While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (2 page)

If I have an endless appetite for reading about murder, for seeing how yet another young woman’s life is ended, I also need to hear—perhaps I need to tell—the other story, the one about the girl that gets away, who goes on to invent another self, another life.

“This is the story of my rebirth,” Jody wrote when she was twenty-five, the opening line of her own account of the murders, titled “Death Faces” and submitted as her senior thesis for graduation from Georgetown. It’s a project of narrative nonfiction, an ambitious project, I think, brave. Jody sends me a copy a few weeks after our first meeting.
This is the story of my rebirth.
Of course, I think, she would have to believe this; she would have to believe that she has been reborn. And yet I’m surprised enough that I stop reading, stop right there, before I’ve begun. Surprised by what? Her honesty? The relationship of her statement—the statement of a stranger—to my own life?

Or maybe it’s her perspective—whatever allows her to introduce the story of her family’s annihilation as a beginning rather than an end—that strikes me as unusual.

In the years after I broke away from my father, I dreamed often of car accidents or of buildings collapsing. In these dreams, by some miracle or fluke—it’s never a function of ability or intelligence—I escape from the wreckage, I run and keep running until I am some distance away. When I reach a place of safety, I begin to inventory my body, which is naked, stripped of clothing. In the dream, I run my hands over my arms and chest, down my flanks and my legs. I touch every part of myself I can reach, counting fingers and toes, the way a mother does a newborn, to see if I’m intact, all there. How much have I managed to take with me? Sometimes I appear to be all right, at first I do, but I’m injured in a place I can’t see. Blood leaks from a wound I can’t find. Often a leg is gone and this perplexes me. How have I escaped—run away—without it? In a recurrent dream, my face has fallen into small pieces, like those of a jigsaw puzzle, and I gather up all I can and set off to find a surgeon who can put me back together into a person I am able to recognize.

“We’ve both forsaken the West for the East coast,” I write, e-mailing Jody before we meet, “and I wonder if you feel as I do, that the past is another life, in another country, a place you’ve left forever. The people with whom you and I grew up are gone—dead or permanently separated from us by what came to pass. You’ve abandoned the landscape, started over. And yet, of course, you remain yourself. You are the girl who was in the house that night with your brother. You and he are your parents’ children.

“I remain fascinated by my father,” I tell her. “I don’t know who he is. I rebuilt myself after he dismantled me. I feel there are parts of myself that he has yet to relinquish or that I have yet to reclaim. Perhaps, in contemplating you and your brother, studying what came before and precipitated the murders and what has happened since in the lives of the two survivors, I can articulate something both of us want to understand. I can’t tell you what that something is, not yet. I’d have to write my way toward it.”

Later, after I read her thesis, I think: Was this what Jody was doing, at twenty-five, in writing “Death Faces”? Was she trying to understand how she’d survived, or even
that
she’d survived? And what about her brother, Billy? Because the more I know about Jody, the more I want to understand him, as well, a boy of eighteen at the time of the murders. He had to go on, too; he had to have some kind of life after. And of course I want to know what made him do it, what happened in that family before.

I know my history and Jody’s are not comparable, that the massacre of her family was catastrophic in a way I can barely begin to imagine. Almost everything she knew was destroyed, lost. The connection between us—a parallel I assume and she confirms—is that both she and I had a previous self who no longer exists. We didn’t arrive at our adult selves through the usual transitions, the normal trials. Instead, a rupture occurred, a violence was done to each of us, an act or acts that were outside our ability to avoid or manage or even understand—the kind of thing that wasn’t supposed to happen, didn’t happen, could not happen. When it did, its effect was like the foundation being torn out from under a house. Everything came apart; what was salvageable had to be reassembled into a new whole. The adult Jody may be rebuilt from pieces of the girl she was before, but she is not that same girl. The original Jody is gone. I know this from my own history. And I know that in terms of my telling the story of her family, the difference between Jody’s and my experiences is as important as the intersection. Were Jody’s a story of incest (rather than one that may turn out to include incestuous motivations), I couldn’t approach her, it, as I can a story of murder, which, unlike incest, remains for me an impossible something, the kind of violent rupture that is final, and that wouldn’t, couldn’t happen in a family.

There’s a part of the analogy I draw between Jody and myself that she rejects even before we meet. “Your brother lives, exiled from you, and from everyone else,” I write in my first e-mail to her. “And my father lives, also and necessarily exiled from me. I wonder if your brother and my father are not similar figures, not through their actions but in the way they exist for us: out of reach, the unknowable recipients of our love, anger, confusion, fear, and more.”

