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Overview
During an armed robbery in 1974, five hostages were held in the basement of a small home-audio store in Ogden, Utah, by a group of enlisted US Air Force airmen stationed at a nearby base. The victims—including wife and mother Carol Naisbitt—were brutally tortured, shot in the head, and left for dead. Yet somehow, Carol’s sixteen-year-old son made it out alive—and “the emotional strain his family underwent during his year-long hospitalization, is the heart of Kinder’s story” (Kirkus Reviews).
In Victim, the first true crime book to go beyond the headlines and tell story of love, loss, courage, and survival, “the crime in question becomes not merely something that happened to somebody else somewhere else, but rather an event that touches us all firsthand and very deeply.” A compelling and tragic look at how lives can be changed forever by a random act of violence, it remains one of the most influential books in the victims’ rights movement and has become required reading for trainees at the FBI Academy at Quantico (Boston Herald).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555847975 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 771,160 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE VICTIMS
St. Benedict's Hospital sat high on the east bench overlooking Og-den, Utah. It was an old three-story structure made of red brick, and from its rooftop shone a fluorescent white cross. At night the panorama spreading before it was a city of one hundred thousand, the lights streaking and twinkling in the distance all the way to the shores of the Great Salt Lake.
That Monday evening, April 22, 1974, was warm and darkness had settled over the city. The St. Benedict's emergency room was quiet. At 10:40 emergency physician Dr. Jess Wallace was in the hallway talking to Dr. James Allred, when a loud buzzer sounded. Wallace ran into the ER office and flicked on the emergency receiver, a hotline between the hospital and emergency ambulance units. The driver calling in was talking so fast Wallace could hardly understand him. Seconds later the driver had signed off and Wallace knew only that an ambulance was coming in with two people shot in the head. They would be at the hospital in three minutes.
Wallace said to Allred, "Stick around, I may need you."
Then he flipped a switch, lighting a large red flasher on the switchboard upstairs. Immediately, "ER alert" reverberated over the hospital intercom. Far below, in the middle of town, the flashing red lights of the ambulance began whirling silently in the night.
The glass doors to the emergency room were propped open, and the two doctors were joined in the hallway by nurses from Intensive Care and Coronary Care, a medical technician, a respiratory technician, an X-ray technician, and the nursing supervisor. They waited by the open doors for an ambulance they were certain carried two bodies from Ogden's notorious Twenty-fifth Street. Winos from the street were rushed to the hospital regularly to have their heads sewn up or a knife wound closed or to be pronounced DO A from one cause or another. Someone standing by the door said that this time one of them had probably shot his old lady then turned the gun on himself. Each of the crew feared only that he or she would be assigned to peel off the shoes or the socks or the underwear of one of the victims.
As the crew waited by the ER doors, the ambulance zigzagged through the grid of city blocks, moving steadily toward the hospital. Traffic was light, and the few cars on the streets cleared away at the sound of the approaching sirens. The motorcycle escort passed first; then a hundred yards behind it came the ambulance at a steady fifty miles an hour. Eight blocks from town they swung right onto Harrison, sped up for a few blocks, then braked and swung left at the high school. Behind the motorcycle the ambulance driver shot straight up the hill, turned right, shut down the siren, and raced the last two blocks to the neon orange EMERGENCY.
The ambulance circled beneath the red brick portico, its flashing red light ricocheting off the walls, splashing over the waiting crew like an eerie red strobe. They saw the driver spring from the front seat. But he moved without that controlled sort of quickness the ambulance attendants usually exhibited. He was shouting, but no one could understand him. He sprinted to the rear of the ambulance and flung open the doors. Two attendants kneeling in back were frantically trying to squeeze oxygen into the victims. They looked frightened. The crew realized then what they had only sensed watching the driver. Something had gone awry.
Then suddenly all three of the attendants were yelling to them at once. Disjointed bits and pieces of torture and mass murder. Of a girl raped. Of a man strangled. Of a ball-point pen driven into a victim's ear. Of five people bound on their hands and knees and shot through the head, blood and vomit everywhere, the most sickening thing any of them had ever seen. They shouted that there were still more bodies in the basement of the Ogden Hi-Fi Shop.
