Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [217]
“No,” Frank said. “I don’t want to see it.”
I felt relieved. “Neither do I,” I said, and we drove off into the night.
AT VERN’S THAT NIGHT, MY UNCLE HAD TAKEN ME aside at one point and said: “I have Gary’s clothes here in the house with me. There’s something about them I want to show you. Would you like to see them?”
I said I would be willing to see them another time, but I didn’t think it would be appropriate to do so in front of Frank.
I went back another night and sat at Vern’s kitchen table, on which he placed a large plastic bag. From the bag he pulled out a sleeveless black sweatshirt, white pants, and tennis shoes with red, white, and blue shoestrings, and spread them before me. These were the clothes that Gary was wearing when he was executed. I had expected them to be bloodied and ravaged, but they weren’t. All the blood had since been washed out. I sat there and ran my hands over the clothes. They felt soft to me, and for some reason it did not make me sad to touch them. There was almost something comforting about it.
Vern picked up the shirt and pointed out the pattern of perforations that the bullets had made as they pierced the cloth and ripped through Gary’s heart. Four neat holes, each about the size you could put your finger through.
“Look at this,” Vern said, and pointed out another hole, a little farther apart from the others. “That, too,” he said, “is a bullet hole.”
According to Utah’s tradition—and perhaps its law as well—there are five men on a firing squad, but only four of them have loaded rifles. One of them has a gun with a blank in it. This is done so that if any man is bothered by his conscience, he can always entertain a reasonable doubt that he ever actually fired a bullet into the condemned man.
There should have been four holes in the shirt. Instead, there were five. The State of Utah, apparently, had taken no chances on the morning that it put my brother to death.
I SPENT A LOT OF TIME VISITING MY COUSIN BRENDA during my Utah stay, and I also came to know and like the man she was about to marry, a strong, smart, good-tempered guy named Jack. It didn’t take me long to realize what all my brothers had loved about Brenda. She was funny, earthy, dead-honest, terribly bright and loving. She also had a conscience that she could not violate, and it was in misjudging that aspect of her that Gary had made his most fatal mistake. Brenda loved Gary and felt bad for him, but when he started to kill people, she would not harbor or protect him. She knew that if she did, he would kill others. I knew exactly how she felt, and I knew that when she told the police where they could find him, she had done the right thing.
On the last night I spent in Utah, Brenda brought me an opaque green jar, with a sealed lid on it. Through the cloudy greenishness, you could make out the contents: They were chips of bone that had been sifted out from the ashes of a cremation.
“I’ve lived with this a long time,” Brenda said. “I think it more rightly belongs with you.”
I now own all that is left in this world of Gary Mark Gilmore. It sits in my office, and it has been close to me as I have written every word these last few months.
BUT BONES AREN’T THE ONLY THING I brought back from Utah. I also brought back the knowledge of a secret that I found truly devastating and that I did not know what to do with.
I had first learned about this secret from the taped interviews that Larry Schiller and Norman Mailer loaned me. In a conversation between