Summary:

On Monday, July 19, 1976, Max Jensen went to work as usual at the self-service gas station in Orem, Utah. That night, Gilmore had a spat with his girlfriend and went driving with her mentally unstable younger sister, April.

At around 10:30 pm he told April he wanted to make a phone call. He left her in the truck and walked away. Gilmore went around the corner, out of her sight, and into the Sinclair service station.

He spotted the attendant and quickly saw that no one else was around. He walked up to Max Jensen and pulled out a .22 Browning Automatic. He instructed Jensen to empty his pockets, which the young Mormon quickly did. Then he told Jensen to go into the bathroom and lie down on the floor with his arms under his body. Jensen got into the position. He was obeying everything that Gilmore said.

Then inexplicably, Gilmore put the gun close to Jensen's head. "This one is for me," he said, and fired. Then he placed the muzzle right against Jensen's skull and shot him once again, this time "for Nicole." (girlfriend Nicole Baker Barrett)

Gilmore spent the night with April at a motel and the following night, he walked into the City Center Motel in Provo, not far from Brigham Young University. He confronted the attendant, Ben Bushnell, who lived on the premises with his wife and baby. Gilmore told Ben to give him the cash box and get down on the floor. Then he shot Bushnell in the head. Bushnell's wife came in, so Gilmore grabbed the cash box and left. Trying to dispose of the gun in a nearby bush, Gilmore shot himself in the hand.

By Wednesday, Gilmore's cousin, Brenda Nicol, turned him into the police. Gilmore gave up near a roadblock without a fight. At first, he denied the murders, but later admitted both.

In October, Gilmore was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. He chose death by firing squad and waived all appeals. Despite the efforts of other groups to stop it, 6 months after the murders, the execution was carried out.

Gary Gilmore was the first person executed in the U.S. in almost 10 years. In prison most of his life and paroled only four months before the murders, Gilmore becomes a celebrity with his efforts to hasten his execution. His last words: “Let’s do it.”

The Crime Library.com

"Gary Gilmore: Death Wish," by Katherine Ramsland.

Freedom

It's not that his ambitions were great that got him into trouble, but that he hadn't the patience to earn what he desired. From a young age, Gary Mark Gilmore just went out and took whatever he wanted—beer, cigarettes, cars, money. More times than not (according to him) he was successful, but when he wasn't, he landed in the slammer. He'd just get an idea into his head and do it. He said he couldn't help himself.

Gilmore’s story is documented in a book written by his younger brother, Mikal Gilmore, called Shot in the Heart, and by Norman Mailer, who wrote a narrative nonfiction account, The Executioner’s Song, in which he utilized letters that Gilmore wrote, interviews with many of his intimates, trial transcripts, and interviews or statements that Gilmore gave to the press. Mailer did not himself interview Gilmore, but his account relies on actual documents, with an emphasis on how those around Gilmore perceived him.

There are also a few film clips available of Gilmore as he spoke to the press or to the courts, and an A&E documentary collected these into an overview of his fight to die rather then face years in prison. Gilmore is a historical case, in that he was the first man to be executed after the U. S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, and because he refused all appeals to which he was legally entitled.

Born on December 4, 1940, he'd aspired as a boy to become a man of God. By the time he was thirty-five, he'd spent more than half of his life in prison, from juvenile detention to a federal penitentiary. At age 14, he dropped out of school. By fifteen, he was running an illegal car theft ring. That's when he was first arrested, although he'd been drinking for three years, harassing teachers, playing hooky, and stealing petty items.

According to his own statements to court-ordered psychologists, he developed a need for bravado, which meant staring down approaching trains until near-impact or sticking a wet finger into an outlet. Upon his first arrest, his father Frank got a lawyer and got him off, teaching him to manipulate the legal system and skirt responsibility for criminal acts. After all, Frank had made a living at it for many years. He was a professional con man, but could not abide the taint of criminality in his son.

However, Gilmore then stole something that got him into Oregon's MacLaren Reform School for Boys. He spent a year there, and then went in and out of jail until he was eighteen. At that point, he ended up in the Oregon State Correctional Institution on a car theft charge. His father couldn't do much for him, especially after he piled up an array of disciplinary charges while in prison. Then he was out and then in again, and this time while he was behind bars, Frank Gilmore died. According to statements made by one of the wardens in the documentary, “A Fight to Die,” Gary went wild, tearing up his cell and attempting suicide. This was a blow he could not bear.

Yet there was no release for him, no respite to mourn. He became violent to guards and inmates alike. Because he was so difficult to handle, he was heavily drugged with an anti-psychotic called Prolixin, and only with his mother's horrified intervention was he removed from this dehumanizing regimen. He never forgot its paralyzing effects. He got out when he was 21 and promptly committed robbery and assault for $11.

