While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (17 page)

“I
 
REMEMBER BEING SHOCKED WHEN I GOT THE INDICTMENT,”
Billy says of learning he was being charged for intentionally killing Becky. Jody had stated clearly to the police that Billy had taken their sister up to her room and asked that she keep Becky upstairs, where she would be safe. Whatever Billy had done to their parents, it was different from what had happened with their little sister.

Arraigned on three murder charges, Billy was appointed a lawyer, Stephen Pickens, who hired a psychiatrist to examine his client and establish whether there was any basis for an insanity plea. As Billy was found mentally competent, Pickens was left with only one possible defense, to argue for reducing the charge leveled against his client, from aggravated murder to manslaughter. For this he needed to gather mitigating evidence, something that would convince a jury that Billy’s act was less premeditated than it appeared, reasons to believe that the murders were provoked, in this case by what Billy described as a history of severe abuse. For this, Pickens needed at least one credible witness to testify that his client had been cruelly treated by the parents he killed. The obvious choice was his sister Jody.

But Jody’s testimony was critical to the state’s case against her brother, and from his privileged vantage as a legal aid attorney, Thad Guyer knew Jody had “at least been considered as a possible co-conspirator” in the killings. Medford was a small town, and Thad knew DA Justin Smith; he’d heard the joke making the courthouse rounds, the one that went, “Did you hear the one about Billy Gilley? He went to bat for his sister.” Determined to protect Jody in whatever way possible, and aware that if she cooperated with the DA’s office the state wouldn’t pursue her as an accomplice or accessory to murder, Thad allowed the prosecution access to Jody while refusing it to Stephen Pickens, “for fear that blaming Jody might become an aspect of the defense or sentencing.”

“She was sixteen years old at the time, and emotionally distraught, and I may have simply told her that she should not discuss the case with anyone without consulting with me first,” Thad stated in the affidavit he prepared when subpoenaed by post-conviction counsel, a copy of which I obtain through Billy, not from Thad, who doesn’t allude to either Pickens’s request or his refusal to grant it when I speak with him.

Even after he’d had “one or more conversations with [Pickens] regarding the case,” and understood that Billy’s attorney was concerned over “how little he had by way of defense,” Thad didn’t relent. Nor did he discuss the matter with Jody, who was frightened by the little contact she’d had with Billy since the murders—the letter with the dagger and the puddle of blood—frightened of Billy himself, who was making accusations against her and saying that she’d betrayed him.

Billy’s turning on Jody would prove a costly mistake. Thad told Jody not to offer any information that wasn’t directly elicited by the DA’s questions. The fact remained that Jody and Billy were the only people in the house when their parents and sister were murdered, and while Billy never suggested that Jody helped him kill any of the three, he did say that his sister had understood and tacitly approved his plan. In a videotaped interview made three weeks after the murders by a clinical psychologist, Dr. Abrams, Billy claimed he and Jody “had discussed killing their parents on previous occasions, and that his sister had encouraged him to commit the murders.” Jody, he said, “wanted to skip school the next day,” and told him she “wouldn’t be able to unless I killed them.” During Becky’s school play Jody “brought up the killings again,” Billy said, asking if he “thought they would get enough money afterwards to have a party.”

It seems unlikely that a juror would take Billy’s word over Jody’s. His juvenile record included first-degree arson, first-degree criminal mischief, second-degree theft, reckless endangerment, and disorderly conduct. Aside from his rap sheet, numerous psychological profiles in his Children’s Services Division file suggested Billy was impulsive, prone to antisocial behavior, and, on occasion, paranoid. The staff of the youth shelter had found him dishonest, irresponsible, and lacking the self-control necessary for group counseling. Dr. Maletzky, who examined him two months after the murders, considered him a sociopath. Still, Thad judged, the protection granted Jody by her brother’s delinquent history wasn’t absolute. Also of the opinion that Billy was a sociopath, and therefore belonged in prison, Thad saw only one reasonable course of action: to guard details that might complicate what, for his client’s sake, needed to be presented as a clear-cut case.

