The Executioner's Song (66 page)

When Gary said again, “What can I do about it?” Snyder answered, “Well, I don’t know.”

Gary then said, “Can I fire you?”

Esplin said, “Gary, we’ll make the Judge aware that you want to can us, but we’re going to file anyway.”

They parted on pretty good terms.

Noall Wootton was up in San Francisco at a national homicide symposium. Went there, as he put it, to learn how to prosecute murder cases, and they even gave him a certificate. He was going to have his wife join him for a few days and have a little fun, but word from his

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office took care of that. Wootton’s secretary phoned to say that Gary Gilmore was going to withdraw his motion for a new trial. He was not going to appeal. He wanted to be executed and Snyder and EsPli were damn upset. Didn’t know what their ethical position was suP” posed to be. Wootton concluded he had better get back. Who what con’s trick Gilmore had come up with? Wootton couldn’t remember a ploy like this before.

The courtroom on November i offered a quiet scene. There not many people seated, and Gary’s speech to the Judge, everytling considered, was, Wootton thought, kind of open and courteouS. It was still off the wall. Wootton got permission from Judge Bullock to make a few inquiries:

MR. WOOTTON Mr. Gilmore, has your treatment in priso thus far at the Utah State Prison influenced your decision in any way?

MR. GILMORE No.

MR. WOOTTON I-lOW about your treatment at the Utah County jail?

MR. GILMORE No.

MR. WOOTTON Now you have been represented by two attorneys who are paid by Utah County. Do you understand that?

MR. GILMORE Yes.

MR. WOOXTON Are you satisfied with the counseling they have given you and the representation that they have made for you?

MR. GILMORE Not entirely.

MR. WOOTON In what way, sir?

MR. GILMORE I’m satisfied with them.

MR. WOOXXON So the way they have represented you hasn’t neceS” sarily had any influence on your decision, is that correct?

MR. GILMORE That’s my own decision. It’s not influenced by rYthing other than the fact that I don’t care to live the rest of my life in jail. That doesn’t mean this jail or that jail, but any jail.

MR. WOOXTON Has anyone else influenced your decision other titan your own thoughts, sir?

MR. GILMORE I make my own decisions.

MR. WOOTXON Are you under the influence of any alcohol or drtigs or other intoxicants at this time?

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MR. GILMORE NO. Of course not.

MR. WOOTTON Have you been under the influence of any such thing, sir, in the course of your thoughts concerning this decision? MR. GILMORE No. I’m in jail. They don’t serve beer, whiskey, or any thing.

MR. WOOTTON Sir, in your own judgment, do you feel that you are mentally and emotionally competent to make this decision at this time?

MR. GILMORE Yes.

MR. WOOTTON Do you make any claims of being insane or mentally disturbed at this point?

MR. GILMORE NO. I know what I’m doing.

MR. WOOTTON Sir, would you request that the Court extend the ex ecution date beyond the normal appeal time in order to give you addi tional time to think this decision out?

MR. GILMORE I’m not going to think differently about it at any time.

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artist Harry Houdini who died on Halloween 50 years ago,

Several magicians gathered Sunday in the Detroit hospital room where Houdini died, hoping for a mes sage from the master. All they got on a video tape machine brought to record the event, was interference from a local rock station.

“It’s not even very good music,” said one magician.

DESERET NEWS

Slayer Wants To Keep Death Date

Provo (AP) Nov. i — Unless he changes his mind and appeals, or the courts and the governor intervene, a 35-year-old parolee convicted of murdering a hotel clerk will keep his Nov. 15 execution date.

“You sentenced me to die. Unless it’s a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it,” Gilmore said yesterday.

Fourth District Court Judge Bullock told Gilmore he could still change his mind and appeal, and an attor ney for Gilmore said he would prepare appeal papers just in case Gilmore decides to appeal.

DESERET NEWS

Houdini Didn’t Show

Nov. …. Halloween was a disappointment to groups trying to make contact with the spirit of escape

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By the second day of November, after all the phone calls came Bessie began to hear echoes again. The past rang in Bessie’s ear, the past reverberated in her head. Steel bars slammed into stone.

“The fool,” Mikal screamed at her. “Doesn’t he know he’s Utah? They will kill him, if he pushes it.” She tried to calm her youngest son, and all the while she was thinking that from the time Gary was 3 years old, she knew he was going to be executed. He had been a dear little guy, but she had lived with that fear since he was 3That was when he began to show a side she could not go near.

One time, in that endless year when Frank was away in the Colorado jail, she sat in her mother’s house and watched Gary play in the yard. There was a mud puddle she had told him to stay away from. Two minutes after she went inside, he then sat down in the middle.

It put a fear through her. Would he always be so defiant?

Now, the walls of the trailer closed in again. Somebody asked her once if it had been difficult to learn to live in the trailer, and she said no, not difficult at all. That was because she had never lived there, but died the day she moved in.

It was an ugly place, and she hated ugly places. Her health went down. She had only, she thought, inherited enough art from

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Uncle George, the painter, to know how to decorate a home, but sle ,had done that much for the last house. It had been nice. Now, sle lived in a narrow room, and her arthritis got worse as she sat througta the days and years at a table in the kitchen end of the thing with the radio stacked on the telephone books and the sore bones of her pelViS installed on a pillow.

Everything was shades of brown. One poverty after another’ Even the icebox was brown. It was that shade of gloom which woold not lift. The color of clay. Nothing could grow.

Outside were fifty trailers in this lot off the highway they called a Park. It parked old people. At little expense. Had her trailer cot $3,500.9 She could no longer remember. When people asked if it had one bedroom or two, she would say, “It’s got one and a half bed” rooms, if you can believe it.” It also had a half porch with a half awO” ing.

