The Executioner's Song (106 page)

GILMORE NO, not really. You could say it was a little more

that Mr. Bushnell was going to die.

INTERVIEWER Why?

GILMORE Because it was already a fact that Mr. Jensen had and so the next one was more certain. nTERVIEWER Was the second killing easier than the first? GILMORE Neither one of ‘em were hard or easy.

INTERVIEWER Had you ever had any dealings of any kind: either of those men?

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GILMORE No.

INTERVIEWER Well, what led you to the City Center Motel, where

Bushnell worked? We’re just trying to understand the quality of this rage you speak of. It wasn’t a rage that might have been vented in sex?

GILMORE I don’t want to mess with questions that pertain to sex. I think they’re cheap.

INTERVIEWER But if, on the night you killed Bushnell, you had

wound up with a friendly girl who could offer you beer and company and a relaxing time, wouldn’t that have helped you feel better? GILMORE I don’t want to answer that question.

INTERVIEWER You seem to find it easier talking about murder than

sex.

GILMORE That’s your judgment.

Good stuff, thought Farrell. A good beginning.

All through Christmas weekl however, there was a pall. No more in terviews of merit. Farrell began to wonder if he had scared Gilmore off. Or was Gary disabled from the holidays? Looking over his bitter responses about Christmas in prison, it was not hard to read between the lines: my last New Year’s on earth.

Barry also began to worry that the lawyers might be the cause. Day after day, in that last week of the year, they went out and ban tered with Gary, skipped around key points, ignored any reasonable follow-up to good responses, and read Farrell’s more elaborate ques tions as if they were too literary for real men to get their mouth around.

Barry would call up Stanger’s office and, with great difficulty, dictate new questions. A day or two later, the tape would come back so empty of content that Farrell would wonder whether the lawyers wanted to show they could not only produce, but hold back. He fig Ured they must still be mad over Schiller’s trip to Hawaii. Maybe

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there was something unholy in interrogating a man on the way to his death, but virtually nothing came back.

STANGER Have you ever been any good as a prison politician?

GILMORE In the last period when I was in Oregon I got off into a revolutionary bag a little bit, and then I just seen them revolutionaries ain’t gonna revolution shit, so I fell out of that. (laughing)

STANGER Okay. You spent more than four years in the hole, Is this because you choose to do it the hard way? Or, because your acts are beyond your control?

GILMORE (laughing).. I gotta pick A, or B now, huh? (laughing)

STANGER Multiple choice… (laughing)

GILMORE Man, I’m just a fuck-up.

Moody and Stanger might not have been overworking the mine, but they were sure curious about sales. As soon as Schiller came back from Hawaii they began to question him about the overseas sales. Schiller had to give them details on deals before they were even disCussed. His remark at lunch that he could sell the letters, and they would never know, had come home to him. They paid a lot of attention to the prospect of money coming in. He hoped it might fire them up to do better interviews, but it only made them feel that they were doing the work for everybody else. They even started to claim that the interviews were not part of their original arrangement, and they should get additional compensation. He could tell it would be an ongoing discussion.

About the way it went. Certain exchanges drove Farrell up the wall In the interview on December 2o, there had been a clue in the back-and-forth:

INTERVIEWER Your sense of the inevitability and the rightness of your fate suggests that the killings were a long time coming. Had you fantasized yourself in the killer’s role long before it became a reality? (pause) It’s a good heady question, isn’t it? (laughter)

GILMORE Yeah, it is. I wonder if I could go take a hit ‘n’ miss? (laughter) That’s rhyme in Cockney for “piss.”

INTERVIEWER Sounds good. Let’s do it.

GILMORE And come back and answer that one. I’ll give that some thought.

INTERVIEWER Okay.

GILMORE It’s rather religious.

Then Gary had come back with his long and half-satisfactory account of killing Jensen. That was last week. It proved what Farrell had expected. Secretly, Gilmore did like literary questions and highly formulated approaches. It dignified his situation. Here, despite the lawyer’s mockery of the question, he had still worked to find some kind of an. swer. But such willingness to reply would not bear up if the lawyer kept responding with nothing but jokes. It was like people making quips around the bed of a man dying of cancer.

