While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (9 page)

J
ODY LET HER GO. HALF ASLEEP, SHE DIDN’T TRY TO
figure out what was happening. Did she ask Becky to turn off the light when she went back downstairs? She doesn’t remember. Like so much of what preceded her sister’s screams, the light, or the dark, was obliterated by those screams.

She remembers what followed the screams, remembers clearly, although she never did manage to describe it to anyone’s satisfaction, the series of noises she was asked about over and over again. How long? How loud? How many? Did they come from the foot of the stairs? From the living room? Your parents’ bedroom?

How could the terrorized sixteen-year-old explain to detectives that when this kind of thing happens it’s like one of those old home movies that melt and break when the projector has been running long enough to get hot? Damaged frames have to be cut out, the film spliced back together with tape. You can still follow it, afterward, but there are pieces missing.

Whatever happened before the screams—maybe nothing, maybe just the empty frames of sleep—after them Jody sat up in bed, the covers fell from her shoulders into her lap. She heard a noise, and then she heard it again, several times, but it wasn’t—it seemed to her that it couldn’t have been—real. Or if it was, it couldn’t have been what she thought it was: the sound of someone—Billy—hitting Becky very hard, hard enough to stop her from screaming. If it was happening, Jody remembers telling herself, it was happening in a book. Becky was in the book, and Jody was, too. They all were, she told herself, the whole family. Wasn’t that how she got through most of her life anyway, by being in a book?

Billy tells me he remembers waiting by the side of the woodstove, trying to come up with a way to keep Becky out of their mother’s bedroom, but when she came back downstairs she was intractable, “a brat the way she usually was,” he tells me. He blocked her way physically, and she pummeled him and tried to barrel her way through his arms. Although Billy’s reports of hitting Becky (and, possibly, his memories of it) are not in agreement with one another, most follow the basic steps of his panicking, picking up the bat from where he’d left it on the floor, and hitting her on the head once with the intent of knocking her unconscious and, he explains to me, failing to take into account the fragility of the skull of an eleven-year-old relative to an adult’s. After he hit her, he says, Becky fell, striking her head on the corner of the coffee table before hitting the floor. Only one account, Dr. Maletzky’s, based on the interview that followed most closely on the murders, suggests that Billy hit Becky more than twice—“approximately five times,” with the initial purpose of “protect[ing] her against seeing the ‘mess’” in their mother’s room, but escalating in a frenzy of panic until he assumed he had killed her.

Dr. Mario Campagna, the neurosurgeon who testified at Billy’s trial for murder, described Becky’s injuries as follows: There was a severe laceration behind the right ear from which brain matter extruded and a smaller one on her forehead, near the hairline, that was also leaking brain matter. X-rays revealed that her skull had been shattered in what is commonly called an “eggshell-type fracture where there are fifteen or twenty of them throughout all the skull.” It was Dr. Campagna’s opinion that Becky had probably been hit twice, hard. It was unlikely, he said, that her head’s striking a table as she fell caused either of her injuries.

“So if you hit Becky only once, and you’d already killed your parents, what was all the pounding Jody heard?” I ask Billy.

“The noise of the bat hitting the arm of the couch where my father was lying. After…after Becky…I went back to where my father was and I started screaming that it was all his fault Becky was dead, and he was…he was dead, but I was hitting him anyway, trying to, but the couch—it’s one of those where the arms are made of wood, it doesn’t have…it’s not padded or what do you call it? Upholstered? Anyway, the bat kept glancing off the wood.”

It isn’t until after I speak with Billy in person that I read his affidavit, a copy of which he mails to me, and the explanation is the same: as soon as Billy realized how gravely he’d injured Becky, he says, “I picked up the bat and ran into the living room and stood next to my father. I told him that this was all his fault. I remember I started hitting him and screaming ‘I hate you’ over and over.”

“It’s important,” Detective Davis said to Jody on the day of the killings, “that you tell me exactly what you heard. Screaming was the first thing you heard when Becky went downstairs?”

