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

remembers Becky’s performance as having been very accomplished for an eleven-year-old—“a fabulous comedic turn”—and that Becky had enjoyed being the center of attention. “She was a popular kid,” Jody tells me. “Spirited. Confident. Very outgoing. She had an attractive personality.”
    “Was she not punished the way you and Billy were?” I ask, wondering how Becky had protected what seems to have been a joyful nature.
    “Was she slapped, cuffed, unreasonably screamed at? Sure, but not as frequently,” Jody says. “She didn’t challenge their authority. She wasn’t a teenager yet.”
    “What about the stories Billy tells, about how your mother infantilized Becky, that she encouraged her to drink from baby bottles, even at eleven years old? That the two of them played a game in which Becky wore her old diapers that your mother had saved, and that they were always pretending she was still a baby?”
    Jody shakes her head. “I think he’s made it into something bigger than it really was. I don’t remember her wearing diapers. The bottle thing, once or twice. But not the diapers. Would Becky have even fit into them at that age? She was a pretty big eleven.”
    Among the papers Jody shares with me are a few of her sister’s homework assignments, including a “Values Summary,” in which Becky listed the ten things she held most important:
    1) God
    2) Mom and Dad
    3) bunny [a plush toy with which she would be buried]
    4) dog
    5) stereo
    6) gymnastics
    7) people
    8) TV
    9) school
    10) stickers
    Becky felt her strengths were her ability to “get along with more than one person at a time,” that she could “keep secrets,” and that she was “usually nice.” “I like to be with people more than [I like to be] alone.” It was important to like oneself, she thought, because then you “won’t die feeling like a failer [
sic
].”
     
    The family got home from Jacksonville Elementary by nine-thirty, Jody told the police. She went up to her room to go to bed; the rest of the family remained in the living room to watch TV. According to Billy’s affidavit, Becky and their mother argued after Jody went upstairs. Becky wanted to stay up later; Linda said she had to go to bed right then. Becky cried but eventually obeyed, going to her own room on the first floor. As was usually the case, she woke later and got into bed with their mother. Bill was sleeping on the couch, as he had been for the past six months, ever since he had, as Jody stated in her affidavit, “offered me all the money in his pocket if he could fool around with me.”
    When Jody told her mother what her father had suggested, Linda threw Bill out of their bedroom and out of the house. For two weeks he lived in a motel across the street from the bowling alley, Medford Lanes, which was as long a period of geographic estrangement the couple could afford. After he returned home, his exile from the bedroom was secured by the revelation of a different sexual transgression. One evening in the fall of 1983, a young woman called the Gilleys’ house. The family was gathering for dinner when the phone rang and Becky answered it. There was a girl on the line, Becky told her father, a girl who said she was Bill’s daughter. “My dad went to the phone,” Billy says in his affidavit, “and told the person that he wasn’t her father, not to call again, and then hung up. My dad told my mom that it had been a crank call.”
    When the phone rang again, Linda answered, and Billy heard her ask the caller “how she knew that my dad was her father.” Whatever the girl said was enough to convince Linda, who hung up, called Bill a bastard, went into her room, and slammed the door. Hoping that were he to add another misdeed to his father’s growing list of transgressions, together all of Bill’s sins might reach the critical mass necessary for Linda to go through with the long-threatened divorce, Billy chose his father’s most recent disgrace as the ideal