While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (4 page)

W
HILE BILLY AND JODY WERE TALKING IN JODY’S BEDROOM
that afternoon, or while Billy was talking and Jody wasn’t paying much attention, their mother Linda opened the door at the foot of the stairs and told Billy “to get [his] ass downstairs…[that] when she was disciplining Jody or Becky [he] shouldn’t get involved.” It was at this moment, Billy recalls, that he promised his sister everything would be all right, and that Jody told him she was counting on him and not to let her down, statements Jody is sure she never made.

Downstairs, Billy’s father poked his finger into his son’s chest and told Billy to butt out, and that “if he wants to beat Jody’s ass he’ll do it.” Then Bill told his son to get out of his sight, and Linda threw the bat at Billy and told him “to get [his] crap out of there.”

Billy went outside to practice hitting. The only social interaction he had outside of the family was playing on a softball team his father’s employee Glenn Riggs had invited him to join. Having quit school, for the past two years Billy had worked full-time for his father, a period during which, Jody stated in her 1999 affidavit, “physical abuse lessened, perhaps, but psychological abuse intensified. For example, Billy was sometimes paid only in cigarettes, which were parceled out individually or, at best, a pack at a time. I perceived this as a way for my parents to keep control over him both financially and psychologically.”

As bad as school had been for Billy, who failed most of his classes and got himself into constant trouble, at least it did provide an alternate environment. Most abused children are not vulnerable to their tormentors all day long; they’re safe in a classroom; they tag along to a friend’s house in the afternoon. Working for his father, Billy endured relentless verbal assaults. He was incompetent, his father told him, worthless. “You kids,” his father would say, including Jody and Becky in his taunts, “are so stupid, if I pulled down your pants there’d be shit all over them because you’re too dumb to wipe right.” As insults go, this one is a triumph of economy, offending so many sensibilities at once. Vulgar and demeaning, it’s also infantilizing, suggesting toilet training and its attendant humiliations. It assumes a father’s prerogative to subjugate his grown children and to breach—destroy—all boundaries, exposing their nakedness and effectively calling them his chattel. And, of course, it’s ugly; it conjures a shame that would have implicated everyone within hearing, especially, and perhaps most painfully, the children’s father himself. Nearly forty years old, Bill had yet to arrive at a level of discourse above that of a schoolyard bully.

Although they’d dropped out of high school themselves, Bill and Linda made sure their son understood that they considered Billy’s quitting school to be what Jody calls “a momentous personal failure, giving them license to denigrate him even more frequently than before.” She recites for me what had become the refrain to Billy’s life: “That he was a loser who would only end up in prison. This was something he heard constantly.”

It was an opinion Jody shared. She’d been taught by her parents’ example to believe her brother would fail at whatever he tried, and Billy had given Jody reasons of her own to distrust and despise him. While the adult Jody recognizes and has formally acknowledged her parents’ persecution of her brother, she is not his apologist. One of the challenges I discover in telling the story of the Gilleys is the ambivalence it—Billy—inspires. The harsh treatment he received summons sympathy; it did not—how could it?—make him sympathetic. The wishful alchemy of a novel can burnish a boy with beatings, ennoble and sweeten him into a David Copperfield or a Huck Finn, but Billy’s plot is nonfiction, and it didn’t thrash him into the shape of a hero.

For three years, from November 1996 through December 1999, Billy pressured Jody both directly and through their respective attorneys to provide him an affidavit, which she did provide, not because she supports her brother’s appeal—she believes he is dangerous and should remain in prison—but because she discovered “the tenor of our family life had not been recorded in the original trial.” There were six points that Billy asked his sister to corroborate, and he enumerated them in a letter to Jody postmarked November 29, 1996:

(1) father had a drinking problem and slept around

(2) our parents faught wich [
sic
] included him hitting her and her berating him

(3) father hit us kids

(4) mom slapped and berated us

(5) father’s sexual comments and advances toward you

(6) my nurturing and protective attitude toward you girls

The first five were accurate, Jody felt, and she was willing to make a statement to that effect. The sixth she considered an outrageous—infuriating—fabrication because it transformed Billy from a sexual predator into her protector, denying experiences that had blighted her childhood. Worse, when she delayed giving him an affidavit, he sent her a threatening letter. “Jody, you know you fucked me in the past!…If you help me now I would completely forgive you…if you refuse to help me I will still get out, but it may take longer and cost you your freedom.”

