Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [185]
On Tuesday morning, January 11, Frank and I caught a plane into Salt Lake. We tried talking for a while on the flight, but after a bit my brother lapsed into a brooding silence. I could tell he was in deep pain over what would be facing us.
His silence gave me a chance to think about some things I hadn’t wanted to think about. I was heading into Utah to confront a man, a blood relative, whom I had never really known, and whom I now had a bitter relationship with. I could tell myself we were very different people—I had told myself that for years—and in certain ways, that was true. Gary was a killer, I was not. But in truth, on this day we were both monsters, each determined to get his own way, despite what would likely be mortal consequences for others.
I was prepared and willing to do whatever was necessary to stop Gary’s execution. I could tell myself I was doing this for good moral purposes—I did not believe in the death penalty, and certainly Gary’s execution would hasten its return—but I had other reasons that were less generous. I did not want Gary to die this way because I did not want his death to ruin my life or what remained of the lives of my family. I did not want to live with the ruin and stigma of being a brother to the man who had brought capital punishment back to America. I had rights to my own hopes, I told myself, and those hopes could never come to be, as long as I was a blood relation to such shame and infamy. I already knew that part of the world would judge me for Gary’s actions, and I did not want to share his condemnation. I still had my whole life ahead of me.
To get my way, to win this battle, I would have to impose my will on the situation and on my brother. I would have to take legal action that might forestall his execution, maybe even for years. I knew that if I did so, I would be robbing him of this strange moment he had seized in history. Worse, I would likely be condemning him to another form of suffering—a waiting for a slower death, within the hell of prison—and despite the horrible things Gary had done, I had little doubt that he had suffered much in recent months and that his waiting for the moment of his death could not be an easy thing. But if I didn’t make Gary suffer, then the rest of us would have to. I would have to be with my mother and see the look on her face when we heard the news that the execution had been carried out. More than anything else, I did not want to see my mother go through that moment.
Even though I was hoping to save my brother’s life in the course of this visit (And what the hell did that mean? How could you save the life of a man whose soul was already lost?), I did not feel in any sense like a good person on this morning. In fact, I would never again feel like a good person. That possibility, much less that certainty, got left somewhere up there in the sky during that flight. When the plane landed, I was in a place where people decided who would live and who would have to die. It was both a physical and spiritual place, and it was a place I’d been headed for my entire life, just as Gary had been headed for it. This was the drama we had been assigned to play.
Once you arrived at such a place, the stain of blood would wash upon your hands and would never be cleansed or forgotten.
No, I was not a good person and I never could be again. The momentum of my blood history had taken that possibility away from me.
WHEN WE ARRIVED IN SALT LAKE CITY, Richard Giauque met us at the airport with a Rolls-Royce. He apologized immediately for its “gaudiness”—he’d had to borrow his law partner’s car at the last minute, he said. En route to Draper, Giauque explained that it was possible to achieve a stay until the constitutionality of Utah’s death penalty had been determined.
Draper Prison is located at a place in the Salt Lake Valley known as the “Point of the Mountain.” Because