Shot in the Heart

by Mikal Gilmore

  “We believe,” the prosecutor said, “that there may be other records for Mr. Laffo under other names in different jurisdictions. It is also likely that this defendant has committed other confidence game and embezzlement crimes—and perhaps crimes of a more serious nature—elsewhere in this state or country without being detected, or perhaps has fled proper arrest. He is obviously a man adept at wielding numerous aliases. We, in fact, are not certain of his real name, even at this time. We recommend a lengthy sentence. Though this was not a terribly serious crime, Harry Laffo is a man clearly given to criminal behavior, and if nothing else, we would like to hold him long enough for other states to run a record on the names that we have and see if he’s wanted under any other charges.”

  Judge H. E. Munson sentenced Harry R Laffo to five years in the Colorado State Penitentiary. Seeing the devastated look on her husband’s face, Bessie found herself feeling more pity for him than anger. He looked like a crushed man, and for the first time she saw that he was already an old man. “This is outrageous,” she thought. “He has already paid for his other crimes, and these small-town nobodies are railroading him to puff up their own measly feathers.”

  After a few days, Bessie came to the difficult decision that she could not stay in Colorado while Frank served his sentence at the penitentiary at Canon City. She didn’t feel equipped to support herself in a strange place and take care of two small children at the same time. She took Frankie and Gary and, right after the New Year, headed back to her parents’ farm in Provo to wait for her husband while he did his time in prison.

  I HAVE IN MY POSSESSION A COPY OF MY FATHER’s Colorado Department of Corrections records. There isn’t much to the file, though the little that is there tells a fair amount, at least as far as my father is concerned. For example, the file contains documented confirmation of his use of several pseudonyms, a criminal record that spanned at least a quarter century, and the implicit suggestion that he may have been involved in other unknown or unsolved mysteries.

  Beyond that, the records are of value to me for two other reasons. First, these are not merely the earliest documents I have been able to find regarding Frank Gilmore; they are, in fact—aside from his death certificate and listings in various city and telephone directories—the only hard information I have ever been able to find regarding my father’s life on this earth. None of his school records survived, he never served in the military, and his employment history cannot be verified. Not even his tax or Social Security records can be found.

  The other value of these prison files for me is that they contain the earliest photo I have ever seen of my father’s face. It is not a particularly young face. He was about fifty-one when this mug shot was taken (Colorado State Prison #22470), and with his false teeth missing and his ruffled, prematurely gray hair, he looks much older, more like a man of sixty. I try to read what’s in his face. I can’t learn much, of course, about his secrets or the source of his dread from this picture, but I can plainly see that deep sorrow and a difficult courage were fighting for possession of him on that day in early 1942. He looks like a guilty man who cannot understand his own crimes and who fears that worse consequences are coming his way.

  My brother Frank thinks that I have my father’s looks, but I have never seen the resemblance. When I see this photo, though, I am reminded of something I would like to forget: I recall seeing my face in the mirror one evening a few years ago, after several hours of drinking and probably crying. I believed on that night that I had lost my last chance for the sort of happiness that I might gain from having my own family—that I had lost my heart for such a dream and would now have to live without the dream. If I did have kids at this point, I feared I would end up committing the same arrogant error my father had committed: waiting too late in life to have children that I would never live long enough to love and protect properly. I hated realizing that truth about my life and I hated seeing knowledge of it on my face—it made me look empty and old and ugly—and I never wanted anyone in the world to see me with that look.

  That is close to the look that the prison photographer caught on Frank Gilmore’s broken face the day he was taken away from his family and, for all he knew, cut off from his future as well. He had no idea, of course, that fifty years later one of his sons would see that photograph and discover something of himself and his inheritance in it.

  It is funny. For years I think I was as close to my father as anybody has ever been—as my mother said, I was the only one in the family who still loved him at his death. Though I would spend my adolescent years living with my mother, it was my father—more than anybody else—who raised me, and it was my father I felt safe with. But now when I look at this picture of his face, I think of the things he did to my mother and brothers during this time and the time to come. I try to reconcile my sense of him, and the sanctuary I felt in his presence, with his brutality and his abandonments of his other children. I cannot understand how a man who could be so loving could also leave a baby of his on a park bench while he went off to try and pass a bad check—because that is what truly happened on that day in Atlantic, Iowa, when he lost custody of Gary to a state orphanage. I cannot believe that man was my father, that I once loved him more than anybody else in my world. That I still love him, because I don’t know how not to.

  My father feels so close, and yet so far. He’s the biggest enigma in this history, and I’m worried that if I can’t solve him—if I can’t uncover his secrets and explain his fears—I have no right telling this story. Maybe to know my father, I’m going to have to examine my own heart and face up to the part of him that dwells there. At the same time, my greatest fear is that I am too much like the man, that I already own his sins.

