While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (3 page)

“Did he say ‘get rid of them’?” Davis asked her.

“I don’t know if he said…I don’t remember how he said it, but I know he said something like that. But I never listen to him when he talks like that because I’ve just…I don’t listen to him a lot of the time. Just, you know, he’s talking and I’ll just shake my head.”

Despite the inconsistencies among the siblings’ various reports—Jody’s immediate answers to the police, her subsequent answers in court, her affidavit, her personal written accounts, her current memories, Billy’s statements to the police, his interviews with forensic psychiatrists, his affidavit, his personal written accounts, and his current memories—it seems that on the afternoon of April 26, 1984, Jody and Billy engaged in what she understood to be a fantasy of revenge and what he believed was her sincere wish that he kill their abusive parents. Had Jody thought her brother was seriously considering murdering their mother and father, she wouldn’t have given him what he received as her tacit approval. Had Billy not misinterpreted her silence—her lack of dissent—as support for his at last taking an unbearable situation into his hands, repaying violence with violence, he might not have killed Bill and Linda Gilley and mortally wounded his younger sister that night.

T
HE STORY OF THE GILLEY FAMILY BEGINS WITH AN
ill-advised romance. Linda Louise Higdon was in high school when she fell in love with exactly the wrong boy. At least this was the opinion of her adoptive mother, Betty Glass, whose 1996 affidavit for Billy’s appeal bears witness to her disapproval. “Linda started talking about marrying Bill Gilley, Sr., the father of Billy Gilley, Jr., when she was sixteen years old. Before she started talking about marrying Bill I had seen and heard how he treated his own mother. I remember that Bill was an excellent mechanic but that when his mother would ask him to fix something wrong with her car that he would tell her to ‘fix it yourself.’…I told Linda that any man who talked to his mother the way Bill did, I would not marry him.”

The Gilleys, Betty had concluded, were low class, no better than their forebears, who had been among the first significant wave of refugees fleeing Ireland’s catastrophic potato famine of 1846 to 1850. Subsistence farmers for generations, inured to hardship and to hunger, to fate’s commonplace rearrangement of human agendas, the Gilleys’ Irish ancestors settled in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. Seemingly tethered to the underclass, they’d struggled to survive even in a new land of promise, and when drought arrived in the 1920s, famine pushed at least a few Gilleys to a more distant frontier. Among those who flooded California’s San Joaquin Valley looking for migrant work was Billy and Jody’s grandfather, William Gilley, of whom only a souvenir photograph remains. Taken in Paris on the occasion of the city’s liberation from Nazi Germany—a seal dated 1945 is superimposed on the print—the card is inscribed “To Billie My Only Son, Love Your Dad.” The man in the photograph is clean-shaven, handsome, and completely without expression. He appears as if suspended in a state below consciousness, waiting for an animating jolt.

Whatever William Gilley’s nature might have been before he was drafted and sent overseas to war, the soldier who came home was an alcoholic and a wife beater. His son, Bill, who was working in the fields by the age of eight—the fastest potato picker ever, in his mother’s estimation—took it upon himself to defend his mother and two younger sisters from his father’s blows, inviting retribution even as he learned how to be a father from the poor example whose fists he dodged. He wasn’t a young man to waste much time thinking, and he had his own quick temper. Probably, he absorbed these lessons in brutality without any awareness of doing so. Later, much later, Bill’s mother would reminisce about Bill’s promising her he’d “kill the bastard,” conveying regret she’d never given her son the chance to make good on his threat. Instead, she threw her violent husband out of the house and set about divorcing him.

