Executioner's Song, The - Norman Mailer [169]
Still, the lawyers tried. They talked to Brenda on the phone.
Snyder thought she was flippant and more than a little frightened of Gilmore. He had told her, she said, that he would get even with her for turning him in. Lately, there had been an orange van following her car. She thought it might be a friend of Gary's.
She said she had gone out on a limb to get Gary out of prison, and felt he'd kind of stabbed her in the back. She loved him very much, she said, but thought he was going to have to pay for what he had done.
Later, the lawyers phoned again. On the Monday night that Gary came to her house with April, did he seem to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol? Those were mitigating circumstances. Brenda repeated what April had said, "I'm really afraid of you when you get that way, Gary." She liked Gary, Brenda repeated, but he deserved what he was going to get. At best, Brenda would be a dangerous witness, decided Snyder and Esplin,
They called Spencer McGrath, and he said he liked Gary, but was very disappointed over the turn of events. The mothers of a couple of young fellows he had working for him were indignant that he had hired a criminal. He was now catching about all the trouble he needed. People would stop him on the street and say, "How's it feel, Spencer, to have had a murderer on your payroll?" That wasn't helping his projects any.
They never talked to Vern Damico. Gary kept saying that his relationship with his relatives had not been that good. Besides, the lawyers received a report of a conversation with Vern from Utah State Hospital:
Mr. Damico gave me the following information regarding Gary Gilmore:
He doesn't like to be defeated, and when he is, he will not forget it and won't forgive. He is also very revengeful and has Mr. Damico's family very frightened as they were the ones who turned him in. He has written a letter to his cousin and told her he hopes she has nightmares for turning him in. The family is also a little concerned that he will break out of jail or the hospital as he has a history of that in the past.
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They were down to searching for a psychiatrist who would declare Gilmore insane. Failing that, Snyder and Esplin were looking to find a paragraph in one of the psychiatric reports or even a sentence they could use.
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT
Dates of Assessment: August 10, 11, 13 and 14, 1976
Assessment Procedures:
Interviews with patient
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
Bipolar Psychological Inventory
Sentence Completion
Shipley Institute for Living
Bender-Gestalt
Graham Kendall
Rorschach
Mr. Gilmore said at one point, "All week long I had this unreal feeling, like I was seeing things through water, or I was watching myself do things. Especially this night, everything felt like I had this unreal feeling, like I was watching at a distance of what I was doing . . . I had this cloudy feeling. I went in and told the guy to give me the money, and I told him to lay down on the floor, and then I shot him . . . I know it's all real, and I know I did it, but somehow or other, I don't feel too responsible. It was as though I had to do it. I can remember when I was a boy I would put my finger over the end of a BB gun and pull the trigger to see if a BB was really in it, or stick my finger in water and put it in a light socket to see if it really would shock me. It seemed like I just had to do it, that there was a compulsion for me to do these things."
Intellectual Functioning:
Gary is functioning in the above-average to superior range of intelligence. His vocabulary IQ was 140, his abstraction IQ was 120, and his full-scale IQ was 129. He said that he had read an