While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (5 page)

J
ODY REMEMBERS THAT THE ISSUE OF HER PUNISHMENT
for skipping school on April 26 remained unresolved when the family sat down to dinner at six. During the meal, Billy says, “I noticed my dad would stop eating from time to time and just stare at me,” making Billy tense and apprehensive, as such an act of intimidation was intended to do. Of course, were Billy actively planning to murder his parents, any silent look that passed between him and his father would have been unnerving.

Jacksonville Elementary, where Jody and Billy’s little sister, Becky, went to school, was hosting a program at seven that evening, and Becky was the star of the fifth grade’s performance of “Eat It,” a spoof of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” released in 1984 by “Weird Al” Yankovic. As was true of most school events, all members of the family were expected to attend, and by six-thirty Jody was finishing up the dishes. At one point she looked up from the kitchen sink and saw that Billy was outside, “hitting a cardboard box with a bat. He would swing it in two fashions,” the pre-sentencing investigation of his crime summarized, either as if he were hitting a baseball or by bringing it down on the box from overhead.

As is unsurprising for any young man stripped of authority and brutalized by his father, Billy had long been enamored of weapons and other displays of potency. He practiced martial arts; he used nunchaku, or “numb chucks” (two truncheons connected at their ends by a short chain or rope); he played mumblety-peg and threw darts. Probably he found it tempting to smash whatever might absorb his anger, including cardboard boxes. After the murders, however, much would be made of Billy’s batting this particular box, pictures of what might otherwise appear as an unremarkable piece of rubbish introduced as evidence in his trial for murder, along with the bloodied bat itself. When I visit Billy in prison, in November 2005, he tells me emphatically that he was not practicing murder on a box and makes the reasonable observation that hitting a cardboard box wouldn’t be much preparation for bludgeoning a person to death. Instead, he says, he was striking the box thoughtlessly, just whacking it around, off the lawn and onto the driveway. Perhaps he used more force than was necessary, but, after all, people often take out frustrations on inanimate objects.

Before the family left for the performance at school, Billy and his mother argued. According to the report made two months after the murders, by Dr. Barry M. Maletzky, the conflict issued from what Billy intended to wear to Becky’s open house at school. In the end, he compromised “and wore clothing of which she mildly approved.” Billy’s affidavit describes a significantly more threatening face-off in which Linda slapped him for interfering with her disciplining of Jody, a transaction that Jody doesn’t remember and Billy may have fabricated for the sake of his appeal. “I told my mom she couldn’t expect me to stop protecting Jody,” Billy says, “that I guessed I was supposed to sit by and let my mother hit Jody and my father rape her.” Linda, according to Billy, slapped him again and told him to get in the car and keep his “fucking mouth shut.”

Billy’s reports of his mother’s verbal abuse often include profanities that are hard to imagine coming from the Linda Gilley whom Jody describes, or the one characterized in various social workers’ case files. It may be that Billy uses rough language to convey the level of his mother’s hostility, but some of the words he attributes to her,
cocksucker,
for example, sound more like vulgarisms typical of a male prison environment than they do the outbursts of an enraged housewife, especially one characterized by both her surviving children as hyper-religious and squeamish about sex.

“In the car going to the play no one spoke,” Dr. Maletzky’s report continues. “Mr. Gilley [Billy] said this was typical of the family, as whenever anyone mentioned anything in the car an argument ensued.” The school program unfolded without incident. Billy and Jody went with their little sister to see some displays that had been set up for visitors. Jody remembers Becky’s performance as having been very accomplished for an eleven-year-old—“a fabulous comedic turn”—and that Becky had enjoyed being the center of attention. “She was a popular kid,” Jody tells me. “Spirited. Confident. Very outgoing. She had an attractive personality.”

“Was she not punished the way you and Billy were?” I ask, wondering how Becky had protected what seems to have been a joyful nature.

“Was she slapped, cuffed, unreasonably screamed at? Sure, but not as frequently,” Jody says. “She didn’t challenge their authority. She wasn’t a teenager yet.”

“What about the stories Billy tells, about how your mother infantilized Becky, that she encouraged her to drink from baby bottles, even at eleven years old? That the two of them played a game in which Becky wore her old diapers that your mother had saved, and that they were always pretending she was still a baby?”

Jody shakes her head. “I think he’s made it into something bigger than it really was. I don’t remember her wearing diapers. The bottle thing, once or twice. But not the diapers. Would Becky have even fit into them at that age? She was a pretty big eleven.”

