While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family by Kathryn Harrison Page A

hid myself. Like her, I’d been a striving student who depended on academic achievement as a means of transcending unhappiness. Like her, I had a need for coherence that was sometimes difficult to achieve and maintain. Before my father entered my life, I wasn’t happy or particularly sane, but I understood who and where I was in my own history, as much as a twenty-year-old can. Afterward, nothing made sense; everything I knew about myself and my family fell into a rubble of impressions that I could no longer assemble into a shape I recognized, or any shape at all. I myself had no shape then, but was undone, awaiting reassembly.
    I also found at least one strand of myself that connected me to Billy, in whose past I glimpsed an anger similar to my own. Even before the reappearance of my father, I had a history of depression, eating disorders, self-cutting, substance abuse, recklessness, and other destructive behaviors, all of which proceeded from my anger with my parents, the violence of which I turned on myself and my body, at least in part because I’d been instructed by examples different from those given to Billy. A male and therefore biologically more inclined toward aggression, Billy had had a raging and physically abusive father on whom to model his behavior. I was taught that girls didn’t express anger and that self-sacrifice was a virtue, a route to sanctification. Although Billy and I had behaved very differently, weren’t his actions a manifestation of the same species of unbearable rage I had borne unconsciously for much of my life?
    T HE EARLIEST RECORDED COMMENTS ON BILLY’S conduct indicate trouble. His report cards from Phoenix Elementary noted that his work habits were poor. Although he seemed to want to improve, he didn’t take pride in his work, nor was he organized, focused, or, in the words of his first grade teacher, able to “make the best of a difficult situation.” By second grade his classroom behavior had deteriorated to the point that he was falling into frequent conflicts with classmates, and his teacher, who gave him still lower marks for his work habits than those he’d received in first grade, decided that she couldn’t promote a student who was so lacking in confidence and so unable to read, spell, or do the required math; she’d have to hold him back for another year of second grade. As school records demonstrate, the only area in which Billy displayed competence was art, and it was art that elicited the only words of praise that Billy remembers having received in his entire elementary school career.
    On January 8, 1973, Becky Jean Gilley was born, and Billy had a second baby sister and felt the same kind of pride in her as he had in Jody, five years earlier. Billy tells me that again he called the new baby his own and showed her off to his friends. He held Becky while she had her bottle and helped his mother to change and watch over her, but the connection he had with her was not nearly so intense as his feelings for Jody. He was older now—eight—and he had other children with whom to play and, increasingly, fight. After school, when he wasn’t antagonizing boys on the playground, he drifted down the block from Phoenix Elementary to watch through the big storefront window of a martial arts academy. Fascinated by what he saw there, Billy begged Linda to enroll him in a class, for which she managed to scrape together the money, inspiring a lasting interest in a discipline that offered him a chance to experience what he characterizes for me as “positive male role models who encouraged and praised” him, providing a little psychic insulation against his own father.
    After briefly trying out the career of firefighter, Bill had settled into what would become his permanent, and final, employment as a tree trimmer. Neither of Bill Gilley’s living children remember why it was that he quit working as a fireman—although Billy surmises that his father had one too many scares and