![]() ![]() In fact, Houdini was only sixteen years old in 1890, the year of Frank Gilmore's birth, and did not begin his career as a magician until the following year. Bessie researched this at the library and concluded that Frank was the illegitimate son of Harry Houdini. Frank Sr.'s mother, Fay Gilmore, once told Bessie that Frank Sr.'s father was a famous magician who had passed through Sacramento, where she was living. The theme of illegitimacy, real or imagined, was common in the Gilmore family. He seized on this as the reason that he and his father never got along he became very upset and walked out on his mother when she tried to explain the name change to him. Frank's mother, Fay, kept the original "Faye Coffman" birth certificate, and when Gary found it two decades later, he assumed he must be either illegitimate or someone else's son. This name change proved to be a sore point years later. Frank christened his son Faye Robert Coffman, but once they left Texas, Bessie changed it to Gary Mark. Gary was born while they were living in Texas under the pseudonym of Coffman to avoid the law. On a whim, he married Bessie (née Brown) (August 19, 1913, Provo, Utah – June 29, 1981, Portland, Oregon), a Mormon outcast from Provo, Utah, in Sacramento, California. November 23, 1890, Lincoln, Nebraska – July 31, 1962, Seattle, Washington), an alcoholic con man, had other wives and families, none of whom he supported. The other sons were Frank Jr., Gaylen, and the writer and music journalist Mikal Gilmore. Gary Mark Gilmore was born in McCamey, Texas, on December 4, 1940, the second of four sons, to Frank and Bessie Gilmore. His life and execution were the subject of the 1979 nonfiction novel The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer, and 1982 TV film of the novel starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore. (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. Georgia, which had resulted in earlier death penalty statutes being deemed "cruel and unusual" punishment, and therefore unconstitutional. These new statutes avoided the problems under the 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, he became the first person in almost ten years to be executed in the United States. Supreme Court upheld a new series of death penalty statutes in the 1976 decision Gregg v. ![]() Gary Mark Gilmore (born Faye Robert Coffman Decem– 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. ![]()
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