At this point, the State of Oregon decided that he was a repeat offender with a poor prognosis. He went to Oregon State Penitentiary. While incarcerated, his brother Gaylen, the third of Bessie and Frank's four boys, was stabbed in the stomach. Mikal Gilmore documents this tragic incident. Having no money for medical care, Gaylen died. This time, Gary was allowed to attend the funeral, but losing Gaylen had its effect. Gary often ended up in solitary confinement over his inability to conform to the prison routines.

Yet spending so much time alone in solitary proved beneficial. With an IQ of 130, he educated himself in literature and began to write poetry. More notably, he developed an artistic talent that won contests. For that, he was granted an early release in 1972 to live in a halfway house in Eugene and attend art school at the local community college.

While he welcomed this opportunity, it apparently intimidated him. Rather than show up to register, he stayed away and drank. He visited his brother Mikal, who reported that he was afraid of Gary. Within a month, Gilmore had committed armed robbery and was arrested. When he went to trial again, he asked permission to address the court, which was granted, and his actual words are recorded in several places, including court transcripts.

With great articulation, Gilmore made an appeal for leniency. He said that he had been locked up for the past nine and a half years, with only two years of freedom since he was fourteen. Justice had been harsh and he'd never asked for a break until now.

He argued that “you can keep a person locked up too long” and that “there is an appropriate time to release somebody or to give them a break. …I stagnated in prison a long time and I have wasted most of my life. I want freedom and I realize that the only way to get it is to quit breaking the law. …I’ve got problems and if you sentence me to additional time, I’m going to compound them.”

The judge told him that he had already been convicted once for armed robbery, a serious charge, so there was no option but to sentence him to another nine years. Gilmore was hurt and angry. As promised, he became more violent while in prison and on a number of occasions tried unsuccessfully to kill himself. They wanted to try Prolixin again, but Gilmore begged for an alternative. He was transferred to a maximum-security penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. That meant that no one in his family could visit him. He started writing to a cousin in Utah, Brenda Nicol, and only three years into his sentence, a parole plan was worked out. Brenda gave several interviews about her involvement with Gary, and Mailer offers a complete description of her account.

Brenda orchestrated Gilmore’s release. She hadn't seen Gary since he was a boy, but she remembered how distinctive he was. She believed that if she and her family could help him out with a loving community and a job, he'd get along okay. She didn't know that he'd been diagnosed (according the reports that Mailer documents) with a psychopathic personality disorder. She had no idea how compulsive he was, or demanding. It was in her mind to do a good deed, so she worked on bringing Gary home. Finally in 1977, he was released to go live in Provo. He arrived with everything he owned packed in a small gym bag. He was ready for freedom, he firmly believed.

Yet life in Utah proved to be hard. He'd hated prison, but the skills he'd developed there to survive just didn't work in a conservative Mormon community. He was briefly employed in his Uncle Vern Damico's shoe shop and then did insulation for a man named Spencer McGrath, but he had a hard time concentrating.

The first chance he got, according to interviews that Vern Damico gave to Mailer, he went out drinking. When he couldn't afford beer, he stole it. Then he found himself a beautiful girlfriend, Nicole Baker Barrett, thrice divorced by age 19, and soon returned to a life of compulsive theft because he wanted what he wanted…right now. It was the sight of a white Ford pickup truck priced well beyond his means that appeared to those who knew him to have sparked a spree that could only have ended badly.

First Victim

Gilmore had bought a blue Mustang from Val Conlin, a used car dealer, but it had problems and often wouldn't run. He still owed on that but he'd seen a ten-year-old, overpriced white truck on the lot that he really wanted. The dealer said no way, not unless he found himself a co-signer. That frustrated Gilmore. By hook or by crook, he intended to have that truck. To his mind, there were always ways of getting money. He'd already stolen some merchandise to sell. Then he managed to collect a bag full of guns---nine of them. He gave one to Nicole, she later told police officers, showed her the rest, and said he intended to sell whatever he could. Nicole’s interview for A&E is the best source of information for what happened in those final days, along with Gilmore’s own documented admissions. Each person who saw him over the next few days later gave interviews on film as well. Gilmore had scared her. He'd already shown a violent side, she later related, and now this. She didn't know what to do.

Gilmore had moved into her rented home in Spanish Fork, near Provo, but things weren't always so good. He often took a drug, Fiorinal, for headaches and he drank all the time, which created sexual dysfunction, an inability to think clearly, and a great deal of frustrated anger. He was impulsive and demanding, and there were times when Nicole was actually afraid of him, though she loved him. Once when he'd picked her up she'd had the feeling of an evil presence emanating from him. She thought he might be the devil, and there were times when he acted like he was. He even claimed he knew Charles Manson.