William, however, saved her the trouble. While crossing the highway to get to the liquor store on the other side, William was run over by a truck. Having returned home from war with his body intact, he lost both of his legs, belatedly joining the ranks of veterans whose limbs had been sacrificed in a more honorable pursuit. Two stories elaborate on William’s eventual death; both are set on the end of a pier. In the one Jody tells me, her grandfather is fishing from his wheelchair when a thief creeps up from behind, lifts his wallet, and pushes him into the water. In the other, Billy’s version, William isn’t fishing but rolls himself off the end of the pier intentionally, choosing death over the indignity and impotence he’d brought upon himself. In the absence of any evidence, the difference between the two accounts is significant only for what it reveals about the siblings. Jody attributes her grandfather’s death to a malignant force outside of his volition. Billy presumes it to have been a suicide: a culminating act of self-destruction; an admission of despair, of defeat. Whether Billy is making a judgment against his father’s father and thus his own male inheritance or projecting his self-loathing onto his grandfather, Billy has decided William’s death was one he brought upon himself.

Widowed, Bill’s mother, Essie, found a man less inclined to hit her when he was drunk, and she married him. According to Billy, the two made a contentious if not physically violent couple—Jody remembers visits to their house as comparatively peaceful—and while Bill’s new stepfather didn’t beat him, neither did he show him the interest or affection that might have compensated for his own father’s lapses. Bill quit school after the tenth grade. He knew how to make a car run and how to dig a spud out of the ground. He may never have considered it: how it was possible to come all the way across an ocean, from the old world to the new, just to go on picking potatoes and drinking yourself to death.

Linda’s father, like Bill’s, had also drifted west during the thirties, joining the general exodus of the Dust Bowl years and settling in California. When Linda was born, her father, Lonnie Higdon, gave his occupation as “transfer man” for the McCloud River Lumber Company in Mount Shasta, California. Linda’s mother, Phyllis Lorraine Tallerico, came from Oakland, a “pure-blooded Italian,” Billy calls his grandmother, who remained in northern California all her life. That the surname Phyllis used, Tallerico, was neither her husband’s nor her father’s suggests she may have had an earlier marriage, which, given she was only twenty-four at Linda’s birth, would have to have been brief. As temporary, perhaps, as the one that followed it, to Lonnie. Linda wasn’t even a year old when her mother discovered that Lonnie was cheating on her and shot him dead, earning herself the epithet by which she’d be remembered long after people forgot her real name: the Crazy Italian. Found legally insane, Phyllis Tallerico was sent to a state mental institution and remained there for seven years. Upon her release, she moved to San Francisco, where she lived alone, writing letters and sending cards to her little girl, who never received them.

Lonnie’s sister, Betty Jo Higdon Glass, had taken her niece, Linda, to raise as her own daughter, without allowing even so remote a contamination as a birthday greeting from her crazy mother. Betty, who had married a widowed school bus driver named David Glass, was unable to conceive a child of her own. Tragic as Linda’s circumstances were, Betty received the news of Lonnie’s murder and her sister-in-law’s imprisonment as an annunciation. Fate, if not God, had circumvented biology and delivered a baby into her arms. An attractive woman, her career as a model noted in a caption under her picture in a small-town paper from northern California, Betty dressed Linda like a doll, favoring her niece over her two stepchildren and encouraging what would become Linda’s preoccupation with her appearance, if not exactly vanity. Jealous of this interloper, with whom they shared no blood, David Glass’s children never let Linda forget that her real mother was insane and had murdered her father.

Whatever excuse the Glasses gave when they refused to give their daughter permission to marry Bill Gilley, his family understood that they had been judged and found wanting, and in turn voiced their disapproval of the teenagers’ plan. But young love can draw at least as much energy from obstacles as from encouragement. On Thursday, November 28, 1962, Linda wrote to Bill, who was serving a drunk driving sentence in the San Luis Obispo county jail, that the dean of girls had called her stepfather in for a meeting at the high school and told them both that she was at risk of being expelled if her grades didn’t improve. As Bill was himself a dropout, the threat was not as great as her parents would have wished, and rather than waiting to be dismissed, Linda quit.

All Linda wanted, she wrote the boy she loved, was to “get out of the house and find a way up there” to be near him, a plan Betty thwarted by sending Linda to what was in essence a juvenile detention home for girls whose parents had run out of patience with their sexual independence if not outright delinquency. There Linda would remain, against her will, for two long months, time enough, her parents must have hoped, to cool her ardor for Bill Gilley. That Linda had decided to drop out of school for love of him only confirmed that Bill was a bad influence on her. But not one whose spell could be broken by reform school. Linda came home even more intent on marrying Bill Gilley than she had been when her parents sent her away. If she’d learned anything while she was gone, it was to regard her mother and father as enemies to her happiness.