Other than Jody, two people who would have testified on Billy’s behalf were Linda’s friend Frances Livingston (no relation to Bob and Renae Livingston) and his grandmother Betty Glass, neither of whom made an attractive character witness. Frances was significantly overweight and had not had much formal education. And Betty, unhinged by the murders, had become a spectacle in downtown Medford, accosting passersby to tell them her grandson was innocent, her cold and conniving granddaughter had planned the murders, and the DA was so incompetent that he “couldn’t even pick his nose right.” When Billy said he wanted his grandmother to testify, Pickens refused. He didn’t trust her to conduct herself in the courtroom any better than she did on the street.

But Billy didn’t know what his grandmother was doing out in front of the courthouse, and says Pickens didn’t tell him that Jody’s lawyer, Thad Guyer, wouldn’t allow him access to his sister. According to Billy, when he told Pickens he wanted to testify on his own behalf and explain that he’d never meant to harm Becky, only to kill “my parents, in order to protect myself and my sisters from the physical and psychological abuse,” Pickens refused. He couldn’t allow him to admit to the purposeful murder of his mother and father, because his plan was to try for the reduced charge of manslaughter. For this, he had to prove Billy had attacked his parents with criminal disregard for their lives, but not the intent to kill. Over and over, Billy’s attorney asked him “questions about Jody’s testimony to the police…statements that contradicted my own statements.” Pickens didn’t believe him, Billy felt, “because he continued to challenge my credibility by using Jody’s statements.”

On June 1, 1984, the DA’s office interviewed two inmates in the Jackson County Jail about conversations they’d had with Billy. One, Keith Armstrong, said Billy told him that “Jody had collaborated in the killing of the parents and that while in the midst of killing them Becky happened onto the scene and began screaming. When she started to run away he struck her.” Billy told Armstrong that his father had been “cruel” and used to take out his frustrations on his children “due to a poor marriage.” Linda, Billy said, “was the craziest woman he’d ever known,” and a “violent argument” had precipitated the murders. The other inmate, Steve Martin, asked Billy directly why he’d killed his parents. “Because Dad used to beat me with a hose,” he answered, and “my mom’s crazy and she raised my little sister so that’s why I killed both of them.” Neither of these reports conflicts with Billy’s statements to Pickens or to the psychiatrists who evaluated Billy at Pickens’s behest. On June 25, 1984, an Oregon State Penitentiary inmate, Paul Dizick, told the state police officer who interviewed him that a year or so earlier, Billy had “asked him about committing the crime of murder.” He’d wanted to know if there were firearms that couldn’t be traced by ballistics and where to shoot someone “so as to ensure their death.” Mr. Dizick’s advice was to use a shotgun and to kill more than one person—three or four—and then to act crazy, so as to set up an insanity plea. When Dizick asked whom he wanted to kill and why, Billy told him he was being kept “prisoner,” and “implied that he hated his father.”

Toward the end of June, when Billy was evaluated by Dr. Maletzky, it was the doctor’s opinion that he had “taken poor care of his appearance,” and that he betrayed “a good deal of tension with some facial tics that remit[ted] as the interview continue[d].” Billy told Dr. Maletzky he believed that “if there [were] a God,” his parents and sister were in heaven, and possibly “better off now that they were dead.” That he should imagine Becky happier and better off for having been dispatched to paradise wasn’t so odd, but why would Billy put his parents, whom he felt justified in killing for their crimes against their children, in heaven with her? Twenty-one years later, when I ask him about the possibility of God and heaven, he dismisses both as fantasies.

“Did you ever believe in God?”

“When I was a little kid.”

“When did you stop?”

“Probably when my parents died. Then or right after.”

“Why then?”

“Because if there was a God then he wouldn’t of let any of it happen. But I wasn’t…” Billy shrugs and looks out through the wire-reinforced glass at the fallen snow, still absolutely white, undisturbed. “I hadn’t really believed for a while,” he says.