Finally it all just got to her. She just took her two children and went to live in an apartment five miles away. Gary went looking for her. He was in a state. She wasn't going to run out on him. He told his cousin Brenda he might just kill her. But he couldn't find her. On top of that, he was now deeply in debt with no clear way out…except the only way he knew. He'd been free less than three months and already he couldn't cope.

Mailer interviewed the families of Gilmore’s victim’s and Gilmore’s friends to put together the following accounts:

On Monday, July 19, 1976, Max Jensen went to work as usual at the self-service gas station in Orem, Utah. His shift went from 3 in the afternoon until 11. He was just there until he could find a job that paid more so that he and his new wife could get a little security. At around the same time that Max was going through the routines of his job, Gilmore learned that no one would co-sign on the truck for him, so he insisted that he himself could pay it off within a few weeks.

Conlin assured Gilmore that he would repossess the truck at once if the payments weren't made. Then Gilmore left with the truck and headed toward Nicole's mother's house. Nicole wasn't there, but her mentally unstable younger sister, April, had a crush on Gary and was happy to go for a ride in his new truck. She told him she wanted to stay out all night. Angry and hurt by Nicole, as he later said in letters to her, he was pleased to oblige. Around 10:30 that evening, he told April he wanted to make a phone call. He left her in the truck and walked away. She had no idea where he was going.

Gilmore went around the corner, out of her sight, and into the Sinclair service station. He spotted the attendant and quickly saw that no one else was around. He walked up to the man, whose nameplate read "Max Jensen" and pulled out a .22 Browning Automatic. He instructed Jensen to empty his pockets, which the young Mormon quickly did. Then he told Jensen to go into the bathroom and lie down on the floor with his arms under his body. Jensen got into the position. He was obeying everything that Gilmore said. Then inexplicably, Gilmore put the gun close to Jensen's head. "This one is for me," he said, and fired. Then he placed the muzzle right against Jensen's skull and shot him once again, this time "for Nicole."

To his surprise, the blood spread fast and got on his pants. He turned around and left the gas station, not even noticing the wad of cash on the counter. His next move was to take April to see a movie, "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest." Then they went over to Brenda's. She thought Gilmore was strangely agitated. He had some clothes that he didn't seem to want her to see. He didn't stay long and she couldn't get over the feeling that something was up. Without further explanation, Gary drove off with April and they got a room at a Holiday Inn. While they slept, the hunt began for Max Jensen's killer. Around 11:00 p.m., a customer had found the body.

The Killing Continues

Ben Bushnell, 25, was the manager of the City Center Motel in Provo, not far from Brigham Young University. He and his wife lived on the premises with their infant son, and things looked promising for Ben's future.

On Tuesday July 20, Gilmore had trouble with his new truck, so he took it to gas station three blocks from his Uncle Vern's house. Upon learning that a fix could take twenty minutes, according to Norman Fulmer, the man who ran the gas station, Gilmore decided to run a little errand. He walked down the street and saw the City Center Motel next to Uncle Vern's. Emboldened by his previous murder, he got an idea. He went into the lobby.

Ben had just come in from the store so he asked Gilmore what he wanted. Gary told Ben to give him the cash box and get down on the floor. Then he shot Bushnell in the head. But the man wasn't dead yet. He lay there twitching and trying to move. Gilmore wasn't sure what to do, but just then Bushnell's wife, Debbie, came out so Gilmore grabbed the cash box and left. He pocketed the cash and placed the box under a bush.

A block later, he took the gun he'd used by the muzzle and shoved it into another bush, but something caught the trigger and he took a bullet in the fleshy part of his hand, between the thumb and palm. He went into the garage to get his truck and the owner, Norman Fulmer, spotted the trail of blood. Then on the police scanner Fulmer heard about an assault and robbery at a nearby hotel. He wrote down the truck's license plate number and after Gilmore drove away, Fulmer called it in. Patrol cars sped through town and SWAT teams turned out to track and capture Gilmore. They figured he'd just killed a man for around $125. Pretty much like the murder in Orem the night before.

Uncle Vern came out to see what all the excitement was about, and it wasn't long before he realized that his nephew was involved. Over the past month, he'd watched Gilmore go from bad to worse, especially when he drank, and this brutal act seemed to cap his latest escalation of acting out. Vern's wife called Brenda, and she in turn called a police dispatcher she knew. Then Gilmore called her. He admitted he'd been shot and needed help. He told her where he was. Brenda sent the police to go get him. About the same time that they were evacuating neighbors and closing in, Debbie Bushnell was learning that the paramedics couldn't save her husband. He was dead.

Afraid that Brenda wasn't coming, Gilmore left the house where he'd gotten some first aid and drove right through a police roadblock. Then it dawned on the cops that he was the guy. They set out after him and eventually ordered him to stop just outside Nicole's mother's house. Gilmore gave up without a fight. He asked only that they be careful of his wounded hand. Nicole was there. She went out and saw him lying on the ground. Then she overheard the cops suggest that he'd just committed two murders. She couldn't help but wonder if her leaving him had something to do with it, but she also though he was one stupid, crazy son-of-a-bitch.