The problem, Schiller decided, was that vis-h-vis Gary, the lawyers were feeling stronger all the time. They had made a point of letting him know that while he was sunning in Hawaii, they had been out at the jail on Christmas Day. They had also been out New Year’s Day. And every day in between. That Gary had sure been lonely. The lawyers informed Schiller as if he had been absent for years. There was no question Gary looked forward to the visits they would make. It enabled him to leave his cell and go to the booth just off the visitors’ room. Even after a couple of hours of conversation, they had no more than to hang up the phone and start to leave, when they would hear a tap on the window. Gilmore was pulling them back. He wanted to inquire about their children. He would give advice. When they do something wrong, punish them. But keep telling them you love

them.

Those daily sessions had given the lawyers such concern for Gary’s daily situation, Schiller decided, that they were not seeing the big job. It had become natural for them to downgrade it.

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Schiller’s most worrisome problem on returning, however, was with Gary. First, he had to tell him about the National Enquirer. That piece would be out in a few days. From Hawaii, he instructed

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the lawyers to explain to Gilmore that he had sold a few rights to the Enquirer because they were going to do a story on Gilmore anyway, and he thought they should pick up some money. That worked. Gilmore agreed. But then, in another telegram, Schiller made the mistake of using a cede name for Nicole. Not wanting the prison to know what he was talking about, he sent in some questions refemng to her as Freckles.

Too late, he realized that Gary sometimes called her that in his letters. What a prize goof! He must have wanted to confess to Gary that he had read the letters. If Gilmore would only agree that reading those letters was no crime, it might encourage more intimacy in the questioning. No chance. While Schiller was still in Hawaii, Moody read him a note from Gary.

Dear Larry,

Freckles?

Her name is Nicole.

Dig?

You’ve read the letters —I don’t like that.

I’ve got about a hundred letters right here in my cell that Nicole wrote to me.

You aint reading them.

DEC. 3°, 3:43 P.M.

GARY GILMORE UTAH STATE PRISON

PO Box 25°

DRAPER UT 84020

I UNDERSTAND YOUR POINT AND IT WAS WELL MADE STOP I WAS NOT

TRYING TO HIDE THE FACT STOP REGARDS

LARRY

When there was no answer, Schiller sent another telegram.

JAN 2, I:42 P.M.

GARY GILMORE UTAH STATE PRISON BOX 250

DRAPER UT 84020

NICOLE’S PRIDE IN YOUR LETTERS ALLOWED HER TO SHARE THEM WITH SEVERAL PEOPLE INCLUDING MYSELF STOP SIDE BY SIDE BOTH SETS OF LETTERS COULD ONLY LEAVE A TRUER AND MORE COMPLETE RECORD OF YOUR LOVE THAN EITHER OF THEM ALONE STOP I WANT TO DEFEAT THE IDEA THAT YOU HAVE A POWER OVER HER STOP THAT IS THE EFFECT THAT IS BEING DRAWN WHEN ONE READS ONLY YOUR SIDE STOP HER LETTERS IN MY OPINION WOULD BE THE STRONGEST WAY OF GIVING THE TRUE PICTURE OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP STOP THIS IS NO WAY TO COMMUNICATE BUT IT’S THE BEST THAT WE GOT.

LARRY

“I will before it’s over,” thought Schiller.

The answer came back on tape via Moody and Stanger:

I don’t question your motives. I know you need to know all you

ca l .

But some of your methods …

Its a matter of how you approach ne Larry —

You can offend me.

I would rather you didn’t

May I suggest — that you be utterly straightforward with me.

Because I’m a literal man.

When I asked you not to read those letters you didn’t argue with me or try to persuade me.

The next time you offend me it will be forever Larry.

But, for the nonce, this one time, I will let it ride.

Now you know.

Sincerely, Gary

GILMORE I got a mailgram from Larry and he asked ff he could have the letters Nicole has written to me. Just tell him that I destroyed ‘em, I won’t elaborate. He uses a little abstract psychology and that doesn’t work with me. He sort of suggested.., it was kind of an innuendo, too, that you know, a lot of people think I’ve got some kind of hold over Nicole and maybe ff we could see this correspondence, we could clear that all up. I don’t like that kind of suggestion. There’s no way he can see her letters, they’re printed in my heart. That’s where they’re at, and they’re gone, so, this’ll save me from writing him a letter …. (laughs)

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THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG

Next, it looked like the blip was going to hit the fan altogether. The National Enquirer came out with their piece, a disaster. It wasn’t so much the letters Scott Meredith had sold to them, as that they analyzed a tape of Gary speaking, and put his psyche all over the page.

