The Executioner's Song (147 page)

Later that winter, Noall Wootton was having martinis with a couple of attorneys in the Sheriff's Office of Salt Lake County, and one remarked, "These fellows still want me to prosecute Nicole for smuggling pills in to Gilmore." Noall Wootton said, "Bill, for hell's sake, what's that going to accomplish? Forget it."

                "Well," said Bill, "I already have. I told them I declined it. I am not interested." Under it all, Wootton would have loved to question Nicole to find out how she did get the pills in.

Sam Smith called Vern one day and wanted to know how they smuggled the liquor into the prison.

                "You must be dreaming," Vern told him. "I don't know how." Sam called again. Tried to get him to open up. For some reason, it remained a mystery to Vern.

After the month in Malibu, Nicole decided she liked living in Los Angeles, with her kids, and so she took a house out in the San Fernando Valley that didn't cost too much. Just a shabby little ranch bungalow, five blocks from the very end of town. She could almost have been in Spanish Fork. The desert began down the street, and the mountain rose not a mile away. Nicole tried to keep the kids in day school, hold a job, and go to school herself, but it was a dull stretch. There was no man. There was nothing in her life.

                She bought a camper with some of the money Gary had left her, and got a driving license, and went out to Utah and came back.

                She had not had sex since that night in October with the Sundowner in the middle of Gary's trial, but late in April, returning from Utah, she picked up a hitchhiker. It had been a long, difficult stretch with all kinds of guys trying to make out, and Nicole had been wondering if she could go for the rest of her life without it. Being faithful left her feeling choked up and dull and bored and itchy and intense.

                After she made love to the hitchhiker, she no longer felt Gary's presence near. She didn't feel it after that for a long time. Felt as if he had gone away. That left her depressed and close to dead. Still, she kept on having sex. It didn't solve anything, but not having sex also solved nothing. Either way, she was not going to fall in love.

                Still, sex left her feeling ugly. She tried to figure it out. She was the one who was living. If she had tension and could get rid of a little by making love to somebody, and then, once they were gone, even the memory of them was gone, and had nothing more to do with her, or her body, or her heart, or her memories, so where then was the treachery to Gary?

                Still, sex left her more and more out of touch with him. She was drifting in her heart. It was hard to get started on any program to improve herself. Larry told her she was smart enough to walk right out of the swamp by herself, but the truth was she felt lazy and was tempted to say, "Oh, fuck it, I'm in a swamp. I'll stay here."

                The thought Nicole really wanted to lose was that there was no more Gary. It was a possibility she did not like to consider. It was too depressing to believe he might not be on the other side.

Several times that year, when friends would get to talking about Gilmore, Barry Farrell, in the course of the evening might volunteer a tape. People were curious to hear Gilmore's voice. So Barry would play one of the cassettes, but listening to Gary's voice would totally chill him out. The tapes were so interesting to other people that they never wanted him to turn them off.

Larry was now doing interviews with various people in Provo who had known Gary, and Lucinda kept typing the transcripts. After a couple of months when that job began to peter out, she went to work for David Frost who was doing a series of television interviews with Richard Nixon.

                Lucinda did the work in Los Angeles, transcribing Frost's tapes in an office building in Century City from four o'clock in the afternoon until about eight o'clock in the morning three days a week.

                There she was, locked in this empty skyscraper with Richard Nixon's voice coming out of a tape recorder, and it was not nearly so interesting as Gary Gilmore. She kept hearing Gilmore's voice, and in her mind, he sounded like a cowboy. Mean, gravelly, twangy, economical, boyish, vulnerable, full of love squeezed into tight little pellets.

A year after the execution, Kathryne Baker wrote to Schiller:

                You know, Larry, I used to feel sorry for Gary, but what he's done to my girls, what he's still doing to them, well I could kill him a hundred times over—I live with Gary every day, the fear of him in April, is driving us all crazy! When night comes for her, its a nightmare for all of us. She is scared to death of the dark because "he's out there with a gun killing people." She doesn't say Gary . . . only "He"—and she's truely haunted—at 4 AM last week, hysterical, "He's out there killing people, now he's gone to kill more people—hurry, we got to get up there before He kills more!" this is how it is all the time—even in her sleep—when she sleeps. It makes no difference if we are all here, She must be reassured all night that he can't get in & kill us, no one sleeps the whole night because April wakes us every hour with "Are you allright mama—what are we going to do??!" I tell you Larry I hate Gilmore so bad I wish he was here so I could kill him! April . . . from the things she says in her sleep & her panic at the sight of blood, I guess Gary's shoes and pant-legs must have been covered with blood & brains, I guess so if the wall's were splattered, I don't know what to do anymore, I can't talk to Sissy about her feelings towards Gary, she hides them, but will relate to music and cry long for Gary, it's in poems—I can't talk to April about Gary, because she don't & won't mention his name hardly ever—night before last in her sleep she said, "there he is with blood on him & that crazy look in his eyes."

                Now, who, other than Gary would be tormenting her dreams! I know that crazy look in his eyes—it was there when he came after his gun, when he took April with him—sounds like I need a shrink too huh?? ha ha Well I don't, I'm O.K. just need help in fighting the ghost of Gilmore.

