While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (13 page)

Dr. Fried pointed out that “parental rejection” and “inconsistent management with harsh discipline” were factors that predisposed children to develop conduct disorders, often diagnosed among children institutionalized early or bounced from one foster home to another, kids whose experience had been so fractured they had little sense they were safe, let alone loved. Were Billy to remain with his parents, he would require long-term counseling and would have to be held under strict probation, Dr. Fried thought. Even so, he wasn’t convinced Billy would improve at home and concluded his report with the comment, “Billy may have to be eventually referred to an institutional setting in order to provide him with the structure necessary to function.” Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be until he was in prison that Billy had a chance to test the acuity of Dr. Fried’s vision.

Until then, he was trapped at home with parents who, despite their determination to keep him in line, were incapable of fostering an environment that supported their intentions. Linda had a sharp tongue, and she used it, Billy believes, not only to provoke his father into beating him, but also to tempt Bill to threaten her physically. She taunted Bill; she insulted him; implicitly, she dared her husband to hit her, and sometimes he did. The way Billy describes it, this wasn’t so much masochism on Linda’s part as it was her seeking moral superiority over Bill. Whenever he hit her—if she could make him hit her—he provided material proof of his being so depraved as to beat his wife, the badge of a bruise proclaiming Linda the innocent victim. But as often as not he turned on Billy.

“Part of the problem was that my dad felt like I took sides with her, against him, because I stepped in sometimes when he was gonna hit her. It wasn’t that I took her side, or that I thought she was right,” he tells me, “just that I wanted to stop him from hitting her. So he got this idea that she and I were against him. Also,” he says, turning his hands up and delivering the statement without betraying any awareness of the irony of its coming from a man who beat his mother and sister to death, “you’re not supposed to…you don’t hit women.”

One such altercation, in which Linda had been, in Jody’s words, “screaming and spitting angry,” and threatening divorce, ended with Bill’s stalking out to the barn alone, with his shotgun. Just as Linda’s saying she was going to leave Bill was a dramatic gesture from a woman who, Jody says, “didn’t have the force of will to ever go through with leaving, or to be alone and have to start over,” so, Jody believes, was her father acting out when he threatened suicide in response. Bill may have had no real intent to kill himself, but he did manage to scare his wife, who didn’t have the courage to follow him and sent her children out to the barn in her stead. “Make sure your dad isn’t doing anything stupid,” she told them.

“When he took the gun outside she became quietly nervous,” Jody says. There was “something in her eyes, the way she sent us out there. She wondered had she pushed him too far.”

I hear Jody’s description, more detailed and active than her brother’s, after Billy has told me about his father’s threats to kill himself. In fact, I e-mail her about the incident in one of a series of follow-ups to my visit with her brother, assuming she’ll confirm my guess that she doesn’t remember any such event, that it’s one of the places where her and Billy’s autobiographies diverge. But I’m wrong.

“As the girl who was sent to the barn to ‘talk him out of it’ I do indeed remember my father sitting on an upside-down grease can (about the height of a stool, a foot or so in diameter) with the shotgun across his lap, staring at the ground, looking up as we came in” to stop him. While she doesn’t disagree that her brother was with her, Billy is not present in her memory of the event.

“How old were you?” I ask Jody.

“Old enough to know that being sent to talk a desperate man with a gun out of doing something stupid was perhaps not in our best interest.”

Billy recalls two threats of suicide. Each time, he says, his father left his mother a note, “sat on the ground in the barn, and put the barrel of the rifle in his mouth until my mother agreed to forgive him.”

The discrepancy between the siblings’ memories of the one threat they both saw may proceed from fact: Billy may have entered the barn first and seen his father in a different posture, one Bill abandoned before Jody entered. But presuming they witnessed the same scene, the difference between what they remember seeing may result from their individual interpretations of the seriousness of their father’s intent: Jody feeling it was manipulative, Billy taking it at face value.

