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

as I pass among the trees.
    Maybe, too, I want the sense of danger, court it the way I used to as a young woman, twenty-five, twenty-six, when I took recklessly long swims at night. Each time, I walked out of the dark water breathless, exhilarated, my legs scraped and stinging where I’d brushed against rocks I hadn’t seen. Again I’d escaped. The heaving black ocean with its wraithlike tendrils of eelgrass reaching around my legs, its hunger, never satisfied, for another and another sacrifice, the gnashing and churning of its depths—I’d swum out of it. My old self, the girl I’d been before, waited in the shadows against the cliff, shoved with my towel in a crease between the rocks. Or maybe I’d taken her along, buried within me. In either case I’d proved it again: the dead girl couldn’t drag me under, she couldn’t slow my speed.
    A self who is out of reach and unknowable.
We all have such a self, of course, at least one. But for people who are fated to sift through the debris that remains in the wake of a family’s disintegration, the ones who can’t stop searching for the piece, perhaps very small, that might explain what happened and why, that secret self whom we glimpse but never truly see can take on a sinister cast. She is dangerous, perhaps, or she is wicked. She is guilty of something—why else would she refuse to be known? She is broken and frail, empty to the point of trans-parence. Because she remains hidden, she invites a measure of dread. Who is this self that consciousness—conscience?—is unable or unwilling to acknowledge?
    If any admission by Jody other than this, of a secret, unknowable self, could have fixed my desire to understand her life and the lives of her parents and siblings, I don’t know what it might be.
    What follows is a narrative of a family tragedy, my reconstruction of the events that occurred on April 27, 1984, their antecedents, and their still unfolding consequences for Jody, and for her brother, Billy, who remains in prison. Studying the Gilleys required making inquiries into myself as well, attempts to understand how my enduring fascination with the violent end of another woman’s family informs the way I regard my own, very different past.
    Jody and Billy provided most of the information on which this account is based. With Jody as my guide, I visited the places where the Gilleys lived and where three of them died, and it was through Jody that I contacted her brother, Billy, with whom she does not correspond and whom I’ve come to know. Jody introduced me to other people who were affected by the Gilley murders; she and her brother allowed me access to documents essential to my re-creating their lives and the lives and deaths of their parents and of their little sister, Becky.
    Mine is not the first narrative of the Gilley family but rests upon and responds to others: the case files of social workers; the memories of people I interviewed; the records kept by law enforcement and by the Children’s Services Division of Jackson County, Oregon; the ten psychiatric evaluations made of Billy between the ages of thirteen and thirty-five; the transcript of his trial for murder; the reports compiled by two private investigators hired by Billy’s appeal attorney; the affidavits collected for his appeal for a retrial; the appellant briefs that argue against claims made by his appeal. Among all the efforts to understand how a child is driven to so extreme and desperate an act as killing his parents and sister, most revealing are the stories, both fiction and nonfiction, that Jody and Billy have written in the years since the murders. Their words are very much a part of this book; their various accounts demonstrate how essential the process of telling and retelling the story of their family has been to their surviving its destruction.
    For Jody and for Billy, the work of putting together a coherent narrative from what were often dislocated, fractured memories has been