The attendants shoved the stretchers out of the ambulance, and the emergency crew moved in quickly to help. Hands reached out and lowered the bodies into the wash of red light.
On the first stretcher, in a red dress, was a petite blond woman, a large diamond ring on her left hand, an ornate jade ring on her right. Behind her was a teen-age boy dressed in jeans and a brown-check shirt, his longish blond hair cut in a neat shag. He was gulping for air like a dying fish. His skin was bright blue, his blond hair spattered with blood and flecks of vomit. From his mouth bright red scars trailed away across his cheeks and chin. The woman's hair was soaked with sweat, making her appear almost bald. In the back of her head, her blond hair was matted around a bloody hole, and the same curious red scars encircled her mouth. Both bodies stank of blood and vomit.
The group that not sixty seconds earlier had dreaded only gummed socks and stained underwear were now staring at two bodies, not from the remote gutters of Twenty-fifth Street, but from their own safe world.
The confusion spilled through the doorway and hurtled twenty feet down the corridor to the trauma room. Dr. Wallace ran alongside. For an instant he thought the woman looked familiar. He yelled to the driver.
"Any idea who they are?"
"No!" the driver yelled back.
"What about these scars around the mouth?"
The driver hadn't even noticed them.
"I don't know," he said.
An attendant kept pace with the boy, trying to squeeze oxygen from a black Ambu bag into the boy's lungs. Wallace grabbed his arm.
"Hold off for a minute," he said. "Let's see what we've got here, first."
Wallace ran ahead to the trauma room, turned around, and stared in disbelief at the bodies coming through the door.
"For Christ's sake, since when do you bring them in here backwards!" he yelled. "Get them turned around so we can work on them!"
He scanned the bodies quickly with his eyes. The boy was trying to breathe, but the woman made only an occasional effort. Wallace began shouting orders.
"Jim, see what you can do for the woman. Chad, you go with Jim. Get a tube in her as fast as you can. Andy, you and Vicky stay with me. Ginny, shoot two pictures of each, the woman first."
Dr. Allred and respiratory technician Chad Nielsen wheeled the woman across the hall to the other room. In the trauma room, nurse Vicky Moyes yanked the curtain closed. The boy's body was swung in a sheet hammock from the ambulance cart onto the trauma table. Vicky scissored off the boy's shirt and removed his pants.
From the time Wallace's eyes made contact with the boy's body, he had been reflexively cataloging his injuries and life signs: bullet hole right rear of head; body flaccid, bright blue; red scars around mouth — no explanation. The boy's body now lay naked and unconscious on the table. Wallace began a closer, rapid examination. The boy's pupils were dilated and gave no response to light. His heart was palpitating wildly. His lungs were barely expanding. There was a tight gurgling in his chest. A peculiar odor emanated from his mouth. Dr. Wallace gripped the boy's sensitive Achilles tendon and mashed it between his fingers. The boy did not even flinch.
Wallace looked at the youthful face now gray and gasping for air. "Okay, we've got to try something," he said. "Vicky, start an IV, see if you can get him some blood pressure. Andy, hand me the laryngoscope, and have the tube ready."
He stood behind the boy's head. Andy Tolsma, the medical technician, grabbed a long, thin chrome cylinder from the crash cart and slapped it into his outstretched hand. Wallace held the boy's chin with one hand, pulling it back to form a straight line from the boy's mouth to his trachea. With the pinpoint of light shining from the laryngoscope, he searched the boy's throat for the white-ringed vocal chords.
"Andy, get the tube ready ... ." He stopped. "Wait a minute, wait a minute. His throat's so swollen I can't even see the damn vocal chords!"
Wallace dropped the laryngoscope. He snatched the plastic tube out of Andy's hand and stuck one end in the boy's mouth. He placed his ear over the other end of the tube and listened for air exchanges. Quickly, smoothly, he manipulated the endotracheal tube through a mass of swollen tissue and farther down the boy's throat. At last it pushed past a triangular flap of skin and slid into the trachea.
