The Executioner's Song (82 page)

                "I don't know what I would have told a man who was planning to take his life," Cash said. "Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn't. But I would have tried to talk him out of it."

                The singer said his first impulse was not to get involved. "I told him (the attorney) I wasn't looking for any publicity. I thought I had better mind my own business. Who needs that kind of publicity?"

                When Boaz persisted, saying his client wanted to see Cash or visit him, Cash said he decided to call the prison.

The moment Brenda heard the news, she began to call every hour, but all they would say at Gary's hospital in Salt Lake was that he was still alive. Brenda would ask, "If I go over, will you let me see him?"

                They would reply, "You better be walking in with the Governor if you want to get through." She asked if she could talk, at least, to one of the nurses taking care of him, and they finally put a woman on.

                "Would you please tell Gary that Brenda called and I'm thinking of him dearly," she said. "I'd love him to fight for his life." It was a mind-blower. She never knew if the nurse passed on the message.

                Up at the hospital, they had about decided Gary had not made a real attempt to kill himself. By their best calculation he had taken half of a lethal dose, twenty capsules, about two grams. Three grams represented a 50-percent lethal dose, that is, half the people who took such an amount died. Since Gilmore was a big man, his chance of doing the job with two grams was small. Besides, he had taken the pills just before morning check, That was suspicious. Nicole seemed to have swallowed the same amount many hours earlier and was in much worse condition. After all, she hardly weighed one hundred pounds. He weighed nearly twice as much.

Warden Sam Smith was being interviewed.

INTERVIEWER   Any ideas as to how he may have gotten the substance?

WARDEN             Well, there's a number of possibilities. He could have accumulated his own medication, saved it up, ingested it, he could have obtained it from possibly other inmates living in Maximum Security, it's possible he could have obtained it from those that have visited him.

INTERVIEWER   How easy would it be for someone to take drugs in to the men?

WARDEN             Well, it's virtually impossible to prevent someone from hiding something as small as drugs on their person or in a cavity of the body.

INTERVIEWER   Aren't people searched, though, when they go in and see him?

WARDEN             Yes, the people are given a skin shakedown but that does not mean that you can explore every cavity of the body and ascertain that there is no medication.

INTERVIEWER   As the man responsible for Gilmore's well-being and safety, how do you feel about what happened today?

WARDEN             Of course I feel bad but I recognize realistically that if a person desires to kill themselves then it's pretty difficult to prevent over a prolonged period of time.

INTERVIEWER   Thank you, Sam.

The press was in a savage mood after this interview. One reporter remarked that with Sam Smith to listen to, you didn't need Seconal.

The joke among the press was that looking for a street address in any one of these Utah towns was like trying to locate artillery coordinates on a map. 2575 North 1100 West. "Yes, sir," wrote Barry Farrell in his notebook. "You have the right address. It's just that you're in the wrong town." Barry Farrell, there to do an article for New West, was at a point of frustration where his best pleasure was taking notes. He hated Salt Lake. "There is a Swissness to the place," he wrote, "a complacency that people from the Coast are likely to find infuriating. Getting drunk here is like signing up for methadone maintenance."

                Then he added, "After one o'clock, the only sound downtown is the creaking of the neon signs."

It was hard to get near this story. Everything was shut off. Farrell couldn't remember too many occasions when the center of interest in a story had been so removed. He had not been a writer for Life magazine over many a year without getting into a few places.

                Often, he could obtain interviews others couldn't. There were, however, no interviews here. In his notebook, Farrell wrote, "One can only imagine how suffocating Gilmore must have found it . . . The claustrophobia that ensues when one finds himself without the opportunity to sin."

Earl Dorius was naturally concerned how the drugs had reached Gilmore and he phoned the Warden for information. Sam Smith told him the prime suspects were Nicole Barrett, Dennis Boaz, Vern Damico, Ida Damico, and Brenda Nicol. Dorius thanked him for the information.

When Gibbs heard the news, he thought back to a discussion with Gary on how to smuggle drugs into Maximum. It was his advice, he remembered, to use balloons.

                That night when Big Jake came on duty, he told Gibbs the prison officials were stupid. Why, the Provo Police had informed the prison that Nicole picked up two prescriptions of Seconal the day prior to these suicide attempts. Yet they still didn't give her a real search. Big Jake looked at Gibbs and added, "I'll bet you educated him on how to get the stuff inside." Big Jake put on a big grin and walked off.

DESERET NEWS

Most Letters Urge Clemency

Nov. 16— . . . A Minneapolis man asked why Gilmore should be singled out for execution when other convicted killers live.

                "Former Lt. William Cailey, convicted of the 'premeditated murder of not less than 22 Oriental human beings,' is now walking the streets," he wrote.

Ironically, George Latimer, chairman of the Board of Pardons which will decide Gilmore's fate, was Calley's chief civilian defense attorney.

DESERET NEWS

Nov. 16—The Daughters of Wisdom in Litchfield, Connecticut, speaking of Gilmore, said, "We believe he is meant to do something worthwhile for mankind. He needs time to find out what that something is."

DESERET NEWS

Nov. 16— . . . Max Jensen's father, David Jensen, an Idaho farmer and stake president in the LDS Church, said, "His death made us feel sad, but it's something we are accepting. We sure wouldn't want to trade places with Gilmore's parents."

DESERET NEWS

Nov. 6—Bushnell's widow, who is expecting another child shortly after the first of the year, has gone to California to live with her mother-in-law. Family members say she goes to pieces at a mention of her husband's name.

