By Travis Uresk

2/13/25

10 of Utah’s most infamous criminals and serial killers.

When it comes to homicidal history, there are more than a few names throughout the decades that, even their mere mention still send chills down the spine. Whether it be Ted Bundy's sickening acts or the enigmatic and devious exploits of Mark Hofmann, whose forgeries and bombings shook people's faith, each chapter in Utah's criminal history reveals layers of intrigue that continue to fascinate -- and disturb.

Melvin Dummar, Utahn who claimed a piece of Howard Hughes’ fortune in ‘Mormon Will,’

Melvin Dummar, a Utah gas station owner who became the stuff of legend, punchlines, a Hollywood Oscar winner and years of litigation over a chunk of Howard Hughes’ estate that was supposedly left to him, died at the age of 74.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal, which reported Dummar’s death, quoted Ray Dummar as saying his brother had been battling cancer for the third time. Dummar had been living in recent years near Pahrump, Nev.

Melvin Dummar insisted he gave Hughes, one of the greatest yet most reclusive business magnates of his day, a ride in a pickup truck on a cold night in the Nevada desert on Dec. 29, 1967. Before Dummar dropped him off in Las Vegas, the man identified himself as Howard Hughes, though Dummar didn’t believe him, he said years later.

Hughes died in 1976. Three weeks later, April 27, Dummar said he received an envelope at his gas station in Willard, Utah. It purported to be Hughes’ will.

The handwritten document left assets to medical institutes, charities, the Boy Scouts of America, relatives and executives at Hughes’ companies. It also left one-sixteenth of the estate each to Dummar and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Because of that last supposed beneficiary, the document became known as the “Mormon Will.”

Dummar estimated his share at $156 million. He never got a cent because a Las Vegas jury determined in 1978 that the will, leaving Dummar $156 million, was a forgery. Dummar's story was later adapted into Jonathan Demme's film Melvin and Howard in 1980, in which he was portrayed by actor Paul Le Mat.

A Las Vegas jury in 1978 found the will to be a forgery. There also were court cases in California, Texas and Utah. Dummar lost them all.

He sold the rights to his story to Hollywood. “Melvin and Howard” was one of the best-reviewed films of 1980. It won two Academy Awards, including best supporting actress for Mary Steenburgen.

Dummar later would say the $90,000 he received from the film was absorbed by his legal fees. In a 2005 interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, he and his wife, Bonnie Dummar, recounted the hurt they felt from the decades of ridicule.

“You’ve just got to learn to turn the other cheek,” Melvin Dummar sighed.

“Yeah, but we’re running out of cheeks,” Bonnie Dummar quipped.

Melvin Earl Dummar was born Aug. 28, 1944, in Cedar City. Various sources say he was one of either eight or 10 children born into a family that moved around. He largely grew up in Fallon, Nev.

In 1963, Dummar enlisted in the Air Force. He was discharged after nine months due to his “emotional makeup,” according to the book “Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes,” by legendary investigative reporters Donald Barlett and James Steele.

That book also recounts how, in 1968, Dummar was arrested and charged with forging a $251 payroll check from his employer, Basic Refractories Inc., in Gabbs, Nev. A jury would not reach a verdict, and the charge was dismissed.

Dummar held a series of odd jobs and appeared on game shows. He won a car, a freezer and a range over multiple appearances on “Let’s Make a Deal.” He won another car on “Hollywood Squares.” He also appeared on “The Price Is Right.”

He had split from his first wife when he was driving on U.S. Highway 95 between Gabbs and Las Vegas the night in late 1967 when he said he found Hughes. Dummar said he pulled onto a dirt road to stop and urinate. He saw a man facedown. Dummar was about to contact the sheriff when the man regained consciousness.

“I couldn’t leave him there,” Dummar told The Tribune in 2006. “He would have died of exposure.”

The man asked for a ride to the Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas, in Dummar’s telling. Dummar said he left Hughes at the back door of the hotel and gave him some pocket change.

Dummar had bought the gas station in Willard by the time the “Mormon Will” emerged. His story became a national sensation. Wire services spread it all over the world.

Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon joked on “The Tonight Show" about Dummar and Hughes — Carson struggled to pronounce Dummar’s name — and pondered whether the story could be true.

“There’s going to be people picking up hitchhikers all over the country now,” Carson quipped.

There were multiple problems with Dummar’s assertions. The document had misspellings, contradictions and misstatements about Hughes’ businesses and assets.

First, Dummar told reporters he didn’t know how a copy of the will arrived at the church’s Salt Lake City headquarters, but he later acknowledged that was a lie. Dummar resealed the envelope and dropped it off at the headquarters. He explained his actions later by saying he thought someone was playing a joke on him, and he was confused.

Publicity also muddied Dummar’s claims. There were crank calls and visitors. In one example, two weeks after Dummar received the envelope, an Edmonton, Alberta, man arrived at the Box Elder County Sheriff’s Office with a newspaper article about Dummar in hand and said he was riding with Dummar when they picked up Hughes. The Canadian said it was he, not Dummar, who gave Hughes 25 cents when he asked for money. His claims went nowhere.

At the Las Vegas trial in 1978, Bonnie Dummar had to answer questions about how she had pleaded guilty to welfare fraud in Orange County, Calif., in 1973, before she married Melvin Dummar. She was sentenced to 90 days in jail and ordered to repay the money.

But the couple never wavered from Melvin Dummar’s assertion he gave Hughes that ride.

“If I had to do it over again,” Melvin Dummar told The Tribune in 2006, “I’d pick up Mr. Hughes.”

Source: https://www.sltrib.com/

Mark William Hofmann

Mark William Hofmann (born December 7, 1954) is an American counterfeiter, forger and convicted murderer. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished forgers in history,

Hofmann is especially noted for his creation of documents related to the history of the Latter Day Saint movement. When Hofmann's schemes began to unravel, he constructed bombs to murder two people in Salt Lake City, Utah. As of 2009, he is serving a life sentence at the Utah State Prison in Draper.

Early life

As a sixth-generation Mormon, Hofmann was reared in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by two devoutly religious parents. Hofmann was a below-average high school student, but he had many hobbies including magic, electronics, chemistry, and stamp and coin collecting. Friends of Hofmann later reported that he built a metal detector out of household items and could "figure stuff out." He and his friends were also said to have made bombs for fun on the outskirts of Murray, Utah. According to Hofmann, while still a teenage coin collector, he forged a rare mint mark on a dime and was told by an organization of coin collectors that it was genuine.

As was expected of Mormon young men, Hofmann volunteered to spend two years as an LDS missionary, and in 1973 the Church sent him to the England Southwest Mission, where he was based in Bristol. Hofmann boasted to his parents that he had baptized several converts; he did not tell them that he had also perused Fawn Brodie's skeptical biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History.

While in England Hofmann also enjoyed investigating bookshops and buying old Mormon and anti-Mormon books. A former girlfriend whom Hofmann came within a few days of marrying later stated that she believed he had lost his faith long before he performed his mission and that he went to England only because of social pressure and the desire not to disappoint his parents.

After Hofmann returned from his mission, he enrolled as a premed major at Utah State University. In 1979, he married Doralee Olds, and the couple eventually had four children. Dorie Olds Hoffman filed for divorce in 1987 and became co-founder of a holistic healing company. Despite her denials, there has been speculation that Olds knew more about the forgeries than she admitted.

Forgeries

Anthon transcript

Hofmann forgery of "Reformed Egyptian" document, LDS archives. Note the columnar arrangement and the "Mexican Calender" described by Anthon. In 1980, Hofmann said that he had found a seventeenth-century King James Bible with a folded paper gummed inside. The document seemed to be the transcript that Joseph Smith's scribe Martin Harris had presented to Charles Anthon, a Columbia classics professor, in 1828.

According to the Mormon scripture Joseph Smith—History, the transcript and its unusual "reformed Egyptian" characters were copied by Smith from the Golden Plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon.

Mark Hoffman (left) with LDS Prophet Spencer Kimball. Kimball is using a magnifying glass to examine a document but it unable to detect it is a fraud

Hofmann constructed his version to fit Anthon's description of the document, and its "discovery" made Hofmann's reputation. Dean Jessee, an editor of Joseph Smith's papers and the best-known expert on handwriting and old documents in the Historical Department of the LDS Church, concluded that the document was a Joseph Smith holograph. The LDS Church announced the discovery of the Anthon Transcript in April and purchased it from Hofmann for more than USD$20,000.

Appraised by the LDS church for $25,000, it was purchased on October 13 in exchange for several artifacts the church owned in duplicate, including a $5 gold Mormon coin, Deseret banknotes, and a first edition of the Book of Mormon. Assuming the document to be genuine, prominent Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley predicted that the discovery promised "as good a test as we'll ever get of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon" because he thought the paper might be translated. The eccentric Barry Fell shortly claimed to have decoded the text.

Hofmann promptly dropped out of school and went into business as a dealer in rare books. He soon fabricated other historically significant documents and became noted among LDS Church history buffs for his "discoveries" of previously unknown materials pertaining to the Latter Day Saint movement. These fooled not only members of the First Presidency — notably Gordon B. Hinckley — but also document experts and distinguished historians. As Richard and Joan Ostling have written, Hofmann was by this time a "closet apostate" motivated not only by greed but also by "the desire to embarrass the church by undermining church history."

Joseph Smith III blessing

During the early 1980s, a significant number of new Mormon documents came into the marketplace. Sometimes the Church received these as donations, and others it purchased. According to the Ostlings, "The church publicized some of the acquisitions; it orchestrated public relations for some that were known to be sensitive; others it acquired secretly and suppressed."

In 1981, Hofmann arrived at the headquarters of the Utah church with a document which supposedly provided evidence that Joseph Smith the Prophet had designated his son Joseph Smith III, rather than Brigham Young, as his successor. In a forged cover letter, purportedly written by Thomas Bullock and dated January 27, 1865, Bullock chastises Brigham Young for having all copies of the blessing destroyed. Bullock writes that although he believes Young to be the legitimate leader of the LDS church, he would keep his copy of the blessing.

Such a letter, if true, would portray Young and, by extension, the LDS church in an unfavorable light. In September 1981, Hofmann gave the letter to Hinckley as a “faithful Mormon.”

According to Hofmann, Hinckley filed the letter away in a safe in the First Presidency's offices. The letter was also later given to the RLDS Church. Hofmann expected the church to "buy the blessing on the spot and bury it." When the church archivist balked at the price, Hofmann offered it to the Missouri Church, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which had always claimed that the line of succession had been bestowed on Joseph Smith's line but had never had written proof. A scramble to acquire the Blessing then occurred, and Hofmann, posing as a faithful Utah Mormon, presented it to his church in exchange for items worth more than $20,000. Nevertheless, Hofmann engineered the situation so as to ensure that the document would be made public.

The next day a New York Times headline read, "Mormon Document Raises Doubts on Succession of Church's Leaders," and the LDS Church was forced to confirm the discovery and publicly present the document to the RLDS Church.

During the race by the Utah and Missouri churches to acquire the Blessing of Joseph Smith III, Hofmann discovered "a lever to exercise enormous power over his church," a power to "menace and manipulate its leaders with nothing more sinister than a sheet of paper." Salt Lake County District Attorney's investigator Michael George believed that after Hofmann had successfully forged the Blessing, his ultimate goal was to create the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon, which he could have filled with inconsistencies and errors, sell them "to the church to be hidden away and then—as he had done often with embarrassing documents"—make "sure its contents were made public."

Salamander letter

Perhaps the most notorious of Hofmann's LDS forgeries, the Salamander letter, appeared in 1984. Supposedly written by Martin Harris to William Wines Phelps, the letter presented a version of the recovery of the gold plates that contrasted markedly with the church-sanctioned version of events. Not only did the forgery make it clear that Joseph Smith had been practicing "money digging" through magical practices, but instead of an angel, "a white salamander" had appeared to Smith.

After the letter had been purchased for the church and became public knowledge, Apostle Dallin Oaks asserted to Mormon educators that the words "white salamander" could be reconciled with Joseph Smith's Angel Moroni because in the 1820s, the word salamander might also refer to a mythical being thought to be able to live in fire, and a "being that is able to live in fire is a good approximation of the description Joseph Smith gave of the Angel Moroni."

In 1984, Jerald and Sandra Tanner, noted critics of the LDS church, became the first to declare the letter a forgery despite the fact that it, as well as others of Hofmann's 'discoveries,' would have strengthened the Tanners' arguments against the veracity of official Mormon history. Document expert Kenneth W. Rendell later said that while there was "the absence of any indication of forgery in the letter itself, there was also no evidence that it was genuine."

Other Mormon forgeries

No one is certain how many forged documents Hofmann created during the early 1980s. But they included a letter from Joseph Smith's mother, Lucy Mack Smith, describing the origin of the Book of Mormon; a letter each from Martin Harris and David Whitmer, two of the Three Witnesses, each giving a personal account of their visions; a contract between Smith and Egbert Bratt Grandin for the printing of the first edition of the Book of Mormon; and two pages of the original Book of Mormon manuscript taken in dictation from Joseph Smith by Oliver Cowdery.

In 1983, Hofmann sold to the Church, through its then-de facto head Gordon B. Hinckley, an 1825 Joseph Smith holograph letter confirming that Smith had been treasure hunting and practicing black magic five years following his First Vision. Hofmann had the signature confirmed by Charles Hamilton, the contemporary "dean of American autograph dealers," sold it to the Church for $15,000 and gave his word that no one else had a copy of the letter. Then Hofmann leaked its existence to the press, after which the church was virtually forced to release the letter to scholars for study, despite previously denying it had it in its possession.

To make this sudden flood of important Mormon documents seem plausible, Hofmann explained that he relied on a network of tipsters, had methodically tracked down modern descendants of early Mormons, and had mined collections of nineteenth-century letters that had been saved by collectors for their postmarks rather than for their contents.

Oath of a Freeman

In addition to documents from Mormon history, Hofmann also forged and sold signatures of many famous non-Mormons, including George Washington, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Daniel Boone, John Brown, Andrew Jackson, Mark Twain, Nathan Hale, John Hancock, Francis Scott Key, Abraham Lincoln, John Milton, Paul Revere, Myles Standish, and Button Gwinnett, whose signature was the rarest, and therefore the most valuable, of any signer of the Declaration of Independence.

He also forged a previously unknown poem in the hand of Emily Dickinson. But Hofmann's grandest scheme was to forge what was perhaps the most famous missing document in American colonial history, the Oath of a Freeman. The one-page Oath had been printed in 1639, the first document to be printed in Britain's American colonies; but only about fifty copies had been made, and none of these was extant. A genuine example was probably worth over a million dollars in 1985, and Hofmann's agents began to negotiate a sale to the Library of Congress.

Murders

Despite the considerable amounts of money Hofmann had made from document sales, he was deeply in debt, in part because of his increasingly lavish lifestyle and his purchases of genuine first-edition books. In an effort to clear his debts, he attempted to broker a sale of the "McLellin collection”—a supposedly extensive group of documents written by William E. M'Lellin, an early Mormon apostle who eventually broke with the LDS church. Hofmann hinted that the McLellin collection would provide specular revelations unfavorable to the LDS church. Unfortunately for Hofmann, he had no idea where the McLellin collection was, nor did he have the time to forge a suitably large group of documents.