NATIONAL ENQUIRER

Murderer Gary Gilmore is Lying —

He Does NOT Want to Die!

By John Blosser

That’s the conclusion of Charles R. McQuiston, a former top U.S. intelligence officer, who used a PSE (Psychological Stress Evaluator) to analyze a 2o-minute tape of a telephone conversation with Gilmore at the Utah State Prison …. (The PSE is a device that is used by law enforcement agencies to determine when a person is lying, by charting stress patterns in the voice.)

“I am totally convinced that Gilmore does not wish to die. He is very emotionally involved with this process of meeting his Maker, and he is very scared,” the intel ligence officer said.

“He wants clemency for his crimes,” McQueen told The Enquirer.

Here are some excerpts of Charles McQuiston’s PSE analysis:

GILMORE “The law has sentenced me to die. I feel that is proper.”

MCQUISTON’S ANALYSIS

“There is extremely heavy stress on the words ‘to die.’ This means there is no way he wants to die.” GILMORE “I’ll simply go out there and sit down and be shot.”

MCQUISTON’S ANALYSIS

“His cyclic rate goes wild on this statement. He may

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be forced to do this (face the firing squad) but it’s not simple — and he certainly doesn’t want it to happen.” GILMORE “I guess you could say I do believe in a life hereafter, and that makes it a little easier for me (to face death).”

MCQUISTON’S ANALYSIS

“The stress patterns show that he does believe in a life in the hereafter.

‘i’hat is a true statement. However, it doesn’t make it easier for him.

“It makes it much more difficult. He believes. “But he feels that he is going there (to the here after) without the proper credentials—and he is scared.”

JAN 5 4:31 P.M.

GARY GILMORE UTAH STATE PRISON

PO BOX 250

DRAPER UT 84020

IT HAS TAKEN ME 24 HOURS TO CALM DOWN AFTER SEEING THE EN QUIRER OTHERWISE WESTERN UNION COULDN’T TAKE MY WORDS. THEY BOUGHT MATERIAL AND OBVIOUSLY USED ONLY A SMALL PART OF IT. I GUESS I SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED IT BUT IN SOME WAYS I’M STILL NAIVE. I’M JUST ASHAMED THAT THIS IS THE FIRST THAT YOU SEE BUT YOU KNOW THE REASONS WE WENT THIS WAY. THAT MARKET IS NOW SATISFIED AND WE CAN GO FOR WHAT WE WANT.

LARRY

Jan 5

Dear Larry,

Just read with unengrossed interest the National Enquirer. Very distasteful …

I guess people can print and read and think what they like. But I am curious …

I mean, I would assume a man in your position-and your experience and firsthand knowledge of yellow journalistic papers like the Enquirer —would be able to exert more control over what is released, what is printed …

Or did you exert all the control you cared to?

I’m distantly curious —

Not greatly interested …

You see, I know the truth o,f the matter. And so does Nicole. And I don’t have to account to anybody but myself and Nicole.

Im not a nice guy or a hero. But I’m not the guy the Enquirer says I am, either.

Larry, you can think, print, and produce according to the conclusions you, yourself, reach. I believe you are a man of some sensibility and interested in the truth.

My sole re-but tO the Enquirer is this:

Everybody knows that the National Enquirer is not exactly what you would call an “unimpeachable source.”

GARY

Moody and Stanger told him Gary had no larger reaction than that. Schiller had to feel confused. This piece in the National Enquirer had impugned Gilmore’s honor in death, and yet this reply was all it brought forth. Call Nicole Freckles, however, and Gary almost wouldn’t speak. It nearly brought Schiller to a halt. He had to ask himself whether he was qualified, at bottom, to know Gary Gilmore?

Hey Darlin Companion —i Love you!

i am qften lost here and i will be that way often wherever am — till i feel your soul wrap around me.