Ronnie Lee Gardner shot two men to death in Salt Lake City within six months. In October 1984, while on the run from Utah State Prison, he robbed the Cheers Tavern and killed Melvyn Otterstrom, a 37-year-old company comptroller who tended bar there one night a week. On April 2, 1985, as guards brought him into the Metropolitan Hall of Justice for a hearing on that killing, a woman handed him a revolver. In the shooting that followed he killed Michael Burdell, a 36-year-old attorney who had taken cover behind a door, and wounded an unarmed bailiff, George "Nick" Kirk. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the tavern killing, and in October 1985 a jury convicted him of capital murder for Burdell's death and sentenced him to die.
The case then spent a quarter century in the courts. Gardner's lawyers argued that the jury had never fully heard about his childhood of neglect, drug use and abuse, and that he had changed. The courts and, in June 2010, the state parole board rejected those arguments. The families of his victims were divided: Otterstrom's relatives and Kirk's widow and daughters asked that the sentence be carried out, while Burdell's father and fiancee said Burdell would never have wanted Gardner executed. Gardner chose the firing squad, a method Utah had dropped for new death sentences in 2004, and was shot shortly after midnight on June 18, 2010. It was the first firing-squad execution in the United States in 14 years.
Gardner was born in Salt Lake City on January 16, 1961, according to a Salt Lake Tribune timeline published in 2010. Most of what is known about his early life comes from the evidence his lawyers gathered for his appeals and his 2010 commutation bid, and from the summaries of that evidence in court opinions and press reports. The state never accepted that this history excused his crimes, and the courts that reviewed it treated it as mitigation, not as a defense.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, in its 2009 ruling, called it undisputed that his childhood was troubled in many respects. Summarizing his lawyers' submission, the court listed what they said a full investigation would have shown: a broken and dysfunctional home; a period living in a condemned house; foster placements and repeated stays in detention; a stepfather who exposed him to crime; sexual and emotional abuse of the children in the family; a childhood bout of meningitis that could have caused brain damage; gasoline sniffing from about the age of six; LSD by age ten; and a list of juvenile charges by ten that ran from public intoxication and shoplifting to grand larceny and fighting. At eleven he spent a year in a locked unit at the Utah State Hospital. Tests there showed signs of possible brain impairment, and a later test battery placed him in the range of moderate brain damage. He was sent to the state industrial school at fourteen. The Tribune timeline dates his meningitis hospitalization to March 31, 1965, and a child worker's request for a state hospital evaluation to February 1972.
At his 1985 penalty hearing a defense psychiatrist, Dr. Heinbecker, told the jury some of this: that Gardner came from a broken home in which his mother struggled to discipline nine children, that his stepfather had been in prison, that the family had long histories of crime and substance abuse, that his mother had been charged with parental neglect when he was two and again when he was five, and that tests suggested organic brain damage.
The Associated Press, drawing on court documents in 2010, reported that authorities first noticed Gardner at the age of two, when he was found alone in the street wearing only a diaper. By six he was sniffing gasoline and glue, and by ten he had used LSD and heroin and was acting as a lookout while his stepfather committed robberies. At eleven he was placed in the state mental hospital, not because of a diagnosed illness but because child welfare officials thought he was better off there than at home; he was released about 18 months later. He told the courts he had only a fourth-grade education. He spent time in the state industrial school and in a foster home, where, the AP reported, he was sexually abused.
Amnesty International, which campaigned for clemency, summarized the federal appeal evidence in May 2010 in more detail. By that account his mother suffered from mental illness and the family lived in severe poverty; he developed a severe tic, possibly Tourette syndrome; he was sexually abused by an older brother and later by a foster carer; he sniffed paint thinner from about five or six until eighteen; and his stepfather took him to Wyoming to steal mercury from oil field sites. These are the defense's allegations as Amnesty presented them, not findings of any court.
Gardner himself described the boy he had been in blunt terms at his 2010 hearing. He called himself "a nasty little bugger," said he had a very explosive temper, and recalled that his mother had said it was as if he had two personalities. He told the board it would have been a miracle if he had not ended up on death row.
According to the Associated Press, Gardner had his first child, a daughter, at about sixteen, and a son a few years later. The Tribune timeline dates the daughter's birth to May 23, 1977, and the son's to February 9, 1980. Two weeks after his son was born, on February 25, 1980, Gardner arrived at Utah State Prison for the first time, after a robbery conviction. The state's 1987 appellate brief lists prior robbery convictions dated February 22, 1980, and September 17, 1981.