Jody replies immediately. I’m wrong, she tells me. She doesn’t love her brother. She’s tried to, but she can’t. “It’s me who is out of reach and unknowable,” she writes, “and I reserve all my anger, confusion, and fear for myself.”

A self who is out of reach and unknowable.
I read those words many times before the two of us meet, trying to understand them, her. Is she stating a human truth that applies to all of us, being philosophical in suggesting that no one can ever know him-or herself completely? Or is she acknowledging something peculiar to herself and, by extension, others who have experienced violence, trauma? Are people like us left with parts of our own psyches walled off, removed from our ability to access them? And are those parts alive? Or are they dead? Are they aspects of ourselves that were destroyed by the shock, whatever it was, and interred within us?

I bring the printout of Jody’s e-mail with me when I drive to the restaurant we chose for our first meeting, a Japanese place not far from where she lives in Washington, D.C. Parked a few blocks away, I consider her words, propped on the steering wheel. It’s 6:45. Having allowed myself time to get lost, I find the restaurant easily and am early, with minutes to fill. I turn the radio on, then off. I read the e-mail, watch traffic move along Connecticut Avenue, the busy thoroughfare that runs through the Capitol. A fine rain has begun to fall; the street is wet. Long, dazzling reflections of red taillights spill over its dark surface.

Washington is a city I know only through my husband’s family, and whenever I visit I stay with my mother-in-law, who lives near Rock Creek Park. Often when I run in the thickly wooded park, I lose my way. I follow its deeper, unpaved paths and my mind wanders, I forget to watch for trail markers. Today, before I shower and dress to meet Jody, I go for a run and get so turned around that I emerge more than a mile from where I intended to exit. It frightens me sometimes, getting lost. I remember stories of women who disappeared, what’s left of their bodies found months later in one of the park’s many dells or ditches, and I chastise myself for choosing so lonely a place to run. But solitude helps me think, running helps me think, and I like the way the earth absorbs my footfalls, so that I hardly hear myself as I pass among the trees.

Maybe, too, I want the sense of danger, court it the way I used to as a young woman, twenty-five, twenty-six, when I took recklessly long swims at night. Each time, I walked out of the dark water breathless, exhilarated, my legs scraped and stinging where I’d brushed against rocks I hadn’t seen. Again I’d escaped. The heaving black ocean with its wraithlike tendrils of eelgrass reaching around my legs, its hunger, never satisfied, for another and another sacrifice, the gnashing and churning of its depths—I’d swum out of it. My old self, the girl I’d been before, waited in the shadows against the cliff, shoved with my towel in a crease between the rocks. Or maybe I’d taken her along, buried within me. In either case I’d proved it again: the dead girl couldn’t drag me under, she couldn’t slow my speed.

A self who is out of reach and unknowable.
We all have such a self, of course, at least one. But for people who are fated to sift through the debris that remains in the wake of a family’s disintegration, the ones who can’t stop searching for the piece, perhaps very small, that might explain what happened and why, that secret self whom we glimpse but never truly see can take on a sinister cast. She is dangerous, perhaps, or she is wicked. She is guilty of something—why else would she refuse to be known? She is broken and frail, empty to the point of trans-parence. Because she remains hidden, she invites a measure of dread. Who is this self that consciousness—conscience?—is unable or unwilling to acknowledge?

If any admission by Jody other than this, of a secret, unknowable self, could have fixed my desire to understand her life and the lives of her parents and siblings, I don’t know what it might be.

What follows is a narrative of a family tragedy, my reconstruction of the events that occurred on April 27, 1984, their antecedents, and their still unfolding consequences for Jody, and for her brother, Billy, who remains in prison. Studying the Gilleys required making inquiries into myself as well, attempts to understand how my enduring fascination with the violent end of another woman’s family informs the way I regard my own, very different past.

Jody and Billy provided most of the information on which this account is based. With Jody as my guide, I visited the places where the Gilleys lived and where three of them died, and it was through Jody that I contacted her brother, Billy, with whom she does not correspond and whom I’ve come to know. Jody introduced me to other people who were affected by the Gilley murders; she and her brother allowed me access to documents essential to my re-creating their lives and the lives and deaths of their parents and of their little sister, Becky.

