While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (7 page)

I don’t make the connection until months after Billy tells me the story, but once I do I can’t dismiss it: in mistreating his son, Bill re-created the life-threatening incident in which he himself had been the victim. Five years after he’d been pulled, paralyzed, from the lake in Eugene, he forcibly rehearsed Billy’s entry into and exit from water, in order to “make him a man.” Perhaps the compulsive scenario wasn’t, as it seemed to Billy, conceived to punish and terrorize him. It may be that his father had been in the thrall of an inexorable psychic demand that he prove and reprove his own manhood, in the form of his small namesake’s ability to save himself from drowning.

Not that this excuses a sadistic transaction whose emotional impact grew only larger as time passed, the memory of it having become, for Billy, an internal monument to his father’s cruelty. Nine years after he prepared the account in his affidavit and twenty-one years after the murders, when Billy and I talk about the diving board incident, Billy tells me his grandmother threatened his father with a baseball bat belonging to his grandfather and, further, that this was the same bat with which he later beat his father to death.

Rather than Betty having made so menacing and inflammatory a gesture at her volatile son-in-law, it seems likely to me that Billy’s memory is inspired by his wish for a grandmother who was powerful enough to save him—a woman with a weapon she was willing to use. That the weapon would change over time from a nondescript piece of wood to the same bat that ended his father’s life speaks not only to the vengeful quality of Billy’s rage at having been abused by his father when he was too young to defend himself but also to his need to create a coherent narrative for a life that was severed—rendered incoherent—both by what he had done and by what had been done to him.

In the years after the 1984 murders, both Billy and Jody would continue to be preoccupied by what was, for each, a profoundly important work in their now separate lives: creating a coherent narrative. To preserve himself from psychic disintegration, Billy had to tell himself the story of the murders—their antecedents, accomplishment, and effects—in a way that allowed him to understand and live with himself: a story that made sense to him. And, if his appeal were to succeed, granting him a retrial, the version of the story in his affidavit needed to make sense to other people, too, explaining the murders as a response to brutality. In this context, to
make sense
is a process not only of discovering but also of inventing meaning, creating what was
not
there all along. In terms of narrative’s ability to knit and hold a life together, it may not be factually true that Billy murdered his father with the same baseball bat that his grandmother threatened to strike Bill with, but to Billy it makes perfect sense. A legal lie and a narrative truth, it draws a line of causation that connects the murders directly to the abuse he suffered.

Jody, who escaped being murdered, was left with a narrative task as daunting and necessary as her brother’s. The law would punish Billy for what he’d done, relieving him of that burden. Jody, however, would have to live with what she failed to do. Even had she not been unconsciously complicit in the murders, still she had to manage the guilt she felt for having failed to anticipate and prevent her brother’s killing their family. To this end, she, too, needed to review years of domestic blight in order to understand what provoked her brother’s violence. She had to discover how she could go on to have a life that wasn’t ultimately overwhelmed by the fact of the murders.

At the beginning of our relationship, I could tell Jody that I was compelled by her story and that I had some sense of why I was. Both of us were people who had endured a moment or a period of psychic violence—Jody’s far more dangerous and traumatic than mine—that required us either to reattach the amputated past to the future or to embrace what felt truer, and more possible: the idea that a previous self had perished and a new one had invented herself in the dead girl’s place. The more I learned about Jody’s life, the more of myself I recognized in Jody. Though I hadn’t suffered the kind of abuse or deprivation she had endured as a child, I did have parents who were young and damaged, both of whom had abandoned me. My mother had been cold, withholding, and often cruel; the father I embraced as a savior manipulated me into sex. Like Jody, I used books to enter alternate worlds in which I hid myself. Like her, I’d been a striving student who depended on academic achievement as a means of transcending unhappiness. Like her, I had a need for coherence that was sometimes difficult to achieve and maintain. Before my father entered my life, I wasn’t happy or particularly sane, but I understood who and where I was in my own history, as much as a twenty-year-old can. Afterward, nothing made sense; everything I knew about myself and my family fell into a rubble of impressions that I could no longer assemble into a shape I recognized, or any shape at all. I myself had no shape then, but was undone, awaiting reassembly.

I also found at least one strand of myself that connected me to Billy, in whose past I glimpsed an anger similar to my own. Even before the reappearance of my father, I had a history of depression, eating disorders, self-cutting, substance abuse, recklessness, and other destructive behaviors, all of which proceeded from my anger with my parents, the violence of which I turned on myself and my body, at least in part because I’d been instructed by examples different from those given to Billy. A male and therefore biologically more inclined toward aggression, Billy had had a raging and physically abusive father on whom to model his behavior. I was taught that girls didn’t express anger and that self-sacrifice was a virtue, a route to sanctification. Although Billy and I had behaved very differently, weren’t his actions a manifestation of the same species of unbearable rage I had borne unconsciously for much of my life?

