“Just Do it.”
Is
it Nike Sportswear?
No,
it is Gary Gilmore!
“Let’s
do it!”
Who
is he?
Unlike
Amrozi the Smiling Assassin and Al Rashidi, Gary Gilmore was very brave when he
came face to face with the gunfire, his trademark quote, “Let’s do it!” will
always be in the mind of death penalty supporters. I will post about him from
Wikipedia and provide other links to read more about him.
 |
|
Portland Police Bureau mug shot
|
Born
|
Faye Robert
Coffman (renamed Gary Mark Gilmore later)
December 4, 1940 McCamey, Texas, USA |
Died
|
January 17,
1977 (aged 36)
Draper, Utah, USA |
Charge(s)
|
Armed
robbery (3 counts)
Assault (2 counts) Murder (2 counts) |
Penalty
|
Execution
by firing squad
|
Conviction
status
|
Executed on
January 17, 1977
|
Parents
|
Frank and
Bessie Gilmore
|
Gary Mark Gilmore (December
4, 1940 – January 17, 1977) was an American who gained international notoriety for
demanding that his own death sentence be fulfilled following two murders he
committed in Utah. He became the first person executed in the United States
after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in
the 1976 decision Gregg v. Georgia. (These new statutes avoided the
problems that had led earlier death penalty statutes to be deemed
unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia.) Gilmore was executed by firing
squad in 1977.
Early life
Gilmore was born in a hospital in McCamey, Texas, on
December 4, 1940, the second son of Frank and Bessie Gilmore. Frank Gilmore Sr.
was an alcoholic con man who sold fake magazine subscriptions. He had married
Bessie, a Mormon outcast from Provo, Utah, on a whim, in Sacramento,
California. Frank had many wives and families before her, none of whom he
supported. They had a son, Frank Jr., and then Gary came along while they were
living in Texas under the pseudonym of Coffman to avoid the law. Frank
christened his son Faye Robert Coffman, which Bessie quickly changed to Gary,
once they left Texas. However, this birth certificate proved to be a sore spot
years later (Gilmore's mother had kept his original birth certificate). Many
years later, in the early 1960s, upon finding the birth certificate that stated
his name was "Faye Robert Coffman", Gilmore thought that he had been
illegitimate or someone else's son; he felt that it was the reason he and his
father did not ever get along, and he was very upset and walked out on his
mother, Bessie, when she tried to explain the name change to him.
The family relocated throughout the Western United
States during his childhood, and his father supported the family by selling
fake magazine subscriptions. Gilmore had a troubled relationship with his
father, whom his brother Mikal described as a "cruel and unreasonable
man." Frank Gilmore's mother claimed that Frank was the illegitimate son
of magician Harry Houdini. Mikal has said he believes the story is false, but
that his father and mother believed it. Fay (Frank Gilmore's mother) who was
from Sacramento, told Bessie about Frank's father, with whom she had a short relationship,
mentioned he was a famous magician who had stopped into town, and so Bessie
went to the library to research it and came up to the conclusion that Harry
Houdini had been Frank's father. However, Houdini was only sixteen years old in
1890, the year of Frank Gilmore's birth. Furthermore, he did not start his
career as a magician until the following year.
Frank Gilmore, Sr. was strict and quick to anger.
Often, he would whip Gary and Frank, Jr. with a razor strap or a belt for
little or no reason. Less often, he would beat his wife, Bessie. He mellowed
somewhat with age, and the youngest Gilmore son, Mikal, reported in his book Shot
In The Heart, that Frank whipped him only one time, and he never did it
again after his son told him "I hate you". He showed Gary, Frank,
Jr., and the third son, Gaylen, no such mercy, however; he would beat them with
a whip, sometimes badly. In addition, Frank and Bessie would argue loudly and
call each other hateful names. Frank would anger Bessie by calling Brigham
Young, the second president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-Day Saints, "Bring'Em Young" and call her crazy, and then Bessie
would retaliate by saying that she would kill him one night. Bessie also called
him a "Cat-licker", which was supposed to be an epithet for
"Catholic", because Frank was Catholic. This went on for years, and
caused considerable turmoil within the Gilmore family.