“Yeah. She screamed like ‘Stop’ or ‘Ouch’ and then I started hearing this pounding.”

“You heard the screaming and then a pounding noise. Can you recall whether it was one pound or two?”

“It was a whole bunch.”

This was the moment, Jody says, that she knew Billy had killed the rest of the family. “But I was afraid,” she told Detective Davis. “I couldn’t say anything or do anything because I knew if I did he would hit, kill me, too.”

T
HE PICTURE I’VE LONG CARRIED IN MY MIND, OF
two teenagers in a car that won’t move, doesn’t fade or change as I learn the fuller story of who the Gilleys were before the night of the murders. That image remains, but I form others as well, and when I think of Jody it’s as a little girl playing on Dyer Road, where she lived until she was eight.

In October 2005, when Jody and I visit Medford, we discover that her first home is being rehabbed, turned into a paint store. Still, it’s a marginal neighborhood. Lots stand empty, overgrown with weeds and brambles, and a couple of stray dogs nose among the windblown rubbish that has come to rest in a shallow ditch beside what’s not so much a road as a long dirt driveway accessing a few homes. When Jody and I visit Dyer Road, we walk together past the same unkempt trees—scrub oak—she used to play among.

Looking up at their twisted boughs, Jody tells me about an alternative world she created as a child, one populated by families of ghosts who lived in the trees near her home. Accompanying her brother to or from the school bus stop, she’d greet them by name as she passed their respective dwellings. I like this picture I have of her, calling out to her ghosts, playing outside rather than reading in her room, and when she tells me her mother used to look out the window and see her sitting on the back fence chattering away to someone no one else could see, I like that, too. Unlike most of the impressions I form of Jody’s childhood, the scene seems carefree. At first it does.

But time passes, and I find myself returning to our walk along Dyer Road. I examine the single photograph I have of the road and the trees—one Jody took with her cell phone—and as I consider Jody’s ghosts in the context of all I’ve come to know of her family, increasingly they strike me as sad. Though testimony to her imaginative nature, still they are ghosts, and ghosts are dead. Ghosts are those who have died and yet persist in our fantasies. Doesn’t this make them different from other imaginary companions? Might not Jody, as young as six or seven when she created them, have already begun at that age to mourn what,
whom,
she’d lost—aspects of herself, all the Jodys she might have been were it not for the destructive environment into which she was born? Couldn’t the part of her mind that dreamt, whether sleeping or waking, have preserved the memory of other Jodys, girls who never had a chance to come to life and whose outlines lingered, just out of reach?

After all, it was only by being dead—deadened—that the sixteen-year-old Jody would manage to navigate the night of the murders, not responding emotionally but thinking, thinking wildly, trying to arrive at a strategy for escape, and for saving herself and what was left of Becky. Jody herself observes that her ability to survive the murder of her family depended at least in part on defenses she’d created long before to protect herself from her parents’ cruelty. Billy may have taken refuge in television and comic book heroes, vented his anger and misery at school, but Jody amputated her feelings. She separated her rational, thinking self from the emotional suffering selves, the parts of her that were frightened, angry, grieving.

“C
ONING MONEY,” BILLY SAYS WHEN I ASK HOW HIS
family afforded the 1976 move from Dyer Road to Ross Lane, eight years before the murders. “That whole place was bought with coning money.” He shakes his head and laughs, a noise of contempt.

The house on Ross Lane was bigger than the one on Dyer Road. It had a fireplace and an upstairs and, located in a rural area on the outskirts of Medford, the property included a seventeen-stable barn, a paddock, and three smaller outbuildings.

“But what is coning, exactly?” I ask Billy. “What’s involved?”

Billy explains that seed cones, essential to reforestation efforts, are harvested from mid-August through September, when the cones of evergreen trees are mature but haven’t yet opened to disperse the seeds they hold, and before hunting season fills the woods with gunfire. Collectors climb the trees using spurs and rake the branches to release the green cones, which are gathered into burlap sacks. At the time, Billy estimates, each sack was worth about $50; coners paid by the sack needed to fill twenty to earn $1,000. But before 1981 (when the Reagan administration cut funds to an array of state and local programs) the federal Bureau of Land Management handed out lucrative coning contracts to tree workers who put in successful bids, paying them for an entire season’s worth of work, valued at far more money than even the most energetic worker could earn independently. Among them was Bill Gilley, who made as much as $30,000 each summer from 1974 to 1980, a significant, ultimately crucial supplement to his income.