T
HE EARLIEST RECORDED COMMENTS ON BILLY’S
conduct indicate trouble. His report cards from Phoenix Elementary noted that his work habits were poor. Although he seemed to want to improve, he didn’t take pride in his work, nor was he organized, focused, or, in the words of his first grade teacher, able to “make the best of a difficult situation.” By second grade his classroom behavior had deteriorated to the point that he was falling into frequent conflicts with classmates, and his teacher, who gave him still lower marks for his work habits than those he’d received in first grade, decided that she couldn’t promote a student who was so lacking in confidence and so unable to read, spell, or do the required math; she’d have to hold him back for another year of second grade. As school records demonstrate, the only area in which Billy displayed competence was art, and it was art that elicited the only words of praise that Billy remembers having received in his entire elementary school career.

On January 8, 1973, Becky Jean Gilley was born, and Billy had a second baby sister and felt the same kind of pride in her as he had in Jody, five years earlier. Billy tells me that again he called the new baby his own and showed her off to his friends. He held Becky while she had her bottle and helped his mother to change and watch over her, but the connection he had with her was not nearly so intense as his feelings for Jody. He was older now—eight—and he had other children with whom to play and, increasingly, fight. After school, when he wasn’t antagonizing boys on the playground, he drifted down the block from Phoenix Elementary to watch through the big storefront window of a martial arts academy. Fascinated by what he saw there, Billy begged Linda to enroll him in a class, for which she managed to scrape together the money, inspiring a lasting interest in a discipline that offered him a chance to experience what he characterizes for me as “positive male role models who encouraged and praised” him, providing a little psychic insulation against his own father.

After briefly trying out the career of firefighter, Bill had settled into what would become his permanent, and final, employment as a tree trimmer. Neither of Bill Gilley’s living children remember why it was that he quit working as a fireman—although Billy surmises that his father had one too many scares and decided the work was too dangerous—but it seems unlikely that a man injured as badly as Bill had been in the diving accident could have managed the physical demands of firefighting. Tree work wasn’t much better, in that it required him to strap spurs onto his legs and shimmy up tree trunks while carrying heavy equipment. But Bill was in his early thirties, arthritis had yet to aggravate the chronic discomfort in his neck, and he’d made friends with an established tree surgeon who taught him the basics and guided him into the business. In years to come, Bill would acquire an aerial lift truck (commonly called a cherry picker) to reach and cut trees’ higher limbs, and he’d own a chipper, a dump truck, and a couple of pickups and employ as many as six workers. In the beginning, however, he was a modest, one-man operation, and had to get up a tree the hard way.

By the time Billy was in the third grade he was nine years old, able in his father’s estimation to work when he wasn’t at school. After all, Bill had been in the potato fields by that age, even younger, helping his family to get by. And while Billy couldn’t do more than pick up debris on the ground—gathering the smaller limbs, twigs, and foliage that his father dropped from overhead—he could do that. When working for his father, of whom he was frightened, Billy tells me he did what he was told and didn’t complain: he was the little man he was expected to be. Out of his father’s sight, however, and beyond the reach of his temper, he was fast becoming a child with serious behavior problems.

Frustrated by his inability to do the simple school work that came easily to others, including Jody, who was three years younger, and by his vulnerability to his violent father, Billy was not only disruptive in the classroom but also began picking physical fights on the playground, perhaps to prove or assert what strength he had, perhaps to imitate his father. At home there was no chance of prevailing, but schoolyard scuffles were less unevenly matched. And he was testing other limits as well, determined to thwart authority figures who tried to control him in other contexts. Ten years old, Billy was the leader of what he calls “a shoplifting ring.” With the help of an accomplice or two, whose job was to divert the attention of whoever manned the counter of a local mini-mart, Billy stole as many candy bars as he could from the shelves. Back at school he’d then give them to girls in trade for jewelry they made and then sell the jewelry. Sometimes, he tells me, he gave candy to girls in exchange for a look at their underpants or the chance to “feel them up.” At least this is how he remembers it. Or is it the way he wants to remember himself? The way he needs to remember himself in order to preserve the notion of his having been a fully male child in defense of his father calling him a sissy?

“In kindergarten I remember charming the girls to kiss me and let me look up their dresses. From then on I was full-time skirt-chaser,” Billy writes me from prison. “If you get a copy of my mug shot from the Medford Police dept., you would see that I had the type of looks that women threw themself [
sic
] at me.” In fact, his mug shot is not distinguished by his looks, which are average, but by his glazed eyes and expressionless mouth. In a later photograph, taken at the time of his trial, he’s clean-shaven with his hair parted in the middle. His deep-set eyes are shadowed, unreadable, and his smile appears empty, a reflex summoned by the camera. Having spent six months in jail, he looks more substantial, and more relaxed. As for his ability to attract women, for all his posturing, the forty-year-old man I encounter in the Snake River visiting room doesn’t come across as sexually knowing.

