While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (8 page)

“H
E SHOULD HAVE GONE TO MACLAREN,” JODY SAYS
. “If he had, well…” She falls silent.
If.

Conceived as a social experiment in the 1920s, the MacLaren School for Boys, in Woodburn, Oregon, was a vocational training school for juveniles whose delinquency was considered to have resulted from factors over which they had no control: environment and heredity. By the 1950s, MacLaren had become a working farm that not only produced most of its own food but also provided its surplus to other institutions. In this, its most exemplary period, husband-and-wife teams served as house parents and worked the farm along with the 180 boys in their care. In 1977, however, a class action lawsuit was filed against the school, “alleging cruelty to students, unfair disciplinary actions, no due process and citing other issues,”
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such as overcrowding to the point that boys were sleeping on the floor. The suit was settled in 1979 and a number of changes resulted, but MacLaren remained a forbidding and terrible place in the public imagination, a name invoked to frighten children into obedience.

On Tuesday, May 20, 1980, Billy, his mother and father, and a caseworker from Children’s Services Division appeared before a circuit judge in Jackson County’s Juvenile Division for a dispositional hearing to decide where to place Billy, who was fifteen years old and, after a series of minor thefts, had recently run away from home. There were two choices: to leave him in the custody of his parents, contingent on their getting help for him and continuing to attend the parenting classes they had been instructed to take, or to send him to MacLaren. At the hearing, the Children’s Services caseworker offered this assessment of her client: “I believe that Billy is a very troubled young man. Billy is withdrawn and impulsive. It appears that Billy responds to others in whichever way will give him the most attention. He refuses to divulge his memories of his past. I believe this is because he does not want to deal with his emotions. Psychological tests indicate that Billy is a very sensitive person and easily hurt. I believe that Billy is suppressing much hurt and/or anger. He has also found that as long as he attracts attention by doing either responsible or irresponsible acts, he never has time to deal with his inner thoughts and feelings.”

Children’s Services recommended that the court make a decision based on their caseworker’s report, on Billy’s “attitude” in court, and on his behavior for the past few days, while he had been living at home with his parents. Presumably in terror of a whipping, Billy had managed to behave very well for five days, but even if he had not, Linda didn’t want her son to be sent to MacLaren. She was happy to use the idea of a punitive reform school as a means of controlling him, but Jody believes her mother never had any sincere intention to have Billy sent away, beyond her own control. “Once again,” Jody says, her mother’s “desire for him to be okay” required Linda to deny how disturbed her son really was, and as usual, her first concern was how the family, especially she herself, might appear to others.

“It was a solemn moment,” Jody says of the conversation she had with her mother about Billy, adding that she suspects her mother’s uncharacteristic invitation to her to share her thoughts about the possibility of her brother going to reform school was prompted by a social worker’s suggestion that the decision involve the whole family, taking each member’s perspective into account. “She asked me to join her in her bedroom and she sat down on the bed. I was lying on my side, head cupped in hand, and she told me that they were thinking about sending Billy away to MacLaren, the long-threatened destination. What did I think she should do? I was unequivocal—he should go. Nothing they were doing or saying was changing anything. He kept getting worse and worse.”

“Worse and worse” referred, of course, to Billy’s growing juvenile record and the domestic discord that resulted from his behavior, but there was another reason Jody wanted her brother out of the house. “I don’t remember how old I was when it started, or when it went from something I thought I might be imagining to something I suspected, to something I knew.”

It
was Billy’s creeping into Jody’s bedroom late at night, while she was sleeping, with the purpose of molesting her, and even if it was not yet a violation of which she was consciously aware, it would have had the power to intensify Jody’s sense that her brother was dangerous, and that she in particular needed protection from him. On several occasions, Jody remembers waking abruptly and feeling “odd, unsettled.” Aware that something had disturbed her sleep, she couldn’t guess what, exactly, it had been, until one night when she sat up and saw Billy standing by her bed in the dark. “Why are you here?” she asked him. He gave her the unconvincing excuse that he was looking for a pillow, and she sent him away.

Suspicious, and resourceful, Jody set a trap for her brother. She chose her moment carefully. The two of them were sitting in the backseat of the car, waiting for their parents to finish saying good-bye to friends and drive them all home. It was late, and Jody pretended to doze off. After a few minutes, their parents still inside the house, Jody felt her brother’s hand steal between her legs. Quickly, she closed her knees and caught his hand between her thighs. As before, Billy had a ready, less-than-credible excuse. He’d been falling asleep, too, he told her, and his hand had fallen inadvertently into her crotch.

Twenty-five years later, Billy’s explanation is the same. “I never touched Jody intentionally,” he says when I ask him why his sister remains convinced that he did. “We were always left in the car like that, our parents with their friends, Frances and her husband, or whoever, all of them drinking. It took forever for them to get Becky from where she was sleeping and come out and take us home, so we were always falling asleep back there.”

“What about when Jody woke up and saw you in her bedroom?” I press.

