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

context in which to take his mother out to the yard and inform her that when he and his father were on the road, traveling to distant jobs, Billy had witnessed his father engaging in “extramarital affairs.” His mother, he said, “thanked me for telling her and promised not to tell my father where she had learned of his infidelity,” a promise she kept for less than one minute. Linda went back in through the kitchen door, and immediately Billy heard his father “yell from inside the house that he was going to kill me.” Linda came out to warn Billy that his father was getting one of his guns.
    Bill sounded angry enough and had threatened to kill his son often enough that Billy wasn’t inclined to wait around and see what happened. Before his father came after him he took off across the field and hid himself in a shed behind Kathy Ackerson’s house. Sometimes, Billy tells me, after his father had emptied a few rounds into the field for target practice, Bill would sneak up on Billy when he was mowing the lawn or chopping kindling, hold his pistol to Billy’s head, and let him feel the release of the trigger, laughing when he saw how it frightened him.
    As she had done many times before, Linda went after Billy and tried to make peace between her son and her husband. This time, however, Billy said he’d had more than he could take and refused to return home. Together, he and his mother came up with a plan. The following week, when the family was going to Redding, California, to spend Thanksgiving with friends, Billy wouldn’t come back to Oregon with them. Instead, he’d stay in Redding. He had $500 saved, he says, and his mother gave him another $200, as well as $400 in food stamps, and the advice that he live in his car to save money.
    While Linda assumed that Billy was going to make a living doing tree work for an old colleague of his father’s, Billy tells me his real plan was to get by as a small-time dope dealer. But before he’d been in California long enough to find any employment, legal or not, he totaled his car and found himself without a place to sleep, without transportation, and, suffering the effects of a concussion sustained in the accident, unable to work. All he needed to reprise entirely the hand-to-mouth existence of the father he feared and hated was an anxious, pregnant wife.
    Billy tells me that the concussion was severe enough that it left him with headaches, dizzy spells, blackouts, transient muscle tremors, and blurred vision. When these didn’t improve and he started running a fever, he was frightened enough to call his mother, who told him to come back to Medford. Sadly, his memory is that he was homesick. “Not for the family,” he says quickly, noting my incredulous and perhaps pitying expression, “but I missed the house and the barn. I missed having my animals.”
    “When Billy came home again,” Jody’s affidavit states, “my parents were almost gleeful in his failure…now he would have no choice but to do everything that they told him to do, in whatever words and tone with which they chose to abuse him. His failure to make it on his own validated all their predictions—that he would never amount to anything, that he’d always be a bum, even that he’d be better off dead.”
    Eighteen years old, with several hundred dollars remaining to him and the strongest disincentives to return to where he was threatened, ridiculed, and battered, Billy could no longer summon the confidence of the boy he had been at fifteen, the boy who had said, during a 1980 interview with a psychologist hired by Children’s Services, that were he on his own he would have no problem fending for himself. The two years he’d spent working for his father, so isolated from his peers that Linda had often forced the extremely resistant Jody to take her big brother along with her when she went out with friends, had stripped Billy of whatever allowed him to believe in his autonomy. Much as Billy wanted to