Brenda soon learned that no one else had been hurt and Gilmore was now in custody. She knew he'd hate her for it, and when he asked her the next day why she had turned him in, she said, "You commit a murder Monday, and commit a murder Tuesday. I wasn't waiting for Wednesday to roll around." (This is her recollection as she recounted it to both Mailer and the A&E crew.) While Gilmore eventually accepted the fact that what he'd done was wrong and he deserved to be punished, he never totally forgave her for this betrayal. When she turned him in, she had effectively separated him forever from Nicole. To his mind, she could have driven him to the border and let him go up to Oregon. He didn't seem to get it.

Upon his arrest, Gary said that he'd talk with one cop, Gerald Nielsen, and he freely spoke about his various interactions with Gilmore in film and to Mailer. At the hospital, a test on Gilmore's hand indicated that he'd recently held metal in it. Then it was set in a cast. Nielsen then tried to get him to admit to the murders. He said that he had not killed anyone and that he could account for his whereabouts. He even said there were witnesses who would vouch for him. The facts were, as he recounted them, that he'd come across a guy holding up the man at the motel. He tried to stop it and got shot in the hand for his trouble. On the night before, he'd been with April the whole night and she'd be able to tell them that he hadn't killed anyone.

The story didn't check out; it was full of holes. In fact, there was a witness who had seen Gilmore with the gun and the cash box at the motel. April knew that Gilmore had left her to "make a phone call." Then Val Conlin found Gilmore's stash of stolen guns. He called the police and turned them in. Nielsen went back to try again. This time Gary simply said he didn't know why he had killed the two Mormons. He didn't have a reason. He admitted that if he hadn't been caught, he'd likely have gone on killing. Not much later, he said that he ought to die for what he'd done.

On August 3, at the preliminary hearing, prosecutor Noall Wootton met Gilmore for the first time. Mailer indicates from interviews that Wootton was impressed with the prisoner's intelligence, and it struck him that this man embodied the system's utter failure to rehabilitate. Gilmore would never be anything but dangerous---yet he might have been so much better than that.

For the next few months, Gilmore and Nicole wrote love letters to each other with great intensity, sometimes three a day. She knew that he faced life in prison, and possibly worse, yet she couldn't unhook herself from this enigmatic man who'd walked into her life and changed it forever. They swore an eternal bond. By October, everything was ready for trial. Since the case for the Bushnell murder was the strongest, the prosecution concentrated on it. If need be, they could go back and try Gilmore for Jensen's murder, but Wootton expected to prove his case. He had plenty of witnesses, even without the questionable confession. If Harry Houdini was really Gary Gilmore's grandfather, as his mother had often intimated, perhaps he'd passed down a few tricks on getting out of hopeless situations. Gilmore would need them.

Destined For Death

How does someone with talent and intelligence fall into such a life? Why would Gary Mark Gilmore develop into a habitual criminal who so thoughtlessly took the lives of two young men who'd done nothing to him? In his case, the answer seems to lie with the turbulent family in which he'd grown up; it had been full of fantasy and denial, coupled with rampant and random abuse.

Years later, Gary's youngest brother, Mikal, researched their family's history for his book, Shot in the Heart, to see where things went wrong. His feeling was that Gary reminded their father of his own failings in life and therefore got the brunt of the man's anger. Gary's conduct disorders as a juvenile, coupled with his compulsive personality, took the path of least resistance ---straight into the narcissistic and remorseless depths of psychopathy. He never knew when he'd get beaten, nor why, so he formed a notion of a harsh and punitive reality that made no sense. In many ways, the prison system itself was a metaphor of his father. No matter how he resisted and reacted, he'd always get beat up.

Frank Gilmore Sr. was a con man and an alcoholic. He'd married Bessie on a whim, and he'd had many wives and families before her, none of whom he cared about or supported. They had a son, Frank Jr., and then Gary came along while they were wandering aimlessly through Texas under the pseudonym of Coffman to avoid the law. Frank christened him Faye Robert Coffman, which Bessie quickly changed to Gary, but this birth certificate proved to be a sore spot years later. Gary thought he'd been illegitimate, deciding that this was the reason that his father had never loved him.

Frank had many dark secrets and Bessie was a Mormon outcast. They seemed to cling to each other to escape the realities of their pathetic lives. Frank craved independence and would disappear for long stretches of time. Bessie, for her part, did not allow the children to touch or hug her, so there was emotional deprivation from both parents. Yet Bessie did want security, so she persuaded Frank to settle in Portland, Oregon, and open a legitimate business.

