Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  My mother called the night of Gary’s original sentencing, October 7, to tell me that he had received the death penalty. I found myself echoing my friends’ consolations. “Mother,” I said, “they haven’t executed anybody in this country for ten years and they aren’t about to start with Gary.”

  I hung up the phone and went and sat on the curb outside my house. I sat there a long time, staring at the nearby river, until my girlfriend came out and put her arm around me. “I know it’s awful,” she said. “But you know they won’t kill him. They never put people to death in America anymore.”

  “No,” I said after a moment, “you don’t understand. He’s going to die. They’re going to execute him. He was born for it.”

  FOR WEEKS AFTER THE KILLINGS AND GARY’S DEATH SENTENCE, I felt grief and anger, and deep and painful humiliation. I could not believe that my brother had left his family with so much horror and shame to live with, and I could not forgive him for what he had done to the families of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell. I prayed that in some ways the awful episode was over—that Gary would simply rot away the rest of his life in the bitter nothingness of a Utah prison.

  Then I tried going on with my life. I had told my close friends about what had happened with Gary—I felt I owed them a chance to decide whether they wanted to be the friend of a murderer’s brother—but I hadn’t told any of the editors or journalists I worked with. I still thought maybe I could keep enough of this horrible truth buried somewhere, so it would not spill over into the rest of my life and corrupt whatever dreams I might still have.

  In the autumn of 1976, I learned that Rolling Stone had accepted an article of mine for publication. I was pleased. From the time I began reading the magazine, I had held a dream of someday writing for it. In early November, I went to San Francisco to work on an assignment and to meet the editors at the magazine. We got along okay, and my principal editor, Ben Fong-Torres, indicated that he would like me to do more work for them. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my girlfriend.

  When I stepped off the plane at Portland’s airport, I heard my name on the loudspeaker: “Mr. Mikal Gilmore: please pick up a red courtesy telephone. There is an emergency phone call for you.”

  I picked it up. It was Andrea. “I’m sorry I’m late. I’ve been with your mother all afternoon. She’s had an accident—she’s fallen down. I think you should come see her right away.”

  Andrea arranged for a friend of ours, Michael, to pick me up at the airport. I could tell by the way that Michael was acting, as he drove me to my mother’s trailer, that he knew more than he was telling me. He was grave and quiet.

  When I arrived, my mother showed me a news story on the front page of The Oregonian: CONVICTED KILLER ASKS UTAH TO PUT HIM TO DEATH. During the time I had been in San Francisco, Gary had waived all rights of appeal and review and was requesting that his execution be carried out. Fourth District Judge J. Robert Bullock had complied, setting the date for Monday, November 15.

  I was shocked and I was furious. I figured Gary was throwing a bluff, but I also figured that if there was one state in the Union that would be happy to oblige his request, it was Utah, with its passion for Blood Atonement. As it turned out, that same day Gary’s original attorneys had filed for a stay—against his protests—and the Utah Supreme Court had granted one.

  That night, back at my own home, I sat and drank some wine and tried to think about what was happening. I remember thinking that nothing would ever be the same. Not for myself, not for my family, maybe not even for the nation around me. I remember thinking that the past and the future were now closed off from each other for me, and all that was left was a terrible present: a present that had quickly become the entryway to a nightmare that none of us could ever be delivered from.

  THE NEXT DAY I DECIDED IT WAS TIME TO CONFRONT GARY. I put a call through to Draper Prison. To my amazement Gary was on the phone within two minutes.

  Our first few exchanges were polite but tentative. Gary grew impatient quickly. “Something on your mind?”

  “Gary, are you serious about this?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s right, you don’t. You never knew me.” Gary had thrown a hurdle I couldn’t leap, one he was entitled to. I was at a loss for a reply. “Look,” he continued, a softer tone to his voice, “I’m not trying to be mean to you, but this thing’s going to happen one way or the other. There’s nothing you can do to stop it, and I don’t particularly want you to like me. It’ll be easier for me if you don’t. It seems the only time we ever talk to each other is around the time of somebody’s death. And now it’s mine.”

  I hadn’t counted on Gary taking the offensive. I felt helpless against it. “What about Mother?” I asked.

  “Well, I want to see Mother before all this goes down,” Gary said. “I want to see all of you. Maybe that will make it easier. But I am serious about this, and I don’t want you or anybody else to interfere. It’s totally my affair. I killed two men, the court sentenced me to die, and now I’m accepting that sentence. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on trial or in prison. I’ve lost my freedom. I lost it a long time ago. Now I’m just going to make them finish the job they started twenty years ago.”

  I began to form a reply, then stopped. “What’s wrong?” asked Gary.

  “It’s hard to hear this stuff from somebody you love—”

  “Hey, I don’t need to hear that,” Gary broke in. “I won’t let anything hurt me anymore, and I don’t want you to think I’m some ‘sensitive’ artist because I drew pictures or wrote poems. I killed—in cold blood.” A guard told Gary that his time was up.

