Shot in the Heart Read online

  This book is dedicated to my brother, Frank Gilmore, Jr.

  He endured much to help me tell this story.

  There’s something the dead are keeping back.

  —ROBERT FROST

  THE DREAM

  I HAVE DREAMED A TERRIBLE DREAM.

  In this dream, it is always night. We are in my father’s house—an old charred-brown, 1950s-era home. Shingled, two-story, and weather-worn, it is located on the far outskirts of a dead-end American town, pinioned between the night-lights and smoking chimneys of towering industrial factories. In front of the house, forming the border to a forest I am forbidden to trespass, lies a moonlit stretch of railroad track. Throughout the night of the dreams, you can hear a train whistle howling in the distance, heralding the approach of a passenger car from the outside world. For some reason, no train ever follows this signal. There is only the howl.

  In the house, people come and go, moving between the darkness outside and the darkness inside. These people are my family, and in the dream, they are all back from the dead. There is my mother, Bessie Gilmore, who lived a life of bitter losses, who died spitting blood, calling the names of her father and her husband— men who had long before brutalized her hopes and her love—crying to them for mercy, for a passage into the darkness that she had so long feared. There is my brother Gaylen, who died young of old wounds, as his new bride sat at his side, holding his hand, watching the life pass from his sunken face. There is my brother Gary, who murdered innocent men in rage against the way life had robbed him of too much time and too much love, and who died when a volley of bullets tore his violent, tortured heart from his chest. There is my brother Frank, who turned increasingly quiet and distant with each new death, who was last seen walking down a road nearby the night-house of this dream, his hands rammed deep into his pockets, a look of uncomprehending pain seizing his face. And there is my father, Frank Sr., who died from the ravages and insults of cancer. Of all the family members, he is in these dreams the least, and when he is there, I end up feeling guilt over his presence: I am always happy to see him, it turns out, but nobody else is. That’s because, in the dreams, as in life, there is the fear that my father will spread anger and ruin too far for his family to survive, that he will somehow find a way to kill those who have already been killed, who have already paid dearly for his legacy. When he appears, sometimes the point of the dream is to convince him that the only cure for all the bitterness, for all the bad blood, is for him to return to death. Lie down, Father, we say. Let us bury you again.

  Finally, there is me. I watch my family in these dreams and seem always to feel apart from the fraternity—as if there is a struggle here for love and participation that, somehow, I always fail. And so I watch as my brothers come and go. I look out the windows and see them move in the darkness outside, through the bushes, across the yard, toward the driveway. I watch cars cross the railway tracks. I watch them come and take my brothers and deliver them back, and I know they are moving to and from underworlds that I cannot take part in, because for some reason I cannot leave this house.

  Then, one night, years into these dreams, Gary tells me why I can never join my family in its comings and goings, why I am left alone sitting in the living room as they leave: It is because I have not yet entered death. I cannot follow them across the tracks, into the forest where their real lives take place, he says, until I die. He pulls a gun from his coat pocket. He lays it on my lap. There is a door across the room, and he moves toward it. Through the door, there is the night. I see the glimmer of the train tracks. Beyond them, my family. “See you in the darkness beyond,” he says.

  I do not hesitate. I pick the pistol up. I put its barrel in my mouth. I pull the trigger. I feel the back of my head erupt. It is a softer feeling than I expect. I feel my teeth fracture and disintegrate and pass in a gush of blood out of my mouth. I also feel my life pass out of my mouth, and in that instant I feel a collapse into nothingness. There is darkness, but there is no beyond. There is never any beyond, only the sudden, certain rush of extinction. I know that it is death I am feeling—that is, I know this is how death must truly feel—and I know that this is where beyond ceases to be a possibility.

  I have had this dream more than once, in various forms. I always wake at this point, my heart hammering hard, hurting for being torn back from the void that I know is the gateway to the refuge of my ruined family. Or is it the gateway to hell? Either way, I want back into the dream, but in those haunted hours of the night, there is no way back.

