MOODY If you're gonna get shot, you're gonna have a deathwatch too. That's part of it.
GILMORE Yeah (pause) Okay, man.
MOODY Do you want me to send these questions in?
GILMORE I'm not really all that choked up about answering any more.
MOODY Okay.
GILMORE It, man, is so noisy. If I could have some quiet during these last fucking hours.
MOODY You doing your exercises or anything like that to pass the time?
GILMORE Yeah . . . I do all that.
MOODY You reading any?
GILMORE No, uh . . . I don't read anymore. I've real all I'm gonna read.
MOODY Draw anymore?
GILMORE No.
MOODY You going to draw that self-portrait?
GILMORE Don't have a mirror.
MOODY Well, I guess you don't have much of anything, do you?
GILMORE I've got myself. (long pause) I don't want to ah, fuck around with writing the answers to these questions. I guess he deserves answers, but God damn it I don't like the way Schiller does some things.
MOODY Well, there are lots of times we don't like the way he does things, but his is a style, and he's in a tough racket and you develop a style like his.
GILMORE Is everybody just supposed to accept that?
MOODY No, I don't think so. But he's got a damn difficult job. He's trying to do it. That's all. He's working his ass off.
GILMORE I asked him not to read those letters and he did.
MOODY Okay. (long pause) Don't you feel that you owe Larry something?
GILMORE Go ahead and read the questions. I'll answer 'em. I want Larry to understand that he don't have the right to say who the fuck I can or can't speak to. My brother asked me to talk to a friend of his, and I told him yeah. I know who Moyers is. I wouldn't have answered anything that you wouldn't have wanted me to say.
MOODY You're really splitting hairs over nothing. 'Cause there's no way in hell Moyers is going to get in to talk.
GILMORE I know that. I was pissed off because Mike was unhappy: MOODY Okay.
GILMORE All right.
MOODY The next question has been asked a number of times. Have you ever killed anyone before Bushnell and Jensen? . . . How about this guy that you beat with the pipe?
GILMORE He lived. (sigh) Kind of altered his life, though.
MOODY Don't you find shooting pretty damn grotesque?
GILMORE What's grotesque is the fact that you have to be strapped in the chair with the hood, and all that horseshit.
MOODY Doesn't the blood and guts of a shooting appeal to you?
GILMORE (laughs) Fuck you, Larry . . . the blood and guts . . . Yeah, man, that really appeals to me. I'm gonna take a spoon.
The questions went on. No breakthrough.
From the two executions Father Meersman had previously attended, he had learned things could go badly wrong. The person to be executed might become so upset he would lose his own particular kind of calmness. Father Meersman always tried to keep a man in such a state ahead of the execution, tried to let him know what was going to be done. He figured if the man more or less knew you went to this place, point A, and from point A you were moved to point B, and then, at a certain time, you would go to point C, and so forth, he wouldn't have to say, "Where are we going now?" and maybe get upset over it. Some little thing like that could bother a man much too much.
Whereas, if they knew ahead, so they could go through it sort of smoothly, and if everybody leading them was calm, then that could prove a contributing factor to their own calmness, just knowing more or less how the mechanics were going to be. You didn't want anything of a surprise to happen. Everybody was very tense when an execution was taking place, and you didn't want anything to get out of step or make the man balk.
Meersman always felt he was the one who succeeded in explaining to Gary why they put the hood on. It wasn't personal, he told him, just that you wanted to be very still, so the target didn't move the slightest bit. Any slight movement could throw the bullets off. If Gary wanted to die with dignity, then he had to respect that very, very simple thing about the hood. It was there for practicality to allow the thing to run very dignified, and no movement. Gary listened in silence.
On Saturday afternoon, Gil Athay came out of Judge Lewis's chambers in the Federal Building and faced the press in the corridor.
The reporters were frantic. Judge Lewis's regular courtroom was in the Tenth Circuit Court, Denver, and his chambers here, while commodious, had simply not been large enough. Many had not been able to jam in for the proceedings.
So now there was chaos, and cameras flashing, and the call letters of microphones from foreign and domestic radio stations in his eyes. Athay felt as if he were marching into one of the rings of the circus.
If was hard not to resent such an atmosphere. For days he had been fighting his way down corridors made narrow by the bodies of reporters. It had gotten out of hand. He was a dapper man with eyeglasses and a brush mustache, and he was not tall enough to avoid getting swarmed over in crowds. So at this point he said, "I'll be happy to make a statement, but it has to be downstairs." There remained a complete pandemonium. In his ears, he could still hear Judge Lewis saying, "You make it very difficult for me, Mr. Athay, to place it all on my shoulders, you know. If you'd given us time, there could have been three Judges to hear this." But Athay by then had been sufficiently keyed up to answer, "Well, I think, Your Honor, that's true, but we have to make the decision, and can't hide behind the committee." Had he really said that? The case of Dale Pierre must have tightened his temper.