Those to whom Hofmann had promised documents or repayments of debts began to hound him, and the sale of the "Oath of a Freeman" was delayed by questions about its authenticity.

In a desperate effort to buy more time, Hofmann began constructing bombs. On October 15, 1985, he first killed document collector Steven Christensen, the son of a locally prominent clothier. Later the same day, a second bomb killed Kathy Sheets, the wife of Christensen's former employer. As Hofmann had intended, police initially suspected that the bombings were related to the impending collapse of an investment business of which Kathy Sheets' husband, J. Gary Sheets, was the principal and Christensen his protégé.

The following day, Hofmann himself was severely injured when a bomb exploded in his car. Although police quickly focused on Hofmann as the suspect in the bombings, some of Hofmann's business associates went into hiding, fearing they might also become victims.

Another blast. This time, in a car, by the old Deseret Gym, and the

victim is Mark Hofmann. He loses some fingers and gets injured very badly, but survives.

Trial and sentencing

During the bombing investigation, police discovered evidence of the forgeries in Hofmann's basement, and they found the engraving plant where the forged plate for the Oath of a Freeman had been made. (Through inexperience, Hofmann also made two significant errors in his Oath, creating a version impossible to have been set in type.)

Hofmann was arrested for murder and forgery in February 1986. In January 1987, he pled guilty to second-degree murder and theft-by-deception to avoid the death penalty, confessing his forgeries in open court. In January 1988, he was sentenced to life in prison.

In 1988, before the Utah Board of Pardons, Hofmann confessed that he thought planting the bomb that killed Kathy Sheets was "almost a game… at the time I made the bomb, my thoughts were that it didn't matter if it was Mrs. Sheets, a child, a dog… whoever" was killed. Within the hour the parole board, impressed by Hofmann's "callous disregard for human life" decided that he would indeed serve his "natural life in prison."

After Hofmann was imprisoned, his wife filed for divorce. Hofmann attempted suicide in his cell by taking an overdose of antidepressants. He was revived but not before spending twelve hours lying on his right arm, blocking its circulation and causing muscle atrophy. His forging hand was thereby permanently disabled.

Legacy

A master forger, Hofmann fooled a number of renowned document experts during his short career, and an unknown number of his forgeries may still be in circulation. But it is Hofmann's forgeries of Mormon documents that have had the greatest historical significance.

In August 1987, the sensationalist aspects of the Hofmann case led Apostle Dallin Oaks to believe that church members had witnessed "some of the most intense LDS Church-bashing since the turn of the century." Student of Mormonism Jan Shipps agreed that press reports "contained an astonishing amount of innuendo associating Hofmann's plagiarism with Mormon beginnings. Myriad reports alleged secrecy and cover-up on the part of LDS general authorities, and not a few writers referred to the way in which a culture that rests on a found scripture is particularly vulnerable to the offerings of con-artists."

According to the Ostlings, the Hofmann forgeries could only have been perpetrated "in connection with the curious mixture of paranoia and obsessiveness with which Mormons approach church history." After Hofmann's exposure, the Church tried to correct the record, but the "public relations damage as well as the forgery losses meant the church was also a Hofmann victim."

Robert Lindsey has also suggested that Hofmann "stimulated a burst of historical inquiry regarding Joseph Smith's youthful enthusiasm for magic [that] did not wither after his conviction" despite "even harsher barriers to scholars' access to [LDS Church] archives… The Mark Hofmann affair had emboldened many scholars to penetrate deeper and deeper into recesses of the Mormon past that its most conservative leaders wanted left unexplored, and it was unlikely that those in the Church Administration Building would ever be able to contain fully the fires of intellectual curiosity that Hofmann had helped.Fan."

Wikipedia.org

Ronnie Lee Gardner

In 1980 Gardner was sent to prison for robbery and escaped in 1981. Two weeks later, Gardner confronted a man who was sleeping with his girlfriend. He was wounded by gunfire and was eventually arrested and returned to prison. In 1984 he was taken to the hospital for a check-up where he overpowered a guard, stole his pistol and escaped again. Three months later, Gardner shot and killed Melvyn John Otterstrom as he tended bar at the Cheers Tavern in Salt Lake City.

On April 2, 1985 Gardner was under a $1.5 million bail and was transported from the Utah State Prison to the Metropolitan Hall of Justice in Salt Lake City for a pretrial hearing on a second degree murder charge for killing Melvyn Otterstrom.

As Gardner and his guards entered the courthouse basement, Carma Jolley Hainsworth, walked up and handed Gardner a gun. It was later discovered that she had also hidden a bag containing men's clothing, duct tape and a knife in a tote bag under a sink in the women's bathroom in the basement of the courthouse. The guards exchanged gunfire with Gardner, shot him through the lung, and then retreated from the area.

In attempting to escape, Gardner entered the archives room, where he shot and killed attorney Michael Burdell, hiding behind the door. Gardner then forced prison officer Richard Thomas, who was also in the basement, to conduct him out of the archives room to a stairwell leading to the second floor. As Gardner crossed the lobby, he shot and seriously wounded Nicholas G. Kirk, then 58, a uniformed bailiff who was unarmed and had just stepped off an elevator. Gardner climbed the stairs to the next floor, where he took hostage Wilburn Miller, a vending machine serviceman. As Gardner exited the building, Miller broke free and escaped. Outside, Gardner was surrounded by half a dozen waiting policemen with drawn weapons. Ordered to drop his weapon, he threw down his gun and lay down, surrendering to the officers.

Ronnie Lee Gardner sits with his lawyer Andrew Parnes in court at the Matheson Courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Final/Special Meal:Gardner fasted from food in the 36 hours leading up to his death, drinking only liquids. He ate his last meal Tuesday evening — a feast of steak, lobster tail, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and 7UP.

Last Words:None.

Gardner executed

By Christopher Smart - Salt Lake Tribune

June 18, 2010

Ronnie Lee Gardner's quarter-century on death row ended at 12:20 today when a firing squad executed one of Utah's most notorious killers. His death signaled the end of a gut-wrenching saga for the families of the Utah men Gardner murdered or wounded and those who had hoped to spare the killer's life.

Barb Webb, daughter of Gardner victim Nick Kirk, sobbed when news of the execution came. "I'm so relieved it's all over," she said, hugging her daughter, Mandi Hull. "I just hope my sister, who just passed away, and my father, and all of the other victims are waiting for his sorry ass. I hope they get to go down after him."

Just after midnight, Gardner's family members leaned against each other in a tight cluster and sobbed. They played Lynyrd's Skynyrd's "Free Bird," singing along. "I'm just glad it's over. I'm glad he's free," said Randy Gardner after his brother's death. Other Gardner relatives whooped and cheered as they released 24 balloons decorated with messages. "I love you, Ron!" some of them screamed, falling into each other's arms. Gardner's daughter,

Brandie Gardner, put her hands to her face and sobbed.

For the nation, the 49-year-old Salt Laker's death by four bullets marked what could be the last execution of its kind in the country. Utah is the only state still using a firing squad, and only four men on death row could still choose it -- the state switched to lethal injection in 2004. Gardner's story went global when he told a judge how he preferred to become one of the 50-odd people executed in the United States each year: "I would like the firing squad, please." Some hope the attention will highlight problems meting out capital punishment in Utah. Both death penalty opponents and believers decry the nearly 25 years Gardner spent between his conviction and execution for the April 1985 murder of Michael Burdell.

Earlier this month, attorneys for the son of a Provo woman killed in her home during a 1985 robbery by death row inmate Douglas Stewart Carter asked a federal judge to speed up appeals in that 25-year-old case. "My dad passed away last year. He didn't have any closure," said Gary Olesen, son of victim Eva Olesen. "I'm hoping Gardner's execution will help. But I'm not sure it will." Jani S. Tillery, from the Maryland Crimes Victims' Resource Center, said her client is only asking the court to "move forward."

Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who has pushed to streamline death row appeals, said the run-up to today's execution may have generated legislative momentum to remake state law. "I'm hearing from a lot of people, 25 years is just too long," said Shurtleff. "It's ridiculous."

Ralph Dellapiana, an attorney affiliated with Utahns for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, said he hopes Gardner's death will spark discussion "that this arbitrary process be changed to something else." The last two executions in Utah have been of killers who halted their own death-row appeals. John Albert Taylor was executed in 1996 after eight years on death row, while Joseph Mitchell Parsons spent 11 years on death row before his 1999 execution. Unlike them, Gardner has fought to the bitter end.

Gardner's appellate attorneys have argued unsuccessfully over the years that if his jurors had known about the mitigating facts surrounding his troubled childhood -- poverty, drugs, violence and sex abuse -- they would have sentenced him to life in prison. As part of Gardner's bid for commutation before the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole, three of those jurors signed affidavits saying they would have sentenced Gardner to life without parole if that possibility had been available. A fourth said he would have seriously considered it. Life without parole was not possible until 1992 in Utah. Gardner himself told the parole board last week he was a changed man from the person who shot and killed Melvyn Otterstrom at The Cheers Tavern on Oct. 24, 1984.

Just before an April 2, 1985, court hearing in the Otterstrom case, Gardner killed attorney Michael Burdell and seriously wounded bailiff Nick Kirk in a failed courthouse escape. Gardner said over the past decade he had become cognizant of the pain he had caused his victims and their families. He told the parole board he had developed a new awareness of why he had been so violent and impulsive. "I can't even apologize to the victims, and it makes me sad," said a crying Gardner. "People at that courthouse that didn't even get hurt, I'm sure it traumatized them."

He told the parole board he wanted to spend the rest of his life counseling young inmates and helping abused children with an organic farm program. Gardner also argued his execution would bring the families of his victims little comfort. "I know killing me is going to hurt them just as bad," he said. "I've been on the other side of that gun."

Yet Gardner was unable to shed his reputation. Over the past 25 years Gardner has captured headlines numerous times for attacks on other inmates and misbehavior including a standoff at a prison visiting room where he broke down a glass partition, barricaded the door and had sex with his half-brother's wife as officers looked on helplessly.

Members of the victims' families argued both for and against Gardner's death. All said they wanted to end a long nightmare. "This story must be allowed to slip into history," said Jason Otterstrom during the commutation hearing. "Our families need peace." The parole board unanimously voted against Gardner. A flurry of last-minute appeals to the governor, U.S. Supreme Court, and 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also failed.

A bishop with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints served as Gardner's spiritual adviser at the end of his life, his attorneys said. Gardner became the 1,213th person nationally and the seventh in Utah to be executed since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. The justices halted executions four years earlier, finding the ultimate punishment was not being applied equally.

Gardner's life and death exemplifies a troubling pattern often seen by psychologists, said Craig Haney, a University of California psychologist who has studied people who commit violent crimes for 30 years. "We know that abused and neglected children grow up to be impulsive and violent," Haney told the parole board." Ronnie Lee Gardner is a perfect model for someone who grows up to commit horrendous crimes."

Gary Mark Gilmore

On Monday, July 19, 1976, Max Jensen went to work as usual at the self-service gas station in Orem, Utah. That night, Gilmore had a spat with his girlfriend and went driving with her mentally unstable younger sister, April.

At around 10:30 pm he told April he wanted to make a phone call. He left her in the truck and walked away. Gilmore went around the corner, out of her sight, and into the Sinclair service station.

He spotted the attendant and quickly saw that no one else was around. He walked up to Max Jensen and pulled out a .22 Browning Automatic. He instructed Jensen to empty his pockets, which the young Mormon quickly did. Then he told Jensen to go into the bathroom and lie down on the floor with his arms under his body. Jensen got into the position. He was obeying everything that Gilmore said.

Then inexplicably, Gilmore put the gun close to Jensen's head. "This one is for me," he said, and fired. Then he placed the muzzle right against Jensen's skull and shot him once again, this time "for Nicole." (girlfriend Nicole Baker Barrett)

Gilmore spent the night with April at a motel and the following night, he walked into the City Center Motel in Provo, not far from Brigham Young University. He confronted the attendant, Ben Bushnell, who lived on the premises with his wife and baby. Gilmore told Ben to give him the cash box and get down on the floor. Then he shot Bushnell in the head. Bushnell's wife came in, so Gilmore grabbed the cash box and left. Trying to dispose of the gun in a nearby bush, Gilmore shot himself in the hand.

By Wednesday, Gilmore's cousin, Brenda Nicol, turned him into the police. Gilmore gave up near a roadblock without a fight. At first, he denied the murders, but later admitted both.

In October, Gilmore was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. He chose death by firing squad and waived all appeals. Despite the efforts of other groups to stop it, 6 months after the murders, the execution was carried out.

Gary Gilmore was the first person executed in the U.S. in almost 10 years. In prison most of his life and paroled only four months before the murders, Gilmore becomes a celebrity with his efforts to hasten his execution. His last words: “Let’s do it.”

The Crime Library.com

"Gary Gilmore: Death Wish," by Katherine Ramsland.

Freedom

It's not that his ambitions were great that got him into trouble, but that he hadn't the patience to earn what he desired. From a young age, Gary Mark Gilmore just went out and took whatever he wanted—beer, cigarettes, cars, money. More times than not (according to him) he was successful, but when he wasn't, he landed in the slammer. He'd just get an idea into his head and do it. He said he couldn't help himself.

Gilmore’s story is documented in a book written by his younger brother, Mikal Gilmore, called Shot in the Heart, and by Norman Mailer, who wrote a narrative nonfiction account, The Executioner’s Song, in which he utilized letters that Gilmore wrote, interviews with many of his intimates, trial transcripts, and interviews or statements that Gilmore gave to the press. Mailer did not himself interview Gilmore, but his account relies on actual documents, with an emphasis on how those around Gilmore perceived him.

There are also a few film clips available of Gilmore as he spoke to the press or to the courts, and an A&E documentary collected these into an overview of his fight to die rather then face years in prison. Gilmore is a historical case, in that he was the first man to be executed after the U. S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, and because he refused all appeals to which he was legally entitled.

Born on December 4, 1940, he'd aspired as a boy to become a man of God. By the time he was thirty-five, he'd spent more than half of his life in prison, from juvenile detention to a federal penitentiary. At age 14, he dropped out of school. By fifteen, he was running an illegal car theft ring. That's when he was first arrested, although he'd been drinking for three years, harassing teachers, playing hooky, and stealing petty items.

According to his own statements to court-ordered psychologists, he developed a need for bravado, which meant staring down approaching trains until near-impact or sticking a wet finger into an outlet. Upon his first arrest, his father Frank got a lawyer and got him off, teaching him to manipulate the legal system and skirt responsibility for criminal acts. After all, Frank had made a living at it for many years. He was a professional con man, but could not abide the taint of criminality in his son.

However, Gilmore then stole something that got him into Oregon's MacLaren Reform School for Boys. He spent a year there, and then went in and out of jail until he was eighteen. At that point, he ended up in the Oregon State Correctional Institution on a car theft charge. His father couldn't do much for him, especially after he piled up an array of disciplinary charges while in prison. Then he was out and then in again, and this time while he was behind bars, Frank Gilmore died. According to statements made by one of the wardens in the documentary, “A Fight to Die,” Gary went wild, tearing up his cell and attempting suicide. This was a blow he could not bear.