He actually succeeded at it and for a while they were happier. Yet Frank drank heavily, which sent him into terrible rages. He'd whip his sons severely. The boys soon learned that no matter what they said or did, their father simply wanted to brutalize them, all the while insisting that they love him. One time, Gary was abandoned on a park bench while his father went to scam someone and he ended up in an orphanage for several days.

As he grew older, Gary reacted. He began to despise people in authority, and they in turn, treated him in a way that reminded him of his father. Both parents turned a blind eye to his problems, pretending they would just go away somehow. Neither respected the law, and they would rather get their children off than let them learn the consequences of their actions. The point at which psychological intervention might have made a difference for Gary, Frank refused to pay for it.

On top of all of this, Bessie had a deep-rooted superstition about Gary that went back to her own childhood. She believed that as a girl playing with a Ouija board, she had conjured up a demonic ghost that had attached itself to her family. When one of her sisters was killed and another paralyzed in an accident, she felt certain it was the ghost. Then she married Frank and found out that his mother, Fay, was a medium who could get spirits to materialize. One night while at Fay’s house with three of her sons, including Gary, she learned that there was to be a “special” séance to contact a spirit who had died under the shameful suspicion of murder. Bessie stayed away.

After the ceremony, she found Fay in a state of exhaustion with an expression on her face of great fear and helplessness. She helped the older woman to bed, but later that night Bessie woke up to the feel of being touched, and when she turned over, she was looking into the face of a leering inhuman creature. She jumped out of bed and saw Fay, an invalid, staggering toward her, insisting that she get out now. “It knows who you are!” Fay shouted. Bessie ran to Gary’s room and saw the same figure leaning over her son, staring into his eyes. She grabbed the kids and ran. Fay died shortly thereafter and Gary began to have terrible, shuddering nightmares that he was being beheaded. He was certain something was trying to get him and the nightmares haunted him the rest of his life.

Bessie saw the entity again in their house, and that’s when Gary began to get into trouble. He continued having dreams, swearing that something was in the room with him. Bessie concluded that the thing had taken over her son’s soul. His life thereafter was filled with angry, malevolent energy that seemed bent on self-destruction. Whether influenced by a demon or by familial abuse, Gary developed a death wish that guided his actions.

He seemed destined to die in some violent manner, though he'd often heard his mother's horror stories of an execution that she claimed to have witnessed as a girl. She'd been enraged that her father had taken her, a mere child, to witness a hanging. She told this story over and over. All of the boys believed that she'd really witnessed this incident and it had left a deep impression on them. Yet when Mikal researched it in Utah records, he realized that it was impossible for her to have witnessed such an event. She had made it up, possibly deriving this metaphor from her helplessness and anger. Yet it was a fatal vision that may have marked her second son with a sense of inevitability. Mikal concludes that the lies she told revealed terrible psychological truths that became an unspoken emotional legacy for her sons. They wanted to erase themselves from existence, and in fact, one was murdered, one was executed, one dropped into a psychological coma…and one (Mikal) became a writer.

The Trial

Two public defenders, Craig Snyder and Mike Esplin, took on Gilmore's case, but it looked pretty hopeless. There was an eyewitness who placed him near the Bushnell murder with the cash box and gun in his hand, and to top it all, he'd shot himself with the same gun. Then there was his cache of stolen guns, not to mention his apparent confession to a cop and later to his cousin. He'd told Brenda to tell his mother "it was true." As vague as that was, the jury could construe it as an admission of guilt. Their best hope was to find some legal technicality and take it to an appeals court.

While Noall Wootton was asking for the death penalty on the grounds that Gilmore was a danger to society should he ever escape and a threat to other inmates if sent to prison, no one had been executed in Utah for sixteen years. Wootton wasn't a death penalty advocate, but he did believe there was no possibility for Gilmore's rehabilitation. And even if he managed to get this sentence, he believed there was small likelihood of its being carried out. Gilmore's trial lasted only two days, starting on October 5, 1976.

The transcripts lay out the main events: An FBI ballistics expert matched two spent cartridges and the bullet from Bushnell to the gun left in the bush, a patrolman had traced Gilmore's trail of blood to that same bush, and the witness named Gilmore as the person he saw at the motel. The defense had no defense. When the two lawyers quickly rested without calling witnesses, Gilmore protested.

The following day he asked the judge if he could take the stand to present his own defense. He figured that, based on what they had heard from the prosecution, it would take the jury less than half an hour to convict him and he wanted the chance to tell his story. He thought he had a good case for insanity. After all, he'd felt completely dissociated during the commission of the crime, like it was inevitable and he couldn't have done anything differently. He didn't have control.

His lawyers stood up and indicated that they had consulted four separate psychiatrists, all of whom had said that Gilmore had known what he was doing and that it was wrong. While he did have an antisocial personality disorder, which may have been aggravated by drinking and Fiorinal, he still did not meet the legal criteria for insanity.