When Jody received this message, she showed it to the prison, and Billy’s letter writing privileges were restricted. He was to have no contact with her. On reviewing the transcript of Billy’s murder trial, Jody learned that by answering only those questions she was asked and volunteering no information—as her attorney had instructed her to do—her original testimony had been misleading by virtue of what it omitted. Without the missing information, she believed her brother “could not have been fairly tried or sentenced,” and so she provided an affidavit that included the first five of his six points. Although she personally “could not…advocate any change in his sentence,” or characterize Billy as having been a protective presence during her adolescence, she did “know that saving Becky and I was at least his rationalization, or even his cause” in the murder of their parents.

L
AS VEGAS PRESENTED THE NEWLY WEDDED LINDA
and Bill with limitless distractions from whatever anxieties their courtship had inspired. They didn’t need more than a pocket full of quarters to play the slot machines, and they didn’t have to pay admission to a show at the Sands or Harrah’s to find entertainment. Two teenagers from the backwaters of northern California could find plenty to look at just walking along the Strip. Back home, though, their choices were less attractive. Either the couple freeloaded off one or another set of parents, whose generosity was grudging at best, or they took off on their own to pick up the only kind of work they were qualified to do, which was—aside from Bill’s being able to fix cars—unskilled manual labor.

Or, as a welfare caseworker summarized in a 1967 report that tried to make sense of their precarious financial situation by tracking their movements over the previous few years, the Gilleys had become “seasonal migrant workers.” In the interview on which the report was based, Linda described a hand-to-mouth existence that required the energy and resilience of youth. Typically, from February through May, she and Bill worked the potato harvest in Klamath Falls, Oregon. From Klamath the couple drove south to Medford and thinned pears. Then came July cherries in Salem—more climbing, reaching, and picking—August beans in Eugene, then back to Medford in September and October to harvest the pears they’d thinned in June. They were traveling through a pretty part of the world, and there were a few variations: there were apples, peaches, and peppermint. But when the work wasn’t tiring it was tedious, and there were no bunkhouses or toilets provided for laborers. To buy a night’s sleep in town would use up all the money they’d made that day, so they slept in makeshift tents in the orchards, or, if it was too cold or rainy, spent the night in their car. As for bathing, often the only water to be had was what flowed past in a frigid stream.

When he could, Bill worked as a mechanic for a service station or found a position at a lumber mill, but he lost these jobs when he failed to show up on time, or at all. One of the many social workers that had occasion to interview the couple in the five years between 1967 and 1971 wondered if their itinerancy might be explained by the fact that “from time to time they get itchy feet, or Mr. Gilley desires a different kind of work and he quits his previous employment.” Wanderlust was a good guess, but the truth was probably less romantic. When Bill didn’t show, it was more likely he was hungover after a night of drinking.

The Gilleys can’t have found as much privacy as a newly married couple would have wanted, but by October 1964, Linda was pregnant. She was never a woman who enjoyed sex; in fact, years later, Bill would tell Jody and Billy that their mother was frigid and tolerated intercourse only to prove her love, an implicitly incestuous comment in its disregard for parent-child boundaries, but Linda did have dreams of a family, and a home. Perhaps she even assumed that expecting a baby would force her husband to settle down.