Yet there was no release for him, no respite to mourn. He became violent to guards and inmates alike. Because he was so difficult to handle, he was heavily drugged with an anti-psychotic called Prolixin, and only with his mother's horrified intervention was he removed from this dehumanizing regimen. He never forgot its paralyzing effects. He got out when he was 21 and promptly committed robbery and assault for $11.

Gary Gilmore at Court in Provo, Utah on Dec. 1, 1976. Gilmore was in court to get a new date of execution by firing squad.

At this point, the State of Oregon decided that he was a repeat offender with a poor prognosis. He went to Oregon State Penitentiary. While incarcerated, his brother Gaylen, the third of Bessie and Frank's four boys, was stabbed in the stomach. Mikal Gilmore documents this tragic incident. Having no money for medical care, Gaylen died. This time, Gary was allowed to attend the funeral, but losing Gaylen had its effect. Gary often ended up in solitary confinement over his inability to conform to the prison routines.

Yet spending so much time alone in solitary proved beneficial. With an IQ of 130, he educated himself in literature and began to write poetry. More notably, he developed an artistic talent that won contests. For that, he was granted an early release in 1972 to live in a halfway house in Eugene and attend art school at the local community college.

While he welcomed this opportunity, it apparently intimidated him. Rather than show up to register, he stayed away and drank. He visited his brother Mikal, who reported that he was afraid of Gary. Within a month, Gilmore had committed armed robbery and was arrested. When he went to trial again, he asked permission to address the court, which was granted, and his actual words are recorded in several places, including court transcripts.

With great articulation, Gilmore made an appeal for leniency. He said that he had been locked up for the past nine and a half years, with only two years of freedom since he was fourteen. Justice had been harsh and he'd never asked for a break until now.

He argued that “you can keep a person locked up too long” and that “there is an appropriate time to release somebody or to give them a break. …I stagnated in prison a long time and I have wasted most of my life. I want freedom and I realize that the only way to get it is to quit breaking the law. …I’ve got problems and if you sentence me to additional time, I’m going to compound them.”

The judge told him that he had already been convicted once for armed robbery, a serious charge, so there was no option but to sentence him to another nine years. Gilmore was hurt and angry. As promised, he became more violent while in prison and on a number of occasions tried unsuccessfully to kill himself. They wanted to try Prolixin again, but Gilmore begged for an alternative. He was transferred to a maximum-security penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. That meant that no one in his family could visit him. He started writing to a cousin in Utah, Brenda Nicol, and only three years into his sentence, a parole plan was worked out. Brenda gave several interviews about her involvement with Gary, and Mailer offers a complete description of her account.

Brenda orchestrated Gilmore’s release. She hadn't seen Gary since he was a boy, but she remembered how distinctive he was. She believed that if she and her family could help him out with a loving community and a job, he'd get along okay. She didn't know that he'd been diagnosed (according the reports that Mailer documents) with a psychopathic personality disorder. She had no idea how compulsive he was, or demanding. It was in her mind to do a good deed, so she worked on bringing Gary home. Finally in 1977, he was released to go live in Provo. He arrived with everything he owned packed in a small gym bag. He was ready for freedom, he firmly believed.

Yet life in Utah proved to be hard. He'd hated prison, but the skills he'd developed there to survive just didn't work in a conservative Mormon community. He was briefly employed in his Uncle Vern Damico's shoe shop and then did insulation for a man named Spencer McGrath, but he had a hard time concentrating.

The first chance he got, according to interviews that Vern Damico gave to Mailer, he went out drinking. When he couldn't afford beer, he stole it. Then he found himself a beautiful girlfriend, Nicole Baker Barrett, thrice divorced by age 19, and soon returned to a life of compulsive theft because he wanted what he wanted…right now. It was the sight of a white Ford pickup truck priced well beyond his means that appeared to those who knew him to have sparked a spree that could only have ended badly.

First Victim

Gilmore had bought a blue Mustang from Val Conlin, a used car dealer, but it had problems and often wouldn't run. He still owed on that but he'd seen a ten-year-old, overpriced white truck on the lot that he really wanted. The dealer said no way, not unless he found himself a co-signer. That frustrated Gilmore. By hook or by crook, he intended to have that truck. To his mind, there were always ways of getting money. He'd already stolen some merchandise to sell. Then he managed to collect a bag full of guns---nine of them. He gave one to Nicole, she later told police officers, showed her the rest, and said he intended to sell whatever he could. Nicole’s interview for A&E is the best source of information for what happened in those final days, along with Gilmore’s own documented admissions. Each person who saw him over the next few days later gave interviews on film as well. Gilmore had scared her. He'd already shown a violent side, she later related, and now this. She didn't know what to do.

Gilmore had moved into her rented home in Spanish Fork, near Provo, but things weren't always so good. He often took a drug, Fiorinal, for headaches and he drank all the time, which created sexual dysfunction, an inability to think clearly, and a great deal of frustrated anger. He was impulsive and demanding, and there were times when Nicole was actually afraid of him, though she loved him. Once when he'd picked her up she'd had the feeling of an evil presence emanating from him. She thought he might be the devil, and there were times when he acted like he was. He even claimed he knew Charles Manson.

Finally it all just got to her. She just took her two children and went to live in an apartment five miles away. Gary went looking for her. He was in a state. She wasn't going to run out on him. He told his cousin Brenda he might just kill her. But he couldn't find her. On top of that, he was now deeply in debt with no clear way out…except the only way he knew. He'd been free less than three months and already he couldn't cope.

Mailer interviewed the families of Gilmore’s victim’s and Gilmore’s friends to put together the following accounts:

On Monday, July 19, 1976, Max Jensen went to work as usual at the self-service gas station in Orem, Utah. His shift went from 3 in the afternoon until 11. He was just there until he could find a job that paid more so that he and his new wife could get a little security. At around the same time that Max was going through the routines of his job, Gilmore learned that no one would co-sign on the truck for him, so he insisted that he himself could pay it off within a few weeks.

Conlin assured Gilmore that he would repossess the truck at once if the payments weren't made. Then Gilmore left with the truck and headed toward Nicole's mother's house. Nicole wasn't there, but her mentally unstable younger sister, April, had a crush on Gary and was happy to go for a ride in his new truck. She told him she wanted to stay out all night. Angry and hurt by Nicole, as he later said in letters to her, he was pleased to oblige. Around 10:30 that evening, he told April he wanted to make a phone call. He left her in the truck and walked away. She had no idea where he was going.

Gilmore went around the corner, out of her sight, and into the Sinclair service station. He spotted the attendant and quickly saw that no one else was around. He walked up to the man, whose nameplate read "Max Jensen" and pulled out a .22 Browning Automatic. He instructed Jensen to empty his pockets, which the young Mormon quickly did. Then he told Jensen to go into the bathroom and lie down on the floor with his arms under his body. Jensen got into the position. He was obeying everything that Gilmore said. Then inexplicably, Gilmore put the gun close to Jensen's head. "This one is for me," he said, and fired. Then he placed the muzzle right against Jensen's skull and shot him once again, this time "for Nicole."

To his surprise, the blood spread fast and got on his pants. He turned around and left the gas station, not even noticing the wad of cash on the counter. His next move was to take April to see a movie, "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest." Then they went over to Brenda's. She thought Gilmore was strangely agitated. He had some clothes that he didn't seem to want her to see. He didn't stay long and she couldn't get over the feeling that something was up. Without further explanation, Gary drove off with April and they got a room at a Holiday Inn. While they slept, the hunt began for Max Jensen's killer. Around 11:00 p.m., a customer had found the body.

The Killing Continues

Ben Bushnell, 25, was the manager of the City Center Motel in Provo, not far from Brigham Young University. He and his wife lived on the premises with their infant son, and things looked promising for Ben's future.

On Tuesday July 20, Gilmore had trouble with his new truck, so he took it to gas station three blocks from his Uncle Vern's house. Upon learning that a fix could take twenty minutes, according to Norman Fulmer, the man who ran the gas station, Gilmore decided to run a little errand. He walked down the street and saw the City Center Motel next to Uncle Vern's. Emboldened by his previous murder, he got an idea. He went into the lobby.

Ben had just come in from the store so he asked Gilmore what he wanted. Gary told Ben to give him the cash box and get down on the floor. Then he shot Bushnell in the head. But the man wasn't dead yet. He lay there twitching and trying to move. Gilmore wasn't sure what to do, but just then Bushnell's wife, Debbie, came out so Gilmore grabbed the cash box and left. He pocketed the cash and placed the box under a bush.

A block later, he took the gun he'd used by the muzzle and shoved it into another bush, but something caught the trigger and he took a bullet in the fleshy part of his hand, between the thumb and palm. He went into the garage to get his truck and the owner, Norman Fulmer, spotted the trail of blood. Then on the police scanner Fulmer heard about an assault and robbery at a nearby hotel. He wrote down the truck's license plate number and after Gilmore drove away, Fulmer called it in. Patrol cars sped through town and SWAT teams turned out to track and capture Gilmore. They figured he'd just killed a man for around $125. Pretty much like the murder in Orem the night before.

Uncle Vern came out to see what all the excitement was about, and it wasn't long before he realized that his nephew was involved. Over the past month, he'd watched Gilmore go from bad to worse, especially when he drank, and this brutal act seemed to cap his latest escalation of acting out. Vern's wife called Brenda, and she in turn called a police dispatcher she knew. Then Gilmore called her. He admitted he'd been shot and needed help. He told her where he was. Brenda sent the police to go get him. About the same time that they were evacuating neighbors and closing in, Debbie Bushnell was learning that the paramedics couldn't save her husband. He was dead.

Gilmore's execution chair.

Afraid that Brenda wasn't coming, Gilmore left the house where he'd gotten some first aid and drove right through a police roadblock. Then it dawned on the cops that he was the guy. They set out after him and eventually ordered him to stop just outside Nicole's mother's house. Gilmore gave up without a fight. He asked only that they be careful of his wounded hand. Nicole was there. She went out and saw him lying on the ground. Then she overheard the cops suggest that he'd just committed two murders. She couldn't help but wonder if her leaving him had something to do with it, but she also though he was one stupid, crazy son-of-a-bitch.

Brenda soon learned that no one else had been hurt and Gilmore was now in custody. She knew he'd hate her for it, and when he asked her the next day why she had turned him in, she said, "You commit a murder Monday, and commit a murder Tuesday. I wasn't waiting for Wednesday to roll around." (This is her recollection as she recounted it to both Mailer and the A&E crew.) While Gilmore eventually accepted the fact that what he'd done was wrong and he deserved to be punished, he never totally forgave her for this betrayal. When she turned him in, she had effectively separated him forever from Nicole. To his mind, she could have driven him to the border and let him go up to Oregon. He didn't seem to get it.

Upon his arrest, Gary said that he'd talk with one cop, Gerald Nielsen, and he freely spoke about his various interactions with Gilmore in film and to Mailer. At the hospital, a test on Gilmore's hand indicated that he'd recently held metal in it. Then it was set in a cast.

Nielsen then tried to get him to admit to the murders. He said that he had not killed anyone and that he could account for his whereabouts. He even said there were witnesses who would vouch for him. The facts were, as he recounted them, that he'd come across a guy holding up the man at the motel. He tried to stop it and got shot in the hand for his trouble. On the night before, he'd been with April the whole night and she'd be able to tell them that he hadn't killed anyone.

The story didn't check out; it was full of holes. In fact, there was a witness who had seen Gilmore with the gun and the cash box at the motel. April knew that Gilmore had left her to "make a phone call." Then Val Conlin found Gilmore's stash of stolen guns. He called the police and turned them in. Nielsen went back to try again. This time Gary simply said he didn't know why he had killed the two Mormons. He didn't have a reason. He admitted that if he hadn't been caught, he'd likely have gone on killing. Not much later, he said that he ought to die for what he'd done.

On August 3, at the preliminary hearing, prosecutor Noall Wootton met Gilmore for the first time. Mailer indicates from interviews that Wootton was impressed with the prisoner's intelligence, and it struck him that this man embodied the system's utter failure to rehabilitate. Gilmore would never be anything but dangerous---yet he might have been so much better than that.

For the next few months, Gilmore and Nicole wrote love letters to each other with great intensity, sometimes three a day. She knew that he faced life in prison, and possibly worse, yet she couldn't unhook herself from this enigmatic man who'd walked into her life and changed it forever. They swore an eternal bond. By October, everything was ready for trial. Since the case for the Bushnell murder was the strongest, the prosecution concentrated on it. If need be, they could go back and try Gilmore for Jensen's murder, but Wootton expected to prove his case. He had plenty of witnesses, even without the questionable confession. If Harry Houdini was really Gary Gilmore's grandfather, as his mother had often intimated, perhaps he'd passed down a few tricks on getting out of hopeless situations. Gilmore would need them.

Destined For Death

How does someone with talent and intelligence fall into such a life? Why would Gary Mark Gilmore develop into a habitual criminal who so thoughtlessly took the lives of two young men who'd done nothing to him? In his case, the answer seems to lie with the turbulent family in which he'd grown up; it had been full of fantasy and denial, coupled with rampant and random abuse.

Years later, Gary's youngest brother, Mikal, researched their family's history for his book, Shot in the Heart, to see where things went wrong. His feeling was that Gary reminded their father of his own failings in life and therefore got the brunt of the man's anger. Gary's conduct disorders as a juvenile, coupled with his compulsive personality, took the path of least resistance ---straight into the narcissistic and remorseless depths of psychopathy. He never knew when he'd get beaten, nor why, so he formed a notion of a harsh and punitive reality that made no sense. In many ways, the prison system itself was a metaphor of his father. No matter how he resisted and reacted, he'd always get beat up.

Frank Gilmore Sr. was a con man and an alcoholic. He'd married Bessie on a whim, and he'd had many wives and families before her, none of whom he cared about or supported. They had a son, Frank Jr., and then Gary came along while they were wandering aimlessly through Texas under the pseudonym of Coffman to avoid the law. Frank christened him Faye Robert Coffman, which Bessie quickly changed to Gary, but this birth certificate proved to be a sore spot years later. Gary thought he'd been illegitimate, deciding that this was the reason that his father had never loved him.

Frank had many dark secrets and Bessie was a Mormon outcast. They seemed to cling to each other to escape the realities of their pathetic lives. Frank craved independence and would disappear for long stretches of time. Bessie, for her part, did not allow the children to touch or hug her, so there was emotional deprivation from both parents. Yet Bessie did want security, so she persuaded Frank to settle in Portland, Oregon, and open a legitimate business.

He actually succeeded at it and for a while they were happier. Yet Frank drank heavily, which sent him into terrible rages. He'd whip his sons severely. The boys soon learned that no matter what they said or did, their father simply wanted to brutalize them, all the while insisting that they love him. One time, Gary was abandoned on a park bench while his father went to scam someone and he ended up in an orphanage for several days.

As he grew older, Gary reacted. He began to despise people in authority, and they in turn, treated him in a way that reminded him of his father. Both parents turned a blind eye to his problems, pretending they would just go away somehow. Neither respected the law, and they would rather get their children off than let them learn the consequences of their actions. The point at which psychological intervention might have made a difference for Gary, Frank refused to pay for it.