On April 19, 1981, Gardner and another inmate escaped from the prison. On April 30, still at large, he confronted a man he believed was involved with his girlfriend; he was shot in the neck and arrested, the Tribune timeline records. He went back to prison.
On August 6, 1984, he was taken from the prison to University Hospital in Salt Lake City for a medical examination. There, according to the Tribune timeline, he overpowered a guard, took his pistol, kidnapped an employee and escaped. He was still free two months later.
Melvyn John Otterstrom's family did not want him remembered as "a bartender." His niece, Jenny Sedgwick, told the Deseret News in 2010 that calling him that had hurt the family for years. He loved adventure and mountain climbing, she said, he was a businessman, and he took his work seriously.
Otterstrom was 37. By day he was the comptroller of Utah Paper Box, and he worked one night a week behind the bar at the Cheers Tavern in Salt Lake City; a state prosecutor later told the parole board he took the job to earn extra money for his young family. He had been an Eagle Scout, had served in a Green Beret unit of the Utah National Guard, and had earned a degree in business administration and accounting at the University of Utah. He enjoyed hunting, cars and learning, and he played the trumpet; his relatives remembered him playing "Moon River" in a way that could make listeners cry. His sister and only sibling, Carolyn Crawford, said he was outgoing, friendly and funny but could turn serious, and that when he was around everything felt all right. To Sedgwick he was something between a big brother and a father figure, "the glue" of a large and close extended family.
He was married to Kathy, whom his family called the love of his life, and they had a son, Jason, who was three when his father died. Jason Otterstrom grew up to pursue a doctorate. Otterstrom's parents, John and Florence, never recovered from their son's death, the family said.
The Deseret News reported that Gardner shot Otterstrom once in the head during a robbery at the Cheers Tavern and that Otterstrom's wife found him later. The exact date is reported two ways in the Salt Lake Tribune: its 2010 timeline gives October 9, 1984, while its report on the day of the execution gives October 24, 1984.
The investigation itself is thinly documented. The 2010 Deseret News reports identify Darcy Perry McCoy as the woman who drove Gardner during the robbery and who later testified against him. Gardner was back in custody by early 1985. When guards brought him to court on April 2, 1985, the charge pending against him in the Otterstrom case was second-degree murder, according to the Utah Supreme Court and the Tenth Circuit.
The account that follows is drawn from the facts recited by the Utah Supreme Court in 1989 and 1994 and by the Tenth Circuit in 2009, which rested on the trial record.
On the morning of April 2, 1985, two prison transportation officers, Luther Hensley and Stan McAfee, drove Gardner from the maximum security unit of Utah State Prison to the Metropolitan Hall of Justice in downtown Salt Lake City for a pretrial hearing in the Otterstrom case. As he entered the basement lobby, a woman handed him a gun. Gardner pointed it at his guards. One of them exchanged fire with him and hit him, and the guards withdrew toward the parking lot.
Wounded and looking for a way out, Gardner walked into the court's archives room, where a clerk, a prison officer and three attorneys were working. He said he had been shot and went back out. Two of the attorneys, Michael Burdell and Robert Macri, moved behind the open door of the room. Gardner came back in holding the gun in front of him, saw the two men and stopped about two feet from Macri, pointing the gun at him. Burdell said, "Oh, my God." Gardner swore, moved the gun from Macri to Burdell, and, after what one witness at trial called "a definite pause," shot Burdell in the head. Macri ran into the lobby. Gardner fired at Burdell a second time.
He then forced the prison officer in the archives room, Richard Thomas, to lead him to a stairwell. As they crossed the lobby, Nick Kirk, a uniformed bailiff, came down the stairs to see what was happening. Gardner shot him and kept going up the stairs. On the next floor he took a vending machine serviceman, Wilburn Miller, as a hostage and forced him outside. Once they were out of the building, Miller broke free and dove back in through a teller's window. Surrounded by police, Gardner threw down the gun and surrendered.
