While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (6 page)

The officer who trolls past the table separating Billy and me keeps his eyes on our hands and asks every half hour, in the amplified baritone of someone, like a radio announcer, impressed with the sonorous quality of his own voice, “Does anyone need to urinate?” When he asks, Billy smiles sheepishly and looks away or into his lap, embarrassed by this indignity, as he doesn’t seem to be by others. He reports without self-consciousness that at the conclusion of each of our visits, inmates are strip-searched, their body cavities examined to determine if any material thing has been passed to them from the free world. I’m not sure how to interpret his offering me this detail, as he doesn’t mention it in the tone of outrage he uses when speaking of other violations he’s experienced as an inmate. Maybe he imagines it to be a kind of intimacy, my knowing this about him. Or perhaps he regards it as a proof of his commitment to follow through on the promise he made me: he shows up knowing the humiliation to which he’ll be subjected on my departure.

Billy speaks of the murders themselves without hesitation, eager to correct whatever misperceptions he fears I may have formed from other sources, especially my conversations with his sister. The violent end of the Gilley family means that little of its material history has survived: no cardboard box of Super 8 movies; no baby shoes or Little League jerseys; no photo albums; no expired passport, its pages stamped with the dates of a lost itinerary; no family Bible with births and deaths recorded on the flyleaf; no medical records; no diaries; no correspondence beneath the lid of an old cigar box. People who preserve such things are people who want to hold on to their past. Apart from the childhood memories of Jody and Billy, no less perishable and inconsistent than those of any other pair of siblings, there’s little with which to resurrect their dead. Very little when compared to the self-referential cocoon the typical American family spins around itself. And much of what remains are photocopies, some of these second-or even third-generation, so ghostly as to be unreadable in spots.

From Jody I have a sheaf of local news articles about the murders; the transcript of the trial in which her brother, Billy Frank Gilley, Jr., was found guilty of the aggravated (first degree) murders of his father, Billy Frank Sr., his mother, Linda Louise, and his sister Becky Jean; the pre-sentence investigation into her brother’s earlier deviant behaviors; the transcript of her 911 call; two appellant’s briefs responding to Billy’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus; as well as more personal items: a note written on a paper place mat from a Denny’s restaurant; an exchange of three love letters between Bill Sr. and Linda; nine snapshots, no longer in color but reduced to a Xerox machine’s smudgy black and white; a single page taken from Billy’s baby book and another from Jody’s; two of Becky Gilley’s homework assignments; a dental record describing a playground accident on October 10, 1982, that resulted in fourteen-year-old Jody’s losing an upper incisor, which was replaced; a letter inviting Jody to join Medford Mid-High’s debate team and a subsequent communication from the high school suggesting that her SAT scores indicated she was a good candidate for learning a second language; three personal essays written by Jody and published in her college literary magazine; the affidavit, dated December 20, 1999, Jody provided to augment the original trial’s transcript; a college creative writing assignment that includes citations from family documents that no longer exist; and a copy of Jody’s thesis, “Death Faces.”

The three family mementos Billy has managed to save are a proud letter from Linda to her mother telling Betty that Jody had been invited to join the debate team, and two snapshots of his maternal grandparents.

All the other documents Billy keeps are those generated by his appeal, including welfare and Children’s Division case files, school records, reports made by a private investigator, thirteen affidavits his attorney has collected to establish mitigating evidence his court-appointed lawyer did not present at his original trial or sentencing, and nine psychiatric evaluations, the first made in July 1978, when he was thirteen, and the last in August 2000. In addition to evidence demonstrating the incompetence of his original lawyer and citations seeking to reveal his home life as typical of parricide cases that (prior to 1984) received verdicts of manslaughter, Billy’s appeal presents a third category of evidence: the opinions of the two clinical psychologists who tested Billy after he was sent to prison that Billy suffers organic brain syndrome. “It was quite clear,” Dr. Robert Stanulis’s affidavit reads, “that Mr. Gilley had a brain injury because he had sustained significant head injuries at the hands of his abusive father.”

