Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [1]
I have had this dream more than once, in various forms. I always wake at this point, my heart hammering hard, hurting for being torn back from the void that I know is the gateway to the refuge of my ruined family. Or is it the gateway to hell? Either way, I want back into the dream, but in those haunted hours of the night, there is no way back.
I HAVE A STORY TO TELL. IT IS A STORY OF MURDERS: murders of the flesh, and of the spirit; murders born of heartbreak, of hatred, of retribution. It is the story of where those murders begin, of how they take form and enter our actions, how they transform our lives, how their legacies spill into the world and the history around us. And it is a story of how the claims of violence and murder end—if, indeed, they ever end.
I know this story well, because I have been stuck inside it. I have lived with its causes and effects, its details and indelible lessons, my entire life. I know the dead in this story—I know why they made death for others, and why they sought it for themselves. And if I ever hope to leave this place, I must tell what I know.
So let me begin.
I AM THE BROTHER OF A MAN WHO MURDERED INNOCENT MEN. His name was Gary Gilmore, and he would end up as one of modern America’s more epochal criminal figures. But it wasn’t his crimes—the senseless murders of two young Mormon men on consecutive nights in July 1976—that won him his notoriety. Instead, what made Gary famous was his involvement in his own punishment. His murders took place not long after the United States Supreme Court had cleared the way for the renewal of capital punishment, and Utah—the place where he had murdered—had been among the first states to pass legislation restoring the death penalty. But practicing it was another matter. When Gary received his death sentence in the fall of 1977, nobody had been executed in America in more than a decade, and despite its new laws, the country still didn’t have much taste for legal bloodshed. All that changed with Gary Gilmore.
On November 1, 1976, Gary refused his right to appeal his sentence and insisted that the state go ahead and meet the date it had set for his death. Immediately he hit a national nerve, and nearly every day and night for the next few months he made headline news. There were arguments, delays, and intrigues; there was even a love story. But through it all, Gary remained fierce and unswerving in his determination to die—he even tried his own hand at it twice—and he had put the State of Utah and death penalty advocates in a difficult, unexpected spot. He made them not just his allies, but he also transformed them into his servants: men who would kill at his bidding, to suit his own ideals of ruin and redemption. By insisting on his own execution—and in effect directing the legal machinery that would bring that execution about—Gary seemed to be saying: There’s really nothing you can do to punish me, because this is precisely what I want, this is my will. You will help me with my final murder.
And the nation hated Gary; not for his crimes, but because, in his indomitable arrogance, he seemed to have figured out a method to win, a way to escape.
Many people, of course, already know this part of the story. It was major international news for several months in 1976 and 1977, and it was later the subject of a popular novel and television film, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. If you’ve read that book or seen the film, you know the story of Gary’s last few months: the trusts he betrayed, the love he lost, the lives he destroyed, and the self-negation he sought. What is less generally known, and what has never been