While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (20 page)

I
T WOULD BE HARD TO FIND TWO LESS SIMILAR APPROACHES
to autobiography than Billy’s and Jody’s. But both siblings have used narrative—creating meaning and continuity through storytelling—to manage the psychic impact of the murders, and both have written stories of animals to approach a human situation that perhaps defied comprehension if left in the realm of human beings.

The emotional core of “Death Faces” was published by itself in
The Georgetown Journal
as “Early Ambitions” by Kara Curry, as Jody continued the practice of using pseudonyms borrowed from spices so she could write anonymously about some of the more disturbing incidents of her childhood, in this case one that inspired her to sleep with a knife in her bed.

“In the summer of ’83,” Jody wrote, “my father bid on a contract to beautify the eucalyptus trees at Stanford University. A local Californian tree service subcontracted to my father, who really needed the money. Father, my brother, I, and two other workers (Dave and Jackie) climbed into my dad’s rigs and drove down to Palo Alto for the summer. We were to stay in the home of the original contractors, who stayed elsewhere.”

During the first week of cutting back the eucalyptus, a limb came down bearing a nest of newborn squirrels. “The mother was missing. Three hairless and embryonic baby squirrels landed nearby. One did not survive the fall. To my horror, my brother threw the dead one in the chipper.”

Despite the predictions of Dave and her father and even a couple of passersby that the tiny creatures would never survive without their mother, Jody took the remaining two and their nest back to the borrowed house and fed them human infant formula every two hours. “Whenever I put my hand in the nest, they squeaked and moved toward its warmth, they nuzzled my fingers. They were so helpless and young. I wanted to save them.” But they didn’t live longer than two days in her care, and she blamed herself when they died, wondering if she’d given them spoiled formula.

In the moment, Jody was anguished in the way children are when they fail to save orphaned or injured animals. Already she’d daydreamed about them becoming her pets, animals she’d raised herself. Believing in her ability to save them, she believed, too, in her power to kill them. But Jody’s emotionally charged account of the squirrels’ fate was written in 1991, eight years after the squirrels died and seven years after her brother murdered her parents and sister, and this passage about a nest of three siblings without a mother to protect them and whose annihilation is authored by forces beyond their control or understanding can’t be read as anything other than a miniature prefiguring the larger tragedy that befell her own family.

The proof of this is in the epilogue to the story. The summer following the murders, at the wheel of Thad’s Volvo, with him as a passenger, Jody ran over a squirrel, and in the wake of what was an accident she was so overcome with what she calls “grief” that she cried “uncontrollably. I don’t think I’ve ever cried like that before. I couldn’t stop the tears. I stopped the car.

“Thad, accustomed to what he affectionately called my ‘acrylic veneer,’ looked at me incredulously and said, ‘You’re a softy. Deep down you’re just a softy,’ as though it were some kind of revelation.”

“Early Ambitions” makes no reference to the murders. The presumptive death of the run-over squirrel echoes the sacrifice of the nest of squirrel pups and, for a reader unaware of the murders, Jody’s grief appears to be a response to innocence lost, in that the essay is an account of her father’s wolfish behavior during that summer at Stanford. Away from home, Bill could drink openly after a day’s work, and as Dave, too, drank a lot, the partnership of the two men was sealed if not founded on their shared addiction. By habit, Jody closed herself in her room each evening and read while the rest of the crew made their way through one beer after another. “After a while,” Jody/ Kara wrote, “my father came to my room to persuade me to come out and join in with everyone else. Was there something wrong with me that I had to hide in my room? Did I think I was better than everyone else?”

As it happened, Bill didn’t get Jody to leave her book and join him and his friends, but he did do something that disconcerted her enough that she took a knife to bed with her. “I made a pact that whoever attacked me, no matter who they were, would be stabbed.”

“But what did he do?” I ask Jody.

“I don’t know. Something.”

“A physical something? Or did he, I don’t know, did he proposition you?”

“No. No, that came later.”

“But it must have been something pretty menacing for you to have taken a knife to bed.”

“I think it was…it was maybe just the way he looked at me.”

The summer of 1983, when Jody was fifteen, was the point at which she became aware of herself as sexually desirable. She noticed, as she hadn’t before, that men looked at her in her shorts, seeing not a child but “the young, beautiful one who could not be disguised by the grime and the company she was keeping.” Did this new sense of herself enable her to perceive her father’s aggression, as she hadn’t before? If suddenly she understood him as a predator, this knowledge alone could have been enough to frighten her, even if he hadn’t subjected her to an overt physical advance. Too, Jody reminds me, the fear that lingered in the wake of Billy’s molestation resulted in her being particularly sensitive to any perceived sexual threat.