Mine is not the first narrative of the Gilley family but rests upon and responds to others: the case files of social workers; the memories of people I interviewed; the records kept by law enforcement and by the Children’s Services Division of Jackson County, Oregon; the ten psychiatric evaluations made of Billy between the ages of thirteen and thirty-five; the transcript of his trial for murder; the reports compiled by two private investigators hired by Billy’s appeal attorney; the affidavits collected for his appeal for a retrial; the appellant briefs that argue against claims made by his appeal. Among all the efforts to understand how a child is driven to so extreme and desperate an act as killing his parents and sister, most revealing are the stories, both fiction and nonfiction, that Jody and Billy have written in the years since the murders. Their words are very much a part of this book; their various accounts demonstrate how essential the process of telling and retelling the story of their family has been to their surviving its destruction.

For Jody and for Billy, the work of putting together a coherent narrative from what were often dislocated, fractured memories has been inseparable from—and even, I believe, the same undertaking as—reassembling what remained of themselves, of salvaging what they could of the children they had been before—before he murdered his family, and before she endured the kind of psychic assault most of us will never have to contemplate.

O
N THE MORNING OF THURSDAY, APRIL
26, 1984, Jody Gilley went to her neighbor Kathy Ackerson’s before school. As was her habit, she went out the kitchen door and cut across the field that separated their two homes. Jody and Kathy had gotten to know each other the previous year, on the bus to and from Medford High, where they were now sophomores. They didn’t socialize during the school day; Jody hung with a straighter crowd than Kathy, who by her own admission was something of a stoner. As Jody describes it, she and Kathy weren’t best friends, but they liked each other and were frequently in each other’s homes. “My next-field neighbor,” they called each other. It wasn’t unusual for Jody to finish getting dressed over at Kathy’s.

“Because you wanted to wear something your mother didn’t approve of?” I ask Jody.

“No, the dressing-sexy-for-school thing happened much earlier, in fifth or sixth grade. By tenth grade it was all about looking punk. Ratting my hair, applying dark eye makeup, piercing my ears with safety pins. And all of that happened at school, in the girls’ bathroom. At Kathy’s it was just, you know, getting ready for school together. Me probably using the Mary Kay makeup she had because her mom sold it, whereas my makeup was bottom-drawer Fred Meyer lip gloss and Maybelline. Also, I was curling-iron challenged, and Kathy could get that perfect eighties feather in a way I couldn’t.”

I nod. Long, auburn, glossy: Jody’s hair is the first thing I notice about her. The way she gathers it into one hand and pulls it forward in a thick rope over one shoulder—the image stays with me after our first meeting, I’m not sure why. Perhaps because it’s a pretty gesture. Jody herself is pretty, with a heart-shaped face and hazel eyes, not much if any makeup. Dressed in dark pants and a denim jacket, high heels. When she talks, all the emphasis is in her voice. She speaks without using her hands, as I was taught, unsuccessfully, to do.

Nothing about Jody’s appearance surprises me—I didn’t, after all, have any idea what she looked like—but her physical presence is itself unsettling. The Jody I know is sixteen, a girl in a car with her brother, the two of them motionless. Petrified, as if the murders had been, like the head of a Gorgon, a sight that turned them to stone. For ten years I’ve known Jody not as a woman but as a character, one among the many in my head, images taken from books and movies, not so much people as ideas of people, whom I expect never to encounter in the flesh.

There was more to getting dressed at Kathy’s than looking the way Jody wanted for school. It was easier in the house across the field. Kathy’s parents weren’t always fighting with each other or screaming at their children. Her mother didn’t look for excuses to punish her daughter; she didn’t throw things at Kathy or pin her down and blow cigarette smoke in her face just out of meanness. She didn’t denigrate her children or act like reading was a waste of time, the way Jody’s parents did. The fact that Jody spent so much of her life hidden behind the cover of a book was a source of conflict at home; her family understood her insatiable, nearly compulsive reading for what it was: escape, judgment. Jody would rather be anywhere than there, with them; she was just biding her time until she could walk out the door, old enough that the police wouldn’t come after her and bring her back, as they did her brother when he ran away.

Kathy had brothers, but they were younger than Billy, thirteen and fourteen, and they were good kids, normal anyway. They didn’t cause the kind of trouble Billy did—didn’t get kicked out of Bible camp for smoking in the woods, didn’t get arrested for breaking into cars or setting people’s living rooms on fire. They didn’t sneak into Kathy’s room at night to put their hands between her legs.

