While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (12 page)

J
ULY
14, 1978.
OCTOBER
9, 1979.
APRIL
15,
JUNE
23, July 16, August 5, September 17, and October 23, 1980.

In little over two years, Billy was evaluated eight times: by a psychologist, a social worker, a clinical psychologist, a physician specializing in developmental disabilities, a psychiatrist, another clinical psychologist, another psychologist, and a team of educational specialists. What exactly was wrong with him?

The first battery of tests had been made at the behest of Westside School to discover reasons for Billy’s poor academic performance and for his “poor social relations with peers.” The tests administered included an intelligence scale as well as one developed to rate behavior. The psychologist who made the report, Michael Knapp, conducted parent and teacher interviews, as well.

Linda, who had preserved a fantasy of an entirely different domestic life than the one she inadvertently created and had kept detailed baby books for all three children, noting the dates of their first words and steps and other milestones, described her son as a child who had been developmentally precocious during his first years. Billy said his first words at six months, “his first sentence shortly after one year.” The only problems his mother reported having with him at home, at the time, were that he didn’t take enough responsibility for a boy his age and that he argued with and teased his younger sisters, complaints that would seem universal among parents of adolescents.

“During testing Billy was very cooperative, but was extremely quiet, hardly speaking at all,” the psychologist reported. “He gave very brief answers…and seemed very tense and rigid. He did not offer any information about himself or his interests spontaneously.” His intelligence was found to be average, although “the fact that Billy was very verbally reticent may have spuriously lowered his verbal IQ score.” Knapp found evidence of poor short-term memory and concentration, perhaps the result of his feeling anxious and stressed, but did not find support for an earlier diagnosis of poor hand-eye coordination, “locating and tracking” problems, or dyslexia.

Knapp’s diagnosis was that Billy’s “extreme learning problems in reading and spelling” were “associated with a behavioral disorder, and previously poor classroom survival skills.” Essentially, he was failing to pay attention to the teacher. Had the harshly critical voices of his parents resulted in his ignoring all adults in authority? Linda’s responses to the “Problem Behavior Identification Checklist” indicated “proneness to emotional upset, social aggression, and unethical behavior.” All of this added up to a blanket diagnosis of “behavior disorder.” Although given the treatment he received from his parents, it seems natural that Billy was angry, uncooperative, tense, hypersensitive, and, as he’d been “often noted to comment…unhappy” because “no one understood or liked him.” That Linda had to take a test to help determine what was wrong with a child whom she had witnessed endure a decade’s worth of routine brutality and who seemed subsequently to suffer feelings of low self-esteem, hostility, and unhappiness is testimony to how far from reality her own compulsions and misperceptions had taken her. Rather than whipping the devil out of their son, at Linda’s instruction Bill seems to have whipped him further and further in.

Knapp recommended that Billy have one-on-one remedial help to bring him up to the appropriate grade level, a level he found him capable of attaining, and that he be referred “to the Mental Health School Consultation Team,” who could assess the situation and design a program to help with Billy’s “acting-out” in school. With respect to his behavior at home, Knapp suggested family counseling that would include Linda and Bill, perhaps in the form of a “home intervention program.” None of these recommendations was followed.

On April 3, 1979, Billy, thirteen years old, “was observed by a witness shoplifting two packs of cigarettes.” Billy ran from the store and was apprehended, and appeared with his parents on April 19 at the county courthouse’s Juvenile Division for a “warning interview.” Six weeks later he and another boy were caught entering an unlocked car from which they removed a pack of cigarettes, precipitating a second warning interview on June 19. In both cases Billy was stealing to support a habit he wasn’t old enough to satisfy legally, a behavior he’d watched his parents model from the time he could focus his eyes on them.

As a juvenile offender, Billy was referred to the Children’s Services Division. On October 9, he and his parents met together and individually with a psychologist, Carol Wood,* who did her best to discover what was troubling him. Billy tells me that once he was out of his parents’ hearing, he spoke frankly of his father’s drinking, of the whippings, the verbal abuse, and the violent altercations of his parents. Whether naïve, inadequately trained, or simply lacking the common sense her job demanded, Carol Wood repeated what Billy told her to his parents, suggesting that they were, in Billy’s words, “crazy and unfit.” Already on the defensive, having been put in the compromising position of being forcibly interviewed by a CSD caseworker, Bill and Linda, particularly Linda, were furious, both with Carol Wood and with their son. They denied everything Billy said and demanded to speak with him in private.

“My parents came to me and were very angry. They asked me if I had said the things about the whippings, the drinking, the beating, the slapping, the yelling, and fighting to Carol Wood. I remember that it was like a checklist that my parents went through with me. I was afraid and I told my parents, ‘No.’”

Having intimidated Billy into retracting his accusations, and more damaging, into saying he’d lied, thereby establishing himself as dishonest to authorities he would have to deal with in the future, his parents, Billy says, threatened CSD with a lawsuit based on Wood’s wrongfully accusing them of being unfit. In response, CSD fired Wood and destroyed the report, inserting a note into the case files. Wood’s evaluation, the note explained, “contains errors of fact and interpretation, and should be disregarded in its entirety,” a directive that was easy to follow, as the report was gone. Shaken by his parents’ ability to reach beyond the family home and into a county agency whose purpose, he’d been told, was to protect and support children, Billy decided that it was safer to assume no one was on his side.

