The Executioner's Song - The Executioner's Song Part 65
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The Executioner's Song Part 65

The ambulance came and put an air bag around his leg, inflated it, laid him on a stretcher, and started down the road. Then they had to stop because a wrecker was blocking the highway in order to lift Gibbs's car out of the gully. He raised his head long enough to ask if they could get the luggage from his trunk, and the officer said he would. With it all, Gibbs noticed that his headlights were still on.

At the hospital, the doctor stitched up his scalp, and split his pants to x-ray the knee, leg, ankle and foot. Turned out his leg was shattered and his jaw fractured. The doctor also said that the tendons were torn so bad in the calf and ankle his leg would probably have to be amputated. It was certainly swollen twice its size. His foot was completely black. The rest of the limb was purple. Immediately, Gibbs said, "My leg ain't going to be taken off. Just give me a shot for pain, and I'll leave."

Before he could get out of there he had to show the highway patrolman his identification. The cop proceeded to write two tickets, one for traveling too fast under existing conditions, one for no driver's license in his possession. They hadn't had the fake one ready in Salt Lake by the time he left. So the cop said it would be $20 bail for the first, $15 on the other. Cash. Gibbs signed the tickets, paid over the $35, and asked to be taken to one of the nicer motels. The cop got him out to the patrol car in a wheelchair, and dropped him off at the Mile High. It was about midnight. They had to wake the lady who ran the place, then help him inside to register, next wheel him to Room 3 with his luggage. The shot that doctor had given was beginning to take effect, and his pain eased, and Gibbs went off to sleep.

When he awoke next morning, Christmas Day, his leg was killing him.

He called the Owl Cab Company. in Butte and asked the lady dispatcher if a cab could pick him up a bag of ice, a six-pack of Coke, a fifth of Canadian Club and some cigarettes. Once the booze arrived, Gibbs managed to get out of bed by holding onto the back of a chair, hopped to the bathroom, looked in the mirror at the stitches and his black eye, then got back into bed and fixed a good stiff drink. It did nothing for the pain, so he fixed several more. Helped a little, but not much. It wasn't like taking whiskey for a toothache.

That evening, he could stand it no longer, and called the motel lady and asked if her husband would take him to the hospital. She wasn't married, but she had two friends who had eaten Christmas dinner with her, and these gentlemen brought him to the St. James Catholic Hospital, after Gibbs asked for the best doctor in town.

There it was. The fellow's name was Best. Dr. Robert Best. One of Evel Kneivel's own personal doctors.

Well, Best wanted to admit him to the hospital, but Gibbs again said no. Instead, he left with a pain prescription for codeine, and one for Oral Varidase to break up the blood clots. Plus a cast. "You better hope," said Dr. Best, "that phlebitis doesn't set in." This was Gibbs's Christmas Day.

After the second suicide attempt, Campbell said to Gilmore, "Look, if you want to talk about the firing squad, I'll be your sounding board."

Gilmore said, "Aw, hell, we don't want to talk about that. We're just going to shoot this old half-drunk thief, you know," They would joke about it.

Once in a while, Gilmore would ask him what the other prisoners were thinking, but Cline did not tell him that more than a few were fed up with Gary Gilmore. It was because everything he did affected the affairs of other prisoners in Maximum. What with needing three guards for him, it even hurt the classroom schedule. Chow got delayed not once, but several times. When it was anything very big, like a suicide attempt, the place got locked up. The convicts were tired of all those hassles.

On the other hand, they never said Gary was crazy. He'd been in prison eighteen years. Everybody empathized with that.

Of course with Gary on death watch, that is not only on Death Row, but with a date to be executed, he had a whole three-cell section to himself. A suite. His own cell, the middle one, had solid walls on three sides and regular cell bars on the door. They let it stay open, however, and allowed him access to the short corridor facing the three cells. Of course, there was always a guard present. Gary could even walk up to the cellblock gate and look out on the main corridor and talk to any officer or prisoner walking by. Sometimes, in the late hours of the night, Father Meersman would visit, and Gilmore would bring a stool or sometimes just sit on the floor, his back against the bars, while Meersman would camp on a chair out in the main corridor.

They would converse through the bars. Everything around them was painted in a light, pastel green.