“If Jody saw someone in her room—if there was someone coming in and touching her, it wasn’t me.”

“Who would it have been, then?”

“Our father, that’s who. He molested both of them, both my sisters. He used to watch Jody sunbathing and he’d have his hand on himself, he’d be, you know, touching himself, touching his penis. I even saw him with Becky on his lap, when she was nine, ten. He’d be massaging her privates, and she let him. She did because he’d give her some change.”

Jody shakes her head when I report this explanation.

“You don’t think it’s at all possible?” I ask her.

“No. Absolutely not.”

“He did make sexual overtures,” I say, referring to her father.

“Yes, but that was later. And it was different—he didn’t touch me.”

I consider the idea that Jody may have repressed memories of being molested by her father, but I do so out of a commitment to think carefully and thoroughly about her family history. The Jody I encounter in conversation strikes me as an unusually stalwart and self-disciplined individual. I know that she has dedicated a great deal of time and energy to understanding what unfolded among the members of her troubled family, and has, in her own words, “been pretty open with all the horrors that are normally repressed out of shame and fear.” I can imagine Jody refusing to engage with threatening memories, reacting to them cerebrally and sidestepping their impact on her feelings, but not denying them.

If Billy was sexually aroused by his sisters, which he tells me was not the case, displacing his attraction onto his father would allow him to simultaneously keep and disown incestuous feelings. But another motivation for his insisting that his father molested his sisters may be legal. In service to his appeal, Billy has made a study of parricide cases and from them learned what typically provokes a child to violently assault a parent. Physical abuse, a parent’s alcoholism, the failure of social services to rescue the child, authorities thwarting the child’s attempts to run away, escalating tensions in the months leading up to the murder: the Gilley family exhibited most of the known catalysts for parricide. But if Billy could claim a complete list of predisposing factors, wouldn’t his case be that much stronger? In this lies the temptation for Billy to present his father as a sexual predator, providing himself with a noble provocation for murder—he was desperate to protect his sisters from sexual abuse—as he did in his 1996 affidavit, but not when speaking with either of the psychiatrists who examined him twelve years before, in the months after the murders. It would have been a lie based in the truth, as Bill had, during the last year of his life, made inappropriate gestures as well as comments toward Jody, looking at her in a way she describes as “leering” when she sunbathed on the roof of the barn in her bikini, but still a fabrication.

Whenever it was that Jody did at last confirm her suspicions about Billy—and she can’t give me the year—she went to her mother and told Linda what her brother had done and was met with disbelief, which she tells me she received as “an ultimate betrayal. At that moment I lost any remaining respect [for my parents] or feeling that I was their child.” During the hours-long lecture inspired by Jody’s accusation, Linda said to Billy, in essence, that what was disgusting about her older daughter’s claim wasn’t that Billy had done it—she didn’t believe he had—but that he was so degenerate a person that his own sister could believe such a thing about him.

“Anyway,” Jody says, “beyond the abuse, there were ample non-abuse reasons why sending Billy away seemed like the right response to his transgressions. Not that his punishment at home wasn’t ten times worse, but in my view he was the source of most of the family strife at that point. There were almost daily calls from school about fights, smoking, et cetera, or we had to deal with police, or counselors. And all those yelling marathons—even the ones that weren’t directed at me affected me, all of us.”

The judge released Billy to his parents. As only three weeks remained in the school year, and as he was failing his classes to the point that, in his caseworker’s words, “his only purpose for attending school would be social in nature,” the court followed her recommendation that he remain at home for the duration of the term.

A week after the hearing, Billy was arrested for burglary in the first degree and arson in the first degree.

Andrew,
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Josh,
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and Dwight Martin
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were, Billy tells me, “a family of firebugs” who would and did set fire to anything. They were bad kids, conniving and destructive, and Billy was with them when they broke into 2792 Old Stage Road, a home belonging to people the Gilleys knew. They rummaged around, stole a calculator, set fire to a bag of garbage, and left. Nervous in the wake of their trespass, the Martins decided to ditch the calculator, but Billy said no, he’d keep it, and the boys parted company.

Two days later, the four met up again and, as a petition filed on June 13, 1980, states, “did then and there unlawfully and recklessly damage a grass-covered area, the property of Jackson County, by fire.” When the police arrested the Martins, who, Billy says, were always the first to be investigated when the crime was arson, Dwight ratted on Billy, claiming he’d instigated the break-in and had the stolen calculator. On June 5, the police came to the Gilleys’, found Billy in possession of the calculator, arrested him, and took him back to juvenile detention.

“Why did you keep the calculator?” I ask Billy. “Did you really want it?”

“No. I dunno. I guess I just never like to throw stuff away,” he says and he shrugs, giving me a sheepish smile.

Certainly Billy was impulsive and he had poor judgment. He was confused, angry, despairing. But this was the first time he’d been involved in an act of deliberate destruction, destruction for its own sake. Perhaps he was, as he says, just a lookout for the Martins—the state came to a different conclusion—but even the lookout is a participant, and burning the home of another family, a happier, more prosperous family, was a new expression of anger, of a kind that so easily gets out of control.