On top of all of this, Bessie had a deep-rooted superstition about Gary that went back to her own childhood. She believed that as a girl playing with a Ouija board, she had conjured up a demonic ghost that had attached itself to her family. When one of her sisters was killed and another paralyzed in an accident, she felt certain it was the ghost. Then she married Frank and found out that his mother, Fay, was a medium who could get spirits to materialize. One night while at Fay’s house with three of her sons, including Gary, she learned that there was to be a “special” séance to contact a spirit who had died under the shameful suspicion of murder. Bessie stayed away.

After the ceremony, she found Fay in a state of exhaustion with an expression on her face of great fear and helplessness. She helped the older woman to bed, but later that night Bessie woke up to the feel of being touched, and when she turned over, she was looking into the face of a leering inhuman creature. She jumped out of bed and saw Fay, an invalid, staggering toward her, insisting that she get out now. “It knows who you are!” Fay shouted. Bessie ran to Gary’s room and saw the same figure leaning over her son, staring into his eyes. She grabbed the kids and ran. Fay died shortly thereafter and Gary began to have terrible, shuddering nightmares that he was being beheaded. He was certain something was trying to get him and the nightmares haunted him the rest of his life.

Bessie saw the entity again in their house, and that’s when Gary began to get into trouble. He continued having dreams, swearing that something was in the room with him. Bessie concluded that the thing had taken over her son’s soul. His life thereafter was filled with angry, malevolent energy that seemed bent on self-destruction. Whether influenced by a demon or by familial abuse, Gary developed a death wish that guided his actions.

He seemed destined to die in some violent manner, though he'd often heard his mother's horror stories of an execution that she claimed to have witnessed as a girl. She'd been enraged that her father had taken her, a mere child, to witness a hanging. She told this story over and over. All of the boys believed that she'd really witnessed this incident and it had left a deep impression on them. Yet when Mikal researched it in Utah records, he realized that it was impossible for her to have witnessed such an event. She had made it up, possibly deriving this metaphor from her helplessness and anger. Yet it was a fatal vision that may have marked her second son with a sense of inevitability. Mikal concludes that the lies she told revealed terrible psychological truths that became an unspoken emotional legacy for her sons. They wanted to erase themselves from existence, and in fact, one was murdered, one was executed, one dropped into a psychological coma…and one (Mikal) became a writer.

The Trial

Two public defenders, Craig Snyder and Mike Esplin, took on Gilmore's case, but it looked pretty hopeless. There was an eyewitness who placed him near the Bushnell murder with the cash box and gun in his hand, and to top it all, he'd shot himself with the same gun. Then there was his cache of stolen guns, not to mention his apparent confession to a cop and later to his cousin. He'd told Brenda to tell his mother "it was true." As vague as that was, the jury could construe it as an admission of guilt. Their best hope was to find some legal technicality and take it to an appeals court.

While Noall Wootton was asking for the death penalty on the grounds that Gilmore was a danger to society should he ever escape and a threat to other inmates if sent to prison, no one had been executed in Utah for sixteen years. Wootton wasn't a death penalty advocate, but he did believe there was no possibility for Gilmore's rehabilitation. And even if he managed to get this sentence, he believed there was small likelihood of its being carried out. Gilmore's trial lasted only two days, starting on October 5, 1976.

The transcripts lay out the main events: An FBI ballistics expert matched two spent cartridges and the bullet from Bushnell to the gun left in the bush, a patrolman had traced Gilmore's trail of blood to that same bush, and the witness named Gilmore as the person he saw at the motel. The defense had no defense. When the two lawyers quickly rested without calling witnesses, Gilmore protested.

The following day he asked the judge if he could take the stand to present his own defense. He figured that, based on what they had heard from the prosecution, it would take the jury less than half an hour to convict him and he wanted the chance to tell his story. He thought he had a good case for insanity. After all, he'd felt completely dissociated during the commission of the crime, like it was inevitable and he couldn't have done anything differently. He didn't have control.

His lawyers stood up and indicated that they had consulted four separate psychiatrists, all of whom had said that Gilmore had known what he was doing and that it was wrong. While he did have an antisocial personality disorder, which may have been aggravated by drinking and Fiorinal, he still did not meet the legal criteria for insanity.

Faced with that, Gilmore withdrew his request. He seemed suddenly to resign himself to the hopelessness of his situation. He'd already experienced some remorse for what he'd done but thought he'd probably end up doing it again. Never had he felt so much pain as that week without Nicole, according to what he said in his letters to her, and he knew he'd have kept up the spree, mindlessly hurting others.

In closing, Wootton took pains to point out that Ben Bushnell had been shot by a gun held directly against his head. It had been no random shot but quite deliberate. Esplin countered with the fact that Gilmore himself had been wounded by the gun going off accidentally. It could have been the case that it had discharged accidentally in the incident that had resulted in Bushnell's death, even if held against him. Maybe Bushnell had moved suddenly. Since there are no eyewitnesses, who was to say differently? He urged the jury to find Gilmore guilty of a lesser crime of second-degree murder committed during a robbery, or even to acquit him altogether.

On October 7, 1976, after an hour and twenty minutes, the jury returned a verdict of Guilty of Murder in the First Degree. Then after lunch, the sentencing phase—called the Mitigation Hearing-- began. Again, the defense lawyers were at a disadvantage, since it was Gary's own family who had turned him in. Clearly they were afraid of him. Brenda felt that Gilmore had betrayed her trust and that he ought to pay for what he'd done. Getting good witnesses looked pretty hopeless. Yet no one could have predicted at that moment that Gilmore's own worst enemy in this regard would be himself.

At the end of the hearing, Gilmore was asked if he had anything to say, with the expectation that he would show some remorse, but all he said was, "I am finally glad to see that the jury is looking at me." The sentence was death, arrived at unanimously, and to be carried out on November 15, just over a month hence. Gilmore was asked to choose between being hanged or shot by a firing squad. He chose the latter, believing that a hanging could easily be botched. While his attorneys prepared the expected course of action, Gilmore took the unexpected one.

Backlash

Although his attorneys had every intention of running an appeal, they told Mailer, Gilmore made up his mind to accept his due. He fired Esplin and Snyder and hired Dennis Boaz, a lawyer from California who had written to him on a whim in support of his desire to go through with the execution. Boaz also revealed his interactions with Gilmore to Mailer, who talked with various other people who’d spoken to Boaz. Gilmore traded an exclusive interview for the man's services, but as Mailer saw it, Boaz got hungry for the writer's life and started talking too much to the media. Gary decided to fire him.

Yet the very idea that a man was going to be executed stirred the residents of Utah into attention. This hadn't happened in sixteen years. To top it off, in 1972 the U. S. Supreme Court had ruled in the case of Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty as currently applied was cruel and unusual.

Therefore, it was unconstitutional. All states were ordered to commute death sentences to life imprisonment. There was no more death row. Then four years later, after the states had revised their laws, the Supreme Court made a series of rulings that allowed capital punishment to be reinstated for certain types of murders. Thus, as of July 2, 1976, just three weeks before Gilmore committed his murders, such an act became a capital offense in Utah, and not without considerable controversy. While the hiatus had only lasted four years, it had been ten full years since the U. S. had executed anyone.

Then when Gilmore said that he did not wish to appeal, the Attorney General, Earl Dorius, wondered if the court might be caught in a net of its own making. Gilmore was supposed to be executed within sixty days of sentencing. There were no provisions for what might happen if they didn't get the deed done within the scheduled time frame. They hadn't executed a man in so long he couldn't be certain that they'd be ready in time. Dorius wondered if it was possible that, on a technicality, Gilmore might just go free. In fact, as he indicated to Mailer, he wasn't altogether certain how to put together a firing squad.

Just a few days before his scheduled execution, Gilmore argued his case before the Justices of the Utah Supreme Court, insisting that he did not wish to spend his life in prison, particularly not on death row.

He thought the sentence was fair and proper and he wanted to accept it like a man. "It's been sanctioned by the courts," he said, "and I accept that." To his mind, it was his karma to die. He'd had dreams of it all his life and had come to believe that he owed a debt from a past life. The manner in which he was to die would be a learning experience for others. That was all right with him. By a vote of 4 to 1, the Justices granted his wish. He requested that his last meal be a six-pack of beer.

But there were groups who could not abide such a decision, either on Gilmore's part or on the part of the law. The protests began at once, and his former lawyers felt duty-bound to continue to file an appeal. When Gilmore's mother heard about it, she told her youngest son. Mikal's comment, according to Mailer, was not to worry. "They haven't executed anyone in this country for ten years," he said, "and they're not going to start with Gary."

November 15th came and went.

Associations against the death penalty, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, intended to stop this execution. They did not want such a precedent on the record of the court giving in to a defendant and dispensing with the appeals process. On behalf of the prison population, as well as future prisoners, they felt they could not allow this procedure to continue in the direction in which it was going. A Stay of execution was granted, despite Gilmore's protests. He was ready to die. He wanted this over with.

Then he and Nicole formed a plan, which was documented in their letters to each other. She also admitted to it later in filmed interviews. Gilmore instructed her to go around to various doctors to collect as many barbiturates as she could get. She managed 50 pills. Smuggling half in a balloon inside her vagina, she handed them over to Gary. Then at midnight, she swallowed her dose. Gary was supposed to do likewise, but he waited till closer to morning, which gave the appearance that he wanted her to die while he was found and saved. In fact they both survived, but now Nicole was effectively cut off from her lover. There were to be no more communications between them. Nicole was signed in to a psychiatric facility for observation.

In the meantime, the rights to Gilmore's story were up for sale. He authorized Uncle Vern to negotiate, and he ended up selling to Lawrence Schiller and ABC for $50,000, which Gilmore distributed randomly among relatives and former associates from prison. He fully expected to die in December.

Authorizing another lawyer, Ron Stanger, to speak on his behalf, he went before the Utah Board of Pardons to plead his case once more and ask all the religious and civil rights groups to butt out. "It's my life and my death," he insisted on film. He hadn't realized that no one had taken the sentence seriously. He didn't know it was all a joke. He expected that if they were going to hand it down, they were going to carry it out. As he spoke, his courage and anger were both evident. He wanted this over with.

His execution was set for December 6, two days after his thirty-sixth birthday. Then on December 3, Gilmore’s mother stepped in. She was represented by the same lawyer whose rhetoric had convinced the Supreme Court to stop capital punishment several years earlier until the laws were changed. She requested a Stay on her son's behalf. He'd been on a hunger strike ever since he'd been separated from Nicole, she claimed through the lawyer, so he didn't know what he was doing. She should be able to step in.

Gilmore composed an open letter to her, published by the press, to ask that she allow him to get on with it. Ten days later, the Stay was overturned and Gilmore ended his 25-day hunger strike. Upon learning that he would still have to wait another month for his execution, he tried once again to kill himself, but was found in time. Then Mikal decided that he needed to try to stop the process. He went to Utah to talk with his brother, describing the meeting in detail in his book, and was ultimately convinced that Gary knew what he was doing and wanted to do it.

On film, Mikal said that Gary had quoted Nietzsche to him, that "a time comes when a man should rise to meet the occasion." That's what he was trying to do. During their last meeting, Gary kissed Mikal on the mouth and said, "See you in the darkness." Mikal left without taking any further action.

Finally it was scheduled for January 17, 1977. Overnight, the courts had continued to wrestle with the legal questions before them. A federal court judge in Salt Lake City ordered a Stay, but the Tenth Circuit Court in Denver set it aside. The ACLU continued to protest this right up to the moment that Gilmore began his walk as a dead man. Even as late as 7:30 a.m., Gilmore's fate hung in the balance. It was the U. S. Supreme Court that finally decided the issue. The execution was allowed to go on as scheduled.

The End and the Beginning

The night before he was to die, Gilmore had been given plenty of drugs. His relatives visited and he was in good spirits. Uncle Vern admitted on A&E that he’d brought him some whiskey, which Gilmore drank down. Then Johnny Cash, his favorite singer, called and sang him a song. Gilmore tried to sing it with him. Then he made a tape for Nicole on which he asked her to kill herself for him. Finally, the circus was over. All of those who believed the con was bluffing, that he'd change his mind at the last minute, were in shock. Gilmore had asked to be allowed to die and he was going to die.

At 8:00 a.m. on January 17, 1977, the volunteer firing squad got into place. Four of the five weapons were loaded and one would fire a blank. That way, each man would have some idea that perhaps he was not the one who had ended another man's life. They placed the barrels of their rifles through small square holes in a wall as Gilmore was strapped into a chair. He gave his watch to Vern to give to Nicole; he'd broken it at his estimated time of execution. A paper target was placed over his heart and a black corduroy hood over his head. He was strapped into the chair. The least movement could make the bullets miss their mark. Mailer gives a full account of the final minutes, which were also described on film by some of those who attended.

Asked for last words, Gilmore said, "Let's do it." Then to the priest delivering last rights, he said in Latin, "There will always be a father." The countdown began. Gilmore appeared calm. There were three distinct shots. His head went forward into the strap, his right hand delicately lifted, then dropped. The spectators he'd requested to witness the event watched as blood flowed from his heart down his shirt and onto the floor. The doctor went forward to listen, and said that he was still alive. In twenty more seconds, it was over. Three lives had been tragically wasted.

Bessie got the news that there had been a Stay, but then she saw on the television that her second son, Gary Mark Gilmore, had been executed. Some of his organs were donated before he was cremated, and his ashes were spread in three designated areas of Utah, including Spanish Fork. His immortal words, "Let's do it," opened the door for other convicted criminals to be put to death.

Since 1977, there have been 711 executions in the United States. [Katherine Ramsland has written a dozen books and numerous articles, as well as publishing folklore and short stories.

Warren Jeffs

By Grace Handy

February 27, 2024

When polygamy was outlawed by the Mormon Church in 1890, splinter groups formed, including the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints, or FLDS, in which members could practice polygamy – or "plural marriage" – discreetly, without persecution.

The FLDS was able to flourish in a remote enclave nestled along the border of Utah and Arizona near Zion National Park in a community called Short Creek.

In the FLDS community, the most important person is the prophet, and members believe that God communicates directly through him. Among the core beliefs of the community is that the more wives a man has, the closer he gets to salvation.

From 1986 to 2002, Rulon Jeffs served as FLDS prophet and president.

As Rulon Jeffs' health declined, his son Warren Jeffs slowly took control of the FLDS community. Rulon Jeffs died in 2002, and Warren Jeffs succeeded him as prophet.

FLDS members were used to taking direction from Warren Jeffs but, over time, his orders became more restrictive – and, to some, alarming.

Jeffs banned television, movies, popular music, and fictional books. He also executed strict mandates on behavior, dress, and language. Women were told to "keep sweet," suppress emotions and feelings, obey their husbands, and above all, obey Jeffs — the all-knowing prophet.

Briell Decker, Jeffs' 65th wife, told ABC, "'Keep Sweet' meant you could have no emotions except for sweetness. That was the only emotion allowed."

ABC's new special, "Truth and Lies: The Doomsday Prophet," streaming now on Hulu, features exclusive, never-before-seen interviews with FLDS members filmed inside the community.

Beneath what appeared to be an attempt to present an ideal community of content and obedient followers, Jeffs allegedly used his power to pursue twisted exploits.

ABC sat down with Jeffs' daughter, Rachel Blackmore, who alleged her father sexually abused her for years during childhood. "When your parent does something like that, it feels shameful on you, too. And then it kept happening," Blackmore told ABC.

