On the morning of January 17, 1977, Gary Mark Gilmore was strapped to a wooden chair in an abandoned cannery behind Utah State Prison. A black hood covered his face. Twenty feet away, five law enforcement officers aimed .30-30 rifles at his chest through holes cut in a canvas curtain. When the warden asked for any final words, Gilmore's response was characteristically terse: "Let's do it."

Those three words would become among the most quoted last statements in American criminal history — not because they revealed any profound truth about life or death, but because they captured something essential about the man who spoke them: his relentless determination to author his own ending, even if that ending was his execution.

Gilmore's death marked a grim milestone in American jurisprudence. He was the first person executed in the United States in nearly ten years, his death coming just months after the Supreme Court's 1976 decision in Gregg v. Georgia had cleared the way for states to resume capital punishment. But Gilmore's execution was unique in the annals of American death penalty cases. He was killed not despite his opposition to the sentence, but because of his insistence upon it.

The Murders That Changed Everything

The killings that brought Gilmore to Utah's death row were as senseless as they were brutal. On the evening of July 19, 1976, the 35-year-old ex-convict walked into a gas station in Orem, Utah, and robbed Max Jensen, a 26-year-old Brigham Young University student working the night shift. Though Jensen had fully complied with Gilmore's demands, handing over the cash and following orders, Gilmore forced him to lie face-down on the restroom floor and shot him once in the head.

The next evening, Gilmore repeated the scenario at the City Center Motel in nearby Provo. Bennie Bushnell, 25, also a BYU student, was working as the night manager. Again, there was no resistance, no struggle. Bushnell handed over the money — a mere $125 — and followed Gilmore's instructions to lie on the floor behind the registration desk. Gilmore shot him in the head at point-blank range.

Both young men left behind widows and infant children. Both had been trying to support their families while attending university. Neither death served any purpose beyond satisfying some incomprehensible compulsion within Gilmore himself.

The killings were solved almost immediately. While disposing of the .22-caliber pistol used in both murders, Gilmore accidentally shot himself in the hand. The trail of blood led police directly to him, and a garage mechanic who witnessed Gilmore hiding the weapon provided the final piece of evidence. Gilmore was arrested without resistance as he tried to drive out of Provo.

A Life Shaped by Violence

To understand Gilmore's later insistence on execution, one must first confront the grinding brutality of his early life. Born Faye Robert Coffman in McCamey, Texas, in 1940, he was the second of four sons born to Frank and Bessie Gilmore. Frank Gilmore Sr. was an alcoholic con man who moved his family frequently across the American West, supporting them through various fraudulent schemes.

The family dynamic was poisonous. Frank Sr. was "cruel and unreasonable," according to Gilmore's youngest brother, writer Mikal Gilmore, who would later chronicle the family's dysfunction in his memoir "Shot in the Heart." The father would regularly beat his sons with a razor strop, whip, or belt "for little or no reason." He would also assault his wife, while Frank and Bessie engaged in bitter verbal warfare that traumatized their children.

The family's sense of identity was built on lies and confusion. When Gary discovered as an adult that his birth name had been Faye Robert Coffman, he became convinced he was illegitimate or "someone else's son." This discovery became a source of deep anguish and rage, contributing to his lifelong sense of displacement and his troubled relationship with his parents.

Despite scoring 133 on an IQ test and showing artistic talent, Gary dropped out of high school in ninth grade and began his criminal career at age 14 with a car theft ring. His father died of lung cancer in 1962 while Gary was in jail. Though their relationship had been deeply troubled, Gary was devastated by the loss and attempted suicide by slitting his wrists.

The next fifteen years followed a predictable pattern: arrest, imprisonment, brief periods of freedom, and increasingly serious crimes. Gilmore spent most of his adult life behind bars, moving through Oregon's correctional system and eventually landing in the federal maximum-security prison in Marion, Illinois. A prison psychiatrist diagnosed him with antisocial personality disorder with intermittent psychotic decompensation.

The Final Chance

In April 1976, Gilmore was granted conditional parole and went to live with a distant cousin, Brenda Nicol, in Provo, Utah. It seemed, briefly, that he might have a chance at building a conventional life. He found work, first at his uncle's shoe repair shop, then at an insulation company. But the old patterns quickly reasserted themselves: stealing, drinking, fighting.

The one bright spot was his relationship with Nicole Barrett Baker, a 19-year-old mother of two who had already been married twice. The relationship was intense but volatile, complicated by Gilmore's increasingly aggressive behavior and pressure from Baker's family to end the affair. Their turbulent romance would later be dramatized in Norman Mailer's Pulitzer Prize-winning book "The Executioner's Song," which portrayed their connection as both passionate and destructive.

It was during a particularly difficult period in this relationship that Gilmore committed the murders. The killings appeared to serve no rational purpose — he gained little money and faced almost certain capture. Some observers have suggested they were elaborate acts of suicide-by-proxy, a way for Gilmore to engineer his own death while making society pull the trigger.

