While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (11 page)

“Do you think your desire to learn made your mother feel ashamed?” I ask her, imagining Jody’s bookishness could have provoked Linda to regret having dropped out of school.

“No. I think it was that my intelligence was a barrier between me and the rest of the family.”

“Because you had different interests and wouldn’t partake of the family culture of watching
Theatre of Blood,
and all the other horror movies, et cetera?”

“Yes, that. But more because she knew I understood that things were not as they were supposed to be—that the image she worked so hard to cultivate, of the ideal happy family, was a sham.”

Bill was physically violent; he could be crude; he had a bad temper. But both Jody and Billy see their mother’s part in the familial abuse as equally damaging, perhaps even more for its insidious quality. If they were a pair of criminals—or if they were a pair of criminals of a different kind—it might be said that Linda was the brains and Bill the brawn of their operation. It was Linda who spent more time with the children, Linda who kept track of their transgressions and sentenced them accordingly, who doled out restrictive punishments, like groundings, and who made the dreaded “wait until your father comes home” announcements of beatings to come. “Her [Linda’s] vicious dog,” Billy describes his father for me. Too, as it was Linda who controlled the household finances, it was she who could, if she wanted, “parcel out favors” like an extra hot shower, when the limit she set was two per week. Because she prepared dinner, Linda could force Jody and Billy to eat what they hated. Most unforgivable of all, it was Linda’s pride and narcissism, her refusal to let anyone see just how disastrous was her domestic situation, that prevented her from allowing her children to save themselves, and the rest of the family, from the annihilation that was, at that point, still preventable.

I
ASK THAD GUYER, THE LEGAL AID ATTORNEY WHO
became Jody’s guardian after she was orphaned, if he believes that Billy had what I characterize as “a romantic fixation” on his sister and intended to run away with Jody after killing their parents. The two of us are speaking in the bar of the Hilton hotel on Sixteenth and K streets in Washington, D.C. It’s a conversation Thad has agreed to have at Jody’s behest, divulging information he would withhold had she not given her permission. Even so, I could have skipped my trip to RadioShack for a compact tape recorder: he won’t speak if I turn it on, he tells me.

After I get used to the abrasive energy of his delivery, it’s my sense that Thad’s gruffness is diagnostic: he wants to know if he can intimidate me, if I have the mettle required to tell the story of what happened to Jody’s family. “Yes!” he exclaims in answer to my question about Billy wanting to run away with Jody. The tenor of his voice is that which accompanies a hand striking the top of a table. “Yes! He wanted to marry her. Billy Gilley wanted to fuck his sister. He viewed himself as her white knight, and their parents as the oppressors he was going to save them from.”

“What about Becky?” I ask.

“Becky was an impediment.”

“So he believed he could do this thing, that it was possible for the two of them to run away together?”

“Billy is paranoid. He is delusional.”

“How smart do you think he is? How intelligent?”

“Billy’s a person of maximum average intelligence,” Thad says, by which I think he means that he believes him to have no more than average intelligence, although the statement’s clipped, clinical quality makes it sound even less generous than that. “He has street smarts. He started out normal. There’s no organic brain problem.” Although he doesn’t say so, I suspect Thad believes my perceptions are clouded by liberal sentiment, a haze he intends to burn off with cynicism.

“You’re referring to the appeal he’s making, the statement from the doctor who claims he has—”
brain damage from being hit so often by his father,
I’m about to say when Thad cuts me off.

“He doesn’t.”

“I know the documents I’ve read—the ones collected by Billy’s attorney for his appeal—are crafted to convince people of his innocence, but all the same, they corroborate Jody’s experience of their parents as abusive.”

“Which documents?”

“Well, Henry Linebaugh’s affidavit, for one. Linebaugh was the tree surgeon who knew Bill and testified that he was pretty brutal to Billy.”

The affidavit describes summer days so hot, Linebaugh said, “you couldn’t even breathe up on the trees,” with Billy left literally out on a limb, without water, for hours. Linebaugh’s memory was that he found the teenage Billy alone and injured on a number of occasions, bleeding enough to require bandaging, with no first aid kit on the site, no other worker to administer it.

