Gary Gilmore

Gary Gilmore
Portland Police Bureau mug shot
Born	Faye Robert Coffman (later changed to Gary Mark Gilmore) (1940-12-04)December 4, 1940 McCamey, Texas, US
Died	January 17, 1977(1977-01-17) (aged 36) Draper, Utah, US
Cause of death	Execution
Criminal charge	Armed robbery (3 counts) Assault (2 counts) Murder (2 counts)
Criminal penalty	Execution by firing squad
Criminal status	Executed on January 17, 1977
Parent(s)	Frank and Bessie Gilmore
Killings
Victims	Max Jensen Bennie Bushnell, 25
Date	July 19 & 20, 1976
State(s)	Utah
Location(s)	Orem Provo
Date apprehended	July 21, 1976

Gary Mark Gilmore (December 4, 1940 – January 17, 1977) was an American criminal who gained international notoriety for demanding the implementation of his death sentence for two murders he committed in Utah. After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg v. 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 v. 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 v. Georgia.) Gilmore was executed by firing squad in 1977.

Gary Mark Gilmore was born in McCamey, Texas, on December 4, 1940, the second of four sons, to Frank and Bessie Gilmore. The other sons were Frank, Jr., Gaylen, and the writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore. Frank Gilmore Sr. (1890–1962), an alcoholic con man, had other wives and families, none of whom he supported. On a whim he married Bessie (née Brown) (1914 – June 1980), a Mormon outcast from Provo, Utah, in Sacramento, California. Gary was born while they were living in Texas under the pseudonym of Coffman to avoid the law. Frank christened his son Faye Robert Coffman, but once they left Texas, Bessie changed it to Gary Mark. This name change proved to be a sore point years later. Frank's mother Fay kept the original "Faye Coffman" birth certificate, and when Gary found it two decades later, he assumed he must be either illegitimate or someone else's son. He seized on this as the reason that he and his father never got along; he became very upset and walked out on his mother when she tried to explain the name change to him.

The theme of illegitimacy, real or imagined, was common in the Gilmore family. Frank, Sr.'s mother Fay Gilmore once told Bessie that Frank, Sr.'s father was a famous magician who had passed through Sacramento, where she was living. Bessie researched this at the library and concluded that Frank was the illegitimate son of Harry Houdini. In fact Houdini was only sixteen years old in 1890, the year of Frank Gilmore's birth, and did not begin his career as a magician until the following year. Mikal Gilmore, Gary's youngest brother, believes the story to be false, but has stated that both his father and mother believed it.