She was nearly seventeen, she reminded her parents. In little longer than a year, the law would allow her to marry whomever she pleased, no matter what they or anyone else thought of him. Betty knew when she was beaten. She hadn’t changed her mind about Bill; she still thought he was common, ill mannered, and, to use Billy’s word, “bone-lazy”—incapable of keeping a job if he managed to get one. But given Linda’s determination, which made it impossible to guess where love left off and pigheadedness took over, their continuing to fight about Bill could accomplish nothing but further estrangement between mother and daughter.

On the eve of Valentine’s Day, 1963, Bill Gilley and Linda Higdon were married in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the grudging approval of her parents. The groom was six months shy of twenty, the bride still sixteen, a lovely-looking girl, as Jody remembers from photographs of her mother taken around the same time, with big, dark eyes, olive skin, and tumbling masses of black hair. But beauty is no guarantee of happiness, and Bill and Linda’s wasn’t a match made in heaven, not any more than Betty predicted. The handwriting, if not on the wall, was still there to be read: two problems that would prove insurmountable for the young couple were those they’d spelled out for themselves in the letters they exchanged while Bill was in jail.

The first was alcoholism, which had made it necessary for the couple to communicate by mail while Bill served out a DWI sentence that seems not to have been an occasion for shame or concern. In fact, Jody remembers the incident that led to her father’s arrest described as if it had been a cartoon misadventure, in which “silly Daddy had driven off a curve and landed on the roof of a house,” an unexpected frolic rather than evidence of a serious problem. Nineteen is young to be enslaved to a disease that typically develops over the course of years, but Bill was the son of an alcoholic, and his mother and stepfather were drinkers as well, who, Billy tells me, encouraged grandchildren as young as eight to sip freely from their glasses. Probably they’d given him a head start.

The second was infidelity. Each of Linda’s letters to Bill reveals not only her fundamental insecurity but also doubts about the permanence of Bill’s affection for her. Having gotten a haircut, she told Bill how much older it made her look. “You think you’ll still love me in short hair?” she asked, betraying a concern that her looks might not be good enough to keep his interest. A first postscript excuses her messy handwriting; a second inquires if Bill would be angry if she were to go to a movie with a friend’s brother, for whom she had no romantic feelings—“Tell me if you object, O.K.?” the last ends with the entreaty, “Let’s not fight because I love you and I want us to be happy together forever.” The next day, Linda wrote Bill again, addressing him as “Babe,” and focusing on an unresolved—and, she seems to suspect already, irresolvable—conflict over his seeing other girls while demanding that she remain faithful to him. “I want to be your wife, but am I going to have a cheating husband?” she demanded.

“Honey, I miss you so much I stay nerves [
sic
] all the time,” Bill replied, and apologized for having hurt her. “Its [
sic
] that I love you so much.” He couldn’t make any promises about getting married when he was in jail, where he “can’t even think straight,” and where, separated from her, he didn’t know what was “going on.” Resorting to a favorite rhetorical trick of philanderers, he implied Linda was the one who wasn’t to be trusted, alluding to a pessimistic account of his prospects from her friend Vicki. “If you don’t [love me] tell me so I can quit making plans about us,” he concluded, having avoided the issue of his cheating on her and threatening to abandon her if she wouldn’t reaffirm her love.

Months before they were married, the pattern for their life together had been set.

A
RTICULATE, POISED, THE THIRTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD
woman sitting on the couch across from my chair is hard to imagine as having once been the girl who spoke to the emergency operator, the one who said, for example, “He’d a probably went to 7-Eleven.” It’s in her diction, her impeccable syntax, and especially in her frame of reference. Greek myth, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Camus, Sartre: it’s a long list that accrues over the months of our continued conversations and correspondence, one whose disproportionate focus on warfare, cruelty—Elie Wiesel—torture, faith, apostasy—Bruno Bettelheim—justice, and moral responsibility bears witness to Jody’s struggle to understand the murders her brother committed. Not his motives, she knew those, but the meaning of an act that both defied and demanded explanation.

