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

decided the work was too dangerous—but it seems unlikely that a man injured as badly as Bill had been in the diving accident could have managed the physical demands of firefighting. Tree work wasn’t much better, in that it required him to strap spurs onto his legs and shimmy up tree trunks while carrying heavy equipment. But Bill was in his early thirties, arthritis had yet to aggravate the chronic discomfort in his neck, and he’d made friends with an established tree surgeon who taught him the basics and guided him into the business. In years to come, Bill would acquire an aerial lift truck (commonly called a cherry picker) to reach and cut trees’ higher limbs, and he’d own a chipper, a dump truck, and a couple of pickups and employ as many as six workers. In the beginning, however, he was a modest, one-man operation, and had to get up a tree the hard way.
    By the time Billy was in the third grade he was nine years old, able in his father’s estimation to work when he wasn’t at school. After all, Bill had been in the potato fields by that age, even younger, helping his family to get by. And while Billy couldn’t do more than pick up debris on the ground—gathering the smaller limbs, twigs, and foliage that his father dropped from overhead—he could do that. When working for his father, of whom he was frightened, Billy tells me he did what he was told and didn’t complain: he was the little man he was expected to be. Out of his father’s sight, however, and beyond the reach of his temper, he was fast becoming a child with serious behavior problems.
    Frustrated by his inability to do the simple school work that came easily to others, including Jody, who was three years younger, and by his vulnerability to his violent father, Billy was not only disruptive in the classroom but also began picking physical fights on the playground, perhaps to prove or assert what strength he had, perhaps to imitate his father. At home there was no chance of prevailing, but schoolyard scuffles were less unevenly matched. And he was testing other limits as well, determined to thwart authority figures who tried to control him in other contexts. Ten years old, Billy was the leader of what he calls “a shoplifting ring.” With the help of an accomplice or two, whose job was to divert the attention of whoever manned the counter of a local mini-mart, Billy stole as many candy bars as he could from the shelves. Back at school he’d then give them to girls in trade for jewelry they made and then sell the jewelry. Sometimes, he tells me, he gave candy to girls in exchange for a look at their underpants or the chance to “feel them up.” At least this is how he remembers it. Or is it the way he wants to remember himself? The way he needs to remember himself in order to preserve the notion of his having been a fully male child in defense of his father calling him a sissy?
    “In kindergarten I remember charming the girls to kiss me and let me look up their dresses. From then on I was full-time skirt-chaser,” Billy writes me from prison. “If you get a copy of my mug shot from the Medford Police dept., you would see that I had the type of looks that women threw themself [
sic
] at me.” In fact, his mug shot is not distinguished by his looks, which are average, but by his glazed eyes and expressionless mouth. In a later photograph, taken at the time of his trial, he’s clean-shaven with his hair parted in the middle. His deep-set eyes are shadowed, unreadable, and his smile appears empty, a reflex summoned by the camera. Having spent six months in jail, he looks more substantial, and more relaxed. As for his ability to attract women, for all his posturing, the forty-year-old man I encounter in the Snake River visiting room doesn’t come across as sexually knowing.
    “When Master sets me free, I’ll drop the weight, color my hair, and date older women,” he confides in the same letter, and I wonder if he intends this aside as a