His own trial lawyers, the brothers Andrew and James Valdez of the Salt Lake Legal Defenders Association, had been due to meet him at 9 a.m. for the hearing. Andrew Valdez was walking toward the courthouse when he saw Gardner go down on the lawn bleeding from the chest. Gardner was taken to University Hospital. Burdell was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital, according to the state's appellate brief. Kirk, shot in the abdomen, spent a little over a week in the hospital.
At the hospital a prison officer assigned to guard Gardner, Wayne Jorgensen, later testified that Gardner told him he had shot Burdell because Burdell looked as if he would jump him, and that he would have killed anyone who tried to stop him from escaping.
Michael Burdell was the second of ten children, his father, Joseph Burdell Jr., told the Deseret News in 2010, and he looked out for his younger brothers and sisters from an early age. He served in Vietnam, where, his family said, he refused to carry a weapon. Afterward he put himself through law school while working for Motorola.
In Mesa, Arizona, in the mid-1970s, he met Donna Gray, later Donna Nu, at a philosophical discussion group. They became engaged. Both were drawn to Summum, a small religious movement based in Salt Lake City, and in 1981 they moved to Utah to be near its pyramid. Burdell took a religious name in the movement. Through it he and Nu grew vegetables for people in need, work for which they received a commendation from the Utah Legislature.
In Salt Lake City Burdell practiced as a defense lawyer, often representing clients nobody else would take and usually without charge, his father said. On the day he died he was at the courthouse representing a disabled Vietnam veteran for free. Afterward, his family found $5.97 in his checking account. Friends described a man who lived simply and laughed easily; Nu said his laugh was so infectious that she could not help laughing herself, decades later, when she remembered it. His friends and fiancee told the American Bar Association's journal and other outlets that he was a pacifist who opposed the death penalty. At his memorial service, the Deseret News reported, his sister prayed for Gardner.
George "Nick" Kirk had been married to his wife, VelDean, for 36 years and was the father of five children. They met when she was 15 and married when she was 17; he was then a "body and fender man" doing auto repair in a family business. He later joined the Salt Lake County sheriff's volunteer reserve and became a court bailiff. In court he was strict and expected respect; outside it he chatted with everyone and had coffee with reporters. He loved fishing, hunting, boating and bowling, and on days off the couple would take their camper on the road.
On April 2, 1985, VelDean Kirk was working as a secretary on the ninth floor of the sheriff's office, across a courtyard from the courthouse. When sirens filled the street she went down to look, and a detective walked over to tell her that the man who had been shot was her husband. Kirk had been hurrying down the stairs, she said, worried in particular about a judge he was close to. He was unarmed; bailiffs at the time had neither guns nor radios.
The bullet damaged his stomach, intestines, hip and leg. He survived, went through repeated operations and tried to return to work, but he lived in constant pain and walked with a limp, his widow told the Deseret News. He could no longer get his boat in and out of the water, and he gave up bowling, golf and coaching his grandchildren. He sought more than $40,000 for his trauma and received $6,000 from the county commission. He died of a heart attack in 1995, at 69. His family believes the shooting shortened his life.
Carma Hainsworth, the sister of Darcy Perry McCoy, served eight years in prison for her part in the escape attempt, the Deseret News reported in 2010. She said at a 1987 parole hearing that she had only carried letters between Gardner and her sister and gathered clothes for him to change into, and that she had not known what would happen that morning. She told officials that her sister, who looked like her, had handed Gardner the gun. The prison officer who shot Gardner, Luther Hensley, supported that account, but other witnesses identified Hainsworth as the woman in the courthouse. A sheriff's investigator and the prosecutor who worked the case said they suspected McCoy was involved but could not build a case against her. At his 2010 commutation hearing, Gardner said for the first time that the woman who gave him the gun was the woman who had testified against him in the Cheers case. No charge against McCoy over the escape was ever reported.
Gardner pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the Otterstrom case after the courthouse shooting and before his capital trial; the state's 1987 brief records his trial lawyers telling the judge at an August 5, 1985, hearing that they were concerned about how that plea would be used. The Utah Supreme Court later held that the prior homicide was admissible at the penalty phase as part of his character and history. In 1997 the same court noted that, apart from his death sentence, Gardner was serving two sentences of five years to life for first-degree felonies; it did not say which crimes those terms covered. Utah did not have a sentence of life without parole until 1992, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
Gardner was tried before Judge Jay E. Banks in the Third District Court in Salt Lake County, with the Valdez brothers as his lawyers. Pretrial publicity was heavy, and the trial took place close to the building where the shooting happened. The judge denied a change of venue, held five days of jury selection, and denied the motion again once a jury was seated.