“If my dad actually saw whatever it was,” Billy says when I ask about his getting hurt, “he’d sorta sneer and ask, ‘You don’t need a Band-Aid, do you?’ in this real sarcastic way.” Billy leans forward over the table between us to show me a scar on his wrist. “It’s from a chain saw,” he explains, and he tells me he got it when working alongside an untrained hire who cut a branch improperly so that it broke and hit the still-running saw, which in turn hit Billy’s wrist. “It was bleeding enough to, you know, spurt a little, and the guy, he says I should maybe go to the hospital for stitches, but my dad takes a look, and, you know, it’s the same thing, ‘You don’t
need
to go to the hospital, do you?’ So I say no.” Billy shrugs. “I took a break, kept the hand up over my head for ten minutes, and tied a rag around my wrist. Then it was back to work.”

Hot weather was bad enough; winter posed worse dangers. “A bully,” to use Linebaugh’s word, Bill forced his son to climb high into the “dense, cold, freezing fog,” on limbs that Billy says “were iced over, so I couldn’t get even one cleat into it, couldn’t get any purchase at all.” One very cold day, Linebaugh found Billy stuck “forty feet up in a tree without any protective equipment…not even a hard hat…his rope snagged fifteen feet below him, in what was an egregious violation of OSHA
^*7
guidelines.” Basic safety regulations insist that whenever one worker is high in a tree, another remain on the ground below, managing the climber’s lines so they don’t snag and trap him in the tree. Because tree workers often have to wriggle through tight places, Billy explains, they can’t carry the bulky coils of rope they need, but must pull it up after them. Still, the rope can snag, requiring a ground man to help free it. Linebaugh said that the sixteen-year-old Billy “was terrified in the tree with his knees knocking in the freezing fog where his hands were blue.” He freed the rope and allowed Billy to descend. The rope was badly worn, “exhibiting signs of being cut by chainsaws.”

Linebaugh asked Billy where his father was, but Billy, he said, “was so cold that he couldn’t talk because his teeth were chattering so fast.” When he warmed up enough to say something, he told Linebaugh his dad had been gone for “two or three hours.”

“Where was he?” I ask Billy.

“I dunno. Sometimes he’d of been inside, having a cup of coffee, gabbing with the client. Or if he was hungover he might of been parked somewhere, sleeping in the cab of his truck.”

“Bill seemed to resent and despise his son,” Linebaugh said. “Bill constantly put down his son as slow-witted and stupid. I remember when Bill would call to Billy and Billy didn’t respond [because he hadn’t heard his father over the noise of the chipper], Bill would punch his son in the head and yell ‘Hey Stupid!’ to get his attention. The force in [
sic
] which Bill hit Billy seemed hard enough to knock him unconscious, but Billy acted like it was just a normal part of his job. It appeared to me that in his father’s mind it was.

“I kept expecting to hear one day that Billy got killed while working for his father,” Linebaugh concluded his affidavit. “When I heard that Billy had killed his father, it didn’t surprise me at all. I remember thinking it was self-defense.”

Thad shrugs off the idea that Billy may have suffered brain damage at the hands of his father. His response to Billy’s appeal aligns with Jody’s; both believe Billy has created what Jody calls “a mythic scenario that fits the typical parricide case.”

“Predisposition to abuse is cyclical,” Thad says dismissively.

“Meaning that—”

“Meaning that it cycles through generations.”

“That fathers who were beaten tend to beat their kids?”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t believe Billy suffered from anything akin to battered wife syndrome, that he perceived himself to be in a perpetual state of—”
danger
? I’m about to ask before he cuts me off.

“Absolutely not. Those murders were plotted, announced, and executed.” Thad voices what he understands to have been implicit in Billy’s comments and actions on the afternoon of the murder: “I’m going to kill them. Here’s how I’m going to kill them. I’m going to do it tonight.”

“And Jody didn’t respond because she didn’t take him seriously, she’d heard it before. And he wasn’t that specif—”

“Not just that, he’s a sociopath. Billy never freaked out over what he’d done. He was absolutely cold-blooded. Nothing like his sister. Jody was immediately recognizable as a…a diamond in the rough. These families do that, throw off a diamond.”
These families.
The words are patronizing. They make Thad sound like an elitist, but perhaps his is the perspective that comes from having worked for so many years with people who live on the edges of society, impoverished and undereducated. Listening to him speak about Jody, it’s easy to picture him as the Pygmalion Jody suggests he was in “Death Faces,” Jody in the role of Galatea.

