While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (16 page)

“I
MET JODY WHEN SHE CAME INTO THE LEGAL AID
office with Kathy’s parents, the Livingstons, for adoption,” Thad Guyer tells me. “The secretary’s all excited, comes running back from reception to my office. ‘You’ll never guess who’s in the waiting room,’ she says. ‘It’s that girl, the one from the murders.’

“Everyone knows about it. Small town, lots of media. The secretary tells me Jody’s there with people who want to adopt her. Now the Livingstons, they’re sympathetic, they’re well meaning, but ignorant. They’re what Jody’s leaving behind.”

As she was over fourteen, the law stipulated that Jody had some say over who would assume her care, and after Thad had spoken with Renea, Bob, and Jody together, he asked the Livingstons to leave his office for a few minutes and wait in the reception area so he could discuss the matter privately with Jody. Why, he asked her, not two days after her parents were murdered, was she pursuing adoption by the neighbors? From Jody’s perspective, the answer was simple.

“I need a place to live,” she told him.

“But that doesn’t mean the Livingstons should adopt you. You have other options.” There were informal arrangements, Thad explained, without any paperwork, and there were different levels of guardianship. Any of these was more easily reconsidered than adoption. Thad suggested Jody wait to make any big decisions until she’d recovered enough to consider her choices calmly. She and Kathy’s parents left the legal aid office having established the Livingstons as her legal guardians.

“Not an hour after the meeting, Jody calls me,” Thad says. “Will I go with her to the house on Ross Lane so she could get her things? I suggest this is something she should be doing with the Livingstons—people who just that morning she was considering as adoptive parents—because it would give them an opportunity to nurture her. It would offer all of them an occasion to begin to establish their new bond.”

“I don’t want them to nurture me,” Jody told him. “I want to go with you.”

After contacting the DA’s office to secure permission to enter the crime scene, Thad drove to the Livingstons’ home and picked up Jody. With her, he ducked under the yellow police tape cordoning off the property. Curiously, while Jody remembers Kathy was with them and that the three of them entered, Thad remembers he alone accompanied Jody into the house, and Kathy told the private investigator that it was only she and Jody. The house, Thad tells me, smelled strongly of blood, a smell he compares to the odor of carnage he encountered in Vietnam.

“‘Put your hand over my eyes,’” he remembers Jody asking him. “She didn’t trust herself not to look,” he explains. Is his scrupulousness inspired by the fact that, in 1984, Thad was hurtling toward a midlife crisis? His marriage was on the rocks; he was working on his reputation as a womanizer. It wasn’t long after he became Jody’s “personal lawyer and protector,” as Betty Glass called him, heavily inflecting the word
personal
to convey intimacy, that rumors of his sexual involvement with Jody were flying, quite possibly launched by Betty herself.

“You cover your eyes,” Thad says he told Jody, “and I’ll lead you. I’ll hold your hand.”

I try to picture them in the house on Ross Lane, picking their way around blood spatters, a twosome in his mind, a threesome in hers. Upstairs, in what Thad calls Jody’s “little attic bedroom,” she gathered a “minimal amount of clothes,” a few books and record albums, and Bunny, her sister’s favorite stuffed animal, which Jody wanted to take to Becky, on life support in the hospital, and which she ended up placing in her casket.

Among the books Jody kept from her childhood bookshelf is V. C. Andrews’s
Flowers in the Attic,
a gothic horror story that remains in her collection today, among more literary fare. The story of four children whose mother forces them, after their father’s death, to live in her wealthy parents’ attic,
Flowers in the Attic
deals with themes of incest, child abuse, and secrecy. Because the children’s mother and father were half siblings, their marriage incestuous and their offspring polluted, the children’s grandmother won’t allow their overt presence in her home. Imprisoned in the attic for years, until one of the two younger siblings, who are twins, is poisoned and dies, Christopher, seventeen, the resourceful pragmatist, and Cathy, fifteen, the tempestuous narrator, consummate what has always been their intense attachment and escape with the remaining twin to an uncertain future.

Jody has kept
Flowers in the Attic,
she tells me, because of a comment her grandmother made after the murders. “What had happened was just like what was in that book,” Betty said, and Jody has long intended to reread it to figure out what her grandmother might have meant. In fact, when I read the novel, the parallels between its overwrought plot and Jody’s own family history do strike me as stark, but not because of the brother-sister incest. Whatever Billy imagines he shared with his sister, none of my conversations with Jody suggest it was in any way mutual. From what I understand of the Gilleys, it’s Linda who seems to have stepped from its pages, especially from the perspective of Betty. Wasn’t Linda a mother whose sordid background pollutes future generations and leads her to sacrifice her children for the sake of appearances? That Betty would insist on the book’s eerily forecasting what befell her adopted daughter’s family bears witness to her sustained anxiety about Linda’s origins, her secret past that couldn’t be overcome in spite of Betty’s sustained efforts.

