A stereo shop robbery became a night of torture and murder
On April 22, 1974, gunmen took hostages at the Hi-Fi Shop 314 metres from this ground near the United States Post Office and Courthouse in Ogden, forcing them to drink Drano and shooting them in the basement, killing Carol Naisbitt, Stanley Walker and Sherry Michelle Ansley; Cortney Naisbitt and Orren Walker survived. Dale Selby Pierre and William Andrews were later executed for the killings.
A stereo shop robbery ended in three basement murders
Several men walked into the Hi-Fi Shop on Washington Boulevard shortly before closing time and began taking hostages. Two employees, Stanley Walker and Sherry Michelle Ansley, were bound in the basement. A 16-year-old named Cortney Naisbitt walked in later to thank Walker for a parking favor and was tied up alongside them. Then Stanley's father, Orren Walker, came looking for his son. Carol Naisbitt arrived soon after, searching for hers. Five people sat bound in that basement by nightfall.
The airman Dale Selby Pierre ordered Orren Walker to make the hostages drink Drano, telling them it was vodka laced with sleeping pills. Walker refused and was left face-down on the floor. Pierre and William Andrews forced the drain cleaner on the others instead. It blistered their mouths and throats within seconds.
He shot Carol and Cortney Naisbitt in the backs of their heads. Carol died. Cortney survived. He killed Stanley Walker, missed Orren twice, then raped Ansley in a basement corner and shot her dead. When Orren Walker was found still breathing, Pierre and Andrews tried to strangle him with wire, then drove a ballpoint pen through his ear. He lived. Pierre and Andrews were later convicted and executed for the killings.
A settler's stray shot killed a Shoshone chief
A settler named Urban Stewart fired at random into his own cornfield in 1850. The shot killed Terikee, chief of the Weber band of Shoshone, on ground that would become Ogden. The killing was not planned. It came out of an ordinary chore on an ordinary piece of land, and it set off retaliatory violence between settlers and Native people across the valley for years afterward.
Settlers built a walled fort out of fear
Terikee's death left Ogden's scattered farm families afraid of reprisal. They abandoned their separate homesteads and built Bingham Fort, a walled compound about half a mile west of Five Points, its perimeter wall standing nine feet high around a defensive mound. It was fear, built in timber and earth, a direct answer to a killing that had started as an accident.
A commercial building has stood on this lot since 1907
The building at 298 24th Street, the lot beneath your own feet, went up in 1907 as a commercial structure. Weber County's assessor records it now at nearly 61,000 square feet on a lot just under an acre and a half. It has stood through the entire span of this history, from the fort-building years still fresh in local memory when it was framed, through the decades of Ogden growing into a rail town, into the present day, changing hands and uses as commercial property does, without ever leaving this exact ground.
Two inmates died in custody at the county jail
Two inmates have died in custody at the Weber County Jail in the same year: one found unresponsive during an early morning check on April 6, and a second who died after a medical event on September 1. Both were ruled the result of medical crises rather than violence inflicted by another hand. The jail sits on the same ground that has, across a century and a half, kept turning routine confinement and ordinary errands into something fatal.
The storefront and the jail cell are gone from view now, but the ground under this corner has a long habit of turning the ordinary into the fatal.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.