Embedded within “Death Faces,” the dead squirrels appear, in contrast to the murders, as a manageable, mournable experience, allowing her to confess feelings of guilt and horror. “On the way home, [after striking the squirrel with her car] I looked for
evidence of what I had done,
but when we reached
the scene of the crime,
there was no evidence of a squirrel, dead or otherwise….
I’ll never know if I was an instrument in the death
of that squirrel or not” [emphasis mine].

Typically, Jody uses the word
instrument
when she and I speak of the guilt she feels in relation to her family’s destruction; it’s a word she always applies to her brother in the context of an unanswered, unanswerable question: Was Billy the instrument of Jody’s desire that her parents die?

Evidence. Scene of the crime. Instrument in the death of.
These are strong terms for accidentally running over a squirrel—so strong they reveal their true object.

T
HE COMPLEXITY OF BILLY’S FEELINGS ABOUT HIS
mother permeates not only his conversation and his letters but also the children’s stories he writes and illustrates. When he describes Linda, Billy, like Jody, uses the word
depressed,
a conclusion he and his sister have reached independently, as the few letters they exchanged never touched on the topic.

“When I think about how she sat there watching TV,” Jody says, “eating her bacon that she wouldn’t share and never going out of the house. And the ulcer, that chalky ring of Mylanta around her mouth—now, when I add it all up, I see a woman who was profoundly depressed. But not then. I didn’t see it then.”

As a child, Billy was very aware of his parents’ acrimony and his father’s ability to hurt his mother. Still, his sympathy barely has time to register on his face before it’s occluded by resentment. I ask him if he still has nightmares and if his parents are present in those dreams, and he nods.

“They don’t have to be nightmares, exactly, but the two of them are always hanging over my shoulder. Whatever I’m doing they’re always there, with me. I can’t get rid of them.” Across the table from me, he looks back over his shoulder, and acts out trying to brush something off from where it clings to him. The expression that goes with the gesture, a look of revulsion and horror, is so intense that it startles me, conjuring vampires or wraiths even in the brightly lit institutional setting. It’s an image of Billy that will remain with me, the dread these ghosts inspire. The parents he killed are joined to him forever. Murder has made them his as irrevocably as birth delivered him into their arms.

But the stories Billy writes are sunny. They’re fey and redemptive and marked—all of them—by unlikely salvation. My favorite, “Katrina and the Seagull,” takes place in Puerto Rico, its heroine, Katrina, a nun who hasn’t enough money to provide for the orphans in her care. While this much has been borrowed, it would appear, from the 1960s fantasy sitcom
The Flying Nun,
the rest is original. Dying of an unnamed disease that has rendered her barren, Katrina takes the orphans out to search for food in dumpsters, teaching them how supermarkets throw away food that is still good. While rummaging in the garbage, she sees a cat attacking a seagull and quickly takes up a toy she finds in the dumpster and hurls it at the cat, frightening it away. She carries the wounded seagull to the orphanage and nurses the bird back to health. A magic seagull, it casts a spell on her so that she can talk to animals.

The seagull explains that he was born from the union of two clouds; from them come his magic powers, and he asks Katrina what wish she would have him grant her. Bring the orphans a bunch of bananas, she suggests; they love them. The seagull complies, and brings a bag of gold coins as well, but when he delivers the treasure he finds that Katrina has fallen into a coma, the mysterious disease soon to claim her life. The gull flies to his parents, the clouds, and asks them to help save the nun. The clouds tell the gull to inhale them into his breast, fly back to the dying woman, and exhale the cloud-parents into her mouth. He does as they say, and Katrina is saved, reborn as a magic gull. She lays eggs, and is given the offspring she always wanted.

Like other of Billy’s stories, “Katrina and the Seagull” casts an animal in the role of hero, empowered by language and other supernatural gifts that allow it to rescue a human being. And, like the other stories, it reprises a scene from Billy’s childhood, in this case the mother figure providing food for her children from a dumpster. The character of Katrina recasts Linda as a dying woman, a barren woman, a chaste woman, and a virtuous and selfless woman—all wishes that, if granted, would have changed the past radically and saved Billy from his fate, saved him from orphaning himself and his sister. Katrina’s transformation from woman to bird, a universal metaphor for a (if not the) holy spirit, rewards her love for children with fecundity. In Billy’s fantasy, motherhood is earned through generosity and self-sacrifice.

