While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (22 page)

His allusions to crying and screaming have an emotionless feel to them, as if he referred only to their physical manifestations, the tears or the noise but not what elicited them. It’s a style of reporting emotion that is not unlike Jody’s. Perhaps this is one of the very few things they still share, an adaptation that dates back to early childhood.

O
N WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER
14, 1984,
BILLY WENT ON
trial for three counts of aggravated murder. Two days later, a jury of six men and six women found him guilty on all counts, even though Jody’s testimony indicated clearly that he had not planned to harm Becky. His attorney, Stephen Pickens, had conceived an argument that relied heavily on forensic photographs of a machete resting on the mantel just a few feet from Bill Sr.’s body. It was Pickens’s contention that if Billy had wanted to kill his father and mother he would have used the ready and more efficient blade rather than a baseball bat. At best, this was a feeble defense, and while Pickens did note the presence of the machete while cross-examining Jody, he didn’t mention it in his summation. He never actually made the argument he said he had planned. When a journalist outside the courtroom asked him why this was, Pickens said he forgot.

“My attorney,” Billy says in his affidavit, “did not use the defense that I had talked to him about…did not talk about my killing my parents to protect myself and my sisters…. The whole time my attorney represented me the only conversation that we had about the machete was one time when he asked whether the machete was mine. I told him it was and that I used it to split kindling.”

Part of Stephen Pickens’s job, Connie Skillman tells me, was to educate his client. “Billy was a child, too,” she says. “He needed guidance. Was his attorney advising him?” Billy knew nothing about jurisprudence, he tells me, but what he’d seen on TV, one or two programs from which he’d mistakenly concluded that an attorney had absolute power to determine what his client could or could not say.

“If I’d known I had the right to testify no matter what my attorney’s advice was,” he states in his affidavit, “I would have chosen to testify.”

Did Billy forget the conversations he had had with his attorney? Is he consciously misrepresenting them. In 1984, Pickens told Medford
Mail Tribune
reporter Mark Howard that his client had chosen “not to take the witness stand in his own defense,” and in 1997, when subpoenaed by Billy’s post-conviction counsel, he reported that Billy had been “adamant” in refusing to testify on his own behalf. Pickens may have been sloppy in failing to mention the blade upon which his argument teetered, but it would be wrong to judge him dishonest from allegations made by Billy, who has lied in the past, and who has a motive to portray Pickens as incompetent.

The
Mail Tribune,
Medford’s local paper, reported that Jackson County’s district attorney, Justin Smith, built “an airtight case,” using testimony from Oregon State Police criminalist Brad Telea, detectives Richard Davis and Leon Stupfel, Officer Rupp, troopers Scholten and Springer, medical examiner Larry Lewman, surgeons Robinson and Campagna, and his star witness, Jody Gilley. Among these ten, Pickens cross-examined only Jody and did not call any witnesses for the defense. He had none. According to Billy, Pickens allowed him to believe that his grandmother would testify on his behalf when, in fact, Pickens went to considerable trouble to ensure that she didn’t.

“Later [after the trial had concluded] the bailiff talked to me,” Betty Glass states in her affidavit, “and said he had orders from Billy’s attorney to take me out [of the courtroom] if I opened my mouth to say anything in [
sic
] Billy’s behalf.” On the face of it, Pickens’s defense was so minimal that journalists outside the courthouse asked him why he’d even brought the case to trial if he hadn’t intended to defend his client. Pickens answered that the only alternative was for Billy to plead guilty to the charges and that “in a trial he at least had a chance of an acquittal or a reduced charge.”
^*19

When called as a witness, Jody did exactly what Thad told her to do. “Literally terrified that everything I said about my abusive redneck household would be heard by my peers through the media and used to persecute me at school,” Jody stated in her affidavit that she “listened to the questions, told the truth, gave short answers, and volunteered nothing.” Thad’s concerns about the possibility of her being implicated in the murders had ignited her own fear, as did the palpably hostile presence of Betty, who she knew was denouncing her publicly as a murderer. “When I testified,” she stated, “I was fearful for my own fate,…extremely emotionally traumatized, and in denial about what abusers my dead parents had been. I realize now that some of the accounts I gave of our home life, sexual and psychological abuse, and the whole tenor of who the Gilleys were as a family, may have been inaccurate and misleading, at least by omission.”

As a witness for the prosecution, Jody heard only those parts of the trial that unfolded when she was on the stand. It wasn’t until years later, while reviewing the transcript in order to write “Death Faces,” that she “realized how stark some of [her] omissions were when viewed within the context of the rest of the trial testimony.”