He had come to believe that his client, Dale Pierre on Death Row, was innocent. That was an extraordinary belief to most. The public was convinced Dale Pierre was one of the hi-fi killers who had poured Drano down people's throats and stuck ball-point pens in their ears. The wife of a prominent gynecologist had been killed in that record store, and her son's brain had been permanently damaged. Stove-in by the killers. A horror of a case, but Athay had come slowly to the conclusion that Dale Pierre was innocent and had been convicted by the Jury because he was black, a condition to avoid in the State of Utah. In Utah a black man couldn't become a priest in the Mormon Church.
So Athay had embarked on a crusade. In fact it had cost the full price of a crusade. When he ran for Attorney General in the last election, Bob Hansen, his opponent, had made Dale Pierre one of his most powerful talking points and won by a good margin. Would-you-want-this-man-who-defends-clients-who-stick-ball-point-pens-in-middle-aged-women's-ears-to-be-your-next-Attorney-General had been the whispered theme of the campaign. Nothing Athay could do. You couldn't tell every voter that he had been made Pierre's lawyer by Court appointment, nor that in the beginning, in fact, he had seen it as an unpleasant duty, and only later had become convinced of Pierre's innocence. You couldn't tell the voters that Dale Pierre was a complex man, a difficult man, but now, to Gil Athay, rather a beautiful black man, and besides, Athay had always hated capital punishment.
He was ready to argue there was no rational way you could justify the death penalty, except to admit it was absolute revenge. If that, he would say, was the foundation of the criminal justice system, then we had a pretty sick system.
So he had worked with the ACLU on this Gilmore business, and today had entered an appeal which had been audacious in the extreme.
After standard opening remarks that the lack of mandatory appeal in the Utah statute was unconstitutional, Athay had introduced his legal novelty. Let one execution be carried out under a defective law, he argued, and it would be hard in the future to find a higher Court ready to declare that same statute unconstitutional. No Judge would want to say to a fellow Judge, "You know, you executed that man in error." Gary Gilmore's death threatened, therefore, the life of Dale Pierre. An interesting argument, but difficult. To get the Court's attention, you had to make your language virtually insulting.
In the meeting on January 10, the ACLU therefore put Athay's venture next to last on their list. But by Friday afternoon, with the sad word coming from Giauque that Mikal Gilmore was not signing any papers, Gil Athay went to Judge Anderson's Court. Anderson was a rigid Mormon, but he was also the only Judge available at that hour. While there was hardly any realistic hope, Athay got caught up, nonetheless, in his own reasoning, and came to feel he had a good shot. Judge Anderson had listened carefully. The basic problem, however, remained. Nobody wanted to face the sinister merits of the argument. Judge Anderson turned him down.
Having failed there, Athay had gone to Judge Lewis on Saturday afternoon, but by now, the legal weakness of his case was apparent.
He had no statistics to offer. He couldn't show that 50 percent of the state population, say, had once thought Dale Pierre should be executed, but now because of the emotionalism of the Gilmore case, the figure had gone up to 90 percent. Nothing to muster but logic.
So Athay lost again in Judge Lewis's Court, and knew as he fought his way past the press in the corridor, that one way or another, he would try to get to the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow.
4.
The Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty held its meeting in the State Office Building auditorium on Saturday afternoon and Julie Jacoby thought it was all rather decorous. The only outsider who got up to speak was Henry Schwarzschild, and he didn't go on for long. It was best if locals did the talking. Professor Wilford Smith, a bona fide Mormon from BYU, was a true catch, and there was Frances Farley, who was not only a Utah State Senator but a woman, and Professor Jefferson Fordham from the University of Utah Law School, then James Doobye, President of the Salt Lake City chapter of the NAACP. Buttons were available at the door-WHY DO WE KILL PEOPLE WHO KILL PEOPLE TO SHOW THAT KILLING PEOPLE IS WRONG?-and the program said, "Your donations are greatly appreciated."
Hoyle counted the house at 175, a decent turnout. There were men and women present that Julie didn't know, plus all the ACLU folk she could recognize. It was what you could call the liberal community in Salt Lake.
Once again, the committed were preaching to the converted. In Julie's mind it was futile. Everyone knew the mouse was fighting the elephant.
Nonetheless, they wanted to do something. The idea, as Julie saw it, was not to let those unthinking bloodthirsties swallow the day without some resistance. The world was watching Utah, and so they wanted the world to know some people in Utah did not agree with the prevailing forces.