Does Billy consider the suicide threat a more significant transaction between their parents than Jody? While Jody never brings it up on her own, her brother alludes to it several times during my visit, and he includes it in his affidavit, the purpose of which is to reveal a domestic life that drove Billy to murder his parents. A further contrast is that Jody gives herself an active role in the drama that unfolded, while Billy never places himself within the scene. He is an observer, what he describes a single image, a photograph rather than a film, a picture of his father with the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth.

Even if we can’t know exactly what happened in the barn, Jody’s and Billy’s accounts, juxtaposed, are useful for the differences they reveal between the siblings: their personalities, their roles within their family, their understanding of themselves. Jody was analytical and cool under pressure. Far from being a helpless witness to disaster, she saw herself as representing a potential solution. Billy felt the import of a situation rather than assessing it rationally. Perhaps he’d been told he couldn’t think straight enough times that he believed this to be true. He inhabited a stark and sinister emotional landscape and expected the most damaging outcome to a given situation. Always in trouble, often blamed for what was not his fault, he could do nothing but watch as tragedy unfolded.

“A
S WE EXITED THE HOUSE THAT NIGHT,” JODY STATED
in her affidavit, Billy “told me of his plan for both of us to take our parents’ car and the money from my mother’s purse and drive away to a new life far away. He seemed surrealistically unaware of the full nature and consequences of his actions.”

“We’re going to Reno,” Billy says to Jody in “Death Faces,” a creative rendering of the past that gave Jody the freedom to write what she imagined, ten years after the murders, were her brother’s thoughts and feelings at the time. In “Death Faces,” Billy’s plan is “to leave the house with Jody and Becky…but never to escape punishment.” After dropping Becky off “with family friends,” he and Jody “would drive into the night toward the great southwest desert lands…[and] a day or a week later,” he would surrender himself to the police.

Eager to discover some of what informed the sixteen-year-old Jody’s vision of the world, I buy myself a box of fifteen Harlequin romances that would have been published back when she was reading them—between 1970 and 1980—on eBay, for three dollars, and soon learn the formula: A young and inexperienced (i.e., virginal) heroine arrives by chance or intent in a remote land, whose geography and customs are peculiar to her. Often she has been orphaned or raised in such poverty that she must find respectable work, as a governess or a teacher. Or she may be a student, an artist. Because the novel is told from the heroine’s point of view, she shares those details of her new environment she finds remarkable. By the end of the first chapter, sometimes by the end of the first page, she’s encountered a man who is older and more worldly (i.e., sexually experienced) than she, and is surprised by how powerfully he interests or provokes her. Determined to resist his advances, she can’t deny her desire for him. The plot moves briskly through the necessary complications and misunderstandings between the couple, and by the end love has conquered all. The heroine’s vigorous emotional workout has left her intact, still a virgin; her hero, therefore, still a gentleman.

But I’m sure it wasn’t love that captured the teenage Jody’s interest. If it had been, she would have grown bored much more quickly than she did. A discerning consumer of entertainment, the adult Jody’s taste in literature runs to Primo Levi and Camus, not authors of the kind of books I imagine following an addiction to cheesy romances. Because she tells me she used to hide them “like a bottle of booze” inside other, larger books, I expect her to confirm my assumption that she turned to Harlequins for their repetitive, narcotic quality, like favorite bedtime stories told over and over, comforting by virtue of being so familiar, so I’m surprised when Jody describes them as “learning tools.”

“I wanted them for all the information I could get out of them!” she says, exclaiming what she considers self-evident.

“Like what?” I press, skeptical.

“Like the Bosporus being the name of the strait between Europe and Asia,” she gives as her first example. “What it means to have high tea in London, England” is the second.

As Jody’s awareness of her family as ignorant and uncultured grew, so did her determination to transcend her origins, to escape becoming like the parents she had begun to despise—for their cruelty, first, but their disinterest in learning cost them her respect as well. If where she’d arrived in the world had denied Jody access to knowledge other girls might have, middleclass girls from good families, she’d find a way to compensate. Harlequins contained the kind of information Jody might have chosen to get from an encyclopedia, if she’d had one at home, and, she points out, they showed her “how ‘normal’ people behaved and treated each other.”