Dr. Will Levin’s report suggests that certain of Billy’s cognitive deficits were “associated with multiple head traumas.”

Organic brain syndrome causes “varying degrees of confusion, delirium (severe, short-term loss of brain function), agitation, and dementia (long-term, often progressive, loss of brain function).”
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In other words, the conclusion at which the two doctors’ testimony points is that Billy was mentally incompetent at the time of the murders as a direct result of his having been knocked out by falling tree limbs and by his father’s beatings.

“Did Billy ever come home from work with any kind of head injury?” I ask Jody.

“Not that I was aware of. You’re referring to his claiming he has brain damage?”

I nod. “He says your dad would drop tree limbs on him. That he did it intentionally, from overhead, while Billy was working on the ground.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Jody says, “because it’s the workers on the ground who are responsible to stay out from under the boom. To keep their eyes on where it is and avoid it, because debris does come down. Anyone with any tree experience knows that.”

“So you don’t think…you think it didn’t happen.”

“I’ve worked on site before, I’ve watched my dad work. When I did brush—and that is all that Billy did, cut brush and run the chipper—you do not pick up brush under the bucket. You wait the ten minutes until it has moved to the next area, then you cut or drag the brush to the chipper and run it through. It could be that my dad didn’t try not to hit him, because any rational person would pay attention to where the boom and branches were. Besides, wouldn’t Billy have come home bloodied? Wouldn’t he have said something at the time?”

J
ODY AND I VISIT MEDFORD IN EARLY AUTUMN, WHEN
the surrounding foothills range from deep evergreen to the flaxen of dry grasses, the occasional black silhouette of a single live oak imposed on the yellow. It’s a landscape of abundance, farmland cut out of the original forest into orchards and pastures. Acres of pears give way to hilly paddocks of goats and sheep, horses and cows. The occasional apiary has a roadside stand selling jars of honey on the honor system: a box nailed to a post with a slot for accepting bills and coins.

In contrast to its environs, Medford itself looks like countless other little cities through which I’ve driven on road trips across the United States, each an unconscious drift of clutter over an otherwise unoffending landscape: strip malls and mini-marts; an attenuated string of businesses devoted to auto maintenance—Midas, AAMCO, Firestone, and so on—giving way to car lots, used and new; Safeway, Rite Aid, Kmart, Costco; the fast food roster of McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell; Chevron, Exxon, Texaco; a movie theater with a busted marquee; an out-of-business bowling alley; and on Medford goes. None of these seems either necessary or unnecessary, and there’s a flat, faded, grimy quality to the streets, a sort of sprawl endemic to small town America, as if there will always be enough space to waste more of it. In the 1970s, it was pretty much the same, Jody says, just half the size, and cable TV, PlayStation, and the Internet hadn’t yet killed off the bowling alley.

The Gilleys settled in Medford in 1970, on Dyer Road, a short, unpaved track on the outskirts of town. Their house had three small bedrooms, enough so that Linda’s mother could come up from California occasionally and help out, as long as Billy and Jody shared a room. Of the time she spent with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren, Betty Glass recalled that Bill “was mean to Billy and seemed jealous” of his five-year-old son, that he was a generally abusive parent, and that the two-year-old Jody would kick and scream if her father tried “to touch her or hug her,” suggesting a level of terror I don’t hear in Jody’s accounts of her early childhood. Betty’s comment is likely a belated embellishment, intended to bolster Billy’s appeal by corroborating her grandson’s assertion that Bill Sr. had molested his daughters, or Betty may have fallen so under the sway of Billy’s version of the past that she didn’t remember her own. When subpoenaed by Billy’s post-conviction counsel, Billy’s defense attorney testified that he’d spoken with Betty more than once in the immediate aftermath of the murders and she “never related to me ever any kind of history in terms of abuse.”

