Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [88]
Said Duane: “I think the kids in L.E.D. had a daily routine something like ours, except they didn’t get to go outside and the discipline was much more harsh. By harsh I mean, rumor had it that instead of being sent into segregation, L.E.D. allegedly had a room with manacles where you’d actually be chained to the wall, which we didn’t have. I never had to endure that, but I heard from other kids who were in L.E.D. that they were manacled to the wall, and that the supervisors beat them. Instead of spats across the butt it was a real whipping, with a belt across the back, like being flayed. And if they put you on bread and water in L.E.D., you were on bread and water—with a cup of milk in the middle of the day— for up to three weeks. I received that treatment for a week a couple of times and didn’t suffer any lasting effects. I don’t know what would happen if you went for two or three weeks on it. I think it would be pretty bad.”
Gary spent the rest of 1955 in L.E.D. Shortly before Christmas, the cottage manager made the following note: “Gary is still our boy in the corner. I still believe Gary will not trust anyone, staff or boy. He tries to be one of the group but seems unable to do so. When I talk to a group he will go into a corner and not take any part in the discussion.” The manager also noted that Gary seemed to have bad dreams almost every night and often talked in his sleep.
But while Gary was quiet and aloof, the supervisors in L.E.D. didn’t find him particularly troublesome. “Some staff thought Gary was the best boy they had ever had and did not belong in L.E.D.,” one counselor wrote. “Different ideas were expressed that perhaps the boy was caught in a web of circumstances not his fault, and therefore may have minimal if any delinquency.”
On January 1, 1956, MacLaren’s released Gary from L.E.D. to the custody of Cottage 3—considered by many to be the school’s best cottage. Two days later Gary went to the cottage’s manager and told him that if he was not put back in L.E.D., he was going to run away again. He didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t smoke in the regular cottages, plus he found life outside L.E.D. too crowded and loud. The manager put him back in L.E.D. for the night, then decided that Gary had been bluffing and returned him to Cottage 3. The next day he ran away, and within a week he was back in custody and assigned again to L.E.D.
This penchant for hard-time punishment became a pattern that would hold true for my brother for the rest of his prison career. He would invariably commit flagrant violations that had the effect of earning him sustained bouts of severe punishments—usually in isolated circumstances. Indeed, by the time of his death, Gary had spent roughly half of his jail time in isolation, segregation, or some other form of maximum incarceration. MacLaren’s was where he established the pattern: For the next several months he would behave admirably inside L.E.D., and as soon as he was released into the school’s general population, he would run away or commit some infraction that would land him back in maximum security.
“One of the last times I saw Gary,” Duane told me, “we were having lunch together in one of the cafeterias, and he was trying to talk me into joining him in L.E.D. He was telling me how much he liked it there, and I knew that was bullshit. Who could like being locked up twenty-four hours a day? Also, everybody knew that if we had any cases of serious perversion going on, it was in L.E.D. But Gary insisted it was a great life. He said, ‘Man, Duane, we get to smoke and swear as much as we want there. We don’t have to live by the same rules. We don’t even have to go to school or work.’ What he didn’t seem to understand was, those weren’t privileges. That treatment was the school’s way of saying that the boys in L.E.D. were beyond saving. They could smoke and they could swear, but those kids were locked up, and they would stay there until the authorities were ready to let them go.”
ONE OF THE INCIDENTS associated