Standing up quickly, he said to Andy, "Hook up the bag and start pumping him."
Andy attached a quart-size black bag to the mouth of the tube. A machine filled the bag with oxygen. Andy hand-squeezed the oxygen into the boy's lungs.
The nurse was struggling with a needle in the boy's arm. Dr. Wallace stepped around the table.
"What's wrong, Vicky?"
"His veins have collapsed."
"Let me try it. You get the bottle ready."
Wallace gripped the boy's arm and pressed the needle deep into the flesh. It hit the vein on the first try. Vicky stepped in and attached the tube to a hanging bottle of dextrose. Wallace looked up.
"What the hell is that?"
He stared at the plastic valves of the bag Andy was squeezing. Oozing from the boy's throat was a bloody, pink froth. Wallace could see no explanation for this pulmonary edema unless the boy, in addition to being shot, had also swallowed some sort of caustic.
"Vicky, see if you can suction that stuff out. Andy, you better set up for a trache. Keep pumping and suctioning him. I've got to take a look at the woman."
Across the hall Dr. Allred had also inserted an endotracheal tube in the woman. Chad was bagging her with a similar black oxygen squeeze bag. Ginny Tolsma was trying to X-ray the woman's head when Dr. Wallace hurried in.
"Hon," he said to her, "you're going to have to move a little faster. You've got to finish the woman and do the boy real quick. I might have to do a trache on him. We need those pictures right away."
Ginny nervously realigned a photographic plate beneath the woman's head and maneuvered the bulky machine in closer. She snapped the picture, removed the plate, held another plate to the side of the woman's head, and snapped a second picture. Then she stepped back out of the way and dragged the X-ray machine across the hall.
The two doctors were already examining the woman. She was splotched with blood and vomit. Her breathing was sporadic and only shallow when drawn. Her heart had stopped beating. Her blood pressure was zero.
Wallace said, "Nothing much to save, is there."
"Jess, she doesn't have a chance," said Allred. "I don't even know why we're supporting her."
"I know she's not responding, but I want Hauser to take a look at her before we stop bagging her." He stared at the woman's face. "Boy, she looks familiar."
Dr. James Hauser, the neurosurgeon called in by Dr. Wallace at the time of the alert, appeared in the room and ducked inside the curtain.
"We don't think the woman's got a chance," said Wallace. "Take a quick look at her, then you've got to hurry across the hall and examine the boy."
Dr. Hauser felt the woman's skin, which was cool and clammy. With thumb and forefinger he spread her eyelids and shined a light into her pupils, which were large and unresponsive.
"This doesn't look good at all," he said. "How long has she been here?"
"Not more than four or five minutes," said Wallace.
"What's her blood pressure?"
"I can't get a reading," said Allred.
Dr. Hauser was meticulous but quick with his examination. As he was finishing, Ginny Tolsma brought in the developed X rays. The woman's shadowy skull was marked by two bright metallic spots. The bullet had entered her brain just above her right ear and split in two. One piece of the missile had traveled forward. The other had veered down toward the brain stem. The three doctors only glanced at the X rays.
"I think you should quit," Dr. Hauser said to Chad. "There's nothing more we can do for her."
Chad stopped squeezing the black bag, and the woman made no further attempt to breathe.
Dr. Wallace and Dr. Hauser ran across the hall. Andy was squeezing oxygen into the boy's lungs. At intervals he removed the black bag and Vicky ran a thin, slurping tube down the boy's plastic airway. She was trying to suction out the bubbles. But the bubbles flooded into the airway, faster and faster, redder and redder. Like a machine his lungs were manufacturing copious amounts of reddish foam. It skirted the suction tube, boiled over, and spread across the boy's face. As Dr. Wallace ran into the room, he focused immediately on the boiling pink liquid.
"That stuff won't suction out any faster?"
"No," said Vicky, "and it's getting worse."
Wallace looked quickly at the boy's eyes and thought he saw a slight reaction in the pupils. To Hauser they appeared fixed and dilated.
"Go ahead and take a closer look at him, anyhow," said Wallace, "while I do the trache."