While she could not “attest to all of Billy’s ‘motives’ in the parental murders [she did] know that saving Becky and [herself] was at least his rationalization, or even his cause.” Billy, she said, believed she and Becky “would have been as emotionally abused, their potentials and self-concepts as destroyed as were his…. Billy saw this and said so in the weeks before the murders.”

“Well, Mr. Gilley,” Judge Karaman said on December 27, 1984, “I heard the trial, I arraigned you, and now this is the time for sentencing, and you have been given an opportunity to tell me in your own words anything you may have on your mind which you would like for me to hear in mitigation of the sentence I might impose…. Is there anything you can offer me? I have to sentence you now, and frankly, you’ve put me in a position where I am sentencing you from a lack of information.”

“I’m just confused about it all right now, Your Honor,” Billy said. “I still can’t understand myself.”

“All right,” Karaman said. “You’ve tried to sort it out in your own mind and you still can’t?”

“Yes.”

“Is that the way you feel?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not mentally ill. You’ve been examined by a good number of psychiatrists. The only conclusion I can reach is a very severe personality disorder, antisocial personality. With the type of acting out you did in this case, the best I can do for society is to try to put you away for as long a period of time as the law will allow, and I see no choice.”

“Well, I was physically threatened several times,” Billy said, “and I had great fear.”

“During that day?”

“Yes. Well, it was a couple of days before. It happened several times that week. It was just something that happened often in our family. Counseling—I’ll get settled up in the penitentiary and I’ll try to get this straightened out.”

Much later, for his appeal, Billy testified, “I didn’t understand what that opportunity [sentencing] signified for me. I was never told that I would have the opportunity to speak to the judge directly and that I could tell him anything that I wanted about myself or my case. I remember thinking that this was just a formality because, as my attorney told me, all we had to do was show up for court. After the sentencing, after the judge had sentenced me to three consecutive life sentences, I asked my attorney what consecutive and concurrent meant. He told me that he would come and see me and explain it. I never saw him again.”

Unaware that he could have prepared comments for the judge, Billy responded simply and honestly to his predicament, as he never would again. He’d been mistreated and threatened and had committed a crime the magnitude of which confused him to the point that he couldn’t understand himself.

“Law enforcement officers got stuck on the fact that Billy killed his little sister,” Connie Skillman tells me. “That ruined his chances of a lesser sentence. It got around that he’d said he didn’t want Becky to grow up and be like his mother and it cemented the idea that he’d acted alone, without Jody’s involvement.” Connie remembers Billy’s demeanor in court struck people as arrogant, a word I find impossible to apply to the man I meet. Like Jody, Billy betrayed no emotion in court, most likely a function of shock, the pressure of scrutiny. Billy’s was the face of someone who’d suffered years of abuse, and its blank canvas tempted observers either to assume he had no feelings or to project negative ones onto it.

Jody wasn’t present at Billy’s sentencing but the pre-sentence investigation Judge Karaman reviewed included her “victim’s statement,” in which she responded to a series of questions. Asked to describe the nature of the “incident” in which she had been involved, she said, “My entire family was viciously murdered by my brother.” Her psychological injuries were many and almost indescribable. It’s very difficult to explain how it feels when the only family you have regardless of the family problems is torn from you leaving you cold, empty and uncertain about the basic foundations and meanings about life and the world. If you can imagine the emptiness, lonliness [
sic
] and remoarse [
sic
] one would have after this incident you would have to triple your estimation in order to put the feelings into perspective and there are so many different feelings to contend with. There are also the feelings of fear, a fear of after me [
sic
]—something about which I consistently have nightmares about. The final fears pertain to the future…will I ever understand? What’s going to happen to me? What could I have done and more importantly will I gradually become mentally instable? All of these thoughts constantly haunt me.

Among Jody’s nightmares, which she dismisses today as “paint-by-number dreams,” one stands out. Despite the passage of twenty years, she remembers it clearly. In it she sees a dark, shadowy figure dragging off a girl. She tries to stop the predator but it stabs her repeatedly in the hands and escapes with the child. There’s no blood in this dream, nor any pain, but she feels acutely afraid and wakes distressed by her failure to prevent the abduction. It’s tempting to respond to what seems obvious symbolism and assume the shadowy figure is Billy, the girl Becky, the stabbed hands Jody’s inability to protect her sister, her feelings upon awakening fear and grief that derived from her having failed to keep Becky out of harm’s way. But beneath the paint-by-number surface is a more compelling drama in which the dark figure, the child, the hands, and the abduction are all aspects of Jody and the dream an unconscious narrative of her helplessly relinquishing whatever her hands represent—volition? potency?—to an occult presence, a figure whose face she cannot see, a self she doesn’t know, with the result that a child self, perhaps an innocent self, is lost. Although the event is dire, fatal to some part of her, she is wounded without being able to bleed or to feel.