  I HAVE A STORY TO TELL. IT IS A STORY OF MURDERS: murders of the flesh, and of the spirit; murders born of heartbreak, of hatred, of retribution. It is the story of where those murders begin, of how they take form and enter our actions, how they transform our lives, how their legacies spill into the world and the history around us. And it is a story of how the claims of violence and murder end—if, indeed, they ever end.

  I know this story well, because I have been stuck inside it. I have lived with its causes and effects, its details and indelible lessons, my entire life. I know the dead in this story—I know why they made death for others, and why they sought it for themselves. And if I ever hope to leave this place, I must tell what I know.

  So let me begin.

  I AM THE BROTHER OF A MAN WHO MURDERED INNOCENT MEN. His name was Gary Gilmore, and he would end up as one of modern America’s more epochal criminal figures. But it wasn’t his crimes—the senseless murders of two young Mormon men on consecutive nights in July 1976—that won him his notoriety. Instead, what made Gary famous was his involvement in his own punishment. His murders took place not long after the United States Supreme Court had cleared the way for the renewal of capital punishment, and Utah—the place where he had murdered—had been among the first states to pass legislation restoring the death penalty. But practicing it was another matter. When Gary received his death sentence in the fall of 1977, nobody had been executed in America in more than a decade, and despite its new laws, the country still didn’t have much taste for legal bloodshed. All that changed with Gary Gilmore.

  On November 1, 1976, Gary refused his right to appeal his sentence and insisted that the state go ahead and meet the date it had set for his death. Immediately he hit a national nerve, and nearly every day and night for the next few months he made headline news. There were arguments, delays, and intrigues; there was even a love story. But through it all, Gary remained fierce and unswerving in his determination to die—he even tried his own hand at it twice—and he had put the State of Utah and death penalty advocates in a difficult, unexpected spot. He made them not just his allies, but he also transformed them into his servants: men who would kill at his bidding, to suit his own ideals of ruin and redemption. By insisting on his own execution—and in effect directing the legal machinery that would bring that execution about—Gary seemed to be saying: There’s really nothing you can do to punish me, because this is precisely what I want, this is my will. You will help me with my final murder.

  And the nation hated Gary; not for his crimes, but because, in his indomitable arrogance, he seemed to have figured out a method to win, a way to escape.

  Many people, of course, already know this part of the story. It was major international news for several months in 1976 and 1977, and it was later the subject of a popular novel and television film, Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. If you’ve read that book or seen the film, you know the story of Gary’s last few months: the trusts he betrayed, the love he lost, the lives he destroyed, and the self-negation he sought. What is less generally known, and what has never been much documented, is the story of the origins of Gary’s violence—the true history of my family and how its webwork of dark secrets and failed hopes helped create
the legacy that, in part, became my brother’s impetus to murder.

  These parts of the story were never told because, quite simply, nobody would ever talk about them. During the last few weeks of Gary’s life, Larry Schiller—who had secured the rights to Gary’s life story and who would later conduct most of the interviews for The Executioner’s Song—tried to get Gary to talk openly about the realities of his childhood and family life. Schiller sensed that something horrible had happened in that past, but Gary insisted this was not the case, and he often met these questions with mockery or anger, even until the last hours of his life. Months later, Schiller and Norman Mailer would spend numerous hours interviewing my mother, Bessie Gilmore, trying to explore the same necessary territory: Had something happened in Gary’s childhood that later turned him to the course of murder? Schiller and Mailer tried their best but, more often than not, my mother answered their inquiries with maddening riddles and outright avoidance. There were large, dark parts of the family’s past that she would not deal with, and that she preferred to cloak in the guise of mystery. Something to do with my father: how he had lived his life and how he had treated his sons. Whatever happened in those long-ago days, neither Gary nor my mother would reveal it, and both of them went to their graves keeping a tight hold on their secrets. It was as if they would rather die than give up the past.