“When Master sets me free, I’ll drop the weight, color my hair, and date older women,” he confides in the same letter, and I wonder if he intends this aside as a compliment to me, five years his senior. In any case, he affects a confidence lacking in his prison compositions, which include a handful of romantic poems about his fantasy wife. One, written in 1995, speaks of “never knowing love” another of the same vintage describes the anguish of never experiencing a lover’s touch. I ask Jody if Billy was a virgin when he went to jail, but she doesn’t know. He had a girlfriend the summer before the murders, when he was seventeen, but Jody didn’t spend much time with the two of them.

A lack of experience might explain Billy’s attempt to compensate for the deficit by sexualizing his early memories, a process no more conscious than arming himself with the baseball bat his grandmother allegedly brandished, and therefore one that produces an unreliable memory that can’t be challenged. Of a little Mexican girl in their neighborhood, Billy tells me that in the course of playing house with him and Jody the girl taught Jody to French kiss, and that Jody in turn taught Billy, and that brother and sister continued to practice this new kind of kissing, a scenario I suspect is false even before Jody denies any such experiments.

Whatever the genesis of his maladjustment, whether or not it was inspired by his having witnessed his father mistreating his mother in the bedroom, Billy was already on his way to becoming the brother who would sexually violate the sister he loved. Billy was lonely; he wanted intimacy; his understanding of how to treat girls was modeled on his parents. Clearly the children’s father was a malignant influence, but Linda had her hang-ups, as well. Betty seems to have done her best to instill in her adoptive daughter a puritanical control of sexual desire. Perhaps in order to correct for tendencies she feared Linda had inherited from a mother who had been sent to jail for committing a crime of passion, she’d wielded the idea of a severe and punishing God with regrettable success.

Stories Billy and Jody tell suggest Linda was not willing to acknowledge that her children were—like all children—sexual beings. In the determination to quash any urge before it had a chance to manifest itself, she often found cause for concern where none existed. Jody remembers an afternoon when she was eight, Becky three. The two girls were hiding in bed, playing when they were supposed to be napping. Jody had taken a toy camera under the blanket; when she pushed its shutter-release button and peered through the viewfinder it showed her a series of pictures that she shared with her little sister. Linda, having heard giggling coming from their bedroom, jumped to the unfounded conclusion that the girls had hidden themselves under the covers not because they were horsing around rather than sleeping but to conceal mutual sexual exploration. She pulled both girls out from under the bedclothes and accused Jody of instigating—or failing to prevent—a game of touching each other’s genitals. Becky was too young to understand how she was supposed to have misbehaved, but Jody was frightened by the wildness of her mother’s accusation, and by her behavior. Linda shook both girls violently and screamed at them in a way Jody remembers as unhinged—not so much underscoring her point as succumbing to hysteria. On an earlier occasion, when Billy and Jody were so young that they bathed together, Linda caught Billy—in complete innocence, Jody says—flashing Jody from behind his towel and slapped both of them so furiously that the impact of her hand on their wet skin launched flurries of bubbles into the air around them. Perhaps by insisting on incestuous motives where there were none Linda inspired the very feelings she was attempting to eradicate.

Just as discipline in the Gilley household was male-to-male, female-to-female, so was the transmission of sexual mores. Billy was his father’s to educate; the girls were Linda’s problem. By the time Jody had developed breasts and secondary body hair, her mother had told her very clearly that she was never, ever to allow anyone to touch certain parts of her body between her neck and her thighs. To make herself clear, she pointed out those parts on Jody herself. Wearing an expression that betrays an embarrassment and revulsion that is twenty-five years old, Jody demonstrates her mother’s lesson by putting her own hands first on her breasts and then over her crotch, showing me how Linda had touched her.

“Like the ‘dirty pillows’ scene in
Carrie
?” I ask, alluding to the movie (made from the Stephen King novel of the same name) in which a mother’s pathologically creepy and repressive attitude toward sexuality—
dirty pillows
is her way of alluding to breasts—pushes her teenage daughter to madness and the story to a supernatural apocalypse.

“Exactly!” Jody says, and she laughs with me. “That was exactly it.”

A psychosexual melodrama driven by adolescent lust and anguish,
Carrie
is an easy movie to laugh about, but its place among pop culture classics rests on the heroine’s response to her mother’s paranoia and abuse, to the intolerable psychological pressure her mother exerts on her. When Carrie finally snaps, the audience is equally relieved and horrified by what results, recognizing that all of the destruction proceeds from her mother’s unnatural lack of sympathy, of basic human feeling. It’s this, as much as the phrase
dirty pillows,
that makes Jody and me laugh: the black joke of a mother whose persecution of her child precipitates so violent an ending.