While Jeffs accumulated brides, some of them young teens, underage marriages were common in the broader community.

At the age of 14, Elissa Wall was married off to her 19-year-old first cousin. Wall said she had no choice but to go through with the marriage, which was officiated by Jeffs.

Ruth Stubbs, another member of the FLDS community, was married off when she was 16. Her husband, Rodney Holm, was 32. He was a police officer in Short Creek and was already married to two other women. Holm was arrested for bigamy and unlawful sexual conduct with a minor and spent a year in prison.

Warren Jeffs' alleged involvement in facilitating marriages between underage girls and adult men led to him being placed on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list in May 2006. Criminal charges had been brought against him in Utah and Arizona.

Jeffs eventually fled Short Creek and went on the lam, hiding out in various cities around the United States per his journals – or "priesthood records" – that were later presented at his trial. While on the run, Jeffs had a compound built in Eldorado, Texas – where he would send hand-picked followers, telling them they were being called to Zion, or "heaven on earth." Jeffs named the compound the YFZ Ranch (or "Yearning for Zion" Ranch).

"People were slowly disappearing [from Short Creek] at that time," said Charlene Jeffs, a former FLDS member who was then married to Warren Jeffs' brother, Lyle. Several of Charlene's children, Ammon, Susie, and Thomas, were called to Zion, she said.

"It was supposed to be an honor to have them called forth. But all it was, was heartache," said Charlene Jeffs, who was exiled from the FLDS community in 2012.

In August 2006, Jeffs' journey on the run came to a halt when his car was pulled over for a routine traffic violation outside of Las Vegas. Then, court proceedings began.

Wall testified against Jeffs in 2007. Wall told ABC it was an empowering experience: "I was forced to face him. I was forced to get on the stand, face him, and say 'you did this' ... I was no longer just an innocent little girl who just did everything out of fear. I had a voice and it was starting to become heard."

Jeffs was found guilty of accomplice to rape for facilitating Wall's underage marriage. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The charges would be overturned on appeal in 2010, and Jeffs was never retried. However, by that point, other evidence against Jeffs was found at the YFZ Ranch after law enforcement raided the ranch, leading to new charges.

"[Officers] saw scrapbooks and letters supporting the fact that these girls were being married off at a very young age and were having babies," said Angela Goodwin, a district attorney in Texas.

During the raid, officers found horrific evidence incriminating Jeffs – including an audio recording of him having sexual relations with a 12-year-old. Officials also discovered a pregnant 15-year-old at the ranch who was carrying Jeffs' child.

Former FLDS members allege Jeffs still runs the church from behind bars in Palestine, Texas, and releases revelations that his devout followers adhere to. One revelation from the summer of 2022 has been particularly concerning to former members, especially those with family members still in the religion.

"The revelations say that within five years, the children will be translated to heaven. But the problem is … you have to die first," Roger Hoole, a private attorney involved in many FLDS cases, told ABC.

Amid current concerns about Jeffs' revelations, Short Creek is moving on – and perhaps nothing is more indicative of the vast progress in the community than the election of Donia Jessop as mayor of Hildale, on the Utah border of Short Creek.

Jessop is the first female mayor and first former FLDS member elected to office. Jessop has implemented modernization in the community – for example, she is working with the United Effort Plan to completely transform the former FLDS meetinghouse.

"We want to recreate a place, a community building, where we can come together and celebrate in the things that we've always loved, the programs, the dance, the arts. We want to create a safe haven for the people," Mayor Jessop told ABC.

Another major development in the community was the creation of the Short Creek Dream Center, a place of refuge for people transitioning out of the FLDS – and anyone fleeing oppressive or abusive environments.

The Dream Center, symbolically, was the former home of Warren Jeffs. Briell Decker, one of Jeffs' former wives, was granted the 28,000-square-foot home after escaping the FLDS – and she helped create the Dream Center.

Decker, who experienced so much pain and trauma in her early life, says she is proud to now help others at the center.

"I feel like I'm safe. I feel like more lives are being touched than I could have ever possibly imagined," Decker told ABC.

Wall, now an activist and author, moved back to Short Creek several years ago and noticed an emotional shift in the community.

"The most important change that I think Short Creek has undergone in the last decade is healing. As people returned and came back, bringing all of their experiences, for them they were coming home," Wall said.

As veteran journalist Mike Watkiss tells ABC, "This is a story about a culture, a community, that has chronically oppressed women. The women are the victims, and the women have been the forces and instruments of change."

Barton Kay Kirkham

Barton Kay Kirkham (December 1936 – June 7, 1958) was a deserter of the United States Air Force who was discharged in 1955 after committing a robbery in Colorado. In 1956, he was sentenced to death after the murder of two grocery store clerks during an armed robbery in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Kirkham chose to die by hanging to generate publicity and become an inconvenience to the state of Utah. Though an attempt was made to appeal his conviction by questioning his sanity, prison officials noted that Kirkham's defiant attitude remained remorseless until shortly before his execution. His hanging at Utah State Prison in 1958 was the first to be carried out by the state in 46 years.

Background

Barton Kay Kirkham was the eldest of five children raised by a Mormon family in Salt Lake City. He was a fan of bop music and described himself as "a rebel." Kirkham left his family's church life and school in the 11th grade and joined the United States Air Force. After 18 months, he committed a robbery while absent without leave in Colorado, and was given an undesirable discharge from the force. Kirkham spent the next 9 months in a reformatory and was paroled in July 1956.

Murders

On the night of August 12, 1956, Kirkham entered the Nibley Park Market grocery store in Salt Lake City to rob it. When he thought 50-year-old storekeeper David Avon Frame was not giving him all of the money that he had, Kirkham took Frame to the back of the store. There he found 37-year-old Ruth Holmes Webster, mother of four children in Sandy, Utah. Kirkham had them kneel on the floor and shot them in the head. He netted $54 from the robbery.

Kirkham was apprehended the next morning after he forced a brother and sister to take him on a joyride through Provo Canyon. When later asked about his motive for killing Frame and Webster, he said, "Man, I don't know..."

Trial and sentencing

The first-degree murder trial commenced on December 12, 1956 with Judge Martin M. Larson presiding over the case. Kirkham was defended by attorneys Lamar C. Duncan and Wayne L. Black. On December 14, Kirkham was found guilty of murdering Frame and faced a mandatory death penalty. He was never tried for the murder of Webster. Kirkham was remanded to Utah State Prison on January 11, 1957 as the sentencing phase of the trial proceeded. Kirkham's attorneys immediately filed an appeal with the Utah Supreme Court. The appeal claimed that their client's mental state was not properly taken into account.

On March 25, 1958, the court upheld Kirkham's conviction and denied his request for a rehearing, sending his case back for sentencing. Kirkham said he was certain he would be executed and resented his attorneys' "trying to prolong the waiting and stalling around."

On April 26, 1958, Judge Larson sentenced Kirkham to death. When asked to select between the option of execution by firing squad and hanging, he responded: "What costs most?" Kirkham said he chose to be hanged "because of the publicity... the novelty... to put the state to more inconvenience." It would be the first hanging in Utah since 1912. Kirkham said that he hoped "to set some sort of record."

Incarceration

While on death row at Utah State Prison, Kirkham followed newspaper articles and legal briefs of his case and read psychiatric texts and medical journals. Warden Marcell Graham described him as a good prisoner who caused little trouble. Kirkham grew out his hair and beard for 13 months until ordered to get a haircut. He then shaved himself bald to annoy the prison officials. Kirkham maintained a hardened image and reportedly laughed off concepts of mercy or religious salvation. He claimed to have no regret over the killings.

On June 4, 1958, Kirkham appeared before the state pardons board for a final hearing for clemency. His attorneys had planned to demonstrate that he was insane with the help of psychiatrists. Kirkham initially told the board that he was a loner and felt "no remorse or anything like that." In the final minutes of the hearing, he broke out into an appeal that he would prefer involuntary commitment in a mental institution over capital punishment. The board declined to commute his sentence.

Execution

Kirkham was visited by his parents during the night before his hanging. Prison guards noted that he changed his demeanor as he received his parents warmly and was seen by Mormon and Roman Catholic chaplains. His mother was near collapse. Kirkham watched a movie with his parents and said farewell shortly before midnight. Kirkham ordered a last meal of pizza and ice cream, telling the prison steward that "you get cheese, meat and everything in one meal. Not so much fuss." In the auditorium of Utah State Prison, Kirkham ate his pizza and played classical music on a piano in the company of the chaplains, news reporters and deputy sheriffs. He joked about his impending execution and commented on his keyboard skills: "I'll just have to practice more."

At dawn on June 7, 1958, Kirkham was driven two miles to a pasture on the prison's farm. After a black hood was placed over his head, Kirkham was led up a ramp to a newly-built gallows. His drop had been measured at 6 feet to accommodate his reported weight of 200 pounds. A professional hangman from the Northwest was paid $400 for his services.

Kirkham trembled slightly as the hangman fitted a noose around his neck and placed the knot under his left ear. As directed by state law, Sheriff George Beckstead walked up to Kirkham to receive his last words. At 4:57 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, the official time of dawn, Beckstead signaled the hangman to pull an iron lever, opening the trap door under Kirkham. The Kirkham family did not come to witness the execution. Prison physician W. C. Knott climbed on a stepladder to examine Kirkham's hanging body, which was concealed from view by burlap and canvas hung under the 11-foot-high platform. He was pronounced dead at 5:11 a.m. in the last hanging to be conducted by the state of Utah.

No subsequent inmate had been executed by the state in this manner by February 1980, when the Utah State Legislature replaced the option of hanging with lethal injection.

Theodore Robert Bundy

Theodore (Ted) Bundy was wanted for questioning in as many as 36 murders in Colorado, Oregon, Utah, Florida and Washington. In June 1977, the FBI initiated a fugitive investigation when Ted Bundy escaped from a Colorado courthouse where he was on trial for murder. He was recaptured but escaped again, in December 1977, from the Garfield County Jail in Colorado. He was placed on the FBI's "Ten Most Wanted Fugitives" list and was subsequently arrested, using an alias, by the local authorities in Florida for a stolen car violation in February 1978. In 1979, he was sentenced to death and in 1989 executed for the murder of two Florida State University sorority sisters.

On November 7, 1974, Carol DeRonch, 18, was in a Utah Shopping Mall when she was approached by Bundy, who told her that someone had been trying to break into her automobile. She thought that he was a police officer and Bundy later showed her a badge.

Bundy asked her to accompany him to the car to see if anything was missing. Upon reaching the car the girl looked in and determined nothing was missing. He eventually asked her if she could go to the station to make a complaint. Bundy drove her in his Volkswagon, and pulled over on the way and forcibly placed a pair of handcuffs on her wrist. She screamed and fought her way outside the vehicle and eventually got away.

Nine months later, Bundy was arrested fleeing police and handcuffs were found in his car. Bundy was convicted of Aggravated Kidnapping after waiving a jury trial and received a 1-15 year sentence. He escaped while in custody but was recaptured 6 days later. He escaped a second time and fled to Tallahassee, Florida, staying at a rooming house near the Florida State University Campus.

During the early morning hours of Sunday, January 15, 1978, Bundy entered the Chi Omega sorority house and brutally attacked four women residing there. Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy were killed, and Kathy Kleiner and Karen Chandler sustained serious injuries. Within approximately an hour of the attacks in the Chi Omega house, Bundy entered another home nearby and attacked a woman residing there, Cheryl Thomas. All five women were university students. All were bludgeoned repeatedly with a blunt weapon.

Bundy was identified by a resident returning home to the Sorority House, just as he was leaving with a club in his hand. Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman were killed by strangulation after receiving severe beatings with a length of a tree branch used as a club. Margaret Bowman's skull was crushed and literally laid open. The attacker also bit Lisa Levy with sufficient intensity to be identified as human bite marks.

Bundy was arrested a month later in Pensacola. Of critical importance was the testimony of two forensic dental experts who testified concerning analysis of the bite mark left on the body of Lisa Levy. The experts both expressed to the jury their opinion that the indentations on the victim's body were left by the unique teeth of Bundy. Bundy was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted first-degree murder, and two counts of burglary. For the two crimes of first-degree murder the trial judge imposed sentences of death.

On February 9, 1978, Kimberly Leach, age 12, was reported missing from her junior high school in Lake City, Florida. Two months later, after a large scale search, the Leach girl's partially decomposed body was located in a wooded area near the Suwanee River.

There were semen stains in the crotch of her panties found near the body. Two Lake City Holiday Inn employees and a handwriting expert established that Bundy had registered at the Lake City Holiday Inn the day before her disappearance under another name. A school crossing guard at the junior high school identified Bundy as leading a young girl to a van on the morning of the disappearance.

Bundy was again convicted of murder and sentenced to death. This death sentence to be carried out a decade later.

Ted Bundy Victims List:

WASHINGTONLonnie Trumbull; Seattle (6/23/66)

Kathy Devine; Seattle (11/25/73)

Lynda Ann Healy; University of Washington (2/1/74)

Donna Manson; Evergreen St. College, Olympia (3/12/74)

Susan Rancourt; Central Washington St. College, Ellensburg (4/17/74)

Brenda Baker; Seattle (5/25/74)

Brenda Ball; Burien (6/1/74)

Georgeann Hawkins; University of Washington (6/11/74)

Janice Ott; Lake Sammamish St. Park (7/14/74)

Denise Naslund; Lake Sammamish St. Park (7/14/74)

OREGON

Kathy Parks; Oregon St. (5/6/74)

UTAH

Nancy Wilcox; (10/2/74)

Melissa Smith; Midvale (10/18/74)

Laura Aimee; Lehi (10/31/74)

Debbie Kent; Bountiful (11/8/74)

Susan Curtis; Brigham Young University (6/28/75)

Nancy Baird; Layton (7/4/75)

Debbie Smith; Salt Lake City (2/?/76)

COLORADO

Caryn Campbell; Aspen (1/12/75)

Julie Cunningham; Vail (3/15/75)

Denise Oliverson; Grand Junction (4/6/75)

Melanie Cooley; Nederland (4/15/75)

Shelley Robertson; Golden (7/1/75)

IDAHO

Lynette Culver; Pocatello (5/6/75)

Jane Doe; Boise (9/21/74)

FLORIDA

Lisa Levy; Tallahassee (1/15/78)

Margaret Bowman; Tallahassee (1/15/74)

Kimberly Ann Leach; Lake City (2/9/78)

Theodore Robert Bundy, born Theodore Robert Cowell (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989), known as Ted Bundy, was an American serial killer. Bundy murdered numerous young women across the United States between 1974 and 1978. He twice escaped from prison before his final apprehension in Feburary 1978. After more than a decade of vigorous denials, he eventually confessed to 30 murders, although the actual total of victims remains unknown. Estimates range from 29 to over 100, the general estimate being 35. Typically, Bundy would bludgeon his victims, then strangle them to death. He also engaged in rape and necrophilia.

Early life

Childhood

Bundy was born at the Elizabeth Lund Home For Unwed Mothers in Burlington, Vermont, to Eleanor Louise Cowell. While the identity of his father remains a mystery, Bundy's birth certificate lists a "Lloyd Marshall" (b. 1916), although Bundy's mother would later tell of being seduced by a war veteran named "Jack Worthington".

