While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (14 page)

“H
OW MANY TIMES DID YOU RUN AWAY?” I ASK BILLY.

“Three or four, I guess. Three. There was one time that it was just, you know, a joyride. Me and another guy in his dad’s car. We didn’t go anyplace. We were in town when we got picked up.”

“Did you ever run far away?”

“Once I got to Vancouver.”

“Canada?”

“Nah.” He laughs. “Washington State. Vancouver, Washington.”

On the evening of April 8, 1980, Billy, who was then fourteen, was working on his bike in his father’s workshop—the small outbuilding adjacent to the one Linda used for storage—when his father came home “really drunk and started yelling at me for leaving tools lying around.” Billy apologized. He’d begun putting the tools away when his father cuffed him and asked was he looking for a fight. Rather than attempting to defend himself, Billy kept his head down and continued restoring order to the workshop. He told his father no, he didn’t want to fight, and asked him please to stop hitting him. Then, he says, “my father hit me in the face and knocked me to the floor with a bloody nose.” Bill told Billy to get up, and when Billy didn’t, he began kicking him. “I got up so my father would stop kicking me, but then when I tried to get up he hit me in the side of the head.” Because Billy doesn’t remember how the incident ended, he assumes he was knocked unconscious for a brief time. Alternately, he might have been literally frightened out of his wits. When he opened his eyes and looked up, his father was gone. Scared to move, Billy remained on the floor of the workshop for another two hours, until midnight, when he crept up to the living room window and saw that his father was asleep on the couch. He came in, washed his face, and went to bed.

Billy says his mother routinely locked herself in the bedroom, purposefully ignoring the strife without, but when I ask Jody about this she can’t recall any instance in which Linda was not vigilant with respect to both Bill’s drinking and her children’s whereabouts and finds it unlikely, almost inconceivable, that their mother would have retired for the night without knowing that all three of her children were where they were supposed to be, in their beds, asleep. Perhaps it’s easier for Billy to believe that Linda didn’t see certain events than that she did nothing about what she saw. However the conflict played out, whatever Bill did or didn’t do, at school the next day Billy told a friend he was running away. The friend, eager to escape the foster home in which he’d been placed, suggested they head up to his real parents’ home in Vancouver, Washington, just over the Oregon border. He was sure his parents, who were hippies and dope dealers (perhaps this explains his placement in foster care), would welcome him and Billy.

“We got some money together and bought bus tickets,” Billy recalls. “When we got there we called his parents and told them what had happened to me.”

The friend’s father picked up his son and Billy from the bus station and brought them home, and Billy called Linda to let her know that he was all right but didn’t say where he was, allowing his mother to believe that he was still in Medford. When she asked why he hadn’t come home from school, Billy said Bill had attacked him and that he wasn’t coming back. Linda told Billy she didn’t believe him and ended the call under the impression that Billy was at a pay phone in downtown Medford, waiting for Bill to come pick him up.

The next morning, Billy’s friend’s mother “convinced me that I should call mom and let her know I was staying with friends for a while so that I could figure some things out.” Linda apologized for disbelieving what she now knew was true: Bill admitted to her that he’d beaten up their son. She cried, she told Billy she loved him; she begged him to return and promised that things would be different. This time she’d kicked his father out of the house, she said. She’d told Bill she was divorcing him. Billy had little reason to trust in his mother’s word. Only two months had passed since Linda’s last tearful promise that things were going to change. Wary, he said he loved her, too, but that he needed time to think. At the idea of being thwarted, Linda grew furious and insisted that Billy come home right away. He refused and hung up.

A day later, his friend’s whereabouts were traced by the foster care agency, revealing where both boys had gone, and Linda called Billy. If he didn’t come home immediately, she threatened, “she would report [his] friend’s parents for harboring a runaway and have them arrested.” Not doubting his mother for a moment, and aware that he was already indebted to his hosts for their generosity, a rare enough experience that he placed a premium on it, Billy returned to Medford. But, as a police report had been filed, he didn’t have to go home. Instead, he was taken into the custody of the Children’s Services Division.