Gardner did not deny that he shot Burdell. His defense was that he had not meant to kill: that he was in such pain and distress from his own wound that the shot was a reaction, an accident, or at most reckless. He testified, and on his lawyers' advice he told the jury about his prior convictions, including violent ones, so that the prosecution could not raise them first. Jorgensen's account of what Gardner said at the hospital was used to rebut the defense. The emergency room doctors had told the defense before trial that Gardner arrived lucid and aware, not in shock.
On October 22, 1985, the jury convicted Gardner of first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, aggravated kidnapping, escape and possession of a dangerous weapon by an inmate. At the penalty phase the defense called Dr. Heinbecker, who had been brought in two days before and had about a day to review records. On October 25, 1985, the same jury voted for death. Utah law then let a condemned prisoner choose between lethal injection and the firing squad.
Gardner spent nearly 25 years in a six-by-twelve-foot cell in the Uinta 1 maximum-security unit, the Deseret News reported. He sold artwork and crafts he made in prison, including hand-made baby booties and handkerchiefs, and told the parole board he had raised about $1,300 that way for a youth program he hoped to start.
His prison record was long. A parole board member noted in 2010 that he had instigated a riot, stabbed another prisoner and made several escape attempts. The Salt Lake Tribune reported a standoff in a prison visiting room in which he broke a glass partition and barricaded the door. On September 25, 1994, he stabbed another inmate, who survived. Prosecutors charged him under a Utah statute that made aggravated assault by a prisoner serving a first-degree felony sentence a capital crime. In 1997 the Utah Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for an assault that did not kill violated the Eighth Amendment.
The Utah Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and death sentence on January 31, 1989, rejecting 15 claims, among them venue, courtroom security, the use of the prior homicide and the admission of Jorgensen's testimony. The U.S. Supreme Court declined review in 1990. An execution by lethal injection scheduled for August 24, 1990, was set aside while new appeals went forward, the Tribune timeline records.
In state post-conviction proceedings, a district judge ruled on July 26, 1991, that Gardner's lawyers had been ineffective at sentencing, because the defense psychiatrist had too little time, and on appeal, and ordered a new penalty hearing. The Utah Supreme Court reversed on November 10, 1994, finding no prejudice, and the U.S. Supreme Court again declined review. During those proceedings the defense learned that Robert Macri had been hypnotized before trial to help him recall a detail; the court held the claim could have been raised earlier. Another execution date was stayed on March 8, 1996.
The federal habeas case, filed in Utah's federal district court, ran from the mid-1990s to 2009, with a side trip back to the state courts over a faulty jury instruction on the meaning of "knowingly." A federal magistrate judge recommended denying relief in 2003, and the district court agreed. On June 19, 2009, a three-judge panel of the Tenth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Michael McConnell, affirmed. The court accepted that the trial lawyers had been deficient in preparing mental health evidence for sentencing, but held that the Utah Supreme Court had not been unreasonable in finding no prejudice: Dr. Heinbecker had already told the jury the core of Gardner's history, and more detail might have cut both ways by making him seem more dangerous. It agreed that the "knowingly" instruction was wrong but found the error harmless. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case on March 8, 2010.
On April 23, 2010, Third District Judge Robin Reese signed a death warrant setting the execution for June 18. Asked how he wished to die, Gardner told her, "I would like the firing squad, please." The attorney general's office later said it could have argued that he had no right to switch back to the firing squad but chose not to contest it. His lawyers then filed a new round of challenges, arguing among other things that the state had refused to pay for the experts and investigators who could have developed mitigating evidence. The Utah Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the warrant on June 4, 2010, holding that a sentence can be appealed but an order carrying it out cannot, and ruled against him on his other appeal in a decision issued on June 14.
Utah's Board of Pardons and Parole rarely held commutation hearings in capital cases. According to records kept by a Weber State University professor and cited by the AP, only 14 men had ever had death sentences commuted in Utah, the last in 1962. The board agreed on May 19, 2010, to hear Gardner's case, and the five members reviewed more than 1,000 pages of records before a two-day hearing at the prison on June 10 and 11. A federal judge had refused, the day before, to postpone it over Gardner's claim that the board's lawyers worked for the same attorney general's office that was seeking his execution.
