January 17: On This Day in World History … briefly
Despite his wish for the death penalty to be carried out, protesters made an appeal on his behalf.
1977: Murderer Gilmore gets his death wish
Gary Mark Gilmore (Faye Robert Coffman) was an American criminal who gained international attention for demanding the implementation of his death sentence for two murders he had admitted to committing in Utah. After the US Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg vs Georgia, he became the first person in almost ten years to be executed in the United States. These new statutes avoided the problems under the 1972 decision in Furman vs Georgia, which had resulted in earlier death penalty statutes being deemed as ‘cruel and unusual’ punishment, and therefore unconstitutional. (The Supreme Court had previously ordered all states to commute death sentences to life imprisonment after Furman vs Georgia). Gilmore was executed by a firing squad in 1977. His life and execution were the subject of the 1979 nonfiction novel ‘The Executioner’s Song’ by Norman Mailer, and 1982 TV film of the novel starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore.
At the age of 14, Gary started a small car theft ring with friends, which resulted in his first arrest. He was released to his father with a warning. Two weeks later, he was back in court on another car theft charge. The court remanded him to the MacLaren Reform School for Boys in Woodburn, Oregon, from which he was released the following year. He was sent to Oregon State Correctional Institution on another car theft charge in 1960 and was released later that year. On the evening of July 19, 1976, Gilmore robbed and murdered Max Jensen, a gas station employee in Orem, Utah. The next evening, he robbed and murdered Bennie Bushnell, a motel manager in Provo. Although both men had complied with his demands, he murdered each of them. The young men were each ordered to lie down and then were shot in the head. Both were students at Brigham Young University; both left widows with infants.
While disposing of the .22 caliber pistol used in both killings, Gilmore accidentally shot himself in his right hand, leaving a trail of blood to the service garage where he had left his truck to be repaired prior to murdering Bushnell. Garage mechanic Michael Simpson witnessed Gilmore hiding the gun in the bushes. Seeing the blood on Gilmore’s crudely bandaged right hand when he approached to pay for the repairs to his truck, and hearing on a police scanner of the shooting at the nearby motel, Simpson wrote down Gilmore’s registration plate number and called the police. Gilmore’s cousin Brenda turned him in to police shortly after he phoned her asking for bandages and painkillers for the injury to his hand. The Utah State Police apprehended Gilmore as he tried to drive out of Provo, and he gave up without attempting to flee. Although he was charged with the murders of Jensen and Bushnell, the Jensen case was never brought to trial, apparently because there were no eyewitnesses.
“Let’s do it.” said murderer Gilmore as prison officials led him out to face a firing squad at the State Prison in Provo, Utah. Seconds later, four bullets thudded into his heart.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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