Snyder and Esplin got in touch with Bessie Gilmore. Gary was right-she could not travel. There was the cousin, Brenda Nicol, only Gary was angry at her. At the Preliminary Hearing on August 3, he had waved to her across the Court. Thought she was there to see him. Soon learned that Noall Wootton had called her. On the stand, Brenda told of the phone call Gary made from the Orem Police Station. “I asked him what he would like me to tell his mother,” Brenda had said on the stand. “He said, ‘I guess you can tell her it’s true.’ ” Mike Esplin tried to get Brenda to agree Gary meant it was true he had been charged with murder. Brenda repeated her testimony, and took no sides. Gary found that hard to forgive.
Still, the lawyers tried. They talked to Brenda on the phone. Snyder thought she was flippant and more than a little frightened of Gilmore. He had told her, she said, that he would get even with her for turning him in. Lately, there had been an orange van following her car. She thought it might be a friend of Gary’s.
She said she had gone out on a limb to get Gary out of prison, and felt he’d kind of stabbed her in the back. She loved him very much, she said, but thought he was goin. g to have to pay for what he had done.
Later, the lawyers phoned again. On the Monday night that Gary came to her house with April, did he seem to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol? Those were mitigating circumstances. Brenda repeated what April had said, “I’m really afraid of you when you get that way, Gary.” She liked Gary, Brenda repeated, but he deserved what he was going to get. At best, Brenda would be a dangerous witness, decided Snyder and Esplin,
They called Spencer McGrath, and he said he liked Gary, but was very disappointed over the turn of events. The mothers of a couple of young fellows he had working for him were indignant that
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he had hired a criminal. He was now catching about all the trouble he needed. People would stop him on the street and say, “How’s it feel, Spencer, to have had a murderer on your payroll?” That wasn’t helping his projects any.
They never talked to Vern Damico. Gary kept saying that his relationship with his relatives had not been that good. Besides, the lawyers received a report of a conversation with Vern from Utah State Hospital:
Mr. Damico gave me the following information regarding Gary Gilmore:
He doesn’t like to be defeated, and when he is, he will not forget it and won’t forgive. He is also very revengeful and has Mr. Damieo’s family very frightened as they were the ones who turned him in. He has written a letter to his cousin and told her he hopes she has night mares for turning him in. The family is also a little concerned that he will break out of jail or the hospital as he has a history of that in the past.
They were down to searching for a psychiatrist who would declare Gilmore insane. Failing that, Snyder and Esplin were looking to find a paragraph in one of the psychiatric reports or even a sentence they could use.
PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSESSMENT
Dates of Assessment: August lO, II, 13 and I4, 1976
Assessment Procedures: Interviews with patient
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory Bipolar Psychological Inventory Sentence Completion Shipley Institute for Living Bender-Gestalt Graham Kendall Rorschach
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Mr. Gilmore said at one point, “All week long I had this unreal feel ing, like I was seeing things through water, or I was watching myself do things. Especially this night, everything felt like I had this unreal feeling, like I was watching at a distance of what I was doing… had this cloudy feeling. I went in and told the guy to give me the money, and I told him to lay down on the floor, and then I shot him. . . I know it’s all real, and I know I did it, but somehow or other, I don’t feel too responsible. It was as though I had to do it. I can re member when I was a boy I would put my finger over the end of a BB gun and pull the trigger to see if a BB was really in it, or stick my finger in water and put it in a light socket to see if it really would shock me, It seemed like I just had to do it, that there was a compul sion for me to do these things.”
Intellectual Functioning:
Gary is functioning in the above-average to superior range of in telligence. His vocabulary IQ was I4o, his abstraction IQ was I2O, and his full-scale IQ was I29. He said that he had read an awful lot in his life, and indeed, he missed only two words on the vocabulary test ….
Personality Integration:
On the paper-pencil personality test, Gary shows himself to be an individual who is very hostile, socially deviant, currendy unhappy with his life, and insensitive to the feelings of other people. He has a high hostility component toward the establishment ….
Summary and Conclusion:
In summary, Gary is a 35-Year-old Caucasian single male.., of superior intellect. There is no evidence of organic brain damage. Gary is basically a personality disorder of the psychopathic or antisocial type, I think, however, that there may be some substance to his talk about the depersonalization symptoms that he experienced during the week that he was separated from Nicole and during the shooting of these two people. It is clear, however, that he knew what he was doing …. I see no alternative other than to return him to court for further legal processing.
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I8 August I976
Neurologic Consultation
He indicated he occasionally has jagged lines across his visual fields, especially on the right, followed by inability to see for about to minutes followed by severe headache, which is occasionally accompanied by a dizziness. Headache lasts an hour or so, then goes away. The headache always follows a visual experience, but he also has other headaches which are sometimes “real bad,” which come without this and may occur at any time. These occur with considerable variability, and at times he has used Fiorinal almost every day because this usually stops it, whereas aspirin, Tylenol, and other things have not seemed to help. He has been struck in the head in some fights, but has not been knocked out. A few months ago he suffered a laceration in the left eyebrow region, which has healed well. As a youth, his brother tended to hit him on the back of the neck and he thinks he may have a vertebra out of place, and has recurring neck aches.
He reports that from his youth he has had a tendency towards compulsive behavior. He would get a thought in his mind and not be able to keep himself from doing it. He gives as an example going out to the middle of a train trestle and waiting until the train came to the end of the trestle before starting to run in the opposite direction to get off the trestle before the train caught up with him. While in the penitentiary on a fifth tier, he would get a compulsion to stand up on a railing and touch the ceiling above, with the possibility of failing 5o feet to the floor below ….
His unusual behavior in response to a sense of compulsion and his alleged spotty amnesia will require further appraisal from the psychiatric point of view, but at this point it seems quite unlikely that they represent any sort of seizure manifestation.