After being held overnight at CSD, Billy was referred to a psychologist named Marie Taylor,* who interviewed him, and to whose questions he gave careful answers. Billy told Marie that yes, he was unhappy, but he blamed this on school. His bad grades, his conflicts with other kids, his inability to stay out of trouble: these were what had prompted him to run away, he said. Too, he “couldn’t take all the yelling and confusion at home.” Although he’d returned willingly to Medford, this was only out of consideration for the people with whom he’d been staying. He still did not want to go home.

Billy was afraid to tell the truth—afraid his parents would find out and retaliate—and as Carol Wood’s report had been destroyed, Marie had no way of knowing what “yelling and confusion” really meant, nor why the fourteen-year-old boy in her office not only refused to see his parents but also asked to be placed in foster care, a request so unusual that it should have alerted the agency to the likelihood of severe abuse. Typically, even chronically battered children cling to the parents who torture and rape them. Perhaps Marie hoped that placement in a shelter home “for the purposes of evaluation” would make her new client’s situation a little clearer.

Billy’s custody was transferred to the Jackson County Youth Shelter, a group home that housed eight adolescents, where he remained from April 15 through May 7. The shelter’s mission was to provide temporary room, board, and support to troubled, abused, runaway, and homeless youth. There were strict rules of conduct, a daily schedule that included structured and free time, and all residents were expected to complete domestic chores. During his three weeks in the shelter, Billy was counseled, observed, and disciplined, and the staff’s findings were organized into a comprehensive report made to Children’s Services.

“Billy appeared to function best under structured situations,” the report said. “He had difficulty managing his free time, especially in social situations. This is when he usually got himself into trouble.” Upon arrival he was “very quiet and withdrawn,” and when he did begin to talk he didn’t speak honestly about himself but made up stories. Staff members found it easier to speak with Billy privately, but even then it was “very difficult” to get him to “disclose his feelings.” Given his reticence, they paid particular attention to nonverbal cues when summarizing their impressions:

Billy’s most striking feature is his eyes and facial expression. He rarely smiles and he maintains a consistent expression regardless of his mood. His large brown eyes most often reflect a sad, frightened look. He maintains [eye] contact well, even when lying, but there is often a sense of distance, as if one were looking in a mirror. His voice rarely fluctuates in volume, even when he’s angry…. Billy also criticized himself frequently and on a few occasions mentioned suicide. He has a very low opinion of himself, reflected also in the stories he makes up about himself….

Billy requires a situation where he is loved and a concerted effort is made to reinforce his positive qualities…. Both individual and family counseling are strongly recommended—individual, to help Billy find out who he really is, and family, to help bring an understanding and cooperative interaction to his home life….

Billy has shown that he is capable of kind and gentle nature [
sic
]. We are hopeful that through careful consideration of the above recommendations, Billy will learn to achieve this.

For a boy who would be fifteen the following month, Billy’s behavior was notably immature. His pranks included dropping a fly in another child’s juice glass, disconnecting a phone while someone was using it, placing a boy’s croquet ball in dog feces, and generating conflict by spreading rumors. Some of these complaints he qualifies by explaining that the report failed to include antecedents to his acts. For example, he tells me, he “did not drop the croquet ball in dog shit until after” he’d been antagonized. He attributed his trouble getting along with the boys to their being “abnormal.”

“Shy, he had a brief crush on a girl…which was not returned…and [he] withdrew, obviously very hurt, but refused to talk about it.” In a separate transaction he convinced a fellow resident to “make dirty remarks” to a different girl, who slapped him when she discovered that he had been the instigator. The pattern wasn’t new; during a trip to California he’d incited a cousin to make unwelcome sexual comments to Jody.

As had been true of his previous delinquencies, cigarettes caused a lot of problems for Billy. “By far, the most difficult restriction for Billy was not being allowed to smoke cigarettes. He was instructed when he first arrived that he was to earn this privilege. Billy found this requirement incomprehensible as he tried everything he could to beg, borrow, or steal a cigarette.” The staff expressed frustration with Billy, who was caught smoking in his room, the boys’ bathroom, “and even under the house,” but no one seems to have considered the problem from the point of view of addiction.

