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Thread: Gary Mark Gilmore - Utah Execution - January 17, 1977

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    Gary Mark Gilmore - Utah Execution - January 17, 1977


    Max Jensen


    Gary Gilmore was born Faye Coffman in McCamey, Texas on December 4, 1940.


    Facts of the Crime:
    On the evening of July 19, 1976, Gilmore robbed and murdered Max Jensen, a Sinclair gas station employee in Orem, Utah. The next evening, he robbed and murdered Bennie Bushnell, a motel manager in Provo. He murdered these people even though they complied with his demands. As he disposed of his .22 caliber pistol used in both killings, he accidentally shot himself in the hand, leaving a trail of blood from the gun to the service garage where he had left his truck to be repaired shortly before the murder of Bushnell. The garage owner, seeing the blood and hearing on a police scanner of the shooting at the nearby motel, wrote down Gilmore's license number and called the police. Gilmore's cousin, Brenda, turned him in to police shortly thereafter, after he placed a phone call to her asking for bandages and painkillers for the injury to his hand. Gilmore gave up without a fight as he was trying to drive out of Provo. He was charged with the murders of Bushnell and Jensen, although the latter case never went to trial, apparently because there were no eyewitnesses.

    Victims: Max Jensen and Bennie Bushnell

    Time of Death: 8:07 AM

    Manner of Executon: Firing Squad

    Last Meal: Steak, potatoes, milk and coffee

    Final Words: “Let’s do it.”

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    Gary 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, 70ml 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 absorb the bullets. Five gunmen, local police, stood concealed behind a curtain with five small holes cut for them to place their rifles through. When asked for any last words, Gilmore simply replied, "Let's do it!" The Rev. Thomas Meersman, the Roman Catholic prison chaplain, imparted Gilmore's last rites. 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")[1]

    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.

    (Source: Wiki)

  3. #3
    Senior Member Frequent Poster joe_con's Avatar
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    November 29, 1976

    Firing Squad or Drug Overdose: Gary Gilmore Claims His Right to Die


    What motivated Gary Mark Gilmore, 35, to insist that he be put to death in so dramatic a manner as the firing squad? Or unexpectedly try to cheat the state last week by swallowing an overdose of Seconals? The enigmatic killer's case will be argued in psychiatric, as well as legal, circles for a long time as the U.S. considers reviving the death penalty, dormant for nine years.

    Gilmore, who killed two men on successive nights in July, has asked for a method of execution that seems bizarre in 1976. The condemned man is strapped into a wooden chair. A black hood is lowered over his head and a target of black cloth is pinned directly on his heart. Twenty feet in front of him the barrels of five .30-caliber Winchester rifles protrude through a black mesh screen that hides the marksmen. Only four of the rifles contain real bullets. There is no provision for a coup de grace.

    To the few people who know Gilmore well, the horror of that scene heightens the bravery—or lunacy, or exaggerated masculinity—of the man. His attempt to kill himself complicates the puzzle even further. (Gilmore's girlfriend, Nicole Barrett, also overdosed the same day.) Cline Campbell, the Mormon chaplain of Utah State Prison, who visits Gilmore every day, says: "I am convinced that his desire to be executed is sincere and sane." The chaplain told Salt Lake City's Deseret News that Gilmore, who had been in reform schools and prisons from his 14th year until he was paroled last April, feels remorse. His two victims were strangers to him—Max Jensen, 24, an Orem, Utah gas station attendant, and Bennie Bushnell, 26, a motel night manager in Provo. "They probably didn't deserve to die," Gilmore has said.

    The second oldest of four brothers, Gilmore was born Dec. 4, 1940 in McCamey, Texas. His father was Frank Gilmore, a publisher who drank heavily and died in 1962. He raised Gary as a Catholic, but the boy heard about Mormon beliefs from his mother. Though he since has studied a number of religious ideas, Gilmore belongs to no church. "He believes in a life after death," says Chaplain Campbell, "at least that he is going someplace and report. And he believes that if he voluntarily gives his life, it will pay the price somewhat."