Having rejected his mother’s fundamentalist religion—in part, he tells me, because of its dogmatic insistence that animals lack souls and don’t go to heaven—and concluded that there is no God, Billy seems to have created a curious and playful animism, granting consciousness not only to animals but also to clouds and, in other stories, plants.

When Billy tells me his hope that his work might someday be published, and that he spends much of his time writing and drawing in his prison cell, I suggest to him that an editor might receive a gritty graphic novel more readily than a children’s book, explaining that the juvenile market is very crowded and that publishers tend to buy stories without illustrations and commission the art separately. Graphic novels are an expanding market, suddenly hot, I tell him. Couldn’t he draw on his prison experiences or on stories inmates have told him? From Amazon I order him a couple of books intended to guide the aspiring graphic novelist. But, no, Billy explains after he receives the books, he has no interest in writing for adults, none at all, and as I get to know him better I understand that realism can’t provide the solace he needs. In January 2006, he sends me a letter describing his most recent illustrated story, “Ned No-Arms and Buttercup.”

“It’s about a boy born with no arms and his pet chicken,” he writes. “The fun really starts when he discovers he has the power of telekinesis.” In the lower right corner of the letter’s last page, near his signature, is a drawing of an armless boy using his telekinetic powers, indicated by his staring eyes and delighted smile, to get himself an apple from a basket. That Ned No-Arms’s powerlessness and implicit castration is not the result of an accident but innate, an aspect of his essential self, hints at how soon—from birth—Billy’s parents managed to strip him of any sense of himself as an effective, useful human being. And yet, Ned is not alone, nor untouched, because tucked into the bib of his overalls is Buttercup, the pet chicken, another symbol of spirituality, albeit somewhat comic. Neither is Ned without sustenance: by virtue of an invisible force granted by fantasy, the apple is coming to him, floating through the air. Had Billy not shared with me a number of biblical drawings of Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden—including one with the tree of knowledge from which the apple of sexual knowledge dangles—I might not read Ned’s receiving his apple as a restoration of potency despite his having been castrated (by virtue of having no arms). But symbols aren’t chosen randomly, without meaning, at least unconscious meaning, and Billy didn’t give Ned a slice of pizza, or one of the candy bars he himself likes.

That all of Billy’s stories are characterized by alienation and misunderstanding among humans, and that they include animals that talk and are endowed with perceptions and powers that transcend human abilities, suggests he doesn’t place much hope in meaningful communication between people. And why would he? Interviewed by Children’s Services, evaluated by one mental health professional after another, counseled by social workers in the group home, Billy told many of these people outright that he was suffering at the hands of his parents and that he would prefer foster care to living with them. Even when he was afraid to make a direct accusation, Billy described a family that was profoundly troubled. But no one saved him. The only result of his speaking out was that his parents were shamed; they were enraged and vengeful. Now, more than twenty years after he killed them, he sits alone in his cell, writing and drawing, creating alternate worlds, narratives in which he restores to himself some of what he has lost.

Whenever I felt low, I could simply drive the isolated highways, country roads, and sometimes the interstate listening to music and thinking until I found myself again, or at least found the courage to keep trying. Renewed, I’d tell myself I would eventually find a reason for all that happened. And though I had thought of suicide as a way to stop the pain, anger, and fear, I considered it only because one should always weigh all options before making decisions.

I slowly drove down the hill on the curvy road toward the valley on September 5, 1984. For everyone else it was the first day of high school. For me it was the first day of walking and sitting among my peers since the tragedy that had struck my family in the middle of April, when my life became composed of new friends, new patrons, and many awful memories.

So begins “The First Day of School,” an essay Jody wrote in 1995. At twenty-seven years old, a graduate of Georgetown University, she was making a living in New York as a freelance writer. The eleven years and three thousand miles between her and the murders, and the vantage from her carefully reconstructed new life, allowed her to write a sense of order onto what had been a decade of emotional turmoil.