Faced with that, Gilmore withdrew his request. He seemed suddenly to resign himself to the hopelessness of his situation. He'd already experienced some remorse for what he'd done but thought he'd probably end up doing it again. Never had he felt so much pain as that week without Nicole, according to what he said in his letters to her, and he knew he'd have kept up the spree, mindlessly hurting others.

In closing, Wootton took pains to point out that Ben Bushnell had been shot by a gun held directly against his head. It had been no random shot but quite deliberate. Esplin countered with the fact that Gilmore himself had been wounded by the gun going off accidentally. It could have been the case that it had discharged accidentally in the incident that had resulted in Bushnell's death, even if held against him. Maybe Bushnell had moved suddenly. Since there are no eyewitnesses, who was to say differently? He urged the jury to find Gilmore guilty of a lesser crime of second-degree murder committed during a robbery, or even to acquit him altogether.

On October 7, 1976, after an hour and twenty minutes, the jury returned a verdict of Guilty of Murder in the First Degree. Then after lunch, the sentencing phase—called the Mitigation Hearing-- began. Again, the defense lawyers were at a disadvantage, since it was Gary's own family who had turned him in. Clearly they were afraid of him. Brenda felt that Gilmore had betrayed her trust and that he ought to pay for what he'd done. Getting good witnesses looked pretty hopeless. Yet no one could have predicted at that moment that Gilmore's own worst enemy in this regard would be himself.

At the end of the hearing, Gilmore was asked if he had anything to say, with the expectation that he would show some remorse, but all he said was, "I am finally glad to see that the jury is looking at me." The sentence was death, arrived at unanimously, and to be carried out on November 15, just over a month hence. Gilmore was asked to choose between being hanged or shot by a firing squad. He chose the latter, believing that a hanging could easily be botched. While his attorneys prepared the expected course of action, Gilmore took the unexpected one.

Backlash

Although his attorneys had every intention of running an appeal, they told Mailer, Gilmore made up his mind to accept his due. He fired Esplin and Snyder and hired Dennis Boaz, a lawyer from California who had written to him on a whim in support of his desire to go through with the execution. Boaz also revealed his interactions with Gilmore to Mailer, who talked with various other people who’d spoken to Boaz. Gilmore traded an exclusive interview for the man's services, but as Mailer saw it, Boaz got hungry for the writer's life and started talking too much to the media. Gary decided to fire him.

Yet the very idea that a man was going to be executed stirred the residents of Utah into attention. This hadn't happened in sixteen years. To top it off, in 1972 the U. S. Supreme Court had ruled in the case of Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty as currently applied was cruel and unusual.

Therefore, it was unconstitutional. All states were ordered to commute death sentences to life imprisonment. There was no more death row. Then four years later, after the states had revised their laws, the Supreme Court made a series of rulings that allowed capital punishment to be reinstated for certain types of murders. Thus, as of July 2, 1976, just three weeks before Gilmore committed his murders, such an act became a capital offense in Utah, and not without considerable controversy. While the hiatus had only lasted four years, it had been ten full years since the U. S. had executed anyone.

Then when Gilmore said that he did not wish to appeal, the Attorney General, Earl Dorius, wondered if the court might be caught in a net of its own making. Gilmore was supposed to be executed within sixty days of sentencing. There were no provisions for what might happen if they didn't get the deed done within the scheduled time frame. They hadn't executed a man in so long he couldn't be certain that they'd be ready in time. Dorius wondered if it was possible that, on a technicality, Gilmore might just go free. In fact, as he indicated to Mailer, he wasn't altogether certain how to put together a firing squad.

Just a few days before his scheduled execution, Gilmore argued his case before the Justices of the Utah Supreme Court, insisting that he did not wish to spend his life in prison, particularly not on death row. He thought the sentence was fair and proper and he wanted to accept it like a man. "It's been sanctioned by the courts," he said, "and I accept that." To his mind, it was his karma to die. He'd had dreams of it all his life and had come to believe that he owed a debt from a past life. The manner in which he was to die would be a learning experience for others. That was all right with him. By a vote of 4 to 1, the Justices granted his wish. He requested that his last meal be a six-pack of beer.

But there were groups who could not abide such a decision, either on Gilmore's part or on the part of the law. The protests began at once, and his former lawyers felt duty-bound to continue to file an appeal. When Gilmore's mother heard about it, she told her youngest son. Mikal's comment, according to Mailer, was not to worry. "They haven't executed anyone in this country for ten years," he said, "and they're not going to start with Gary."

November 15th came and went. Associations against the death penalty, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, intended to stop this execution. They did not want such a precedent on the record of the court giving in to a defendant and dispensing with the appeals process. On behalf of the prison population, as well as future prisoners, they felt they could not allow this procedure to continue in the direction in which it was going. A Stay of execution was granted, despite Gilmore's protests. He was ready to die. He wanted this over with.

