“Gary didn’t invite you.”
“I don’t care whether he did or not. I’m not going to see him I’m there to wait for you.”
“No,” Nicole said, “I’ll go myself.”
“Get it straight, kid,” said Kathryne, “I’m taking you.”
Then the news came over the radio. None of them could believe it. Gary’s execution had been delayed again.’ Governor Rampton had just issued a Stay. The radio announcer kept repeating it in an excited voice.
Tamera was sure glad her editor had said to stick with Nicole. Otherwise, she might have run back to the newspaper to see if they needed her. Instead, she could now offer to take Nicole over to the prison. On the way, Nicole gave her the key to the apartment in Springville. Told her she could pick up the letters, and hold them.
During that twenty-minute trip to the prison, Nicole still looked calm, but Tamera knew she was stunned. What came off was one clear message: Gary would now have to commit suicide. That was bringing it very near to Nicole.
She started telling Tamera about her mother-in-law, Marie Barrett. Really liked Marie, she said, liked her a lot better than Jim Barrett. Marie was a groovy lady and loved Sunny and Jeremy. Nicole said she would have always gotten along great with her, if Marie .hadn’t been such a super housekeeper. Nicole liked to keep the house clean, but her mother-in-law had to do it her way. Other than that, she was terrific. Nicole had about decided Sunny and Jeremy ought to grow up with Marie after she was gone.
Then she told Tamera about the last time she saw Marie. It was just after Kip had been killed.
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“NOW, it will happen to Gary soon,” Nicole had said to Marie Barrett, “I don’t know what there is about me.”
She had been feeling miserable all over. Marie said, “Nicole, maybe next time, you’ll find a fellow you can have a good relationship with. Just be more careful. Check him out a little more before you get married.”
Nicole said, “There won’t be another time.”
“You’re through with men?” Marie asked.
Nicole said, “I don’t know what I mean, but there won’t be another time.” She almost gave it away. “If something happens to me,” Nicole said, “would you take the kids?”
“Sure, I would,” Marie said, “you know I would. Only nothing’s going to happen to you.”
“Then, that afternoon,” Nicole said to Tamera, “the cops came around to Sprmgville anti knocked on the door and kind of looked me over.” Just made polite conversation at the door, but she knew Marie had sent them. Nicole would still trust her with the children, only she didn’t know about confiding in her personally. Tamera took it as a message.
Soon as she dropped her at the prison, Tamera returned to Nicole’s apartment, picked up the letters, put them in a grocery sack, and searched the place for a gun or sleeping pills. Didn’t know what she would do if she did find something, but made the search.
PROVO HERALD
Nov. 11, I976. Salt Lake City (UPI)- Utah Governor Calvin L. Rampton asked the Utah Board of Pardons to review Gilmore’s conviction at their next meeting on Wednesday, November I7, and decide if the death penalty is justified.
Gilmore said he was “disappointed and angered” by the governor’s action. “The governor is apparently bowing to pressure from various groups who are motivated by publicity and their own egotistical concerns rather than concern for my ‘welfare.’ “
PRESS CONFERENCES
Out in Phoenix, Earl Dorius was bombarded with the news. Everybody was stopping him in the lobby to ask, “What’s going on in Utah?” Earl felt as if the conference were totally destroyed for him. He couldn’t listen to anything. Kept racing back to his room to catch the news. If he wasn’t on the phone, he was flipping stations on the TV set. “What do you think of the Governor’s action?” everyone asked him. “I haven’t had a chance to research it,” he would say, “but it’s my impression the Stay was improper because it was granted at the request of outside parties.”
He realized he was closer to the office at this point than to the conference, and decided to check out of Phoenix and get back to work.
SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
Nov. ix, 1976-Boaz signed an agreement with Utah State Prison Warden Samuel W. Smith that he would serve only as an attorney for Gilmore, then talked freely about his intentions to “serve as a writer first, a lawyer second.”
