While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (18 page)

The first blank in the post-sentencing report generated after Billy’s trial, the blank that follows the words
SUMMARY OF THE FACTS,
is filled with hurried script, a hybrid of printing and cursive executed with what looks to have been a black felt-tipped marker. “killed mother father & sister,” it says. The first time I page through the documents, I stop in the midst of what I’d intended as a quick overview to consider the abbreviated statement, arrested by the casual way the few cataclysmic words had been dashed off. Shouldn’t the statement have been written and punctuated carefully and correctly? Shouldn’t there be a special font or style of inscription, a writing implement used only for recording murders—something, anything—for words like that? Maybe the bureaucratic equivalent of a branding iron could scorch the information onto the form. I stare at this
SUMMARY OF THE FACTS
for some minutes and return to the Xeroxed document several times in the days that follow. The words
killed mother father & sister
are rendered in the same hand as that which flows out from under a waitress’s fingers and onto her pad. Or it’s a meter maid’s scribble on a parking ticket: functional, forgettable. Apparently, the tone missing from the spoken language of murder, incest, and other unspeakable acts is absent from the written as well. And the lack can’t be remedied. To create that tone, that special script, would be to imply that in some small measure we condone abominations, we accept their existence enough to give them a mode of reference.

“But they must have understood,” I say to Connie of the people who faulted Jody for her lack of emotion. “They must have known she was in shock. That if her affect was flat, it was flat because she was in shock.”

“Still,” Connie says.

Still.

Trying to help me see Jody as she was at sixteen, just after the murder of her family, Connie stops talking to pantomime dropping an invisible cloak over her body. Silently, she acts out drawing a zipper from her knees all the way up over the top of her head, hiding herself. This is how defended Jody was, Connie says, how off-limits. Her simple performance stays with me. I think of it during subsequent interviews with Jody, my notebook lying open in my lap, ready to receive whatever she tells me. Later, when I read what Jody’s said, I wonder what words I could add to convey the emotional content of what she’s described—I try to imagine the part she didn’t articulate—and I see it again: a hand drawing a zipper closed from the inside of a cloak, disappearing the girl underneath. But perhaps this is as good as any of the ways we fail to adequately describe the experience of trauma and abuse: it disappears you.

“Alone at home, that’s where I grieve, not in public or in conversations with people,” Jody writes me, explaining what shouldn’t require explanation. But we want—we insist, really—that people,
victims,
emote to guide or confirm our feelings about what they’ve endured, especially if it falls outside the borders of our own experience. If they don’t, we hold them in suspicion.

A
 
MONTH AFTER MY VISIT TO THE SNAKE RIVER
Correctional Institution, I receive a letter from Billy, and with it the drawing he promised me of the layout of the house at 1452 Ross Lane. When we spoke about the murders I asked him so many questions about the interior of the house, which I didn’t see when I visited Medford, that he said he’d mail me a floor plan to clarify what he couldn’t when we met and were not allowed to use pen and paper. At the time of my visit to Medford I’d been disappointed that I hadn’t been able to secure permission to enter the house, but Billy’s floor plan shows me something more compelling than anything I might have learned from the structure itself: Billy’s vision of his home.

The plan is meticulously executed in blue ink on white paper, every line, even one as short as that indicating a single stair tread, measured and drawn with a ruler. Doorways, plumbing fixtures, kitchen appliances: all of these appear as they would in architectural blueprints. Each room is identified, and Billy has furnished the house with beds, tables, and chairs, even a minute television on a corner stand, to which he’s added a V for antennae.

On the couch adjacent to the living room’s front window he’s traced the outline of a tiny man with the annotation “father slept on couch” floating above the spot where he attacked and killed his father. A similar figure of his mother lies, also faceup and featureless, on the bed in which he murdered her. Becky, whom he killed when she was trying to get back to her mother, is placed not where she died but on the bed in her own room, next to an asterisk with the reminder “Becky often slept in Mother’s bed.” Billy lies on his bed in the smallest of the downstairs rooms, Jody is in her attic bedroom. The five figures are not only androgynous but also stylized. Their perfectly round and featureless heads remind me of plastic toys for preschoolers.

That Billy chose to represent his family as he did might not strike me so strongly had he not included a supplementary map of the outbuildings. On it he’s divided the barn into two equal parts. In one is “Billy’s Hot Rod,” a generic drawing of whatever car Billy was trying to rebuild at any given time. The other side, belonging to his father, is empty save for a huge tractor wheel, its deep tire treads indicated by a ring of zigzags that make it look like an outsize circular saw. “Billy was tied to this tractor wheel for whipping,” reads the legend written next to it.