Whereas when Gary would be brought out to the visiting room to meet his lawyer or uncle, they would take him down the long main corridor of Maximum from which shorter corridors led off at right angles to the one-story cell blocks. At such times, as a precaution against escape, no other inmate would be in the main corridor. While Gary walked along, passing the barred gate to each cell block, the prisoners would see him coming, and call out, "Hey, Gary," or "Hang in there."

"Stay with it," they would yell.

Toward Christmas, Moody and Stanger went out to the prison every morning and then again every afternoon or evening. It got to the point where they had to assign the rest of their cases to other people in the office. They didn't mind that much Their feeling for Gary was definitely getting warmer. In fact, he soon had them on another mission.

There was a murderer named Belcher in the cell block next to Gary in Death Row, and he'd been described to Moody and Stanger often enough to have a clear picture. Belcher was a heavyset fellow, maybe six feet tall, barrel chested, short-cropped hair, dark complected, and he had a protruding forehead, an overhanging brow, big features, big arms, very muscular. Gary described how his head was always swiveling around, always suspicious. Often he wouldn't talk. Stanger heard from the guards that Belcher was an obsessive-compulsive and kept things in his cell like cans of soup, or any kind of trinket they let him retain, really one of those crazy recluses whose apartments were like junk shops. He was certainly property conscious.

Would throw fits if you tried to take his things away. A very territorial man. From what Ron could gather, he lived like a bear, as if his cell was a cave. Yet he and Gary, of all people, got along well.

From what Moody heard, Belcher also liked kids.

A few days before Christmas, at Gary's suggestion, Bob got one of his law clerks to take a picture of a large group of children, holding up a big sign that said, "HI, BELCHER!" It tickled the daylights out of Gary to pass the photograph over on Christmas Day. "Here," he said to Belcher, "here's a shot of some kids rooting for you."

4.

Dec 23 Oh Gary i love You So i miss you! God how i miss you. More than the sky and the earth. More than my freedom and more than my children .

The lawyers gave me a letter from you today. But these scuzzy, sheep herdin Aids took it before i got to read it. The Punks shake me down even when i visit with my mother an Kids. Fuckin Looneys. Oh, Baby i wanted so bad to read your lovin' words.

Babe, what is to become of us? God, what is happening? i need to see you. How could they let you die so alone, my love? i want so bad just to look into your eyes once again.

God ain't it crazy? Aint it so fuckin crazy.

i'm furious with the ways an wiles of Love Life and the Ultimate Wisdom, furious with God. And furious with myself for not being patient and doing things right the first time with jack an jill.

Love to have that pretty white bird sitting here on my night stand. You remember that i spoke or wrote to you once of my childhood daydream of being through with this senseless life and being born once again but if the choice be mine it was to be born into the wings of a small white bird. And still would i choose the same if i could.

Christmas Eve Dec. 24 Long days waiting For your Love again Long nights restless Scattered thots Wondering whats become Of all our chances.

Nicole Dec. 25 it is not really a 'fear jest such a great sadness to think of the uncertainty of days ahead.

Nicole DESERET NEWS.

No Move for Nicole Provo, Christmas Day-Nicole Barrett has been ordered committed indefinitely to the Utah State Hospital in Provo.

Fourth District Judge David Sam ruled that the mother of two young children should stay in the mental hospital . . .

Meanwhile, a turkey dinner with all the trimmings was the highlight of Christmas Day at Utah State Prison where Gilmore is in isolation for disciplinary reasons.

Gilmore was not allowed to receive any presents and today was a non-visiting day, so he had no visitors a prison spokesman said.

Sterling Baker's wife, Ruth Ann, wrote a letter.

Dear Gary, I was thinking about you and how you are going to be alone on Xmas. I wish I could be up there with you. I really love you a lot. I hope in the next world we can meat, and be able to know each other well. But please don't try to hurry it. I don't want you to die.

Usually the Damico family would have a big Christmas party. One year they would get together at Brenda's house, next year at Toni's, then Ida's. This season, being no joy for it, they met at Toni's to exchange gifts, said a prayer for Gary, had a cup of coffee, went back to their separate places.

Mikal came over to the trailer on Christmas Day but Bessie's mind was on other times. She remembered one Christmas when Gary was not in Reform School and was watching his baby brother unwrap the gifts. She had tended to spoil Mikal in those days. It had taken her half the night to wrap his presents, but in the morning Mikal kept saying, "This is an awful day. I've got so many things I don't want." Gary kept laughing.

