The Executioner's Song (140 page)

                Schiller got a glint in his eye. Johnston could see the compliment go all the way in. "Yes, it was swell," said Johnston, "but why did you give it all away?" Larry cocked his head, and got a sly grin like a big German shepherd who is lolling its tongue. He said, "I didn't give away anything that mattered."

                But he couldn't keep it in. "Gilmore's last words," Schiller confessed, "were not what I said they were."

                Johnston laughed. He had a feeling there was more to the story. "Larry, there are some," he said, "who might look on that as a lie." "No," said Schiller, " 'Let's do it' was the last thing everybody heard," Johnston said to himself, "This is one secret he'll have to tell. He's like a kid who'll have to tell one person anyway."

                "Well," said Larry, and swore him to secrecy, "Gary spoke in Latin to the priest."

                "He did? What were his words?"

                "If I knew them, I couldn't pronounce them," said Schiller, and gave his sly grin again. "But I'll find out."

They drove over together to the execution site. When they got inside the cannery, Schiller couldn't believe what he now saw. His description of the events had been accurate in every way but one.

                He had gotten the colors wrong. The black cloth of the blind was not black but blue, the line on the floor was not yellow but white, and the chair was not black, but dark green. He realized that during the execution something had altered in his perception of color.

                He left the place of execution a second time with a memory of reporters swarming over the chair, the sandbags and the holes in the mattress, creatures of an identical species feeding, all feeding, in the same place. As he went out the door, one man was explaining to another that steel-jacketed bullets had been used so they would make no larger hole in the rear than in the front, which would avoid, thereby, the worst of the mess, and the body jumping from the impact.

PART SEVEN

The Fading of the Heart

Chapter 39

TELEVISION

While Earl stood in the corridor, one of the newsmen came running by and said, "Gary Gilmore is dead." Again, Earl looked out the window and saw other newsmen down in the plaza, and the sun shining in Denver, and people going to work. When he came downstairs to the main lobby, Sandy Gilmour of Channel 2 television in Salt Lake asked to interview him, and Earl said, "Yes," and Gilmour asked him how he felt to be the one to inform the prison that the execution could proceed, and Earl explained his only responsibility was to let them know the Tenth Circuit had overruled Judge Ritter. That was all, he said. He did not feel like discussing the intricacies of his emotion.

                Then, Earl, Bob Hansen, and the rest of the staff moved out in a taxicab. Judy Wolbach, they heard, would be traveling home on another plane.

Toni was waiting in Minimum Security with Ida, Dick Gray, Evelyn Gray, and all the people who had not been invited to the cannery. A guard in a maroon jacket walked into the room, and said, "Anybody come to tell you?" Toni said, "No." The man was pale, and trembling terribly. He said, "It's over with. Gary's dead."

                Ida started to cry. She had held up real well, but now it overflowed. The guards were wonderful then. Several came over to ask if there was anything they could do about transportation, and Toni told them she was waiting for her daddy to come back. In a while, one of them said her father was waiting by the tower where their trucks were parked. The prison officials were wonderful to her on the way out, and that reminded her how just before the execution, they had been very attentive, wanted to see if there was anything her mother needed, or did they want coffee? It was almost like being in a funeral home, and these were the attendants.

                When they got to her truck, Vern wasn't there yet, and the parking area seemed massive with cars and people. Reporters clustered around like flies, interviewing her mother through one window, herself through the other, until Toni finally got foulmouthed. By then, she had really had it. She was smoking with the window open, and one of them came over and kept asking for an interview even though Toni was shaking her head. This TV man had no respect for her feeling that she didn't want to talk and he set his microphone in the window and said, "Can I put this here?" That was when she told him where he could put it. His hands flew all over. Later, a girl friend told her that on "Good Morning America" you could catch where they cut a few words.

                Then she could see Vern, cane in hand, trying to walk up to them. His face was distraught. He was obviously in pain, and she had the feeling his knee was going to go on him. So, she jumped out of the truck to run over, and three reporters grabbed her arm. So help her, three. "Please give us a few words." She grabbed one of the microphones as if to say something, then threw it to the ground where it broke into a dozen little pieces, and shouted to Vern, "Get your truck out later. It's stuck behind the others now." Then she led him to her truck, and drove to her home in Lehi, gave him coffee, got him settled down, then took him for breakfast to the Spic and Span Cafe in Provo. About two hours later, he went out to the prison with her and recovered his vehicle.

All through the night before Gary was executed, Pete Galovan had been working at the city swimming pool. He was very tired when he got home early that morning, and he knelt down and prayed. Asked the Lord to forgive him for some of the harsh feelings he had had toward Gary. He didn't want to hate him in any way. He felt concerned about that. In fact, Pete got so concerned he began to cry.

                Then he felt Gary come into the room.

                Pete was there praying on his knees, and Gary came into the room accompanied by two other men. Gary was wearing a white shirt and white pants, and the two men with him were dressed in white suits and wore ties. They might be relatives of some sort from the past or the future. Pete didn't know.

                Gary now said to Pete that he did not hold anything against him. He explained that right after his execution, his relatives had been there to receive his spirit. The Lord had sent them. It was very very clear to Pete that this was exactly what Gary was saying.

                Gary was in a good mood and said he was experiencing all kinds of new sensations. They were really funny. He told Pete he was walking through walls, and it was an experience. He felt like a kid in an amusement park. He would now be able to visit every prison in the world, he said, and he planned to go all over as soon as his ashes were cast from the plane. Then he would come back to Provo from time to time.