Trial and Conviction

Gilmore's murder trial began in Provo on October 5, 1976, and lasted just two days. The evidence was overwhelming. A motel guest had witnessed the Bushnell murder, the murder weapon was recovered, and Gilmore's own blood trail led police directly to the evidence. FBI ballistics experts matched shell casings from both crime scenes to the recovered pistol.

Perhaps most tellingly, Gilmore's court-appointed attorneys, Michael Esplin and Craig Snyder, made virtually no effort to defend him. They did not cross-examine most prosecution witnesses and called no witnesses for the defense. When Gilmore asked to testify on his own behalf — possibly to present an insanity defense — his own lawyers presented psychiatric evaluations showing he was competent and aware his actions were wrong.

The jury retired to deliberate on October 7 and returned by midday with a guilty verdict for first-degree murder. They unanimously recommended death, citing the special circumstances of the crime. Faced with Utah's two methods of execution — hanging or firing squad — Gilmore chose the latter, declaring, "I'd prefer to be shot."

The Fight to Die

What happened next was unprecedented in American legal history. Rather than filing the customary appeals, Gilmore announced he wanted his sentence carried out as quickly as possible. "I accept the sentence that was given to me," he said. "I don't want to sit around and wait for the appeals court."

This created an extraordinary legal and moral dilemma. The American Civil Liberties Union, death penalty opponents, and even Gilmore's own mother filed motions to prevent the execution, arguing that the state could not kill a man simply because he wished to die. They obtained several stays of execution, each one frustrating Gilmore further.

At a board of pardons hearing in November 1976, Gilmore expressed his fury at the interference: "They always want to get in on the act. I don't think they have ever really done anything effective in their lives. I would like them all — including that group of reverends and rabbis from Salt Lake City — to butt out. This is my life and this is my death. It's been sanctioned by the courts that I die and I accept that."

The forced delays drove Gilmore to two suicide attempts, on November 16 and December 16, 1976. Each time, prison officials saved his life so the state could later take it. The absurdity was not lost on observers, but the legal machinery ground forward inexorably.

The Final Morning

The last stay of execution was overturned at 7:30 a.m. on January 17, 1977. At 8:07 a.m., Gary Gilmore was dead.

The execution was conducted with clinical precision. Gilmore was transported to the abandoned cannery that served as Utah's death house, strapped to a chair with sandbags placed behind him to catch the bullets. The five volunteer executioners — local law enforcement officers from the county where Gilmore was convicted — stood concealed behind their curtain.

According to prison officials, four rifles contained live rounds and one contained a blank, so no executioner could be certain he had fired a fatal shot. However, when Mikal Gilmore later examined his brother's clothing, he found five bullet holes in the shirt, suggesting "the state of Utah, apparently, had taken no chances on the morning that it put my brother to death."

Gilmore had requested that his organs be donated for transplant purposes, and within hours of his death, two people received his corneas. His body was sent for autopsy and cremated the same day. The following day, after a brief memorial service, his ashes were scattered from an airplane over Spanish Fork, Utah.

The Executioner's Song

Gilmore's story captured the American imagination precisely because it challenged conventional narratives about capital punishment. Here was not a man protesting his innocence or fighting for his life, but someone demanding the right to die. His case forced the country to confront uncomfortable questions about autonomy, justice, and the state's role in carrying out what amounted to assisted suicide.

The media coverage was intense and often sensationalized. Saturday Night Live featured a sketch about Gilmore just weeks before his execution. Norman Mailer spent years researching and writing "The Executioner's Song," conducting hundreds of interviews to create what became a definitive account of the case. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1979 and was later adapted into a television movie starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore.

But beneath the media spectacle lay deeper questions about American violence and the death penalty. Gilmore's case became the first test of the post-Gregg era capital punishment system. That the first person executed was someone who demanded his own death seemed to some observers a fitting commentary on the arbitrary nature of who lives and who dies in the American justice system.

Final Words

In his final moments, Gilmore maintained the stoic control that had characterized his approach to his own death. After giving his famous last words, "Let's do it," the prison chaplain administered last rites. As the black hood was placed over his head, Gilmore spoke once more to the priest in Latin: "Dominus vobiscum" — "The Lord be with you." The chaplain responded, "Et cum spiritu tuo" — "And with your spirit."

They were the last words Gary Gilmore would ever speak. Seconds later, four bullets tore through his chest, ending a life that had been defined by violence from beginning to end. He was 36 years old.

Gilmore had gotten what he wanted: control over his own death and a place in history as the man who broke America's decade-long moratorium on executions. But the cost of that control was measured not just in his own life, but in the lives of Max Jensen and Bennie Bushnell — two young men whose names are often forgotten in the shadow of their killer's notoriety. They were the real victims of Gary Gilmore's final act of will, and their deaths remain the most senseless aspect of a senseless story.

In demanding his own execution, Gilmore had posed a question that American society is still struggling to answer: when someone commits acts so heinous that death seems the only adequate response, who has the right to decide when enough suffering has been endured? Gilmore insisted that right belonged to him alone. On a cold morning in Utah, the state agreed.