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A mass murderer awaiting execution is a media dream. Forget his victims; he's the
dominant figure. First, because he knows what it is to take a life. And more, because he
knows the hour of his death.
Now add the Timothy McVeigh twist: Initially, he didn't fight his conviction or his
sentence. In fact, he couldn't wait for the government to execute him. Then the FBI
fumbled the ball on the goal line, and we had a new ball game.
McVeigh is not the first American killer who has thwarted his attorneys' efforts to get
his execution postponed. That honor goes to Gary Gilmore, a badass from Utah who murdered
two men in 1976. He was executed by a firing squad, which was the inspiration for the
title of a remarkable book written by his brother Mikal: 'Shot
in the Heart.'
Mikal Gilmore's concern is not the crime, it's the creation of the criminal. He asks:
"Could I locate one moment where everything went wrong, one moment -- or period of
time -- that might have made all the difference?"
So he takes us through his family's sorry, violent history, looking for that moment.
Instead, he finds many moments --- enough to fill 400 chilling pages. Along the way, we
come to understand how Gary Gilmore transforms a murder conviction into a demented
triumph: "He had found the perfect way to beat the system by having them kill
him."
Mikal Gilmore's book is a chronicle of hate: his father's hatred of Gary, Gary's hatred of
his father. That couldn't be a starker contrast to Timothy McVeigh's family, one of those
pleasant All-American types with a patriarch who is baffled by what his son has done. He's
not Gilmore's nightmare father, far from it. And he did not spawn a second son who will
explore how it came to be that McVeigh coolly planned that mass murder in Oklahoma City.
Although McVeigh has spoken at length to the authors of American Terrorist, there is
clearly much more that he's holding back.
It's one of the many stupidities of capital punishment that, in killing the killer, we
lose the opportunity to find out what made him kill. So McVeigh will be a monster to most,
a martyr to some, a man to very, very few. We'll never get a book like 'Shot in the Heart'
out of the McVeigh story, we'll never learn anything that might help us identify
killers-to-be --- or the killer in us.
To understand current events, we'll have to go back to the winner of the 1994 National
Book Critics Circle Award: 'Shot in the Heart.'
--- Jesse Kornbluth (JesseKay@AOL.com)
(c)
Copyright 2001, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
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