                Gary now revealed that because he had been full of valiant feeling at the end, the Lord was planning to use him as an example for people who had problems similar to his. At the end of a thousand years of peace, his spirit would come forth. He told Pete he had a very good chance of becoming one of the higher people. He had been told he was a dynamic spiritual person who had made a very deep choice in this life, and that could counteract a lot of bad decisions earlier. If he faced up to things now, the Lord was really going to use him.

                Right after Gary left, Pete called Elizabeth, and told her about it, and said he would slip Gary's name onto the prayer rolls, so that Gary M. Gilmore would be in every Mormon temple in the world, and every day countless people would be praying for him.

From a memo by Earl Dorius on the events of January 17:

                The taxi driver heard us talking and toward the end of the ride, he asked whether we had anything to do with the Gilmore case, and we all smiled and filled him in on what had happened.

                When we arrived at the airport, I remember that in the waiting area there was a group of people watching the news on television.

                They told us they had just heard that Gary Gilmore had been shot and is dead. I remember Jack Ford asking them in disbelief how they knew this, and acted like he did not know anything about it. I turned to Jack and told him he was cruel in leading on the people when in fact we were the ones that had argued the case, but we joked and then boarded the plane and flew back to Utah. The plane trip back was much more relaxing. We talked about subjects other than Gilmore but it seemingly took longer to return home than it took to get to Denver.

                When we arrived back in Utah, there was not a single member of the news media at the airport. Salt Lake City seemed extremely quiet. We deplaned and walked to our car alone with no news reporters asking us any questions. It seemed fitting that with the death of Gary Gilmore the publicity also ended.

                But on the last leg from the airport, not a block from his home, Earl saw an empty billboard on which somebody had painted, "Robert Hansen, Hitlerite." He didn't know if it had been put up because Bill Barrett and he lived out there, and somebody in the community wanted to let them know what they thought, or if it was just a coincidence.

Brenda had gone into the hospital on the tenth of January and surgery was the eleventh. Six days later, the execution came right in the middle of feeling surgically cut up. The day before, she couldn't believe how many people kept calling. She was being given prayers on the telephone and hearing them again on the radio station. People in the hospital told her they were praying. Then, Geraldo Rivera called and wanted to do a live TV interview in her hospital room. Brenda thought, How atrocious. Got to be kidding.

                She couldn't handle it. The night of Toni's birthday, she had one phone call with Gary and knew it was the last time she was ever going to hear his voice. To add to it, she couldn't sleep. They brought her a Seconal capsule. It didn't do a lot of good. Two hours later, the nurse was in with a flashlight to see if Brenda was asleep. "How can you sleep with that light in your eyes," Brenda grumbled, so the doctor ordered another.

                Every two hours, they gave her Seconal, but she couldn't fail asleep until four in the morning when they came in with a shot.

                Then, she woke up at seven-thirty, half-crocked from the drugs, but had to find out if they were going to kill him or not, Switched on the TV and drove everybody in her room crazy until she heard he had been granted a Stay, first news she picked up that morning, and Brenda went completely bananas, so hysterical she didn't know if she was happy or sad. Then, in a few minutes, reversed. By then, she didn't know if it was her adrenalin or her heart that was flaming up and down. In just a few more seconds it flashed across the screen: GARY GILMORE IS DEAD! The surgeon came to see her a minute or two after this, and stood patiently waiting for an end to her hysterics, said, "How do you feel today?" She thought, "Oh, you simple son of a bitch, get away from me."

                She didn't want anybody near. The doctor asked again how she felt and the nurse explained what had just happened. The doctor said, "Oh, that's really too bad, but they should have wasted him a long time ago." Brenda said, "You can give me my release papers. I want a prescription for pain, and get your ass out of my room." She picked up her pillow and threw it at him. He said, "If you want to get hard about it, I'll suggest you not be released today." She said, "What in the hell do you care for? I don't like you anyway. If I had known you were cutting me, I wouldn't have come in." That was one man she could say she detested by now.

                After he signed the release, she called Johnny. By eleven o'clock she was out. They had to sneak her the back way, so she could get home without a lot of reporters bugging her. Brenda didn't remember a whole lot from that event until three days later.

At the hour of Gilmore's execution, Colleen Jensen was at home in Clearfield getting ready for school. She was now a substitute teacher, and had begun the job just two weeks before. Today, she was having her first class with a new group of students, and while she got dressed that morning thinking the execution was stayed, for that was what she heard on the first news, by the time she reached school, it was over. Kids in the class were talking about it as she came through the door. She could hear their whispers about her involvement in it.

                So, she gave a little speech to the class.

                She did not tell them that in the evenings when she sat downstairs, nursing Monica, and rocking her to sleep, she would show the baby pictures of her daddy, and tell Monica who he was. At such times, Colleen would try to speak to Monica out of the stillness of herself, and thereby tell the one-year-old that Max was dead, her daddy was dead. For now, talking to the class, she merely said that for those who did not know, she would tell them who she was, and what her part in it all had been. She added that it was not something they would need to discuss again. She also said she was ready, if they were, to get on with the teaching and the class.

Phil Hansen woke up and watched in bed that morning, just shaking his head and uppercutting himself. As he looked at the TV, he thought, "If I'd had one inkling they were going to bring off that midnight ride, I would have prepared papers and had Ritter sign another Stay."