Gary Gilmore
American murderer (1940-1977)
Gary Mark Gilmore (born Faye Robert Coffman; December 4, 1940 – January 17, 1977) was an American criminal who gained international attention for demanding the implementation of his death sentence for two murders he had admitted to committing in Utah. After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg v. Georgia, he became the first person in almost ten years to be executed in the United States. These new statutes avoided the problems under the 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, which had resulted in earlier death penalty statutes being deemed "cruel and unusual" punishment, and therefore unconstitutional (the Supreme Court had previously ordered all states to commute death sentences to life imprisonment after Furman). Gilmore was executed by a firing squad in 1977. His life and execution were the subject of the 1979 nonfiction novel The Executioner's Song, by Norman Mailer, and the 1982 TV film of the novel starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore.
Early life
Gary Mark Gilmore was born in McCamey, Texas, on December 4, 1940, the second of four sons, to Frank and Bessie Gilmore. The other sons were Frank Jr., Gaylen, and the writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore. Frank Harry Gilmore, an alcoholic con man, had other wives and families, none of whom he supported.
“Gary Gilmore” enters the record as american murderer (1940-1977). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Gary, Gilmore and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q560440. VIAF identifies the subject as 28353361. The Library of Congress control number is n79088185. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1940, 1977, 1976 and 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gary Gilmore” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.