Galatea, I remember, was a statue, Pygmalion the king of Cyprus who carved her from ivory and then, seeing her perfection, fell in love. In answer to his prayers, Aphrodite brought Galatea to life. When I come to the end of my first reading of “Death Faces,” I look up the tale in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
struck by the fact that the story Jody chose to illustrate her second life, the one that began after the murders, confirms what I imagined to have been their effect. I couldn’t picture her as living, animate. I turned her into a statue; I sat her next to Billy in a car that wouldn’t move. In telling the story of her life, Jody also characterized herself as a girl who had been frozen—rendered lifeless—by what she had witnessed. And of course Galatea is a very particular statue, one that is reborn as flesh and blood, imbued with spirit.

“Jody’s quality is based in literacy,” Thad says. “She is a product of reading. Of her imagination. Billy was illiterate. Into head-banging, heavy metal, nihilistic rock—”

This time I interrupt. “But he had learning disabilities. He couldn’t help being illiterate.”

Thad leans forward, speaking emphatically, bearing down on me. “Billy Gilley was
informed
by nihilistic, destructive music. Jody may have listened to it, but she was
entertained
by it. And she had many other sources of information. The prevailing reality for Jody was reading. Her bedroom, it was a separate world from the rest of that house, which was filled up with comic books. She had books everywhere in that room. It was overwhelming to see, actually.”

“What music did Billy listen to?” I ask Jody, and I tell her about Thad’s judgment of its impact on her brother.

“AC/DC and the like. But he also liked the Cars and Blondie,” she adds, mentioning two bands I, too, liked as a teenager, saying she’s “loath to pin any causality” on her brother’s taste in music.

“Acid rock, yeah, some heavy metal, AC/DC,” Billy says, “but I listened indiscriminately to rock, I listened to all of it.”

I tell Thad, whose expression is one of manufactured patience, a message to me that he’s not so much listening as temporarily indulging my misperception, that Billy is no longer the person he used to be, that he’s taught himself to read in prison, earned his GED, and associate’s degree. I tell him Billy draws a lot, as well, and sends me the illustrated stories he writes.

“You know the first piece of Billy’s art I saw?” Thad says. “A heart with a knife in it, dripping blood.”

“The letter from jail?” I ask.

He nods. “Nice, huh?” he says.

I have a photocopy of the drawing Thad recalls. It’s at the top of a letter Billy sent to Jody from jail, five weeks after the murders, and it isn’t a heart but something more ominous, more personal. Through the loop of the cursive uppercase
J
of his sister’s name, a loop shaped like the left half of a valentine heart, a short dagger is drawn to appear as if plunged into the initial. Below her name, a small puddle has accumulated from what drips from the hole stabbed in the
J,
as if it were blood from a pierced organ. Thad remembers it as a heart because that’s the impression the drawing leaves.

“Yeah,” Billy says when I ask him about the drawing, “I was angry. I’d been there, alone in jail, for what, a hundred and fifty days?” (The letter’s June 1 postmark indicates it had actually been thirty-five days since his arrest.) “I was angry with her for betraying me. For telling them all of it was me, was all my idea.”

S
HE WAS AFRAID—SO AFRAID SHE COULDN’T MOVE
—and she did nothing. She tells me she remembers knowing what she knew, and telling herself it was happening in a book. How many books had she read in which terrible things happened, the situation appeared hopeless, the heroine doomed, when somehow, against all odds, she was saved? Now, Jody told herself, she was a character in a book, she was the girl for whom things looked bad—very bad—but turned out all right. In the end, they always did turn out.

Trolling through flea markets, Linda would buy the occasional dollar box of used toys or books for her children, and when Jody, twelve or thirteen, found a collection of battered Harlequin romances, Linda bought them for her, inadvertently providing passport into a realm in which Jody would spend much of her adolescence.

“Had she known what was in them”—the pre-or extramarital touching and kissing of which her mother disapproved—“she’d never have allowed me to read them,” Jody tells me, smiling, the idea of having gotten away with even so small, so innocent, an infraction still giving her pleasure. But Linda didn’t read much aside from the comic books she collected, and Jody did—she read whatever she could get her hands on.

