Theresa Gilligan spent the last moments of her life comforting her children. She didn't beg for her life. She didn't cry out. In the moments before two bullets entered the back of her head, she tried to soothe her frightened children.
Soon, they would be dead, as would her husband. So says the man sentenced to be executed for killing them.
But don't take this as his confession. Twenty-five years after he was arrested and charged with murdering the Gilligan family, Donald Ray Wallace Jr. has never publicly admitted he committed the crime. He did confess privately, in letters he sent to Theresa Gilligan's sister 12 years ago. But he later took it back, saying he'd made up the story to quell her grief. Now he contends it doesn't really matter whether he's guilty or innocent. Either way, he says, he knows he's going to die for the crime. He just doesn't think he should die bearing the title, "the designated crown prince of evil." In more than 25 letters sent to the Evansville Courier & Press, Wallace argues that much of what we know about him or the crime has been fabricated, embellished or distorted.
Perhaps most offensive, he writes, is the belief that he was a calculating, cold-blooded killer. It's an image largely woven from testimony at his trial in 1982; in particular the testimony of a girlfriend who swore Wallace confessed to killing Theresa and Patrick Gilligan, and then shooting their 5-year-old daughter, Lisa, and 4-year-old son, Gregory. The reason he gave, she testified, was that he didn't want the children to grow up as orphans, living with the trauma of having seen their parents killed.
Those and many other words attributed to him, Wallace writes, never came from his mouth. "(A)s Yogi Berra said, 'I never said everything I said. '"
Still, the story of his confession persists, he believes, to make it easier to execute him. If the story were to be true, he writes, it would be "powerful evidence of a criminally defective mind, of one who is devoid utterly of any normal human reason."
It's seemed futile to combat it, he writes, because no one would believe him. "So I have borne it in silence, knowing that I've forever lost the privilege of any benefit of doubt," he writes. "There is, however, more to this case than meets the eye. But I can't even talk about that. So I sit here like a clown in the dunking booth and have to accept, as part of my job, almost, periodic immersions in the public waters of hatred and condemnation." Wallace, however, has told many versions of what happened on the night of Jan. 14, 1980.…
At his trial, Wallace refused to take the witness stand. But his lawyer, William Smock of Terre Haute, Ind., contended Wallace wasn't the killer. Smock's theory was that Wallace and an accomplice set out that night to burglarize homes on Aspen Drive. Wallace broke into one home while the accomplice broke into the Gilligan home. The defense claimed it was the accomplice who shot and killed the family. He didn't know the Gilligans had been shot until he walked into their home.
When Wallace was arrested, he had blood on his clothing that matched the Gilligans. He also had jewelry and other items stolen from the Gilligan home. Later, at his trial, witnesses, including a girlfriend, testified he'd confessed to them on the night of the killings. Then he posed for pictures with guns and jewelry stolen from the Gilligan home and went out to a bar. ….Wallace went into the Gilligan home "because he believed that if his partner was successful in finding something of unusual value he would probably hide and conceal it from him (Mr. Wallace), thereby cheating him out of something rewarding..." According to another report: "Mr. Wallace alleged that the sounds of (Patrick Gilligan's) moaning and attempted conversation quickly got to him and he proceeded to pick up a set of barbells, using them to kill Patrick Gilligan.
In 1992, Wallace gave another version in a series of letters he wrote to Theresa Gilligan's sister, Diana Harrington. . In his letters to the Evansville Courier & Press, Wallace acknowledges that he wrote Harrington against the advice of his attorneys. He'd decided he had nothing to lose. "I had already accepted that I was going to be executed or imprisoned forever," he writes. "It was clear that she was carrying a load of pain and anger that overshadowed her life. And I played a major role in causing that pain." But nowhere in his letters to the Courier & Press does he admit that he played the only role in causing her pain. He never admits that he was the one who shot the Gilligans…>end
Diana Harrington's book...SURVIVING THE DEATH PENALTY... is the true story of one of the most heinous crimes committed in Indiana...the Patrick Gilligan Family... The crime, the criminal Donald Ray Wallace Jr., the victims and the unrest this death penalty wait held for 25 years. It is a parallel story of both the criminal, the victims and their lives. This story is not only about a cold blooded crime, but also about the journey one travels as a victim. This is the story from the initial crime to its conclusion, with twists & turns that most average people seldom understand or endure. This book tells of the Death Penalty wait for both the criminal and the victims and how their lives are forever intertwined. Stories such as this one are few and far between. Crimes happen in the millions but the victims story, along with the criminal's story, are often not told in their entirety.
Serial killer Ted Bundy's murders recounted from the perspective of thirty years after his execution in a Florida prison.
Brutal, compelling, with new updated facts about the case, his victims and the compulsions that drove Ted Bundy to mass murder.
Prime-Time Crime Time (600 pages) is a collection of 35 fictional crime/detective stories and the work is author Jay Dubya's 43rd published hardcover/paperback book.
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