The Executioner's Song (133 page)

Dennis Boaz had been out in Iowa for a couple of days in December and got into a symposium on a TV program where he heard that President Ford might commute Gary’s sentence before retiring from office. So, he sent a telegram saying that if capital punishment was

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going to be applied, it should be applied equally. No executions until there was one law for everyone. Never heard from Ford.

On the day of the execution, he felt a kind of silent sadness and tears came to his eyes. Gary died on January 17, a day whose number came to 6, which was the motherhood of brothers, and, of course, that made him think of Cain and Abel. In the period Dennis was working with Gilmore, he had sprouted a red mark above his right brow, not a pimple, but a mark signifying death. First discov ered it toward the end of November. It was round and it was red, but not a pimple. It was there nearly two months, and then faded away after Gary died. Interesting, at any rate. He noticed things like that.

Nicole had found out that Gary was going to be executed today, but she had no idea of the time. In the morning, walking back from the ward dining room, she suddenly felt a great need to lie down on her bed. They started making a big thing of it, but she just walked to ward her room. Nobody said anything more. Then she lay there, and tried to think about Gary. For days she had been dreaming of the moment he was shot and falling back. She always saw Gary standing up when he got it. Now, in her mind, she saw nothing but those red blocks they gave the patients to put together into a cube.

They were in her head, and she was trying to push them away, when suddenly Gary’s face came to her out of the darkness, came in fast with a look of pain and horror. He didn’t fall back, but right up toward her. Her body flipped around on the bed, her eyes opened, and that was all. She kept trying to feel him again that day, but couldn’t. He wasn’t near her at all for a few days.

After Gaylen was dead, Bessie thought she would never get over it. But this was going to be worse. When she called the prison and said goodbye to Gary on this last night, he had said, “Don’t cry.”

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“I’m not going to cry, Gary,” she had told him, but she had wanted so much to say, “Don’t die, Gary, don’t. Please, please, don’t.” Only it would hurt what he was building up-whatever it might take of him to go out there. So she had to be careful. It was a nightmare.

Listening to the clock through the hours Bessie could not keep from thinking, “His nightmare will be over, but mine will never be.”

When Mikal got the paper early that morrting, it said the execution had been stayed. They turned on “Good Morning America.” A little earlier, Bessie had said, “Don’t put it on.” She didn’t want to hear it. If it happened, she didn’t want to know about it for hours. She certainly didn’t want to hear about it on TV. Yet after Mikal brought in the paper, somebody —was it Frank Jr., or Mikal, or his girl friend: she could never remember for fear she would not forgive — one of them said, “It is safe now. There’s a Stay. We can turn on ‘Good Morning America.’ ” They did. A voice stated, “Gary Mark Gilmore is dead.” It sounded like it came from above. Bessie cried into the sore flesh of her heart.

Maybe half an hour later, Johnny Cash called and gave Mikal his condolences.

By the time Doug Hiblar came by, Bessie had turned bitter. She had the look on her face of a woman who had just had her home bombed. “Get out,” Bessie said, “you people have killed my son.”

“What do you mean, Bessie,” stammered Doug, “I didn’t even know him.”

“You people in Utah killed my son.”

He did not say, “I’m from Oregon.”

“Mountain, you can go to hell,” said Bessie to herself. “You’re not mine anymore.”

Outside, around the court, photographers were gathered with their cameras at the door of Bessie’s trailer.

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On the drive home, Stanger asked, “What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” said Moody. “I can’t go to the office.”

Stanger laughed. “Need a default judgment to occupy your afternoon?”

“No,” said Moody devoutly, “I couldn’t stand it.”

They had to talk to somebody who had been a part of it. Even though they were going to go on a week’s vacation with their wives in a couple of days and so now had to run around like hell to leave their affairs in some kind of order, they couldn’t go back to the office now. Instead, they said, “Let’s go to Larry’s place,” but when they got to the Orem TraveLodge, Schiller hadn’t come back yet, so they talked to Barry Farrell. It was important to keep talking.