Rather than ushering in a new era of stability, the arrival on June 30, 1965, of Billy Frank Jr. made it easier for his parents to get by on next to nothing. No longer a destitute young couple, now the Gilleys were a destitute family and could apply for public assistance, more often than not their only source of income. After a season or two on the road, Billy, an increasingly sickly baby who was often left untended and underclothed in an outdoor playpen, was hospitalized for what a pediatrician at the Eugene Community Hospital diagnosed as “severe status asthmaticus as well as bronchopneumonia,” a potentially fatal condition in the absence of bronchodilator therapy. After this and a subsequent hospitalization, Billy’s chronic bronchitis receded into upper respiratory infections but never cleared up entirely. Because the coastal fog and smog of California’s San Luis Obispo County tended to exacerbate his symptoms, the pediatrician recommended that Billy remain in the drier central regions of Oregon—the so-called banana belt whose climate produced so much fruit—forcing Linda to acknowledge that taking her baby home to Betty was making him sicker. But often Linda saw no choice but to leave Billy with her mother while she was on the road with her husband. Other times, when Linda was fighting with Bill—about his drinking, about his straying, and increasingly about the footloose lifestyle that both resulted from and encouraged these transgressions—she herself moved back in with her parents and her son. In the affidavit she provided for Billy’s appeal, Betty Glass stated that shortly after his son was born Bill “ran off with another girl,” leaving Linda and the baby for months “without any money or any food” so that the Glasses had to support them. Bill was jealous of his son, Betty thought; she’d heard him complain that Linda “spent all her time with Billy.”

When they were together, the couple chased planting, pruning, and harvesting jobs through the seasons, but there was another reason the Gilleys moved back and forth over the state line. Welfare documents show that they attempted to prove simultaneous residency in both California and Oregon—producing a gas bill here, a receipt for a few weeks’ rent there—so as to collect public assistance from both states at once. But, as caseworkers were required to investigate their clients’ histories, it took only a few phone calls to discover the deceit.

During the summer of 1966, when Billy was a year old, Linda walked out on her husband and took their baby back to Pismo Beach, California, where she lived with her parents and, according to case files, collected “temporary assistance for about three months.” As uncomfortable as Linda’s relationship with her adoptive mother was, having a child necessarily tightened her bond to Betty. That she depended on Betty for support her husband failed to provide, while being too proud to admit that Betty’s suspicions about Bill had been incorrect only insofar as they underestimated his faults, quickly emerged as the existential trap of Linda’s life. The longer she remained with Bill, and the more she invested in her hope that everything would turn out all right—answering her fears of struggling as a single mother with the demand of her hard-line Baptist faith that she sacrifice herself to her wedding vows—the less able Linda became to consider, let alone plan, an escape. What she couldn’t predict was the extent of the tragedy she was sowing.

Released in May 1967 from a six-month jail sentence for driving without the license he’d lost after a second DWI charge, Bill reunited with Linda, and the family drifted north toward Eugene, Oregon, where, on August 2, Bill landed himself in an entirely new form of confinement. The Gilleys were taking the afternoon off from harvesting beans when Bill, intoxicated perhaps, or just foolhardy, dove headfirst into a shallow lake in one of Eugene’s public parks and broke his neck. Conscious but unable to move, he was transported to Sacred Heart Hospital, where he would remain for two and a half months, following an emergency surgery to fuse the shattered vertebrae in his neck and relieve pressure on his crushed spinal cord. Prongs were implanted in his skull to immobilize his head, and he was confined to a Striker Frame bed that held his body sandwiched between two mattresses and turned him, like a roast on a very slow spit, every two hours.

Even a man with unusual reserves of psychic strength would have trouble bearing up under what Bill’s doctors described as a condition necessarily characterized by intense emotional distress. Far from being that individual, Bill Gilley was a poorly parented, ill-educated, prematurely alcoholic field hand with a bad temper. Beyond the relentless claustrophobia and discomfort of being stuck in the frame, he had to endure the apprehension of not knowing whether his future would in any way resemble the one he’d imagined before diving into the lake. Billy has few good things to say about his father, but when he speaks of how violently abusive a parent Bill had been, it’s with the understanding that Bill had been severely traumatized by the lake accident and his slow recovery, enough to further degrade an already deformed character. For Bill, the final insult added to his injury was that he was a smoker with a two-packa-day habit who couldn’t even light a match.

As for Linda, she was pregnant again.