Family photo 1960. For a long time, Ted thought his mom was his sister

Bundy's family did not believe this story, however, and expressed suspicion about Louise's violent, abusive father, Samuel Cowell. To avoid social stigma, Bundy's maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell, claimed him as their son; in taking their last name, he became Theodore Robert Cowell. He grew up believing that his mother was his older sister. Bundy biographers Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth wrote that he learned Louise was actually his mother while he was in high school. True crime writer Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally, states that it was around 1969, shortly following a traumatic breakup with his college girlfriend.

For the first few years of his life, Bundy and his mother lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1950, Bundy and his mother, whom he still believed was his sister, moved to live with relatives in Tacoma, Washington. Here, Louise Cowell had her son's surname changed from Cowell to Nelson.

In 1951, one year after their move, Louise Cowell met Johnny Culpepper Bundy at an adult singles night held at Tacoma's First Methodist Church. In May of that year, the couple were married, and soon after Johnny Bundy adopted Ted, legally changing his last name to "Bundy".

Johnny and Louise Bundy had more children, whom the young Bundy spent much of his time babysitting. Johnny Bundy tried to include his stepson in camping trips and other father-son activities, but the boy remained emotionally detached from his stepfather. Bundy was a good student at Woodrow Wilson High School, in Tacoma, and was active in a local Methodist church, serving as vice-president of the Methodist Youth Fellowship. He was involved with a local troop of the Boy Scouts of America.

Socially, Bundy remained shy and introverted throughout his high school and early college years. He would say later that he "hit a wall" in high school and that he was unable to understand social behavior, stunting his social development. He maintained a facade of social activity, but he had no natural sense of how to get along with other people, saying: "I didn't know what made things tick. I didn't know what made people want to be friends. I didn't know what made people attractive to one another. I didn't know what underlay social interactions."

Years later, while on Florida's death row, Bundy would describe a part of himself that, from a young age, was fascinated by images of sex and violence. In early prison interviews, Bundy called this part of himself "the entity". While still in his teens, Bundy would look through libraries for detective magazines and books on crime, focusing on sources that described sexual violence and featured pictures of dead bodies and violent sexuality. Before he was even out of high school, Bundy was a compulsive thief, a shoplifter, and on his way to becoming an amateur criminal. To support his love of skiing, Bundy stole skis and equipment and forged ski-lift tickets. He was arrested twice as a juvenile, although these records were later expunged.

University years

In 1965, Bundy graduated from Woodrow Wilson High. Awarded a scholarship by the University of Puget Sound (UPS), he began that fall, taking courses in psychology and Oriental studies. After two semesters at UPS, he decided to transfer to Seattle's University of Washington (UW).

While a university student, Bundy worked as a grocery bagger and shelf-stocker at a Seattle Safeway store on Queen Anne Hill, as well as other odd jobs. As part of his course of studies in psychology, he would later work as a night-shift volunteer at Seattle's Suicide Hot Line, a suicide crisis center that served the greater Seattle metropolitan and suburban areas. There, he met and worked alongside former Seattle policewoman and fledgling crime writer Ann Rule, who would later write a biography of Bundy and his crimes, The Stranger Beside Me.

He began a relationship with fellow university student "Stephanie Brooks" (a pseudonym), whom he met while enrolled at UW in 1967. Following her 1968 graduation and return to her family home in California, she ended the relationship, fed up with what she described as Bundy's immaturity and lack of ambition. Rule states that, around this time, Bundy decided to pay a visit to his birthplace, Burlington, Vermont. There, according to Rule, he visited the local records clerk and finally uncovered the truth of his parentage.

After his discovery, Bundy became a more focused and dominant person. In 1968, he managed the Seattle office of Nelson Rockefeller's Presidential campaign and attended the 1968 Republican convention in Miami, Florida as a Rockefeller supporter. He re-enrolled at UW, this time with a major in psychology. Bundy became an honors student and was well liked by his professors. In 1969, he started dating Elizabeth Kloepfer, a divorced secretary with a daughter, who fell deeply in love with him. They would continue dating for more than six years, until he went to prison for kidnapping in 1976.

Bundy graduated in 1972 from UW with a degree in psychology. Soon afterward, he again went to work for the state Republican Party, which included a close relationship with Gov. Daniel J. Evans. During the campaign, Bundy followed Evans' Democratic opponent around the state, tape recording his speeches and reporting back to Evans personally. A minor scandal later followed when the Democrats found out about Bundy, who had been posing as a college student.

In the fall of 1973, Bundy enrolled in the law school at the University of Utah, but he did poorly. He began skipping classes, finally dropping out in the spring of 1974.

While on a business trip to California in the summer of 1973, Bundy came back into his ex-girlfriend "Stephanie Brooks"' life with a new look and attitude; this time as a serious, dedicated professional who had been accepted to law school. Bundy continued to date Kloepfer as well, and neither woman was aware the other existed. Bundy courted Brooks throughout the rest of the year, and she accepted his marriage proposal. Two weeks later, however, shortly after New Year's 1974, he unceremoniously dumped her, refusing to return her phone calls. A few weeks after this breakup, Bundy began a murderous rampage in Washington state.

Murders

Washington state

No one knows exactly where and when Bundy began killing. Many Bundy experts, including Rule and former King County detective Robert D. Keppel, believe Bundy may have started killing as far back as his early teens. Ann Marie Burr, an eight-year-old girl from Tacoma, vanished from her home in 1961, when Bundy was 14 years old, though Bundy always denied killing her. The day before his execution, Bundy told his lawyer that he made his first attempt to kidnap a woman in 1969, and implied that he committed his first actual murder sometime in 1972. At one point in his death-row confessions with Keppel, Bundy said he committed his first murder in 1972.

In 1973, one of Bundy's Republican Party friends saw a pair of handcuffs in the back of Bundy's Volkswagen. He was for many years a suspect in the December 1973 murder of Kathy Devine in Washington state, but DNA analysis led to another man's arrest and conviction for that crime in 2002. Bundy's earliest known, identified murders were committed in 1974, when he was 27.

Shortly after midnight on January 4, 1974, Bundy entered the basement bedroom of 18-year-old "Joni Lenz" (pseudonym), a dancer and student at UW. Bundy bludgeoned her with a metal rod from her bed frame while she slept and sexually assaulted her with a speculum. Lenz was found the next morning by her roommates in a coma and lying in a pool of her own blood. She survived the attack but suffered permanent brain damage.

Bundy's next victim was Lynda Ann Healy, another UW student (and his cousin's roommate). In the early morning hours of February 1, 1974, Bundy broke into Healy's room, knocked her unconscious, dressed her in jeans and a shirt, wrapped her in a bed sheet, and carried her away.

Co-eds began disappearing at a rate of roughly one a month. On March 12, 1974, in Olympia, Bundy kidnapped and murdered Donna Gail Manson, a 19-year-old student at The Evergreen State College.

On April 17, 1974, Susan Rancourt disappeared from the campus of Central Washington State College (CWSC) in Ellensburg. Later, two different CWSC co-eds would recount meeting a man with his arm in a cast—one that night, one three nights earlier—who asked for their help to carry a load of books to his Volkswagen Beetle.

Next was Kathy Parks, last seen on the campus of Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, on May 6, 1974. Brenda Ball was never seen again after leaving The Flame Tavern in Burien on June 1, 1974. Bundy then murdered Georgeann Hawkins, a student at UW and a member of Kappa Alpha Theta, an on-campus sorority. In the early morning hours of June 11, 1974, she walked through an alley from her boyfriend's dormitory residence to her sorority house. She was never seen again. Witnesses later reported seeing a man with a leg cast struggling to carry a briefcase in the area that night. One co-ed reported that the man had asked for her help in carrying the briefcase to his car, a Beetle.

Bundy's Washington killing spree culminated on July 14, 1974, with the daytime abduction of Janice Ott and Denise Naslund from Lake Sammamish State Park in Issaquah. That day, eight different people told the police about the handsome young man with his left arm in a sling who called himself "Ted". Five of them were women whom "Ted" asked for help unloading a sailboat from his Beetle. One of them went with "Ted" as far as his car, where there was no sailboat, before declining to accompany him any farther. Three more witnesses testified to seeing him approach Ott with the story about the sailboat and to seeing her walk away from the beach in his company. She was never seen alive again. Naslund disappeared without a trace four hours later.

King County detectives now had a description both of the suspect and his car. Some witnesses told investigators that the "Ted" they encountered spoke with a clipped, British-like accent. Soon, fliers were up all over the Seattle area. After seeing the police sketch and description of the Lake Sammamish suspect in both of the local newspapers and on television news reports, Bundy's girlfriend, one of his psychology professors at UW, and former co-worker Ann Rule all reported him as a possible suspect. The police, receiving up to 200 tips per day, did not pay any special attention to a tip about a clean-cut law student.

The fragmented remains of Ott and Naslund were discovered on September 7, 1974, off Interstate 90 near Issaquah, one mile from the park. Found along with the women's remains was an extra femur bone and vertebrae, which Bundy would identify as that of Georgeann Hawkins shortly before his execution.

Between March 1 and March 3, 1975, the skulls and jawbones of Healy, Rancourt, Parks and Ball were found on Taylor Mountain just east of Issaquah. Years later, Bundy claimed that he had also dumped Donna Manson's body there, but no trace of her was ever found.

Utah and Colorado

Bundy smiles for the cameras and pleads "Not guilty" during a press conference announcing his indictment on first degree murder charges.

That autumn, Bundy began attending the University of Utah law school in Salt Lake City, where he resumed killing in October. Nancy Wilcox disappeared from Holladay, Utah, on October 2, 1974. Wilcox was last seen riding in a Volkswagen Beetle.

On October 18, 1974, Bundy murdered Melissa Smith, the 17-year-old daughter of Midvale police chief Louis Smith; Bundy raped, sodomized and strangled her. Her body was found nine days later. Next was Laura Aime, also 17, who disappeared when she left a Halloween party in Lehi, Utah, on October 31, 1974; her naked, beaten and strangled corpse was found nearly a month later by hikers on Thanksgiving Day, on the banks of a river in American Fork Canyon.

In Murray, Utah, on November 8, 1974, Carol DaRonch narrowly escaped with her life. Claiming to be Officer Roseland of the Murray Police Department, Bundy approached her at the Fashion Place Mall, told her someone had tried to break into her car, and asked her to accompany him to the police station. She got into his car but refused his instruction to buckle her seat belt. They drove for a short period before Bundy suddenly pulled to the shoulder and attempted to slap a pair of handcuffs on her. In the struggle, he fastened both loops to the same wrist. Bundy whipped out his crowbar, but DaRonch caught it in the air just before it would have cracked her skull. She then got the door open and tumbled out onto the highway, thus escaping from her would-be killer.

About an hour later, a strange man showed up at Viewmont High School in Bountiful, Utah, where the drama club was putting on a play. He approached the drama teacher and then a student, asking both to come out to the parking lot to identify a car. Both declined. The drama teacher saw him again shortly before the end of the play, this time breathing hard, with his hair mussed and his shirt untucked. Another student saw the man lurking in the rear of the auditorium. Debby Kent, a 17-year-old Viewmont High student, left the play at intermission to go and pick up her brother, and was never seen again. Later, investigators found a small key in the parking lot outside Viewmont High. Itunlocked the handcuffs taken off Carol DaRonch.

On October 2nd, 1975, Carol DaRonch along with Jean Graham and a friend of Debby Kent's were asked to view a line-up of seven men, one of whom was Bundy, at a Utah police station. Investigators were not surprised when Carol DaRonch picked Ted from the line-up as the man who had attacked her. Jean Graham and a friend of Debby Kent's had also picked Ted from the line-up as the man they had seen wandering around the auditorium the night Debby Kent had disappeared.

Although Ted repeatedly professed his innocence, police were almost positive they had their man. Soon after he was picked out of the line-up, investigators launched a full-blown investigation into the man they knew as Theodore Robert Bundy.

In 1975, while still attending law school at the University of Utah, Bundy shifted his crimes to Colorado. On January 12, 1975, Caryn Campbell disappeared from the Wildwood Inn at Snowmass, Colorado, where she had been vacationing with her fiancé and his children. She vanished somewhere in a span of 50 feet between the elevator doors and her room. Her body was found on February 17, 1975.

Next, Vail ski instructor Julie Cunningham disappeared on March 15, 1975, and Denise Oliverson in Grand Junction on April 6, 1975. While in prison, Bundy confessed to Colorado investigators that he used crutches to approach Cunningham, after asking her to help him carry some ski boots to his car. At the car, Bundy clubbed her with his crowbar and immobilized her with handcuffs, later strangling her in a crime highly similar to the Hawkins murder.

Lynette Culver went missing in Pocatello, Idaho, on May 6, 1975, from the grounds of her junior high school. After his return to Utah, Susan Curtis vanished on June 28, 1975. (Bundy confessed to the Curtis murder minutes before his execution.) The bodies of Cunningham, Culver, Curtis and Oliverson have never been recovered.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, investigators were attempting to prioritize their enormous list of suspects. They used computers to cross-check different likely lists of suspects (classmates of Lynda Healy, owners of Volkswagens, etc) against each other, and then identify suspects who turned up on more than one list. "Theodore Robert Bundy" was one of 25 people who turned up on four separate lists, and his case file was second on the "To Be Investigated" pile when the call came from Utah of an arrest.

Arrest, first trial, and escapes

Bundy was arrested on August 16, 1975, in Salt Lake City, for failure to stop for a police officer. A search of his car revealed a ski mask, a crowbar, handcuffs, trash bags, an icepick, and other items that were thought by the police to be burglary tools. Bundy remained calm during questioning, explaining that he needed the mask for skiing and had found the handcuffs in a dumpster. Utah detective Jerry Thompson connected Bundy and his Volkswagen to the DaRonch kidnapping and the missing girls, and searched his apartment.

The search uncovered a brochure of Colorado ski resorts, with a check mark by the Wildwood Inn where Caryn Campbell had disappeared. After searching his apartment, the police brought Bundy in for a lineup before DaRonch and the Bountiful witnesses. They identified him as "Officer Roseland" and as the man lurking about the night Debby Kent disappeared.

Following a week-long trial, Bundy was convicted of DaRonch's kidnapping on March 1, 1976, and was sentenced to 15 years in Utah State Prison. Colorado authorities were pursuing murder charges, however, and Bundy was extradited there to stand trial.

On June 7, 1977, in preparation for a hearing in the Caryn Campbell murder trial, Bundy was taken to the Pitkin County courthouse in Aspen. During a court recess, he was allowed to visit the courthouse's law library, where he jumped out of the building from a second-story window and escaped, but sprained his right ankle during the jump. In the minutes following his escape, Bundy at first ran and then strolled casually through the small town toward Aspen Mountain.

Ted Bundy's cell out of witch he escaped on 30 december 1977, by cutting a hole in the ceilling

He made it all the way to the top of Aspen Mountain without being detected, where he rested for two days in an abandoned hunting cabin. But afterwards, he lost his sense of direction and wandered around the mountain, missing two trails that led down off the mountain to his intended destination, the town of Crested Butte. At one point, he came face-to-face with a gun-toting citizen who was one of the searchers scouring Aspen Mountain for Ted Bundy, but talked his way out of danger.

