Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  This put Oregon in a difficult position. The prison’s legal rationale for keeping Gary at Marion was tenuous at best, and now there was a moral matter. Whatever any of the officers or administrators thought of Gary, they did not question the depth of love between him and his mother. Warden Cupp, though, still opposed bringing Gary back. In a letter to the State Corrections Division, Cupp wrote: “The return of Gary Gilmore to Oregon State Penitentiary at the present time is, in my opinion, a calculated risk which contains the elements of unpredictability and portent of danger. I would prefer to avoid the risk. According to the information given to me … the Parole Board delegation is to interview Gary this month. We may have some indication for a future move when the evaluation of the Parole Board is presented.” The Corrections Division wrote back, telling Cupp that this time he might have no choice. Gary was doing well at Marion, and his mother was now in poor health. If he wasn’t returned to OSP, it might be necessary to parole him.

  Meantime, Gary had started a correspondence with my cousin Brenda, in Provo, Utah. Brenda was the daughter of my mother’s favorite living sister, Ida, as well as the daughter of everybody’s favorite uncle, Vernon. From childhood, Brenda and Gary had been each other’s preferred cousins, though like many of the rest of us, Brenda had grown distant from Gary over the years. But now, as they began writing each other, she saw a new side of Gary begin to emerge: He was more reflective about his mistakes, and he was starting to long for the sort of family life that his years of incarceration had deprived him of. He was clearly an intelligent man, and, when he wanted to be, seemingly a compassionate one. Brenda thought Gary was probably ready now to grow within the confines of society, and she believed it was the family’s obligation to take him in and give him a new start. In a complex series of correspondences between Brenda, Gary, the Oregon Corrections Division, and Marion’s administrators, a parole plan was finally worked out. Gary would be paroled into the custody of his family in Utah—my cousin Brenda and her husband Johnny, and Vern and Ida. He was to get a job, stay away from bad habits and crime, and see a parole officer regularly. He was also to stay in the State of Utah. If he lived up to all these agreements for a few months, then he would be allowed a trip to Oregon, to see my mother, and he might even be allowed to move back into the state. In the meantime, my mother was always free to travel to Utah, health permitting, and see her son.

  On April 9, 1976, Gary was released from Marion, Illinois, and, after a bus ride to St. Louis, Missouri, he took a plane into Salt Lake City, Utah. Brenda and her husband Johnny met him at the airport and took him to his new home in Provo.

  My mother was as surprised by this news as I was. I’d had no idea that there were negotiations underway for Gary’s release. When my mother told me that my brother was being paroled into the custody of a family he hadn’t known for nearly thirty years, and into the heart of one of Utah’s most devout and severe Mormon communities, I remember saying, “This does not sound like a great idea.” As soon as I’d said it, I felt ungracious. After all, did I want Gary to spend the rest of his life in prison? Didn’t he deserve another chance at freedom?

  THERE ARE DAYS THAT CHANGE ALL THE POSSIBILITIES OF YOUR LIFE —what you comprehend of your past, what you can expect of your future. Days that tell you, nothing will ever be the same. You will have to live with what has happened for the rest of your life. For my family—and for many others—those days came in late July 1976.

  This is how we learned the news:

  It was a hot day in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. On such days, my mother found the confines of her trailer uncomfortable. A few months before, because of her health problems, she had been forced to quit her job busing dishes at the restaurant in Milwaukie. She was now living off her Social Security benefits, and whatever money Frank brought home from his custodial and day labor jobs. She rarely ventured out of the house. The combined effect of her surgery and arthritis was turning her into something of a recluse—which is probably what she had wanted to be for years.

  Still, she was not in bad spirits. Gary was free from prison and was in love with a beautiful young woman in Provo. Only a couple of weeks before, she had received a letter from him. “I didn’t know anybody could be this happy,” he had written. He also asked, if he sent her the money to cover the costs and arranged for a comfortable mode of travel, would she come visit him in Utah? He badly wanted to see her. On this hot afternoon, my mother had dragged her chair out to the small porch at the front of her trailer and was sitting there fanning herself. She was thinking about Gary’s invitation and how much she wanted to see him. She thought she had just about enough strength to make the journey. It would be good to see Utah again.

