Gary McGivern

Gerald "Gary" McGivern (October 26, 1944 – November 19, 2001) was a felon found guilty in 1967 of the armed robbery of a gas station in Pelham Manor, New York, United States, during which two police officers were wounded.

McGivern was tried with his partner in the robbery, Charles Culhane, and was sentenced to ten to twenty years in state prison.

Culhane was his codefendant in a robbery of a gas station in Pelham, New York, in December 1966.

Instead of accepting a plea bargain of five years in the case, McGivern chose to go to trial.

The Westchester County court sentenced him to ten to twenty years in state prison.

Although he claimed in the legal papers to have personal knowledge of Culhane's case, Bowerman had never been arrested in Westchester County and had no association with the 1967 robbery case.

An assistant for the Westchester County DA's office, B. Anthony Morosco, formally opposed Bowerman attending the hearing.

The five men left Auburn Prison on the morning of September 13 in a 1967 blue Chevrolet owned by Deputy Fitzgerald.

It was not equipped with a security screen between the front and back seats.

All five men dressed in plainclothes.

The vehicle headed south on the New York State Thruway.

On three occasions before lunch, Robert Bowerman requested that the deputies stop while he urinated along the side of the road.

The deputies allowed Bowerman to leave the vehicle.

When the Chevrolet passed through Ulster County on the Thruway in the early afternoon, Robert Bowerman asked the deputies to stop the vehicle again.

The sequence of what happened next became the source of considerable dispute over the next three decades in three trials, numerous appeals, the polygraph tests McGivern passed, news coverage and controversy surrounding the grant of executive clemency.

Deputy Sheriff William Fitzgerald and the prisoner Robert Bowerman were shot to death inside the car at Milepost 67.4.

Culhane and McGivern maintained it was a solo escape attempt by Bowerman who was responsible for killing Deputy Fitzgerald.

The surviving deputy Joseph Singer claimed McGivern shot Fitzgerald and that the escape attempt involved all three prisoners.

Culhane and McGivern were indicted for felony murder, with attempted escape in the second degree as the underlying felony.

On September 13, 1968, McGivern, Culhane and a third convict, Robert Bowerman, were being transported by two deputies, from Auburn State Prison to a court hearing in White Plains.

During a rest stop along the New York State Thruway, a deputy's gun was seized in an attempted escape.

During the struggle inside the police car, a deputy and Bowerman were shot to death.

McGivern and Culhane contended that Bowerman acted alone in the escape attempt, and that Bowerman killed the deputy.

Following one trial ending in a hung jury, a second trial in which they were sentenced to death, then a successful appeal of that death sentence, in a third trial they were found guilty of felony murder and sentenced to 25 years to life.

Sing Sing prison was McGivern's first destination and then upstate to Auburn Prison where he left for White Plains, New York, Westchester's county seat, on September 13, 1968, to appear as a witness in a court hearing for Culhane.

On September 13, 1968, McGivern, Culhane and a third prisoner Robert Bowerman left Auburn prison with two deputies for a court hearing ordered by Westchester County Judge John C. Marbach, a former district attorney and trial lawyer.

Marbach acted on Culhane's coram nobis application to determine the validity of Culhane's claim of improper sentencing in the Pelham Manor case.

He approved a hearing on the matter.

Westchester County Sheriff Daniel F. McMahon sent two of his deputies—Joseph Singer and William Fitzgerald—to Auburn to pick up the three prisoners and deliver them to court in White Plains.

McMahon was the former Public Safety Commissioner of Yonkers and a former chief of the criminal division of the office of the United States Attorney in New York.

He had been elected Westchester's county sheriff the previous January in 1968.

Robert Bowerman, a jailhouse lawyer at Auburn, prepared the coram nobis application for Culhane.

Bowerman had a history of escape attempts.

The Ulster County Legislature passed a resolution on June 3, 1971 (Resolution 129) "that the office of the Ulster County Attorney be empowered to conduct a detailed legal investigation of the facts surrounding this crime to determine if there is sufficient grounds for instituting a negligence action against Westchester County, the Westchester County Sheriff and the State of New York for its statutory obligation."

Ulster County's legislators expected to be reimbursed for the cost of prosecuting the case, a crime which occurred within Ulster's borders on the Thruway.

In a controversial New Year's Eve 1985 decision, New York Governor Mario Cuomo granted McGivern clemency, and he was paroled three years later.

McGivern was born in Manhattan, the son of Gertrude Burke and Thomas McGivern, who were both born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

He attended Catholic schools and served in the United States Navy.

He lived with his family in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx.

McGivern's first serious brush with the law was for marijuana possession in the Bronx.