In fact, they got some publicity. The Salt Lake Tribune gave them the front page of the second section and ran a marvelous picture of Dean Andersen of St. Mark's Episcopal Cathedral in front of a beautiful banner a couple of students had made. It was navy blue with white letters and said, "NO EXECUTION."
SALT LAKE TRIBUNE.
"Official Blood Bath"
Protestors Say of Utah Death Penalty Salt Lake, Jan. 6-The execution of Gary Mark Gilmore has turned into a "super bowl of violence," an Episcopal priest charged Saturday.
"It is complete with a Barnum and Bailey circus atmosphere and movie rights, reserved seats, T-shirts and love letters. We could all laugh about it, but in two days a team of volunteers will kill Gary Mark Gilmore without appeal," the Very Rev. Robert Andersen said.
DESERET NEWS.
Salt Lake, Jan 5-About 15 or so bishops from the National Council of Churches are expected to arrive Sunday afternoon to participate in a Sunday-Monday vigil at Utah State Prison.
Henry Schwarzschild, coordinator of the National Coalition against the Death Penalty, called the execution "a brutalizing horror," a "dangerous precedent," and "judicial homicide."
5.
That same afternoon, the Warden held a press conference and Tamera brought back a firsthand account of how they were going to move Gary from Maximum Security over to the cannery, where he would face the firing squad. Sam Smith had also given out regulations for the media. The outer gates to the prison were going to be closed to the press on Sunday night at 6 P.M. They would not open again till 6 A.M. of the 17th. That meant any of the press who wanted to be on the grounds at any time during the hours preceding the execution would have to spend the night in the prison parking lot.
Schiller now had a problem. If he went in at six in the evening he would not be able to receive any last-minute phone calls Gary might be able to make to the motel. On the other hand, Gary was going to be allowed to spend his last night with Moody, Stanger, and members of his family. There was even a small chance the Warden would let Larry join that group. In that event, it was better to be right on the prison grounds. A dilemma. While he was pondering this, Tamera said, "Larry, I'd like you to come to BYU this afternoon and give a speech about Gary Gilmore to the Social Sciences class. "Tamera," said Schiller, "what is this?"
"Look," she said, "my Bishop asked me."
Schiller thought, Maybe she hopes to improve her standing with the Church. Probably thinks of herself as inactive, lately. So he said, "All right, it's an excuse to get out of this madhouse."
He carted himself to the university on the afternoon of the 15th and went into this hall at BYU with something like four hundred fucking college students, all Mormons, and this teacher who was a Bishop got up and blah blah blah. He introduced Tamera Smith, said she was once a student here and now works for the Deseret News and Tammy got up and made a ten-minute speech, very pious, ideal Mormon girl striving for her Recommend. Then the Bishop introduced Schiller who stood there and made his indictment-of-journalism speech. Couldn't remember a word afterward, but it was a standard thing he kept in the back of his mind. Any day he couldn't talk for fifteen minutes would be a very bad day.
After a while, he asked for questions, and thirty hands flew up, and he pointed to a student who said, "Mr. Schiller, can you please tell me why you're wearing a Gary Gilmore belt?"
Larry looked down and, by God, he had a Gucci on. Interlocking G's on the buckle. So, he explained the initials to those four hundred Mormons, and then said to the fellow who asked the question, "You are a journalist, because you have turned one thing into another, and that is journalism." The rest of it was simple, very simple and very placid. He wouldn't call the students bright or intelligent, so much as in their own world. They were hostile to Gilmore, of course, but hostility in a Mormon was so reserved, you didn't even see it. It just showed in the questions. "Why," they would ask, "don't you do the story about Ben Bushnell rather than Gary Gilmore?" and Schiller would answer that at this point in the realm of the United States, Gary Gilmore was making history. Fair or not, Benny Bushnell and his death never would. The kids didn't like it, but he was very straight on. Told them he was not there to please them, but to show the other side of the coin. "I'm not going to hide what I am," had been one of his first remarks. So it went. They asked. He answered.
Two hours out of his life.
Back at the motel, Schiller had an interesting conversation with one of the police officers, Jerry Scott, that he had hired on Moody's recommendation. Scott was a great big fellow with dark hair, reassuring in appearance, and had taken a leave of absence from his cop job to work for Schiller. He obviously knew the name of the game. Since he could only protect one entrance of the motel building at a time, he generally parked his police car on the back side to scare off anybody coming from that direction. On the near side, there was Scott waiting.
This afternoon, right after BYU, Larry discovered Scott was the same policeman who had driven Gary Gilmore from Utah County Jail to Utah State Prison on the day his trial ended. What a bonus. It gave Schiller the idea that Jerry Scott was bringing good luck. Just as well.