Whatever Betty did or did not witness, the only material record of her version of what unfolded in the Gilley home is an eight-page affidavit, prepared for Billy’s appeal and dated November 12, 1996. Outspoken in her support for her grandson in the months after the murders, when Billy was jailed and awaiting trial, Betty was not, in the opinion of at least one judge, a disinterested witness. She’d always been eager to believe the worst of Bill, and while the form of an affidavit—a sworn statement, stamped and notarized—lends it the appearance of truth, portions of Betty’s were rejected as hearsay by at least one judge.

With two small children, bills to pay, and an unemployed wife, Bill Gilley had moved his family into what the Jackson County welfare office considered a “suitable”—modest—home that was “sparsely furnished.” They “were having difficulty getting all the utilities turned on,” the caseworker reported, and Bill still didn’t have the one thing that would alleviate the increasing pressure he was under: a real job. He worked occasionally as a mechanic for Nelson’s Garage in Phoenix—a tiny town between Medford and Ashland—and he drew a couple of weeks’ salary here and there from a mint farm in Grants Pass, about thirty miles northwest of home. Beyond a lack of training and perhaps aptitude, the discipline of regular employment was one Bill had yet to teach himself. As for Linda—no less influenced by media than any other American housewife, especially by TV’s glorification of the nuclear family—she would always be keenly aware of the discrepancy between what she had and what she thought she should have. While she waited for what never happened, her family’s arrival into the middle class, she economized by shopping at Salvation Army and relying on swap meets for furnishings, housewares, and clothes. The family owned a used television set, and Billy reminisces for me about spending happy hours with his mother, watching old movies and eating popcorn. Among the memories he recounts, though, this one is generic, unblemished, and without texture, suggesting to me that it’s more wishful than accurate.

“My mom and I were very close when I was little,” Billy reports, but the same was not true of him and his father, he tells me. In fact, all the untroubled childhood memories Billy recounts specifically exclude his father. When Bill was away from the house, Billy and Linda did chores together, made meals together, and he “liked to pick flowers for her and make her things at school.” At the same time, Billy was besotted with his baby sister. One of the Gilley family’s cherished and central myths—not an untruth but a story told and retold until it acquired a sanctity that defied anyone’s questioning it—was of the young Billy’s devotion to Jody.

“I fell in love with Jody the first time I saw her,” he tells me. “I used to play with Jody all the time. I’d keep her company, talk to her while she was in her crib.” Billy called his sister his own baby and would alert Linda whenever Jody was wet or crying. “Mama,” he’d call, “my baby needs changing. Mama, my baby needs her bottle.”

Jody has few memories of her first years but concedes that she and Billy were close as young children. They played and bathed together, shared simple chores, and later her mother often spoke of her brother’s devotion to her at that age. An indifferent housekeeper, Linda was more inclined to sit on the kitchen floor and draw pictures with her children than mop that floor, or to leave the laundry waiting while she watched TV, but she did keep house after a fashion. She made do, Billy tells me, with his washing the floor, as well as a six-year-old can wash a floor, she tried to brighten up the place with contact paper, and she had dinner for Bill when he came home, the point at which things tended to deteriorate. Linda couldn’t resist nagging Bill, about money, mostly, and about his drinking.

“I remember my mom berating my father continually. All the time,” Billy says. “My father responded by periodically beating my mother and smashing the furniture.”

“Is that what you remember?” I ask Jody.

“My mother gave as good as she got. He’d throw something. She’d throw something.”

It was around this time that Billy says he saw his drunk father raping his mother. Frightened by the sound of fighting on the other side of the wall, Billy left his bed and went to his parents’ room, where, his affidavit reads, “My mom had a bloody face and she was crying.” When Linda noticed Billy in the doorway, she told him to return to his room. He didn’t understand what was going on and should leave them alone, she said. Assuming it isn’t a fantasy concocted to make his father appear that much more of a brute, this early memory of Billy’s is called into question by the process of memory itself. What psychology identifies as “primal scenes” are understood as having been created at least as often as they are witnessed, giving form to a child’s apprehensions about sex, which even when consensual may appear as a violent subjugation. Too, all of us have what are called “screen memories” that protect us from what we cannot bear to contemplate. Like dreams, screen memories are assembled by the unconscious from parts that are real—experiences from our waking lives—and others that are imagined. Still, if the rape of his mother that Billy recalls as an adult, independent of any witness, cannot be taken at face value, it is not without significance.

