Gary Gilmore

• 1. Introduction

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  Gary Gilmore, an American criminal, was shot by a firing squad at the Utah State Prison in Draper at 8:07 in the morning on the 17th of January 1977. Asked whether he had any last words, he answered, "Let's do it." Few condemned people have pushed so hard for their own sentence to be carried out. His insistence made him the first person executed in the United States in almost ten years. Why did a man demand his own death, and who tried to stop him? What had happened to capital punishment in the country before he arrived at the prison? And why did novelists, comedians, musicians and artists keep returning to his story long after the smoke cleared?

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• 2. A Contested Birth

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  Faye Robert Coffman was the name Frank Gilmore gave his newborn son in McCamey, Texas, on the 4th of December 1940. The family was living there under the false surname Coffman because Frank, an alcoholic con man, was avoiding the law. Gary was the second of four sons born to Frank and his wife Bessie. His brothers were Frank Jr., Gaylen and Mikal, who would become a writer and music journalist. Frank had other wives and families that he never supported. He had married Bessie, an outcast from Provo, Utah, on a whim in Sacramento, California. Once the family left Texas, Bessie changed the baby's name to Gary Mark.

  Two decades later, a birth certificate in the name Faye Coffman turned up. Frank's mother, Fay, had kept it all that time. Gary found it and concluded that he must be illegitimate or someone else's son. He seized on that idea as the reason he and his father had never got along. When Bessie tried to explain the name change, he became very upset and walked out on her.

  Illegitimacy, real or imagined, ran through the whole family. Fay Gilmore once told Bessie that Frank's father was a famous magician who had passed through Sacramento. Bessie went to the library and decided the man must have been Harry Houdini. The dates do not fit well. Houdini was only sixteen in 1890, the year Frank was born, and he did not begin his magic career until the following year. Nobody knows whether Fay meant someone who would only later become famous. Mikal believes the story is false, but he says both of his parents believed it. Gary's oldest brother, Frank Jr., was the illegitimate son of Robert Ingram, who was Frank Sr.'s son from an earlier marriage. Ingram had a brief affair with Bessie shortly after she married his father. Frank Sr. believed that Gary, too, was not his own.

  The Gilmore boys grew up on the move across the Western United States, while Frank supported the family by selling fake magazine subscriptions. Mikal described his father as a "cruel and unreasonable man." Frank would whip Frank Jr., Gary and Gaylen with a razor strop, a whip or a belt for little or no reason. He beat his wife less often. Mikal said he was whipped only once, and never again after he told his father, "I hate you." The parents also screamed at each other for years. Frank mocked Brigham Young, the second president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as "Bring 'em Young." Bessie answered by calling him a "Cat-licker" and threatening to kill him some night.

  In 1952, the family settled in Portland, Oregon. Gary scored 133 on an IQ test, did well on aptitude and achievement tests, and showed artistic talent. Even so, he dropped out of high school in the ninth grade and ran away to Texas with a friend, returning to Portland after several months.

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• 3. Cycles of Confinement

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  At the age of 14, Gary started a small car theft ring with friends, and that led to his first arrest. His father took him home with a warning. Two weeks later he was back in court on another car theft charge. This time the court sent him to the MacLaren Reform School for Boys in Woodburn, Oregon, and he was released the following year. Another car theft charge in 1960 landed him in the Oregon State Correctional Institution, and he was out again later that year.

  In 1961, doctors diagnosed Frank Sr. with terminal lung cancer. He died at the end of July 1962, while Gary sat in Rocky Butte Jail in Portland facing charges of driving without a license. A jail guard delivered the news. Despite the years of conflict, Gary was devastated, and he tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists. After that, he grew more erratic and was often drunk.

  In 1964, Gilmore faced assault and armed robbery charges. The court sentenced him to 15 years as a habitual offender, and he went to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. A prison psychiatrist diagnosed antisocial personality disorder with intermittent psychotic decompensation. In 1972 he won a conditional release. The terms were to live on weekdays in a halfway house in Eugene, Oregon, and to study art at a community college. He never registered for classes. Within a month he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery.

  His violent behavior inside kept getting worse. In 1975, officials moved him out of Oregon to the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, which was then a maximum security facility.

