While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (15 page)

“Billy responds to authority in whatever way he can receive the most attention,” the shelter report concludes. “He never resists punishment. In fact he accepts discipline…too readily. He managed to stay on some form of punishment or restriction for the majority of his stay here.”

Billy had, of course, been taught to confuse punishment with love. He’d been told he was stupid and wicked and loved, and he’d been beaten for that bewildering set of provocations all his life. That the shelter report recommended individual counseling to help him “find out who he really is” suggests that his sense of self was not only frail but also disorganized, perhaps arrested at some point in early childhood by the treatment he’d received, perhaps fractured by that treatment.

Linda and Bill may have thought of the cruelties they imposed as discipline, but
discipline
(from the Latin for
instruction
) means to teach by imposing order, external order that is ultimately internalized. Abuse achieves the opposite, ushering in fear and confusion: internal chaos. Abuse impedes learning; it makes a child into an agent of dissonance and destruction. At fourteen, it was the “yelling and confusion” at home to which Billy asked not to be returned. When Billy was nineteen and the judge who sentenced him for murder gave him the opportunity to speak for himself, Billy said he was “confused about it all,” and that he couldn’t “understand [him]self.”

“You’ve tried to sort it out in your own head and you can’t?” the judge asked.

“Yes,” Billy answered.

He was, as he had been for years, confused. While Jody read compulsively and had developed a means of insulating herself from her environment by retreating into the well-ordered realm of her imagination, an internal landscape filled with what she took from books, Billy seems to have lacked the means to create internal order for himself. Only later, when he was away from his parents and in a strictly structured setting—prison—would he begin to make sense of his life and himself, begin to construct an autobiography that explained and justified what he had done.

As the report from the shelter home indicated, the fourteen-year-old Billy may not have known who he was, but he did know where he was. Evaluated by the caseworker responsible for making referrals from the shelter, Billy told her he “refused to return home until his parents acknowledged that family problems do exist and are willing to work on them.” The generalization, like “yelling and confusion,” was not nearly as compelling as the truth he felt he couldn’t tell: he was terrified of his father and considered his mother complicit in every beating he received. On whatever occasion Linda hadn’t provoked one outright, she’d allowed it to happen, refusing to see what she saw, failing to hear what she heard. Perhaps she did, as she said, love him, but what did it mean, what was it worth?

“Throughout my years growing up,” Billy summarizes in his affidavit, “whenever I stood up to my father or whenever I tried to get away, my mother would talk me into coming home, telling me things would change for the better, telling me that she loved me. She would always end up taking my father’s side, letting my father do the same things to us kids, and things never did change for the better like she promised.”

B
ILLY “PICKED UP SOME CIGARETTES AT A 7-ELEVEN
store, then went home…he could see that Becky was alive. He thought that he would end her life by injecting air or poison into her veins, as he had some hypodermic needles in the house, but decided to go upstairs and wait,” Dr. Maletzky wrote in his report. “He turned on several lights, going from room to room, looking at pictures in magazines and wandering about. Finally the police came to the door and, after a short time, he opened it and voluntarily surrendered….

“Mr. Gilley has difficulty describing his feelings during the murders. He said he was frightened and at times he said he was detached, as if it were like a movie and he was watching his hands doing the murder, but he did not say that he felt outside of his own body or that he felt estranged or apart from reality. He described knowing what he was doing, planning it, and recognizing that some others would think it was wrong. Of interest is the fact that he had no plan for the disposal of the bodies and thought instead Jody might help with this. Even after he returned home [from Kathy’s] he did not make attempts to hide the bodies…. He had no plans at that point for what he was going to do for the next several hours or days, how he would live or support himself, or what was going to happen to Jody, though he had a vague idea that she would run away with her boyfriend as she was talking about this earlier”—a boyfriend Jody never mentions when speaking of the murders. Given Linda’s hysteria about sex and the rigid control she maintained over those hours Jody didn’t spend in school, it’s hard to imagine Jody having had much of a chance to develop a relationship with a boy, let alone a bond serious enough that she might plan on their running away together.