Sometimes she didn’t get out for weeks at a time. The arthrits got worse. At Speed’s, she couldn’t keep up with her work. Thoe twisted fingers ached with every plate she lifted from a table. Eacla move felt like the beginning of a disagreeable transaction. Sometines she had to figure out in the middle how to shift her course so that tPe repercussion of the pain would not freeze her spine. Finally, the boOS said he had to let her go, and gave her final pay. She was making $/o a week. Once she stopped working, the arthritis got worse. One kree started to bother her, then the other.

A doctor said he could operate on her arthritic knees and put tn plastic ones. She said no. She had a picture of living in this plastt house with plastic knees. The long hair that fell to her waist turoe gray, and she kept it in a bun. What with the difficulty of raising 1er arms, it usually stayed in the bun. “I’m ugly,” Bessie would say herself. It was as if, in losing the house, she must also lose her lookO”

She moved in the year Mikal graduated from high school. Fle went to college in Portland, and put himself through. He was brilat and got good marks, and had to think of his own life. There wle periods when he would visit less. The day she’ lost the ten-roorn house with the marble-top furniture, Mikal went north, she welat south, and they never lived under the same roof again.

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She had only moved a little farther south on McLau vard in Milwaukie south of Portland City line, moved that four-lane avenue of bars and eateries and discount gas station even had an old World War II Boeing bomber the air above its gasoline pumps. That was about as could get. Since she stayed in the trailer more and more that silly airplane on beat-up old McLaughlin Boulevard

Mikal was gone. They were all gone. She did not much was her fault, and how much was the fault of world that ground along like iron-banded wagon wheels in grass, but they were gone. Gary was away forever, and in heti the wind still whistled through the vent in Gaylen’s pick made, and Frank Jr. was often gone, and when she weekends, he lived deep in his own thoughts and practiced magic no more, and Frank Sr. was dead and Ion

The sorrows of the family had begun with Gary, wanted to be dead. When he departed, would they all other step into that pit where they gave up searching other? She lived again through the days when Frank Sr.

His bad look, she was fond of saying, was stron

a man across a room. He had been in show business muscles rippled. He was a strong and powerfully built watched him go down to nothing and die.

He had always been very afraid of cancer. His mothert and Frank never said a word, but Bessie knew. out fear. The sound of the word could change the day for

She watched him linger in the hospital. He wasted Once she had been very much in love with him, but there so many fights over the boys, over-Gary most of all, that end, there was not much feeling. But, oh, it was hard to die. She almost loved him very much again.

To herself she wept when she thought of the first time brought before a Judge, because that was the first time

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on Gary’s side. “Don’t admit a thing,” he kept saying to

wisdom of his life was in the remark. If nothing was admit-. other side might not be able to start the game of law and jus-

Judge found Gary guilty anyway.

Gary was playing at the other end of the field. “Kill me,” he

. Frank Sr. was in Colorado Prison, she lived for a time with

night a bat flew into Fay’s house. She called the police to Out. No question of the evil in that bat. Then, a year to the day died, a bat entered the house with the Philippine furniture and the turnaround drive. She ran upstairs and again, shivering with a fear twenty years old. It hap-near to the day Gary was sitting at her desk holding the birth with the name of Fay Robert Coffman. That was the mo-she knew no matter how many years it took, she would lose the too much hatred in Gary. You did not keep a house as that.

she did try. Tried through the years, and the thickening the stiffening knees, the slow twisting of her limbs. If the

1 would pay those back taxes, $i,4oo, no fortune, she sign the deed over until she repaid the Church in full.

It would be simple, she thought, but the outcome produced voices in her ear. Real voices. She could hear every ugly The Bishop said, We’ll send a man to appraise the property, he came, he set the worth at $7,ooo. She told him that her had paid twice the sum ten years ago, and her husband was He said, “They asked me to appraise it low,” and talked of the of the grounds.

the voices began to ask why she didn’t agree to live on a basis. Did she have to stay in a big house now? She could

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always work for one of the rich ladles in the Church, and have her bed and room free.

It didn’t seem wise, the Bishop explained, to keep a home she could not maintain physically. As it was, the city threatened suit if she didn’t take care of the weeds in the rear. She had four sons, but the rear of the house was a thicket of tall grass, tin cans, cat briars. The Church sent young people over to try to clear it, but that was a large job. Couldn’t Mikal help?

He had, explained Bessie, his studies. After this reply, there was a crevasse of ice between the Bishop and herself.

She heard the voices talking of the financial situation. The home, if you included the expense of keeping it up, would not be worth what it would cost to buy back the arrears on the taxes. They told her again that the grounds to the house were ill kept, and choked with weeds, and her sons had not kept it up. She felt able to kill. She didn’t like someone telling her what her sons ought to do. Nor those voices saying that the wise course was to find a mobile home she could live in and handle.

Of all the people, she said to herself, who ever hurt me, it’s been only Mormons, nobody else ever could. She remembered the terrible hatred in Gary’s face on the day she told him in the visiting room at Oregon State that the Church never helped her to save the house. There was a look in his eyes then as if he had found an enemy worthy of his stature.

Now, she was in the trailer sitting in the dark, TV not on, radio not on, her legs in wrapping, and her nightgown looking like it was a hundred and two years old. She could hear the boy from the Mormon Church rapping on the door, breaking the silence, the boy who came over to help her. He would do the dirty dishes that were all over the table and all over the sink, pick up after the trail of the immediate past of the day before, and the five days before, all that record of liv ing from day to day through the twisting of her limbs. Sometimes she would sit and not reply to the boy’s knock, sit in the dark, and feel him looking through the panes of the door to see if he could find her shadow sitting there. Finally, she would say, “Go away.”

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