While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (19 page)

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FTER THE FUNERAL, THAD GUYER TOOK JODY HOME
to the Livingstons, leaving her in a situation that deteriorated within two months. Judging by the investigative report based on Kathy’s interview—which took place fifteen years after the murders, during which time she’d had no contact with Jody—Kathy was suspicious of Jody’s cerebral nature, unable to understand how she might have developed her intellect at the expense of her emotions to protect herself from an unbearable family life. “Jody is very precise about what she does and calculates every move…. Jody’s mind is always clicking,” she said. In Kathy’s opinion, her friend “spent an inordinate amount of time reading and planning the rest of her life.” Unused to domestic violence and unable to imagine its effects, Kathy was “creeped out” by Jody’s ability to compartmentalize or, if need be, deny her emotions and continue to function. Though she’d witnessed how the Gilleys treated their children and commented on the absence of love in the Gilleys’ home, she didn’t make the connection between Jody’s environment and what was not Jody’s essential nature so much as her response to that environment. When the two girls went to the house on Ross Lane—without Thad, in Kathy’s version—Kathy found it “very disturbing” that Jody could enter her parents’ bedroom, where “there was a comforter on the bed with blood still soaked on it.” But Jody wanted Bunny, the toy Becky always took to bed, and knew she’d find it where her sister had been sleeping. A goal-oriented individual, inured to forging past what disturbed or hurt her, she went in the bedroom, walked past the bed where her mother had died, and picked up the rabbit. Another person might have admired what he or she saw as courage and strength of purpose unusual in a sixteen-year-old, but Kathy faulted Jody for what seemed to her a lack of feeling.

The girls’ friendship had always been a function of geography rather than temperament, and Thad attributes their inevitable falling-out to Kathy’s envy of Jody’s receiving a monthly $260 death benefit check, giving Jody the ability to buy things—clothes, music, movie tickets—that Kathy couldn’t afford. But it’s also true that Kathy, revealed by her conversation with the private detective to be less sophisticated and psychologically acute than Jody, had been pulled into the wake of three brutal and suddenly notorious killings, the kind of crime that was, or had been, unheard of in Medford. Perhaps it was beyond her ability to play host to someone directly connected to the murders. Jody, after all, was doing weird things, walking in her sleep, for example, her empty arms carrying what she believed was a quilt and saying, like Lady Macbeth trying and failing to scrub away the stain of her guilt, “Here, wash this. It’s covered in blood.” If Kathy remembered being upset by a blood-soaked comforter, it may have been the one she couldn’t see. Probably it was easier to focus her fear of what Billy had done, of the sudden realization of what didn’t seem possible—murder within a family—onto Jody and assign at least some of the fear she felt to what she called Jody’s “creepiness.”

Too, as Billy himself reminded Jody and her new guardians, he might be jailed but he still existed. A month after the murders, he placed a collect call to the Livingstons, identifying himself to Kathy, who answered the phone, as “George Osborn” and arguing that yes, she did too know who he was and he wanted to talk to Jody. “When Jody got off the phone,” Kathy said, she “told me that Billy said, ‘I can’t believe you told them that I did it all and that you told on me. I thought we were going to run away and be free.’” The call was followed by the letter with the bloody dagger, postmarked June 1, 1984:

Dear Jody I want you to giv grandma mom’s weding ring and the clock that belonged to grandpa, it will be beter for you in the long run! And I don’t want you to hert grandma any more, and if you tack my car away from me you will be sorry but wont be able to say it!

All my love Billy

Aside from the drawing, the letter’s salient feature is its childishness, the spelling, grammar, and phrasing one might expect from a boy of eight rather than eighteen. The note’s casual tone and failure to convey any urgency or anxiety about the future reinforces the impression that the writer is very young, very unaware of the gravity of his situation. Billy’s suggestion that Jody had hurt their grandmother alludes to the implicit insult of her having chosen the Livingstons as her guardians rather than Betty. By the time Billy went to trial, in November of that year, the rift between Jody and her grandmother had widened to the point that Betty publicly voiced her suspicion that Jody was a “snake in the grass [who] put Billy up to it,” as he was by nature a sweet-tempered person, incapable of plotting the murder of his own family, an opinion that stood in direct contrast to that of his paternal grandmother, Essie Mitchell, who said he was “full of hate all the time.”

