While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (10 page)

I
N THE FALL OF
1977,
BILLY ENTERED SIXTH GRADE
and was at last tested for the learning disabilities that were evident five years earlier, when he first tried and failed to read. Only with respect to vocabulary, listening skills, and applied math was he above average for his grade level. His reading and other language skills were poor, as was his ability to concentrate effectively. While his vision wasn’t impaired, his oculomotor patterns—the pointing and focusing of his eyes—tested as inadequate, as did his visual space perception, which included the awareness of depth. Subsequent tests would reveal that Billy’s eyes didn’t work together as they should, but for the time being he was given the blanket diagnosis of dyslexia and shunted into remedial classes, which didn’t help as he was not in fact dyslexic.

“That must have been frustrating,” I comment when we talk about this. Billy looks at me and shakes his head slowly. He’s eating the second in a package of two Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, taking small, even bites and using the ruffled brown paper that held the candy to convey it to his mouth without getting his fingers sticky. When he finishes, he folds the brown paper neatly into the shiny orange wrapper and places it on the table next to the can of Mountain Dew he asked me to buy him. At the beginning of each interview I ask if I can get him something from the vending machines he’s not allowed to operate, and each time he requests either one or two packets of Reese’s cups with a Mountain Dew or Snapple. The fact that I pay for these small things he would otherwise have to purchase with a day’s worth of menial prison work makes them something to savor, but I don’t think this is what inspires his careful, polite handling of the candy, the way he opens each wrapper without tearing it. Nor does it seem to be one of the countless small rituals on which inmates spend their seemingly limitless supply of time and attention—or it isn’t only that. Like his speech, all of Billy’s movements are measured, so controlled as to appear almost leisurely.

“Not really,” he says, having taken sufficient time to consider the idea of his having been frustrated by remedial language assignments he couldn’t do. “See, I’d already given up. The teacher kept telling me I wasn’t trying when I was. I
was
trying. I just couldn’t do what she told me to. So I gave up. I mean, what was the point?” He raises his eyebrows and holds up his empty hands. The adult Billy, who slowly taught himself to compensate for his visual deficit and began, in prison, to read, seems to have made peace with his disastrous school career. Too, having accomplished academic feats that once seemed impossible, Billy takes evident pride in his belated success, forwarding me his college transcript from Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon, through which he took classes and earned an associate’s degree in 1993, while in prison.

“Three point two seven,” he reminds me more than once during my visit, referring to his B+ average.

But when he was in the sixth and seventh grades, Billy was clearly an unhappy child. “Nervous,” reads one school health record, “frequent headaches and stomachaches.” “Emotional disturbance, undue restlessness and shyness,” comments another. Not only did school fail to provide Billy the kind of positive reinforcement it gave Jody and later Becky, but his poor classroom performance and his tendency to get into trouble made his home life worse than it might have been had he been a source of pride. Always concerned first with what outsiders might think of her and her family, Linda focused on the public aspect of Billy’s failure and was determined to reform her son, an ongoing project to which she and Bill brought a lot of energy and little insight, administering whippings reflexively without ever seeming to consider that they weren’t accomplishing what was perhaps never more than the nominal goal of disciplining their son. Jody and Billy both describe parents who took sadistic pleasure in punishing their children, and whose viciousness was enabled by the fact that Linda gave instructions for Bill to carry out. With such a system in place, neither parent had to take full responsibility for what was excessive, often brutal retaliation for minor, even trumped up infractions. Linda was “only” saying that punishment was required; Bill was “only” doing what his wife said he had to do. Her religious rationales and his having been fathered by a battering alcoholic were the Gilleys’ particular recipe for child abuse.

Linda was brought up by churchgoers, her mother alert to manifestations of the Crazy Italian that needed to be prayed or punished away, but it was Linda’s frustration with her husband that intensified her commitment to rigid Baptist doctrine. Trapped in an unhappy marriage to a man who, she suspected, drank surreptitiously and cheated on her, Linda would be satisfied, I imagine, more by a punitive than a forgiving God. Fundamentalism excused her from the effort of working out her own answers to questions of right and wrong, and it reassured Linda that her long-suffering fidelity would be rewarded even as Bill’s sins earned him a far worse comeuppance than any she could give him. It was a seductive enough idea that she became an unusually intolerant and self-righteous young woman, religious in a way her parents had never been.