The Gilmore family settled in Portland, Oregon, in
1952. Gary Gilmore began engaging in petty crime as an adolescent, with
offenses ranging from shoplifting, car theft and assault and battery. Although
Gilmore had an IQ of 133, had high scores on both scholastic and academic
tests, and showed artistic talent, he dropped out of high school in the ninth
grade. He ran away from home with a friend to Texas, returning to Portland
after several months.
By the age of 14, Gilmore started a small car theft
ring with other friends, resulting in his first arrest. He was released to his
father with a warning. Two weeks later he was back in court on another car
theft charge. The court remanded him to the MacLaren Reform School for Boys in
Oregon, from which he was released the following year. He was sent to Oregon
State Correctional Institution on another car theft charge in 1960, and was
released later that year. In 1961, Frank, Sr., was diagnosed with terminal
colon cancer. He died a few months later, at the end of June 1962, while Gary
was in prison; Gary heard about his father's death from one of his jailers;
despite his dysfunctional relationship with his father, Gary was devastated,
and tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists.
Criminal career
In 1962, Gilmore was arrested and sent to the
Oregon State Penitentiary for armed robbery and assault. He faced assault and
armed robbery charges again in 1964, and was given a 15-year prison sentence as
a habitual offender. A prison psychiatrist diagnosed him with antisocial personality
with intermittent psychotic decompensation.
He was granted conditional release in 1972 to live in a halfway house in
Eugene, Oregon, on weekdays, and study art at a community college. Gilmore
never registered, and within a month he was arrested and convicted of armed
robbery. Because of his violent behavior in prison, he was transferred from
Oregon to the maximum security federal prison in
Marion, Illinois, in 1975. He was conditionally
paroled in April 1976 and went to Provo, Utah, to live with a distant cousin,
Brenda Nicol, who tried to help him find work. Gilmore worked briefly at his
uncle Vern Damico's shoe store and for Spencer McGrath's insulation company,
but he soon returned to his previous lifestyle of stealing, drinking, and
getting into fights. Gilmore, then 35, had a relationship with Nicole Baker, a
19-year-old widow and divorcee, with two young children. The relationship was
at first casual, but soon became intense and strained because of Gilmore's
aggressive behavior and pressure from Baker's family to stop seeing him.
Murders
On the evening of July 19, 1976, Gilmore robbed and
murdered Max Jensen, a Sinclair gas station employee at 168 East and 800 North
in Orem, Utah. The next evening, he robbed and murdered Bennie Bushnell, a motel
manager at City Center Inn at 150 West and 300 South in Provo. He murdered both
men even though they complied with his demands. As he disposed of the .22
caliber pistol used in both killings, he accidentally shot himself in his right
hand, leaving a trail of blood from the gun all the way to the service garage
where he had left his truck to be repaired shortly before the murder of
Bushnell. Garage mechanic Michael Simpson witnessed Gilmore hiding the gun in
the bushes. Seeing the blood on Gilmore's crudely bandaged right hand when he
approached to pay for the repairs to his truck, and hearing on a police scanner
of the shooting at the nearby motel, Simpson wrote down Gilmore's license
number and called the police after Gilmore drove away from the garage.
Gilmore's cousin, Brenda, turned him in to police shortly after he phoned her
asking for bandages and painkillers for the injury to his hand. The Utah State
Police pulled Gilmore's truck over as he was trying to drive out of Provo, and
Gilmore gave up without attempting to flee. He was charged with the murders of
Bushnell and Jensen, although the latter case never went to trial, apparently
because there were no eyewitnesses.
Trial
Gilmore's murder trial began at the Provo
courthouse on October 5, 1976. Peter Arroyo, a motel guest, testified that he
saw Gilmore in the motel registration office that night and that Gilmore robbed
Bushnell by the cash register. After taking all the money, Gilmore was said to
have ordered Bushnell to lie down on the floor and then to have shot him in
cold blood. The next witness was Gerald F. Wilkes, a local FBI ballistics
expert, who testified that he found the shell casing at the crime scene which
he compared to Gilmore's gun that was left there. Gilmore's two court-appointed
lawyers, Michael Esplin and Craig Snyder, surprised both the prosecutor Noall
T. Wootton and Judge J. Robert Bullock by not cross-examining the majority of
the witnesses and offering no defense. Gilmore wanted to testify on his own
behalf, but suddenly withdrew the request the following day. Both sides made
closing arguments.