MADISON H. THOMAS, M.D.
August 3I, 976
StaJZJ: Presentation:
DR. HOWELL HOW many ECTs did you get?
ANSWER Well, they told me they gave me one series of six.., the doctor they had working there at the penitentiary, the psychiatrist, that was his cure-all for everything. If you got violent or got out of
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line or whatever, or he figured you needed to be a little more passive, he would, you know, hook you up to Bonneville Dam.
DR. WOODS So a lot of guys got hooked up to Bonneville Dam.
ANSWER Yeah, while he was working there. One hell of a lot of
guys.
DR. LEE6UE Now why did you get the Prolixin? What happened
there?
ANSWER Well, there was another riot. It happened in the hole and it took them about x days to contain it. I was chained for two weeks, and during that time they came in and shot me with Prollxin. They were giving me cc’s twice a week, and I had lost 5o, maybe a little bit more, 50 pounds by the time they finally let me up out of that nightmare.
DR. hOWELL About how many would you guess you had?
ANSWER They were giving me two shots a week for four months.
DR. KIGEa You have got clean psychiatric reports eleven out of twelve. The whole time you have been in the prison system except one. One report.., said you had a paranoid psychotic state. Do you recall when that one was?
ANSWER God, it’s so easy to be accused of being paranoid in prison. I mean maybe I had a disagreement with somebody and they were in a position to say I was paranoid and thereby dismiss whatever the thing was. I don’t know.
DR. HOWELL During that time you don’t see yourself as having been mentally ill.
ANSWER A lot of those guards are mentally ill.
DENNIS CULLIMORE, MEDICAL STAFF WORKER Was there anything
either of the evenings of the murders about your mental state that was different than usual?
ANSWER Well, I didn’t have — all of the strings had been cut, like I didn’t have control of myself. I mean I was just going through motions. I wasn’t planning anything. These things were just occurring …
DENNIS CJLLIMORE, MSW At what point did you know that you were
going to shoot him?
ANSWER When I shot him. I didn’t know it before then.., it just seemed like it was the next move in a motion that was happening, you know.
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DR. KIGER Have you had other emotionally charged episodes where you didn’t remember all that happened at that time?
ANSWER I’m not really excitable, you know, I don’t get emotional. Some things I let weigh on me pretty heavy, but it’s not the sort of thing that mounts and builds, you know. It’s not a spur of the mo ment thing.
DR. LEBECUE That feeling that you described to several of us about somehow things being unreal like seeing through water, has that happened to you before this summer?
ANSWER Not, not really.., only there have been times when life seems to slow down and you can watch movement more intensely. Like if you get in a tight situation, a fight situation, or something like that, the feeling there is somewhat similar to this.
DR. KICER Anything similar to when you are on grass?
ANSWER When you are on grass, you just trip along and everything is fine, but when you’re in a tense situation, I don’t know. No, I can’t say that I have really experienced that feeling before.
DR. LEBECUE SO, it was something new to you.
ANSWER Yeah, I would say so.
DENNIS CULLIMORE, MSW Does anyone have anything else? OK.
DR. WOODS Thanks for coming in, Gary.
ANSWER All right.
Comprehensive Treatment Plan
A report will be made to the court stating that the patient is both competent and responsible.
BRECK LEBEGUE, M.D. Resident in Psychiatry
Formulation:
This is a 35-year-old white male who is here for psychiatric evaluation. There is no evidence of thought disorder or psychosis, amnesia, organic brain damage, seizures, or any other behavior of pathology which would prevent him from conferring with his attor ney and standing trial on the charges. He is aware of the circum stances and of his actions. He does describe some symptoms of deper—
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sonalization during the actions, but it is not uncommon for those who murder to undergo a temporary process of dehumanization. I feel that he was responsible for his actions at the time of the incident.
Staff Diagnosis:
Personality disorder of the antisocial type.
BRECK LEBEGUE, M.D. Resident in Psychiatry
Gilmore gave off no aura of the psychotic. The more Snyder and Esplin searched these staff reports and transcripts, the less they en countered madness, and the more he appeared grim, ironic, practical. There was hardly a wall in the law you could not climb if you could get onto some little thing, some legal grip with which to raise yourself to find another hold. There were cracks in many a block of law, but in the Gilmore case, these psychiatric walls offered nothing.
They took the problem to Dr. Woods, who had seen a lot of Gary at the ward level, and John Woods went over it with them. The law yers came up so often to his office that he began to worry about it. Woods was young to be Director of the Forensic Program, and he liked his job, and was intellectually stimulated by the therapeutic ideas of his superior, Dr. Kiger, whom he thought was one hell of an innovator. So, Woods didn’t want to get the hospital in any trouble, and worried a little over the correctness of all these visits. On the other hand, he didn’t mind helping the defense lawyers and enjoyed contemplating the problem. Finally, he told himself, Well, ff the pros ecuting attorney wants to talk about these things, I’ll help him too. I’m here to give any information I can.
Woods thought that if Gary’s defense was to be based on his mental condition, then Snyder and Esplin had to’ come up with an argument that would connect the psychotic to the psychopathic. Not easy. The law recognized insanity. You could always save the neck of
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a psychotic. Psychopathy, however, was more a madness of the moral reflexes, if you could begin to use such a term (which you couldn’t) in a Court of Law. Woods pointed to one interview where Gary, speaking of the moment he shot himself, said, “I looked at my thumb and thought, ‘You stupid son of a bitch!’ ” That was hardly a psychotic reaction. Morally self-centered, yes. Criminally indifferent to the mortal damage just done to others, yes, but there was no psychological incapacity to grasp his practical situation. If you were practical, then you were liable.