Gaylen, on the other hand, came home one afternoon that year just before the holidays and said one of the Sisters told them how there was no Santa Claus. He was very upset. Bessie said, "Gaylen, there's only the spirit of giving. That exists. You've had the good heart to believe in Santa Claus longer than anybody else."

Then her thoughts came back to the trailer. These days all thoughts returned to the trailer. Her heart turned over, as if a great wheel had revolved. She felt a tear drop, pure as sorrow itself.

GILMORE What is Christmas? These holidays in jail are a bummer. You don't get any mail. The routine is disrupted, the day just seems slower. They act like they're really doing something by giving you a big meal, but it ain't like the menu in the paper. You don't get it good, you know. I don't like weekends in jail, but holidays I hate.

Shirley Pedler, Executive Director of the ACLU in Utah, had gotten her job right after college. She applied for the post, and there she was, Executive Director, with a general membership of a few hundred people. The funds to keep the office going came from membership dues, and a modest grant from the national office. Five or six Salt Lake attorneys volunteered their time on a regular basis, and as many as twenty might help once a year. It was small stuff and, right now, beleaguered. In Utah, belonging to the ACLU was like being a Bolshevik.

Once the ACLU got into the Gilmore case, Shirley Pedler began to receive a lot of hate mail and crank calls. For more than a month they called her at work and at home, all day, all night. She knew it would continue until Gilmore was dead. She was living by herself, and sometimes after a long day, she would dread going home to hear the phone ringing. "Something bad's going to happen to you," a voice would intone. "I hope you get shot with Gilmore," the next caller would say. Sometimes the men were obscene. One remarked that since she was good looking and single, he was ready to do this and that to her.

They usually hung up quickly. By now, these days, she was tending to flare up. Didn't hesitate to tell her callers off. Her nerves had never been well insulated, but with the loss of sleep and the loss of weight, she had nightmares about Mr. Gilmore. A man would kick a platform out from under him. As he hung in the air, they would release gas pellets. Some of the dreams were bloody.

Raised to be active in the Church, she was no longer a practicing Mormon. All the same, these callers were like people she had grown up with. She didn't feel betrayed so much as unable to believe what was going on. "The injustice in this case is so apparent," she would say to herself. At the Board of Pardons Hearing, she thought Chairman Latimer was totally inconsistent. "Why is there no public outcry?" she wanted to know. It had been a travesty, and in the middle was Gilmore, a terribly pale and quite attractive young man, Shirley Pedler thought. His fasting made him look ghastly, but unforgettable.

He was so pale.

Afterward, she became personally self-conscious about the fact that this man's life, due to the maneuverings going on, was in very uncertain circumstances. He did not know his fate from day to day, and yet she was part of those maneuverings.

So she wrote a letter to Gilmore. She told him that she regretted the discomfort that the ACLU was causing him and the terrible uncertainty.

She wished she had the opportunity to talk to him directly, and explain what they were doing. She knew his life was being made more difficult by her. She wanted to tell him why she thought it had to be done. She wished they could cooperate, instead of finding themselves on different sides.

She thought that if she could speak to Gary Gilmore, she would say that she was not personally out of sympathy with his wish to commit suicide. She could see how confronting life at Utah State Prison might warrant taking one's own life, and he had a right to decide whether he was going to live or die. But she did feel the State had no business participating. Capital punishment was not only wrong, but his execution would touch off others, for it would demystify the taking of life by the State. The real horror was people lining up to blow somebody away with a lack of passion, a methodical, calculated turning of the machinery of the State against the individual. But she did feel the State had no business participating. Capital punishment was not only wrong, but his execution would touch off others, for it would demystify the taking of life by the State. The real horror was people lining up to blow somebody away with a lack of passion, a methodical, calculated turning of the machinery of the State against the individual.

Why come to terms with it? That was what she wanted to say.

As lawyers, Moody and Stanger were able to beat the no-visitor law, and they went to see Gary late on Christmas afternoon.

GILMORE Shirley Pedler wrote me a personal letter. What does she look like anyway?

STANGER She's a slight, young woman, about thirty, not bad looking. I've never seen her in person. I've only seen her on TV. She wears a suit with pants.

GILMORE I don't know what we can do to make the ACLU butt out. The Supreme Court said they're not gonna rehear it. What else can they do? Go to the United Nations? . . .

