While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (23 page)

“What do you want me to tell her?”

B
ILLY WON’T TALK ABOUT BECKY, NOT REALLY. SHE’S
a hole in the conversation, in all our conversations. Whenever I steer us back to her, he avoids the fact of her murder so nimbly that I am not sure how he does it: a sleight of speech rather than of hand, not conscious. I don’t think he could be so deft if he were trying consciously to avoid the topic. One minute we’re talking about Becky, or I think we are, and the next Billy is reminiscing about a dog his family once owned, a dachshund he calls Sugar, who somehow insinuates herself into our dialogue at the point where Becky vanishes. Or I think we’re talking about Becky when, without transition, we’re talking about martial arts, or graphic novels, or his mother’s interest in horror movies.

Driving back from the prison to the town of Ontario, traffic moving slowly along the snow-choked highway, I’m trying to understand how this happens when I remember what an eye surgeon once told me. Laser repairs to the retina can leave holes in restored vision, blank areas that don’t trouble a patient because his mind fills them in reflexively. Within a week of the surgery, the patient is no longer aware of any lacunae in his field of vision; he can’t find them even if he looks for them. Soon he forgets there’s something he isn’t seeing. I wonder if Billy’s avoiding responsibility for his sister’s death doesn’t represent a similar capacity. A psychic rather than physical reflex, it would—like the eye-brain adaptation—result from his need to create coherence, a picture he can accept, with the side effect of impairing his moral vision.

Because it’s not that Billy refuses outright to talk about Becky; that would be less unsettling. Nor is it that he won’t describe the circumstances of her death. But he can’t answer my question of what it’s like to live with the understanding that he killed his little sister, or of how that immense fact, qualitatively different from the murder of his abusive parents, affects him, both in the moment and over the years. Becky is a hole in our conversations because she’s a hole in his vision. Before he can consider this blank place his mind has filled it in. One day it’s a little dog. The next, when I return us to the same landscape, something else will stumble or be pushed into the hole, another animal most likely. Billy talks about animals a lot, perhaps because he knows I have a dog and three cats and assumes pet ownership is an interest we share. Perhaps because, in the context of the murders he committed, he wants to be perceived as a man who loves animals, removing himself from the group of killers whose heartlessness is confirmed by a history of cruelty to animals.

Frustrated by my failure to engage Billy in a conversation about the sister he killed, I write to him in October 2006, almost a year after my visit, asking directly, as I haven’t before in a letter, if he ever thinks about Becky. “I want to know whether or not she pops into your head, and if she does, in what way?”

The letter I receive in answer explains that Billy writes for children because of Becky. Always “good at making up stories on the spot,” he alludes to having told his little sister bedtime stories. “I only wish Becky were still alive so she could hear my new stories,” he writes. “She would have enjoyed them.”

Aside from his having sidestepped the cause of her death—“I only wish I hadn’t killed Becky” would be a more honest wish—were she alive, Becky would be thirty-two and long past bedtime stories. Billy’s suggestion that his dead sister inspires his children’s books strikes me as too conveniently sentimental, a veil drawn before a blank place, a way to fill in one of those holes in his vision.

But I’ve seen Billy’s stories, their careful illustrations and neatly lettered text. I know he invests a great deal of himself in them for some child—not Becky, I suspect, but the little boy he once was, the one who was afraid at bedtime and who would be comforted by stories suggesting that when humans failed him, animals would not. It may be that Billy’s refusal to write for adults is part of a larger refusal, a way of resisting the court’s verdict of guilt imposed on a child, a badly mistreated child whom it mistook for a man. I wonder if this isn’t the context in which to receive Billy’s assertion that I haven’t interviewed him but conducted a séance with someone who has been dead for more than twenty years. If Billy’s life stopped in 1984, then he never got to grow up and become a man.

In December, Billy’s Christmas card arrives. It’s homemade, as was the one he sent in 2005, a drawing of Santa Claus in his workshop, a reindeer licking his cheek. Santa, who judges whether children are good or bad and rewards them accordingly. Santa, whose fall from truth to fiction caused the seven-year-old Billy to question the existence of any God at all.

On the floor, at Santa’s black-booted feet, sits a peculiarly alert and vigilant-looking baby, with rod-straight posture and unnaturally large and staring eyes, wearing a banner that proclaims the year 2007. Atypical as this baby appears—unlike a Gerber or a Pampers baby, unlike any generic or idealized vision of babyhood—I can’t see him as the baby new year. After filing Billy’s greeting card in the binder in which I keep our correspondence, I flip back to an earlier communication from Billy that includes one of his prison compositions. “Our Wonderful Baby” is its title. “You’re the incarnation of the love between your mother and father,” it declares. “We will need several lives to unfold all the love we have for you.”

The longer I consider Billy’s card, the more it strikes me as a wishful self-portrait, one that looks toward rebirth, eyes wide open. Or it looks backward, perhaps, to a time younger than memory, his future like that of any other child, unknown.