Scott was getting paid about five hundred bucks a week.
By Saturday evening, Schiller decided that he ought to have a 16mm movie camera in action. So he made arrangements with CBS for one of their crews and explained he would need long shots of the prison with snow on the ground, and all the atmosphere they could find. It would cost another three thousand bucks, but he had hopes. Later, when he saw the film, it was lousy. The crew didn't know how to shoot anything but newsreel footage. Blew all the opportunities for mood building.
He also made one last attempt to get Stephie to come in from New York. Again she refused. First, he asked her, then he begged.
She would not come. It was a long and heated argument, and he didn't often lose such discussions, but she was adamant. He was really mad.
"You're always criticizing me," he said.
"Don't you see," she cried out, "I criticize you because I love you, and I want to help you."
In certain ways, he felt as close to breaking up with her as he ever had. Yet he knew he wouldn't. That could be the reason in a funny way it was going to work. Maybe, he told himself, he had to understand that Stephie did not see herself as a total go-down-the-road-with-him-gambler-which is what he'd always demanded of his first wife. Rather, Stephie had a nervous system, and it was delicate, and she wished to protect it. She had been in a terrible car accident just a few years before and scarred by it. Her beauty was delicate, it was vulnerable beyond his understanding, and at that moment, maybe it was the weight of every emotion he had been carrying, but he felt a great tenderness toward her, even if she wouldn't join him.
6.
Shirley Pedler had been called down to a studio by ABC News and ran smack into Dennis Boaz. "You're going to get what you want'" she said to Dennis, "I hope you're happy." Boaz looked at her, and said, "Gee, Shirley, can't we be friends?" "I don't want," she told him, "to be your fucking friend." He stood there a little taken aback, and finally turned to the people with him. "Oh, she says she doesn't want to be my fucking friend," he said, and tried to laugh it off. Away he went, away she went, and she was furious. That was one man who had come in to gratify prestige needs. All he wanted, she thought, was to be involved in an event of national import.
Of the two girls in the office Debbie was a former Playboy Bunny, a small good-looking redhead who gave you a lift with her personality and did her work well. The other, Lucinda Smith, was an absolute beauty, Barry decided, dark hair, fabulous eyes, the sweetest voice, one of those intimate, purring, matter-of-fact California voices. Barry liked having her there. She was emotional and cried easily, and there was so much to cry about in the last week that he thought she was indispensable to the office. A chorus, nay, a brook of clear feeling to bring a breath of tenderness to the plasticoid abyss of their motel.
God, she wasn't that many years out of Corvallis run by the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary. Lucinda had been the only Presbyterian there. Her father, Barry learned, used to be head writer and director for Groucho Marx, and she had grown up in Studio City, just as secluded as you could get in the San Fernando Valley, had had an honest-to-God coming-out party, and gone to UCLA. Perfect Southern California pedigree. Now she was listening to Gary Gilmore say fuck, piss, shit.
She had gotten her job through an exclusive employment agency run by two girls. Lucinda had been an English major, and when Schiller called, the agent thought of her immediately, told her it would be an interesting experience. While Lucinda hadn't met Mr. Schiller before the job began, she did have a talk with his secretary in Los Angeles, and was told that if she didn't cut the mustard, she'd be sent home immediately. It gave her the feeling of a boss who laid down the law before they even met. That was stimulating. They would treat her on her merits, rather than her social standing.
Since the other girl had gone in a day ahead of her, she took the plane from Los Angeles by herself. When she got to the Orem TraveLodge, Mr. Schiller was very polite, and said, "Do you want to rest for a while?" She said, "No, I'll get started." Hardly put her bags down before she began to transcribe tapes, one after another. That tempo would increase. Lucinda started at twelve hours a day, and was close to working around the clock by the weekend. She didn't really want to sleep. There was kind of an eerie feeling over the whole thing. She felt better being with Larry and Barry and Debbie. Alone in her room, it would start to come over her what was going on. Alone in her room, it would start to come over her what was going on.
On Saturday night, she did take a break and turned on the TV. There was "Saturday Night Live." They had a parody of Gary Gilmore.
The cast was putting makeup on an actor playing the convict and the director kept saying, "A little more light over here, a little more eye shadow." They were getting him ready to be shot for the camera. Very sarcastic. Kept putting on the makeup. She never thought television would be this weird. She had always thought "existential" was an odd word, but it now was so bleak and cold outside, just a little bit of eternal snow on the ground, and she felt as if no one had ever gone out of this motel with these Xerox machines, and the typewriters.
7.