Shortly after midnight, barring a last minute stay, a prisoner in Utah will be executed for a murder he committed nearly a quarter century ago.

And at his own request, it will be death by firing squad.

In 1985, a man is being escorted through a basement underneath a courthouse.

He's a convicted killer.

But waiting for him is a woman with a

pistol hidden under her clothes. And she would manage to get that pistol to this man. And with that,

he would end up killing someone, wounding others, and actually escaping as well. And this wasn't

the first time that he had escaped prison.

This is Red Rum, stories about the true victims of crime. I upload on Mondays, a video version,

and on Thursdays a podcast exclusive. So make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an episode.

So our case today is it's sent us around a man called Ronnie Lee Gardner.

He's 23 years old and by this point he's already got an incredibly long and complex criminal record.

He dropped out of school in the fourth grade and from that point on, things were pretty challenging, shall we say. He started using drugs really,

really early on. He would fund that drug habit by stealing from anyone, family, friends.

He even started stealing and robbing from establishments like shops and companies and

anywhere he could break into, really. and the drugs that he was using were

cocaine and heroin mainly now when he got caught which he did a number of times he was taken to

prison but prison really wasn't much of a deterrent in fact he, those prison stays, as a kind of training ground.

He would watch the guards shift patterns. He would also have a look at how high the walls were,

trying to plot and plan as to how he might escape, especially if he was ever in there for a longer

period of time. He'd already made one failed prison

escape attempt a little while earlier. He'd actually scaled up to the top of the walls in this Utah

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