While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family Read Online Free PDF Page A

Billy, who had dropped out of school after the ninth grade, was home before Jody returned that day and overheard his mother making plans to trap her daughter in a lie. Having learned from the school’s attendance officer that Jody hadn’t shown up for class, Linda told the children’s father that, as Billy stated in his affidavit, she “was going to pretend not to know about it, so she could catch Jody.” Lest Billy try to warn his sister before Linda had a chance to deceive her, Linda “looked straight at [Billy]…and told [him] to keep [his] mouth shut.”
    When Jody came walking up the road, Billy, who had been watching for the arrival of the school bus, went out to meet her. Linda was too quick, however, and passed him, heading toward the mailbox to make a show of looking inside, “as if to check for the mail” she’d already collected. With their mother hovering too close for them to exchange a word in private, Billy “was afraid to say anything.” *1
    “Why didn’t you come home on the bus?” Linda asked Jody.
    “I got off at Kathy’s and walked,” Jody told her.
    The scene Billy describes played out just as his mother had scripted it. “Oh, really?” Linda asked Jody. “The school called to say you weren’t in first or second period.”
    Jody tells me she was ready with an answer. “Well, you know how they screw up sometimes,” she said to her mother. “Because when I’m tardy they’ve already took the card down to the office.”
    The three had reached the kitchen door when, Jody told Detective Davis, her brother, who was carrying his baseball bat, said he’d “like to bump [their parents] off with it…pound them in.” Billy contends that it was Jody who mentioned physical retribution first, telling him under her breath that she’d “like to smash our mom’s face in.”
    Linda ordered Billy to stay outside, and he did, his affidavit continues, “but just for a little bit. When I got to the living room…I heard my mom telling Jody that she knew Jody had skipped all day.” It was both children’s impression that Linda was delighted to have caught her daughter in a lie on top of truancy. “Drooling,” Billy says to me of his mother’s eagerness to corner Jody, “foaming at the mouth.”
    Then, as both Billy and Jody remember, Billy asked Jody a question. Was she all right?, he wanted to know. “Why don’t you ask mom?” Jody said. “She has all the answers.” At this, Jody told Detective Davis, her mother “got mad and slapped me for being cocky.”
    “I did have a tendency to mouth off,” she tells me.
    Even though the family wasn’t alone—Glenn Riggs, who worked for Bill Sr., was present—Billy says their father stood up from where he was sitting on the couch, unbuckled his belt, and pulled it out from his pant loops. He started walking toward Jody, “yelling that he was going to beat her ass.” That this transpired in front of his father’s employee was something Billy found “especially galling,” reported the psychiatrist who interviewed Billy two months after the murders.
    When Jody’s father came at her with his belt, she protested that at sixteen she was too old to be thrashed, and Bill backed off, warning his daughter that she’d better not skip school again. Jody promised she wouldn’t and asked her parents what her punishment would be, but Linda hadn’t decided and sent Jody to her room. Interviewed later, for Billy’s pre-sentencing report, Glenn Riggs characterized their interaction as “short-lived and not flagrant.” Nonetheless, he was embarrassed to have witnessed the eruption of a domestic conflict, and he got up to go. Bill and Linda walked Riggs out, and Billy took his chance to run upstairs to Jody’s room, the baseball bat still in his hand.
    “I asked her if she was all right,” Billy said, and Jody told him she “hated our mom and dad and wished they were dead.” It wasn’t fair, she complained, that when Billy used to get into