Jody’s relationship with Betty was but one of those she abandoned in her new life, after the murders. If Kathy found that Jody carried too many unpleasant associations, Jody felt the same to be true of Kathy. Soon, Thad tells me, she wasn’t staying at the Livingstons’ but was spending the night at other friends’, whom Thad characterizes as wild, living on the east side, where the rich kids lived. And there was a boyfriend now, on the other side of town, Warren, whom Thad grants a grudging admiration. “Warren was a great break-dancer,” he tells me. “He was a lower-income, west-side kid. I went looking for Jody at his place, and when neither of them were there I spoke with his mother, very white trash, a cigarette hanging from her mouth the whole time she was talking.”

“But if you weren’t interested in becoming Jody’s guardian, why were you running around town after her?” I ask him. “Why wasn’t she the Livingstons’ problem?”

“I’ll tell you why.” Thad leans forward. “Because the Livingstons couldn’t control her, and if they didn’t control her, their guardianship would be terminated. Jody would end up in foster care.”

So Thad qua Professor Henry Higgins—to update Jody’s Pygmalion analogy—emotionally invested in the fortunes of his orphaned Eliza Doolittle, kept chasing after her. And by the time he caught up with her, one afternoon in late June, with her wild east-side friends, “lying in a Stratolounger, wearing a lot of makeup, with her weird hair,” he had something to tell Jody. Two months had been enough for the Livingstons. They’d lost patience with her acting out and no longer wanted to be her guardians.

“So,” Thad says, “there she is lying there looking up at me, full of attitude. Kathy hates her, she says, because she has money and she won’t spend it on Kathy. Who do I think she should live with? I tell her, ‘Pick Connie Skillman if you want someone caring. Pick the Arnolds if you want a normal life.’”

“Normal?” Jody drawled in her most sarcastic tone, of which Thad does a convincing imitation. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”

“Well, where do you want to live?” he asked her.

“I want to live with you.”

Thad shakes his head. “Nooo,” he says to me, drawing the word out. “Unh-unh. ‘That’s not going to work,’ I tell her. ‘I’m in the middle of a divorce.’”

Thad tells me he left Jody in the Stratolounger and went home to talk to his soon-to-be ex-wife, Debbie, who said she was willing to let Jody live with them, in their attic, until Jody decided what to do with herself. “So,” Thad says, “Jody moves in. Her behavior is totally erratic. One week she’s fine, the next she’s reverted back to being a quasi delinquent” (a term that overstates what was really no more than truancy). “I had some control—she was a little more responsive to my attempts at discipline because she knew I had no problem humiliating her by chasing after her.”

In September, Thad moved out of his house and into his friend Dan Hake’s place, at 1469 Stardust Way, “a nice place with a great hilltop view,” on the eastern border of Medford, and Jody moved with him. School started, she broke up with the break-dancing Warren, and Thad tried to establish what he calls “some loose rules.” He knew he couldn’t prevent Jody from cutting school, as she had on the day before the murders, but he asked her to tell him when she was playing hooky, which she did not do. “Then she stops coming home at night,” Thad says. “I don’t know where she is. I have to go looking for her.” Jody had a new boyfriend, Rob Brooks,* from the wrong side of the tracks in Thad’s opinion. He found Jody “hanging out with a lot of dead-end teenagers, no adult supervision, beer, marijuana,” which, Jody stresses to me, she never once smoked.

“If you’re not home in one hour,” Thad told her, “I’m coming back for you.”

To avoid embarrassment, Jody returned to Stardust Way, where Thad confronted her. The school had called, he told her. She was a truant, and she was failing her classes.

“What are you going to do about it?” Jody challenged.

“I’m grounding you,” Thad told her. “You go to school, you come home—that’s it.” Thad laughs. “I can’t make her, she tells me, because I’m a womanizer.”

“You’re…you’re just like a hideous monkey in the forest!” Jody said when he grounded her.

“That’s a direct quote,” Thad says, clearly still amused by the expression of Jody’s outrage. Given the hostility of her response to his girlfriends—and he admits he did see a lot of women in the wake of his divorce—Thad interprets Jody’s judgment as jealousy.

“No.” Jody shakes her head when I introduce the idea. “The only problem I had with Thad’s girlfriends was that they were ridiculously young”—sometimes as young as she—“and that offended my sensibilities.”

Too, Jody remembers sexual tension between herself and Thad. Uncomfortable with what felt like his attraction to her, Jody finally spoke to him about it.

“And?” I prompt.