After trying out a few different churches before finding what Jody calls “the right brand of fire and brimstone,” the Gilleys joined Harvest Baptist Temple, whose membership was large enough that Linda could preserve her anonymity, as Jody says she preferred to do. While most churchgoers enjoy the social embrace of a congregation, Linda wanted only two things of Harvest Baptist: that the doctrine projected from its pulpit reward her martyrdom and that the church bolster the rigid control she wanted over her children’s behavior, especially by dampening the emergence of their sexuality. But Jody and Billy saw too much of their mother’s hypocrisy to join her in the faith she misrepresented. The idea that sex was a means of procreation not pleasure was one Linda could model as well as preach, but she didn’t exemplify Christian tolerance, let alone love.

With a larger house and three outbuildings at their disposal, the strained family had the means to stay out of one another’s way and, presumably, avoid a measure of conflict. Always what Billy calls “a hoarder,” Linda had her own detached garage in which to keep all the things she couldn’t part with.

“Like what?” I ask him.

“Anything. Didn’t matter what. Busted toys and old magazines and boxes of papers and who knows what else. She couldn’t throw anything away.”

Bill had the second garage for his toolshed, and he kept heavier equipment in the barn where, Billy tells me, he also hid his liquor. In contrast to Jody, Billy highlights his father’s drinking and misses few opportunities to bring it up, but Jody tells me Linda made sure Bill was usually abstinent—a “mean, mean-spirited, dry drunk who didn’t need alcohol to be horrid,” Jody calls him. The fact that Bill had an uncontrollable temper whether drunk or sober left him, and his family, without the means to excuse his violence as a result of impaired faculties. Still, both children remember the move to Ross Lane as the point at which Linda forbade Bill to drink in the house, with the result that he did stop in his family’s presence, perhaps misleading Jody as to the extent of her father’s addiction. On the night of the murders, when Jody at last found a chance to call 911, the dispatcher asked if her mother had been drinking that night, and Jody answered no, that her mother didn’t drink alcohol except maybe “she’ll have a drink once a year at New Year’s or something.”

“Okay,” the dispatcher said.

“My dad doesn’t drink, either,” Jody told the dispatcher, who hadn’t asked if he did.

“Your dad doesn’t drink?” the dispatcher asked.

“No.”

It may be, as Jody tells me, that she anticipated the dispatcher’s next question, but the fact that her assertion wasn’t elicited by a question suggests to me that it was the kind of protest that points up the very thing it denies. Fifteen years later, when she was thirty-one and preparing her affidavit, Jody said, without qualifying the statement, “I believe that my father was an alcoholic.”

A close reading of the 911 transcripts reveals a subsequent misunderstanding on Jody’s part that bears witness to the Gilleys’ home life. When the dispatcher asks her if Billy “has ever been violent before,” she answers, “Have they?” reflexively applying the concept of violence to her parents before her brother. Only when the dispatcher clarifies, “Has Billy?” does she answer the question she asked.

What we know, what we know privately but refuse to admit to others, what we know but can’t bear to contemplate, what we know in our hearts but not in our brains: all of these exist at once within us, whether we are children or adults. Eight years old when the Gilleys moved to Ross Lane, Jody was beginning to perceive more than she was able to accept and could identify much that was wrong with her family—the ongoing verbal and sometimes physical abuse between her parents, their violent treatment of her and Billy but not Becky, Linda’s hypocritical religiosity and her panicked response to sexuality—but it would be many years before she allowed herself to see an underlying catalyst for many of these problems: her father’s alcoholism.

