Chapter 31

WILD WIND BLOWING

1

2

Kathryne was in a state about Nicole. Things were bad enough when Gary was at the County Jail, but then Nicole was just going from Springville to Provo. Now, it was different. Hitchhiking to the prison took Nicole through Pleasant Grove, and she would often leave the kids with Kathryne and stop off on her way back.

Kathryne tried to talk about Gary, but it wasn’t very successful. “How’s he seem?” she would ask, and Nicole would answer, “How? How could he seem?” Then, Kathryne found out through Kathy that Gary was saying he wanted to die. Nicole was very quiet about this. Kathryne really got scared when Nicole said that her kids would be better off without her.

They got into a big fight over that. Kathryne said a lot of mean things she didn’t even feel. To begin with, she was afraid of hitchhiking, so she got on Nicole’s ass over that. Then, Gary. “He’s no good,” Kathryne would say. “He’s nothing but a damned killer and he deserves the death penalty. No,” she would correct herself, “that’s too good for him.”

“You don’t understand him,” Nicole would say. “No,” Kathryne said, “I don’t, but why don’t you try to understand those two poor women who have to raise those kids who don’t have a father now, while you are running up every cockeyed day to see that damned killer.”

Kathryne wasn’t really feeling as angry at Gary as she pretended. Secretly, she might even feel bad for him, but she had to find a way to stop Nicole from hitching to the prison. All Kathryne could see for the future was that when they executed Gary, Nicole would go to pieces.

It was one big argument. At the end, Nicole was yelling. That, at least, was better than silence. “Fine, isn’t it,” Kathryne said. “Go and blow a man’s head off.” “I don’t care,” said Nicole, “I don’t want to hear a goddamned thing you got to say.”

“Oh, Nicole, why, why,” asked Kathryne. “Why in the hell are you going there?”

“Because he has nobody else. I’ll go every single day until they execute him. In fact,” said Nicole, “I’ll go and watch it.”

“How could you?” shrieked Kathryne.

Then it wore itself down to simpler stuff. “If you need a ride,” said Kathryne, “for Christ’s sake, if you need to get up there, call one of us.” “Well, you work,” said Nicole, “and I don’t want to bother you.” “Dammit,” said Kathryne, “it don’t make any difference if I’m working. I don’t want you hitchhiking.” “Well,” said Nicole, “I can’t waste the time to drop off here.”

Even Mr. Overman, for whom Kathryne was working, told Nicole, “Listen, girl, if you need a ride, call us at work. It don’t matter if you want to go at eight o’clock in the morning. Your mother can take off to go with you. I don’t like hitchhiking.” Nicole just laughed. She said, “Oh, you all worry too much.”

3

4

Sue was seeing all the changes in Nicole. In the beginning, when Gary had first been in the county jail, Nicole really wanted to go out. Maybe she was in love with Gary as much as she said, but she was also enjoying that nobody was on her all the time, nobody. She and Sue started going out together. Sometimes, after Sue had the baby, they’d party at Nicole’s house.

Then it started. Nicole didn’t want to see guys anymore. After the trial, Nicole would read letters all night long. Or else, the girl was constantly writing. That impressed Sue Baker. One time Sue even saw her writing at four in the morning. She couldn’t stop. It was like smoking.

Sometimes Nicole would laugh at the funny things in his letters. Some would make her cry. She would try not to let Sue know she was crying, but you could see her reading with red eyes. Tears would come down her cheeks. Then she would sit up, stop crying, and go on with her letters.

A couple of weeks after the trial, Nicole became really excited. “Yes,” she said to Sue, “he’s not going to fight it. He wants to die.” Sue started to say what she thought of that and Nicole said, “If he wants to, he’s got the right.” You couldn’t tell Nicole otherwise.

One day, hearing Sue talk about her Valiums of which Sue had one hundred, 10 mg. each, Nicole asked, “How many do you take if you want to kill yourself?” Just asked it one night calmly as hell. Sue never thought nothing of it. Said, “Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to try so I don’t know.” Never gave it thought, but as the days went by, and Nicole got moodier, Sue began to worry now and again.

Nicole wrote Gary about a girl hitchhiker who was raped and then knifed twenty or thirty times by some guy in a white van. She wrote how she wasn’t afraid of that creep or any other. If she was ever in such a situation, nobody was going to make it with her body, unless she was not in it.

Gary didn’t say much in answer, and Nicole was glad. She realized it was her way of trying to apologize for the ex-president of the Sundowners.

Sometimes while hitchhiking, she would have a flash on her death. In her mind she would see the car she was in jumping off the freeway. She would wonder then what would happen in the next moment when she was dead. The thought was like an echo. She would keep seeing the car going off the freeway. Then she would feel the worry, What if death was a mistake? What if in that last moment, just as it was happening, she realized her action was truly a mistake? It was the only concern she had. That she might not have the right to die.