Eventually I have the opportunity to study Jody’s bookshelves and to borrow from them, and I select a few that represent an array of responses—psychological, sociological, legal—to parricide, as well as a sampling of her college texts, passages from which she has underlined with the fervor of discovery. What emerges most palpably in speaking with her, in reading her books and following the paths she took through history, philosophy, and ethics, is the guilt she endured after the murders—guilt for having wished her parents dead, for hating them enough to have fantasized herself about the crime her brother accomplished.

At sixteen, still a child, she was presented with an existential problem that would starkly define much of her life’s work, leaving her with questions that were all but impossible to answer. Should she judge herself on the content of her heart, find herself as culpable as her brother because she’d shared his desire for vengeance? And what about sins of omission? Surely they weighed in the balance. Was she responsible for having failed to prevent the murders? For having, in essence, abandoned the scene of the crime long before it occurred, left in spirit if not in body?

A character who arrives in our first conversation and who will continue to inform our dialogue is perhaps an obvious one, Ivan Karamazov, the intensely moral, cerebral, and tormented brother in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov.
In Ivan, Jody found a means of analyzing why she felt as she did in the wake of her family’s murder. Ivan’s logical atheism and his philosophical rejection of any morality that is based on fear of punishment by God—if it’s based on fear it cannot be true morality—leads Ivan to espouse a premise he’s never tested: there is neither good nor evil; hence, “all is permitted,” even the most depraved acts. Because Ivan shares this idea with the brother who goes on to kill their villainous father, Ivan becomes convinced that he is responsible for this murder he didn’t commit. Wasn’t the murderer simply the “instrument”—the fulfillment—of Ivan’s beliefs?

And if Jody hated her mother and father and wished them both dead, if ultimately she benefited from the freedom Billy’s murders purchased for her, then wasn’t her brother the instrument of her anger and fantasies of vengeance as well as of his own? Perhaps it was her pain and sense of endangerment that galvanized his resolve. Even if she hadn’t, as her brother claimed after his arrest, planned or directed the killings, perhaps her rage empowered Billy to take an action he wouldn’t have taken for himself alone. The legal system would conclude that Jody was without blame, but the standard to which she held herself, the one that considered the content of her heart before acts she did or did not commit, was less forgiving.

It’s a compelling question that Jody frames within an hour of our first meeting, and I understand why I stopped reading
The Brothers Karamazov
when I did, just after college and fully in my father’s thrall, and why I must go back to the novel and read it through to the end. Long after I’d forgiven myself for not having been strong enough to turn away from my father, after I no longer felt I was made permanently unclean by incest, I still found it difficult to manage my guilt over the pain our relationship caused my mother, with whom I had been furious for abandoning me. By claiming the exclusive attention of my father, who she made clear was the only man she’d ever loved, I caused my mother great unhappiness, and her misery had satisfied my anger with her. Hadn’t my father, then, been the instrument of my rage, my desire for vengeance?

I want to lean forward across the table and tell Jody that no, of course she hadn’t participated in her parents’ and sister’s murders, that emotions are not equivalent to actions, but I can’t. The feelings we hold for people are not without power. Jody’s brother freed her from tyranny and abuse, from parents who had become her persecutors as well as his, and from whom she’d drawn apart in every way she could. Her brother damaged her, too, of course, and gravely. He orphaned her and subjected her to trauma and notoriety that even her second self can never completely overcome. But the two—his freeing her, his damaging her—don’t cancel each other out. They coexist; in tandem they unfold through time. I know this because the damage my enslavement to my father did to me existed alongside the anger I bore toward my mother; the fact that I suffered does not redeem the injury I caused.