Whether or not Bill drank surreptitiously in the barn, the structure’s relative privacy and its distance from the house made it an ideal place for him to beat his son. The house on Dyer Road was small, sometimes claustrophobic, but on Ross Lane Linda could make her decision that a punishment was required from inside the house while Bill carried it out remotely, allowing Linda to blind herself to the viciousness of what Bill could claim she demanded. This wasn’t an original means of enabling cruelty, of course. Few despots bear witness to the tortures by which they maintain control, and even though what Jody would later call “atrocities” were those of a single troubled family rather than a corrupt social order, it was a college course on the literature of the Holocaust that gave Jody the language she needed to speak about what her parents had done to her and her brother, abuse that went beyond corporal punishment and that she believes was meant to break their spirits and cripple them emotionally so that they would never be able to escape.

In contrast to the incidental cuffs and slaps across the face that both Linda and Bill applied reflexively whenever their children talked back or annoyed them in some way, a real whipping was, Jody says, “threatened, then announced, and only after a period of intensifying dread, administered.” But first came “hours and hours of lecturing,” marathon harangues during which Billy rarely spoke. Only once does Jody remember her brother breaking his silence, by putting his hands over his ears and emitting a long, awful, and unnerving squeal, like a trapped animal that had abruptly arrived at consciousness to find itself facing immediate slaughter, a noise that perhaps surprised Billy as much as it did the rest of the family. As Billy knew, nothing he could say would prevent or lessen what was to come; defending himself might even provoke an extra lick or two. In the barn, whippings evolved from what they had been inside the house—fifteen to thirty lashes with a leather belt on bared skin—to a more formal procedure, for which
flogging
seems the more accurate term.

“My father whipped me at least once a month,” Billy says in his affidavit. “I would get a whipping for not cleaning my room, or for doing my chores wrong, or getting in trouble at school, running in the house, or forgetting to feed the chickens. He almost always tied my wrists to a wall pole or a tractor tire to keep me from moving around.”

It hadn’t taken many beatings for Billy to figure out that a glancing blow did less damage than a direct one. Earlier punishments, back on Dyer Road, had taught him that if he flinched or writhed inadvertently, the belt didn’t make solid contact when it hit his moving legs or buttocks and hurt him less. With the benefit of this experience, Billy no longer remained in place, bent over his bed with his pants off. Instead, he tells me, he’d drop to the ground and “roll around the way you’re supposed to do if your clothes are on fire.” Predictably, this further enraged his father and made him that much more vindictive. When the whippings were removed to the barn, Bill welcomed this new privacy as an opportunity to tie his son, standing, to a stationary object, so that he could be sure his target stayed put.

“How did he do that?” I ask Billy, remembering a conversation with Jody in which she wondered aloud if her brother submitted to their father meekly, if he offered his wrists to be tied. But Billy misconstrues my meaning.

“With tree line,” he says. “You know, the nylon ropes we used for climbing.”

“No, I mean, did you…” I leave the question unfinished, feeling that to insist on an answer would be to participate in a past punishment by reawakening the humiliation of it. Besides, if Billy walked out to the barn where his father was waiting for him, why wouldn’t he stand still when tied? Jody’s question, I decide, isn’t literal so much as a mark of her inability to imagine offering her body up for abuse. Her essence remained unbroken and defended, hidden deep within herself, one of the coping mechanisms that would allow her to navigate the night of the murders.

Out in the barn, Bill settled on a garden hose rather than his belt, and as Billy was standing rather than bending over a bed, his back took most of the blows, which raised long welts that left bruises after the swelling diminished.

“Although the beatings were severe,” Jody says in her affidavit, “I noticed after a while that Billy endured them with stoicism.” But if stoicism is defined by silence and a lack of affect, what looked like stoicism might have been something else entirely: shock, dissociation, Billy’s attempt to protect his psyche as he couldn’t his flesh.

“I was never taken out to the barn and was almost never the exclusive recipient of a beating,” Jody says, “which for me usually began with my selecting a switch from the hedge, stripping it of the painful knobs, vacillating between the stingy, skinny branch versus the qualitatively different pain of the thicker ones.” If there wasn’t a good switch, a belt or hanger sufficed. But, Jody says, none of them hurt as much as did Linda’s “withholding love and affection, and demeaning my intellectual curiosity.”