    Dennis Boaz, Gilmore's court-approved counsel, agrees. (Gilmore dismissed two court-appointed lawyers when they appealed his death sentence.) "He believes that the soul evolves," Boaz says, "and there is reincarnation, and that the manner in which he dies can be a learning experience for others."

    The only women Gilmore, a sometime poet and artist, seems to care about are his mother and Nicole. They agree he should die if he wants to. Nicole, a 19-year-old mother of two, walked out on Gilmore, setting off the drinking spree that culminated in the killings. Nonetheless, she went along with his notion that they should marry before his execution. Nicole said death "is his right; he believes in it, he wants it, and I just want what he wants."

    His widowed mother, who lives in a trailer park in Milwaukie, Oreg., remembers Gary as a Cub Scout whose hero was Gary Cooper: "He's 35. He has walked around the brim of hell. He can make up his own mind. I love Gary very, very much, and I don't want to see him die, but I won't interfere."

    http://www.people.com/people/archive...067149,00.html
    Last edited by Helen; 11-27-2014 at 06:01 PM. Reason: spacing, added date, bold heading

  4. #4
    Senior Member Frequent Poster joe_con's Avatar
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    January 11, 1987

    10 Years Later, Victims Can't Forget Gary Gilmore : Utah Killer Spurned Appeals, Demanded His Quick Execution

    SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Until the volley of rifle fire ripped through the target over his heart 10 years ago, Gary Gilmore could have changed the script. He was, after all, its author.

    The death sentence he refused to appeal on Jan. 17, 1977, became the first carried out in the United States in a decade. It was bound to bring public attention and stir debate.

    It was the killer's demand for his own death, however--his preference for the firing squad over the cells that had held him--that brought his case into international celebrity.

    "You sentenced me to die. Unless it's a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it," Gilmore told District Judge J. Robert Bullock as he refused to file appeals that could still be keeping him alive today.

    In the ensuing 2 1/2-month death watch, Gilmore twice attempted suicide with the only woman he said he ever loved, stopped eating for 25 days to protest unwanted legal efforts to keep him alive, sold his life story and made the cover of Newsweek.

    Spurned ACLU's Help

    He told the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, to "butt out" of his case, and convinced the U.S. Supreme Court that he was knowingly waiving his appeal rights. Finally, he dodged a federal judge's 11th-hour stay. State lawyers took a predawn flight to Denver and got the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to lift the order 31 minutes before the execution.

    Strapped into a chair in an old cannery at Utah State Prison, Gilmore said, "Let's do it," and the five-man firing squad pulled the triggers.

    It was a tale worthy of a book, Norman Mailer decided as he strolled down New York's Fifth Avenue with Lawrence Schiller, who had paid Gilmore $52,000 for the rights to his story. That book, "The Executioner's Song" earned Mailer a Pulitzer Prize and was the basis of Schiller's television movie of the same title.

    Many lives were changed by Gary Gilmore, whose notoriety in death obscured his earlier crimes.

    In the summer of 1976, three months after he had served 11 years for armed robbery, Gilmore robbed and killed Orem service station attendant Max Jensen, 24, and Provo motel manager Bennie Bushnell, 25, on the nights of July 21 and 22.

    Victims Left Families

    The young men were ordered to lie down and then were shot in the head. Both were students at Brigham Young University; both left widows with infants.

    Debbie Bushnell, who held her husband's head in her lap as he died, gave birth to the couple's second child a few weeks after Gilmore's execution.

    Unlike Jensen's widow, Colleen, Debbie Bushnell has not remarried. It was a long time before she could get over the smell of blood, and 10 years hasn't erased the feeling that much of her own life died on that motel floor.

    "It is a lonely nightmare, and there's no other way to describe it," Bushnell said. "I was widowed at 24, but I might as well have been 80. I really went through the ringer."

    Colleen Jensen Ostergaard, who is close to Bushnell, acknowledges the differences in their grief: "I didn't find my husband dead, and I'm grateful for that."

    Bushnell said that Gilmore's death "didn't make things right with me," but that she feels better off than the families of murder victims who must endure years of appeals for the killers.

    Killed in Jealous Rage

    Gilmore committed the murders in a rage over the breakup of his romance with Nicole Baker, a pretty, thrice-married mother of two. In Mailer's account, Gilmore punctuated the shots that killed Jensen with the words: "This one is for me. This one is for Nicole."