Adjacent to the barn, on the other side of the fence around the Gilleys’ property, is a cow. “Neighbor’s Cow that Billy made Pet out of,” announces its caption. There is also a horse and a goat. These animals, placed around the house and barn, have human eyes, a feature I recognize from other of Billy’s drawings. Cats, chickens, horses, pigs, squirrels, deer, dogs, tortoises: Billy draws them all with grotesquely large and human-shaped eyes fringed by extravagantly long lashes.

I know about the use of the tractor wheel, from my conversations with both Jody and Billy, and I’m not surprised to find he’s used it as the emblem of his father’s territory. I find it stark and sad, but more disturbing to me is the juxtaposition of people who lack organs of sight with animals that have huge, wide, hypervigilant human eyes. In the coming months Billy will send me copies of some of his illustrated children’s stories, fairy tales about talking animals and magical relationships between animals and humans—always with an animal in the role of savior—and these stories will support my reading the floor plan of his home as autobiographical.

In the nonfiction narrative of Billy’s life, the story of himself that he tells to himself, the only creatures that bore witness to his suffering were mute animals, incapable of conveying what they saw, incapable of effecting his rescue. The humans who did see his anguish might as well have been faceless, blind, and dumb, for all they did to help him.

I
N JAIL FOLLOWING THE MURDERS, IN THOSE MOMENTS
he considered the possibility that his attempt to free himself and his sisters had backfired so completely that he’d killed Becky and incarcerated himself, Billy was despairing. Only his grandmother visited him. Jody didn’t respond to his letters. The rest of his extended family withdrew and went back to California after they’d plundered their dead relatives’ belongings and taken in the spectacle of the funeral. He had no friends; his lawyer neither liked nor, he sensed, believed him. He had no means to distract himself from rehearsing the miserable narrative of his short life.

In what he acknowledges to me as a feeble attempt at suicide, on September 21, 1984, Billy removed the narrow blade from a disposable safety razor and cut his arm, nicking a vessel that bled dramatically for a short time but didn’t require suturing. The gesture produced no result other than his removal from the cell he’d occupied originally to what he calls a “rubber room,” where he couldn’t hurt himself. Although no one interpreted Billy’s cutting himself as anything but a bid for attention or pity—one that instead earned him contempt, further hardened the DA’s office against him, and encouraged law enforcement to dismiss him as a coward as well as a sociopath—it did precipitate his third post-arrest psychiatric interview, the one with Dr. David Kirkpatrick, whom Billy still faults for what he considers the indefensibly insensitive remark that he “did not even have the right to kill himself at this time,” because he had a “monumental task” before him: repaying his debt to society.

But Dr. Kirkpatrick wasn’t unsympathetic in his assessment of Billy’s personality. He found him “engaging, intelligent,” and not without remorse, a young man “struggling with extreme existential, moral, and redemptive or restitutive conflict.”

In Euripides’ play
Orestes
—a later work that casts the ancient story in human rather than divine terms—the Argive assembly condemns Orestes and Electra to death by stoning, and Orestes defends their having killed their mother by reminding their accusers of Clytemnestra’s infidelity. In consideration of this, the assembly offers the siblings the choice of committing suicide. This was the extent of mortal law to respond to the terrible ambiguity of breaking the most sacred of taboos in righteous defense. In the end, Apollo intervenes to spare their lives.

Without the option of deus ex machina, heightened public consciousness of the physical, sexual, and emotional abuse that unfold in often deceptively normal-seeming homes has slowly changed the way Americans view parricide, which they have generally tended to dismiss as a crime of unalloyed depravity. Despite his juvenile record, enough of Billy’s early experiences align with those of the typical “victim-offender” that he and his post-conviction counsel have crafted an appeal that hinges on his original attorney’s failure to present him as an abused child. A term applied to battered women and, increasingly, to children who attack and kill their abusers, victim-offenders are considered by today’s courts as a distinct category of murderer, one that was a new concept in 1984, introduced a year earlier to the general public when the February 14, 1983, trial of Richard Jahnke commanded the attention of the entire country.

In November 1982, sixteen-year-old Jahnke and his sister, Deborah, seventeen, lay in wait for their father, who had beaten them and their mother for years, and who had sexually abused Deborah. Brother and sister armed themselves with guns from their father’s arsenal and strategically placed other firearms throughout their home in Cheyenne, Wyoming. When their parents returned from an evening out, Mr. Jahnke got out of his car and walked toward the garage, giving Richard the opportunity for which he’d waited. Jahnke’s attorney, Lee Adler, successfully introduced evidence of long-standing battery, including the fact that his client had reported his father to social services several times to no effect. In the end, Richard, who had meticulously planned his father’s death, was found guilty not of first-or even second-degree murder but of manslaughter. After intense media coverage familiarized the public with the antecedents of his crime, “a letter-writing campaign was initiated to influence the trial judge in sentencing” and in less than three weeks collected 4,000 letters and 10,000 signatures on petitions urging leniency. Paul Mones, an expert legal consultant who has devoted his high-profile career to educating the public and the legal system about parricide, and who provided a declaration for Billy’s appeal, puts it succinctly. “Courts are finally waking up to the problem. Kids just don’t take these actions unless something is very, very wrong.”
^*13

With respect to Billy, Mones was approached for a comment on the likelihood of his committing future acts of violence. Not sufficiently familiar with the Gilley murders to address the case directly, Mones offered a generic response: parricide is the “result of a highly specific set of circumstances, that being the dynamic of the parent/child relationship.”
^†14
Because this dynamic ends with the death of the parent(s), parricides do not, generally speaking, pose a threat to others.