The shadowy figure in this dream that recurred into Jody’s early twenties conjures the “unknowable” self who was the target of “all [her] anger, confusion, and fear.” The violence Billy did to his parents and Becky is finite: these people are dead. The violence he did to Jody and himself is something they carry, and with which they are forced to commune, at least on an unconscious level. Because Jody and Billy shared a hatred of their abusive parents, because he named her as his motive for murder, because their deaths freed her and provided her opportunities she might never have had otherwise, because Jody accepted the terrible gift for which her brother still pays, she bears this dark figure within her. And what alternative does she have, what means of refusing the gift other than to destroy herself, if not in body then in spirit?

Question ten on the Victim’s Impact Statement form asked “what being the victim of a crime meant” to Jody, who answered that “being the victim of a crime means nothing compared to being a victim of this particular crime.” Her brother, she judged “dangerous as well as vengefull [
sic
] and he is a threat.” The “only acceptable thing to do” with Billy, she said in answer to what thoughts she had about his sentence, was “a phenominal [
sic
] amount of imprisonment.” If there had been a symbiosis between Jody and her brother, she was declaring it over. She wanted reassurance that it was a thing of the past, and that it would never return.

“W
HEN I FIRST ARRIVED IN PRISON, I WANTED NOTHING
more than to be dead.” So begins the prison narrative Billy alternately calls his memoirs or, sometimes, his personal profile. “I was young and attractive. The chicken hawks swooped on me from day one. They told me I could put shit on their dick or blood on their blade.”

Ironically, the price for escaping his father was immersion in another environment in which male-on-male predation was the rule, violence the means of displaying potency. Unlike Bill, who hid his brutality from much of the world, Billy’s new attackers were eager to flaunt their ability to get away with anything up to and including murder, and although his account of his experiences as an inmate is self-aggrandizing, it also attempts to compensate for his vulnerability.

“If I didn’t let him put his black dick in my pretty white ass, then he was going to put his shank in my ribs,” Billy writes of the first inmate to assault him. “I started pushing my body into his shank until a flower of blood bloomed on my shirt then spit in his face and screamed ‘Stick it in!’ over and over again. Unfortunately he refused. I just got a reputation as a crazy with a death wish, who can fight.” Although he avoided homosexual rape, Billy describes the result of the stabbing, of his attacker’s “sticking it in,” as “a flower of blood,” sexualizing the blade’s entrance into his body by evoking the conventional deflowering of a girl. He ends the account submissively, in a tone of defeat. “I would rather they had killed me,” he writes.

In answer to my questions about what he alleges was Bill’s sexual abuse of his sisters, Billy tells me that their father displayed sexual aggression toward him as well, claiming that Bill, intoxicated, had once attempted to rape him outright when the two were camping alone, a statement that echoed what he told Dr. Kirkpatrick in 1984. The account, which lacks texture or detail, is one he gives almost as an aside to reports of his father’s inappropriate attention to Jody, and it’s hard to imagine that a genuinely incestuous advance from a boy’s father wouldn’t have imprinted itself distinctly and vividly in his mind. Sadly, it comes across as less paranoid than wishful, damning Bill even as it demonstrates Billy’s value as an object of attention, unnatural and damaging attention but perhaps from the perspective of a needy child a step up from neglect. Maybe what Billy says happened did happen; maybe he imagined it happened; maybe, as time passed, what began as a fantasy born out of his emotional abandonment and fear of his father seemed more like a memory than a made-up event.

“What was it like when you and your father were alone together—when the two of you were on the road?” I ask Billy, returning to the topic on the last day of my visit. He’s telling me about some of the bigger jobs he did with his father—brush clearing and pruning that had been subcontracted by distant parks or preserves—and I find myself curious about how the family dynamics might have changed when the group was fractured. “Was your father less abusive when the two of you were away from home? More?”