  Then the phone rang.

  My mother walked, in her slow, limping way, into the trailer and over to the phone. It always took her many moments to get to the phone, so anybody who called her was accustomed to letting the phone ring for a long time.

  When she answered, it was Brenda. Brenda asked to speak with Frank. This struck my mother as odd. “He’s not here, Brenda. He’s at work. Is something wrong? Has something happened to Gary? What kind of trouble is he in?”

  “He’s fine, Aunt Bessie. I really think I should wait and talk to Frank.”

  “Brenda, tell me what’s happened.”

  She heard Brenda take a deep breath. “Bessie, they’ve got Gary on a Murder One charge. He shot two men in the head, and then he shot one of his thumbs off.”

  It was Brenda’s way to be blunt when she had to be, but this was more bluntness than my mother could bear. “I don’t believe you,” she told Brenda. “The Gary I know would not do such a thing.”

  “Well, Bessie, you better believe it. He killed two young Mormon men.”

  Brenda then handed the phone to Vern. He affirmed to my mother what Brenda had said and gave her a bit more information about the killings. “I think you should brace yourself, Bessie,” he said. “They recently restored the death penalty here. People are angry. I think they’re going to kill Gary.”

  My mother hung up and tried calling Gary at the jail in Utah. When a police officer answered, she told him who she was. “Don’t kill my boy,” she said to the policeman, weeping. “Please don’t kill him. We did so much to get him out.” The officer was tender with her. Told her that nobody at the jail had any plans to hurt Gary. Then went and told my brother that his mother was on the telephone, wanting to speak to him. “Tell her I’m not here,” Gary said.

  “Very funny, Gilmore. Are you going to talk to her or not?”

  “No, I’m not. I don’t know what I would say to her.”

  “I HAD BEEN WORKING, CUTTING TREES, PAINTING FENCES, THAT WEEK,” Frank told me later. “It was hard labor, but it was the kind of work that made me happy.

  “I stopped on the way home and got some groceries, so I could fix dinner for me and Mom. I came in with this big sack, and Mom said: ‘Why don’t you set the groceries down. I have something I have to tell you.’ I set the bag down and I turned around and she started crying. At first I thought one of the brothers had been hurt. And so I asked her. I said: ‘Man, I hope the brothers are all right.’ She said: ‘Yes, your brothers are all right, but—but Gary murdered somebody over in Provo.’

  “That’s how I found out. She told me that, and you know how she would keep crying—you couldn’t understand a thing she said. Finally she calmed down enough to tell me what it was that had happened—that he had been arrested for killing two people, one in a gas station and one in a motel, both in armed robberies and apparently both in cold blood. I remember I just sat there. It was a couple of hours before I even got up and moved at all. I just sat there, totally depressed. Finally I fixed something for Mom to eat, then I wrote Gary a letter. The first thing I said was, in real big letters: WHAT HAPPENED, GARY? Then I said something else below it and I sent it over to him. When I heard from him, I remember he didn’t tell me what happened. He just wrote a letter saying: ‘I’m in jail.’ That’s all he sa
id.”

  I asked Frank if he felt as if his life had stopped, after receiving the news.

  “For several hours it did, yes. It took a while to reel back from it. It’s not something that you want to hear, and we’d had so much bad news from Gary anyway. The other thing is, I remember that I was not just happy because I had some work that I liked for a change, or that I was working with people I liked. I was happy because, for the first time in many years, I had an inner peace. Everybody in the family was out of jail, and that alone was an unusual thing. And when I would come home from work in those days, I’d hear things from Mom like, ‘Oh, Gary’s working and he’s got a girlfriend and they have a little place.’ I was thinking: Man, the guy’s actually living like a human being, like a normal human being. Everybody in the family is out of jail and doing well and I felt really good about it. Then, when I came in and got that, it was just like everything had gone back. Plus this time it was murder. So I said to myself: Well, there will never be any more times when he’ll be out. Not now. Never again will there be a time when I can feel that inner peace that all of us are doing all right on the outside.