  I also would not discuss the details of my family’s past. In fact, I would spend the next fifteen years of my life trying my best to distance myself from my family and what I saw as its terrible history and luckless destiny. I used to tell myself that whatever ran in Gary’s blood that turned him into a killer did not also run in my blood, and that whatever turned my family’s hopes to wreckage would not also devastate my life. I was different from them, I knew. I would escape.

  I now know better. To believe that Gary had absorbed all the family’s dissolution, or that the worst of our rot had died with him that morning in Draper, Utah, was to miss the real nature of the legacy that had placed him before those rifles: what that heritage or patrimony was about, and where it had come from.

  “[T]here are transgressors who, if they knew themselves, and the only condition upon which they can obtain forgiveness, would beg of their brethren to shed their blood, that the smoke thereof might ascend to God as an offering to appease the wrath that is kindled against them, and that the law might have its course.”

  — BRIGHAM YOUNG,

  Journal of Discourses

  Even when the Mormons built ghosts, they built for the ages.

  —WALLACE STEGNER,

  Mormon Country

  ONE BY ONE I HAD WATCHED THEM ALL DIE. First, my father. Then my brothers Gaylen and Gary. Finally, my mother, a bitter and ravaged woman. In the end, there was just me, the youngest, and Frank, the oldest. Then one day, when the pain of the family’s history had become too much to bear, Frank simply walked into a shadow world and could not be uncovered, no matter how hard I sought him. Or maybe I just didn’t seek hard enough.

  That was over a decade ago. In the time that followed I believed I was no longer tied to the wreckage that had been my family’s spirit, and whatever devastations might come in my life, at least now they would be my own. I told myself I was finally alone: free to pursue my own family dream.

  One day, though, that dream dissolved into a nightmare. When that happened, I began to understand that I hadn’t avoided my family’s ruin after all. Indeed, it felt like our ruin might be endless and that the only way to stop it might be to stop the legacy itself—and the only way to do that was to crack open its god-awful secrets, if I could find them.

  And so now I want to go back into my family—back into its stories, its myths, its memories, its inheritance. I want to climb back into the family story the same way I’ve always wanted to climb back into that dream about the house where we all grew up. Climb back in and find out what made the dream go bad, and what made it destroy so many lives.

  It’s as if the structure of my family’s past has taken on the dimensions of a mystery for me. I want to see if, by examining our history, I can discover somewhere within it a key—an event that might explain what produced so much loss and violence. Maybe if I could discover some answers, I might be able to bargain my way out of any further loss.

  So back I go, afraid in part that I might never know the truth, afraid also that I might find too much. I know this much: We all paid for something that had happened long before we were born, something that we were not allowed to know. In the end, perhaps it will all remain a mystery that nobody may touch at the heart.

  THE FAMILY I GREW UP IN was not the same family my brothers grew up in. They grew up in a family that was on the road constantly, never in the same place longer than a couple of months at best. They grew up in a family where they watched the father beat the mother regularly, battering her face until it was a mortified, blue knot. They grew up in a family where they were slapped and pummeled and belittled for paltry affronts. They grew up in a family where they had to unite in secret misadventures just to find common pleasures.

  In the family I grew up in, my brothers were as much a part of its construction as my parents. They were part of what I had to experience, to learn from. They were part of what I had to overcome and shun. They gave me something to aspire to: the chance to escape their fates. In fact, one of the ways my family best served me was by teaching me that I did not want to stay bound to its values and its debts or to its traditions.

  In any event, I grew up in a world so entirely different from that of my brothers, I may as well have grown up under another surname. Obviously, I should be thankful for those differences, but of course things never work quite that smoothly. The misery of my brothers’ childhood is so distinct from the misery of my own childhood, it’s almost impossible for me to feel delivered from their hell, anymore than I feel saved from World War Two merely because I didn’t have to live through it.