Then he and Nicole formed a plan, which was documented in their letters to each other. She also admitted to it later in filmed interviews. Gilmore instructed her to go around to various doctors to collect as many barbiturates as she could get. She managed 50 pills. Smuggling half in a balloon inside her vagina, she handed them over to Gary. Then at midnight, she swallowed her dose. Gary was supposed to do likewise, but he waited till closer to morning, which gave the appearance that he wanted her to die while he was found and saved. In fact they both survived, but now Nicole was effectively cut off from her lover. There were to be no more communications between them. Nicole was signed in to a psychiatric facility for observation.

In the meantime, the rights to Gilmore's story were up for sale. He authorized Uncle Vern to negotiate, and he ended up selling to Lawrence Schiller and ABC for $50,000, which Gilmore distributed randomly among relatives and former associates from prison. He fully expected to die in December.

Authorizing another lawyer, Ron Stanger, to speak on his behalf, he went before the Utah Board of Pardons to plead his case once more and ask all the religious and civil rights groups to butt out. "It's my life and my death," he insisted on film. He hadn't realized that no one had taken the sentence seriously. He didn't know it was all a joke. He expected that if they were going to hand it down, they were going to carry it out. As he spoke, his courage and anger were both evident. He wanted this over with.

His execution was set for December 6, two days after his thirty-sixth birthday. Then on December 3, Gilmore’s mother stepped in. She was represented by the same lawyer whose rhetoric had convinced the Supreme Court to stop capital punishment several years earlier until the laws were changed. She requested a Stay on her son's behalf. He'd been on a hunger strike ever since he'd been separated from Nicole, she claimed through the lawyer, so he didn't know what he was doing. She should be able to step in.

Gilmore composed an open letter to her, published by the press, to ask that she allow him to get on with it. Ten days later, the Stay was overturned and Gilmore ended his 25-day hunger strike. Upon learning that he would still have to wait another month for his execution, he tried once again to kill himself, but was found in time. Then Mikal decided that he needed to try to stop the process. He went to Utah to talk with his brother, describing the meeting in detail in his book, and was ultimately convinced that Gary knew what he was doing and wanted to do it.

On film, Mikal said that Gary had quoted Nietzsche to him, that "a time comes when a man should rise to meet the occasion." That's what he was trying to do. During their last meeting, Gary kissed Mikal on the mouth and said, "See you in the darkness." Mikal left without taking any further action.

Finally it was scheduled for January 17, 1977. Overnight, the courts had continued to wrestle with the legal questions before them. A federal court judge in Salt Lake City ordered a Stay, but the Tenth Circuit Court in Denver set it aside. The ACLU continued to protest this right up to the moment that Gilmore began his walk as a dead man. Even as late as 7:30 a.m., Gilmore's fate hung in the balance. It was the U. S. Supreme Court that finally decided the issue. The execution was allowed to go on as scheduled.

The End and the Beginning

The night before he was to die, Gilmore had been given plenty of drugs. His relatives visited and he was in good spirits. Uncle Vern admitted on A&E that he’d brought him some whiskey, which Gilmore drank down. Then Johnny Cash, his favorite singer, called and sang him a song. Gilmore tried to sing it with him. Then he made a tape for Nicole on which he asked her to kill herself for him. Finally, the circus was over. All of those who believed the con was bluffing, that he'd change his mind at the last minute, were in shock. Gilmore had asked to be allowed to die and he was going to die.

At 8:00 a.m. on January 17, 1977, the volunteer firing squad got into place. Four of the five weapons were loaded and one would fire a blank. That way, each man would have some idea that perhaps he was not the one who had ended another man's life. They placed the barrels of their rifles through small square holes in a wall as Gilmore was strapped into a chair. He gave his watch to Vern to give to Nicole; he'd broken it at his estimated time of execution. A paper target was placed over his heart and a black corduroy hood over his head. He was strapped into the chair. The least movement could make the bullets miss their mark. Mailer gives a full account of the final minutes, which were also described on film by some of those who attended.

Asked for last words, Gilmore said, "Let's do it." Then to the priest delivering last rights, he said in Latin, "There will always be a father." The countdown began. Gilmore appeared calm. There were three distinct shots. His head went forward into the strap, his right hand delicately lifted, then dropped. The spectators he'd requested to witness the event watched as blood flowed from his heart down his shirt and onto the floor. The doctor went forward to listen, and said that he was still alive. In twenty more seconds, it was over. Three lives had been tragically wasted.

Bessie got the news that there had been a Stay, but then she saw on the television that her second son, Gary Mark Gilmore, had been executed. Some of his organs were donated before he was cremated, and his ashes were spread in three designated areas of Utah, including Spanish Fork. His immortal words, "Let's do it," opened the door for other convicted criminals to be put to death.