After they got dressed that day, the girls rode the bus to Medford High, but, as Jody would tell Detective Richard Davis the morning after the murders, they never entered the building. “We went to Games People Play [a video arcade] for a while and then we went over to a guy’s house. And we stayed there for a while and then we went to Pappy’s and got potatoes and then we walked home.”

Jody had skipped school before. According to Kathy Ackerson, interviewed in 1999 by a private investigator, Jody cared about her grades and made straight A’s—“B’s,” Jody corrects—but she was sixteen years old, and it was hard to have to answer to someone every minute of every day. A few unstructured hours, safe from the strife at home and apart from the demands of her teachers, must have presented a significant temptation.

“Mrs. Gilley was very controlling,” Kathy explained to the private investigator dispatched by Billy’s attorney for appeal. “Jody had to sneak around to do things she wanted to do,” things most parents considered harmless. Not only did Jody have “more than her share of household chores…the laundry, the dishes, and the cooking,” but while Jody worked, her friend remembered, Linda Gilley just “sat around and smoked cigarettes.”

The way Kathy saw it, “there was a war going on between Jody and her mother.” She “never heard anyone in the Gilley family say ‘I love you’…never heard either parent, Mr. or Mrs. Gilley, compliment or give positive strokes to any of the kids.”

That Thursday, after Kathy came home to discover the school had telephoned to report her absence, she called the Gilleys’ house to see if Jody had gotten in trouble, and if so, how much. She knew Jody’s brother was beaten severely when he disobeyed or was caught in a lie, and although Jody doesn’t remember having been whipped the way Billy was, not by the time she was in high school, anyway, it was Kathy’s impression that Jody suffered her share of physical abuse. She remembered bruises, she told the private investigator. Once, she thought she’d seen a cigarette burn.

But when Kathy called the Gilleys’ house, she didn’t get to speak with her friend. Instead, Jody’s mother, Linda, “answered the phone and said that Jody was grounded until she was eighteen and then slammed the phone down.” For the rest of the evening the phone was busy—Kathy presumed it had been taken off the hook—and she didn’t see Jody again until 1:34 the next morning.

The idea of being grounded for two years wouldn’t have struck the teenaged Jody as unlikely. The way things turned out, she was pretty much always in trouble, she tells me. Punishments overlapped; they were subject to her mother’s capricious revisions. On any given occasion, whether Jody was actually grounded or not made little difference. If Linda didn’t want her daughter to go out, she’d just say Jody hadn’t done the dishes the right way, or had forgotten to dust the living room, or to pick up after Becky, or whatever else came to mind—it didn’t matter what.

With a few significant exceptions, Jody’s memory of the afternoon of April 26 aligns with what her brother recounts for me when I visit him in prison the following fall, and with his sworn statement: the affidavit he prepared in 1996 for his appeal for a retrial. Billy, who had dropped out of school after the ninth grade, was home before Jody returned that day and overheard his mother making plans to trap her daughter in a lie. Having learned from the school’s attendance officer that Jody hadn’t shown up for class, Linda told the children’s father that, as Billy stated in his affidavit, she “was going to pretend not to know about it, so she could catch Jody.” Lest Billy try to warn his sister before Linda had a chance to deceive her, Linda “looked straight at [Billy]…and told [him] to keep [his] mouth shut.”

When Jody came walking up the road, Billy, who had been watching for the arrival of the school bus, went out to meet her. Linda was too quick, however, and passed him, heading toward the mailbox to make a show of looking inside, “as if to check for the mail” she’d already collected. With their mother hovering too close for them to exchange a word in private, Billy “was afraid to say anything.”
^*1

“Why didn’t you come home on the bus?” Linda asked Jody.

“I got off at Kathy’s and walked,” Jody told her.

The scene Billy describes played out just as his mother had scripted it. “Oh, really?” Linda asked Jody. “The school called to say you weren’t in first or second period.”

Jody tells me she was ready with an answer. “Well, you know how they screw up sometimes,” she said to her mother. “Because when I’m tardy they’ve already took the card down to the office.”

The three had reached the kitchen door when, Jody told Detective Davis, her brother, who was carrying his baseball bat, said he’d “like to bump [their parents] off with it…pound them in.” Billy contends that it was Jody who mentioned physical retribution first, telling him under her breath that she’d “like to smash our mom’s face in.”

Linda ordered Billy to stay outside, and he did, his affidavit continues, “but just for a little bit. When I got to the living room…I heard my mom telling Jody that she knew Jody had skipped all day.” It was both children’s impression that Linda was delighted to have caught her daughter in a lie on top of truancy. “Drooling,” Billy says to me of his mother’s eagerness to corner Jody, “foaming at the mouth.”