Gardner's lawyer, Andrew Parnes, who had represented him for about 12 years, told the board his client was a changed man. He presented affidavits from jurors in the 1985 trial; according to the Tribune, three said they would have chosen life without parole had it been available, and a fourth said he would have seriously considered it. The state objected to the affidavits, and the board accepted them with caution. Craig Haney, a University of California psychologist who studies violent offenders, testified that abused and neglected children often grow into impulsive and violent adults, and that Gardner was almost a perfect model of that pattern.
Gardner testified for about two hours on June 10. He said he was remorseful, that there had been no reason to kill Otterstrom or Burdell, and that his change had begun around 1999, when he first talked at length with psychologists working on his federal appeal. "It wasn't a big religious experience, it was just time to grow up," he said. He described a plan he and his brother had for a 160-acre organic farm and residential program for troubled youth in Box Elder County, and his lawyer read a letter Gardner had written to Oprah Winfrey in 2008 asking for help with it. He said he counseled younger inmates, including a 16-year-old. He wept as he told the board that his attempts to apologize to the Otterstrom and Kirk families had been unsuccessful. "I've been on the other side of the gun," he said. "I know."
Burdell's fiancee, Donna Nu, testified in tears that Burdell would not have wanted Gardner executed and asked the board to honor his wishes. Burdell's friend Ron Temu said Burdell would never have taken another person's life. His father, then 86, had signed a sworn statement in April saying he did not believe his son would have wanted Gardner executed, that he did not believe the killing was premeditated because Gardner had just been shot, and that Gardner was not the same person he had been in 1985.
The other families asked for the sentence to stand. Craig Watson, Otterstrom's cousin, read the family's statement asking that Gardner's sentence be carried out on June 18. Jason Otterstrom told the board the story had to be allowed to slip into history because the families needed peace. Kirk's daughter Tami Stewart said Gardner had never shown compassion for his victims and asked why he deserved any. In a written statement, the Otterstrom family said Gardner had entered their family "like a deadly disease."
For the state, Assistant Attorney General Thomas Brunker called Gardner a cold-hearted killer who had earned his sentence through "an unflagging history of violent crime." He argued that Burdell's murder made Gardner eligible for death and that the killing of Otterstrom and the shooting of Kirk justified it. He questioned whether five years of good behavior reflected change or self-preservation. Board member Jesse Gallegos said it was hard to know whether Gardner was sincere.
On June 14, 2010, the board's chairman, Curt Garner, announced a unanimous decision against commutation. The statement noted that Gardner made no claim of innocence and admitted his guilt, and concluded, after weighing his criminal history, life history and all the evidence, that the jury's death sentence was not inappropriate. Members of the victims' families held hands and quietly celebrated as it was read. Gardner's lawyers filed a federal civil rights suit the same day challenging the fairness of the process.
The Tenth Circuit denied a stay on June 17, finding the conflict-of-interest claim without merit. Governor Gary Herbert, who under the Utah Constitution cannot commute a sentence, twice refused to grant a temporary reprieve, writing that nothing in the materials had not already been considered by the board or the courts. Late on June 17 the U.S. Supreme Court denied his final petition and stay application; Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer would have granted the stay.
Gardner ate his last meal on Tuesday, June 15: steak, lobster tail, apple pie, vanilla ice cream and 7UP. On Wednesday night his family visited, and for the first time in about 25 years he was allowed to reach through the bars and touch them, his brother Randy said. He was then moved to an observation cell. A planned telephone interview with CNN's "Larry King Live" was canceled by the prison minutes before it was to begin, under the department's policy of not making him available to the media. On his last day, Department of Corrections briefings said, he slept, read mail and David Baldacci's novel "Divine Justice," watched the "Lord of the Rings" films, and met with his lawyers and with a bishop of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints whom he had known for years. Officers described his mood as relaxed.
Shortly before midnight Gardner was walked about 90 feet to the execution chamber at Utah State Prison in Draper. He went willingly and cooperated with staff, the corrections director, Tom Patterson, said. He was strapped into a black metal chair, with sandbags stacked around it to stop the bullets, and a small white target was fixed over his heart. At midnight Attorney General Mark Shurtleff told prison officials by telephone that there was no legal bar to proceeding.