Now in the visits, Gary began to talk about pills. You faded out under them. It was peaceful, he said. Not at all like the nausea she felt, and the cold in the tunnel. Pills were gentle.

She still didn’t know if it was okay to die. All through this month, she couldn’t come to a decision. She went back and forth in her mind about the kids, and finally decided she would do it rather than be without him. Sooner or later she would have to take a shot at it. That was cool.

Of course, Gary kept writing to her about it. A couple of times she got mad and told him he pushed the subject too much. Then he would get apologetic and say he was only expressing how he felt. But his talking about it would get her wondering if she wanted to go ahead.

5

Gary woke up in a panic, and sent word to the Mormon Chaplain in the prison, Cline Campbell, that he had to see him. Campbell came by a little later, and Gary told of a dream he had. Pure paranoia, he said. Nicole was hitchhiking and the driver started to molest her. It was crucial that he see her today. Would Campbell bring her to the prison? Campbell would.

The first time Cline Campbell visited Gary, he mentioned that years ago Nicole used to be his student in seminary class. He had spent hours counseling her. The news seemed to go well with Gary. After that, they got along. Shared a few conversations.

Campbell believed the prison system was a complete socialist way of life. No wonder Gilmore had gotten into trouble. For twelve years, a prison had told him when to go to bed and when to eat, what to wear and when to get up. It was absolutely diametrically opposed to the capitalist environment. Then one day they put the convict out the front door, told him today is magic, at two o’clock you are a capitalist. Now, do it on your own. Go out, find a job, get up by yourself, report to work on time, manage your money, do all the things you were taught not to do in prison. Guaranteed to fail. Eighty percent went back to jail.

So he was curious about Gilmore. Looked forward to counseling him. Took the first opportunity, in fact, a few days after the man came to the prison. One evening Campbell just walked into his cell and said, “I’m the Chaplain, my name’s Cline Campbell.”

Gilmore was dressed in the white clothing they wore in Maximum Detention, and he was sitting on his bunk engrossed in his drawing. He had a pencil in his hand and a half-finished pencil portrait before him, but he got up, shook hands, said he was happy to meet Campbell. They got along fine. The Chaplain saw him often.

Until now, Cline Campbell had never been involved with counseling a person who was going to be executed. The men on Death Row were always there, and Campbell had chatted with them, and joked with them, but did not have serious counseling sessions. Those men were not close to being executed—their appeals had gone on for years—and their conditions were depraved. But then all of Maximum was a zoo, a flat one-story zoo with many cages.

At right angles to the main hall were the regular units. Behind a gate would be a series of five cells facing another five cells. Each prisoner had a full view therefore of the prisoner across from him, and partial views of the remaining prisoners on the other side. Sometimes all ten men could be speaking at once. It was a bedlam of cries, and sound reverberated from steel and stone. Echoes crashed into one another like car collisions. It was close to living on the inside of an iron intestine.

Most men were in Maximum Security for three months, no more. But prisoners on Death Row were there forever. Other men could leave their tier at mealtime to move to the cafeteria, or go to the yard. On Death Row, your meals were served in your cell. You never went to the yard. One at a time, each man could leave his cell for a half hour a day and walk up and down the tier. You could talk to the other men, take out—as Campbell had seen—your God-given penis, or invite the other man to stick his through the bars. You could be threatened—and Gilmore was the man to issue such a threat—to get away from the bars, or you’d catch a cup of urine in your face. That was exercise on Death Row.

Compared with other convicts there, Gilmore was relaxed. In fact, Campbell marveled at this ability. Campbell would make a point of going to the kitchen first to bring him a cup of black coffee, and Gilmore would grin, “How you doing, preach?” and speak in a quiet voice.

Sometimes they would talk in Gilmore’s cell. More often, Campbell would have him called out, and they would go into a counsel room in Maximum Security in order that nobody overhear their conversation. Several times, Gilmore would say, “I really appreciate rapping with you. I can’t talk with anybody else here.”

Once in a while they got into deeper conversations. Gilmore would say, “This is stuff I wouldn’t even tell the shrinks,” and mentioned a time when he first went to MacLaren and a couple of boys held him and he was raped. He hated it, he said, but would admit that as he got older, he participated in the same game on the other side. They nodded. There was the old prison saying, “In every wolf is a punk looking for revenge.”

One time, Gilmore made a statement Campbell did not forget. “I’ve killed two men,” he said, “I want to be executed on schedule.”

Then he added, “I want absolutely no notoriety.” His voice was emphatic. He told Campbell he didn’t want news coverage, TV, radio interviews, nothing. “I just believe I ought to be executed, I feel myself responsible.”