“He ignored me,” Billy says. “Indifferent, that’s what he was. Like I wasn’t sitting there in the truck next to him. Away from my mom, away from her nagging and picking at him and stopping him doing what he wanted, he had less aggravations to take out. So he didn’t attack me. But it wasn’t like he suddenly decided he liked me. He was indifferent, that’s all.” Billy says the word for a third time, “Indifferent.” The expression on his face is one of disgust, and the resignation in his voice suggests that indifference might have been a more thorough psychic annihilation than battery.

Linda always insisted that Bill take their son with him when he traveled because she relied on his violence to keep Billy in line, but she had the added—and, as it turned out, naïve—hope that Billy’s presence might prevent Bill from straying. “He had a couple mistresses,” Billy tells me. “There was two outta wedlock kids from before any of us, before he was married. A boy in California—he was six years older than me—and a girl right there in Medford. She’s the one who called the house before…in the month or so before they died.”

“What about the boy? Did you ever meet him?”

“Nope. He died when he was nineteen, in a car wreck.”

“Did you know his name, or anything about him?”

Billy shakes his head. “Just that he was six years older.”

It wasn’t only “mistresses” that his father entertained, Billy says. Bill picked up women in bars—“booze chasers,” Billy calls them—who had sex with his father in the back of the truck for the price of a few drinks. If Bill considered the morality, or the immorality, of what was not an isolated incident but a habit of adultery, probably he excused it by telling himself that Linda’s frigidity had driven him to seek the comfort of other women. As for Billy, whether out of indifference or hostility, Bill didn’t bother to hide his infidelities from his son any more than he did the stack of pornography he kept under the truck’s front seat.

Soon after he arrived at the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem, Billy was “recruted [
sic
] by a martial artist named ‘Weed’ to help him run a martial arts school on the yard” as the resident expert in “finger strike techniques”—that is, the art of forcefully poking an opponent in the eyes or throat rather than punching him. “This parental-like role gave me a reason to live,” Billy wrote, echoing his characterization of his boyhood martial arts teachers as benign father figures, a series of relationships that Jody thinks were likely transitory and impersonal. If her judgment is accurate, perhaps Billy’s early years in prison and his association with Weed were the unconscious inspiration for what became an empowering myth, a way for Billy to see himself as less vulnerable to the violent males all around him.

After the impromptu martial arts school was discovered and shut down by prison authorities, Billy began working in the prison furniture factory, where for two years he assembled desks and chairs for government offices while secretly operating a “black-market hobby ring,” training his “fellow cons to make…jewelry, delux [
sic
] picture frames, and drinking mugs, then pay[ing] them to produce the product for me. I once had eight men working for me. It was my over-ambition that got me noticed and fired.”

Although he didn’t disclose this in his memoirs, somewhat sanitized for his intended readers, among them Jody, the focus of his black market workshop was the clandestine manufacture of shanks from pieces of scrap metal or purloined factory tools. Billy bound one end of the makeshift blades in scrap leather and sold them to other inmates, who buried them in the prison yard (lest they be confiscated by the “screws”), guaranteeing a demand that could never be satisfied as the yard was routinely swept with metal detectors. And there were other illicit enterprises.

In May 1986, Billy was put in disciplinary segregation for twenty-five days for the possession of “pruno,” or, more accurately, what was about to turn into pruno, an alcoholic beverage almost exclusive to prison culture made from oranges, fruit cocktail, sugar, ketchup, and water, mixed and fermented in a plastic bag (the container of choice as it can be hidden in a towel). In 1989, he spent 137 days in segregation for writing a short story about two female convicts who escape from jail—perhaps an allusion, conscious or unconscious, to his two sisters, whom he freed from the prison of their home. Although the officials believed the story was fiction, they judged it to contain information on how to escape. Three months after he got out, he went back for another seventy days, again for making pruno, the foul taste of which—“like vomit” is the usual description—as well as its tendency to make imbibers ill, bears witness to prisoners’ determination to dull their senses.

The end of his employment in the furniture factory is what Billy remembers as the impetus he needed “to go back to school and get his GED,” adding that for him this “practically meant learning to read and write,” as his barely literate early letters from jail demonstrate. When I ask how he compensated for the learning disabilities that defeated his teachers, he tells me he taught himself to read with “two brains,” a split consciousness that allowed one “brain” to read while the other observed the act of reading and caught mistakes. Gradually, with a great deal of effort, he was able to understand textbooks, and his immersion in language improved his spelling and his ability to communicate on paper. The difference between the letters he wrote Jody at eighteen and those he writes today is marked, and not only because they’re much more literate. His childhood more than twenty years behind him, Billy thinks clearly; his natural mental state doesn’t appear to be one of confusion. Late in 2006 he sends me a petition he wrote to prison authorities, protesting their disciplining him for the unfair charge of “racketeering”—selling the legal expertise he’s acquired to fellow prisoners. My first thought as I read it is that his dead parents would be astonished by its organization and persuasive, if devious, logic.