Shirley Pedler had Christmas dinner at her parents' house. They were pretty conservative people, and her father worked for the State, but never, until this meal, had they had a knock-down drag-out about capital punishment. Today, however, her brother started to attack her on the ACLU position, and Shirley had to defend it. Her brother kept saying, "What about the victims and the families?"

It escalated. Shirley had been going in a different direction from her family anyway, but the discussion did ruin the dinner and she felt bad about that. None of them was able to get really comfortable after that.

GILMORE Would you like to hear a poem?

STANGER Sure.

GILMORE I'll give you a little preamble to it. You know prisons are noisy places. And I talked about that guard blowing his nose for five minutes. And this morning he carried on a two-hour conversation, and I finally asked him to shut up. This poem is in the book that I wrote for Nicole. This is the preamble: I get irritable at the noise I have to listen to, toilets flushing, water pipes jarring, stupid conversations, screened conversation Now here's the poem: Dark thots of mayhem on a cold steel nite, when the little noises won't let you sleep.

Dark thots of mayhem, murder and gore.

A bore. Too few dark debts are ever paid.

A fool down the way laughs at the loss of day, another sighs and another cries at the lies of their lives.

Dark thots of mayhem murder and gore, too few dark debts are ever paid More owed.

I wrote that poem in '74 listening to noise I didn't want to hear. I like it quiet. I would love an absence of sound so profound I could hear my blood. I guess that's one of the things I've always hated worst about prison, the noise, listening to motherfuckers barf and cough, and listening to frustration. On the seventeenth of January I hope to hear my last harsh noise.

STANGER Hum, it's a good poem.

Chapter 21.

THE OCTAVE OF CHRISTMAS.

Julie Jacoby had a good opinion of Shirley Pedler and thought her very attractive with that long thin build and her beautiful long hands.

The strain of the Gilmore situation, however, was really making Shirley lose too much weight. She had been a pretty intense woman to begin with, but after these last weeks, she was beginning to resemble a cigarette.

Although Shirley was twenty-four years younger, Julie Jacoby thought they were a lot alike. They would both rather be reclusive, yet were always in the middle of political activity. So Julie was not surprised when Shirley, during Christmas week, asked her to aid in the formation of the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty.

Of course Julie had not been doing a great deal in the year since she and her husband moved from Chicago to Utah. It was nothing like the Days of Rage in Chicago in the summer of 1968 when people were beaten by the police. That was when, in her own mind, she moved on from being little more than just another society lady from the North Shore who came down to United Charities twice a week to spend an afternoon sympathizing with the mothers of black children who came into the office in various states of coma from eating lead paint that had peeled off the walls. Some of those society ladies used to appear for work wearing diamond rings, and Julie had spent time trying to get the idea across that these ladies ought not to carry more wealth on their finger than the person in need across the desk could make in a year.

Her husband was an executive and Julie would say that he seemed never to have recovered from a shock in the womb that left him a deep-dyed forever Republican. Julie, Phi Beta in medieval history from the University of Michigan, had gone to Chicago to seek her fortune, and found it in the good German fellow she married, for he rose in the ranks of his corporation while Julie brought up their children and became-her first clue to future shifts-a lapsed Episcopalian. She might have done no more than join the League of Women Voters, read the National Observer, the New York Review of Books and I. F. Stone, but the Days of Rage on Michigan Boulevard shook her to the roots. She felt radicalized. After Attica traumatized.

She thought Rockefeller was shooting the fish in the barrel that day.

She worked with the Alliance to End Repression.

Then the company moved her husband to Utah. Out in Salt Lake, the ACLU was the only game in town. Julie wanted to start another Alliance to End Repression, but the energy was no longer there. Utah depressed her. She felt that she and her husband were living in a deteriorated relationship, and her young son, ripped from his native soil at the age of twelve, was not happy. It just about took Julie down. She became so occupied with her son's problems that she felt defanged on social issues.

She thought she was in an extremely right-wing place. The Church and State were deeply entangled. Julie went to visit the opening of the Legislature and here was this trio of sour-faced old men sitting up front. They did the opening prayer. She was there that day to testify against capital punishment, and the chairman of the committee, a Mormon, said that as long as he had to listen to the Episcopalian point of view, he would like to read something to close the meeting, and opened a red-bound book and quoted Brigham Young.