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“We have no power to censure him. He is not a member of the Utah bar,” a member of the Utah State Bar’s executive committee explained.
PROVO HERALD
Provo, Nov. iz, i976—Boaz said he plans to “make some money” from Gilmore’s story and split it 5o-5° with the condemned man’s family and any charities he may choose.
Just as Dennis was coming into the prison, Sam Smith called him over and said, “I heard Gilmore had an interview with a London newspaper this morning. Do you know anything about that?”
Dennis was in a real state of excitement. David Susskind had just called from New York. He was interested in doing a movie on Gary’s life. There could be large money at the other end. Dennis’s mind was racing.
“The London newspaper?” he said to Sam Smith. “Oh, sure, I set it up.”
The Warden’s face got red, unusual color for a pale man. Then he shouted. Everybody at that end of the hall popped their heads out of offices. For that matter, Dennis was startled too Nobody was used to Sam Smith yelling.
Smith said he was going to file suit. Dennis said, “I couldn’t care less, Warden.” He was beginning to take personal pleasure in looking for statements to rile Sam Smith. There was something about Sam’s skin that inspired you to get under it.
Dennis even laughed when they strip-searched him, just to be vindictive. It was a comedy. The guards came up to his armpits. Why, two days ago, they’d been so impressed with the way he acted before the Utah Supreme Court, they let him bring his typewriter into the talk with Gary.
After Boaz got through the strip-search, he met Nicole. There was a slitted window along the south end of the visiting room, and
PRESS CONFERENCES
there she was sitting on Gary’s lap, right at that end window, both of them looking out at Point of the Mountain. She didn’t pay much attention to Dennis. Necking with Gary was all she was heeding.
Still, when she came out of it, Dennis thought she had a sweeter, more innocent-looking face than he had anticipated. She was looking tired, even washed out, and that gave her a melancholy wistfulness he definitely liked. But, Gary glowered. Didn’t approve of the budding friendship whatsoever. Looked like he thought Nicole was flirting, when all she was saying was that her grandfather’s funeral would be starting in an hour or so.
Once she left, and Dennis was alone with him, Gary hardly offered a chance to talk about Susskind’s offer. He was too fired up over Governor Rampton. The subject proved infectious. Dennis loved the way Gary could pass you his steam. In fact, Dennis felt like a boiler, all fired up himself at what he could soon say about the Governor.
From the beginning, Dennis was looking to give out thoughts that would bring people face to face with stuff they had never pondered before. Dennis was looking to make a few shocking statements about public executions and get the people thinking. Make them ask themselves, “Why do we have executions behind locked doors? What are we ashamed of?” Just that morning one of his zingers had been printed:
PROVO HERALD
Provo, Nov. i, i976- “I think executions should be on prime time television,” Boaz said. “Then we would get some deterrent out of it.”
He’d been having press conferences practically twice a day since he and Gary won at the Utah Supreme Court and over and over he
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kept telling the press that he was there to represent free and open dealing and would present his life as an open book. He might get masted, but his responsibility was to be very Aquarian and even report things about himself and his feelings that might seem strange. At least the people would be getting open treatment, not manipulation. The press could misquote him, misrepresent him, take his remarks at random and distort them. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to flatten his personality. In fact, right after he came out of the Utah Supreme Court, he told the reporters he was in Salt Lake because it had a higher percentage of beautiful women than any city he’d been in, Plus the fact, he told the press, that a lot of these women like to meet Californians. For the taste of evil. There were millions to be made here, he said, importing California consciousness. Really, he said. Of course, they never printed a word of it.
The press responded by asking about his financial affairs. “I have nothing to hold back,” he told them. “The fact is, I owe $io,ooo, actually about $I5,ooo, if you include not Only what I owe creditors but friends. I have no shame about this. I made a bad investment once, and immediately found the whole thing bellied up, money gone.”
The word in response, he soon learned, was that he was playing Gilmore for the money. He didn’t care. The word would turn around when they realized he wasn’t.
