Writer MIKAL GILMORE, youngest brother of executed killer Gary Gilmore. Gilmore's 1977 death --at his own request-- by firing squad in Utah, was the first American execution in ten years. Brother MIKAL finds seeds of his brother's two murders sown far back in Gilmore family history, and its Mormon roots. When asked why he writes a memoir twenty years after the events many Americans remember from Norman Mailer's book "Executioner's Song", GILMORE says, "I'm writing about it now because for many years I tried to live my life as if I wasn't a member of the same family. I put a good deal of distance between myself and other people in my family, and between myself and the history of my family." Recapturing that history is the aim of his new memoir, "Shot in the Heart" (Doubleday).
Copyright 1994 Fresh Air