What is it that I want from Jody, from Billy, and from all the other people to whom I speak about the murders? In the beginning—maybe in the end, as well—I just want to get the story straight. I want to know what happened, and the exact order in which everything happened, and I dedicate the better part of a year to this goal, collecting and creating more documents than I have room to store in my study. Binders filled with chronologically arranged correspondence between Jody and me, between Billy and me; notebooks filled with details of our conversations; questions that occurred to me after we spoke; thoughts I scrawled in the dark, awake next to my sleeping husband, on whatever scrap of paper I could find without turning on the light; notes taken during interviews; legal documents; police records—and that’s just the directly pertinent material. There’s context, as well, information sifted and indexed and highlighted in the hope of discerning the pressures that drove Billy to kill his family as well as aspects of his experience, whether external or internal, that might have loosened the power of taboo, allowing Billy to give himself permission to murder: Demographic analyses of Medford, including its residents’ education, ethnicity, and per capita income. Books on the fundamentals of tree work. Jackson County lumber industry reports. Tables comparing the percentage of Oregon’s population who hunt and therefore keep shotguns versus those who fish and do not. Graphed statistical correlations between alcoholism and parricide, between child abuse and parricide, sexual abuse and parricide. Opinions of experts in the legal snarls parricide inspires. Mid-nineteenth-century ship passenger lists that include the name Gilley. Civil War casualty lists that include the name Gilley. The top one hundred songs played on the radio in 1982, 1983, and 1984. A list of all the network television shows during those same years. A report ordered from the National Weather Service containing meteorological data collected at the Medford-Ashland airport station during April of 1984.

Can it possibly matter what phase of the moon hung over the murders? I err in the direction of inclusion. “Gilleyalia” is the name I give my crates of files when I e-mail Jody, joking about the glut of information I have pertaining to her, her family, her hometown. Compulsively, I organize information into outlines and, especially, timelines.

Between April 2005 and February 2006, I make five timelines of the Gilley family’s history. Each begins, roughly, with the 1963 marriage of Bill and Linda and continues on into the present. Each is bisected, cut in two by a red line running through the night of April 27, 1984. Before. After. The first timeline is about five feet long, made from a roll of white drawing paper. I bring it to an early interview with Jody, so I can record events as we speak of them. Later, when I realize that five feet is too short, I start over, with a ten-foot piece of the same white paper, happy for the opportunity to neatly transcribe what I’ve had to erase and move while making adjustments to the previous one. I carry this second timeline, rolled in a tube, when I visit Billy in prison, and I work on it in my hotel room, cross-referencing Jody’s memories with what Billy tells me. Linda’s one uncharacteristic day of heavy drinking; Billy’s sneaking into Jody’s bedroom; the electrical fire that destroyed Jody’s attic bedroom—these and other events are hard to sequence because Jody’s and Billy’s accounts don’t coincide. I move them around enough times that again the paper gets smudged and creased.

The final timeline is transcribed onto oversize, twenty-four-by-thirty-six-inch sheets of quadrille paper, taped together into an unmanageably long accounting of events both momentous and negligible. I think very carefully about how I fill in the dates so that I won’t end up having to redo it again. Perhaps I imagine the blue-ruled one-by-one-inch squares will impose order and help make it readable—not
see
able but
read
able, like a narrative.

I can’t not make the timelines. Not any more than I could stop myself from reviewing over and over each minute of my father’s visit the year I turned twenty: conversations mostly, and gestures, tone of voice. Over and over I replayed every word I could remember. I read and reread the few tentative letters my father and I exchanged in the year before that visit, looking for subtexts I maybe missed. I went over all I could recall of my first twenty years, including what seemed irrelevant—because how could I be certain I’d recognize relevance? And I couldn’t take the chance of overlooking the answer, which might be quite simple and not at all what I expected. I was sure that if I could reconstruct everything in the correct sequence then…then what? I’d know? I’d understand what happened, and why?

Yes, that is what I thought—what I think. That if I can tell a story without missing significance or misrepresenting the order of events, I can understand what made things turn out as they did.

On the other hand, if I don’t assemble the pieces exactly right, then the story will come apart. There won’t be an answer.