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

Just, you know, he’s talking and I’ll just shake my head.”
    Despite the inconsistencies among the siblings’ various reports—Jody’s immediate answers to the police, her subsequent answers in court, her affidavit, her personal written accounts, her current memories, Billy’s statements to the police, his interviews with forensic psychiatrists, his affidavit, his personal written accounts, and his current memories—it seems that on the afternoon of April 26, 1984, Jody and Billy engaged in what she understood to be a fantasy of revenge and what he believed was her sincere wish that he kill their abusive parents. Had Jody thought her brother was seriously considering murdering their mother and father, she wouldn’t have given him what he received as her tacit approval. Had Billy not misinterpreted her silence—her lack of dissent—as support for his at last taking an unbearable situation into his hands, repaying violence with violence, he might not have killed Bill and Linda Gilley and mortally wounded his younger sister that night.
    T HE STORY OF THE GILLEY FAMILY BEGINS WITH AN ill-advised romance. Linda Louise Higdon was in high school when she fell in love with exactly the wrong boy. At least this was the opinion of her adoptive mother, Betty Glass, whose 1996 affidavit for Billy’s appeal bears witness to her disapproval. “Linda started talking about marrying Bill Gilley, Sr., the father of Billy Gilley, Jr., when she was sixteen years old. Before she started talking about marrying Bill I had seen and heard how he treated his own mother. I remember that Bill was an excellent mechanic but that when his mother would ask him to fix something wrong with her car that he would tell her to ‘fix it yourself.’…I told Linda that any man who talked to his mother the way Bill did, I would not marry him.”
    The Gilleys, Betty had concluded, were low class, no better than their forebears, who had been among the first significant wave of refugees fleeing Ireland’s catastrophic potato famine of 1846 to 1850. Subsistence farmers for generations, inured to hardship and to hunger, to fate’s commonplace rearrangement of human agendas, the Gilleys’ Irish ancestors settled in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. Seemingly tethered to the underclass, they’d struggled to survive even in a new land of promise, and when drought arrived in the 1920s, famine pushed at least a few Gilleys to a more distant frontier. Among those who flooded California’s San Joaquin Valley looking for migrant work was Billy and Jody’s grandfather, William Gilley, of whom only a souvenir photograph remains. Taken in Paris on the occasion of the city’s liberation from Nazi Germany—a seal dated 1945 is superimposed on the print—the card is inscribed “To Billie My Only Son, Love Your Dad.” The man in the photograph is clean-shaven, handsome, and completely without expression. He appears as if suspended in a state below consciousness, waiting for an animating jolt.
    Whatever William Gilley’s nature might have been before he was drafted and sent overseas to war, the soldier who came home was an alcoholic and a wife beater. His son, Bill, who was working in the fields by the age of eight—the fastest potato picker ever, in his mother’s estimation—took it upon himself to defend his mother and two younger sisters from his father’s blows, inviting retribution even as he learned how to be a father from the poor example whose fists he dodged. He wasn’t a young man to waste much time thinking, and he had his own quick temper. Probably, he absorbed these lessons in brutality without any awareness of doing so. Later, much later, Bill’s mother would reminisce about Bill’s promising her he’d “kill the bastard,” conveying regret she’d never given her son the chance to make good on his threat. Instead, she threw her violent husband out of the house and set about divorcing him.
    William, however, saved her the trouble.