  BACK IN PROVO, BESSIE’S PARENTS LET HER STAY in the shack out back, while George roomed with Uncle Charley, next door. Will and Melissa weren’t thrilled to have their black-sheep daughter back home. They had little money as it was, and they figured they had already finished raising and housing all the children they were going to raise. Even the young twins, Ada and Ida, were now married and living away from home. Bessie had been one of the first to leave the Browns’ household, and it seemed to them that she had thumbed her nose when she took her leave. Then, she went on to marry a non-Mormon man she knew too little about—inarguably a criminal, as her father had surmised—and now she was back to make a nest at the home she had once spurned, while she waited for her husband to be released from prison. Plus, she had done all this without regard for the shame that she now brought to their home. The Browns didn’t think of themselves as petty-minded, righteous types who would hound a man for small mistakes; they had seen many Mormon boys take missteps over the years, and they had seen how a mix of swift punishment and loving forgiveness had helped redeem these men. But to their way of thinking, there was nothing small about Frank Gilmore’s mistakes, and there was likely no redeeming him. He had violated the trust of his wife and endangered the welfare of his children with his repeated crimes, and he apparently had no regard for the basic laws of society. He was a sordid man, they decided—a man whose evil ran much deeper than their gullible daughter suspected. Will and Melissa Brown didn’t like anything about Frank Gilmore, and neither did anybody else in their family. “I was afraid of him,” Bessie’s little sister Ida would say, years later. “I’d hide whenever he was around. I didn’t even like to look at him.”

  Bessie felt the family’s damnation enwrap her, almost as if sentence had been passed on her as well. She felt humiliated by her husband’s actions, and she hated being relegated by her parents to the backyard, like some bad animal. It wasn’t long before all the rancor—the censure she felt from her family and the disappointments of her still-young marriage—began to churn inside her, and her pain and resentment melded into rage. She and her mother would get into fierce shouting matches about the mess of Bessie’s life, and Bessie would say nasty reciprocal things about the hypocrisy of her sisters and the meanness of her father. Melissa coul
dn’t stand it. “If you are going to dare talk that way about your own kin,” her mother said, “godly people who have prayed for you out of the love and charity of their hearts, then you can go and sit by yourself out back. I will not allow you to speak that way about your family in my home.”

  Bessie stormed back to the shed where she slept with her children and slammed the door behind her. She looked at the paltry furnishings around her. Broken-down chairs and tables, a dilapidated bed—things she couldn’t even call her own. She thought about her sisters in their nice homes with their new furnishings, and she hated everything about her life that had brought her to this disgrace. My brother Frank, nearly three years old at the time, watched his mother’s movements with a learned fear. Bessie picked up a bowl from the table and hurled it against the wall. Then she picked up a chair and threw it at the door. The smashing sounds woke Gary, and he began to cry. Bessie yelled at him to stop, which only made him wail louder. She became livid and turned to Frankie. “You make him shut up,” she shouted. “Make him shut up!” Frankie went over and tried to hush his baby brother—patting him lightly on the head—but Gary kept crying. Bessie grabbed a pillow off the bed and began to slam Frank across the face with it, accompanying each blow with the same imperative: “YOU-MAKE-HIM-SHUT-UP.” She kept hitting Frank with the pillow until he ran outside, his mother on his heels. Frankie fell on the ground and lay there crying, covering his head, while Bessie pounded him, over and over. Later, he told me it wasn’t the hitting that bothered him so much; it was Bessie’s screaming, her frantic craziness.

  She beat him until the noise of his crying brought her half-deaf mother outside, to demand that she stop. “If you don’t quit hitting these children,” she said, “I’m going to take them away from you.” Then Melissa gathered Frankie and Gary and took them into the warmth of her home. She dried Frankie’s tears and fed him cookies and rocked Gary at her breast, while Bessie sat in the shack out back, crying alone, without her children or her parents.

  These beatings of the babies became common, my brother Frank recalls. One time, when Bessie and her mother were arguing, Frankie interrupted, asking them to stop. “I don’t even love you anymore,” Bessie told Frankie, and then shoved him. Frankie was off balance and fell and hit his head hard against the wall. Seeing the dazed, scared look on her little boy’s face, Bessie knelt and cradled him, petting his blond hair. “Oh, Frank, I really do love you,” she said, crying. “I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”

  Melissa felt she had seen enough. “That’s it, Bessie. We’re just going to have to take these kids away from you. We can’t stand by and watch this anymore.”

  Bessie dressed Frankie and Gary and fled the farm that day. Later that night, her baby sister Ida found Bessie wandering the streets of Provo, carrying Gary in one arm and leading Frank by the hand. Ida and her husband Vern loaned Bessie twenty-five dollars and got her a room for a couple of nights at the City Center Motel, not far from where they lived. It was at this same motel, a lifetime later, that Gary would commit his second murder. He walked into City Center’s office and shot the motel manager in the back of the head. In the next room, only a few feet away, the man’s baby boy lay sleeping. The boy was about the same age Gary had been when he stayed there, in 1942.