He began to question the existence of an unseen and powerful being, he tells me, when he was a little boy, living on Dyer Road, and learned that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy were not real—and, though he doesn’t say this, when he was routinely beaten, frightened of the dark, and made to go to sleep without a night light.

In the months after our conversation I find myself returning to the moment when Billy speaks about God, both because of the childish incongruity of lumping God in among Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, and because of the unanswerable logic of that same incongruity.

U
PON HER ARRIVAL AT PROVIDENCE HOSPITAL, BECKY
was comatose. At Billy’s trial, the attending neurosurgeon, Mario Campagna, explained her condition as “extremely critical…premoribund…. She was breathing a little bit on her own, but that’s about all. Her pupils were what we call dilated and fixed, which meant there was no response to light. She couldn’t move anything, she couldn’t talk, couldn’t see.” In what Campagna understood as a quixotic attempt to save her life, he “took her to surgery…and took out most of the right side of the skull…. We put her on a respirator after the surgery…. She never did breathe on her own and died on the 29th of April, 1984.” One aspect of Becky’s diagnosis would prove critical to her sister’s psychic survival. Because doctors were sure that her head injuries were so severe that her life couldn’t have been saved even had she received immediate attention, they were able to release Jody from speculations as to whether she might have improved Becky’s chances of recovery if less time had elapsed between Billy’s attack and the arrival of the ambulance crew. That Becky’s injuries were necessarily fatal didn’t dismiss Jody’s guilt, however. Her ethical position couldn’t be altered by information she didn’t have during the agony of the card game with Kathy and Billy.

“I’m sure the ICU nurse knew that Becky was already dead,” Jody wrote in 1995, “but I believed the respirator was proof my little sister would be okay…. I was convinced by her softly twitching hand that she was alive and going to be okay.”

While Becky was in the hospital, Billy behind bars, and Jody living with the neighbors, Bill’s and Linda’s families arrived from California, crossed the yellow crime scene tape, and began carrying off whatever they wanted from 1452 Ross Lane. There wasn’t much of value in the house, except for the comic books, and when police stepped in to stop the plunder, most of what was taken was returned, except for the comic books. Bill’s sister, Christina Sanders,* made the funeral arrangements and untangled what remained of her dead brother’s finances. Several among Jody’s father’s and mother’s relatives offered Jody a home, but she wasn’t prepared to leave behind everything that was familiar for a life in California with people whom her parents had consistently bad-mouthed and taught her to distrust. Taking her 1999 affidavit as an official opportunity to acknowledge those to whom she did turn, Jody wrote that her “greatest comfort came from Ms. Connie Skillman of the District Attorney’s Victims’ Assistance Office.”

Offering help to crime victims was a new idea in Jackson County at the time of the Gilley family murders, and Connie conducted the entire operation from a converted broom closet in the courthouse. Thirty-eight when her father’s father was murdered, Connie had found dealing with the criminal justice system to be so fraught with anxiety, frustration, and injustice that she was inspired to single-handedly introduce her hometown to the idea of victims’ services.

Connie’s grandfather, Milton Janusch, had lived year-round in a cabin he’d built on the outskirts of Medford until 1982, when a young man came to his door and asked to use the toilet. “I made him get down on his knees and beg for his life and then I shot him in the fucking head,” Janusch’s killer said after he was arrested. He threw a coat over the old man, shot him again, and called friends to come over and party. When they refused, he stepped over the body, made himself a sandwich, looked around for where Janusch might have stashed his liquor, stole his truck and his credit cards, and went on a three-day spree before he was caught in Wenatchee, Washington, some five hundred miles north.