Nicole was sitting in her kitchen one morning in the small apartment she now rented in a small town in Oregon which was where she had wandered after L.A., and she was having coffee with the guy who had been with her the night before. She was reaching out for something on the table when all of a sudden her hand looked strange. She saw the ring of Osiris that Gary had given her, and it was broken. The setting had cracked.

                She had built up a lot of control over all these months, but suddenly it just hurt so bad that she bawled right there at the table, two seconds after she saw the broken ring. It was the first real big cry she'd had about Gary in a long time, a month or so.

                She was not sure there was any such thing anymore as Gary. She didn't know if that was where her belief rested. He was a lot out of her mind. He might really be dead.

In Christmastime of 1977, Vern bought barbells and delivered them to Utah State Prison for the convicts. Gary had asked him to do that after the execution.

                It had not been a good year and it did not get better. Vern's leg was so bad he needed another operation, but he had no money. Because he could not stand on his feet for a full day, he had to sell his store, and then there were the lawsuits against Gary's estate. The State of Utah sued him for Snyder and Esplin's legal fees, and the companies who had guaranteed the life insurance on Max Jensen were suing, and there was still a $1,000,000 suit from Debbie Bushnell.

                Then Ida got a serious stroke, and Vern fed her three meals a day in the hospital for three weeks and tried to teach her to walk and talk again. Since her hospital bill would come to $20,000, he forgot about his own operation.

From the day Brenda told her that Gary committed the murders, one of Bessie's legs turned in at the ankle. Then, from the day Gary was killed, that leg would no longer allow her to walk. Up till then, she had been able to make it over to the office for mail. Now, although the office was only three trailers away, she did not try. The leg didn't want to walk.

                Sitting in her chair, she would remember the haunted house in Salt Lake where the nice Jewish lady had been her neighbor. Bessie would think that whatever it was that lived in the house, whatever it was the nice Jewish lady had warned her against, must in those years have begun to live in Gary.

                Now she heard that Ida had a stroke. Vern turned around one night in the house, and there was Ida with the stroke. Bessie could have told Vern. Whatever had attached itself to Gary long ago in that house in Salt Lake must recently have attached itself to Ida.

                Bessie would not, however, tell Vern. When all was said, she did not know Vern well enough to inform him that the apparition was now sitting in his house.

                She did, however, think of her mother-in-law Fay and the old house in Sacramento where the furniture wouldn't stay in place. Bessie sat in her chair among the coffee cups and the saucers on the table of this trailer, sat in the faded nightgown that looked one hundred and two years old, and said to herself, "I have reached the point of no return from Hell."

                Outside the trailer park, automobiles went by on McLaughlin Boulevard. Once in a while, a car would drive under the battered white wooden archway at the entrance, come up to her dark windows and stop. She could feel them looking. She had received letters that threatened her life and she ignored them. Letters could not hurt a woman whose son had taken four bullets through the heart.

                She also received letters from people who wrote songs about Gary and wanted her permission to publish. She ignored such letters.

                She would just sit there. If a car came at night, came into the trailer park, drove around and slowed up, if it stopped, she knew somebody out in that car was thinking that she was alone by the window.

                Then she would say to herself, "If they want to shoot me, I have the same kind of guts Gary has. Let them come."

The End

FINIS

                Deep in my dungeon I welcome you here       

                Deep in my dungeon I worship your fear

                Deep in my dungeon, I dwell.

                I do not know I'll wish you well.

                Deep in my dungeon I welcome you here

                Deep in my dungeon I worship your fear

                Deep in my dungeon, I dwell.

                A bloody kiss from the wishing well.

                --old prison rhyme

AN AFTERWORD

This book does its best to be a factual account of the activities of Gary Gilmore and the men and women associated with him in the period from April 9, 1976, when he was released from the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, until his execution a little more than nine months later in Utah State Prison. In consequence, The Executioner's Song is directly based on interviews, documents, records of court proceedings, and other original material that came from a number of trips to Utah and Oregon. More than one hundred people were interviewed face to face, plus a good number talked to by telephone. The total, before count was lost, came to something like three hundred separate sessions, and they range in length from fifteen minutes to four hours. Perhaps ten subjects are on tape for more than ten hours each. Certainly, in the last two and a half years, Nicole Baker's interviews have added up to thirty hours, and conversations with Bessie Gilmore may come to more than that. It is safe to say that the collected transcript of every last recorded bit of talk would approach fifteen thousand pages.

                Out of such revelations was this book built and the story is as accurate as one can make it. This does not mean it has come a great deal closer to the truth than the recollections of the witnesses. While important events were corroborated by other accounts wherever possible, that could not, given the nature of the story, always be done, and, of course, two accounts of the same episode would sometimes diverge. In such conflict of evidence, the author chose the version that seemed most likely. It would be vanity to assume he was always right.

                A considerable amount of time was spent trying to establish the sequence of events. My researcher, Jere Herzenberg, discovered that people had characteristic flaws or tics in recollection. Some would always remember separate episodes as taking place a few days apart, when, fact, if one had a provisional calendar already constructed from other sources, a particular adventure might be two weeks apart from another. Since accurate chronology soon showed itself as crucial to understanding motivation, every effort was made to get it right, and not for the sake of history alone. One understood one's characters better when the chronology was correct. Of course, many an event could simply not be given an exact date (as, for instance, the spring night when Nicole and Gary cavorted on the ground in back of the mental hospital). One could only situate it approximately, and hope no critical error of sequence had been made.