The Law: The Idyll of Gary and Amber Jim

“I love you Amber Jim. I do. You amaze me…”

During his last two months of life, Gary Mark Gilmore was engaged in a strange and increasingly emotional correspondence with a girl named Amber Edwina Hunt and nicknamed Amber Jim. The daughter of a janitor in Murray, Utah, she is the state’s first female Golden Glove boxer. She has won her first eight fights (against boys), seven of them by technical knockouts in the first round, the eighth in the second. She is a blonde fifth-grader, age eleven.

Amber Jim read about Gilmore’s determination to be executed and wrote him a letter to ask why he wanted to die. “I just thought he might be lonely,” she explained last week to TIME’S David R. Frazier. She wrote Gilmore that she believed in reincarnation. She also asked him what his favorite color was. Gilmore was touched. He wrote back to say that he wanted to die because “I’m not a nice person; I don’t want to cause any more harm. I’ve harmed too many people and by doing so I’ve harmed my own soul.” And his favorite colors were blue and orange.

Amber Jim sent Gilmore her picture and told him she was training for another fight. She said she lifted weights but asked Gilmore to keep that secret. Gilmore sent her $200 and said he would love to sponsor her: “Amber Jim I believe you are a natural-born winner. You’re unique.” He wrote her that he had suddenly become “rather rich,” and asked her what she wanted for Christ mas. He added, “I just like you. Love you, really.”

Amber Jim kept addressing the prisoner as “Mr. Gilmore.” He asked her to stop. “Call me Gary. Alright?” What he wanted for Christmas was to meet her, “my favorite athlete.”

Amber Jim asked Gilmore what his favorite animal was. The tiger, he answered, because “they’re so powerful, so beautiful, so fearless.” He quoted her William Blake’s “Tiger, tiger, burning bright …” then added his judgment: “Neat, huh?” He asked her who her favorite boxer was, adding that his was Rocky Marciano.

Amber Jim asked Gilmore what TV shows he liked best. He didn’t watch TV, but he liked to go to drive-in movies and eat popcorn and potato chips with his girl friend, Nicole Barrett. Music? He liked all kinds, Gilmore confided, but cowboy music most—Hank Williams, Johnny Cash. And who did he think he had been in previous incarnations? Perhaps an Indian. “I feel close to Indians, and Indians like me.”

Gilmore sent Amber Jim one of his own poems, a gloomy meditation that began “Feeling a beckoning wind blow thru/ The chambers of my soul I knew/ It was time I entered in …” On a cheerier note, he said he had asked a relative to buy her an 8-mm. movie camera and projector. He thought about her every day, would write to her every day, and added: “Be cool. I love you.”

Gilmore said he was receiving 200 letters a day, including many from girls who wanted to marry him, “but I got a girl, Nicole. And if I wasn’t in love with her I’d ask Amber Jim to marry me. Just kidding, honey. But you’re a good-looking girl.”

Gilmore detected perfume on Amber Jim’s next letter and remarked on it. They continued comparing views on boxing. Amber Jim’s favorite fighter was not Rocky Marciano but Muhammad Ah’. Gilmore insisted on Marciano, then added that he was starting a bank account for her and putting in $500. He also bought her a ten-speed bike. And a book on Muhammad Ali. “I will always love you honey. You’re a beautiful wonderful little girl … Knock ’em all out. For me. Hugs and kisses, xxoooxxxo.”

That last letter was dated Jan. 15.

Two days later, when Gilmore went before the firing squad, Amber Jim burst into tears.