How did she escape?
Jody asked herself.
Did the heroine jump out the window?
She tells me she tried to figure out if she could jump out of her window and not hurt herself, not break a leg or sprain an ankle. If she could jump from the second floor and run across the field, across the field to Kathy’s, where there was a telephone, a telephone and a door that locked, locked him, Billy, out, then—

But she didn’t—couldn’t—move. She was transfixed, able to think but stuck there, inside her head, asking herself what to do. What would a character in a book do when she suspected her brother had killed her parents and her sister? When she thought that was what had happened, even though it couldn’t be true. Because that kind of screaming was—It wasn’t—Jody couldn’t think of anything that could make Becky scream like that, except—

“What did he say exactly?” Detective Davis asked her. His tape recorder was running. Before he began the interview he said what time it was, and what day, and he said his name, Richard Davis, and hers, Jody Gilley, and after he said her name he spelled it out for the machine. G-I-L-L-E-Y.

What had Billy said when the two of them were talking alone in her room?

“He said something about how unfair they were, and how he’d like to get even,” Jody told him. “When I, when I told him that they were, had been, more lenient with him. And he got real upset and started yelling and saying how he wanted revenge.”

“Was it ‘bump them off’? Was it ‘pound them with the bat’? Which was the phrase he used?”

“I can’t remember. It’s just, I never really paid attention.”

“What other statements had he made? Aggressive statements like this toward your parents?”

“Well. He’s talked about it. About different, different ways of doing it…. But I never thought—I never thought he was really serious. I thought he was just, you know, ha ha.”

“Just idle talk?”

“Yeah. I mean he wasn’t acting, you know, like—”

Tie rocks to their feet and throw them into a river. Put ground-up glass in their food. Take the brake pads off their father’s truck’s wheels. Throw a hair dryer into her bath. Bash their heads in.
It was pretending, or it was joking, ugly but not dangerous, because who could be crazy enough to take it seriously? They were just letting off steam, getting back at them—trying to—that’s what she thought they were doing. Imagining what it would be like: freedom, the cessation of taunts and blows and meaningless, undeserved cruelties. Of being slapped across the face in front of friends, or grounded for no reason. Of being locked out of her own room so she couldn’t run upstairs, turn her radio on, and escape into a book.
Bash their heads in.

The aluminum baseball bat. He’d been swinging it around in the yard that afternoon. She’d watched him hitting the box with his bat. On impact, the box skidded from the scrubby grass onto the bare dirt of the driveway. She hadn’t thought anything of it. She’d gone back to the dishes.

A clunking, a pounding,
she said in court, when the DA asked her.
Thudding:
that was the word Jody used ten years after the fact, in “Death Faces,” struggling to write about what happened that night, to articulate and thereby possess, control, manage even a little bit of what couldn’t be managed—process it, in the jargon of therapy.
Clonking
was in the transcript of the police interview. She thought there had been two distinct sets of them, she told the detective, two sets of noises. Two immediately after Becky screamed, two thuds to stop the screaming, and then another four or five, but those had sounded farther away.

“It’s important that you remember exactly,” Detective Davis said of the pounding noises. “Did Becky continue to scream?”

“She only screamed for a little while.” Just a few screams, three perhaps, then they stopped; there was a silence before the pounding continued.

Jody couldn’t decide how much danger she was in. But it seemed likely that if Billy killed Becky as well as their mother and father, he’d kill her, too. She couldn’t move. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. She knew that if the character in the book was alive, it was because she had gotten out of bed, and Jody hadn’t gotten out of bed, she was just sitting and staring, listening, and a heroine would be doing something. Before her brother came back upstairs, a heroine would have escaped. Out the window—because there were only two ways out of her room, down the stairs that Becky went down, or out the window. So it had to be the window. And it had to be before Billy came back upstairs, because if he saw her going out the window, he would chase her. He was wiry and strong and he wouldn’t break his leg. He’d hit the ground running and catch her.

And then there were the guns, her father’s three guns. He could be loading one. A pistol, or the rifle. They were down there, in the bedroom closet. Everyone in the family knew where they were. Except maybe Becky. But Billy knew; Jody was sure he’d know where to look. With a gun, he wouldn’t even have to jump. He could shoot her from the window.