Among the papers Jody shares with me are a few of her sister’s homework assignments, including a “Values Summary,” in which Becky listed the ten things she held most important:

1) God

2) Mom and Dad

3) bunny [a plush toy with which she would be buried]

4) dog

5) stereo

6) gymnastics

7) people

8) TV

9) school

10) stickers

Becky felt her strengths were her ability to “get along with more than one person at a time,” that she could “keep secrets,” and that she was “usually nice.” “I like to be with people more than [I like to be] alone.” It was important to like oneself, she thought, because then you “won’t die feeling like a failer [
sic
].”

The family got home from Jacksonville Elementary by nine-thirty, Jody told the police. She went up to her room to go to bed; the rest of the family remained in the living room to watch TV. According to Billy’s affidavit, Becky and their mother argued after Jody went upstairs. Becky wanted to stay up later; Linda said she had to go to bed right then. Becky cried but eventually obeyed, going to her own room on the first floor. As was usually the case, she woke later and got into bed with their mother. Bill was sleeping on the couch, as he had been for the past six months, ever since he had, as Jody stated in her affidavit, “offered me all the money in his pocket if he could fool around with me.”

When Jody told her mother what her father had suggested, Linda threw Bill out of their bedroom and out of the house. For two weeks he lived in a motel across the street from the bowling alley, Medford Lanes, which was as long a period of geographic estrangement the couple could afford. After he returned home, his exile from the bedroom was secured by the revelation of a different sexual transgression. One evening in the fall of 1983, a young woman called the Gilleys’ house. The family was gathering for dinner when the phone rang and Becky answered it. There was a girl on the line, Becky told her father, a girl who said she was Bill’s daughter. “My dad went to the phone,” Billy says in his affidavit, “and told the person that he wasn’t her father, not to call again, and then hung up. My dad told my mom that it had been a crank call.”

When the phone rang again, Linda answered, and Billy heard her ask the caller “how she knew that my dad was her father.” Whatever the girl said was enough to convince Linda, who hung up, called Bill a bastard, went into her room, and slammed the door. Hoping that were he to add another misdeed to his father’s growing list of transgressions, together all of Bill’s sins might reach the critical mass necessary for Linda to go through with the long-threatened divorce, Billy chose his father’s most recent disgrace as the ideal context in which to take his mother out to the yard and inform her that when he and his father were on the road, traveling to distant jobs, Billy had witnessed his father engaging in “extramarital affairs.” His mother, he said, “thanked me for telling her and promised not to tell my father where she had learned of his infidelity,” a promise she kept for less than one minute. Linda went back in through the kitchen door, and immediately Billy heard his father “yell from inside the house that he was going to kill me.” Linda came out to warn Billy that his father was getting one of his guns.

Bill sounded angry enough and had threatened to kill his son often enough that Billy wasn’t inclined to wait around and see what happened. Before his father came after him he took off across the field and hid himself in a shed behind Kathy Ackerson’s house. Sometimes, Billy tells me, after his father had emptied a few rounds into the field for target practice, Bill would sneak up on Billy when he was mowing the lawn or chopping kindling, hold his pistol to Billy’s head, and let him feel the release of the trigger, laughing when he saw how it frightened him.

As she had done many times before, Linda went after Billy and tried to make peace between her son and her husband. This time, however, Billy said he’d had more than he could take and refused to return home. Together, he and his mother came up with a plan. The following week, when the family was going to Redding, California, to spend Thanksgiving with friends, Billy wouldn’t come back to Oregon with them. Instead, he’d stay in Redding. He had $500 saved, he says, and his mother gave him another $200, as well as $400 in food stamps, and the advice that he live in his car to save money.

While Linda assumed that Billy was going to make a living doing tree work for an old colleague of his father’s, Billy tells me his real plan was to get by as a small-time dope dealer. But before he’d been in California long enough to find any employment, legal or not, he totaled his car and found himself without a place to sleep, without transportation, and, suffering the effects of a concussion sustained in the accident, unable to work. All he needed to reprise entirely the hand-to-mouth existence of the father he feared and hated was an anxious, pregnant wife.

Billy tells me that the concussion was severe enough that it left him with headaches, dizzy spells, blackouts, transient muscle tremors, and blurred vision. When these didn’t improve and he started running a fever, he was frightened enough to call his mother, who told him to come back to Medford. Sadly, his memory is that he was homesick. “Not for the family,” he says quickly, noting my incredulous and perhaps pitying expression, “but I missed the house and the barn. I missed having my animals.”

