Gary Gilmore (criminal)

Gary Mark Gilmore (born Faye Robert Coffman; December 4, 1940 – January 17, 1977) was an American criminal who gained international attention for demanding the implementation of his death sentence for two murders he had admitted to committing in Utah. After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision ''Gregg v. Georgia'', he became the first person in almost ten years to be executed in the United States. These new statutes avoided the problems under the 1972 decision in ''Furman v. Georgia,'' which had resulted in earlier death penalty statutes being deemed "cruel and unusual" punishment, and therefore unconstitutional. (The Supreme Court had previously ordered all states to commute death sentences to life imprisonment after ''Furman''.) Gilmore was executed by a firing squad in 1977. His life and execution were the subject of the 1979 nonfiction novel ''The Executioner's Song'' by Norman Mailer, and 1982 TV film of the novel starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore.

Early life

Gary Mark Gilmore was born in McCamey, Texas, on December 4, 1940, the second of four sons, to Frank and Bessie Gilmore. The other sons were Frank Jr., Gaylen, and the writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore. Frank Harry Gilmore Sr. (c. November 23, 1890, Lincoln, Nebraska – July 31, 1962, Seattle, Washington), an alcoholic con man, had other wives and families, none of whom he supported. On a whim, he married Bessie (née Brown) (August 19, 1913, Provo, Utah – June 29, 1981, Portland, Oregon), a Mormon outcast from Provo, Utah, in Sacramento, California. Gary was born while they were living in Texas under the pseudonym of Coffman to avoid the law. Frank christened his son Faye Robert Coffman, but once they left Texas, Bessie changed it to Gary Mark. This name change proved to be a sore point years later. Frank's mother, Fay, kept the original "Faye Coffman" birth certificate, and when Gary found it two decades later, he assumed he must be either illegitimate or someone else's son. He seized on this as the reason that he and his father never got along; he became very upset and walked out on his mother when she tried to explain the name change to him.

The theme of illegitimacy, real or imagined, was common in the Gilmore family. Frank Sr.'s mother, Fay Gilmore, once told Bessie that Frank Sr.'s father was a famous magician who had passed through Sacramento, where she was living. Bessie researched this at the library and concluded that Frank was the illegitimate son of Harry Houdini. In fact, Houdini was only sixteen years old in 1890, the year of Frank Gilmore's birth, and did not begin his career as a magician until the following year. As such, whether Fay meant that Frank Sr.'s father was someone who would ''later become known'' as a famous magician may never be known. Mikal Gilmore, Gary's youngest brother, believes the story to be false, but has stated that both his father and mother believed it.

During Gary's childhood, the family frequently relocated throughout the Western United States, with Frank supporting them by selling fake magazine subscriptions. Gary had a troubled relationship with his father, whom his youngest brother Mikal described as a "cruel and unreasonable man." Frank Gilmore Sr. was strict and quick to anger, and would often whip his sons, Frank Jr., Gary, and Gaylen, with a razor strop, whip, or a belt for little or no reason. Less often, he would beat his wife. He mellowed somewhat with age: Mikal reported that Frank whipped him only once, and never did it again after Mikal told him, "I hate you." In addition, Frank and Bessie would argue loudly and verbally abuse each other. Frank would anger Bessie by calling her crazy, and defame Brigham Young, the second president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as "Bring 'em Young". Bessie would retaliate by calling him a "Cat-licker" atholicand threatening to kill him some night. This abuse continued for years and caused considerable turmoil within the Gilmore family.

In 1952, the Gilmore family settled in Portland, Oregon. As an adolescent, Gary began engaging in petty crime. Although Gilmore had an IQ test score of 133, gained high scores on both aptitude and achievement tests, and showed artistic talent, he dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. He ran away from home with a friend to Texas, returning to Portland after several months.

Crimes

At the age of 14, Gary started a small car theft ring with friends, which resulted in his first arrest. He was released to his father with a warning. Two weeks later, he was back in court on another car theft charge. The court remanded him to the MacLaren Reform School for Boys in Woodburn, Oregon, from which he was released the following year. He was sent to Oregon State Correctional Institution on another car theft charge in 1960 and was released later that year.

In 1961, Frank Sr., Gary's father, was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer; he died at the end of July 1962, while Gary was in Rocky Butte Jail in Portland, facing charges of driving without a license. A jail guard told Gary when his father died. Despite his dysfunctional relationship with his father, Gary was devastated and tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists. After his father died, Gilmore got into more and more trouble, as the wilder side of him came out, and he was frequently drunk. He faced assault and armed robbery charges again in 1964 and was given a 15-year prison sentence as a habitual offender and sent to the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, Oregon. A prison psychiatrist diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder with intermittent psychotic decompensation. He was granted conditional release in 1972 to live weekdays in a halfway house in Eugene, Oregon, and study art at a community college. Gilmore never registered and, within a month, he was arrested and convicted of armed robbery.

Due to his violent behavior in prison, Gilmore was transferred in 1975 from Oregon to the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, at the time a maximum security facility.