Then, as both Billy and Jody remember, Billy asked Jody a question. Was she all right?, he wanted to know. “Why don’t you ask mom?” Jody said. “She has all the answers.” At this, Jody told Detective Davis, her mother “got mad and slapped me for being cocky.”

“I did have a tendency to mouth off,” she tells me.

Even though the family wasn’t alone—Glenn Riggs, who worked for Bill Sr., was present—Billy says their father stood up from where he was sitting on the couch, unbuckled his belt, and pulled it out from his pant loops. He started walking toward Jody, “yelling that he was going to beat her ass.” That this transpired in front of his father’s employee was something Billy found “especially galling,” reported the psychiatrist who interviewed Billy two months after the murders.

When Jody’s father came at her with his belt, she protested that at sixteen she was too old to be thrashed, and Bill backed off, warning his daughter that she’d better not skip school again. Jody promised she wouldn’t and asked her parents what her punishment would be, but Linda hadn’t decided and sent Jody to her room. Interviewed later, for Billy’s pre-sentencing report, Glenn Riggs characterized their interaction as “short-lived and not flagrant.” Nonetheless, he was embarrassed to have witnessed the eruption of a domestic conflict, and he got up to go. Bill and Linda walked Riggs out, and Billy took his chance to run upstairs to Jody’s room, the baseball bat still in his hand.

“I asked her if she was all right,” Billy said, and Jody told him she “hated our mom and dad and wished they were dead.” It wasn’t fair, she complained, that when Billy used to get into trouble, their parents would let him off with a warning the first time and punish him only if he repeated the offense, whereas they never gave her that second chance.

As both Jody and Billy recall, Billy became extremely agitated at the suggestion that their parents had ever shown him any leniency whatsoever. He reminded Jody that on many occasions their father had taken him out to the barn and whipped him with a hose until his back was covered with welts and that she’d seen the “black and blue marks where [their] father had beat [him] with his fist.”

Describing the incident, Billy recalls that he and Jody continued speaking in this vein, comparing the histories of their punishments. It is at this point that their accounts diverge, over the subject of sexual abuse. Speaking with me, Billy doesn’t waver even as much as a word from what he stated in his affidavit: Jody told him “the beatings were nothing compared with our dad molesting her,” and she knew their father was “going to try it again.”

“Why did she think that?” Billy tells me he asked his sister, alarmed, and she confided in him that she “noticed our dad stares at her while touching his penis.

“I told her that our mom wouldn’t let that happen,” and Jody said, “Mom didn’t care what he did to her, that Mom had it out for her, and if Mom cared then our dad wouldn’t still be living there.”

Jody, who reported her father’s leering at her and his propositioning her, denies her father ever molested her. For Detective Davis she recounted a different, shorter dialogue between her and her brother, one that made no reference to any sexual impropriety on anyone’s part. She told the detective that while Billy was talking—ranting, really—she “just sat there, and he [Billy] just said he’d like to get, he’d like to get rid of them.”

Detective Davis, who identified himself at Billy’s trial as the one who “more or less directed” the investigation of the murders, interviewed Jody immediately after Billy was taken into custody and again ten hours later, pushing her to recall Billy’s “exact words as best you can remember,” in hopes of establishing that her brother had announced a clear intention to murder their parents that very night.

But years of physical and emotional abuse had created a context from which it was difficult, perhaps impossible, for Jody to tease out an unambiguous threat. Both she and Billy had wished their parents dead. They’d said outright to each other that their parents were horrible, wicked people who deserved to die for the cruelties they’d visited upon their children. In what was a very human response to neglect, battery, and entrapment, each had fantasized aloud about how he or she might go about killing them. Kathy, who remembered Jody studying how to be a secret agent, said that Jody told her “she could make a miniature bomb and fantasized about blowing up her parents.” Jody told Detective Davis that Billy had had the idea to “bash their heads in…rent a boat and tie rocks to their feet and throw them in a river.”

That two teenagers who had endured year after year of “atrocities which society refused to recognize”—these are the words that Jody used in “Death Faces” to describe a childhood in which one after another social worker failed to respond to evidence of abuse—might dream up violent means of avenging their suffering and escaping their tormentors is neither a crime nor a surprise. In fact, none of Jody’s answers to Detective Davis’s questions suggest she found her brother’s comments shocking or even unusual.

“He just said he’d like to get…he’d like to get rid of them.”