From the time he was nine, Billy tells me, he went coning with his father, working on the ground to collect and pack cones into sacks. With the windfall of each government contract, Bill expanded his business, bought equipment, and hired extra hands for the big jobs he landed. In the fall of 1976, feeling flush in the wake of a few fat summers, he and Linda pulled together the down payment on the new place and were confident they could manage the mortgage. For a family with a history of homelessness and vagrancy that had carried them from county to county and from one welfare office to the next, the move represented a sea change. The Gilleys were no longer renting a tiny house on a dirt track; they were landed. Not only did each child have his or her own room, the house included two full bathrooms, a laundry room, a dining room, and a patio. “The fields that surrounded us on all sides seemed like ours,” Jody wrote in college, “regardless of who really owned them,” and the four acres the family did own was enough that they could keep livestock: goats, chickens. As Jody describes it in “Death Faces,” “the house seemed large, and a symbol of my father’s middle class prosperity, and our dreams of becoming ‘rich kids.’”

When the Gilleys moved into their new home, a small cinder block structure adjacent to the patio, an outbuilding they’d end up using as a pantry, was filled with junk. Among what had been left behind by the previous owners were a number of unlabeled amber-colored pharmacy bottles holding pills and capsules. Unidentified, perhaps expired, the drugs were worthless if not harmful, but to Billy they represented a potential form of currency: a means of commanding attention from his new schoolmates. The December move had required the older children to transfer to a new school, and Billy tells me he found switching schools traumatic. Although
destabilized
is not the word he uses, he seems to have been knocked even further off balance than he had been before, struggling under the double burden of an abusive home life and an educational system that, having failed to identify his learning disabilities, was also failing to teach him. He removed all the little die-cast cars from his Hot Wheels carrying case and outfitted it with the bottles of pills. Now he had the perfect prop for presenting himself as a drug dealer. He made the mistake of showing the case to Jody, who was shocked and even frightened by what struck her as dangerous rather than exciting or enviable. Determined to get the case away from her brother and hide it before she went to her mother to tell on him—before he took the opportunity to hide it himself—she got only as far as relocating the evidence before Billy discovered her betrayal and became enraged.

Whatever had been true in the past, the incident with the Hot Wheels case would mark the beginning of a new era between Jody and her brother. When Billy learned that Jody had stolen his drug kit, an object essential to his fantasy of becoming a figure of respect among his classmates, he chased her around the house to prevent her from telling on him and, in order to terrorize her into returning the Hot Wheels case, physically assaulted her in a new and horrible way. He forced her to the floor, got a hand inside her underpants, and tried to thrust his fingers inside her vagina—“all his fingers,” Jody explains, “like a spatula.” He wouldn’t let her go, or take his hand away, until he got her to promise to return the case and not to tell on him. If she told, he threatened her, he’d do it again.

I ask Billy about the incident, and he denies having ever attacked, much less molested, Jody. He denies this incident specifically and believes—or says he believes, or has convinced himself—that there was never any break in the love he felt for his sister. Even periods of estrangement from Jody couldn’t weaken the bond he had with the girl he loved absolutely, he tells me, from the day she was born.

As far as Jody is concerned, this is one of several instances in which her brother serves the conceit of a spiritual alignment that remains intact no matter what violation is visited on it. Sadly, it seems that Billy’s attempt to preserve what he imagined might provide him standing in the school yard caused him to lose what hadn’t been a fantasy and what couldn’t be replaced: his sister’s trust and affection. From this point forward, Jody tells me, her relationship with her brother would be defined by suspicion, fear, even loathing. She had sympathy for the torment he endured, or sometimes she did, but she didn’t want him anywhere near her.