“Did you have a boyfriend at the time?” I ask her, to make sure I’m correct in assuming she did not.

“No,” she says, “but I liked a boy.” The boy’s sister was on the debate team with Jody and they’d “talked a couple of times.” That was the extent of her romantic career in tenth grade.

“Overall,” Dr. Maletzky summarized, “Mr. Gilley describes the event as almost an inevitable one…. He believes that he acted with deliberation, forethought, and justice, at times implying, but not stating, that [his parents] deserved to die…. He honestly says he does not believe he should be punished. He does not believe he is dangerous to anyone else.”

For his part, Dr. Maletzky found Billy cooperative and apparently sincere. “He shares a sense of responsibility for the murders of his three family members with his mother and father,” Dr. Kirkpatrick reported on October 16, 1984.

“I think that all three of us caused it,” Billy said to him.

“W
E GOT THE CALL AT 3:10 IN THE MORNING,” TESTIFIED
Oregon state trooper David Scholten, “and it was four or five minutes after that that I arrived at the residence.” In another five minutes, troopers Rupp and Springer joined Scholten, and took positions around the house. Trooper Rupp knocked on the side door, just to the left of the window over the kitchen sink, the one through which Jody had watched Billy swinging his bat at the cardboard box. He could hear movement inside the house, but no one came to the door. As Billy remembers it now, he wasn’t looking at pictures but sleeping.

“I did what Jody told me,” he says. “I went home because it was late. It was time for bed.” When he saw that his father was dead, Billy says in his affidavit, he suddenly felt “completely exhausted…went to my bedroom and lay down.” Awakened by the banging on the door—if he had fallen asleep, it could not have been for longer than a few minutes—he went to the upstairs bay window, opened it, and looked out.

“I turned the spotlight on the person who came to the window,” Scholten said, and using the squad car’s PA system “advised him that I wanted him to come downstairs and out the front door and to keep his hands where we could see them, which he did.”

“They told me to get down on my knees and put my hands on my head,” Billy says. Then Trooper Rupp searched him, handcuffed him, and asked if there was anyone in the house who was injured. Billy said no because, he tells me, he thought they were asking if anyone needed medical attention, which, he implies, could not have helped Becky. The officers put him in Trooper Scholten’s patrol vehicle, and Scholten “advised the defendant of his rights and asked if he understood them, and he said he did.”

At 3:48, Detective Richard Davis arrived at the house on Ross Lane and entered the front door with troopers Springer and Rupp, Davis guiding their way with a flashlight. Immediately he saw Bill on the couch to the right of the entrance, and, as he said, “it was quite obvious that the man was dead.” Davis “shined the flashlight along the floor toward what is the kitchen area and saw the body of a young girl and approached toward her and [he] could see her chest raise [
sic
] so [he] stopped right there and called for the medical crew.” The paramedics came in and began working on Becky, readying her for transport to Providence Hospital, some five miles to the west, while Davis went on to the master bedroom, where Linda was lying, dead, her face covered with a bathrobe, which Davis picked up and then replaced.

The disposition of the bathrobe would become an issue in Billy’s appeal, as it is his contention that while he had reverently covered his mother’s face, Davis dropped the bathrobe back on her in a haphazard and disrespectful manner, thus tampering with the evidence, as it was
after
he had disturbed the bathrobe that Davis took forensic photographs. Possibly this would make little difference to a juror, but it has (or has developed) real significance for Billy, who conveys indignation about the manner in which the robe was allowed to fall unceremoniously over his mother’s face. Not only was Billy’s rage directed first against his father, whom he hit many more times than he did his mother and to whom he returned to strike repeatedly even after he knew he had killed him, but the fact that he did not extend to his father this most basic respect the living pay the dead—that he did not cover Bill’s defiled face and shattered head but left it for anyone to see—seems doubly significant in the context of the concern he betrays over Linda’s face. In contrast to his treatment of his mother, leaving his father’s face uncovered seems to have been an act of purposeful filial profanation.