    "He was killing Nicole twice," Gilmore's cousin and lifelong friend, Brenda Nicol, agreed in a recent interview. "(The victims) were just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

    Nicol, who had co-sponsored Gilmore's parole and whose testimony later helped to convict him of the murders, suffered a nervous collapse a year after the execution. She tried to commit suicide the night a man tried to pay his tab at the tavern where she worked with a belt made from a strap that had held Gilmore's leg to the death chair.

    "I really felt guilty about the men Gary had killed," she said.

    For years, Gilmore's uncle, Vern Damico, dreamed about the execution his nephew asked him to attend. "I could hear those rifles going off so many times you wouldn't believe," he said.

    Killer's Last Night

    Damico smuggled Gilmore some miniature bottles of bourbon on the eve of the execution. He said the condemned man knew that he deserved to die and wanted to prove that he could accept punishment like a man.

    "No one--and I mean not even James Cagney--could have been any braver," Damico said.

    Nicole Baker, now 30, is trying to forget her former lover without much success.

    "I have a tendency to think about Gary, about how it might have been," she said in an interview.

    Although he forgave her many past loves, Gilmore was wildly jealous of any but him in her future. When the couple reconciled after the murders, Gilmore persuaded her to slip him sleeping pills and join him in a suicide pact.

    http://articles.latimes.com/1987-01-...1_gary-gilmore
    Last edited by Helen; 11-27-2014 at 05:58 PM. Reason: spacing, bold heading & sub headings, move date & source

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    Arrests Expected at U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, DC on 40th Anniversary of First Execution

    Members of the anti-death penalty Abolitionist Action Committee (AAC) and many faith leaders will stage a highly visual demonstration at the U.S. Supreme Court in the 10:00 am hour, Tuesday, January 17 to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1st execution under contemporary laws. A program featuring death row exonerees, murder victim family members and others, will take place the evening before.

    “Executions, death sentences and capital indictments are at record lows across the nation, and only a handful of jurisdictions still use it aggressively,” said Bill Pelke, a spokesman for the Abolitionist Action Committee. “We are prayerfully calling on the new president and leaders in the few states where it is still used to stand down on the death penalty.”

    40 years ago, on January 17, 1977, the State of Utah shot to death Gary Gilmore, who was executed in revenge for his murder of Ben Bushnell and Max Jenson. This was the 1st execution under the Supreme Court’s upholding of new death penalty laws in its 1976 ruling in Gregg v. Georgia. Since then there have been 1442 more executions. 5 more executions are scheduled in January already, including 1 in Virginia on January 18.

    Dozens of participants from across the United States and representing numerous faith-based and civil rights oriented organizations (listed below) are expected to peacefully and visibly call for an immediate cessation of all executions in the United States through non-violent civil disobedience and the risk of arrest. They will display a 30-foot long banner and 40 posters – each poster listing by year the names of all the men and women executed in the United States since 1977.

    Among the participants will be:

    [SCADP Note: Three SCADP members will again be present for the action. In order to be able to march at the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21, we will not risk arrest this time, but rather help with logistics of the events. However, two of us have been arrested at this action in the past, one twice and one three times.]

    * Numerous family members of homicide victims
    * Derrick Jamison, a member of Witness to Innocence, survived 20 years on Ohio’s death row for a crime he had nothing to do with
    * Randy Gardner, whose brother, like Gilmore, was executed in Utah by firing squad. “My Brother Ronnie Lee Gardner was executed June 18, 2010 by the same state and the same method as Gilmore,” says Gardner. “I believed then, and I still believe now, that the death penalty is morally wrong. I never condoned what my brother did, but when the state executes someone, they create yet another family that is damaged and grieving. We don’t have to kill to be safe from dangerous criminals and hold them accountable. It is time to abolish the death penalty.”
    * Shane Claiborne, a leader in the Red Letter Christian movement and author of the book, Executing Grace. Claiborne will be joined by numerous other evangelical and other faith leaders.