“This was a person,” Connie says of her grandfather, “who was very important to me and to my children, especially to my four sons.” As Connie was the closest relative in the area, it fell to her to represent her family’s interests to the various agencies that responded to the murder. Confident and proactive by nature, a woman who raised five children and who conveys optimism as if it were an informed choice, the perspective she’s decided to embrace, Connie tells me she was shocked by what turned out to be an overwhelming, at times impossible task. That it was her family who had to absorb the cost of driving up to Wenatchee to retrieve her grandfather’s impounded truck and pay the fees to have it released she considered unfair. But it was an outrage that she and her husband were left to clean up the blood and brain matter spattered over his cabin. Dealing with the DA’s office was so stressful, she discovered, that on her first visit her hands were shaking too much to turn the knob of the building’s front door. Once inside, the only useful information she was able to glean was that the suspect’s mother worked as a secretary in the police department, a position from which she tried to stymie Connie’s attempts to find out, for example, when her son was to be arraigned.

Already pushed to the limit of her patience, when Connie arrived at the courthouse for the arraignment she found herself in an elevator with the parents of her grandfather’s killer, and a captive audience to his mother’s characterizing him as “a good boy.” When she stepped off the elevator she happened on the “good boy” smiling for the cameras, apparently without remorse. Galvanized by rage, she responded to her own family’s plight by turning it into a cause. During what became a year-long apprenticeship, Connie went to nationally recognized victims’ advocates for guidance and accessed paperwork from programs throughout Oregon to adapt for Medford’s needs. In the end, she made herself so visible and necessary a presence that Justin Smith—the district attorney who would prosecute Billy—included her office in his bid for reelection.

“Information on the case. Recovery of funeral expenses. The opportunity to make a victim impact statement that is presented to the sentencing judge.” As she speaks, Connie ticks off the rights of a victim of violent crime on her fingers. “Someone to clean up the blood—at the state’s expense. Reparation for other costs related to the crime. Someone to explain to a child what happens in a courtroom. Someone to help you choose what to wear to court. Something as simple as saying, ‘You know, you only have one chance to make a first impression. If you’re called to the witness stand, you dress like you would for Sunday school.’ When my grandfather was murdered there was no one, not one person, who could do even that much.”

Two years later, when Jody needed help, Medford had Connie, who came to the house on Ross Lane and went inside.

“What was it like?” I ask her.

“The house?” Connie shudders, and the lovebird on her shoulder, a pet that spends a lot of time out of its cage, ruffles its feathers in response, a tiny, highly colored echo of the movement. “One of those places you just wanted to wipe your feet when you left. Dust, clutter, dirt.
Dirty.
” Connie’s house is clean, and it looks orderly, as if she could locate whatever she needed—a key, a sales receipt, her microwave’s owner’s manual—within a minute or two.

“I gather Jody’s mother wasn’t very interested in housework,” I say. “It sounds as if the only people who ever straightened up were Jody and Becky.”

“And remember,” Connie adds, “the family, the extended family, they’d ransacked the place before Jody even had a chance to retrieve her things, what she wanted of them. Which wasn’t much.” Connie looks toward the ceiling and closes her eyes. “Jody’s room—it was an oasis. Magical. Totally different, a world apart from the rest of the house. Tidy. Organized. Books shelved and alphabetized.
Books.
”

“And Jody?” I ask. “How was she?”

“Amazing, under the circumstances. An amazing young woman who had to make important decisions overnight.” She brings her left hand up to the lovebird, strokes its rosy throat with her forefinger. “How did she come across? Lost. Not scared, just lost. Shut down. Flat affect. Absolutely flat. Glassy-eyed. She told me they—the law enforcement officers—kept asking her the same questions over and over, as if they didn’t believe her. ‘What do they want?’ she kept asking me. ‘What am I supposed to say?’ And, you know, people did fault her for…well, really, for not displaying emotion.”