  BESSIE’S FIGHT WITH HER MOTHER GOT SMOOTHED OVER and she was allowed to return to her shack in the backyard. On July 3,1943, after eighteen months in prison, my father got time off his sentence for good behavior and was paroled from Canon City, Colorado, to Provo. Bessie felt relieved to see him, but Frank Gilmore came home a harder man than when his family had last seen him. My brother Frank told me: “He had been gone so long that I don’t think we remembered him. He was like this new man in our lives, and he was real mean. One time we were eating dinner and I dropped my cake and, man, he just went bananas. Made me get down and pick up every crumb and gave me a few good whacks along the way. He’s screaming and yelling at me and hitting me the whole time for dropping a piece of cake on the floor. Maybe he’d had a bad day, but it was an immature way to treat a little kid.” After that, the boys found themselves punished for the slightest things, like not eating their food fast enough, or crying too loud, or knocking things over. Apparently, it was not difficult to get my father angry enough to hit.

  My father hadn’t been back a day when he learned that Bessie’s parents had recently been considering proceedings to have Frankie and Gary taken away from Frank and Bessie, and turned over to the custody of the Browns. Frank and Will almost came to blows in the argument that followed, and Will ordered Frank off his property. That night, Frank and Bessie and their sons were on the road, hitchhiking their way back to Sacramento. If Frank hadn’t arrived when he did, Bessie realized, they might have lost their sons to her parents and the dull life of their farm. The thought made her feel new hate throughout her veins.

  AFTER MY PARENTS GOT BACK TO CALIFORNIA, Frank wanted to join up and fight the Nazis, but he was too old, plus there was the matter of his criminal record. Instead, my father took jobs working as a ship fitter in various ship plants and steel yards. For the rest of the war, that was the family’s life: Bessie and Frank would move into some place where there was a war project going on and both would work until the project was finished or until Frank got too restless being in one place. Then, on December 12, 1944, my mother bore her third boy, Gaylen Noel Gilmore, in Los Angeles. Gaylen was born with dark brown, almond-shaped eyes and an unceasing smile, and my father quickly formed a special love for him. It was as if, overnight, the novelty of the other boys wore off for him.

  Then came the end of the war. My mother said that when the facts of the Nazis’ atrocities against the Jewish people were revealed, my father sat and cried into the night. Even though he was Catholic, he believed himself to be partly Jewish, because of the Houdini rumor. I remember that years later, when Adolf Eichmann was found and arrested for the crime of engineering the S.S.’s death camps, my father was elated. He would sit in his large easy chair and watch the news of Eichmann’s trial every night, and he kept me by his side, with his arm draped around me. I remember him saying: “They’re going to bury that man in a grave of his own making, six million souls deep.”

  With the war’s end came the end of Frank Gilmore’s parole. My father went back to his occasional petty criminal scams, and the family went back to its vagabond life. My parents and brothers would drift from state to state and town to town for almost the duration of the 1940s.

  NOT LONG AGO I WAS TALKING WITH somebody about these years when my friend said: “I can’t imagine leading that sort of gypsy life for all those years. It’s heartbreaking to think of those kids living that way for so long. Also, imagine your mother, living on the road with three kids and a drunk husband, and absolutely no money. What would ten years of that life do to a woman, especially one who was raised in traditional circumstances? She must have felt like the most awful of outcasts.”

  I have heard other friends say similar things over the years, and yet I have to be honest: I have always felt left out because I was not a part of this time of wandering. It was a vital passage in the family’s history. For all the ways it may have been miserable, it united my parents and brothers in a common range of experience, which I never got to share. I was born apart from that time, and in many ways it made me an outsider among my brothers.

  Earlier, I asked if my family had ever been a real family. Did they share in recreational activities, did they attend church together? The answer is, no, they did not. Here are some of the types of experience that my family shared instead:

  Once, when my parents were working at the shipyards in San Pedro, California, there was a local dining room that provided cheap meals for the poor and government employees. Frank would often take the family there for dinner. One night, the eatery was serving spaghetti and meatballs, and an older man, a vagrant, was making the rounds of the tables, eating the food that others left behind. When the guy got around to my brother Frankie’s plate,
he snatched a meatball without asking and started to eat it. My father flipped. “You crazy son of a bitch,” he yelled. “You like spaghetti?” Frank Gilmore took his plate of spaghetti and shoved it in the man’s face. Then he grabbed the man and began using his face to mop up spaghetti on all the other nearby plates. The cooks came out from back and pulled Frank off the man, and then told him to get himself and his kids out of there and never come back. When they got home, Frank gave Bessie some money and said: “Here. Go back down there and feed the boys, but watch that Guinea son of a bitch. He loves spaghetti.”

  Another time, in an Oakland hotel room, my father decided to reenact his famous pyramid of chairs, from his days as an acrobat in the circus. He pulled a dining table over to the center of the room, piled its chairs on top, plus a couple of end tables and upright ashtrays and flower stands, and then proceeded to climb his self-built tower while my brothers watched excitedly. The whole time, Bessie kept saying, “Now, Frank, be careful.” Frank managed to make it to the top. He stood up, spread his arms in triumph, and then, of course, the whole construction toppled, furniture and father flying in all directions. Frank landed hard on his back, staring blankly at the ceiling. Bessie and the boys leaned over him. Bessie shook him and said: “Frank, are you okay? Speak to me, Frank.” In reply, Frank said: “Ooooooooh.”