Gilmore was conditionally paroled in April 1976 and went to Provo, Utah, to live with a distant cousin, Brenda Nicol, who tried to help him find work. Gilmore worked briefly at his uncle Vern Damico's shoe repair shop and then for an insulation company owned by Spencer McGrath, but he soon returned to his previous lifestyle of stealing, drinking, and fighting. Gilmore, then 35, had a relationship with Nicole Barrett Baker (later ''Nicole Barrett Henry''), a 19-year-old who had been married twice before and had two young children. The relationship was at first casual, but soon became intense and strained due to Gilmore's aggressive behavior and pressure from Baker's family to prevent her from seeing him.

Murders

On the evening of July 19, 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. Although both men had complied with his demands, he murdered them. The young men were each ordered to lie down and then were shot in the head. Both were students at Brigham Young University; both left widows with infants. While disposing of the .22 caliber pistol used in both killings, Gilmore accidentally shot himself in his right hand, leaving a trail of blood to the service garage where he had left his truck to be repaired prior to murdering Bennie Bushnell. Garage mechanic Michael Simpson witnessed Gilmore hiding the gun in the bushes. Seeing the blood on Gilmore's crudely bandaged right hand when he approached to pay for the repairs to his truck, and hearing on a police scanner of the shooting at the nearby motel, Simpson wrote down Gilmore's license plate number and called the police. Gilmore's cousin, Brenda, turned him in to police shortly after he phoned her asking for bandages and painkillers for the injury to his hand. The Utah State Police apprehended Gilmore as he tried to drive out of Provo, and he gave up without attempting to flee. Although he was charged with the murders of Jensen and Bushnell, the Jensen case was never brought to trial, apparently due to there being no eyewitnesses.

Trial

Gilmore's murder trial began at the Provo courthouse on October 5, 1976, and lasted two days. Peter Arroyo, a motel guest, testified that he saw Gilmore in the motel registration office that night. After taking the money, Gilmore ordered Mr. Bushnell to lie down on the floor and then shot him. Gerald F. Wilkes, an FBI ballistics expert, matched the two shell casings and the bullet that killed Mr. Bushnell to the gun hidden in the bush, and a patrolman testified that he had traced Gilmore's trail of blood to that same bush. Gilmore's two court-appointed lawyers, Michael Esplin and Craig Snyder, made no attempt to cross-examine the majority of the state's witnesses, and rested without calling any witnesses for the defense. Gilmore protested, and the following day asked the judge if he could take the stand in his own defense, perhaps arguing that due to the dissociation and lack of control he felt at the time, he had a good case for insanity. His attorneys presented the findings of four separate psychiatrists, all of whom had said that Gilmore was aware of what he was doing and that he knew it was wrong at the time. While he did have an antisocial personality disorder, which may have been aggravated by drinking and drugs, he did not meet the legal criteria for insanity. Gilmore withdrew his request. During closing statements, Esplin did mention that Gilmore had accidentally shot himself, he might've accidentally killed Bushnell. Mentioning the lack of witnesses to the shooting, he asked the jury to find Gilmore guilty of second degree murder or even acquit him. On October 7, the jury retired to deliberate and by mid-day, they had returned with a guilty verdict for first degree murder. Later that day, the jury unanimously recommended a death sentence due to the special circumstances of the crime.

Gilmore chose to not pursue habeas corpus relief in federal court. His mother, Bessie, sued for a stay of execution on his behalf. In a five-to-four decision, the US Supreme Court refused to hear his mother's claim. The Court's ''per curiam'' opinion said that the defendant had waived his rights by not pursuing them. At the time, Utah had two methods of execution—firing squad or hanging. Believing a hanging could be botched, Gilmore chose the former, declaring, "I'd prefer to be shot." The execution was set for November 15 at 8:00 a.m.

Against his expressed wishes, Gilmore received several stays of execution through the efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The last of these occurred just hours before the rescheduled execution date of January 17. That stay was overturned at 7:30 a.m., and the execution was allowed to proceed as planned. At a Board of Pardons hearing in November 1976, Gilmore said of the efforts by the ACLU and others to prevent his execution: "They always want to get in on the act. I don't think they have ever really done anything effective in their lives. I would like them all—including that group of reverends and rabbis from Salt Lake City—to butt out. This is my life and this is my death. It's been sanctioned by the courts that I die and I accept that."Andrea D. Lyon: The Death Penalty, What's Keeping It Alive, p. 2

During the time Gilmore was on death row awaiting his execution, he attempted suicide twice; the first time on November 16 after the first stay was issued, and again one month later on December 16.

Execution

Gilmore was executed on January 17, 1977, at 8:07 a.m. by firing squad at Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah.

On the morning at the time of execution, Gilmore was transported to an abandoned cannery behind the prison, which served as its death house. He was strapped to a chair, with a wall of sandbags placed behind him to trap the bullets. Five gunmen, local police officers, stood concealed behind a curtain with five small holes, through which they aimed their rifles. When asked for any last words, Gilmore simply replied, "Let's do it." The Rev. Thomas Meersman, the Catholic prison chaplain, administered the last rites to Gilmore. After the prison physician cloaked him in a black hood, Gilmore uttered his last words to Meersman: "'' Dominus vobiscum''" (Latin, translation: "The Lord be with you.") Meersman replied, "''Et cum spiritu tuo''" ("And with your spirit.")

In Utah, firing squads consisted of five volunteer law enforcement officers from the county in which the conviction of the offender took place. The five executioners were equipped with .30-30