While driving, they had been getting flashes. Stanger had seen Gary’s hand rising and falling, and the blood on his pants. Stanger couldn’t keep that out of his head. He wanted to extirpate such thoughts. Put his hand right inside his mind, grab the thought and flip it out.

They were happy to talk, therefore, to Barry Farrell. While they had never gotten along that well before, Ron could see how under all his professionalism, Barry was having a strong reaction, so he-felt good about the conversation. So did Moody.

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And Farrell, who had ranted through many a night at how these guys, Moody and Stanger, had such a paucity of humanity that they could not pursue a question profitably, did not indeed have even the curiosity of a lawyer, felt a reason now to temper his outrage. For they were so moved at Gary’s death. They really did understand that somebody has gotten killed, thought Farrell.

Besides, he was eager to hear every detail and wanted to communicate to them how appreciative he was feeling toward Gilmore for approaching his death with this much integrity, my God, absolutely as much as his intellect could muster. Barry couldn’t imagine what Gilmore might have done better. That helped, to relieve him of his own doubts about his own involvement in these last days, this whole obscene, niggling business of translating the best thoughts of one’s soul and conscience into one more rotten question, one more probe into the private parts of a man as protected from self-revelation as a clamshell from the knowledge of a caress.

When Schiller came in, they babbled, and recounted, and asked each other questions, and sputtered it out of them, until they ran down and then Moody and Stanger went home. Ron was thinking that the only event which had ever come close to having this kind of continng reaction on him was the day President Kennedy was killed, Now, arriving at his house, he felt exhausted and immediately went to bed, but couldfft sleep. When he closed his eyes, he would see all the sights again and his skin hurt to the touch.

When they were alone, Farrell said to Schiller, “Have you had breakfast?”

“No,” said Schiller.

“Any interest?” asked Farrell.

“I’m all diarrhea,” said Schiller and thought he might go to sleep.

At that point, Barry looked up and said, “Oh, yes, listen, your mother called.”

Schiller hadn’t spoken to her in two weeks. He picked up the

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phone and learned she had seen the press conference on television after the execution, and wanted to make sure he was all right. She didn’t like the way he looked. A little worn out, she thought.

Schiller assured her that he was still among the living. When the call was done, he went upstairs and actually fell asleep, and was awakened a few hours later by a girl from the New York Times to whom he’d promised to give an interview, but now, he said, he wouldn’t do it. Time was calling. Newsweek was calling. The phone was ringing, They wanted to know if he had pictures of the execution. Wanted to come over and interview him. Schiller had to go into his speech about how he would not be a punching bag. “Your editors are asking for pictures,” he said to Newsweek and to Time, “so, if you want to talk to me, we will have to discuss what you’re going to say. You are not going to call me an entrepreneur. I want to make sure you’re going to call me a journalist.” Really started to lay down the law. “Two weeks ago, you called me an entrepreneur, called me a promoter. Now, you want pictures. Want me to give you more about the execution. Well, I’m taking offense,” he said. “We got to lay out a few ground rules. If you want to say that I hustled interviews’from Lenny Bruce’s widow, then I also want you to write about Minamata which is a book I’m proud of. If you want a picture of Marilyn Monroe, then also put in a picture from the story I published on mercury poisoning.” He said, “If you’re going to slant the story one way, balance it the other,” and he banged it back, and he banged it forthi and could feel his blood flowing through his veins again, instead of all that shit.

DESERET NEWS

Silent Majority No Longer Silent

By Ray Boren

Deseret News staff writer Jan. x7-According to a nationwide Louis.Harris survey last week, Americans favored by a margin of 729 percent Gilmore’s death before a firing squad. ‘

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DESERET NEWS

Emotions High Before Sunrise

By Tamera Smith

Deseret News staff writer

Utah State Prison, Jan. I7—Anticipation, resignation, anger, disappointment, frustration and confusion were emotions that followed close upon each others’ heels during the early morning hours today in Gary Mark Gilmore’s prison quarters.