On October 7, at 10:13 AM, the jury retired to
consider the verdict; by mid-day, they had returned with a guilty verdict.
Later that day, the jury unanimously recommended the death penalty, because of
special circumstances to the crime.
At the time, Utah had two methods of execution —
firing squad or hanging. Gilmore elected to be executed by firing squad,
saying, "I'd prefer to be shot." The execution was set for November
15 at 8 AM.
Gilmore
received several stays of execution, brought about against his expressed wishes
by the efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The last of these
occurred just hours before the re-scheduled execution date of January 17. That
stay was overturned at 7:30 AM, and the execution allowed to proceed as
planned. At a Board of Pardons hearing in November 1976, Gilmore said of the
efforts by the ACLU and others to prevent his January 17, 1977, execution:
"They always want to get in on the act. I don't think they have ever really done anything effective in their lives. I would like them all — including that group of reverends and rabbis from Salt Lake City — to butt out. This is my life and this is my death. It's been sanctioned by the courts that I die and I accept that."
During the
time Gilmore was on death row awaiting his execution, he attempted suicide
twice, the first time on November 16 after the first stay was issued, and again
one month later.
 |
| Gilmore was executed by firing squad at Utah State Prison. |
Execution
Gilmore was executed on January 17, 1977, at 8:07
a.m. by firing squad at Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah. The night before,
Gilmore had requested an all-night gathering of friends and family at the
prison mess hall. On the evening before his execution, he was served a last meal
of steak, potatoes, milk and coffee; he consumed only the milk and coffee. His
uncle, Vern Damico, who attended the gathering, later claimed to have smuggled
in three small, 50-millilitre Jack Daniel's whiskey shot bottles which Gilmore
supposedly consumed. He was then taken to an abandoned cannery behind the
prison, which served as its death house. He was strapped to a chair, with a
wall of sandbags placed behind him to trap the bullets. Five gunmen, local
police officers, stood concealed behind a curtain with five small holes, through
which they aimed their rifles. When asked for any last words, Gilmore simply
replied, "Let's do it!" The Rev.
Thomas Meersman, the Roman Catholic prison chaplain, administered the last
rites to Gilmore. After the prison physician cloaked him in a black hood,
Gilmore uttered his last words to Father Meersman: "Dominus vobiscum"
(Latin, translation: "The Lord be with you.") Meersman replied,
"Et cum spiritu tuo" ("And with your spirit")
Gilmore had requested that, following his execution,
his eyes be used for transplant purposes. Within hours of the execution, two
people received his corneas. Most of his other organs were used for
transplants, as well. His body was sent for an autopsy and cremated later that
day. The following day, his ashes were scattered from an airplane over Spanish
Fork, Utah.
 |
| The execution chamber in Utah State Prison. The platform to the left is used for lethal injection. The metal chair to the right is used for execution by firing squad. |
Cultural impact
As Gilmore was the first person in the United States executed since the
reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, his story had immense cultural
resonance at the time, and it continues to echo in the works of writers,
artists and even advertisers to this day.
Before his execution, the December 11, 1976,
episode of NBC's Saturday Night Live (Season 2, Episode 10) featured
guest host Candice Bergen and the cast singing a Christmas-themed medley
entitled "Let's Kill Gary Gilmore For Christmas". Dressed in winter
attire and surrounded by fake snow, the performers sang the medley of familiar
Christmas carols with altered lyrics. Lyrics set to "Winter Wonderland"
included this line: "In the meadow we can build a snowman / One with Gary
Gilmore packed inside / We'll ask him, 'Are you dead yet?' He'll say, 'No, man'
/ But we'll wait out the frostbite till he dies." A later episode of 'Saturday Night Live, on October 20, 1979, featured
guest host Eric Idle performing impersonations while strapped to a stretcher,
assisted by orderlies. With the stretcher standing on end, Idle covered his
eyes with a black blindfold and announced it as an impersonation of Gary
Gilmore.
