A dozen white balloons were all that announced the rag-tag group in a car park opposite Utah State Prison. White is for mercy. But these folks in Draper expected none on this starry evening.
Exactly which of the squat buildings held the firing squad chamber was hard to discern from the other side of the wire and high walls. And the roar of the cars on the six-lane highway separating parking lot from prison meant that when the midnight hour arrived there was no audible fusillade of bullets. To most Utahans, the condemned man was merely a very bad madman and two-time murderer. To the people gathered here, he was also father, grandfather, brother and uncle.
In the end, the execution – by firing squad – of Ronnie Lee Gardner, convicted in 1985 for killing a Salt Lake City lawyer during a botched courthouse escape attempt, happened a little later than advertised. At 12.15 am, a prison spokesman informed reporters in a nearby media room, the “death warrant was served”.
It was a coy way of telling us that Gardner’s heart had been pierced by four bullets fired by the five marksmen with 30/30 calibre rifles – Winchester 94s – John Wayne’s rifle of choice and more usually used in these parts for the hunting of moose, bear and deer.
The state requires that one of the guns carries a blank so the men, if afflicted by conscience, can imagine their shot did not do the killing. Gardner was pronounced dead at 12.17 am.
Before the order to fire was given, the warden of the prison asked him if he had any “thoughts or feelings” he wished to express. “I do not, no,” he said, moments before his head, already strapped to the death chair, was covered with a hood.
For those reporters inside the death chamber, death did not appear to come instantly. They spoke afterwards of watching the 49-year-old clench and unclench his left hand and jerk his arm up and down. Radio reporter Sheryl Worsley was among them. “Even after he was shot, he moved. I don’t how much that was reflex and he seemed to be clenching. Some of that had to be reflex but I am not sure all of that was. He moved, he moved a little bit, to some degree that bothers me.”
Nate Carlise, a reporter with The Salt Lake Tribune, described Prisoner Number 14873 as “Utah’s own ghost of Hannibal Lecter”, and described hearing not one round of gunshots as they had been told to expect, but rather two. “Boom, boom. The sounds were as close together as you could spew them from your mouth,” he said.
Most of the witnesses also noted that at least one of the bullet holes in the 2-inch white square target – attached to Gardner’s chest, directly over his heart, with Velcro – appeared to have been outside the bull’s eye circles.
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