There was no way, of course, for Jody to have perceived the importance to her brother of the Hot Wheels case and its contents, no way for her to understand the kind of chronic anxiety he experienced. She was a good student and kept out of trouble, largely avoiding the beatings Billy took. Her confidence increased immediately upon the family’s move to Ross Lane, which she took as evidence they’d come up in the world. At that moment, in third grade, Jody Gilley was happier than she would be for many more years, and the only thing wrong with her life, she tells me, was the increasingly disturbed and threatening presence of her brother.

I
N MEDFORD, JODY GUIDES ME THROUGH HER CHILDHOOD
in chronological order: middle school before high school, Dyer Road before Ross Lane. The house on Ross Lane is a clapboard structure painted white, with crisp, dark green trim. The present owner, whom I’ve tried without success to contact, isn’t home to let us inside, so we walk around the periphery of the house while Jody explains the layout within, identifying which window belonged to whose bedroom. The contrast between the blood-soaked fantasies inspired by the house’s history and the well-kempt exterior before us is disorienting. I ask Jody how it feels to be this close to her past, her “before” life, and she lifts her shoulders in a shrug of what looks like bewilderment.

As long as we remain focused on physical details—the ways in which the property is different, the ways in which it remains the same as it was—it’s easy for the two of us to converse. In answer to my questions, Jody points out where Billy stood when whacking the cardboard box, where it was that her father stored his tree service equipment, the location of the plum tree, now twenty years older and larger, that wasn’t tall enough in 1984 to allow her to climb from her bedroom window into its branches, the route across the field to Kathy Ackerson’s, and so on. But when I ask about the emotional experience of returning to this place, she shakes her head and looks at me blankly, without affect. It’s as if her face has lost its animating force, whatever it is that gives expression to her eyes, her mouth. Usually she’s a particularly alert-looking individual, attuned to her environment; her eyes and expression quicken to stimulus. Here she seems stunned, as if by a blow or a drug.

I know that this trip is exhausting for Jody—how could it be otherwise?—but when I refer to it as a “forced march” over difficult terrain, she corrects me. As Jody explained to me months earlier, when she feels overwhelmed by what happened in her family, she measures her loss, individual and personal, against the sweeping tragedies of history, the Holocaust, the Civil War carnage at Antietam, the endless crises on the African continent. Doesn’t the fact that people survived such epic horrors diminish the significance of her own suffering? “A forced march,” she tells me, “is Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow, starving and barefoot.”

I remain in Medford a day longer than Jody and come back to Ross Lane alone. Standing in what used to be the Gilleys’ front yard, I turn slowly in a circle, willing myself to remember what I see: two white posts marking the entrance to the unpaved driveway; a dormer window over the front porch and another over the kitchen; sun striking the side door’s cement steps; the barn with its steeply pitched roof, on which Jody sunbathed, the empty horse paddock; the dense shadows cast by the walnut trees. As far as I know, this is the first place I’ve visited where blood has been shed and not subsequently memorialized, and it teaches me how intense is the urge to mark where a violent death occurred, to be cautioned as much as informed by a monument, even one as simple as the wood cross friends or family place by the side of a road, bearing witness to a fatal crash. We want to know where to step carefully.

It’s quiet on Ross Lane; only two cars pass in the hour I spend there alone. Overhead, the sky is deeply blue and spread with cumulus, clouds with distinct and evocative outlines, hurrying past. I sit, elbows on knees, where Billy, Jody, and Becky must have sat countless times, on the sunny cement step outside the kitchen door, the one through which Jody and Billy left the house on the night he killed the rest of their family. Looking out from Jody’s old doorstep, I find myself returning, as I have several times in the past twenty-four hours, to her rejection of my “forced march” analogy. I try out her strategy of dwarfing a private loss by holding it up to a tragedy of huge proportion. And it’s true, no private anguish can compare. If inclusion in a history book is the measure of human agony, then the exercise provides a kind of perspective. But I wonder: even an army’s pain is experienced one soldier at a time.