“And he was a gentleman. We talked about it. He stopped.”

“Stopped what?” I ask.

“Well, it wasn’t as if he were
do
ing anything, so all there was to stop was his…his conveying that he felt that way toward me.”

With or without the extra frisson of physical attraction, Jody and Thad were emotionally entangled. Jody abided by the grounding; she went to school and reported to an after-school clerical job Thad gave her at his office. She wanted to go to Georgetown, she told him, the university he’d attended, and which had informed his commitment to civil rights and social justice.

Because he believed Jody could go wherever she wanted if she studied hard, Thad encouraged her ambition, pleased that she showed up for work religiously. The fact that she was a model employee made it all the more surprising to him when the school called to say she hadn’t been to class for a week.

Thad confronted her. It was one of the very few times, he tells me, that she cried in front of him. “I’ve ruined everything, haven’t I?” Jody wept.

“Well, you’ve derailed,” he agreed. “But we can get you back on track.”

The transformation, he says, was immediate, and marked by a change of costume, always significant in a Cinderella story, or in a Pygmalion story, for that matter. Jody went from her borderline grunge/punk incarnation to a picture-perfect coed. “Skirt and blouse, with a brooch at the neck. No more weird hair or makeup,” Thad says. “Very conservatively feminine.” She abandoned her “dead-end crowd” for a new group of friends from the right side of the tracks, spending most of her time with Rachelle Cox, a well-groomed good girl with a strict mother. The school counselor professed astonishment at so complete an about-face. Not only was Jody making A’s, her attendance record was suddenly perfect.

“One night I come home from work,” Thad says, “and Jody’s kneeling over the coffee table, and the top of it’s covered in Post-its, arranged in a hierarchy. A-list kids on top, and from there all the way down, level by level, to the losers. She’s mapped out the social strata of the entire eleventh grade, one name to a Post-it.” Jody pointed out her position within the scheme, placing herself significantly below the upper echelon to which she aspired. “She told me which Post-its she knew and considered friends,” Thad says, “and which she needed to cultivate in order to get where she wanted—the top.” The exercise showed him the intensity of Jody’s ambition, her focus, as well as what Kathy judged her unnerving tendency to calculate her every move to ensure a desired outcome. “By the twelfth grade,” Thad tells me, “she was there. She was the most popular.”

“I was sooooooo not the most popular!” Jody exclaims when I share the story with her. “And I’d totally forgotten about the Post-its. This is such an embarrassing story.”

It’s a good snapshot of Jody, both because it bears witness to the focus and determination that characterize her approach to any given situation—a mental organization Billy was unable to achieve until he was separated from his parents—and because it explains the unease of a girl like Kathy when exposed to a personality as fiercely goal-directed as Jody’s, who never felt the confidence to leave anything to chance. That was a luxury for other girls, carefree girls who might consider their social lives an arena for recreation. Jody’s social life was work, as it would be for years to come, when, surrounded by D.C. power brokers, she was immersed in what felt to her like “an alternate universe. It sounds glamorous, but it was hard and painful…. No one goes from that kind of background and jumps class without consequence. I didn’t trust anyone. I had to learn boundaries and all kinds of socialization that other people had received at home.”

In fact, very few people jump class at all, whether or not they come from loving homes. It requires a level of determination that is beyond unusual, extraordinary.

“They were an interruption,” Thad says when we talk, moving without transition from the Post-its to the murders. “Billy didn’t do a thing for her. Jody was always going to be the success she became. If anything, he made it harder. She had to ignore the stigma of being a murderer’s sister, and of being accused of collaborating with a murderer. She didn’t have the chance to run the usual gamut of emotions in relation to her parents. She would have cycled back toward them. As an adult, she would have made peace with them.”

I nod, but I don’t agree with him. Jody’s estrangement from her parents was not the typical adolescent’s breaking free of familial bonds; it grew out of abuse. And while the murders neither made Jody ambitious nor forged her intent to jump class, they did end the life she had before so that she never had to abandon her family, to choose to live in one world while they remained in the one from which she escaped. Too, the murders gave her access to the help—the people—she needed to realize her goals. She knows this, and it compounds her guilt at having survived. “From any objective viewpoint,” she wrote in 1993, “informed by values of ‘success,’ of ‘achievement,’ of worldview and aesthetic appreciation, I have benefited from the murders. At present, I don’t care to calculate the ways I have not, the things I have lost.”