BY CHRISTOPHER SMART
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 23, 2004 12:23 AM

SPANISH FORK – It’s sleek and deadly, and it carries a bit of history.

If you can write the best 500-word essay – either in favor of or against the death penalty – the gun Gary Mark Gilmore used in the mid-1970s to commit two execution-style murders in Utah County can be yours.

Gilmore made history – of sorts – on Jan 17, 1977, when he became the first person in over a decade to be executed in this country. His death by firing squad tipped the balance across the United States toward capital punishment – which had been in a legal stalemate since 1966.

Gilmore’s life story became immortalized in Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and a movie of the same name.

The murder weapon – a Browning .22-caliber Challenger automatic – now belongs to Dennis Stilson, a Spanish Fork gun dealer and bail bondsman. He purchased the gun several years ago and has been unsuccessful in his attempts to sell if for what he thinks it’s worth – somewhere around $500,000.

Gilmore stole the gun from Swan’s, a general store on Spanish Fork’s Main Street, shortly before the July 1976 killings of Max Jensen, a gas station attendant, and Provo motel clerk Bennie Bushnell.

The execution-style murders shocked then-bucolic Utah County. The robberies could have easily been pulled off without killing. Gilmore soon was tracked down and convicted in the Bushnell murder. Unrepentant, he was sentenced to death.

But what made headlines across the country was his refusal to appeal the death sentence and his demand to be shot by a firing squad – he uttered the infamous words, “Let’s do it,” seconds before the shots rang out.

Gilmore, who was 36 when he died, spent half of his life behind bars, beginning as a teenager in reform school and stints in and out of jail until the period just prior to the murders. On death row, he entered into a suicide pact with his 20-year-old girlfriend, Nicole Barrett. Both attempted suicide twice in the weeks leading up to his execution.

Former Salt Lake newsman Jack Ford, who is now a spokesman for the Utah Department of Corrections, covered the Gilmore saga. He recalls the legal tug of war that resulted in the execution and the media frenzy that put Utah in the spotlight.

“Gary Gilmore was perhaps the only death-row inmate to ever appear in person before the Utah Supreme Court,” Ford said. “He stood there and told them, ‘Don’t you have the guts to carry out the sentence? I’m willing to accept it.’ ”

When U.S. District Judge Willis Ritter stayed the execution on Jan. 16, 1976, then-Utah Attorney General Robert Hansen and his chief deputy, Earl Dorius, chartered a plane and flew to Denver for a special hearing before a 10th U.S. Circuit Court panel very early in the morning.

“There was a big push to get Gilmore executed,” Ford said. “The attorney general wanted it to happen.”

National news organizations descended on Salt Lake City for the first execution in more than a decade. “It was a real media circus. Even Geraldo [Rivera] was there. They took over the [prison] parking lot. It was a madhouse.”

Almost 28 years later, Stilson says he hopes something positive can come from the brutal slayings and the carnival atmosphere that surrounded Gilmore’s execution.

“We can’t change the past,” he said. “But I’d like to think I can make something good happen. There is a need here.”