  “I had felt so strong about him being out—I had really felt good about it. It was something I wanted inside. It was sort of like finding a gold mine and then discovering it was built over a deadly trap. That’s the way I felt. To me it was real painful.”

  I WAS THE LAST TO KNOW, MY MOTHER had not called me to give me the news. She couldn’t bring herself to.

  Like Frank, I felt these were good days. I had quit my job at the drug clinic—I’d found the work of watching people make bad choices and sometimes dying as a result a depressing career. A couple of years before, I had finally worked up the courage to do something I had been wanting to do for years: I began writing about music. I had been writing for local newspapers, and I was now starting to sell pieces to some national publications. I felt hopeful.

  I was also working at a record store in downtown Portland, to help pay the bills. I loved being around the music and most of the customers, but there were sometimes rough aspects to the work. Occasionally we would have to bust shoplifters, and sometimes this obligation made us face the possibility of violence. Just a couple of weeks before, I’d had to confront a whole family of shoplifters who had their coats and purses full of cassette tapes. When I stopped them at the door, they pulled knives on me. Lucky for me, a coworker had called the police, and they arrived at the door at the same moment that the knives came out.

  Later, when the matter went to trial, the judge asked one woman who had drawn a knife what she was doing with it in her purse.

  “I was on my way to a picnic,” she replied.

  The judge laughed. “A picnic with a switchblade?” he said.

  On a Friday night, nine days after Gary’s arrest, I came home from work, drained after being on my feet for eight hours on a hot day. Since I had to open the store the next morning at ten, I passed up a chance to go drinking with some friends and headed for home.

  The Wild Bunch, Sam Peckinpah’s genuflection to violence and honor, was on TV, and as I settled back on the couch to half-watch it, I picked up the late edition of The Oregonian. I almost passed over a page-two item headlined OREGON MAN HELD IN UTAH SLAYINGS, but instinctively I began to read it. “Gary Mark Gilmore, 35, was charged with the murders of two young clerks during the holdup of a service station and a motel…” I read on—in a daze—about how Gary had been arrested for killing Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell on two consecutive nights in July. Both men were Mormons, about the same age as I, and both left wives and infant children behind.

  I was stunned. I put down the paper, went into the kitchen, and began throwing up in the sink. My girlfriend Andrea came in, alarmed. “What’s wrong?” she asked. I told her.

  I sat on the couch the rest of the night, rereading the sketchy account. I felt shame, remorse, guilt… and rage. It could’ve been me, I thought, a victim of some senseless robbery.

  The next day, I went to visit my mother in Oak Grove, six miles away from my house in Portland. I had no way of knowing whether she had read the news, except to call and ask, which seemed too distant and cold. I was worried about her health. She was now sixty-three, and she had never regained her strength from the surgery of a few months before, and of course she never would. It turned out that she had known of the killings for more than a week but couldn’t bring herself to tell me. We sat there in the claustrophobia of her bleak home that day, looking at each other across a gulf of devastated common history, and I finally began to understand that she had always lived much closer to the horror than I had. In tears, she asked: “Can you imagine what it feels like to mother a son whom you love that deprives two other mothers of their sons?

  “If I had been there, he never would have killed those two boys. I know I could have stopped him, I could have calmed his heart,” she said, and then buried her face in her hands, and all the tears they held.

  BETWEEN HIS RELEASE AND THOSE FATEFUL NIGHTS IN JULY, Gary had held a job briefly at his Uncle Vernon’s shoe store, and had met and fallen in love with Nicole Barrett, a beautiful young woman with two children. But Gary also had a hard time refusing some old, less-promising appetites. Almost immediately after his release, he started drinking steadily, and he also began taking Fiorinal, a muscle and headache medication that, in sustained doses, can cause severe mood swings and sexual dysfunction. Gary apparently experienced both reactions. He also became violent. Sometimes he would get rough with Nicole over failed sex or what he saw as flirtations on her part. Other times, he would pick fights with the men around him, hitting them from behind, threatening to cave in their faces with a tire iron, which he twirled as handily as a baton. Within a short time, Gary had lost his job, had abused the support of his Utah relatives, and appeared embattled with nearly everyone around him. He drank more; he took more drugs. He took to walking into stores and walking out with whatever he wanted under his arm, glaring at the cashiers, as if they would be crazy to try to stop him. And he took to bringing guns home, where he sat on the back porch, firing them into the trees, the fences, the sunsets. “Hit the sun,” he told Nicole. “See if you can make it sink.”