The “most disruptive” of his pranks also followed a pattern that had been set long before—trying to trick other kids into thinking he had drugs. He supplied a “short-term resident with peppermint tea under the guise of marijuana,” with the result that he single-handedly ruined a dance held later that evening. The boy smoked the “marijuana” in the boys’ bathroom with something other than the desired result. “Accusations [were] made, searches performed, anger, lying, hours wasted, feelings hurt…a lot of negative consequences imposed on innocent people.” Either Billy was incapable of controlling his impulses or he was intentionally repeating what he knew to be a recipe for punishment, or both.

Three months earlier, on February 15, Billy had been suspended from school for possession of a small amount of dry alfalfa he claimed was marijuana. “When my mom brought me home from school, I tried to tell her that the marijuana was really just some alfalfa that I was using to trick the other kids…. My mom told me that I was a ‘damn liar.’ When my father got home he told me to go out to the barn and wait for him.” Out in the barn, keeping company with the tractor wheel to which he’d been tied more times than he could count, Billy decided he “couldn’t take it anymore.” He got on his bike and rode the familiar two miles to the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, where he asked to speak with the counselor he’d been assigned after Carol Wood was fired. But as it was a Friday evening he was told to return home; the counselor had left for the day and wouldn’t be back until Monday. “I told them I couldn’t go home because I would be whipped. I was given a choice: to go home or to go to Juvenile lock-up. I chose lock-up.”

At fourteen, Billy was smoking pot regularly enough that his claim about the alfalfa may have been an attempt to scam his classmates, so he could finance his habit, but Billy had little confidence that anyone might like him in and of himself and had established a pattern of resorting to fakes and props to impress peers.

“He doesn’t really have any friends and usually he’s more friends with little kids than kids his own age,” Jody told Detective Davis, when he interviewed her after the murders. Jody’s friend Kathy added that at the time of the murders he “got along much better with her two younger brothers, who were then thirteen and fourteen, even though he was sixteen or seventeen.” (He was, in fact, eighteen.)

Billy’s affidavit rarely alludes to friends; the only one he mentions separate from a generic reference to his peer group is the foster kid with whom he ran away. Outside of school, or juvenile detention, he seems to have been an unusually solitary—lonely—boy, who spent much of his free time by himself. In answer to a letter I send him before we meet, asking what he liked to do when he was a teenager, Billy writes around the topic of friendship, suggesting a life among peers without mentioning any names or even using the word
friend.
The only one Jody can recall is “John, a blond, chubby kid in the fifth or sixth grade.”

“I was a member of a dirt bike club,” Billy tells me in his letter. “We would get together at a place with lots of dirt trails.” He gave up the bike at sixteen, when he got his driver’s license, but he still loved bowling, swimming, and taking girls “to the YMCA pool, public pools, and lakes…. I also loved going toparties,” he adds. “I started selling killer grass at age thirteen, so I was always getting invited to the best parties…. It was sucha rush. I don’t think it can be explained. To have so much social power beginning at an early age.”

Though Billy did smoke marijuana, it seems unlikely he was the dealer he describes, who at thirteen was working for local growers, paid “two grocery bags packed with leaf, and a bag of buds” after harvest. If he can’t explain the rush of social power that comes with such a position, perhaps this is because he never experienced it. Billy’s reminiscing about his career as the kid everyone wanted to know because he had “grass coming out of his ass” doesn’t sound any different from his assertion that he “was so good at bowling [he] was thinking about turning pro” or that he had “a ten-speed that [he] took to such distances, it would have broken most men,” comments that are clear instances of wishful boasting, the kind of fantasies that have an effect opposite to the one he intends, making him seem pitiable rather than cool.

Speaking with Billy in prison, I return several times to the subject of friendship, trying to elicit stories that will help me understand his isolation. Each of his answers recasts the party scene of his letter, featuring a teenage Billy who is sought out because of the marijuana he’s happy to share. When I see—at last—that he can’t conceive of spending time with another kid who liked him for himself, without the added enticement of drugs, I stop asking.