On June 13, 1977, Bundy stole a car he found on the mountain. He drove back into Aspen and could have gotten away, but two police deputies noticed the Cadillac with dimmed headlights weaving in and out of its lane and pulled Bundy over. They recognized him and took him back to jail. Bundy had been on the lam for six days.

He was back in custody, but Bundy worked on a new escape plan. He was being held in the Glenwood Springs, Colorado, jail while he awaited trial. He had acquired a hacksaw blade and $500 in cash; he later claimed the blade came from another prison inmate. Over two weeks, he sawed through the welds fixing a small metal plate in the ceiling and, after dieting down still further, was able to fit through the hole and access the crawl space above.

An informant in the prison told guards that he had heard Bundy moving around the ceiling during the nights before his escape, but the matter was not investigated. When Bundy's Aspen trial judge ruled on December 23, 1977, that the Caryn Campbell murder trial would start on January 9, 1978, and changed the venue to Colorado Springs, Bundy realized that he had to make his escape before he was transferred out of the Glenwood Springs jail.

On the night of December 30, 1977, Bundy dressed warmly and packed books and files under his blanket to make it look like he was sleeping. He wriggled through the hole and up into the crawlspace. Bundy crawled over to a spot directly above the jailer's linen closet — the jailer and his wife were out for the evening — dropped down into the jailer's apartment, and walked out the door.

Bundy was free, but he was on foot in the middle of a bitterly cold, snowy Colorado night. He stole a broken-down MG, but it stalled out in the mountains. Bundy was stuck on the side of Interstate 70 in the middle of the night in a blizzard, but another driver gave him a ride into Vail. From there he caught a bus to Denver and boarded the TWA 8:55 a.m. flight to Chicago. The Glenwood Springs jail guards did not notice Bundy was gone until noon on December 31, 1977, 17 hours after his escape, by which time Bundy was already in Chicago.

Florida

Following his arrival in Chicago, Bundy then caught an Amtrak train to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he got a room at the YMCA. On January 2, 1978, he went to an Ann Arbor bar and watched the University of Washington Huskies, the team of his alma mater, beat Michigan in the Rose Bowl. He later stole a car in Ann Arbor, which he abandoned in Atlanta, Georgia before boarding a bus for Tallahassee, Florida, where he arrived on January 8, 1978. There, he rented a room at a boarding house under the alias of "Chris Hagen" and committed numerous petty crimes including shoplifting, purse snatching, and auto theft. He stole a student ID card that belonged to a Kenneth Misner and sent away for copies of Misner's Social Security card and birth certificate. He grew a mustache and drew a fake mole on his right cheek when he went out, but aside from that, he made no real attempt at a disguise. Bundy tried to find work at a construction site, but when the personnel officer asked Bundy for his driver's license for identification, Bundy walked away. This was his only attempt at job hunting.

One week after Bundy's arrival in Tallahassee, in the early hours of Super Bowl Sunday on January 15, 1978, two and a half years of repressed homicidal violence erupted. Bundy entered the Florida State University Chi Omega sorority house at approximately 3 a.m. and killed two sleeping women, Lisa Levy and Margaret Bowman. Bundy bludgeoned and strangled Levy and Bowman; he also sexually assaulted Levy. He also bludgeoned two other Chi Omegas, Karen Chandler and Kathy Kleiner. The entire episode took no more than half an hour. After leaving the Chi Omega house, Bundy broke into another home a few blocks away, clubbing and severely injuring Florida State University student Cheryl Thomas.

On February 9, 1978, Bundy traveled to Lake City, Florida. While there, he abducted, raped, and murdered 12-year-old Kimberly Leach, throwing her body under a small pig shed. On February 12, 1978, Bundy stole yet another Volkswagen Beetle and left Tallahassee for good, heading west across the Florida panhandle.

On February 15, 1978, shortly after 1 a.m., Bundy was stopped by Pensacola police officer David Lee. When the officer called in a check of the license plate, the vehicle came up as stolen. Bundy then scuffled with the officer before he was finally subdued. As Lee took the unknown suspect to jail, Bundy said "I wish you had killed me." At his booking Bundy gave the police the name Ken Misner (and presented stolen identification for Misner), but the Florida Department of Law Enforcement made a positive fingerprint identification early the next day. He was immediately transported to Tallahassee and subsequently charged with the Tallahassee and Lake City murders. He was later taken to Miami to stand trial for the Chi Omega murders.

Conviction and execution

Bite mark testimony at the Chi Omega trialBundy went to trial for the Chi Omega murders in June 1979, with Dade County Circuit Court Judge Edward D. Cowart presiding. Despite having five court-appointed lawyers, he insisted on acting as his own attorney and even cross-examined witnesses, including the police officer who had discovered Margaret Bowman's body. He was prosecuted by Assistant State Attorney Larry Simpson.

Two pieces of evidence proved crucial. First, Chi Omega member Nita Neary, getting back to the house very late after a date, saw Bundy as he left, and identified him in court. Second, during his homicidal frenzy, Bundy bit Lisa Levy in her left buttock, leaving obvious bite marks. Police took plaster casts of Bundy's teeth and a forensics expert matched them to the photographs of Levy's wound. Bundy was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death. After confirming the sentence, Cowart gave him the verdict:

It is ordered that you be put to death by a current of electricity, that current be passed through your body until you are dead. Take care of yourself, young man. I say that to you sincerely; take care of yourself, please. It is an utter tragedy for this court to see such a total waste of humanity as I've experienced in this courtroom. You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer, and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. Take care of yourself. I don't feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Once again, take care of yourself.

Bundy was tried for the Kimberly Leach murder in 1980. He was again convicted on all counts, principally due to fibers found in his van that matched Leach's clothing and an eyewitness that saw him leading Leach away from the school, and sentenced to death. During the Kimberly Leach trial, Bundy married former coworker Carole Ann Boone in the courtroom while questioning her on the stand. Following numerous conjugal visits between Bundy and his new wife, Boone gave birth to a daughter in October 1982. However, in 1986 Boone moved back to Washington and never returned to Florida. Her whereabouts and those of Bundy's daughter are unknown.

While awaiting execution in Starke Prison, Bundy was housed in the cell next to fellow serial killer Ottis Toole, the murderer of Adam Walsh. FBI profiler Robert K. Ressler met with him there as part of his work interviewing serial killers, but found Bundy uncooperative and manipulative, willing to speak only in the third person, and only in hypothetical terms. Writing in 1992, Ressler spoke of his impression of Bundy in comparison to his reviews of other serial killers: "This guy was an animal, and it amazed me that the media seemed unable to understand that."

However, during the same period, Bundy was often visited by Special Agent William Hagmaier of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Behavioral Sciences Unit. Bundy would come to confide in Hagmaier, going so far as to call him his best friend. Eventually, Bundy confessed to Hagmaier many details of the murders that had until then been unknown or unconfirmed.

In October 1984, Bundy contacted former King County homicide detective Bob Keppel and offered to assist in the ongoing search for the Green River Killer by providing his own insights and analysis. Keppel and Green River Task Force detective Dave Reichert traveled to Florida's death row to interview Bundy. Both detectives later stated that these interviews were of little actual help in the investigation; they provided far greater insight into Bundy's own mind, however, and were primarily pursued in the hope of learning the details of unsolved murders which Bundy was suspected of committing.

Bundy mug shot, 1980, the day after he was sentenced to death for the murder of Kimberly LeachBundy contacted Keppel again in 1988. At that point, his appeals were exhausted. Bundy had beaten previous death warrants for March 4, 1986, July 2, 1986, and November 18, 1986. With execution imminent, Bundy confessed to eight official unsolved murders in Washington State for which he was the prime suspect. Bundy told Keppel that there were actually five bodies left on Taylor Mountain, not four as they had originally thought. Bundy confessed in detail to the murder of Georgeann Hawkins, describing how he lured her to his car, clubbed her with a tire iron that he had stashed on the ground under his car, drove away with her in the car with him, and later raped and strangled her.

After the interview, Keppel reported that he had been shocked in speaking with Bundy, and that he was the kind of man who was "born to kill." Keppel stated:

He described the Issaquah crime scene (where Janice Ott, Denise Naslund, and Georgeann Hawkins had been left) and it was almost like he was just there. Like he was seeing everything. He was infatuated with the idea because he spent so much time there. He is just

totally consumed with murder all the time.

Bundy had hoped that he could use the revelations and partial confessions to get another stay of execution or possibly commute his sentence to life imprisonment. At one point, a legal advocate working for Bundy asked many of the families of the victims to fax letters to Florida Governor Robert Martinez and ask for mercy for Bundy in order to find out where the remains of their loved ones were. All of the families refused. Keppel and others reported that Bundy gave scant detail about his crimes during his confessions, and promised to reveal more and other body dump sites if he were given "more time." The ploy failed and Bundy was executed on schedule.

The night before Bundy was executed, he gave a television interview to James Dobson, head of the evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family. During the interview, Bundy made repeated claims as to the pornographic "roots" of his crimes. He stated that, while pornography did not cause him to commit murder, the consumption of violent pornography helped "shape and mold" his violence into "behavior too terrible to describe."

He alleged that he felt that violence in the media, "particularly sexualized violence," sent boys "down the road to being Ted Bundys." In the same interview, Bundy stated:

"You are going to kill me, and that will protect society from me. But out there are many, many more people who are addicted to pornography, and you are doing nothing about that."

According to Hagmaier, Bundy contemplated suicide in the days leading up to his execution, but eventually decided against it.

At 7:06 a.m. local time on January 24, 1989, Ted Bundy was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke, Florida. His last words were, "I'd like you to give my love to my family and friends." Then, more than 2,000 volts were applied across his body for less than two minutes. He was pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. Several hundred people were gathered outside the prison and cheered when they saw the signal that Bundy had been declared dead.

Modus operandi and victim profiles

Bundy in custody, Leon County, FloridaBundy had a fairly consistent modus operandi. He would approach a potential victim in a public place, even in daylight or in a crowd, as when he abducted Ott and Naslund at Lake Sammamish or when he kidnapped Leach from her school. Bundy had various ways of gaining a victim's trust. Sometimes, he would feign injury, wearing his arm in a sling or wearing a fake cast, as in the murders of Hawkins, Rancourt, Ott, Naslund, and Cunningham. At other times Bundy would impersonate an authority figure; he pretended to be a policeman when approaching Carol DaRonch. The day before he killed Kimberly Leach, Bundy approached another young Florida girl pretending to be "Richard Burton, Fire Department", but left hurriedly after her older brother arrived.

Bundy had a remarkable advantage in that his facial features were attractive, yet not especially memorable. In later years, he would often be described as chameleon-like, able to look totally different by making only minor adjustments to his appearance, e.g., growing a beard or changing his hairstyle.

All of Bundy's victims were white females and most were of middle class background. Almost all were between the ages of 15 and 25. Many were college students. In her book, Rule notes that most of Bundy's victims had long straight hair parted in the middle—just like Stephanie Brooks, the woman to whom Bundy was engaged in 1973. Rule speculates that Bundy's resentment towards his first girlfriend was a motivating factor in his string of murders. However, in a 1980 interview, Bundy dismissed this hypothesis: "[t]hey...just fit the general criteria of being young and attractive...Too many people have bought this crap that all the girls were similar — hair about the same color, parted in the middle...but if you look at it, almost everything was dissimilar...physically, they were almost all different."

After luring a victim to his car, Bundy would hit her in the head with a crowbar he had placed underneath his Volkswagen or hidden inside it. Every recovered skull, except for that of Kimberly Leach, showed signs of blunt force trauma. Every recovered body, except for that of Leach, showed signs of strangulation.

Many of Bundy's victims were transported a considerable distance from where they disappeared, as in the case of Kathy Parks, whom he drove more than 260 miles from Oregon to Washington. Bundy often would drink alcohol prior to finding a victim; Carol DaRonch testified to smelling alcohol on his breath.

Hagmaier stated that Bundy considered himself to be an amateur and impulsive killer in his early years, and then moved into what he considered to be his "prime" or "predator" phase. Bundy stated that this phase began around the time of the Lynda Healy murder, when he began seeking victims he considered to be equal to his skill as a murderer.

On death row, Bundy admitted to decapitating at least a dozen of his victims with a hacksaw. He kept the severed heads later found on Taylor Mountain (Rancourt, Parks, Ball, Healy) in his room or apartment for some time before finally disposing of them. He confessed to cremating Donna Manson's head in his girlfriend's fireplace. Some of the skulls of Bundy's victims were found with the front teeth broken out. Bundy also confessed to visiting his victims' bodies over and over again at the Taylor Mountain body dump site. He stated that he would lie with them for hours, applying makeup to their corpses and having sex with their decomposing bodies until putrefaction forced him to abandon the remains. Not long before his death, Bundy admitted to returning to the corpse of Georgeann Hawkins for purposes of necrophilia.

Bundy confessed to keeping other souvenirs of his crimes. The Utah police who searched Bundy's apartment in 1975 missed a collection of photographs that Bundy had hidden in the utility room, photos that Bundy destroyed when he returned home after being released on bail. His girlfriend Elizabeth once found a bag in his room filled with women's clothing.

When Bundy was confronted by law enforcement officers who stated that they believed the number of individuals he had murdered was 36, Bundy told them that they should "add one digit to that, and you'll have it." Rule speculated that this meant Bundy might have killed over 100 women. Speaking to his lawyer Polly Nelson in 1988, however, Bundy dismissed the 100+ victims speculation and said that the more common estimate of approximately 35 victims was accurate.

Pathology

In December 1987, Bundy was examined for seven hours by Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a professor from New York University Medical Center. Lewis diagnosed Bundy as a manic depressive whose crimes usually occurred during his depressive episodes. To Lewis, Bundy described his childhood, especially his relationship with his maternal grandparents, Samuel and Eleanor Cowell.

According to Bundy, grandfather Samuel Cowell was a deacon in his church. Along with the already established description of his grandfather as a tyrannical bully, Bundy described him as a bigot who hated blacks, Italians, Catholics, and Jews. He further stated that his grandfather tortured animals, beating the family dog and swinging neighborhood cats by their tails. He also told Lewis how his grandfather kept a large collection of pornography in his greenhouse where, according to relatives, Bundy and a cousin would sneak to look at it for hours.

Family members expressed skepticism over Louise's "Jack Worthington" story of Bundy's parentage and noted that Samuel Cowell once flew into a violent rage when the subject of the boy's father came up. Bundy described his grandmother as a timid and obedient wife, who was sporadically taken to hospitals to undergo shock treatment for depression. Toward the end of her life, Bundy said, she became agoraphobic.

Louise Bundy's younger sister Julia recalled a disturbing incident with her young nephew. After lying down in the Cowells' home for a nap, Julia woke to find herself surrounded by knives from the Cowell kitchen. Three-year-old Ted was standing by the bed, smiling at her.

Bundy used stolen credit cards to purchase more than 30 pairs of socks while on the run in Florida; he was a self-described foot fetishist.

In the Dobson interview before his execution, Bundy said that violent pornography played a major role in his sex crimes. According to Bundy, as a young boy he found "outside the home again, in the local grocery store, in a local drug store, the soft core pornography that people called soft core...And from time to time we would come across pornographic books of a harder nature...."