I nod. My first meeting with Jody followed an e-mail exchange that had been immediately frank and intimate, and perhaps because of this I was struck by how little emotion she betrayed in person. I was a stranger, of course, not a friend or confidante, but my knowledge of the violence in her past, the enormity of the loss she was forced to navigate at sixteen, didn’t prepare me for her telling what I understood to be a shocking story without any palpable shift in affect, not even as much as a minute adjustment in the tone of her voice or a fractional incline of her head toward mine. The words Connie uses to describe her at sixteen—“robotic, emotionally shut down”—no longer apply, and Jody is able to describe feelings carefully and articulately, but I never sense I’m observing or experiencing her emotions, only that I’m listening to her report of them. We laughed frequently during that dinner, but it was laughter that recognized absurdity: an intellectual response. When Jody spoke of grief or anger, her voice and her expression remained, as they had been, composed. Our conversation helped me understand how I make people uncomfortable by speaking of my father without dropping the tone of my voice into the register reserved for fatal illness or natural disaster, without pulling my listeners into a secluded corner—in other words, without warning them.

People who cross the threshold between the known world and that place where the impossible does happen discover the problem of how to convey their experience. Some of us don’t talk about murders or intergenerational sex within our families. We find words inadequate, or we lose them entirely. Those of us who insist on speaking what’s often called unspeakable discover there’s no tone reserved for
un
natural disasters, and so we don’t use any. We’re flat-affect; we report just the facts; this alienates our audience.

“I am as normal and well-adjusted an individual as any whose life reads like the script to a Greek tragedy,” remarks Jennifer Saffron, a pen name Jody created for herself in college, in an essay “Jennifer” published in
The Georgetown Journal
during the fall of 1992. When I e-mail her, asking about the pseudonym, Jody replies that “Jenny is slang for a female ass and saffron is yellow and I was a yella arse for not having the courage to publish it under my own name.”

“Boy,” I type back. “You are one girl who needs a decoder ring.” But, as Jody explained, because she was part of the publication’s editorial staff, her submissions had to be anonymous.

“You say your father sacrificed your sister, your mother ambushed your father, you slaughtered your mother, and now you’ve gone blind and are being chased around the countryside by three blood-soaked women with snakes for hair? Is that all that’s bothering you, Orestes?”
Jennifer Saffron writes, paraphrasing Aeschylus’s
Oresteia
(and confusing Orestes, who does not go blind, with Oedipus, who blinds himself upon discovering he’s had intercourse with his mother).

The story of Orestes, who with his sister Electra plotted to kill their mother, Clytemnestra, to avenge her murder of their father, Agamemnon, and all of Orestes’ family—the House of Atreus—provides one of the few examples Jody found throughout the history of literature as she cast about for stories that might help her make sense of her own life. But Jennifer Saffron doesn’t limit herself to classical allusions. Titled “Here’s the Story…of a Man Named Milpy,” Jody’s essay references the theme song of
The Brady Bunch,
a sitcom that fascinated children like Jody and me not only because it was a direct descendant of
Father Knows Best
and other series that presented soothing images of an attainable normalcy but also because the Bradys were a successfully
restored
family, the seamless graft of a widow and her three daughters onto a widower and his three sons. We couldn’t aspire to an unblemished past, but we did have fantasies of redemption. United, the two halves of the Brady family transcended their separate griefs and reached a point of collective amnesia, living in a sunny suburbia where there was never a problem that wasn’t inherently funny and couldn’t be resolved in twenty-two minutes. Watching it at ten or twelve, I understood the program as educational and paid it the kind of close attention that Jody did her Harlequin romances, depending on it to teach me what was amusing and acceptable—what was normal in a family.

The replacement of
Brady
with
Milpy,
the name Jody chose as “Gilley in literary disguise,” summons James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” whose eponymous hero’s name has itself become a reference to the use of fantasy as escape from an intolerable reality. “Violent death runs in my family,” begins Milpy, whose tone is his most salient feature. Armored by a smart-alecky, sophomoric humor that quashes any possibility of pity, Jody qua Milpy catalogues the tragedies that befell both sides of her family, daring the reader to feel an emotional connection to people portrayed as freaks, and accelerates toward “a Freudian analyst’s dream come true: Billy Jr., not scoring high on the son-o-meter, taking a cue from
Friday the 13th,
murdered them and his younger sister in their sleep.”