Sandra Renfro, a neighbor of the Gilleys from 1971 to 1974, said (when Billy’s post-conviction counsel approached her for an affidavit) that Bill Gilley had a drinking problem and was violent when intoxicated. “Linda did confide in me,” Sandra stated, “that the bruises and black eye that I had seen on her on several occasions were from Bill hitting her.” She’d also seen Bill hit both his children so hard, she said, that they would “fly across the room.” Ironically, given his treatment of them, the sound of his children crying made Bill furious, and whenever one of them did cry he “would yell at Linda and tell her to have the kids ‘shut the fuck up.’”

Linda’s closest friend, Frances Livingston, stated during an interview with a private detective that Linda refused Bill sex when she was angry with him, and it wouldn’t be surprising if Bill, who tended to impulsive and violent behavior whether drunk or sober, bloodied his wife’s nose while forcing himself on the woman he considered his by law. If a marriage license made him responsible to pay bills, didn’t it also offer compensations?

Whether or not it involved rape, Billy was traumatized by his parents’ fighting, especially, he tells me, by those conflicts that erupted at night, after he was sent to bed. By the time he was in first grade he was so frightened of the dark that he had trouble falling asleep and, once asleep, was frequently awakened by nightmares. There was a simple solution, of course, but his father refused it. Bill wasn’t going to pay for extra electricity, he said, just because his son was such a coward that he wanted a night light. It seems that Billy, at seven years old, was already subject to a code of manliness that would prove damaging for years to come, and his mother did nothing to protect him. With respect to what was or was not ladylike, Linda would have her say with Jody and later with Becky, but the definition of a man was Bill’s to establish.

This prerogative determined the outcome of another incident from Billy’s early childhood, one that would become a second, more disturbing memory, with witnesses other than Billy. Summers presented Linda, Bill, and their children the chance to visit Betty and David Glass in Pismo Beach, for a family vacation that didn’t cost much. The Glasses lived near the shore, but even in midsummer northern California ocean water can be uncomfortably cold, and the children swam in a pool belonging to their grandparents’ neighbors. One afternoon, as Betty recounted in her version of the story, she saw “Bill jumping off the diving board into the eight-foot depth holding Billy tightly…. Bill did this until Billy was blue allover his body.”

Enraged when he discovered his son in the pool wearing water wings, Bill stripped them off and said, according to Billy, “today was the day I was going to learn to swim.” For her affidavit, Betty remembered a more aggressive threat: “You’re going to grow up to be a man, not a sissy, even if I have to kill you.” Whatever he said, Bill took his son, minus the water wings, onto the diving board and jumped in holding him tight. At the lowest point of their submersion he let go, forcing Billy to make his own way to the surface. The hostility—the malice—of this “lesson” would have frightened a child who could swim. Billy, who could not, was terrified. He broke through the surface sobbing and screaming, which further angered his father and hardened his will. Over and over again, no matter how Billy begged, wept, and struggled to get free, and in spite of Betty’s and Linda’s pleading, Bill took Billy up onto the diving board and held him so fiercely that even during the minutes Billy was out of the water he felt he couldn’t breathe. “Each time he jumped off the diving board he would drag me down under the water,” Billy says. “My grandmother yelled at him to stop but he just kept on going. I remember inhaling water and I began to cough and gag…and my father just kept on going.” Jody, who was five at the time, remembers her father “throwing Billy into the pool and my mother telling him to stop it, and a sense of being very anxious.”

Betty had gone inside to fetch Linda, and both women were now trying “to get Bill to stop torturing Billy,” as Betty put it. Billy’s grandmother’s version of the story ends with Linda forcibly removing Billy from the pool and taking him inside. Billy, however, in his affidavit, taken twelve years after he had killed his parents and sister, remembered that his “grandmother threatened to hit [his] father with a board to make him stop.”