Jody hadn’t finished out the tenth grade among her old classmates at Mid-High. She may have been able to “steel herself from deep emotion” but she hadn’t had the sangfroid to endure two months of the whispering, pointing, and anonymous notes in her locker suggesting she was as much a murderer as her brother that had characterized her return to school at the end of April. One day was enough to convince her that she wasn’t going back to Mid-High, and Victims’ Assistance provided a tutor so she could complete the semester in private. Summer was devoted to a crash course in what it was like to be an average upper-middle-class American teen, lessons courtesy of Thad Guyer, who might have come along too late to provide her more than a veneer of normalcy, but knew that rock concerts, driving lessons, and the keys to his car represented powerful distractions, if not solace, for a sixteen-year-old. Accustomed to her parents’ selfishness and disregard, Jody found that Thad’s offering her his shiny red 1978 Audi 2000 while keeping the much older of his two vehicles for his own use was itself a mystifying expression of love, and in “The First Day of School” she called the car a “surrogate womb” from which, she wrote, she drew “a perhaps unnatural amount of self-esteem.”

Read in conjunction with “Death Faces,” completed two years earlier, “The First Day of School” reveals the Audi-womb as critical to Jody’s psychic survival. “This is the story of my rebirth,” “Death Faces” begins, and birth can only follow on a period spent in utero. Before she had the Audi, Jody had been dead, in limbo, waiting to be reborn. The image she uses to evoke this state, “a hollow husk of who and what I was before,” invokes growth and change. An empty vessel, it anticipates new life: metamorphosis.

The narrative of Jody’s life, the story of herself by herself, reads not as a story of overcoming tragedy but as the death of one girl and the arrival of another. The Jody Gilley she had been perished with the rest of her family and was replaced by Jody Arlington, as she now called herself, who resembled the girl she’d been before, but only up to a point. “Little did I know that I was my own Frankenstein, an experiment that would go awry, then be reforged, over and over again,” she wrote in 1995. Like most of us, she misidentifies the doctor as the monster—for it is the doctor who is named Frankenstein; the monster has no name—a useful conflation in this context because Jody was both doctor and monster, both author and narrative.

Arlington was a name she chose in transit, in a car, driving to Los Angeles with Thad, Thad’s soon-to-be ex-wife, Debbie, and Jody’s friend Jackie. On their way to a Billy Idol concert, in service to what Jody called Thad’s “socialization program,” they were scanning billboards in hopes of happening upon an acceptable new surname. School would reconvene in a few weeks, and Jody was returning not as a Gilley but as…who? “Unsatisfied with them [the billboards] I decided to add the elements of chance and utilitarianism to the process. Students with last names beginning with the first five letters of the alphabet were to register [for classes] first. The next street sign we crossed that started with one of those five letters would be the new last name. Arlington Blvd. was the winner.”

Reassemble
is the word that comes first to my mind, before
reforge
or
re-create
or
reintegrate.
Once I separated from my father, I undertook the task of salvaging what remained of myself, which, as in my old dream, was not everything. In the dream, my face is shattered, and I gather up the pieces and set out to find a surgeon who can put them back together. When I find the surgeon and unfold the handkerchief in which I’ve saved the pieces of my face, I see they haven’t remained intact. Once living flesh, they’ve dried and shriveled. “Can you do it?” I ask. “Can you sew them back together?” The doctor says yes, but the scars will be disfiguring. I won’t look at all as I used to.

When I wake up, I discover that expressions I’d never analyzed before make sudden, visceral sense: She fell apart. Fell to pieces. Was shattered. Came undone. Unglued. Came apart at the seams.

What I wrote to Jody before we met—that I felt there were parts of myself that my father had yet to relinquish or I had yet to reclaim—was true, and would remain so. Certain aspects of the girl I had been were broken beyond repair; some remained intact, others I jettisoned. My childhood fantasies of my father were gone, my innocence a thing of the past. My already poor relationship with my mother had been damaged even further; after her death, it would take me twenty years to address it adequately. My eagerness to mold myself to others’ expectations had gotten me into trouble for the last time: I promised myself this. I saw how remaking myself over and over in the hope of winning my mother’s love had been an apprenticeship that served my father’s purposes too well.

At twenty, I’d planned never to marry or become a mother. After, I found I’d lost the part of me who saw myself as necessarily alone, the part that served a lie: that I didn’t need anyone else. And I married and had children a decade or more before any of my friends did. Initially it seemed baffling and ironic that I’d fallen in love with a man who was so very straight an arrow—who’d never once smoked pot, or even a cigarette, who wouldn’t start the car until my seat belt was buckled, who balanced his checkbook, grew his own tomatoes, drank infrequently and in moderation—but it wasn’t an accident or a mistake. If I hurried to gather a family around me, it was because some part of me understood that my psychic survival, my remaining reassembled, depended on structure I wasn’t capable of creating and preserving alone, for myself.