“I
’M CONVINCED THE NIGHT OF HER DEATH WAS THE
best night of her short life,” the character of Billy says about Becky in “Death Faces.” Jody, in the voice of Billy, fantasizes that Becky, flush with the success of having performed her lead part in the class musical so well, “probably dreamed of the praise she’d reap from her teachers and peers in school on Monday, praise she was not destined to receive.”

“I must be honest,” Billy says in Jody’s imagined reconstruction, “I hated [Becky] and no matter what Jody says now, Jody hated her, too. Becky was a big baby and a spoiled brat, siphoning off not just a little extra, but all of the parental love available for their children. Certainly that was Jody’s opinion of Becky, especially when forced to clean up after the ‘infant’ when it was 11.”

“Does the Jody character in ‘Death Faces’ represent your perspective?” I ask Jody. “When she speaks is she voicing your feelings?”

“Yes.” Jody nods. “At least as I understood them at that time. Which is now, what, more than ten years ago.”

“What about when Billy speaks?”

“That was my attempt to reveal what I thought were his feelings.”

“Were you resentful of Becky?”

Jody nods. “I was as alienated from Becky as I was from the rest of the family. She was given preferential treatment, mostly as a function of her age. She would have fallen from favor when she hit adolescence, just as Billy and I did, but she wasn’t there yet. She could be a brat. She was experimenting with cigarettes—she and her friend Tina [Kathy Ackerson’s half-sister]—I guess I probably felt as if she was becoming what I was trying to escape.”

“Death Faces” is an unsettling document. A “creative nonfiction” narrative, it allows Jody to tell the story of her family from her brother’s point of view. She can’t know his point of view, of course, not from the inside, and she uses Billy to express her own feelings and opinions. The hatred Billy betrays is Jody’s own—
no matter what Jody says now,
the imagined voice of Billy cautions—an emotion the adult Jody controls very carefully. In fact, Jody’s ability to feel hostility—anger—is something she identifies for me as a casualty of her childhood.

My separate relationships with Jody and Billy are circumscribed by my focus on their past, and this dictates how I experience each of them. I’m not a friend, never a casual observer. Our conversations are limited, largely, to their childhoods. I wonder in what ways this validates, or invalidates, my response to them as individuals? Am I concentrating on the part of their lives that defines them? Or is my experience skewed rather than representative?

Up until the night of April 27, 1984, I find it difficult to think of Jody and Billy, within the context of their family, as entirely independent, whole individuals. It seems to me that while they were growing up together, at the mercy of their destructive parents, they arrived at an adaptive symbiosis. Billy expressed their emotions, their fear and rage, while Jody managed to preserve their ability to reason and function in contexts, such as school, that required measured, controlled behavior. “Of interest,” Dr. Maletzky reported of the night of the murders, “is the fact that [Billy] had no plan for disposal of the bodies and thought instead that Jody might help with this.”

I trust Jody, as I don’t her brother. She holds herself to a standard of honesty that Billy does not. Billy is manipulative; he doesn’t always tell the truth; he may not know how. But with me he is emotionally present in a way that Jody is not. I find him readable,
feelable,
as I don’t Jody, whose defenses are engaged when we’re together and speaking about the past, as they are not when she writes: not in our early e-mail dialogue when she acknowledged a self who was out of reach and unknowable, inspiring her fear and anger, and not in her preface to “Death Faces,” written less than ten years after the murders. In her preface Jody admits to having contacted her brother for “the self-serving reason of pumping him for information for future literary use.” But she abandoned their correspondence. She was, she wrote, “too afraid of what he might tell me about me.”

To what part of Jody might Billy have had access that Jody herself did not? Billy wasn’t unknowable or out of reach. On the contrary, as far as Jody was concerned he was far too much of a presence even in prison three thousand miles away, continuing to ask that she write and visit him. Could it be Billy who, at least in Jody’s imagination, retained a part of herself that Jody decided she didn’t want to see? A wounded, raging self who had been within reach but whom she disowned and abandoned along with her brother?