    Since 1997, a total of 48 arrests have been made of death penalty abolitionists for unfurling banners that read “STOP EXECUTIONS!” on the plaza or stairs leading to the front doors of the U.S. Supreme Court. This action has been repeated every 5 years. The tradition continues, and this year participation is increasing significantly.

    This protest is organized by The Abolitionist Action Committee, an ad-hoc group of individuals committed to highly visible and effective public education for alternatives to the death penalty through nonviolent direct action. Participating organizations and individuals include:

    Abolitionist Action Committee
    Campaign for Nonviolence
    Catholic Mobilizing Network
    Center for Action and Contemplation
    Consistent Life Network
    Embrey Human Rights Program
    Evangelicals for Social Action
    Faith in Public Life
    Journey of Hope … From Violence to Healing
    National Council of Churches
    OPEN
    People of Faith Against the Death Penalty
    PICO Network LIVE FREE Campaign
    RAW Tools
    Red Letter Christians
    Repairers of the Breach
    Sojourners
    We Stand With Love
    Witness to Innocence

    http://sc-abolish.org/arrests-expect...rst-execution/
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  6. #6
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    I remember seeing the December 11, 1976 SNL episode from which the transcript below comes. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the clip itself to post here.




    Let's Kill Gary Gilmore For Christmas

    Written by: Michael O'Donoghue

    ... Candice Bergen
    ... Gilda Radner
    ... Dan Aykroyd
    ... Jane Curtin
    ... John Belushi
    ... Laraine Newman
    ... Garrett Morris

    [Candice Bergen stands before the well-trimmed Christmas tree at home base and addresses the camera.]

    Candice Bergen: One night this July, Gary Gilmore killed a Utah service station attendant and the next night he shot a twenty-five year old student twice in the head. He was convicted of the second murder and sentenced to death. Gilmore requested that the sentence be carried out by firing squad. Prison officials were flooded with calls with people volunteering to shoot Gilmore, a job which pays a hundred and twenty-five dollars. Gilmore's lawyer is negotiating with publishers and motion picture studios for book and movie rights and there has been a cry for public execution. [holds up a New York Post with a large front page headline: The Gilmore Ruling: KILL HIM] All three networks have asked permission to film the event and, if permission is not granted, then there's talk of filming the execution, from a dirigible, helicopter or hang glider. And so it's in this spirit that Saturday Night has prepared a very special Christmas song.

    [As the music begins, we dissolve to the giant Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center and then to a close-up of Gilda Radner, her hair and face pelted with artificial snow, as she sings:]

    Gilda Radner:
    There's a little guy in Utah with a single Christmas wish For one special thing that can't be substituted Doesn't want to get electric trains, get toys or get pet fish All he really wants to get is executed

    [Dissolve wide to take in the rest of the cast, dressed in holiday sweaters amid falling snow, women in the front row, men in back. Everyone sings:]

    Cast:
    So let's kill Gary Gilmore for Christmas
    Let's hang him from atop the Christmas tree
    Let's give to him the only gift that money can't buy
    Put poison in his egg nog, let him drink it, watch him die

    [Dan Aykroyd talks while the others hum softly:]

    Dan Aykroyd:
    Let's throw another yule log on the fire
    And then let's throw Gary Gilmore on there too
    With a ribbon so gay and a card that will say
    "Dear Gary, Merry Christmas to you"

    Jane, Laraine, Gilda:
    In the meadow, we can build a snowman
    One with Gary Gilmore packed inside

    John, Garrett, Dan:
    We'll say "Are you dead yet?" He'll say "No, man"

    Cast:
    But we'll wait out the frostbite till he dies

    Gilda:
    I've one Christmas wish

    Jane, Laraine, John, Garrett, Dan:
    Just ask it

    Gilda:
    Please put Gary in a casket

    Cast:
    So let's toll the silver bells for him
    While he can still hear what they say
    Ding dong ding dong
    You're dead, so long
    We can thrill Gary Gilmore
    If we kill Gary Gilmore
    On this Christmas Day

    [Dissolve back to the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.]

    http://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76jgilmore.phtml

  7. #7
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Moh View Post
    I remember seeing the December 11, 1976 SNL episode from which the transcript below comes. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the clip itself to post here.
    Back when SNL was funny. I found the audio of the skit.

    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

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