Other television comedies have referred to the
Gilmore execution, specifically his final words, "Let's do it." The Seinfeld
episode "The Jacket" originally included a reference to Gary
Gilmore's final words, but the scene was changed during the final shoot. In the
deleted scene, Jerry is trying to decide upon buying the titular jacket, when
he remarks to Elaine: "Well, in the immortal words of Gary Gilmore 'Let's
do it.'" On the Roseanne episode "The Wedding",
Roseanne's daughter Darlene is asked if she is ready to get married. Darlene
responds with a similar punchline, "Well in the words of Gary Gilmore,
'Let's do it!'". On NYPD Blue, Andy Sipowicz cracks "Let's do
it," as his wedding is about to begin, then explains further, "That's
what that guy in Utah said...'Let's do it.' He said that to the firing squad
just before they whacked him."
The founder of advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy,
Dan Wieden credits the inspiration for his "Just Do It" Nike slogan
to Gary Gilmore’s last words.
Gilmore's story was documented in Norman Mailer's
Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The executioner's Song (1979). Notable not
only for its portrayal of Gilmore and the anguish surrounding the murders he
committed, the book also took a central position in the national debate over
the revival of capital punishment. Another writer to blend fact with fiction
was the Colombian writer Rafael Chaparro Madiedo, who made Gary Gilmore one of
the main characters of his 1992 National Prize Novel Opio en las Nubes.
In 1982, The Executioner's Song was adapted
by Mailer for a television movie of the same name starring Tommy Lee Jones as
Gilmore, and co-starring Christine Lahti, Eli Wallach and Rosanna Arquette.
Jones won an Emmy Award for his portrayal of Gilmore. Gilmore's brother's
memoir Shot in the Heart was also made into an HBO movie. Another film
related influence was artist Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2 (1999), in
which Gilmore was made the main character of the second part of The
Cremaster Cycle, a series of five films. Gilmore, played by an actress this
time, appears in the beginning of Cremaster 3 in a metamorphosed form.
Jack Nicholson's performance in The Postman
Always Rings Twice was reportedly inspired in part by Gilmore.
Many musicians have explored the Gilmore case. In
1977, The Adverts had a top 20 hit in the UK with the song "Gary Gilmore's
Eyes". The lyrics describe an eye donor recipient
realizing his new eyes came from the executed murderer. The song was later covered by the German punk rock band Die Toten Hosen
and a country version of the song was recorded by Dean Schlabowske. Also in
1977, New York City experimental punk band Chain Gang released the song
"Gary Gilmore and the Island of Dr. Moreau" as the B-side to their
single "Son of Sam" about a contemporary serial killer that was still
at large. The Police's song "Bring on the Night",
from their 1979 album Reggatta de Blanc, speculated on Gary Gilmore's
possible feelings on the evening before the execution took place. In 1980, The
Judy's released the song "How's Gary?" on their album Wonderful
World of Appliances. The song presumably asks Gary Gilmore's mother what's
wrong with him, saying that he never comes out to play anymore; the song also
inquires about the holes in his vest and why he is wearing a blindfold.
Several playwrights have also integrated the
Gilmore story into their work in one way or another. The Oakland-based
performance artist Monte Cazazza sent out photos of himself in an electric
chair on the day of the execution. One of these was mistakenly printed in a
Hong Kong newspaper as the real execution. Cazazza was also photographed
alongside COUM Transmissions/Throbbing Gristle members Genesis P-Orridge and
Cosey Fanni Tutti for the "Gary Gilmore Memorial Society" postcard,
in which the three artists posed blindfolded and tied to chairs with actual
loaded guns pointed at them to depict Gilmore's execution. In Christopher Durang's play Beyond Therapy (1983), the character
Bruce claims that he "Wanted to see Gary Gilmore executed on
television."
The Welsh playwright Dic Edwards dramatised
Gilmore's life in his 1995 play Utah Blue.
Links:
No comments:
Post a Comment