Later, when I think about what strikes me as her unusually resolute nature, I wonder if there wasn’t another, more important impression Jody may have taken away from all those scores of Harlequin romances, one that’s perhaps so familiar a part of her internal landscape that she doesn’t see it. My guess is that it wasn’t the heroine’s romantic destiny that Jody needed to rehearse over and over, but all the rest of her story. It was managing without the help of a mother and father, without their money or their blessings. It was being brave, and optimistic, and plucky. It was having your own code of ethics that no one but you could corrupt. It was having and keeping integrity and self-respect. And again and again and again, it was landing on your feet in an unfamiliar place and learning, quickly, to thrive there.

T
HE EARLY HOURS OF APRIL
27, 1984,
WERE UNUSUALLY
cold for spring. National Weather Service records indicate that the temperature dipped below freezing, to 30ºF, and that the night sky was overcast, the moon waning, only two days from being entirely shadowed by the earth’s orbit. A country road, Ross Lane was unlit and deserted.

“Did Billy actually suggest going to Reno?” I ask Jody.

“No.”

“So where were you going?”

“I don’t know. Nowhere. The plan was just to go out, leave the house.”

“And do what?”

“I don’t know. I was just going along with him, trying to not make him angry.” Trying to figure out how she could summon an ambulance for Becky without precipitating more violence.

“Was there a fantasy of a new life together? The freedom he talked about when he came upstairs to your room? Or were the two of you silent? Is it possible you didn’t say anything?”

Jody shakes her head, frowning. “I don’t know. Maybe.” I nod as I take notes. Later, rereading them, I think of the picture I’ve carried in my head for so long, of the two teenagers in the car that won’t move, my sense that when they left the house on Ross Lane, their lives, like the lives of their family, ended, too.

“Do you remember being in the car?” I e-mail Jody later, wondering if she, too, has a static image of what was, in fact, occurring in motion.

“Yes,” she replies. “That memory is seared in the brain. Like so many others from the minute the light went on. The fear of perhaps being driven somewhere to be killed; the dirty smell of oil and grime in the car, as though the dust itself was invading the senses, anchoring the everyday into the surreal. Confusion, and my mind racing, trying to play out all the possible scenarios, figuring out how to call the police, and a pervading disbelief that it had happened at all.”

“So you were in the car,” I say. “Then what?” Like many of the questions I ask Jody, I ask it more than once, maybe more than twice. Not because I don’t remember her answers or expect that they might change, but because of my compulsion to rehearse the events, in order, with the expectation that this might make them more comprehensible, a story I can accept. Sometimes I wonder if it doesn’t seem to Jody that we meet over and over for the same interview.

She shakes her head. All she remembers is that she convinced her brother that the two of them should stop at Kathy Ackerson’s, because Kathy might know of a place that would be open after midnight in downtown Medford. Jody hoped that, once inside her friend’s house, she could get access to a telephone and call the police before her brother had a chance to stop her. Or if not at Kathy’s, then somewhere else. If there was any place open, a diner or the movie theater, she could excuse herself to go to the women’s room and call.

But when the two of them pulled out of their driveway in their father’s Ranchero, Billy turned right rather than left, which was the way to Kathy’s. For the extra mile or so required by the longer, more circuitous route to the Livingstons’,
^*12
Jody was sure her brother was taking her to a secluded place where he would, at last, kill her as well.

“He took the long way [to Kathy’s house], for reasons he cannot state,” Dr. Maletzky reported two months after the murders. In his 1996 affidavit, Billy provided an explanation, albeit twelve years after the fact.

“I told Jody I needed to stop at the store and buy some cigarettes. We got in the truck and started driving towards the store that was down the road from our house. I remember Jody reminding me that Kathy’s house was the other way and I told her I wanted to get cigarettes first. Jody told me to wait to get cigarettes until we picked up Kathy. I agreed.”

When they arrived at Kathy’s, Jody told Billy to wait in the car while she went to get her friend. As she expected, the Livingstons’ back door was unlocked, and Jody let herself in and ran through the kitchen and up the stairs to Kathy’s room. It was 1:34 in the morning—Kathy would remember the time exactly, having looked at her digital clock when her friend suddenly entered her room, “breathing very heavily,” as Kathy said to the private investigator.

