Gilmore’s Violence Overpowered Gentle and Perceptive Side

People who knew Gary Gilmore recall a complex, enigmatic man unable or unwilling to master the rage that followed him out of prisons where he had spent more than half of his 36 years.

And they remember his eyes--an artist’s eyes, a lover’s eyes, a killer’s eyes.

On one side, Gilmore was a perceptive, sensitive poet familiar with the works of Shelley, Browning and Chaucer.

He was a tender lover to his girlfriend, Nicole Baker, and gentle with her two young children. An ardent believer in reincarnation, he insisted that he and Baker would be joined in eternity.

And with his demand to die by firing squad for his murders, he was partly seeking redemption and relief from guilt.

But Gilmore’s virtues were overshadowed by much that was dark and remorseless. Impulsive, selfish and violent, he cheated, robbed and eventually killed with little regard for the consequences.

‘A Don’t-Fit’

“Gary wasn’t a misfit, just a don’t-fit,” said Brenda Nicol, a cousin and childhood friend who helped arrange Gilmore’s parole from the maximum security federal prison at Marion, Ill.

In some ways, she said, Gilmore was “just like the guy next door, not somebody you would pick out of a crowd.”

But lawyer Craig Snyder, who helped to defend Gilmore against capital homicide charges, has a different recollection.

Snyder first met Gilmore in the Orem, Utah, jail where he was being held for two murders. He looked “like a caged animal,” Snyder said.

“His eyes. If you were going to look at him and try to guess his occupation, if you were to look at his eyes, you might guess his occupation was killer. He had an absolutely evil look.”

It was a look molded by prison, a place Gilmore came to loathe more than death.

In a letter to his cousin, Gilmore said life in prison was “like walking up to the razor’s edge of hell and looking over.”

Poem About Self

He accepted the blame for his wasted life. In a poem he composed several years before the murders, he wrote of looking into his soul:

One thing was peculiar clear

There was no scorn to menace here

This is just the way it is

Laid bare to the bone

I built this house I alone

I am the Land Lord here.

The desire to control his destiny and an even greater wish not to grow old in prison compelled Gilmore, on Nov. 1, 1976, to refuse to appeal his death sentence.

For the next 10 weeks Gilmore’s legal fight to die brought him media fame, a status he clearly enjoyed.

“He was on an ego trip,” said the Rev. Thomas Meersman, then the Roman Catholic chaplain at Utah State Prison. “He loved to show off the pictures. He was somewhat awed by it after a while.”

Meersman and Gilmore would sit on the floor in the drab, noisy maximum security unit almost nightly and talk. Meersman would later hold Gilmore in his arms as the inmate died from the firing squad’s bullets.

‘Only Way Out’

“There is no more horrible a death than to grow old and die in prison. They have no facilities for older inmates, and he knew that. The firing squad was his only way out of prison,” said Meersman, whose prison ministry spanned 25 years and three executions.

Throughout his days of celebrity, Gilmore’s violent temperament boiled just beneath the surface. From his cell, he wrote Baker that the desire to murder was irresistible and that when it came he did not care whom he killed.

Gilmore also wrote her that he loved her so much that he wanted her to join him in death. An impressionable 20-year-old, Baker smuggled sleeping pills to Gilmore and, hours later, they took equal doses.

The diminutive woman nearly died, but prison officials questioned whether Gilmore really meant to kill himself. For him, the dosage was not lethal, and it was taken only a few hours before guards made regular cell checks.

Gilmore tried again with an unquestionably lethal dose, but once again, guards found him in time.

Ability to Fight

Lawrence Schiller, who bought the rights to Gilmore’s story and directed the television movie “The Executioner’s Song,” which chronicled the killer’s last months, said what set Gilmore apart was not his wish to die but his ability to carry the fight to the judges and attorneys who tried to stop him.

“He was able to rise to the occasion with intelligence,” Schiller said. “And yet, he never manipulated the moment. He stuck by his original concept: ‘You’ve given me a choice. I accept the choice to die. You cannot change my destiny.’ ”

Baker sees Gilmore in simpler terms. She fell in love with him the night they met when she looked into “them big blue eyes,” eyes Schiller said Gilmore would use to “stare into your head.”

She was the only woman Gilmore had ever loved, and he said it was anguish over their breakup that drove him to kill.

Gilmore’s memory brings her little comfort, yet she thinks of him often.

“We can’t, any of us, erase the things we’ve done wrong,” she said. “I know he was wrong, but I think his heart was as right as a crook’s heart could be.”