B
Y THE SUMMER OF
1992,
JODY, WHO HAD EARNED
all the credits Georgetown required to grant her a bachelor’s degree, had yet to turn in her thesis. “Death Faces,” the project she’d designed as a means of putting herself back together was itself in pieces, and would remain so until she managed to put another few thousand miles and an ocean between her and her hometown. Having met Serge, a man she describes as “blond, foreign, and an aristocrat,” terms that remind me of a Harlequin romance hero, she followed him to Spain, and from December 1992 through November 1994 shared an apartment in Madrid with friends. She got a job writing for
Guidepost
and
Lookout,
both English-language magazines for English-speaking people living abroad, and despite conflicts with Serge’s parents, whose disapproval ultimately destroyed their relationship, she would remember her two years in Europe as the happiest she’d yet experienced, the point at which she felt she’d arrived at “normalcy.”

“It was completely liberating,” she tells me. “Richard Wright spoke of the corpse of slavery being around his neck, and that when he moved to Paris it was cast off. There’s something about being in a different culture where no one knows you. Suddenly I wasn’t the girl whose family was murdered, I was Jody, a college graduate and budding writer, finding my way. And I learned that with each year that passed, I wasn’t judged for my family or my childhood, but by what I did every day and the quality of my relationships and breadth of experiences.”

Less burdened by her history than ever before, Jody felt she had the required distance to face the task she’d set herself: writing the story of what she called her rebirth, which she would title with a reference to something she’d seen in the religious art all around her: “that brief look in the eyes and the lines of the mouth when the victim…accepts death as a portal to Heaven or Hell.” In that the focus of “Death Faces” was the murder of her family, the death faces she was determined to see were those only one person could conceivably have seen—Billy. The only way she could confront, assimilate, and hopefully move past the murders was to use her brother’s eyes, to become Billy, at least on the page, and take responsibility for the murders her brother committed.

“You’ve made the caracture [
sic
] Billy very despicable and seedy,” Billy wrote to Jody after reading “Death Faces,” which is, in fact, a sympathetic rendering of her brother, justifying his crimes as a response to the “atrocities” he suffered. By the time he received a copy of the thesis, which he told Jody his lawyer had been “hiding” from him “to protect [his] feelings,” Billy had been at work for years on his own family history, undertaken for legal rather than psychic purposes.

“Dear Person,” Billy wrote to Jackson County’s Children’s Services Division on November 15, 1991, requesting his case files. “I am presently attempting to conduct a psychological evaluation of my family’s past,” he explained in a painstakingly crafted, handwritten letter. His formal schooling over, he’d embarked on a curriculum of his own devising, one that allowed him to revisit the murders as part of a larger history of child abuse and its impact on human personality. Armed with the knowledge that the murders he committed shared a pattern of antecedents with other parricide cases, by the time he prepared his affidavit, in 1996, he knew which aspects of his childhood to underscore and how to present them to his advantage.

Free from the calculation that shapes a story told for legal use, “Death Faces” is a creative work in which Jody took risks that she did not when providing an official account of the past. Identifying the murders as the event that “triggered” her rebirth, Jody could voice a fear that they represented a consummation between her and her brother: a bloody consummation of hatred rather than of love, but a generative force nonetheless. To own her new life, she had to own the act that gave it to her, taking her place not just beside her brother—that wasn’t enough—but
inside
her brother, slipping for a moment into his silhouette, trying on his history, his burdens, his fears. His violence. Or maybe it had been their violence, an emotion she’d entrusted to him.

For Jody, so invested in control, the idea of exploring the most disastrous outcome of uncontrolled rage must have been—I was going to say horrible, but perhaps it was irresistible—necessary. A way to both own and disown what she felt. A way to explore on the page what she couldn’t allow into her life. Hidden behind the mask of Billy, in defense of his murders and her anger, Jody could reveal her anxiety about being judged herself, and express compassion for her brother, as she hadn’t been able to do in the courtroom. Her defense is impassioned, and righteous:

“We [not Billy and Jody but Billy and others who commit parricide] killed our parents because it was the only way for us to live with any dignity, the sole method to escape atrocities which society refused to recognize, measure or remedy, and most of all, to find the singular route open to us to achieve personal autonomy, relevant sanity and ‘justice’ worthy of the name…. To fail to try to understand me, or to have compassion for me, is to close yourself to the most unknowable chambers in the souls of your own children.” To fail to try to understand would be to close herself to the possibility of ever finding the part of her that was out of reach and unknowable.

Curiously, given his generally harsh portrayal of Billy and his opinion that Jody was too eager to accept blame that wasn’t hers, it was Thad Guyer who suggested Jody narrate the story from her brother’s point of view. “Jody called me from Spain, panicking,” he tells me. “She couldn’t finish her thesis, she didn’t know what to do, how to do it. So I flew to Madrid.” It wasn’t that Jody didn’t have enough material, but her copious notes lacked coherence. The story of the murders was still fractured, its parts unassembled and out of sequence, “unprocessed,” a psychotherapist might say.

