Read Online While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family by Kathryn Harrison - Free Book Online

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