Once he’d completed his GED training and earned his high school equivalency certificate, Billy was convinced by fellow classmates to try a few junior college classes. If nothing else, it was a way to fill some hours. Away from home, from people who called him stupid and said he would fail at whatever he tried, Billy discovered he wasn’t a poor student. He liked his teachers, he tells me, and earned an associate’s degree in 1993. He intended to go on and complete a bachelor’s, but before he could satisfy its requirements, the program’s funding was cut. Aside from three semesters of English composition and a handful of art and design classes, most of his coursework focused on sociology and psychology, including abnormal behavior and anger management, with a couple of forays into religion and ethics.

Because of the hiatus in Billy’s secondary school education, he and Jody were college students at roughly the same time. Separated by the width of a continent, by his incarceration, and presumably by a significant gap in quality between Georgetown’s Jesuit tradition and the tuition offered by a provincial western community college, still there were overlaps between what Jody and her brother sought from their respective educations. Both needed a frame of reference to understand what had happened in their family, what Billy had done and why, and what it might mean. Billy, who perceived his mother and father as having created an inhuman trap that elicited his violent response, did not regret killing them, except in that he’d landed himself in prison and—to the limited extent that he could acknowledge it—sacrificed his little sister, an act he first explained to himself by reducing Becky to a part of Linda, not a person in her own right, and later revised as an entirely accidental occurrence. As he did not consider himself guilty or a danger to other people, he was searching for justification, a means of validating the action he’d taken against his persecutors. Jody, who also needed to come to terms with who her parents were and what they had done to their children, was still struggling with the problem she and Connie Skillman identified in the immediate aftermath of the murders: her guilt at having been freed at the expense of the rest of her family.

By conscious design, Jody aligned her psychic quest of understanding the murders and reintegrating herself with the crowning demand of graduation from Georgetown, the school she’d chosen as an emblem of transcending her past. But she didn’t feel she could write a thesis about the murder of her family without the perspective of her brother, with whom she’d had no contact since the conclusion of his trial in late 1984. After a silence of seven years, she wrote Billy a tentative first letter from the relative safety of the East Coast and the psychic armature represented by Georgetown, describing her studies and offering the diplomatic opinion that people could, with time and effort, change. In this initial letter, she explained her failure to communicate with him by saying she assumed he hated her, a trick of projection in that the truth was closer to her hating him. It was a careful communication, a little stiff and formal for an exchange between siblings. She signed it, “Your sister, Jody.”

“Let me start by saying that I never hated you,” Billy answered, “in fact I love you very much. I was mad at you for a while but now I understand what it must have been like for you. I don’t blame you for anything…. For about three years I’ve been studying college psychology.” From the vantage of his raised consciousness, he assured her that while he “used to feel hate for mom and dad,” he now understood their suffering enough to feel “love and sorrow” for them. I read the letter long before I see Billy’s expression when he shrugs the clinging specters of his parents off his shoulders, but even without my having witnessed that look of abhorrence, the claim strikes me as unconvincing and must have thrown the rest of the letter into doubt, discouraging Jody from any hope she might receive genuine information that hadn’t been filtered through her brother’s perspective, which was very different from her own. Jody tells me she has found Billy’s many communications to her as false as were her few letters to him. “If his rationales were “delusional,” her words had been “cold, calculated…exuding approximations of real desires for a visit, a long-overdue reckoning with the past.”

“I hope you are doing well,” Billy tried again. “Lately, I’ve been going to college full time, so I’ve been staying pretty busy.” This second letter was shorter, his longhand effortful. Without a single mistake, it appears to have been first written and then copied out perfectly. “Remember I miss you and love you very much,” he closed. “Sincerely yours, Billy. P.S. please write soon.”

“There are many questions I would like to ask you,” Jody wrote back. “I would like to know your opinions about our life at home before what happened.” After a brief description of her studies at Georgetown—“history mostly”—she returned to the topic of the murders, again obliquely.

“Grandma Mitchell is very sad and she really wants to know from you why you did it. She asks me about you all the time. She says she doesn’t remember anyone hurting you and she asks me all the time why?