi-Fi Murderers Actually Have?
The Hi-Fi Murders shook the town of Ogden, Utah, to its core on April 22, 1974. That evening, as many as six men carried out a vicious and merciless attack on several people during a robbery at a local electronics shop. Although the initial victims were two young employees of the Hi-Fi Shop and a friend of theirs, two more people would end up stopping by the store and unfortunately getting caught up in the extremely violent events. Ultimately, the attack left three people dead and two others with serious injuries that would last for the rest of their lives.
According to the local ABC affiliate, an investigator who was one of the first on the scene said he arrived to find a man running around with a pen stuck in his ear. "We found out the grisly details," said forensic crime scene specialist George Throckmorton. "The first thing we noticed was there were four people down there who had been tied up." What the police found in that basement was truly haunting.
The Hi-Fi murderers brutally tortured their victims before shooting them
One of the murderers, Dale Selby Pierre, 21, said that he had seen a movie in which people were forced to drink Drano, and after finding a bottle of the chemical in the bathroom, he forced their victims to do the same. When they threw up the toxic liquid, he and fellow attacker William Andrews, 20, forced them to drink it again and then put tape over their mouths. But as the Odgen Standard-Examiner reported, the caustic chemical burned their mouths and throats, but failed to kill them, so Pierre decided to start shooting them. Sherry Michelle Ansley was raped before being shot in the head.
When the young people who had been attacked didn't return home, some of their parents came looking for them. The mother of Cortney Naisbitt, 16, came for her son, but was also taken hostage. Carol Naisbitt was shot to death. Orren Walker, father of Hi-Fi Shop employee Stanley Walker, 20, was also taken hostage when he came to look for his son. Orren was shot, but not killed, so the attackers tried to strangle him with a wire and stab a pen in his ear. Although they kicked it through his skull, Orren Walker survived the attack. Cortney Naisbitt survived, as well, despite a gunshot wound to the head.
Although police believed at least six men to be responsible for the attack, only three were charged. Pierre and Andrews were given the death penalty and executed in 1987 and 1992, respectively.