Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [209]
No, it wasn’t a real ghost. I knew that. But for days after, I couldn’t shake the memory of how it had felt real—like a messenger that had come from another realm, or from my own subconscious, to remind me how much my loss was part of a chain that connected me to a history beyond my own isolated pain. That was the night I began to understand that I had never really escaped my family after all, but that instead I’d carried their ruin deep inside me, maybe from the very beginning. Realizing that was enough to drive me from the land where they were all buried, back to my friends and life in Los Angeles.
I HAD BEEN BACK IN LOS ANGELES A FEW MONTHS when a friend, singer Victoria Williams, called to tell me that A Current Affair—a nationally syndicated program that takes real-life scandal and repackages it into a news-entertainment format—had announced it would be running a segment that night on my brother. The show’s producers had tracked down Nicole Baker and talked her into granting an on-camera interview about Gary and his murders and execution-the first lengthy television interview she had ever granted on the subject.
It came as a bit of a surprise to me that, well over a decade after the fact, Gary’s relationship with Nicole and his death would still be fodder for hot news, but maybe it was just a slow day for topical scandal-mongering. I tuned in the program, expecting something tasteless, and what I saw was certainly that—indeed, it was (at least for me) flat-out enraging. But it was also strangely affecting in ways I had not expected. There was news footage of Gary being led to and from court during the many hearings of those last few months, handcuffed and dressed in prison whites, his wary, appraising eyes scanning the cameras that now surrounded and documented him at every possible opportunity. I remembered watching this footage back in the daze and fury of 1976 and thinking he looked exactly how people thought he looked then: cold-blooded, arrogant, deadly. Seeing these images now, so many years and experiences later, I also saw a couple of things I’m not sure I’d seen very accurately back in those days: namely, that Gary looked plain scared, and he also looked like my brother. That is, he looked like somebody I both loved and hated, somebody who had transformed my life in ways that could never be truly repaired. Mostly, he looked like somebody I had missed very much in the years since his death—somebody I wished I could still sit and talk with, no matter how painful the talking might be.
By and large, though, the segment was sordid and mean-spirited. The point, it seemed, was to try to hang much of the blame for Gary’s murders on Nicole. Nicole described the last time Gary had hit her. She said that she knew right then that she was leaving. “I had been hit before by men,” she said, “and I told myself, ‘I’m leaving.’ No matter what I did, I did not deserve that. He knew that was how I felt. And when I looked at him, I knew that when I go, he will kill someone. I knew that if I left him, somebody would die for it.”
“And yet you left anyway?” the interviewer asked.
Nicole looked off camera for a moment, and I saw that familiar twinge around her eyes, and the start of a broken smile. “One of the greater regrets of my life,” she finally answered.
The interviewer’s implication couldn’t have been plainer: Nicole shared in the blame. Because Gary had lost her, and could not cope with that loss, he killed Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell, rather than turning the murder onto the woman who had left him. And beyond this question and conclusion lay an even more insidious implication: that, somehow, it had been Nicole’s obligation to stay with Gary—to continue to absorb his violence so he would never turn