At 4:o7 P.M., Gilmore’s last meal was brought to him in his cell. It consisted of steak, potatoes, bread, butter, peas, cherry pie, coffee and milk. He had only coffee and milk.

Between 8 and 9 P.M., he asked prison staff members to call Radio Station KSOP and request two of his favorite songs—”Valley of Tears” and “Walking in the Footsteps of Your Mind.”

Two switchboard operators spent the night taking calls from all over the world.

From Munich, Germany, one woman called 17 times.

“My husband died in a concentration camp,” she said. “The same thing is happening there. America’s no better than that,” was her repeated contention,

Another woman caller cried, saying She had a dream three weeks ago that Gary should not die.

Schiller had reassigned Jerry Scott from watching over the office to meeting up with Gary’s body in Salt Lake. Jerry was to make certain no kooks tried something while the autopsy took place.

On the drive from Orem to the hospital, Jerry Scott was mulling over how he had been the one to take Gary to Utah State Prison from the County Jail right after his trial, and now, he’d probably be the last

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one to view the remains. That was a large enough coincidence to occupy your mind.

The autopsy room on the fifth floor at the University of Utah Hospital was good sized with two slabs and Jerry, by way of his police work, was familiar with it. Postmortems for the State were held there. This morning, they had just brought in the body of a woman who had drowned in a river north of Salt Lake, and they had her beside Gary, the two tables about ten feet apart.

At first, it was hard to tell who were the doctors what with three males and three females all around the tables, and a couple of them busy removing Gilmore’s eyes, and then another team on the organs for the transplants. They all seemed to be working in a great rush, and obviously had to get everything out pretty quickly. All the same, another doctor, watching, kept saying, “Can you hurry? I have a lot of work to do,” and just a little later, “Aren’t you done with him yet?” Finally, the last of the special doctors said, “Yes, he’s yours,” and the regular autopsy crew took over.

Jerry Scott stood only three or four feet away. He was curious to see what was going on, and the medical examiner told him he could be a witness to the postmortem, and took his name, plus the name of Cordell Jones, a Deputy Sheriff whom Jerry Scott was glad to see there, because Jerry expected trouble later with the people outside when Gary’s body would be transported from the hospital to the crematorium. In fact, he asked Cordell Jones to help on crowd control. Jerry had counted at least twenty people down below at the hospital door of which only a couple were bona ride newsmen, and, more than a good dozen, oddballs and thrill-seekers. So, at the least, Jerry was expecting problems and a confrontation, possibly with agitators.

The doctor who had been getting the transplants had left Gary open from above the pubic hair to his breastbone. Now, the autopsy crew washed him down and the examiner took a scalpel, and continued the incision up the breastbone to the neck, and continued the cut on out to the shoulder on each side. Then, he started pulling up.

He skinned Gilmore right up over his shoulders like taking a shirt half off, and witha saw cut right up the breastbone to the

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throat, and removed the breastplate and set it in a big, open sink with running water. Then, he took out what was left of Gilmore’s heart. Jerry Scott couldn’t believe what he saw. The thing was pulverized. Not even half left. Jerry didn’t recognize it as the heart. Had to ask the doctor. “Excuse me,” he said, “is that it?” The doctor said, “Yup.”

“Well, he didn’t feel anything, did he?” asked Jerry Scott. The doctor said, “No.” Jerry had been looking at the bullet pattern earlier, and there had been four neat little holes you could have covered with a water glass, all within a haft inch of each other. The doctors had been careful to take quite a few pictures. They numbered every hole with a Magic Marker, and turned Gary over to photograph where each bullet exited from his back. Looking at those marks, Jerry could see the guys on the firing squad hadn’t been shaky at all. You could tell they’d all squeezed off a good shot.