Campbell said, “Well, that can’t be all of your motive for wanting to die, Gary, just responsibility?” Gary answered, “No, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve been in eighteen years and I’m not about to do another twenty. Rather than live in this hole, I’d choose to be dead.”

Campbell could understand that. Generally, the LDS Church did believe in the death penalty. Campbell certainly did. He thought to watch a man become more debased, more hateful, more resentful and mean, both to himself and to others on Death Row, was absolutely cruel. The man was better off, and would change less, and be more himself after he was executed, than right here. It was wiser to pass into the spirit world—and await resurrection. There a man could have a better chance to fight for his cause. In the spirit world, one would be more likely to find assistance than degradation.

6

Campbell had been an LDS missionary in Korea, then a Chaplain in the Army with an airborne outfit. He taught seminary for six years after he got out. Also worked as a weekend cop. He would pick up a patrol car at six on Friday night, and turn it back in Monday at 8 A.M. Since he had grown up in the boonies on a Utah ranch, he never needed any training in firearms. He had carried a gun as a boy, and was pretty quick with it. From the hip, he could hit a gallon can fifty feet away in a quarter of a second. Grew up thinking of himself as a second Butch Cassidy.

He was not too tall, but he would have considered it on the side of sin not to be in good shape and well groomed. He stood real straight, shoulders back, and looked like a marksman. He had the patina of finely machined metal. During those weekends when he used to work as a cop, he was on for 24 hours a day, taking all calls. Of course, it was a small town, and he usually had time to go to church, but he carried a beeper so he could always be contacted and actually made more arrests in Lindon City than the other two officers put together, since on the weekend you had to handle every drunk and fracas.

The last time he had seen Nicole was one of those weekends, at two o’clock in the morning. He was driving down a road in Lindon and there she stood hitchhiking. He said, Get in the car, what are you doing out here? It’s dangerous.

He had heard she had a child, and now she was obviously loaded on drugs. He had every reason to take her to jail, but she trusted him, and he saw that she got home. He kept thinking of all the times he had counseled her once a week from five to thirty minutes, and knew what a bad situation she had at home. She had told him about Uncle Lee. It was a touchy thing, however. He could not really get her to go into it. Sometimes she would sit in his seminary class looking dreamy, and have no idea she was there.

Now, on this morning that Campbell went over to find Nicole for Gary, she was asleep on the couch and her two children were asleep on the floor with a blanket over them. After she kind of combed her hair a little, she let Campbell in. Didn’t even know who it was.

Cracked the curtain. Didn’t recognize him. He said, “How are you, Nicole, do you remember me?” She looked hard and she said, “Sure, come on in.” He said, “I’m Brother Campbell.” She said, “Yes, of course, come in.” They exchanged a few courtesies, and he said he’d come because Gary wanted to see her.

She dropped the children off with her ex-mother-in-law, Mrs. Barrett, and on the way out to prison, Campbell discussed her situation. She just said to him without any particular ado, that if Gary died, she might also.

It was quite a remark for Campbell to keep to himself, yet he could hardly turn it in. His life at the prison consisted of holding secrets.

Sometimes a convict would come in and say a particular man was after him. Campbell wouldn’t go to the Warden and discuss what the man had said. The action taken would enable other inmates to pick up that the man was snitching. They’d be after him even more.

So Campbell didn’t disclose a thing unless it was a matter of life and death. Then he would get the man’s permission.

Now, even though he knew Gary and Nicole were thinking of suicide, he could not speak. That would only increase the pressure. There’d be a guard sitting in Gilmore’s cell every minute after that. He could hardly pretend his mind was easy, however. The quiet way Nicole had discussed it worried him most of all. Except for those occasions when he was angry, Gary had the most relaxed eyes Campbell had ever seen—they looked at everything with no strain, graceful as a good outfielder sitting under a fly ball he would never fail to catch. Nicole’s voice had something of the same. It never stumbled when she told the truth.

7

8

Snyder and Esplin had a couple of postmortems with Noall Wootton over the case. They would run into each other in the corridors or the coffee shop, and sometimes bring up questions they had about the other side’s strategy: having won, Wootton did needle them a little, but didn’t think he was too bad about it. His tone went: “Are you sure you suckers got all the cooperation you could from your client?” Or, “Why in Christ didn’t you put his girl friend up there?” “He wouldn’t let us,” they would answer. All agreed it was quite a question. As long as a defendant was sane and competent, he probably had the right to run his defense.

Since Gary had been at Utah State, Snyder and Esplin had had little communication. They talked to him on the phone a couple of times, and in the beginning, made arrangements for Nicole to get in, but they didn’t actually go themselves until a couple of days before the Appeal Hearing on November 1. That day, however, they were given physical contact in the visitors’ room at Maximum. Enough space to pace the floor, maybe 15 by 20 feet.

