Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [181]
Gary decided it was time to get out of town. First, though, he had to take care of his thumb. He drove over to the house of a friend named Craig and called Brenda. In the meantime, a witness had recognized Gary leaving the site of the second murder, and the police had been in touch with Brenda. She had them on one line, Gary on another. She was trying to stall for time until a roadblock could be set up. After a while, Gary figured out that Brenda wasn’t sending any help his way, and he got in his truck and started heading for the local airport. A few miles down the road, just in front of his girlfriend Nicole’s house, he was surrounded by police cars and a SWAT team. He was arrested for Bushnell’s murder, and within a day or so, he had confessed to the murder of Max Jensen.
GARY WENT ON TRIAL A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER, but from the start it was an open-and-shut case. Plus, Gary didn’t help the case much when he refused to allow his attorneys to call Nicole as a defense witness. (By this time, Nicole and Gary were reconciled; she had felt terrible after his arrest and was now visiting him in jail for hours every day.) Also, Gary didn’t help matters by staring menacingly at the jury members and by offering belligerent testimony on his own behalf. Neither the verdict nor the sentence came as a surprise: Gary was found guilty and was sentenced to die. He told the judge he would prefer being shot to being hanged.
My mother called the night of Gary’s original sentencing, October 7, to tell me that he had received the death penalty. I found myself echoing my friends’ consolations. “Mother,” I said, “they haven’t executed anybody in this country for ten years and they aren’t about to start with Gary.”
I hung up the phone and went and sat on the curb outside my house. I sat there a long time, staring at the nearby river, until my girlfriend came out and put her arm around me. “I know it’s awful,” she said. “But you know they won’t kill him. They never put people to death in America anymore.”
“No,” I said after a moment, “you don’t understand. He’s going to die. They’re going to execute him. He was born for it.”
FOR WEEKS AFTER THE KILLINGS AND GARY’S DEATH SENTENCE, I felt grief and anger, and deep and painful humiliation. I could not believe that my brother had left his family with so much horror and shame to live with, and I could not forgive him for what he had done to the families of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell. I prayed that in some ways the awful episode was over—that Gary would simply rot away the rest of his life in the bitter nothingness of a Utah prison.
Then I tried going on with my life. I had told my close friends about what had happened with Gary—I felt I owed them a chance to decide whether they wanted to be the friend of a murderer’s brother—but I hadn’t told any of the editors or journalists I worked with. I still thought maybe I could keep enough of this horrible truth buried somewhere, so it would not spill over into the rest of my life and corrupt whatever dreams I might still have.
In the autumn of 1976, I learned that Rolling Stone had accepted an article of mine for publication. I was pleased. From the time I began reading the magazine, I had held a dream of someday writing for it. In early November, I went to San Francisco to work on an assignment and to meet the editors at the magazine. We got along okay, and my principal editor, Ben Fong-Torres, indicated that he would like me to do more work for them. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my girlfriend.
When I stepped off the plane at Portland’s airport, I heard my name on the loudspeaker: “Mr. Mikal Gilmore: please pick up a red courtesy telephone. There is an emergency phone call for you.”
I picked it up. It