“When Billy came home again,” Jody’s affidavit states, “my parents were almost gleeful in his failure…now he would have no choice but to do everything that they told him to do, in whatever words and tone with which they chose to abuse him. His failure to make it on his own validated all their predictions—that he would never amount to anything, that he’d always be a bum, even that he’d be better off dead.”

Eighteen years old, with several hundred dollars remaining to him and the strongest disincentives to return to where he was threatened, ridiculed, and battered, Billy could no longer summon the confidence of the boy he had been at fifteen, the boy who had said, during a 1980 interview with a psychologist hired by Children’s Services, that were he on his own he would have no problem fending for himself. The two years he’d spent working for his father, so isolated from his peers that Linda had often forced the extremely resistant Jody to take her big brother along with her when she went out with friends, had stripped Billy of whatever allowed him to believe in his autonomy. Much as Billy wanted to stay away from home and from his brutal father, his sense of self was so impaired that he no longer believed in the possibility of his freedom—not so long as his parents were alive.

T
HE SNAKE RIVER CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION, WHERE
Billy has spent the last nine of his twenty-one years of imprisonment, is ten miles north of the town of Ontario, just inside Oregon’s eastern border. The closest airport is in Boise, Idaho, where, on November 29, 2005, I rent a car and drive west and then north, in all about sixty miles of Interstate 84. It’s desolate country, southern Idaho; at least it is at the end of November. Outside of Boise the land is flat and brown, save the occasional stubble of dry yellow cornstalks, and wind catches up loose flakes of fallen snow and spins them along the shoulder of the road. A single billboard with a verse of scripture marks the midpoint of my trip—1 Corinthians 13:7, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” I try to read the small print to see which church has sponsored the message, but I’m driving too fast and have to keep my eyes on the road.

Maybe it’s the barren, plowed ground beyond the billboard, the way each scrape of the harrow is crusted with a line of old snow, that leaches the familiar words of comfort. By the time I arrive in Ontario it’s dusk, and after so many miles of brown the lit-up signs of businesses appear riotous with color. I don’t need the map lying in the empty passenger seat to find my hotel; the trademark green Holiday Inn logo is visible among the rest, a Staples and a Wal-Mart, a Kmart, an Arby’s, a Taco Bell, a Rite Aid, a couple of diners and auto repair shops, Midas, Jiffy Lube. It’s a small town, without much to recommend it.

Early the next morning at the correctional institution, a few minutes before the first visiting period begins, at 8:15, I stand outside the locked double doors waiting for admission. It has snowed heavily all night, slowing travel and, I gather, shortening the usual queue of visitors to a small cluster of mostly women who huddle at the entrance to the prison, talking among themselves about the inadequately plowed roads and predicting who is likely to have been delayed or prevented from coming. Their conversation makes it clear that they know one another, and I move a little to one side, not wanting to intrude while we wait for the guard to open the doors and begin the security clearance. A couple of the women give me friendly looks, perhaps meant to encourage me to explain my unfamiliar presence. The rest ignore me, or they exchange raised eyebrows with one another, inquiring silently if anyone knows who I am.

After handing my driver’s license and completed visitor’s form to the officer at the security desk, I strip off my gloves, coat, earrings, and watch, and leave these and my purse in one of the lockers provided for visitors. “Don’t forget you can’t wear a bra with an under wire,” Billy wrote me in anticipation of my visit, and for this occasion I’ve bought a new one, without any metal to set off the prison’s hypersensitive detector. I give my boots, snow still melting and dripping from between their treads, to the guard and pass through the arch of a security apparatus so excitable that the woman in line behind me suggests I go to the restroom and wet my hair beforehand, lest static electricity set off the alarm. Once through the detector, I tug my boots back on and wait in a holding room between the security desk and the visiting area. When Billy’s name is called, I’m ushered, still under scrutiny, through a set of silently sliding metal doors so thick they inhibit even fantasies of escape.

I haven’t seen a photograph of Billy more recent than his mug shot, taken when he was a wiry-looking kid with brown eyes, brown hair, and a sparse mustache. Now he’s paunchy and clean-shaven, the angles of his face softened to the point that they’re no longer evident. His gray hair is long enough to gather into a ponytail, but he leaves it loose, falling over his collar. His teeth are bad, crooked and stained as if by tobacco—although it’s been years since smoking was permitted in prison—and his expression is wary, nervous. Everything about him suggests a blue-collar job, the labor of his hands rather than his brain, everything except his hands, which are small for a man’s, and soft. When he offers one in greeting, an awkward formal gesture, I take note of how pink and smooth his skin is. His hand seems freshly scrubbed, not one I picture holding a wrench or a hammer, nor wrapped around the handle of a murder weapon.