  You could find much of the truth about these two families—the family of my brothers and the family I grew up in—by flipping through the pages of our main photo albums. Those pages are made up almost entirely of pictures of my brothers, and in most of those photos my brothers appear together in one configuration or another. Pictures of Frankie and Gary as babies, holding each other’s hands and smiling delightedly at the camera; pictures of them standing together, in their matching army and navy outfits during the war years, or in matching slacks, with suspenders, white shirts, and wide ties, when the family lived in the deserts of Arizona. After Gaylen was born, it was pictures of the three of them. Three boys, dressed in authentic cowboy gear, standing with gleaming toy guns in their hands, all trying to look ominous, like little brother outlaws. By the time you page through the books to the time of my childhood, you will find only a few photos of me with any of my other brothers—mostly as we were lined up single file on Christmas mornings in front of the tree, looking like heartsick convicts. Just as notably, there are only two or three pictures of me by myself in those main family albums, in contrast to the numerous solo portraits of my brothers.

  These pictures make plain a certain truth: My brothers and I did not inhabit the same time and space. We did not know each other. We barely belonged together. I remember playing a bit with Gaylen when I was a child, because he was the one closest in age to me, and I remember Frank Jr. taking care of me, taking me to movies, looking after me, loving me. Contrary to my mother’s memories, I don’t recall doing much of anything with Gary until years later, when we were both adults. For all of two or three days.

  Mostly, I remember playing by myself, with my own toys. I liked guns and Western scenarios, just like my brothers—though they all forbade me to touch any of their fancy-ass silver-plated pistols that I envied so much. But more than guns, I liked castles. I had a fine model set of King Arthur’s castle, complete with a drawbridge and turrets. But I didn’t like—in fact threw away—the cheap plastic figurines of knights that came with the package. I had seen a much nicer-l
ooking set of metal knights and horses, in fearsome-looking action positions, made by a ritzy English company called Britains. They were hand-painted, they were gorgeous, and they were expensive, and I more or less made my mother buy them for me. If my brothers could have their pearl-handled six-guns, I could have my ornate knights. I loved placing those knights inside the castle walls, pulling up the drawbridge, keeping them in the fortress where no harm could come to them. I never let my brothers touch my cavaliers in armor—not that they wanted to.

  IT’S POSSIBLE MY BROTHERS and I may have played together more than I recall, but only a few incidents involving the four of us stick out in my mind. One time, we were all in the backyard of our home in Portland, Oregon, and my brothers were tossing darts at a board they had hung on a tree. I loved watching them and I wanted to throw the darts too, but they weren’t about to have a clumsy little kid cluttering up their sport. Of course, I persisted. Pouted, probably. Finally one of them—Gary, if I remember right—relented. “Okay,” he said, “if you want to play darts, we’ll play darts. Here’s how we do it.” He took me over and stood me in front of the target. “We see who can get their darts closest to you.”

  I should have run, but I didn’t. I was glad to be included. Gary tossed the first dart, and it landed about six inches from my foot. Frank Jr. lobbed another, and it hit a couple inches closer. Gaylen tossed his, and it ended up maybe less than an inch from one of my feet. I was starting to feel less like I wanted to be included. The next dart—tossed by Gary—did the trick. It hit my right shoe, went through the top, through the toenail of my big toe, and stuck upright. My brothers looked panicked, and I started to cry. My mother came outside, saw the dart sticking out of my foot, the sheepish look on my brothers’ faces, and was not pleased.

  Later, I took a revenge of sorts. On a beautiful summer afternoon, Gary was sitting on our front porch with a couple of his girlfriends, and my brother Frank was there too, with a girl. Again, I wanted to be included, and again I was told to go away. I went to the side of the house, got one end of the long garden hose, dragged it to the front porch. I handed the nozzle to Gary, who was sweet-talking a honey-blond-haired young woman, and said: “Here, hold this. I’ll be right back.” He wasn’t paying much attention to what I said. He sat there, holding the hose, talking to the girls.