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• 4. Two Nights in Utah

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  In April 1976, Gilmore was conditionally paroled and traveled to Provo, Utah. He moved in with a distant cousin, Brenda Nicol, who tried to help him find work. He spent a short time at his uncle Vern Damico's shoe repair shop. Then he worked for an insulation company owned by Spencer McGrath. Before long he slid back into stealing, drinking and fighting.

  Gilmore was 35 when he began a relationship with Nicole Barrett Baker, who was 19, had been married twice and had two young children. At first it was casual. It turned intense and strained because of his aggressive behavior and because her family pressed her to stop seeing him.

  On the evening of the 19th of July 1976, Gilmore robbed and murdered Max Jensen, a gas station employee in Orem, Utah. The next evening he robbed and murdered Bennie Bushnell, a motel manager in Provo. Both men did what he demanded, and he killed them anyway. Each was told to lie down and was shot in the head. Both were students at Brigham Young University, and both left widows with infants.

  A bungled cleanup exposed him. While getting rid of the .22 caliber pistol, Gilmore accidentally shot himself in the right hand. The blood led back to a service garage where he had left his truck for repairs before the Bushnell killing. Mechanic Michael Simpson saw him hide the gun in the bushes. When Gilmore came to pay, Simpson noticed the blood on his crudely bandaged hand and heard about the motel shooting on a police scanner. He wrote down the license plate number and called the police. Brenda also turned Gilmore in, shortly after he phoned asking for bandages and painkillers. The Utah State Police stopped him as he tried to drive out of Provo, and he surrendered without trying to flee.

  Prosecutors charged him with both killings, but the Jensen case never went to trial. The apparent reason was that no one had seen it happen.

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• 5. Trial and Verdict

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  Gilmore's murder trial opened at the Provo courthouse on the 5th of October 1976 and lasted two days. Peter Arroyo, a motel guest, testified that he had seen Gilmore in the registration office that night. Gilmore took the money, then ordered Bushnell to lie down on the floor and shot him. Gerald F. Wilkes, an FBI ballistics expert, matched two shell casings and the fatal bullet to the pistol hidden in the bush. A patrolman described following the trail of blood to the same spot.

  Gilmore's two court-appointed lawyers, Michael Esplin and Craig Snyder, barely cross-examined the state's witnesses. They called no witnesses of their own. Gilmore protested. The next day he asked the judge for permission to testify in his own defense, perhaps hoping to argue that the dissociation and loss of control he felt that night supported an insanity plea.

  His lawyers then presented the findings of four separate psychiatrists. All four said Gilmore understood what he was doing and knew it was wrong. He did have antisocial personality disorder, which drinking and drugs may have made worse. But he did not meet the legal test for insanity. Gilmore withdrew his request.

  In closing, Esplin pointed out that Gilmore had accidentally shot himself and suggested he might have shot Bushnell by accident too. Because nobody had seen the shooting, Esplin asked the jury to convict on second-degree murder or even acquit. On the 7th of October the jury deliberated, and by midday it returned a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. Later that same day, the jurors unanimously recommended a death sentence because of the special circumstances of the crime.

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• 6. Wanting to Die

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  The 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia had made Gilmore's sentence unusual in the first place. The Supreme Court ruled that earlier death penalty laws were cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore unconstitutional. It ordered every state to commute death sentences to life imprisonment. States then wrote new statutes, and the Court upheld a new series of them in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Gilmore became the first person to be executed under the revived laws.

  Gilmore chose not to seek habeas corpus relief in federal court. His mother, Bessie, went to court to ask for a stay of execution on his behalf. By a five-to-four vote, the US Supreme Court declined to hear her claim. Its per curiam opinion said that Gilmore had waived his rights by not pursuing them.

  Utah then offered two methods, the firing squad or hanging. Gilmore feared a hanging could be botched, and he said, "I'd prefer to be shot." The execution was set for the 15th of November at 8:00 a.m.

  The American Civil Liberties Union fought for stays against his expressed wishes, and it won several. At a board of pardons hearing in November 1976, Gilmore had harsh words for the ACLU and for a group of reverends and rabbis from Salt Lake City. He said, "This is my life and this is my death." He asked them all to "butt out."

  The waiting wore on him. On the 16th of November, after the first stay was issued, he attempted suicide. He tried again a month later, on the 16th of December. The last of the stays came just hours before the rescheduled date, and a court overturned it at 7:30 a.m. on the morning set for the execution.