At home I’ve taken my fourteen-year-old son’s aluminum baseball bat and lifted it over my head to bring it down as hard as I could on the dirt under our maple tree, trying to imagine what it might be like to hit someone’s head with the intention of crushing it, hit it not once but several times and then move on to another victim. Apart from the emotional resistance I have to overcome to accomplish the imagined act, whacking the ground is not a very useful exercise. It produces a less-than-evocative thud and breaks a single ivy vine, but the jolt travels up the bat into my arm, underscoring the resolve necessary for so intimate a murder, much different from firing a gun from a distance. I remember only one line from
In the Belly of the Beast,
a collection of letters from prison, by Jack Henry Abbott. Abbott wrote about how it felt to stab someone to death, the ebbing of his victim’s life communicated to him through the blade of his knife. Taking Billy’s hand, I remember reading that book when I was eighteen or twenty and accepting Abbott’s description as true. It felt true.

Beyond the security gauntlet, the visiting area presents the bland, institutional quality of a hospital or a school, almost disappointing in its lack of crime drama atmosphere. The windows aren’t barred; instead their panes are impregnated with wire grids. The pale light reflected by the fresh snow outside gives everything, even our faces, a clean, almost antiseptic look. Only the inmates’ blue denim shirts and jeans, stamped with bright orange prison seals, and the numerous guards, visibly enamored of their khaki uniforms, weapons, handcuffs, and other disciplinary accessories, distinguish the big square room as one within a correctional facility. Like highway patrolmen, most of the guards have full mustaches; a few even wear mirrored sunglasses indoors.

My visit with Billy isn’t bisected by a pane of unbreakable glass, and we speak without telephone receivers, but we sit where we’re told, facing each other across a short round table that leaves our laps exposed, open to view. We may not move our chairs, set too far apart for us to reach forward and touch each other, and we are allowed no physical contact other than the formalities of greeting and leave-taking, which in Billy’s and my case is a solemn handshake that grows only a little less awkward as the days pass. I am not permitted to bring anything into the visiting area other than up to $10 in change, which I may not conceal in a purse or pocket. Among what distinguishes me from the usual crowd is the fact that I carry my vending machine quarters in a Ziploc bag. All the other women, most of whose tight pants and big hair make me look like a schoolmarm in my black skirt and cardigan, keep their change in zippered, clear vinyl cosmetic cases. I might not stick out so much if I were wearing jeans, as I would have if visitors were allowed to wear denim. But we can’t. If we did we’d blend in with the inmates’ prison blues. On my visitor’s application I stated “friend” as the relationship I bore to Billy, but the corrections officers regard me with frank curiosity. “You get what you were after?” one asks on the last day I came to the prison, the same one who noted my New York address on the forms. “Long way to come for a visit,” he said.

Billy doesn’t seem to consider himself a subject of my writing, or if he does, it’s a role incidental to others. In relation to the book I tell him I’m working on, the one for which he’s consented to be interviewed, he calls himself a “research assistant” or an “advisor on child abuse,” or, because of his efforts to locate and access documents and files from various social service agencies, a “private investigator.” The files are those he needs for his appeal, but, he rationalizes, since I want to see them he’s acting as my private eye.

“If I wasn’t acting as your investigator,” he writes in the cover letter that accompanies those files he’s allowing me to Xerox, “there were a lot of documents I wasn’t going to send you, because they talk trash about me. However, I’m not my client, you are.”

In return for his help, I’ve given him a subscription to
TV Guide,
bought him a few books from Amazon, helped him pay for a new pair of glasses, and lent him the money he needs to make multiple color Xeroxes of the illustrated children’s books he’s written and wants to submit to publishers. In 2006, when Billy loses his prison janitorial job, which pays $25 a month, out of which he must purchase toiletries, stamps, stationery, snacks, anything he wants beyond his uniform and his meals, I make him another small loan that I don’t anticipate he’ll pay back. I don’t think he imagines I expect to be reimbursed. The word
loan
is a means of saving face, that’s all. When Billy gets fired by one of the “screws,” guards he describes as unjust and eager to exercise their power, he has to wait ninety days before he can put his name on the waiting list for another job. Of necessity, he’s thrifty, lest he find himself unable to pay for essentials like soap and toothpaste, but it’s hard to save when you make $25 a month.