  The next day, I learned of Gary’s successful appearance before the Utah Supreme Court on network news, and I also saw clips of my brother being led from the courtroom in shackles, with that wary, piercing stare in his eyes. I pitied and feared Gary in those moments, and I also hated him for what he was bringing upon himself and our family. I couldn’t believe his audacity, the seemingly dispassionate manner with which he sought a state-sanctioned suicide, an act which seemed no less premeditated than murder.

  Also, I was reeling from having the most painful and private aspects of my family’s history transformed into public news. Overnight, a past that I had tried to escape was everywhere. Gary was now on the national news nearly every evening of the week. He was also on the front page of every American newspaper I saw, and now he was staring out at me from the cover of Newsweek. Inside the magazine, I found pictures from my family’s photo books. There was one from a long-ago Christmas morning, with my father, Gary, Gaylen, and myself, all standing in a line. Nobody in that picture looked very happy. God—was this the same Christmas that Gary came into my room, preaching his philosophy of self-abasement?

  The same week as the Newsweek story, I received a call at home. “Is this Mikal Gilmore?” asked the voice at the other end. “I’m from the Los Angeles Times, and I would like to talk to you about your brother Gary Gilmore.” I told him that he had the wrong Gilmore and hung up. That afternoon. I had the number changed. I knew I couldn’t escape from what was happening, but I was not going to participate in it. It is unimaginable, the vertigo you can feel when events throw your life to the top of the world.

  I resented the way this whole event was being viewed—as something that was inevitable, as a horrible fate that could not be refused or altered. I could not understand modern American courts throwing aside the processes, structure, and logic of law simply to meet a challenge of bravado or to appease a suicidal demand. It was as though everybody was caught up in the novelty, the excitement, the vicarious deadliness of the event, and nothing could stop it.

  I decided I’d had enough. Regardless of my brother’s wishes, I was going to consult legal authorities in Utah, to learn what the family could do to seek a halt to the execution.

  THE NEXT DAY OUTGOING UTAH GOVERNOR Calvin Rampton ordered a stay, referring the matter to th
e State Board of Pardons and earning the epithet of “moral coward” from Gary. The same night, I received a call from Anthony Amsterdam of Stanford Law School, a longtime and well-versed opponent of the death penalty and a member of the bar of the United States Supreme Court. He outlined possible courses of action for the family. A family member could retain counsel to seek a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court, the duration of which would be determined by the Court’s willingness to review the case and the subsequent decision of that review. Realistically, it meant that Gary could be subjected to a new trial.

  I passed the information on to my mother, who also spoke with Amsterdam. We agreed it would probably be wise to retain him pending the pardons board decision.

  On Tuesday morning, November 16, the day after Gary’s scheduled execution, Amsterdam called me with the news that Gary and Nicole had both attempted suicide with an overdose of sedatives. That was my first real indication that any attempts to save Gary’s life might prove futile. We can sentence people to die, I thought, but not to live. Gary, though, had an extensive history of suicide attempts, and he had once claimed that few had been in earnest. But that had been years ago, with razor blades and broken lightbulbs. To my knowledge he’d never attempted suicide with drugs.

  I had one more phone conversation with Gary in that period, between his hospital release and the pardons board hearing. He had been fasting to protest the hospital’s refusal to allow him any communication with Nicole, and he was in a bad temper. I tried to tell him about the toll the whole affair was taking on the family, what a circus it had become, and how that seemed to belie his claims to dignity. “What do I owe you?” he snapped. “I don’t even think of you as my brother anymore.”

  I lost my temper. I was weary from the pressure. “I’m sick of the way you’ve shoved everybody around,” I said. “You’re running over a lot of people’s lives for you own sake, and you only insult and berate those who don’t want to see you die.” He hung up on me.

  On November 30, the pardons board decided to allow the execution. In anticipation of that decision, I had flown to San Francisco to deliver a retainer to Anthony Amsterdam authorizing him to take action on my mother’s behalf.

  Events moved rapidly. On December 3, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a stay of execution. But our calls were turned away at the prison, and Gary issued an open letter asking my mother to “butt out.” During this time, neither Gary nor any of his legal representatives attempted to contact any member of the family outside of Utah. The only contact in that manner occurred when writer-publisher Lawrence Schiller, who’d bought the publication and motion picture rights to Gary’s story from him, asked my mother’s sister Ida and her husband, Vernon Damico (who had replaced one of Gary’s earlier lawyers, Dennis Boaz, as Gary’s agent), to pay my mother a visit, ostensibly to make up for the previous times her counsel and feelings had been bypassed.

  But whatever business there was to discuss got put aside once Vern and Ida saw the state of my mother’s health and the way she lived in her trailer. Vern went and bought her some groceries while Ida did some cleaning up. There were strains between my mother and these folks now—my mother believed the family in Utah had stolen her son from her and were now using his awful fame to their advantage—but there was also love between them. They remained family. Vern held my mother in his large, strong arms while she cried about Gary’s deeds and his fate, and Vern and Ida cried too.

  Before leaving, Vern took a thousand dollars from inside his coat and placed it on the table. He told my mother that Gary wanted her to have the money, if she would sign a release. Gary also wanted her to withdraw her opposition to his execution—or at least to stop any further legal action. My mother looked at the money and said, “Well, I could certainly use that,” then broke down and cried again. In the end, she refused to sign, and Vernon was forced to take the money back with him. Everybody involved felt bad about the whole deal.

  ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 13, THE SUPREME COURT lifted its stay, declaring that Gary had made a “knowing and intelligent waiver of his rights.” A resignation began to descend on us.

  Finally my mother got through to Gary on the phone. “Gary,” she said, “do you remember the day when you were a child and you fell into the water off a houseboat in Seattle? I came in the water and got you because I loved you. I loved you no more that day than I do today, so I thought I’d come in the water again to get you. That’s what this is all about.”

  “I wasn’t angry with you,” Gary replied. “I half-expected it; after all, you are my mother. I knew you would try to stop it because I knew you loved me. I also knew you were doing it for Mikal.” Gary asked my mother to withdraw her intervention, and she did.

  A day later, Judge Bullock reset the execution for January 17, and Gary was confined to a “strip cell,” denying him all visitation rights, including family members.

  By Christmas time I told myself, and anybody who asked, that I didn’t care anymore about what would happen. I spent the holidays drunk and often drugged. My girlfriend went home to visit her family, and I was with a different woman every night she was gone. I took sleeping pills because I couldn’t sleep if I didn’t. When I couldn’t sleep, I walked around my house, throwing things, breaking mementos. Then one night I dreamed of Gary being tied to a stake and bayoneted repeatedly, while I stood on the other side of a fence, unable to reach him. The next morning I heard of another, nearly fatal suicide attempt.

  Suddenly I desperately wanted to see Gary, to reach out for one last time, to achieve whatever reconciliation was possible under the circumstances. And at that same moment, I also realized that I was not yet resigned to the idea of Gary’s execution. No matter what had happened, I did not want him to die.

  IN THE FIRST WEEK OF JANUARY, Anthony Amsterdam, negotiating through Gary’s attorneys—Robert Moody and Ronald Stanger—and prison officials, arranged for me and my brother Frank to visit Gary. My mother’s physical condition prohibited her traveling. Richard Giauque, a Salt Lake City attorney who had acted on Amsterdam’s and the family’s behalf in Utah, was to meet us at the airport. As far as we knew, it was a “one time only, no physical contact” visit.

  On Tuesday morning, January 11, Frank and I caught a plane into Salt Lake. We tried talking for a while on the flight, but after a bit my brother lapsed into a brooding silence. I could tell he was in deep pain over what would be facing us.

  His silence gave me a chance to think about some things I hadn’t wanted to think about. I was heading into Utah to confront a man, a blood relative, whom I had never really known, and whom I now had a bitter relationship with. I could tell myself we were very different people—I had told myself that for years—and in certain ways, that was true. Gary was a killer, I was not. But in truth, on this day we were both monsters, each determined to get his own way, despite what would likely be mortal consequences for others.

  I was prepared and willing to do whatever was necessary to stop Gary’s execution. I could tell myself I was doing this for good moral purposes—I did not believe in the death penalty, and certainly Gary’s execution would hasten its return—but I had other reasons that were less generous. I did not want Gary to die this way because I did not want his death to ruin my life or what remained of the lives of my family. I did not want to live with the ruin and stigma of being a brother to the man who had brought capital punishment back to America. I had rights to my own hopes, I told myself, and those hopes could never come to be, as long as I was a blood relation to such shame and infamy. I already knew that part of the world would judge me for Gary’s actions, and I did not want to share his condemnation. I still had my whole life ahead of me.

  To get my way, to win this battle, I would have to impose my will on the situation and on my brother. I would have to take legal action that might forestall his execution, maybe even for years. I knew that if I did so, I would be robbing him of this strange moment he had seized in history. Worse, I would likely be condemning him to another form
of suffering—a waiting for a slower death, within the hell of prison—and despite the horrible things Gary had done, I had little doubt that he had suffered much in recent months and that his waiting for the moment of his death could not be an easy thing. But if I didn’t make Gary suffer, then the rest of us would have to. I would have to be with my mother and see the look on her face when we heard the news that the execution had been carried out. More than anything else, I did not want to see my mother go through that moment.

  Even though I was hoping to save my brother’s life in the course of this visit (And what the hell did that mean? How could you save the life of a man whose soul was already lost?), I did not feel in any sense like a good person on this morning. In fact, I would never again feel like a good person. That possibility, much less that certainty, got left somewhere up there in the sky during that flight. When the plane landed, I was in a place where people decided who would live and who would have to die. It was both a physical and spiritual place, and it was a place I’d been headed for my entire life, just as Gary had been headed for it. This was the drama we had been assigned to play.

  Once you arrived at such a place, the stain of blood would wash upon your hands and would never be cleansed or forgotten.

  No, I was not a good person and I never could be again. The momentum of my blood history had taken that possibility away from me.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED IN SALT LAKE CITY, Richard Giauque met us at the airport with a Rolls-Royce. He apologized immediately for its “gaudiness”—he’d had to borrow his law partner’s car at the last minute, he said. En route to Draper, Giauque explained that it was possible to achieve a stay until the constitutionality of Utah’s death penalty had been determined.