The night the drain cleaner didn't kill fast enough

Five hostages were made to drink drain cleaner and three died

Just before closing time, several men walked into the Hi-Fi Shop at Washington Boulevard and started taking hostages. Two employees were there when it began: Stanley Walker, 20, and Sherry Michelle Ansley, 18. The gunmen marched them down to the basement and tied them up.

The robbery dragged on. A 16-year-old named Cortney Naisbitt wandered in to thank Walker for a parking favor earlier that day. He was pulled into the basement too. Then Walker's father, Orren Walker, 43, came looking for his son and was taken hostage himself. Cortney's mother arrived next, searching for her boy. By the end of the night, five people were tied up in that basement.

The men forced their captors to drink liquid drain cleaner, hoping it would poison them without noise or mess. It burned their mouths and throats instead of killing them outright. One victim was kicked with a pen driven into his ear. An 18-year-old hostage was raped. Then three of the five were shot.

Police could only build a case against three men, all enlisted airmen from Hill Air Force Base: Dale Selby Pierre, William Andrews, and Keith Roberts. Pierre and Andrews were convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Both were later executed. Roberts, who had waited outside in a getaway van, was convicted only of robbery. The other men involved were never caught.

A Danish novelist collapsed and died mid-lecture-tour in Ogden

Ogden could turn even a scheduled stop into an ending. The Danish novelist Herman Bang came through the city in 1912 on an American lecture tour. It was one town among many on his itinerary. He never left it. Bang collapsed and died in Ogden mid-tour. He was known across Denmark for his impressionistic novels. He died in a city he was only passing through. Nothing on his schedule that week suggested the trip would end here.

A contractor built one of Ogden's smallest, most striking apartments

Ninety feet from where you stand, an Ogden contractor named Charles J. Humphris put up a modest brick apartment building between 1916 and 1919. The Helms Apartments rise two and a half stories. Two units sit on each of three floors. Historians later called it one of the smallest and most visually interesting of Ogden's pre-Depression apartment buildings. It still stands at 2248-Jefferson Avenue. A passerby would see nothing remarkable. The brick face gives no hint of anything more than ordinary housing. That is exactly what makes Ogden's ordinary buildings worth a second look.

Downtown storefronts gave way to a temple's single spire

Half a mile away, the church chose a different kind of transformation. In 1969 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints broke ground on the Ogden Utah Temple. The church had held the 10-acre lot since Ogden was first settled. The site sat in the middle of downtown. It was boxed in by ordinary shops and offices. Church president Joseph Fielding Smith dedicated the finished temple in January 1972. The dedication took three days. Its modern single-spire design broke sharply from the businesses around it. A stretch of everyday storefronts had become sacred ground almost overnight.

A small house on 22nd Street changed hands quietly

The lot under your feet has its own quieter record. At 619 22nd Street, Weber County's assessor lists a house built in 1928. It is eight hundred square feet on a tenth of an acre. It has passed through private hands since then. These small residential sales leave no headline behind them. They leave only a deed and a date. No fire, no trial, nothing the county thought worth flagging beyond the year it went up.