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• 7. The Firing Squad

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  An abandoned cannery behind the Utah State Prison served as the death house on the morning of Gilmore's execution. Guards strapped him to a chair and placed a wall of sandbags behind it to catch the bullets. Five local police officers stood hidden behind a curtain that had five small holes for their rifles. The Rev. Thomas Meersman, the Catholic prison chaplain, gave Gilmore the last rites. After the prison physician covered his head with a black hood, Gilmore spoke his final words to Meersman in Latin, "Dominus vobiscum," meaning "The Lord be with you." Meersman answered, "Et cum spiritu tuo," or "And with your spirit."

  Utah firing squads were made up of five volunteer law enforcement officers from the county where the offender was convicted. Each carried a .30-30-caliber rifle loaded with off-the-shelf Winchester 150-grain SilverTip ammunition. They fired at the chest from a distance of 20 feet.

  Prison officials said that four of the men had live rounds and one had a blank, so that none could be sure who fired the fatal shots. Mikal Gilmore doubted it. When he inspected the shirt his brother wore at the execution, he counted five holes. In his memoir Shot in the Heart, he wrote that Utah "had taken no chances on the morning that it put my brother to death."

  The body was sent for autopsy and cremated later that day. A memorial service at Walker Mortuary followed the next day, and an airplane scattered the ashes over Spanish Fork, Utah. Gilmore had also asked that some of his organs be donated for transplant. Within hours of the execution, two people received his corneas, a detail that would soon turn up in a punk single.

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• 8. Afterlife in Culture

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  Saturday Night Live aired its the 11th of December 1976 episode, with Candice Bergen as guest host, while Gilmore was still alive. The cast performed a Christmas medley titled "Let's Kill Gary Gilmore for Christmas," wearing winter coats in fake snow and singing carols with altered lyrics. A later episode, on the 20th of October 1979, had guest host Eric Idle strapped to a stretcher, assisted by orderlies. With the stretcher stood on end and a black blindfold over his eyes, Idle announced an impersonation of Gary Gilmore.

  Dan Wieden, founder of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy, credits Gilmore's last words as the inspiration for the Nike slogan "Just Do It."

  Norman Mailer wrote The Executioner's Song, a nonfiction novel based on Gilmore's life, and it won the Pulitzer Prize. The book is noted for its portrayal of Gilmore and of the anguish around the murders. It also carried Mailer's thinking on the national debate over bringing back capital punishment. In 1982 Mailer adapted it for a television movie of the same name. Tommy Lee Jones played Gilmore and won an Emmy Award. Christine Lahti, Eli Wallach and Rosanna Arquette co-starred.

  The Colombian writer Rafael Chaparro Madiedo made Gilmore a main character in his 1992 novel Opio en las Nubes, or Opium in the Clouds, which won the National Prize. Artist Matthew Barney cast himself as Gilmore in Cremaster 2, a 1999 film and the second of five in The Cremaster Cycle. At the start of Cremaster 3, a transformed character who corresponds to Gilmore is played by Nesrin Karanouh. Welsh playwright Dic Edwards dramatized the story in his 1995 play Utah Blue.

  In 1994, Mikal Gilmore published Shot in the Heart, a memoir of his troubled family that begins with the original Mormon settlers and runs through Gary's execution and its aftermath. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani said it reads like a combination of Brothers Karamazov and a series of Johnny Cash ballads. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. HBO adapted it in 2001, with Giovanni Ribisi as Mikal, Elias Koteas as Gary, Sam Shepard as their father and Lee Tergesen as Frank Jr.

  The Adverts, a punk band, released "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" in 1977, and it plays on the film's soundtrack. The song is told from the point of view of a hospital patient who has received Gilmore's eyes in a transplant. In 2003 the alternative rock band ArmsBendBack released a song with the same title.

  The Oakland-based performance artist Monte Cazazza mailed out photos of himself in an electric chair on the day of the execution. A Hong Kong newspaper mistakenly printed one as the real thing. Cazazza later posed with Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey Fanni Tutti of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle for a "Gary Gilmore Memorial Society" postcard. The three sat blindfolded and tied to chairs, with loaded guns pointed at them. Playwright Christopher Durang worked Gilmore into Beyond Therapy in 1983, where the character Bruce says he "wanted to see Gary Gilmore executed on television."

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