Those who shed blood must pay in blood. It chilled her. The Church was the State. She would have liked to tell that chairman, we live in a world of fallible people where prosecutors decide whether the charge is second-or first-degree murder and nobody knows who or what is influencing the prosecutor. They don't have the right to take an individual's life under the protective coloration of the law.

She might have a problem with her child, and her marriage was dead, and she loved the pleasures of seclusion, and the nourishments of reading. God, she loved to read the way others would insist on three meals a day, but when the call came from Shirley Pedler to help in organizing the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she knew she would go out in the world again with her freaky blond hair, blond to everyone's disbelief-at the age of fifty-four, go out in her denims and chin-length-hanging-down-straight vanilla hair to that Salt Lake world where nobody would ever make the mistake of thinking she was a native Utah lady inasmuch as Utah was the Beehive State. The girls went big for vertical hair-dos, pure monuments to shellac.

So she went to the meeting for a Coalition Against the Death Penalty and twenty people showed up to see what they could do about convincing Gary Gilmore that he was 100 percent wrong in wanting the State to shuffle him off this mortal coil. The Coalition would seek to get the idea across that the State should not be able to kill anybody. Gilmore was a sensitive artist, but he was also, thought Julie Jacoby, acting like a very selfish man.

Shirley Pedler had been intending to organize the meeting herself, but came down with a terrific case of semi-pneumonia, so Julie discovered a fellow named Bill Hoyle from the Socialist Workers' Party had been handed the bill. He was there, he said, to do the legwork. There was a pastor from the United Church of Christ, the Reverend Donald Proctor, and the Reverend John P. Adams from the United Methodist Church who was on the Board of the National Coalition Against Capital Punishment. They discussed what sort of action they should take.

Don Proctor had ideas that Julie thought were something Alinsky-esque. He wanted a highly visible rally, a get-together, say, in the center of a busy shopping mall on a Saturday.

No one was comfortable with that. For one thing, you had to get permission to go on private property. They finally decided to have a mass meeting in a hall prior to January 17, and then a vigil on the prison grounds all through the night before the execution. More ministers might turn out then. Right now was Christmas week, a time of heavy business for reverends.

In the meantime, they had $100 in working funds contributed by the Society of Friends. Bill Hoyle said he'd get some flyers printed and they could count on buttons from the Fellowship of Reconciliation in Nyack, New York. The buttons would say, "Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing people is wrong?"

2.

Back in the motel, Gibbs was eating codeine like candy, but he was careful to take Oral Varidase only as prescribed. Day after Christmas, he called his mother and she told him to keep his leg elevated and put a heating pad on it. She'd been a registered nurse for thirty-five years. She also told him to be careful shaving. If he was even to nick himself, he might not, because of the Oral Varidase, be able to get the bleeding to stop.

Gibbs also called Halterman. Ken's first words were, "If it wasn't you, Gibbs, I wouldn't believe it." Then he said, "Know anybody can get in more jams?" That's all Gibbs needed to cheer himself up.

He phoned Owl Taxi for cigarettes, whiskey, Cokes, ice and some canned tomato and mushroom soup, which he figured to use on the little courtesy coffeepot heater in the room. Until he got his upper plate fixed, he would have to live on soup. Then he called the Highway Patrol to see who had brought his car in, and asked the kid who'd done the job to look in the front seat for the other half of his teeth. An hour or so later, the fellow came to the room with the missing piece. Since the car was totaled, he wondered if Gibbs would consider selling the engine. Could pay around $25 a month. The boy had just gotten married and didn't have much money. Gibbs said, "Take it from me as a late wedding present."

After a couple days of tomato and mushroom soup, Gibbs asked the lady who ran the motel if she knew of a restaurant that offered take-home food. Right offhand, she didn't, but asked what he would like. When he said soft-boiled eggs, toast and milk, she brought it to his room and he paid her $5. She told him two would be sufficient, but he insisted on five. She was one of the most agreeable people he ever met in his thirty-one years of life.

The following day he called a florist shop in Butte and asked the saleswoman to have flowers delivered. Then he asked her to write on the card, "To the nicest lady in the world" and please sign it Lance LeBaron. He explained he did not know her name, but sure did know how well she had treated him. The woman at the florist shop not only agreed she was nice but said the name was Irene Snell, and the flowers were delivered an hour or so later.