“From my brother’s stories,” Jody said in her 1999 affidavit, “I learned that reporting parental abuse would only lead to more of the same.” Her one attempt to initiate some kind of intervention was discouraging enough that she didn’t risk trying to get help again. At some point during the eighth grade, Jody went to Adam Murphy,* the guidance counselor at McLoughlin Junior High, to try “to find out how to report imminent abuse of herself” to Children’s Services. During an argument, Linda had picked up a wooden clog—the closest thing at hand—and hurled it at Jody, frightening her and leaving a bruise on her arm. But the bruise didn’t impress the counselor as evidence of genuine physical abuse, and he showed Jody photographs of what that might look like: children who had been battered or burned to the point of life-threatening injury. If something like that were to happen, then she should contact Children’s Services, Murphy told her, and he gave her a card with the number of a help line to call were she in real danger.

On December 21, 1979, Linda caught Billy smoking in the unfinished half of the attic, and she and Bill took their son downtown and turned him in themselves for what his juvenile record describes as “Reckless Endangerment,” in that smoking in the crawl space represented a fire hazard. Even had Linda’s psychic investment in the season been less intense, it seems peculiarly vindictive for the Gilleys to have marched Billy into jail a few days before Christmas, especially for his satisfying an addiction for which they were more responsible than he. They left him there, in juvenile detention, for three days, relenting on Christmas Eve lest his absence reveal what a farce Linda’s Christmas pageant really was. The more unattainable her fantasy of a happy, prosperous family gathered round a festive tree seemed, the more fiercely she clung to it. Even though money was always tight, Linda made sure there were a lot of presents under the plastic tree, mostly junk, Jody says. “Nobody ever got anything they wanted, ever. It was almost like she tried to pick out what you didn’t want.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Like giving me a plastic action figure of the Creature from the Black Lagoon when she knew I hated that kind of thing.” Jody shrugs, but under the shrug there’s a palpable irritation and bewilderment—hurt—that lingers decades after the fact. On the surface, wrapped in holiday paper, Christmas looked as Linda thought it should. Under that flimsy disguise, her gifts were thoughtless, without meaning, or they were outright barbs.

With a referral from the Jackson County Children’s Services Division, Linda took Billy to a specialist in developmental disabilities. Based on Linda’s observation that “there had been significant changes in Billy’s behavior during the past two years,” and the corroborating evidence of his record, Billy was tested for chemical abnormalities that can contribute to a behavior disorder. “The tests,” reported Dr. Lynn Anderson, “indicate a derangement of glucose and calcium metabolism which can significantly affect behavior: causing such problems as mood swings, violent behavior, learning disabilities, and poor concentration.” She strongly advised that all sugar be eliminated from Billy’s diet and that he not use illicit drugs. If Linda heeded the advice about sugar, she did so only halfheartedly and temporarily.

“I don’t know,” Jody says. “Does switching him to Diet Coke add up to making a sincere effort?”

And there’s no reason to imagine Billy might have curtailed his smoking pot, which, as he describes it, offered him one of the few respites from the conflict at home.

“If I could be alone, up a tree, stoned, that was really nice. Peaceful.”

“You didn’t do tree work while you were stoned, did you?”

“Sure.”

“Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“Nah. It just made everything, you know, look better.”

Among all the reports made on Billy from July 1978 to October 1980—all paid for by Jackson County’s public school system or Children’s Services Division—the starkest, most pessimistic, and, as time would prove, most accurate set of impressions were those recorded on August 5, 1980, by Dr. Frederick E. Fried. Based on his examination of Billy, his review of earlier clinical findings, and Billy’s performance on the MMPI,
^*8
Billy was, Dr. Fried found, “superficially genial but easily angered or irritated and prone to act impulsively.” Although he was bright, he was “unable to profit from experience in the sense that other people do. It is as though, notwithstanding his intelligence, he is unable to anticipate the consequences of his behavior, to predict the responses which will be elicited from others, or to learn those anticipatory anxieties which operate to deter most people from committing anti-social behavior.” In short, as evidenced by his history of impaired attention, inability to follow rules, truancy, poor tolerance for frustration, dishonesty, vandalism, theft, and running away, Billy had a conduct disorder, the usual childhood precursor of sociopathy.

Today it’s understood that impulsiveness, the tendency to act without thinking, is associated with a host of chronic and debilitating behaviors: alcoholism, drug abuse, smoking, eating disorders, attention deficit disorders, aggression, personality disorders, as well as suicide. Current research into the brain coupled with psychological studies indicate that heredity can predispose a person to impulsivity, as can “emotionally disorienting early experiences.”
^†9
Together the two can conspire to disable rational response systems. In other words, there are times when impulsive people literally can’t think straight. A gene called MAOA, which regulates the activity of serotonin in the brain, has a high-risk variant common to men. Those with the variant have deficits in the prefrontal area of the brain that shapes responses, as well as in parts of the brain that control emotion. “These deficits in emotional regulation set people up for strong emotional reactions early in life and make them more vulnerable to trauma.”
^*10
To complete the vicious circle that would appear to describe Billy’s situation, “the deficit in cognitive, inhibitory function creates a propensity to act on those emotions later in life.”
^†11

Assuming Billy’s impulsiveness was in part genetic, inherited from an impulsive father, who drank, smoked, and couldn’t control his temper, then Billy’s biological makeup would have made him particularly vulnerable to that same volatile father, who traumatized him routinely and provided unlimited “emotionally disorienting early experiences.” A generation earlier, Billy’s paternal grandfather, William Gilley, who beat and traumatized his son, Bill, lost his legs when, suddenly intent on getting to a liquor store, he ran across a highway in front of a truck. Probably the pattern did not originate with him.