In the wake of Jahnke’s instantly infamous murder of his father, “the subsequent child-abuse defense attracted a flood of national media attention, from
People
and
Rolling Stone
to
60 Minutes,
”
^*15
and helped establish the characteristics that typify parricide. Like Jahnke, Billy was a white male between the ages of sixteen and eighteen with a long-standing history of abuse. He’d reported the abuse to an appropriate authority without result. When he asked to be put into foster care, and later, when he attempted to run away, he was returned to his tormentors. The six months leading up to the murders were marked by increasing familial tension and a renewed sense of the impossibility of his escaping the home. He attacked his parents when they were defenseless; even the words he spoke upon killing them were those uttered by virtually all nonpsychotic children who kill their parents: “We’re free.” The choice for children like Billy is stark: to remain the passive victim of what appears to them to be a reign of terror that will never end or to take a “most drastic measure to assure the cessation of the abuse.”
^†16

An even more useful precedent for Billy’s case would have been that of Jerry Ball, who killed his mother, father, and two younger brothers with a baseball bat in January 1983. At sixteen years old, he had endured a lifetime of abuse from both parents, rarely expressing anger until one night his mother “cussed” him and “he started swinging the baseball bat and couldn’t stop. Jerry expressed sorrow in the aftermath of his actions that he had killed his six-year-old brother, who had never really done anything to him. ‘He hit him to shut him up,’ the psychologist said. ‘His brother was screaming.’
^*17

The problem for Billy was—and remains—that under Oregon law “extreme emotional disturbance is a defense only of intentional murder, not of aggravated murder,” and the fact that Billy killed his parents as they slept, presenting no imminent threat to him or to Jody, meant that he was necessarily charged with aggravated murder, which in Oregon was also the charge automatically given a multiple murder. “No Oregon case has ever held that a defense of ‘battered child syndrome’ may be asserted as a basis for self-defense or the defense of another,” the Appellant’s Reply Brief states. “Oregon law…has always required that the threat
be
‘imminent,’”
^†18
rather than perceived as imminent due to past trauma.

The brief goes on to argue that although Drs. Stanulis and Levin testified, post-conviction, that Billy suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder and organic brain syndrome and therefore had been mentally incompetent at the time of the murders, the three mental health experts Pickens retained in 1984—Drs. Abrams, Maletzky, and Kirkpatrick—found Billy to be sane. Billy was aware of his actions at the time of the murders, they determined, and had committed them with forethought and intent. Pickens had no reason to suppose there was any basis for a mental defense, a theory that is in Billy’s case the product of “hindsight” and therefore inadmissible, as an appeal can rest only on information available at the time of the original trial.

Clearly the law varies from state to state. In West Virginia, the fact that Jerry Ball had bludgeoned his two little brothers to death didn’t dissuade Paul Mones from defending him nor did it prevent experts in parricide from testifying on his behalf. Two psychiatrists from Boston’s McLean Hospital, Ronald Ebert and Shervert Frazier, who was later appointed director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said, simply, “Jerry was a kid who had suffered severe abuse, which triggered the murders.” Like Billy, and like many other parricide offenders, Jerry Ball hit his parents far more times than was required to kill them, a reflection not of an innate thirst for destruction but perhaps of his belief in the omnipotence of his mother and father. Good and loving parents appear powerful to their children
and
they empower them; they help them discover their own strength and effectiveness. Abusive, tyrannical parents not only loom as implacable gods but also strip their children of confidence in their own ability to effect change. Every child has a hard time accepting the death of a parent; a battered child has even less sense that he, vulnerable and unworthy, might have the strength to dispatch his abuser—better to hit him again, and again, just to make sure.

Though it may sound implausible to someone who hasn’t been subjected to chronic battery, when Billy tells me that, at eighteen years old, he “didn’t really expect his father and mother to stay dead,” I don’t disbelieve him. Having been told all his life that he could do nothing right, that he was a loser, destined for failure, why would he imagine he’d managed to bring about so profound a transformation in the world as he knew it? What other than his parents’ harping on his inevitably ending up in jail might have reassured him that he had in fact made them “stay dead”?