Thad had always insisted that Jody separate herself from the brother he considers an irredeemable sociopath. Unwilling to see Jody’s anger at her parents as anything more significant than an adolescent phase, he doesn’t believe her mother and father were deserving of hatred—at least this is how he characterizes them to me when we meet. But on another occasion, when alluding to the murders in a communication to Jody, to my surprise he calls them “probably…an act of brotherly love.” Might Thad have understood and intended the psychic impact of Jody assuming Billy’s guilt? Did he imagine it might demonstrate her innocence to her in a way that nothing else could? Whether or not it was a calculated suggestion, Thad told Jody he thought she’d have to circumvent her narrative problem by using Billy’s point of view. “I don’t think you’re capable of telling this from first person,” he said.

Which was true. She didn’t know her point of view. But she couldn’t tell the story from Billy’s point of view either, not really, so “Death Faces” became the disturbing account that it is, one in which the narrator is neither Billy nor Jody but a being who existed, if it ever existed, for only as long as a car ride and a game of cards, brother and sister sprung together from the trap of their miserable childhood and yet to separate into accuser and accused.

An impossible creature who existed in the fracture of time, between before and after.

E
ARLY IN
2007,
JODY E-MAILS ME. SHE’LL BE IN NEW
York on the weekend of February 23 for the Armory Show, the annual contemporary art fair, and wonders if we might want to take the opportunity to get together. In the ensuing exchange we stray onto the topic of the annual New York City Tattoo Convention, held in May in the Roseland Ballroom, and from the Tattoo Convention we arrive at Jody’s own tattoo, which I’ve never seen.

“It’s the Batman symbol, on my hip,” she tells me, “completely hidden by a bikini.”

“Batman?” I type quickly, hoping that Jody remains online, eager to see if my guess is correct. “Because of his back story?”

She replies with one word: “Yep.”

Unlike all the other superheroes, Batman has no supernatural gifts. He is the mask of Bruce Wayne, who witnessed the murder of his parents when he was a boy. Both trauma and—more significantly—transformation, the psychic violence of the experience inspired him to cultivate intellectual and physical prowess and, with his original identity disguised, use his abilities to fight crime.

For Jody, one answer to her family’s destruction has been to make sure that loss isn’t waste. Georgetown, the university she chose because it was Thad’s alma mater, the destination that represented both her ambition and her psychic recovery, is an institution that stresses the importance of working to achieve social justice. A Jesuit school, its graduates are charged to use their personal resources for the greater good of society. In the university’s own words, “Our students are encouraged not only to study but also to reflect, and through an understanding of the world, to prepare for lives of leadership and service.”

After the murders—not immediately, but as a college graduate who had recovered enough to analyze what had happened to her—Jody applied her intimate perspective on family violence to whatever causes it might benefit. She spoke about the roots and effects of violence at a federation of American Clubs in Europe, spoke publicly about a past that she had never willingly shared before, incorporating what she’d learned working for a crisis help line in Madrid. Back home, in the United States, she wrote a column on human rights abuses for Equality Now. She became the chief of staff for President Clinton’s National Campaign Against Youth Violence and is on the board of Fight Crime: Invest in Kids and Witness Justice’s Survivors Taking Action network. In the wake of national media attention to a parricide in rural Ohio on May 29, 2005, she wrote a piece for the Sunday
Outlook
section of
The Washington Post,
examining the consequences for the one survivor of eighteen-year-old Scott Moody’s killing spree, his fifteen-year-old sister, Stacy, whom he shot but didn’t kill. Here is an excerpt from what she wrote:

I knew that only a handful of people, myself among them, could shed light on some of the daunting challenges [Stacy] may face if she survives her physical wounds. The psychic wounds take much longer to heal and require a lot of arduous work. But first, she must survive the day-to-day. She’ll have to overcome depression and despair, complete and utter alienation—and guilt. Personal and profound, the trademark tattoo of the sole survivor, that guilt will sometimes be overwhelming. Why didn’t she see what he was planning? What could she have said or done to prevent it? She will spend years looking into the abyss, ever searching for the answer. I know, because that’s what I did…. Often survivors are told to behave as normally as possible, to do what we would normally do. But there is no normal anymore. There is only before and after.

In answer to the “trademark tattoo” of guilt that only she can see, Jody has branded herself with a different, an opposite and counteracting, trademark tattoo.

Batman uses all his resources, his mental acuity and physical training, his wealth and his inventiveness, and above all his strength of will, to fight crime and avenge its victims. His reborn self is the fulfillment of the human capacity for goodness.

“The Jesuits taught me well that giving back is…a path to peace in times of turmoil,” Jody writes to me in an e-mail dated September 16, 2007. A few days later we meet after having not seen each other for some time, months during which I’ve been immersed in a past she has, remarkably, left behind. She hasn’t forgotten it or escaped its fallout, but she has left it behind. She isn’t the girl in the car that won’t move, trapped at the scene of her family’s murder. Instead she’s married to an artist, enjoying work, friends, travel. She’s something no one could have predicted: a happy, productive human being.

“There was a time when I felt like the soldier in
All’s Quiet on the Western Front,
” Jody tells me, “the one whose feet have been blown off and he doesn’t realize that he is running on stumps to get away. That was me for fifteen years. It hasn’t been for many years since.”