Warden Steve Turley asked Gardner whether he had any last words and told him he had two minutes. Gardner answered, "I do not, no." A black hood was placed over his head and the warden left the room. Five certified police officers who had volunteered and whose names were kept secret stood behind a brick wall with a gunport, about 25 feet away, with matched .30-caliber Winchester rifles; one rifle held a blank, so no one would know who fired the fatal shot. They counted down from five and fired on two. The shots came at about 12:15 a.m. A medical examiner pronounced him dead two minutes later. The department first announced the time of death as 12:20 a.m. and corrected it to 12:17 a.m. later that morning.
Nine journalists witnessed the execution. Their reactions differed: the AP's Jennifer Dobner described it as fast and almost clinical, while a KUTV reporter called it violent. Among the witnesses for the victims' families were VelDean Kirk, Craig Watson and Kirk's granddaughter. At Gardner's request, none of his own family attended. Gardner was the seventh person executed in Utah since 1976 and the third, after Gary Gilmore in 1977 and John Albert Taylor in 1996, to die by firing squad anywhere in the United States in that period.
At the state capitol, Shurtleff told reporters that Gardner would never kill or assault anyone again and that he hoped Gardner would find more mercy than he had shown his victims. "Relief, I guess, is what I felt," VelDean Kirk said. Craig Watson described a calm sense that the family would no longer have to relive the case every time it returned to the news. Kirk's daughter Barb Webb told the Tribune she was relieved it was over.
Burdell's niece, Donna Taylor, and her husband had sought out Gardner's family during the final week to offer support. She told the Deseret News that her family had felt shut out when it tried to say that Burdell would not have wanted Gardner to die for him, and that she believed the two men would meet without bitterness.
Outside the prison about two dozen of Gardner's relatives held a vigil, some wearing T-shirts printed with his prisoner number. They sang along to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" and released 24 balloons when word came that he was dead. His daughter, Brandie, wept. His brother Randy said Gardner had been in chains his whole life and was now free, and that he did not agree with the death penalty. A longtime friend, Debbie, said Gardner believed in reincarnation and hoped to get it right next time.
Reports differ on what happened to his body. KSL reported that day that, at his request, he was cremated and his remains given to his family. The same station's report from the vigil quoted relatives as saying there would be no funeral because he had given his body to the state to take care of, and that the family planned a small private memorial.
Utah's attachment to the firing squad is old: by the counts of Weber State criminologist L. Kay Gillespie, 40 of the 50 people the state executed between 1852 and 2010 died that way. In 2004 the Legislature made lethal injection the only method for new death sentences, largely because of the worldwide attention each firing-squad execution brought; the sponsor, Republican Rep. Sheryl Allen, said the method drew attention away from victims. Prisoners already sentenced kept their earlier choice, in part, she said, to avoid opening a new avenue of appeal.
Gardner's case revived the argument. Bishop John C. Wester of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City called the method barbaric. Fordham law professor Deborah Denno argued that lethal injection carried greater risk of a cruel death and that firing-squad executions in Utah had been carried out without problems. A former member of Taylor's 1996 firing squad told CNN the process was quick and professional. Parnes said Gardner chose the method simply because he preferred it, not to embarrass the state or draw attention. A KSL reporter who covered the case recalled in 2015 that when he opted for the firing squad Gardner said he had lived and killed by the gun and would die by the gun.
The question returned in 2015, when shortages of lethal injection drugs left Utah without a usable supply. On March 23, 2015, Governor Herbert signed House Bill 11, which made the firing squad the state's backup method if lethal injection drugs were not available, although he had publicly called it an unpleasant method. NPR reported that Utah was then the only state authorizing execution by firing squad. Gardner's remained the last firing-squad execution in the United States until March 7, 2025, when South Carolina executed Brad Sigmon by that method.
The length of Gardner's case also fed a separate debate. Shurtleff, who had pushed to shorten death penalty appeals, said that many people were telling him 25 years was too long.
The date of the Otterstrom killing. The Salt Lake Tribune's 2010 timeline gives October 9, 1984; the Tribune's report on the execution says October 24, 1984. The court opinions give no date.
Who handed Gardner the gun. Carma Hainsworth went to prison for aiding the escape, and witnesses identified her at the courthouse, but she always denied passing the gun and said her sister had done it. The guard who shot Gardner backed her account, and Gardner told the parole board in 2010 that the woman who gave him the gun was the one who had testified against him in the Cheers case, which matches McCoy. No court has decided the point, and no charge against McCoy over the escape was ever reported. One 2010 Deseret News feature described the woman simply as Gardner's girlfriend.