Flowers in the Attic
casts a spell that’s hard to throw off, and I find myself wondering what the teenage Jody thought of this story and even if she might not have kept the battered paperback—which she rescued first from what remained after an electrical fire that destroyed her bedroom and left its cover scorched, and then from the murder scene—as a vessel for what she can neither discard nor allow into her present life: the story of an older brother who rescues the sister he loves from their unredeemably wicked family.

“Why you?” I ask Thad. “Why did you want to be her guardian?”

“I didn’t.” Thad smiles. It’s a playful smile, flirtatious and at least a little disingenuous. “I tried to farm Jody out to the Arnold family. Phil Arnold,” he clarifies when I raise my eyebrows in question. “Phil was the civil rights lawyer who brought me out to Oregon in the first place. He was a good friend, married, and he and his wife had three daughters. The Arnolds were nice, they were normal. Too normal, Jody thought. And then there was Connie.”

“Connie Skillman?”

Thad nods.

I meet Connie when Jody and I visit Medford. She lives in neighboring Ashland, Oregon, as she did in 1984 when she ran Jackson County’s Victims’ Assistance Program. Now she designs gardens, an antidote perhaps to work that kept her immersed in the aftermath of violent crime. Terraced flower beds ascend to her front door and she comes barefoot down the path to hug Jody before she offers me her hand. To me, Connie looks the way mothers are supposed to look: calm and capable and prepared to face, or face down, what comes her way. Part of this is her physical presence: a former figure skater, she still projects the grace and strength necessary to rebound quickly from a fall.

“Jody had a hard time deciding,” Thad says. “She couldn’t decide. We talked and agreed that Connie’s family might be very rule-oriented. Connie didn’t have any kids left at home, and Jody was afraid she’d be controlled to death.”

I nod, but after spending an afternoon speaking with Connie, I wonder if Jody might not have been threatened by her openness, her emotional availability. What would have happened to Jody’s tightly managed feelings in the company of a surrogate mother who invited—perhaps even required—the emotional presence of those around her? Jody had never lived in a home where it was safe to feel, and in the months following the murders she was even more determinedly “steeled” against emotion than she had been before. If the Gilleys’ disastrous parenting precipitated their own deaths, it also prepared at least one of their children for catastrophic emotional upheaval.

“Okay, then,” I say to Thad. “Why you? Why did Jody want you as her guardian?”

He smiles and replaces his drink on the table between us. It’s clear we’ve arrived at a part of this story he likes well enough to perform, and his playfulness shows me the man Jody met twenty years before, the attorney unconventional enough to wear his hair long, dress like a hippie, and hang a big poster of Darth Vader in his office. When Thad describes the private plane he flew in the eighties, a high-performance, fuel-injected Mooney, as “black, like Darth Vader’s,” I take note that his identification with the
Star Wars
antihero—the “dark father” inseparable from his black mask—has endured for so many years. Perhaps its value is as a disguise, as Thad seems to have come home from Vietnam intent on good works, making a career of social justice and civil rights, serving as a public defender.

“I saw two types of clients in legal aid,” Thad says. “There were the ones who found me callous and unfeeling because I didn’t soften the picture, I didn’t paint it prettier than it was. And there were the others, who appreciated my detachment, the fact that I assessed a situation and gave them honest, reliable information.”

I nod. Detachment, analysis, honesty: these would have appealed to Jody.

Jody trusted him immediately, Thad says, and he tells me she understood the message he was consciously telegraphing, that he “perceived her as a winner.” Within seconds of their meeting, he tells me, he’d tacitly confirmed what Jody wanted most to believe about herself and what her parents had withheld: she was a person of worth; she had only to apply her will and talents to achieve what she wanted.

From Jody’s perspective, Thad’s reward for the faith he placed in her was the fulfillment of this judgment, the satisfaction inherent in “republish[ing] the story of Pygmalion in a small Oregon town,” as she wrote in “Death Faces.” “He sought to live vicariously through her, to empower her and feel her power; to teach her and watch her intellect flash upon others; to groom her and enjoy her beauty.”

The day after he helped her establish the Livingstons as her legal guardians, Jody called Thad again. Would he escort her to her parents’ and sister’s funeral? Already she anticipated being attacked as her brother’s collaborator, and she wanted someone with her to discourage assailants and extricate her from potential conflicts. Thad accepted what was a flattering invitation, to be chosen as Jody’s bodyguard and given a role in the drama everyone was watching. If, as he says, Jody responded to his embracing her as worthy, it was equally true that Thad found it gratifying when she looked to him as the mentor and father she wanted. At the funeral, Thad stayed close enough to Jody to intimidate anyone who tried to approach her. “She cried over Becky,” he remembers. “But not for her parents.” Among the mourners and voyeurs were print journalists and camera crews from local TV news stations. The event was a must-see, the culmination of what Thad describes as days of nonstop media attention, and it wasn’t only Jody’s guilt over having failed to defuse her brother’s violence and save her little sister that made her worry she’d be accused. Already, Connie tells me, calls were coming into the DA’s office suggesting Jody had been involved in the murders.

“Calls from whom?” I ask.

“People. People who read the paper, saw the news. They figured there was more to it than what had been reported, and that she was part of it. Otherwise, why would Billy have killed one sister but not the other?”