“Do you think,” asked one reporter, “that your experience as a Deputy District Attorney has given you a certain lust for Gilmore’s blood?”
“Get it straight,” replied Dennis, “working in the D.A.’s office gave me more power to help people than being a Public Defender. I could reduce charges, take pleas. I cleared nine people in a row on the polygraph before I left the office. That, you see, is part of the game too.” With it all, they listened to him. Dennis had had this concept for years that the media was restless and didn’t really want to be surfeited with handouts and crap. One honest man with no impediment between his impulses and his tongue could turn. the world around.
“I’m into this in part because of numerology,” Dennis would say. “I’m not a numerology nut, of course. I believe in free ,will too much
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for that. But numerology can keep you sensitive to patterns. Every spiritual discipline reveals a pattern, after all, Then you choose your route through the patterns. That’s where free will comes in.”
“You say you have a great many debts?”
“I announce my debts,” said Boaz. “I also owe $z,Ioo to Master Charge, but I won’t pay that. A friend embezzled them with my Master Charge card. That’s Master Charge’s affair, not mine.”
They wanted to know what he had published. He had not published yet, he said. Did he write under his own name? He wrote under K. V. Kitty, under Lejohn Marz. Another pen name was S. L. Y. Fox. Fox, he told them, meant 666, the sign of the beast. Of course they had never heard of Aleister Crowley.
They brought him back to the subject. What did he think of Governor Rampton’s decision? Monstrous. They could quote him. He was always surprised at how little they quoted him.
Nor would they print what he said next, but he would tell them. “Gary lives,” he said, “in a cell so narrow he can touch both walls. The light is on 4 hours a day. Guards beat on the bars. The noise confounds a man’s last thoughts. Gary puts a towel on the bars to keep the light out. ‘Take it down,’ they tell him, ‘or we’ll come in and remove your mattress.’ “
It did not matter ff they got a tenth of what he said. Let them miss the ironies. When you start to open a door, the pressure has to be greatest in the beginning, yet the door moves the least. “Gary is cramped in his cell,” he said. “That’s why they have to give him Fiorinal. Most prisoners take drugs to survive. It Lifts some of the oppression.” They asked him if the officials knew. “Of course. The officials want convicts to be on dope. That way they don’t riot.”
Dennis could sense the reactions. He heard a reporter whisper, “The guy is totally hyper.”
He was not here to defend himself. The opportunity was to attack. “The Warden,” he said, “wants to close this execution down. We want it open. In the Middle East, at an Arabian execution, crowds axe welcomed. The crowd gives the victim a lift. It makes him
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feel like they are there together in a ceremony. It reminds everybody that we are all sacrifices to the gods. Whereas here, at a condemned man’s last moment, there is nobody but executioners. I think that’s wrong, really.”
“What do you and Gary talk about?”
“We talk,” said Boaz, “of the evolution of the soul. Gary knows a lot about Edgar Cayce and the Akashic Register. We discuss karma and the need to take responsibility for our deeds. Gods and goddesses have total freedom because they have total responsibility.” They never printed any of this.
A reporter read aloud a statement by Craig Snyder: “Boaz never contacted Us. I was in Utah Supreme Court, and we argued opposing viewpoints, but I was not introduced, and I’ve never spoken to the man. To my knowledge he has never examined the record or found out what happened at the trial. His publishing agreement with Gilmore flies right in the face of the Canon of Ethics.” “Where did he give the statement?” asked Dennis.
“At the Adelphi Building, where his office is, in Provo.”
“That’s a place with yellow shag carpets and brown and yellow walls, right?” asked Dennis.
“You ever see it?” asked the reporter.
“No,” said Boaz, “but I know crypto-corporate vibes.”
“Come on, Dennis,” said the reporter, “why didn’t you get in touch with Esplin and Snyder?”
“Gilmore doesn’t want to appeal, do you understand that? I’m