Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [119]
“They threw me against the wall and handcuffed me, then threw me in the car and took me downtown and put me in jail. My brother read about my arrest in the paper and made bail, and I told him what the story was. Then I got in touch with the girls to find out what had happened. I learned that the mother wanted to press charges. She said her daughter had been raped, or some doggone thing. Actually, I think Gary had seduced her, but given her age, it was the same as rape. And because it had happened at my place, it left me holding the bag. Finally, the girls came forward and testified that I had nothing to do with it and, of course, I had to give up Gary’s name in order to save my own skin.”
A few days later, the police arrested Gary at our home on Johnson Creek. They took him to the city jail in downtown Portland and began interrogating him and Richard in adjoining rooms, trying to get their accounts straight. Once, for a few moments, the officers left Gary alone so they could go check out one of his statements with Richard. Gary moved a stool over beneath a half-open overhead window, jumped and grabbed the window frame and hauled himself up and out. He dropped twenty feet out the window to the ground below and took off running. The police didn’t catch him.
Eventually, Gary got revenge on Richard for turning him in. Richard came home one night to find that a guitar and radio had been stolen, as well as a rare railroad pocket watch—Richard’s only memento of his deceased father. Later, he heard that Gary had stolen the things. Richard got the guitar back—warped beyond repair—but despite searching all the city’s pawnshops, he never found the watch. When he came to see me that winter morning, he was hoping I might somehow have it for him. Unfortunately, I did not.
“I guess I’d been gullible about Gary,” Richard said, before saying good-bye. “Looking for friends, I was a pretty easy touch, and I figured that Gary needed friendliness as much as I did. But Gary didn’t keep our friendship. I would never have violated a friend’s home and trust the way Gary violated mine.”
GARY HEADED OUT FOR CALIFORNIA and made it all the way to San Diego. There, he stayed with an old girlfriend and changed his name. He was now John Rohr. His life in San Diego wasn’t much different than it had been in Portland. In a single month in San Diego and Los Angeles, he managed to get arrested on five different occasions—everything from driving without a license to stealing liquor. Gary headed on to Texas, where he was picked up for vagrancy. The El Paso Police figured out that John Rohr was really Gary Gilmore, wanted back in Oregon for rape. They shipped him home.
Gary was initially charged with rape, but there had been a complication: The young woman had ended up pregnant. According to what my mother told others, my father offered to pay the hospital costs and a few years of child support in exchange for the dropping of the rape charge. The family and prosecutors agreed, as long as Gary never contacted the woman again or attempted to see her child. In mid 1960, the woman delivered a baby boy. (I do not know his name, nor have I tried to learn it.) My mother later told somebody she had once visited the family and held the baby on her lap. Soon, the girl and her family left Oregon, though my mother stayed in periodic contact with her. The baby boy, contrary to what Gary believed, had not died. “I don’t think Gary loved the woman,” my mother said, “but he probably would have loved the child. It was better for him to think he was dead and not ever try to see him.”
Gary still ended up getting a year for larceny, on an old car-theft charge, and in September 1960 he was remanded to the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem—also known as OSCI: the midway step between county jail and adult state prison. In his intake interview, Gary said of his father: “I don’t really know him too good. He treats me like I ask to be treated.” And of his mother: “A pretty fine woman, lets