On the afternoon of September 2, 1990, correctional officers making routine rounds in the exercise yard of Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge came upon a grim scene. Near the softball backstop, they found the badly beaten body of an inmate, Gerald Pileggi. Two baseball bats lay near him. Though approximately 250 inmates were in the high-security yard at the time, a code of silence met initial inquiries.
Pileggi was alive but unconscious and bleeding profusely when medical personnel arrived; he died in a helicopter while being flown to a hospital in Missoula.
Gerald Bruce Pileggi, a male inmate of unknown age, was incarcerated at the state's maximum-security prison. An autopsy would later reveal the shocking extent of his injuries. He died from massive head trauma, including a blow that caved in part of his skull and another that collapsed his forehead, tore his brain, and ruptured an eyeball. The attack was the culmination of rising tensions within the prison, particularly in the kitchen where Pileggi worked. Court records indicated a group of inmates, including his eventual killers, resented the presence of convicted sex offenders like Pileggi and had started a movement to "take back the kitchen." In the month before his murder, Pileggi had been beaten in the kitchen's dish room by three inmates but refused to identify his attackers to prison staff.
The investigation into the brutal slaying eventually broke through the prison's wall of silence. Eyewitnesses came forward, identifying two fellow inmates as the assailants: Douglas "Doug" Duane Turner and William Jay Gollehon. Witnesses testified that Gollehon first argued with and struck Pileggi, and then Turner delivered a blow with a bat that made Pileggi "drop like a tree." As he lay defenseless on the ground, both men continued to strike him repeatedly with the bats. Blood-spattered pants were later found in Gollehon's cell.
The two men charged with the murder were already seasoned and violent criminals. Turner was serving a 100-year sentence for murdering three of his neighbors in Glendive in 1987, less than a month after his 16th birthday. Gollehon was serving a long sentence for the 1985 beating death of a woman in Billings. Prosecutors said the pair had harassed Pileggi because he was a sex offender and killed him after he reported their taunting to officials.
Turner and Gollehon were tried jointly for the murder of Gerald Pileggi. A jury found both men guilty of deliberate homicide by accountability, a charge that allowed them to be convicted without determining who struck the single fatal blow. In 1992, both were sentenced to death for the crime. The legal proceedings established that they had acted together in a common plan to kill Pileggi.
The violence from Turner and Gollehon did not end with Pileggi's murder. Less than a year later, on September 22, 1991, the pair were chief instigators in a deadly prison riot in the maximum-security unit. During the uprising, they participated in the murders of five other inmates, who were targeted for being informants. For these crimes, Turner and Gollehon received additional life sentences.
Douglas Duane Turner, a man responsible for a total of nine murders, would never face his scheduled execution. On July 8, 2003, at age 31, he was found hanging in his maximum-security cell, having committed suicide. William Jay Gollehon remained on death row for years, his sentence under appeal. He died of natural causes in 2016 while still incarcerated. The murder of Gerald Pileggi stands as a brutal chapter in the history of the Montana State Prison, perpetrated by two of the state's most infamous killers.