“So?” family and friends ask when I return to my home in the East. “What was it like?”—
it
being conversing with a man who murdered his parents and little sister,
it
being visiting a man in prison. It’s both easier and harder than I imagined it would be.

Easier, because for each of our six three-hour interviews, Billy is punctual, cooperative, and eager to please. Beyond his desire to cultivate my generosity, he seems desperate for contact with the world beyond the prison, even with a stranger who asks difficult questions. I can’t bring myself to inquire outright—it strikes me as both painful and perhaps shaming to be as abandoned as Billy appears to be, by both family and friends—but I think I may be the only visitor that Billy’s had in all his years in jail, the only one other than his attorney or the psychologists who examined him for his appeal. Not that he spends his days alone. When he isn’t being punished for breaking a rule—“thrown in the black box,” as he calls solitary confinement—Billy is housed in the general population of Oregon’s largest prison, a three-thousand-bed facility. The Snake River Correctional Institution was completed around the time that the state’s Ballot Measure 11 established minimum mandatory sentences for sex crimes, swelling prison populations and raising the ratio of inmates who are sex offenders from, Billy estimates, 20 percent to 60 percent of the men with whom he lives. Measure 11, Billy tells me, has made life in jail “a lot more boring than it used to be. Less violent and chaotic, but more boring.”

“Because it’s less chaotic?” I ask. “That’s what’s made it boring?”

“No, no.” He shakes his head, his expression that of a teacher assisting a surprisingly backward student. “The problem is, sex offenders are terrible conversationalists. They’re morose. They’re self-involved, self-pitying. And most of them are pretty ignorant. You can’t talk about anything with any of them for even a minute before they’re back on how they didn’t do anything wrong, they don’t deserve to be in jail, and what a raw deal they got.”

Billy’s judgment, purely contextual, that ranks convicted criminals on the basis of their ability to make interesting conversation, as though he were assembling a salon rather than commenting on life in prison, is unexpectedly funny, and while I don’t laugh, I do replay it in my head, amused at Billy’s making such a statement without conveying any of the irony that characterizes some of his other observations. I see, too, how it isn’t funny at all, how being incarcerated perverts and degrades a man’s moral vision, not rehabilitating him but scrambling his priorities. The long hours, with nothing happening, and no end in sight. Billy does make the interviews as easy as they can be, considering their topic, which is, of course, what makes them hard in ways I can’t know until I am actually asking him what it was like to murder his mother and father and little sister.

Too, the content of our conversations is made more burdensome by the fact that I can’t record them in the moment, as I am not allowed to bring any electronic device or even a pencil and paper into the prison’s visiting area. After each three-hour interview, I hurry out to the parking area, get in my rental car, and drive away from the concertina-wired compound. As soon as I can, I pull over by the side of the road and transcribe from memory what Billy has told me, confident that I’ve retained almost all of his observations because I’m holding myself to an unnatural standard of attentiveness, one that would be insupportable were it to last longer than the few days I have. When I’m not engaged in a dialogue with Billy, or recording the one I’ve just had, I find myself falling quickly into a state of passive exhaustion. I go back to my room at the Holiday Inn, order room service, watch CNN, stare out my window as snow drifts down from the darkening sky. Tired and unable to sleep, one night I go to Kmart, then to Staples, drawn through their long, wide aisles by the sedative power of endless choices of toothpaste, dog food, ballpoint pens. After hours of slow-motion browsing, the only thing I buy is a dark red damask tablecloth from Kmart. “Martha Stewart Everyday,” it says on the package, and all through December I spread it under my grandmother’s holiday china, sometimes thoughtlessly, sometimes remembering Billy, and how institutional environments like prisons and hospitals celebrate Christmas, Easter, the Fourth of July: by changing the decorations on the bulletin boards and the color of the Jell-O from food service.

What I’m looking for in Billy, what I’m trying to strain from our conversations, is evidence of his engagement with—or separation from—his past: the boy he was, the boy who killed his family. He’s speaking of a crime that is twenty-one years old, around which I assume he’s had to create layers of defenses in order to guard his sanity. I exhort myself to remain alert to details and nuances—to whatever might appear through a fleeting, accidental breach in his psychic armor. But little does. I’ll have to wait until later, when in the course of our written correspondence he begins to send me his children’s stories, fantasies that, once I know the facts of his life with his parents, reveal themselves as autobiographical and hint at what he can’t articulate in a formal interview with a stranger.