Burning things is exciting. It’s beautiful and complete. A form of magic, a transformation.

Afterward, there’s nothing left.

“M
R. GILLEY,” DR. MALETZKY REPRISED FROM HIS
interview with Billy two months after the murders, “had a feeling he ‘had to do it’” that night. He “felt defensive of Jody, recognized that he and Jody were teamed together in this family against his father, mother, and younger sister,” Becky, whom Billy described to the psychiatrist as “almost the same person” as their mother, giving examples of how Becky always sided with Linda against him. “He lay in bed summoning the courage to act. He said at this point that he understood he had a ‘covenant’ with Jody to take their parents’ lives, though Jody denies any such arrangement.”

A subsequent psychiatric evaluation, made by a Dr. David Kirkpatrick, also at the behest of Billy’s court-appointed attorney, includes a provoking nightmare that Billy did not share with Dr. Maletzky. On the night of the murders, Billy “dreamed a recurrent dream about his mother and father being vampires and devouring the children.” When he woke, after an hour or so of sleep, he was “sweaty” and experiencing dissociation. “In a sort of dream with no physical sensation, no emotions, or sensations, he attacked and clubbed his father with a baseball bat.” Whether this prelude of a disorienting nightmare represents a genuine discrepancy between Billy’s two accounts—one two months, the other six months, after the murders—a difference between the two doctors’ reports of his comments, or Billy’s conscious, or unconscious, agenda to provide his crimes an extra dollop of mitigation in the form of his parents’ tormenting him even as he slept, can neither be known nor proved one way or another.

“I know his perspective,” Jody writes me in an e-mail dated March 21, 2005, before our first meeting. “His rationales are heartfelt and delusional. His pain real and imagined. Much like all of us. Sometimes I see in myself my brother’s delusions and my carefully arranged reality becomes less tidy, and so I put that introspection back into the box”—a mental compartment Jody sometimes calls her “iron box,” suggesting the inviolable strength she demands of it. But Billy’s and Jody’s “delusions” are as different as the needs that inspire them. Billy’s narratives rationalize his actions, adding layers of causation, reasons for murders he considers justified. Jody’s follow an opposite impulse, toward empiricism; she pares away whatever she fears might obscure the truth. If Billy’s retrospective includes emotions or psychological nuances that may not have characterized the original experience, Jody removes feelings or thoughts she might actually have had in the moment, worried she may have added them unconsciously after the fact.

“Between 12:30 and 1:00
AM
,” Dr. Maletzky reported, “Mr. Gilley arose, took his baseball bat, which he had kept with him in his room (he said this was not unusual) and went downstairs.” (His room was, in fact, on the same floor as his parents’ it was Jody who had the attic bedroom.) Having erroneously assumed that he could kill his father by striking him on the head just once, “like on TV,” Billy “found himself hitting his father repeatedly,” because Bill “did not die instantly but moaned and breathed loudly and moved his hand partially to deflect the blows.” Then, Billy told Dr. Maletzky, he “stopped abruptly, ‘ran like crazy’ into his mother’s room, put the light on, and beat her approximately five times on the head with the baseball bat. He said that he was not aware at the time he was beating her that Becky was sleeping next to her” (on a waterbed that may have absorbed and diffused some of the force of the blows, explaining Becky’s failure to wake). When he realized that Becky was stirring, he grabbed her “so she wouldn’t see what he had done, and took her upstairs to Jody’s room.”

“No,” Billy tells me when we talk. “Becky woke up in her own bedroom, on account of all the noise, and then wandered out into the living room.”

“She said she wanted to sleep with Mom,” his affidavit explains, in contrast to the report he’d given ten years earlier, to Dr. Maletzky, and when Becky became insistent the only thing Billy could think to do was send her upstairs to Jody, so he told Becky that Jody wanted to talk to her, and before she could resist he picked her up and ran up the stairs with her. “Stay here,” Billy said to Becky, and he put her down in their sister’s room.

“What is it?” Jody asked, turning her face away from the sudden glare of the overhead light. He seemed nervous, and he was speaking loudly, almost yelling at Becky, but these were afterthoughts. In the moment they didn’t really register or seem significant.

“I’m a heavy sleeper,” she answered the district attorney’s prompt at the trial, “and I was real disoriented and not fully awake.”

“How did Becky appear to you?” the DA asked.

“She appeared the same. She was disoriented as though she had just woken up.”

“Keep Becky up here,” Billy told Jody. “Keep her with you.” Then he went back downstairs, moving quickly, skipping some treads, and closed her door, which was at the foot of the staircase.

“What do you want?” Becky asked Jody, who remembers that her sister was awake only enough to be annoyed at having been woken. She did not seem alert, as she would have if she’d gotten herself up and already engaged in a conflict with their brother. “Billy said you—”

“I don’t want anything,” Jody said. “I was asleep.”

“I’m going down to Mom,” Becky told her. “I’m not staying up here.”