Body of Ted Bundy Transported to Medical Examiner's Office

Bundy said, "It happened in stages, gradually. My experience with pornography generally, but with pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality, is once you become addicted to it — and I look at this as a kind of addiction like other kinds of addiction — I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Until you reach a point where the pornography only goes so far, you reach that jumping off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give that which is beyond just reading it or looking at it."

In a letter written shortly before his escape from the Glenwood Springs jail, Bundy said "I have known people who...radiate vulnerability. Their facial expressions say 'I am afraid of you.' These people invite abuse... By expecting to be hurt, do they subtly encourage it?"

In a 1980 interview, speaking of a serial killer's justification of his actions, Bundy said "So what's one less? What's one less person on the face of the planet?" When Florida detectives asked Bundy to tell them where he had left Kimberly Leach's body for her family's solace, Bundy allegedly said, "But I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet."

Arthur Gary Bishop

A.K.A.: "Roger Downs" - "Lynn Jones"

Arthur G. Bishop

Raised by devout Mormon parents in Salt Lake City, Utah, Bishop was an Eagle Scout and honor student in high school, afterward serving his church as a missionary in the Philippines. On his return to Utah, he graduated with honors from Steven Henager College, with a major in accounting.

Friends and family members were stunned by his February 1978 conviction for embezzling $8,714 from a used car dealership, but Bishop seemed repentant, pleading guilty and winning a five-year suspended sentence on his promise of restitution. Instead of paying the money back, however, he dropped from sight, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. When Bishop refused to surrender, he was formally excommunicated from the Mormon church.

By that time, in October 1978, he was living as "Roger Downs" in Salt Lake City, signing up with the Big Brother program to spend time with disadvantaged youth. Wherever Bishop settled, his charisma lured children into spending time around his home or joining him on camping expeditions. Over time, it led five victims to their deaths.

The first to vanish, four-year-old Alonzo Daniels, was reported missing from his Salt Lake City apartment complex on October 14, 1979. "Roger Downs" lived just across the hall, and he was questioned by police, but it was all routine. Detectives had no leads, no body, and no suspect in the case.

On November 9, 1980, 11-year-old Kim Peterson disappeared in Salt Lake City, last seen when he left home to sell a pair of skates. The buyer was alleged to be a male adult, but neither of Kim's parents had seen the man, and they had no clue to his identity.

Eleven months later, on October 20, 1981, four-year-old Danny Davis disappeared from his grandfather's side while shopping at a busy supermarket in southern Salt Lake County. "Roger Downs," residing half a block from the store, was routinely questioned by authorities, but they made no connection with previous cases and did not consider him a suspect.

Another eighteen months elapsed before the killer struck again, abducting Troy Ward on June 22, 1983 -- his sixth birthday.

On July 14, 13-year-old Graeme Cunningham vanished from home, two days before he was scheduled to go on a camping trip with a classmate and their adult chaperone, 32-year-old "Roger Downs." After questioning "Downs," police began quietly checking his background, discovering his almost unnatural fondness for neighborhood children. They also learned that he was wanted -- under the alias of "Lynn Jones" -- for embezzling $10,000 from a recent employer, stealing his own personnel file from the office before he disappeared.

In custody, Bishop quickly admitted his true identity, confessing to five counts of murder. Next morning, he led authorities to the Cedar Fort section of Utah County, pointing out graves where the remains of victims Daniels, Peterson, and Davis were recovered. A drive to Big Cottonwood Creek, 65 miles further south, turned up the bodies of Troy Ward and Graeme Cunningham.

The continuing investigation revealed that Bishop had molested scores of other children through the years, sparing their lives for reasons known only to himself. Several parents had knowledge of his activities, but none had come forward while the four-year search for a child killer was in progress. A search of Bishop's home uncovered a revolver and a bloody hammer, snapshots of one victim taken after his abduction, and various other photographs of nude boys, focused on their torsos to prevent identification.

In court, jurors listened to Bishop's taped confession, including his admission of fondling victims after death. At some points he giggled, at other times mimicking a boy's final words in a high, falsetto voice. The clincher was his statement that, "I'm glad they caught me, because I'd do it again." Convicted and sentenced to die, Bishop waived all appeals and was executed, by lethal injection, on June 9, 1988.

Burial site

Arthur Gary Bishop

"With great sadness and remorse, I realize that I allowed myself to be misled by Satan."

In the tradition of all great Christians, Bishop blamed the easiest target.

Bishop was devoutly religious. He even went to the Philippines to work for his church, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter day Saints (the Mormons). While in the Philippines one can only imagine what the sick fucker got up to, but he was excommunicated from the Mormons in 1974.

Back in the real world Bishop began his new career. His first victim was Alonzo Daniels, four. On October 16, 1979 he was playing in his front yard when Bishop took him.

Bishop's next hit was Kim Peterson, eleven, on November 27, 1980. Bishop set this murder up by telling Kim that he wanted to buy the boys roller skates. When Kim left his house to sell the roller skates to him it was the last time he was seen alive by anyone other than Bishop.

Around this time (1981) Bishop was arrested for embezzlement. He had written $9000 worth of checks in his boss's name. Arthur Gary Bishop then disappeared. He ended all contact with his family and friends, moved cities, and re-amerged in as Lynn E. Jones and later, Roger W. Downs.

As this new person Bishop enrolled in the big brother program (a group that care for disadvantaged youth) and started hanging out with young boys all the time.

Bishop struck again on October 20, 1981 when he stumbled across Danny Davis, four. Davis's was shopping with his grandfather when Bishop struck. Witnesses said they saw the child being led out of the grocery store by a man and woman. It is not known who the woman was.

He waited for nearly two years before adding to his score. Troy Ward was six-years-old when Bishop got him on June 22, 1983.

Less than a month later, on July 14, 1983, Bishop made his last kill. He chose Graeme Cunningham, thirteen. Bishop fucked up on this one as he was a known friend of the boys, and had promised to take him on a trip to California the following week. At this time Bishop was also in trouble for another embezzlement, and was arrested on this charge so the police could question him further about this murder. When police looked further at Bishop it was worked out that he was in the vicinity of the five murders and quickly became the main suspect. Upon further questioning Bishop caved in and admitted to the murders.

"I'm glad they caught me, because I'd do it again."

Bishop led the police to a secluded area in Ceder Fort, Utah where the bodies of Kim Peterson, Alonzo Daniels and Danny Davis were found buried in shallow graves. He then took police to another site, in Big Cottonwood Canyon, where the bodies of Troy Ward and Graeme Cunningham were buried. All the remains showed signs of sexual abuse, and when Bishops residence was searched a number of explicit photographs were found.

Arthur Gary Bishop was found guilty of all five murders, as well as five kidnapping charges, two counts of forceful sexual assault, and one count of sexual abuse of a minor. As the crimes took place in Utah Bishop had the choice of death by firing squad or lethal injection. Not surprisingly he chose lethal injection, and was executed on June 10, 1988.

"I wanted to help her, I just didn't know how to tell her that I killed her child."

Bishop on visiting the mother of his final victim.

Source: https://murderpedia.org/

Sulejman Talovic

Sulejman Talovic (October 6, 1988 – February 12, 2007) was a Bosniak refugee whose family moved to the United States from the small town of Cerska in the Vlasenica municipality of Bosnia and Herzegovina and who were living in Salt Lake City, Utah.

On February 12, 2007, wearing a tan trench coat, Talovic went on a shooting rampage killing five people and wounding several others at Trolley Square, a Salt Lake City shopping mall, before being fatally shot by police. An amateur video of the incident was captured, but little except gunfire can be heard clearly.

Talovic was buried in his birthplace, a small village of Talovic near Cerska, Bosnia and Herzegovina on March 2, 2007.

The shooting spree

Police later said Talovic was carrying a shotgun, a .38-caliber pistol, and had a backpack full of ammunition. Talovic killed five people: Jeffrey Walker, 52, Vanessa Quinn, 29, Kirsten Hinckley, 15, Teresa Ellis, 29, and Brad Frantz, 24. Additionally, four more people were hospitalized: Allen Walker, 16, son of Jeffrey Walker; Carolyn Tuft, 44, mother of Kirsten Hinckley; Shawn Munns, 34; and Stacy Hansen, 53. After the shooting, Tuft and Hansen were listed in critical condition, and Munns and Walker were listed in serious condition.

Four police officers—an off-duty officer from Ogden named Ken Hammond and several Salt Lake City officers—were involved in the shootout with Talovic.

Personal history

Talovic was a permanent resident who emigrated with his family from Bosnia to the United States in 1998. Talovic received a green card in 2005 and lived with his mother in Salt Lake City. He had a record of minor juvenile incidents and had dropped out of high school at age 16.. Talovic often attended Friday prayers at the Al-Noor mosque in Salt Lake City.

Motive

Talovic's aunt, Ajka Omerovic, emerged briefly from the family's house to say relatives had no idea why the young man attacked so many strangers. She said that Talovic had lived in the Sarajevo area as a child, and that his family moved to Utah from Bosnia. "He was such a good boy. I don't know what happened," she told Salt Lake City television station KSL-TV.

In another KSL interview, with Omeroviv, and Talovic's father, Suljo Talovic, the two indicated concern that some outside influence might have induced Sulejman to commit the killings. "I think this [Sulejman] did. I think somebody (is) behind him, I think, but I am not sure...."

The father suggested that the US government bears some responsibility for his son's actions, saying "The authorities are guilty for not alerting us that he bought a gun. In the US, you cannot buy cigarettes if you are underaged, but you can buy a gun." Contrary to Mr. Talovic's statement, federal law prohibits the sale of handguns and handgun ammunition to those under 21; shotguns and shotgun ammunition are prohibited to those under 18.

In the light of the American War on Terrorism some conservatives, including commentator John Gibson and congressman Chris Cannon have suggested that Talovic repeatedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" prior to his death, suggesting a religious motive. Some sources reach this conclusion by listening to online video of the rampage, which supposedly captures Talovic's religious shouting.

However, police investigators conclude that Talovic said no such thing and was shouting expletives during his assault. Ajka Onerovic was quoted as saying, "We are Muslims, but we are not terrorists," and FBI agent Patrick Kiernan has stated that he has no reason to suspect terrorism.

The Trolley Square shooting was a shooting rampage that occurred on February 12, 2007, at Trolley Square Mall in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The shooting resulted in the deaths of five bystanders and the shooter himself, as well as the wounding of at least 4 others. The killer's massacre was fatally halted by 5 police officers, including one off duty officer who had been at a restaurant with his wife prior to the shooting.

Timeline

The gunman, Sulejman Talovic, was an eighteen year-old Bosniak immigrant. He had a history of minor juvenile incidents, had dropped out of high school and had been living in Salt Lake City with his mother.

On February 12, 2007, at 6:44 PM MST, Talovic began a deadly shooting in Trolley Square resulting in the deaths of five bystanders and the shooter himself, as well as the wounding of at least 4 others. Talovic was described as wearing a white shirt, a tan trenchcoat and a mullet. He carried both a shotgun and a handgun, as well as a backpack full of ammunition.

The gunman's rampage was stopped after trading shots with off-duty police officer

Kenneth Hammond, and Sgt. Andrew Oblad of the Salt Lake City Police Department; their actions prevented further loss of innocent lives. The final confrontation, in which Talovic was killed, occurred in the Pottery Barn Kids home furnishing store. Hammond was at Trolley Square with his pregnant wife, 911 dispatcher Sarita Hammond. Sarita borrowed a waiter's cell phone to call 911.

Talovic was cornered and was shooting at officers, until an active shooter contact team comprised of Salt Lake City PD SWAT team members arrived and shot him. Salt Lake City police officials on February 13, 2007, thanked Hammond as a hero in saving countless lives.

According to local TV station ABC 4, several witnesses reported that a majority of the shooting took place on the ground floor near the Pottery Barn store, though the majority of the dead were found in Cabin Fever, a card store. One of the victims, having been shot, apparently entered the nearby Hard Rock Cafe and told customers to lock the doors. Nothing is yet known of the gunman's motive. Several victims were transported to local hospitals, some in critical condition.

One of the victims was a 16-year-old boy found in his car with a wound to the side of his head; another, Cedric Wilson, was grazed in the head by a bullet, but suffered only minor injuries.

Victims

Killed were:

• Teresa Ellis, 29

• Brad Frantz, 24

• Kirsten Hinckley, 15

• Vanessa Quinn, 28

• Jeffery Walker, 53

Wounded and hospitalized are:

• Carolyn Tuft, 43 (mother of Kirsten Hinckley)

• Shawn Munns, 34

• Stacy Hanson, 53

•  Alan "A.J." Walker, 16 (son of Jeffery Walker)

Officers honored

Five officers were honored at the Utah state capitol on February 16 for their bravery in the Trolley Square shooting.

They are: Sgt. Andrew Oblad, Sgt. Joshua Scharman, Detective Dustin Marshall and Detective Brett Olsen, all of the Salt Lake City Police Department, and Officer Kenneth Hammond of the Ogden Police Department.

John Doyle Lee—The Mountain Meadows Massacre

By Gilbert King

February 29, 2012

The massacre almost brought the United States to war against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but only one man was brought to trial: John D 

John Doyle Lee was born in Illinois Territory on  September 12, 1812. By the time he was 3, his mother was dead. Relatives took him in from his alcoholic father and put him to work on their farm at a young age.

At 20, Lee began courting Agatha Ann Woolsey in Vandalia, Illinois, and in the summer of 1833, she became Lee’s wife—the first of 19 for John D. Lee, who would soon commit himself to the nascent Latter-day Saints movement. He professed his commitment till the day he was executed for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

The massacre, in 1857, was one of the most explosive episodes in the history of the American West—not only were 120 men, women and children killed, but the United States and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints almost went to war.

The denouement of the so-called Utah War set Utah on the path to statehood and the Mormons on a long and fitful accommodation to secular authority, but the Mountain Meadows Massacre remained a focus of suspicion and resentment for decades.

The church issued a statement on the role its members played in the killings in 2007, and opened its archives to three scholars—Richard E. Turley Jr., a Latter-day Saint historian, and Brigham Young University professors Ronald W. Walker and Glen M. Leonard—for their book, Massacre at Mountain Meadows, published in 2008. But in the aftermath of the massacre, only one participant was brought to trial, and that was John D. Lee.

Lee and his wife joined the Mormon settlement in Far West, Missouri, in 1837. That was only seven years after Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but already the Mormons had been pushed out of Smith’s home state of New York and Ohio.

Conflicts arose on grounds both religious and secular—Smith preached that other Christian churches had strayed; Mormons tended to vote as a bloc and to outwork others, concentrating both political and economic power—and the antagonism intensified to the point that the Mormons would be evicted from Missouri and Illinois, where Smith was lynched in 1844.

To break a cycle of mutual suspicion, recrimination and violence, Brigham Young, who would succeed Smith, made plans to lead the remaining LDS members on an exodus to Utah, which was then part of Mexico—beyond the reach of U.S. law.

When was the first school shooting ever recorded?

This might surprise many of you, but school shootings are not anything new. The first school shooting ever recorded was in 1764. It was the Pontiac's Rebellion school massacre. On July 26, 1764, four Lenape American Indians entered the schoolhouse near present-day Greencastle, Pennsylvania, shot and killed Schoolmaster Enoch Brown, and killed nine or ten children (reports vary). Only two children survived.

https://www.1nationjustice.com/post/when-was-the-first-school-shooting-ever-recorded