The boy's blood pressure was still zero. His skin was blue and clammy. He was making a hacking attempt to breathe. His left arm had risen from the table slightly, his hand turned to the outside and flexed open. Stiff-armed, it clawed the air.
The blood spurting from the boy's endotracheal tube had begun to splatter, and Andy was hurriedly tying a gown around Wallace as the doctor prepared to open the boy's throat.
"Jess, there's nothing you can do for this boy," Hauser said. "I don't give him more than a few minutes."
"Well, he's not going to die in my emergency room," said Wallace.
"This decerebrate posturing with the hand," continued the neurosurgeon, "and the fixed pupils with this kind of head injury ... I have never in my life seen this situation in a patient who survived."
Wallace had children of his own not much younger than the boy. When the boy's body had been pulled from the ambulance, Wallace had been struck first by his youth, then by his gasping for air.
"Maybe so," he said to Hauser, "but the kid's still trying to breathe, and we're going to put this trache in and see if we can get him some air. I can't just sit here and watch him die."
"It's your emergency room," said Hauser, "you do what you want. But I'm advising against any heroics."
Andy had prepared the Mayo stand with the tools for the tracheotomy. Wallace took a scalpel from the tray and neatly sliced the boy's throat at the base of his neck. Andy pulled the skin back with hemostats to expose the underlying tissue. Vicky bagged and suctioned the boy through the tube still in his mouth. Dr. Wallace's thick forearms were upraised, his eyes riveted on the slit in the boy's throat. He carefully cut away at the tissue surrounding the trachea. Andy spread the incision wider. The boy's gristly tracheal cartilage emerged. Andy wrenched a hook into it, twisted it slightly, and held it firm as Dr. Wallace cut a dime-size hole in it. Andy spread the cartilage. Wallace reached for the new five-inch plastic tube. As Andy yanked the endotracheal tube from the boy's mouth, Wallace inserted the tracheostomy tube through the cartilage in his throat. Vicky fastened it with cotton ties, reattached the squeeze bag to the new tube, and continued bagging and suctioning the boy. A delicate operation that usually requires fifteen minutes had taken a little under three, and there were no bleeders to tie off. Andy attached a humidifier to the oxygen bag to warm and moisten air for the boy's lungs, while Vicky tried to suction the bubbles flushing out of the new tracheostomy tube.
As soon as he had examined the boy, Dr. Hauser had been paged by the hospital switchboard for another emergency at the McKay-Dee Hospital. Before he left the trauma room, he took up the boy's chart and under Physician's Notes hurriedly wrote the following entry:
Young white male with gunshot wound of R occipit — has had trache thru which there are copious, pink, frothy secretions. Breathing vigorously but totally unresponsive. Pupils dilated & fixed. Impression: terminal head injury.
Intensive Care had been alerted to prepare for the boy. With his tracheostomy tube now in place he was immediately rushed from the trauma room, down the hall, into the elevator, and up to Intensive Care on the third floor. The IV dangled from his arm as a nurse ran alongside the cart holding the bottle of dextrose. Vicky jogged on the other side, squeezing oxygen into the foam filling his new airway.
Dr. Wallace untied the gown from around his waist and watched the crowd attending to the boy.
"Andy," he said, without turning around, "we're sending that boy up there and he's just going to die." He wadded the bloodstained gown in his fist and threw it into a corner. "What the hell," he said, "maybe Hauser was right."
The cart and the nurses rounded the corner at the end of the hall and disappeared. For a few more seconds Dr. Wallace stared after them. "The whole thing was unreal," he said later, "because I was looking at two people, one who was dead and one who was critically injured for no reason at all. You know, you see people hit in cars and even though it's hard to justify, you can see how it happens. You see a child run into the street and he's hit and killed, it's disturbing and upsetting. There's a certain aspect of Russian roulette to living. But just for somebody deliberately to set out and try, actually try, to kill these people ... you couldn't understand how anybody's mind could be so depraved. That's what was so unreal about it, to sit there and look and see the straits this kid was in and know that somebody had done it with no more feeling than if they'd crushed a bug."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Victim"
by .
Copyright © 1982 Gary Kinder.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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