Jody told Kathy she and her brother had snuck out of the house and wanted to go out. Did Kathy know of any place that would be open? Kathy didn’t, and said she was too sleepy to go out anyway. If they wanted something to do, why didn’t Jody bring Billy upstairs and the three of them could play cards for a while? Kathy “went to put on some clothes because [she] was just wearing a nightshirt,” and Jody went back downstairs, trying to figure out what to do. She was afraid to tell Kathy what had happened. What if her friend became hysterical and alarmed Billy? He might in turn become violent, injure or kill some or all of the people in the house, which included Kathy’s mother, stepfather, younger sister, and two younger brothers.

Jody considered using the phone in the kitchen and, as a precaution, went to the back door to check if Billy had remained in the car. But she found him crouched against the screen door, listening, she believes, to see if she’d told anyone what he had done.

“Yes,” Billy says, when I ask him if he was at the door, but it wasn’t to eavesdrop. He’d wanted to go inside with Jody in the first place, but she wouldn’t let him. She told him to wait outside, which he did, having apparently sunk into a state of dazed passivity. “I lit a cigarette and sat in the truck for a few minutes, listening to the radio. I remember that my forehead was hurting and I got a loud ringing in my ears,” intermittent symptoms that had begun months earlier, after he suffered a concussion (from the car accident in Redding). “Then I heard something like a bee in my ear, a loud buzz, and I got spooked, so I went to wait on the porch.”

The two went upstairs to Kathy’s room. “Billy,” Kathy’s interview continues, “was perfectly natural and regular, as he always was, just his regular self.” He asked did she have any marijuana because he was out, and she told him she didn’t, so he bummed a cigarette instead. In contrast to Billy’s description of his sister as calm and self-possessed, Kathy thought Jody “was totally freaked out…acting weird.” In fact, she was shaking so much that Kathy kept pressing her to borrow a sweater, assuming she must be shivering with cold. After Kathy went down to the kitchen to get a few snacks, the three of them “played cards, drank pop, and ate cookies” for about an hour, Kathy said.

“What game did you play?” I ask Jody, an absurd question—what difference could it possibly make?—but I’m trying to picture the scene.

“It was rummy,” Jody says. “Gin rummy.”

All the while she was playing, Jody was trying to figure out if she could somehow get to the phone downstairs and call 911. She knew Becky was alive when they left and that she was gravely injured. The longer it took to call an ambulance, she assumed, the less of a chance Becky had. “Don’t you want to go get those cigarettes?” she tried, after Billy smoked the last of Kathy’s.

It was nearing three on a school morning—2:47 by her friend’s digital clock—and they should get some sleep. “When I suggested he leave and pick Kathy and me up in the morning,” Jody recalled for her affidavit, “he knew this was a ruse and saw that he had misjudged me as a supporter of his plans and what he had done. He simply went back home. If I did not want the ‘freedom’ he had won for me, then neither did he.”

Jody watched from Kathy’s window as Billy got into the Ranchero and, when the taillights had disappeared, became immediately distraught and told Kathy to quick, get her mom and dad, Billy had beaten her parents to death with a baseball bat and he’d probably killed Becky, too. The report was so incredible that at first Kathy didn’t believe what her friend was saying, assuming it was some awful practical joke, but because Jody was crying she went to get her mother. As it happened, Renea Livingston was on her way upstairs to tell the girls to settle down before they woke up the rest of the house, “and that’s when Kathy told me that we need to call the police,” Renea explained to Detective Leon Stupfel, who interviewed her at 5:42 that same morning. “Jody was out of earshot for a minute and I said, ‘Kathy, are you sure?’ because I thought Jody had a tendency to exaggerate things, and Kathy said, ‘I think she’s sure.’”

Renea took the girls down to the kitchen. By that time, she said, Jody “was pretty hysterical…she had trouble telling me but she did say she thought her mom and dad were dead…so I thought okay, I’ll wake up Bob [her husband and Kathy’s stepfather] and we’ll call the police. And [Jody] kept saying, ‘Hurry, do it right away.’ Because she was frightened. So we did, we hurried.”