Chapter 7

Taste

On Monday evening, while Nicole was going over her Last Will and Testament, Larry Schiller drove out to the International Airport in L.A. to buy a copy of Newsweek's cover story on Gary Gilmore. Schiller knew that airports received magazines a day earlier than the average outlet, and sometimes, working on a story, when he had to have a newsmagazine ahead of the competition, he'd even look up the local distributor.

                Schiller spent part of Monday evening going over that cover story. It told him there were five people's rights he would have to buy. Gary's obviously, and Nicole's made two, but Monday night, for the first time, he heard of April Baker and decided he had better get her as well. Then he read Brenda Nicol's name in the article, and saw she was responsible for getting Gary out of jail. That could be a key link in the story. Brenda's rights had to be obtained. He didn't know she was Vern Damico's daughter, or even related to him, but Vern was the fifth name on his list.

                First thing Tuesday morning, he called Lou Rudolph at ABC, and told him of his great interest in the story. There were a lot of different ways to do it, Schiller said, and quickly laid out a number of possibilities. He had learned a long time ago that in television you had to sell executives on the subject first. Had to establish it would still be bona fide television even if you did not obtain all the rights. If, for example, he got Gilmore's okay without Nicole's, a scenario could be worked up of a guy who comes out of prison and struggles with his old con habits, but finally kills a man, a real study of the pains of getting out of jail. That way they could do capital punishment and whether a man had a right to die, and never need to touch upon a love story.

On the other hand, said Schiller, if they got the girl, but couldn't succeed in signing up Gilmore, they might do an interesting struggle of two sisters both in love with the same criminal. They'd have to substitute a fictionalized criminal, but could still explore the triangle.

                Or they could focus completely on Nicole and turn the thing into a study of a young girl who has been married a few times, is saddled with children, then falls in love with a criminal. Play down the murders, but emphasize the romantic difficulties of trying to live with a man that society does not trust.

                Schiller was not trying to impose judgment, he told Rudolph, on the relative merits of these separate scenarios. He was just saying you could bypass Gilmore, make it a woman's story, and still have something of value.

No sooner had he hung up, than the radio was informing him that Gilmore and Nicole had tried a joint suicide. Immediately he booked a plane ticket to Salt Lake. At the airport, he called Rudolph again to suggest another alternative. Still, assuming they couldn't get the rights to Gilmore, they could do a study of a girl who wanted to die and so entered into a suicide pact with a criminal, thereby looking for a star-struck way to solve an unendurable problem.

Schiller repeated that he was sure of the potentialities, and wanted ABC to finance him in a real way. Not hotel bills or airplane fares, Schiller said, because that, Lou, he could always handle with his credit cards, no, Schiller wanted backing to get in there and deal for Gilmore. He would call again from Salt Lake.

He might have known. The moment that suicide attempt hit the media, not only was Larry Schiller on the plane, but everybody was heading for Salt Lake, ready to check into the Hilton where each of the media monkeys could watch all the other monkeys. There were going to be a lot of monkeys in that zoo.

From stories that got back to him, Schiller knew he was well known in the media for his impatience and his funds of energy. He always gave his big friendly grin when he heard such stories. They protected his secret weapon: it was that he had patience. He didn't tell people. Cultivated the opposite image. But he didn't mind being in situations where he just had to sit and wait. Give him an airplane trip or a waiting room. If you counted the years from the age of fourteen when he began to make money as an expert on skid marks, he had, by his own estimate, been running like a maniac for close to twenty-five years. So he didn't mind sitting on occasion.

His father, who once managed the Davega store in Times Square, and knew enterprise when he saw it, bought him a Rollei-cord when he was a kid, and a police band radio, and Schiller would hear accidents come in on the radio, get on his bike and ride to the place. If it was far away, and he only arrived after the vehicles had been removed, he could still photograph the skid marks. Then he would sell the prints to the insurance companies. It was his apprenticeship for getting to the scene.

Having broken into the media as one of Life's youngest photographers, Schiller had covered Khrushchev at the United Nations, and Madame Nhu in a convent, was at the Vatican when the Pope died, and took a picture of Nixon crying as he lost to Kennedy, a famous picture. He knew how to travel without a suitcase. Syndicated the Fisher quintuplets' story and photographed the Alaska earthquakes, Dallas and Watts, the Olympics, covered the trial of Sirhan Sirhan.

                He reported income over six figures before he was twenty-four, and got awful tired of photographing different heads on the same body.

                He was conceivably the best one-eyed photographer in the world—lost the sight of the other in an accident when he was five years old—but he got weary of walking into people's lives, shaking their hands, photographing them, walking out. He left Life and went into producing books and movies and fast magazine syndications on stories that weren't small. Wanted to do people in depth. Instead, did Jack Ruby on his deathbed, and Susan Atkins in the Manson trial.

                He got a terrible reputation. Schiller worked hard to change that image. He published a book, Minamata, about mercury poisoning in Japan, and created the still montages in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Lady Sings the Blues, produced and directed The American Dreamer with Dennis Hopper, did the interviews for a book on Lenny Bruce by Albert Goldman. He won an Academy Award in Special Category for The Man Who Skied down Everest. It did not matter. He was the journalist who dealt in death.

Sitting on the airplane, resting from twenty-five years of galloping out of explosions into cover portraits, from riots to elections, sitting in one place with the fatigue of that twenty-five years embedded like skid marks in his limbs, sitting on this plane full of media monkeys heading for Salt Lake, Schiller thought it through. The Gilmore story would not help his reputation, yet he could not let it go. It irritated the nerve in him that never gave up