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

trouble, their parents would let him off with a warning the first time and punish him only if he repeated the offense, whereas they never gave her that second chance.
    As both Jody and Billy recall, Billy became extremely agitated at the suggestion that their parents had ever shown him any leniency whatsoever. He reminded Jody that on many occasions their father had taken him out to the barn and whipped him with a hose until his back was covered with welts and that she’d seen the “black and blue marks where [their] father had beat [him] with his fist.”
    Describing the incident, Billy recalls that he and Jody continued speaking in this vein, comparing the histories of their punishments. It is at this point that their accounts diverge, over the subject of sexual abuse. Speaking with me, Billy doesn’t waver even as much as a word from what he stated in his affidavit: Jody told him “the beatings were nothing compared with our dad molesting her,” and she knew their father was “going to try it again.”
    “Why did she think that?” Billy tells me he asked his sister, alarmed, and she confided in him that she “noticed our dad stares at her while touching his penis.
    “I told her that our mom wouldn’t let that happen,” and Jody said, “Mom didn’t care what he did to her, that Mom had it out for her, and if Mom cared then our dad wouldn’t still be living there.”
    Jody, who reported her father’s leering at her and his propositioning her, denies her father ever molested her. For Detective Davis she recounted a different, shorter dialogue between her and her brother, one that made no reference to any sexual impropriety on anyone’s part. She told the detective that while Billy was talking—ranting, really—she “just sat there, and he [Billy] just said he’d like to get, he’d like to get rid of them.”
    Detective Davis, who identified himself at Billy’s trial as the one who “more or less directed” the investigation of the murders, interviewed Jody immediately after Billy was taken into custody and again ten hours later, pushing her to recall Billy’s “exact words as best you can remember,” in hopes of establishing that her brother had announced a clear intention to murder their parents that very night.
    But years of physical and emotional abuse had created a context from which it was difficult, perhaps impossible, for Jody to tease out an unambiguous threat. Both she and Billy had wished their parents dead. They’d said outright to each other that their parents were horrible, wicked people who deserved to die for the cruelties they’d visited upon their children. In what was a very human response to neglect, battery, and entrapment, each had fantasized aloud about how he or she might go about killing them. Kathy, who remembered Jody studying how to be a secret agent, said that Jody told her “she could make a miniature bomb and fantasized about blowing up her parents.” Jody told Detective Davis that Billy had had the idea to “bash their heads in…rent a boat and tie rocks to their feet and throw them in a river.”
    That two teenagers who had endured year after year of “atrocities which society refused to recognize”—these are the words that Jody used in “Death Faces” to describe a childhood in which one after another social worker failed to respond to evidence of abuse—might dream up violent means of avenging their suffering and escaping their tormentors is neither a crime nor a surprise. In fact, none of Jody’s answers to Detective Davis’s questions suggest she found her brother’s comments shocking or even unusual.
    “He just said he’d like to get…he’d like to get rid of them.”
    “Did he say ‘get rid of them’?” Davis asked her.
    “I don’t know if he said…I don’t remember how he said it, but I know he said something like that. But I never listen to him when he talks like that because I’ve just…I don’t listen to him a lot of the time.