Where Gardner was wounded. The Utah Supreme Court's 1989 opinion and the state's brief say he was shot in the shoulder; its 1994 opinion says the bullet went through his lung, and the Tenth Circuit said "apparently in the chest." Gardner argued on appeal that his lawyers wrongly let the jury think it was a shoulder wound, which, he said, understated his shock; the Utah Supreme Court called that claim frivolous.
Whether he meant to kill Burdell. The jury and every appellate court accepted that the killing was intentional, and the Tenth Circuit noted a witness's description of a "definite pause" before the shot. Burdell's father said in 2010 that he did not believe the killing was premeditated because Gardner had just been shot. That view does not change the legal outcome but is part of the record.
Nick Kirk's death. Kirk died of a heart attack in 1995, at 69, according to the Deseret News and the AP. His family believes the wound caused his decline; the Deseret News's Otterstrom article reported the family's view that he died "eight years after" the shooting from complications of the stomach wound, and another Deseret News report said "11 years later." Neither figure fits 1995 exactly. No court treated his death as a homicide, and it is not counted as one here.
The time of death. The Department of Corrections first gave 12:20 a.m. and then issued a corrected time of 12:17 a.m.; some early reports carry the first figure.
His remains. KSL reported both that he was cremated and his ashes given to his family and that relatives said he had left his body to the state. The sources do not resolve this.
His reasons for choosing the firing squad. His lawyer said it was simple preference; a KSL reporter recalled him linking it to having lived by the gun. It is also unclear when he first chose the method: the Tribune says he was among the inmates who selected it before 2004, yet his 1990 execution date was set for lethal injection. Other explanations circulated in 2010, including claims tied to his religious upbringing, but none came from Gardner himself in any reliable account.
January 16, 1961: Ronnie Lee Gardner is born in Salt Lake City.
March 31, 1965: hospitalized with meningitis.
About 1972: placed in the Utah State Hospital at age 11, for about 18 months.
May 23, 1977: his daughter is born.
February 9, 1980: his son is born.
February 25, 1980: enters Utah State Prison after a robbery conviction.
April 19, 1981: escapes from the prison; April 30, 1981, shot in the neck and rearrested.
August 6, 1984: escapes from University Hospital in Salt Lake City after overpowering a guard.
October 1984 (October 9 or 24): shoots Melvyn Otterstrom during a robbery at the Cheers Tavern.
April 2, 1985: at the Metropolitan Hall of Justice, kills attorney Michael Burdell and wounds bailiff Nick Kirk in an escape attempt; surrenders outside.
By August 1985: pleads guilty to second-degree murder in the Otterstrom case.
October 22, 1985: convicted of first-degree murder and four other felonies.
October 25, 1985: jury returns a death sentence.
January 31, 1989: Utah Supreme Court affirms (State v. Gardner).
August 24, 1990: scheduled execution set aside pending appeals.
July 26, 1991: state judge finds ineffective counsel at sentencing.
September 25, 1994: stabs another inmate, who survives.
November 10, 1994: Utah Supreme Court reverses the 1991 ruling (Gardner v. Holden).
1995: Nick Kirk dies of a heart attack.
March 8, 1996: another execution date is stayed.
1997: Utah Supreme Court strikes down the death penalty for non-fatal assaults by prisoners.
2004: Utah makes lethal injection the method for new death sentences.
June 19, 2009: Tenth Circuit affirms denial of federal habeas relief (Gardner v. Galetka).
March 8, 2010: U.S. Supreme Court declines review.
April 23, 2010: Judge Robin Reese signs the death warrant; Gardner asks for the firing squad.
June 10 and 11, 2010: commutation hearing at the prison.
June 14, 2010: parole board unanimously denies commutation.
June 17, 2010: Tenth Circuit, U.S. Supreme Court and Governor Herbert decline to stop the execution.
June 18, 2010: executed by firing squad at Utah State Prison, Draper; pronounced dead at 12:17 a.m.
March 23, 2015: Utah restores the firing squad as a backup method.
March 7, 2025: South Carolina carries out the first U.S. firing-squad execution since Gardner's.