Which was why it was important for her to get up, get dressed, and go. Jump. Run.

Except that if she moved, it might make Billy angry, and then she wouldn’t be able to talk him out of killing her,
bashing her head in.
Billy hit Becky because Becky didn’t do what he told her to. But Jody wasn’t doing anything, anything that might make him angry. There was something she hadn’t done, though. She hadn’t kept Becky upstairs. Would he kill her for not keeping Becky upstairs?

“When Billy reappeared with the blood all over his chest,” the DA said in the courtroom, “did he say anything to you?”

“He said that he was sorry for killing Becky, and he kept asking me if I thought he was crazy, and he kept trying to impress me with the fact that he wasn’t crazy, and he says, ‘We’re free now,’ and he said it was like
Friday the 13th,
to see the killer’s view of what he was doing, that that was what it was like and that it was more messy than he thought it would be.”

“He was shaking,” she told Detective Davis, “and you could tell he was really not well and he’s…he’s talking ‘oh we’re free now’ and all this stuff and I was just in total shock. I didn’t know what to do…he was breathing hard, kinda jagged more than hard.”

Billy had come upstairs empty-handed, and he was wearing nothing but a pair of tan boxer shorts, and there was blood spattered over his bare chest and arms.

“The first thing he said was about Becky,” Jody tells me, “that he was sorry he killed her and that we were free. And over and over he said he wasn’t crazy.”

“I just acted like, you know, it was everyday, so what. It was nothin’ out of the ordinary,” she told Davis.

Because, Jody tells me, she knew she had to agree with him. Not make him mad. If she didn’t make him mad, she might have a minute, a minute to think, to plan, because Billy was pacing around and he was breathing funny—panting—but he wasn’t doing anything to her, and he didn’t have anything to hurt her with except for his hands, which were bloody. “Do you think I’m crazy?” Jody tells me her brother kept asking her. “Because I’m not.”

“No,” she reassured him. “I don’t think you’re crazy.”

She was still sitting up in bed, wearing a sweatshirt and underpants, the blankets over her legs. They should go, Billy said. They should get out of there.

“I’m going downstairs to check Mom’s purse,” he told her.

Jody nodded. He went downstairs and she got out of bed. She pulled on her pants and waited for him to come back up.

“Here,” he said when he did. “I’m giving you a hundred. There was three. Three hundred. I’m giving you one hundred.” He held the money out to her. “Here,” he said. “Take it. We’re leaving. We’re going.” She took it. “Okay,” he said when she didn’t move. “Come on.”

Downstairs, Becky’s body lay in the shadows. At first, Jody didn’t see her. All she heard was a snoring noise coming from the couch where her father was sleeping, as he had been every night for months. For a moment she thought he wasn’t dead but asleep. It wasn’t blood on Billy, it was ketchup, and the whole thing was a joke, a horrible, stupid, sick joke. She couldn’t wait to tell her mother what Billy had tried to pull this time. Yes, Billy was crazy, really crazy, and now they’d have to admit it, they’d have to do something about it. Except—

—it wasn’t a trick. She’d only thought it was; for a second she did. But that was before she really listened to the noises from the couch, like snoring but not snoring. Wetter. Bubbly. Air moving through coagulating blood in her father’s throat. So it wasn’t a trick he was playing, and it really was blood all over him. Billy was running water in the bathroom sink, rubbing at his arms and chest with a wet washrag. He pulled off the stained shorts and pulled on a pair of jeans.

“He…he’s not…” Jody gestured toward the couch. “He’s…I can hear him.”

Billy was pulling a shirt over his head. “That’s just nerves or something,” he said. “It isn’t breathing.” He walked around where Becky was on the floor. “Come on,” he said. There were three ways out of the house, three doors, but to get to any of them you had to walk past where Becky was. And now that Jody could see Becky, she heard her as well. Becky was alive; she was moaning.

“Billy—” Jody said, and stopped herself. If she told him Becky wasn’t dead, he might hit her again, hit her until she was quiet.

“What?”

She didn’t answer. He jerked his head toward the kitchen door, and she went out after him.