  When he had hit Nicole with his bare fist once too often, she decided that no man would ever hit her again. She packed up her belongings, grabbed her children, and moved out. Gary tried to get her to come back, but she would not. This went on for a while, until Nicole put herself at a greater distance from Gary. Then Gary told a friend that maybe he was going to kill Nicole.

  On a heat-thick night in late July, Gary drove over to Nicole’s mother’s house and talked his ex-girlfriend’s little sister, April, into going for a ride with him in his white pickup truck. He wanted to drive around and talk and drink beer and look for Nicole, he told April. They drove for hours, listening to the radio, talking aimlessly, until Gary pulled up around the corner from a service station in the nearby small town of Orem. He told April to wait in the truck. He walked into the station, where twenty-six-year-old attendant Max Jensen was working alone. There were no other cars. There was only an empty Utah night. Gary pulled a .22 automatic from his jacket and told Jensen to empty the cash from his pockets. He took Jensen’s coin changer. Then he led the young attendant around back and forced him to lie down on the lavatory floor. He told Jensen to place his hands under his stomach and press his face to the ground. Jensen did these things, and tried to offer Gary a smile. Gary pointed the gun at the base of Jensen’s skull. “This one is for me,” Gary said, and pulled the trigger. And then: “This one is for Nicole,” and he pulled the trigger again.

  Gary walked back to the pickup truck and got in. April had been sitting in the cab with the radio blaring, but she knew something was up. She was spooked.

  After driving around for a while, they went to a drive-in to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. But the movie bothered April—who had spent some time in a psychiatric hospital, following a bad LSD experience that had ended in gang rape�
��and she forced Gary to leave before it was over. They stopped by his cousin Brenda’s, but the visit didn’t go too well. Brenda could tell something was wrong. Finally they ended up at a Holiday Inn, where they smoked some dope, and Gary tried to take April’s clothes off. She was too freaked, though, and would not have sex with him.

  The next night, Gary walked into the office of a motel just a few doors away from his Uncle Vernon’s house in Provo. He ordered the man behind the counter, Ben Bushnell—another young Mormon—to lie down on the floor, and then he shot him in the back of the head. He walked out with the motel’s cashbox under his arm, and tried to stuff the pistol under a bush outside. But it discharged, blowing a hole in his thumb.

  Gary decided it was time to get out of town. First, though, he had to take care of his thumb. He drove over to the house of a friend named Craig and called Brenda. In the meantime, a witness had recognized Gary leaving the site of the second murder, and the police had been in touch with Brenda. She had them on one line, Gary on another. She was trying to stall for time until a roadblock could be set up. After a while, Gary figured out that Brenda wasn’t sending any help his way, and he got in his truck and started heading for the local airport. A few miles down the road, just in front of his girlfriend Nicole’s house, he was surrounded by police cars and a SWAT team. He was arrested for Bushnell’s murder, and within a day or so, he had confessed to the murder of Max Jensen.

  GARY WENT ON TRIAL A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER, but from the start it was an open-and-shut case. Plus, Gary didn’t help the case much when he refused to allow his attorneys to call Nicole as a defense witness. (By this time, Nicole and Gary were reconciled; she had felt terrible after his arrest and was now visiting him in jail for hours every day.) Also, Gary didn’t help matters by staring menacingly at the jury members and by offering belligerent testimony on his own behalf. Neither the verdict nor the sentence came as a surprise: Gary was found guilty and was sentenced to die. He told the judge he would prefer being shot to being hanged.