They were coming as the bearers of good tidings. Their chances of getting the death sentence reduced to life were, they thought, pretty nimble. Number one, as they laid it out for him, the Utah statute on the death penalty passed by the last Legislature did not provide for mandatory review of a death sentence. That was serious. Probably, it was constitutionally defective. This criticism, “constitutionally defective,” was about as strong as you could get in such areas of the law. A lot of lawyers felt the Utah statute was almost certainly going to be overthrown by the U.S. Supreme Court. So it was Snyder and Esplin’s opinion the Utah Supreme Court would now be very hesitant about enforcing a death sentence on November 15th. That Utah Supreme Court would certainly look bad if shortly after they let a man be executed the Supreme Court came down against them.

Besides, they had another good legal vein to work. During the Mitigation Hearing, Judge Bullock had admitted evidence of the Orem murder. That had to have a big effect on the Jury. It certainly was easier to vote for a man’s death if you heard about an additional murder he had committed; therefore, Snyder and Esplin were feeling optimistic. The brunt of their defense had been to maneuver onto these good appeal grounds. Now, they were feeling, in fact, a little excited. Some of this would be brand-new legal stuff for Utah County.

Gary listened. Then he said, “I’ve been here for three weeks, and I don’t know that I want to live here for the rest of my life.” He shook his head. “I came with the idea that maybe I could work it out, but the lights are on 24 hours a day and the noise is too much for me.”

The lawyers kept talking about their grounds for appeal. Wootton’s closing argument with his comments on the suffering of Debbie Bushnell could easily be called prejudicial to Gary. The prospects were good, even excellent.

Gary paced back and forth, and looked a little nervous. He repeated the difficulties he felt with living in Maximum. Finally, he said quietly, “Can I fire you?”

They replied that they guessed he could. However, they said, they thought they might have to go ahead with the appeal anyway. It was their duty.

Gilmore said, “Now, don’t I have the right to die?” He stared at them. “Can’t I accept my punishment?”

Gary told them of his belief that he had been executed once before, in eighteenth-century England. He said, “I feel I’ve been here before. There is some crime from my past.” He got quiet, and said, “I feel I have to atone for the thing I did then.” Esplin couldn’t help thinking that this stuff about eighteenth-century England would sure have made a difference with the psychiatrists if they had heard it.

Gilmore now began to say that his life wouldn’t end with this life. He would still be in existence after he was dead. It all seemed part of a logical discussion. Esplin finally said, “Gary, we can see your point of view, but we still feel duty bound to go ahead on that appeal.”

When Gary said again, “What can I do about it?” Snyder answered, “Well, I don’t know.”

Gary then said, “Can I fire you?”

Esplin said, “Gary, we’ll make the Judge aware that you want to can us, but we’re going to file anyway.”

They parted on pretty good terms.

9

Noall Wootton was up in San Francisco at a national homicide symposium. Went there, as he put it, to learn how to prosecute murder cases, and they even gave him a certificate. He was going to have his wife join him for a few days and have a little fun, but word from his office took care of that. Wootton’s secretary phoned to say that Gary Gilmore was going to withdraw his motion for a new trial. He was not going to appeal. He wanted to be executed and Snyder and Esplin were damn upset. Didn’t know what their ethical position was supposed to be. Wootton concluded he had better get back. Who knew what con’s trick Gilmore had come up with? Wootton couldn’t remember a ploy like this before.

The courtroom on November 1 offered a quiet scene. There were not many people seated, and Gary’s speech to the Judge, everything considered, was, Wootton thought, kind of open and courteous. It was still off the wall. Wootton got permission from Judge Bullock to make a few inquiries:

DESERET NEWS

Slayer Wants To Keep Death Date

Provo (AP) Nov. 1—Unless he changes his mind and appeals, or the courts and the governor intervene, a 35-year-old parolee convicted of murdering a hotel clerk will keep his Nov. 15 execution date.

“You sentenced me to die. Unless it’s a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it,” Gilmore said yesterday.

Fourth District Court Judge Bullock told Gilmore he could still change his mind and appeal, and an attorney for Gilmore said he would prepare appeal papers just in case Gilmore decides to appeal.

DESERET NEWS

Houdini Didn’t Show

Nov. I…. Halloween was a disappointment to groups trying to make contact with the spirit of escape artist Harry Houdini who died on Halloween 50 years ago.

Several magicians gathered Sunday in the Detroit hospital room where Houdini died, hoping for a message from the master. All they got on a video tape machine brought to record the event, was interference from a local rock station.

“It’s not even very good music,” said one magician.