Skip to main content

The Assisted Suicide

March 2023
1min read

Shot in the Heart


by Mikal Gilmore, Doubleday, 403 pages, $24.95 . CODE: DOU-1

Capital punishment had enjoyed a ten-year hiatus in America when a lean convicted killer named Gary Gilmore hounded the state of Utah into carrying out his death sentence in 1977, and his execution became a national event. Now Gilmore’s youngest brother, the Rolling Stone writer Mikal Gilmore, has found a fresh and powerful approach to the whole strange story to which Norman Mailer previously devoted more than a thousand pages in his “true-life novel” The Executioner’s Song . Mailer’s account was told in the clipped, stoic speech of Gary’s Western family; this version is driven more by the Gilmores’ wildness.

It was only because he was the youngest that Mikal escaped many of the terrors inflicted on his older brothers by their father, a failed acrobat, lion tamer, and stunt man who regularly beat his sons. After several earlier marriages, Frank Gilmore had met Bessie Brown, a young Mormon woman of twenty-four, when he was forty-seven. Frank punished their sons, said the eldest, Frank Jr., “not to make us better, but to make us sorry.” Gary Gilmore later credited his hatred of all authority to his weekly sessions under his father’s razor strop. Mikal, however, was hit only once by his father, who was an old man by then. “Gary was the criminal,” his mother later told the boy she favored. “I’d like you to be the lawyer. Your brothers will need a good and caring legal mind.”

Instead Mikal grew up to write rockmusic criticism and this extraordinary book—an attempt to understand two violent and elusive men. Bessie Gilmore’s powerful question haunts the story: “I raised both Frank Jr. and Gary side by side. One son picked up the gun. The other did not pick up the gun. Why?”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "October 1994"

Authored by: The Editors

Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

Authored by: The Editors

A Celebration of Baseball’s Legendary Fields

Authored by: The Editors

The Evolution of the Ballpark

Authored by: The Editors

Clash of Wings
World War II in the Air

Authored by: The Editors

American Flight Jackets, Airmen & Aircraft: A History of U.S. Flyers’ Jackets from World War I to Desert Storm

Authored by: The Editors

Shot in the Heart

Authored by: The Editors

Bettmann Portable Archive

Authored by: The Editors

Pictures of the Pain
Photography and the Assassination of President Kennedy

Authored by: The Editors

Music by Elliott Carter, Gunther Schuller, Milton Babbitt, and John Cage

Featured Articles

Famous writers including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts turned Sleepy Hollow Cemetery into our country’s first conservation project.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.

Roast pig, boiled rockfish, and apple pie were among the dishes George and Martha enjoyed during the holiday in 1797. Here are some actual recipes.

Born during Jim Crow, Belle da Costa Greene perfected the art of "passing" while working for one of the most powerful men in America.