Since 1977, there have been 711 executions in the United States. [Katherine Ramsland has written a dozen books and numerous articles, as well as publishing folklore and short stories.

After publishing two books in psychology, Engaging the Immediate and The Art of Learning, she wrote Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice. At that time, she had a cover story in Psychology Today on our culture's fascination with vampires. Then she wrote guide books to Anne Rice's fictional worlds: The Vampire Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, The Witches' Companion: The Official Guide to Anne Rice's Lives of the Mayfair Witches, The Roquelaure Reader: A Companion to Anne Rice's Erotica, and The Anne Rice Reader. Her next book was Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography, and then she ventured into journalism with Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today. She has also written for The New York Times Book Review, The Writer, Million: The Magazine of Popular Fiction, The Newark Star Ledger, Magical Blend, Publishers Weekly, and The Trenton Times. Her background in forensic studies positioned her to assist former FBI profiler John Douglas on his book, The Cases that Haunt Us. Ramsland holds master’s degrees, respectively, in clinical and forensic psychology and a Ph.D. in philosophy. She has been a professor at Rutgers University, a therapist, and a psycho-educator specializing in the psyche's dark side.]

Gary Mark Gilmore was born in a rural Texas town in December 1940, the second of four sons. His parents drifted around the country most of the time while he and his brothers were growing up, with his father peddling and scamming people with phony magazine and newspaper subscriptions.

The Gilmore family settled in Portland, Oregon in the early 1950s, where Gary Gilmore began getting into trouble with the law, with offences ranging from shoplifing to assault and battery charges. He dropped out of high school at age 15 and drifted across the Midwest making a living out of robbing houses and stores.

He was convicted of armed robbery in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1964, and received an 18-year prison sentence. He was conditionally paroled in March 1976 and sent to Provo, Utah to live with a distant cousin of his who tried to help him find work and make a living for himself. But Gilmore's self-destructive nature soon got the best of him, as he couldn't stay away from the quick and easy life of crime as he saw it. Gilmore began stealing money and items from stores and homes.

Gilmore was convicted of killing Ben Bushnell, a motel manager, in Provo, Utah on July 20, 1976. He had also been charged with murdering Max Jensen, a Sinclair gas station employee in Orem, Utah the previous day, but that case never went to trial apparently because there were no witnesses. Gilmore's trial was held from October 5 to October 7, 1976 — he was quickly convicted of the murder, mostly because there was no defense on his part. The jury also recommended the death penalty for Gilmore due to the special circumstances to the crime. Because Utah then had two methods of execution, firing squad or death by hanging, Gilmore was given a choice, in which he replied, "I'd prefer to be shot."

During the three months Gilmore was on death row awaiting his execution, he attempted suicide twice. The first was on November 16, 1976 and the second was a month later on December 16. The execution was stayed three times. While incarcerated, Gilmore developed a deep dislike for two of his fellow inmates, convicted murderers and rapists Pierre Dale Selby and William Andrews, the "Hi-Fi Murderers." Gilmore had to pass the men's cells on his way to the firing squad, and as he was led past he laughed at the men and called out, "I'll see you in Hell, Andrews and Pierre!"

Gilmore was shot by a firing squad on January 17, 1977, at 8:07 AM, after angrily telling his lawyers to drop the appeals they had filed in defiance of his wishes. The night before, Gilmore had requested an all-night gathering of friends and family at the prison mess hall. On the morning of the 17th, he enjoyed a last meal consisting of a hamburger, hard-boiled eggs, a baked potato, a few cups of coffee, and three shots of whiskey. He was then taken to an abandoned cannery behind the prison which served as the prison's death house. He was strapped to a chair, with a wall of sandbags placed behind him to absorb the bullets. Five prison guards stood concealed behind a curtain with five small holes cut for them to place their rifles through which were aimed at him. Gilmore's last words were: "Let's do it."

Gilmore requested that, following his execution, his eyes be used for transplant purposes. Within hours of the execution, two people received his corneas, inspiring the British punk rock band The Adverts to write and release "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" later that year. Gilmore's body was cremated.

According to Mikal Gilmore's memoir, Utah's tradition dictated that five men comprise a firing squad - four of them with loaded rifles and one with a gun containing a blank, so as to not know who fired the fatal shot. Upon inspecting the clothes worn by Gary Gilmore at his execution, Mikal noticed five holes in the shirt — indicating, he wrote, that "the state of Utah, apparently, had taken no chances on the morning that it put my brother to death" (p. 390).

Wikipedia.org

Gary Gilmore, Utah, January 17, 1977, before he was executed by firing squad in Utah, resuming executions in the United States after a ten-year layoff. 

"This is just one more step down the road of life that I've been heading all my life. Let's go."