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

anywhere than there, with them; she was just biding her time until she could walk out the door, old enough that the police wouldn’t come after her and bring her back, as they did her brother when he ran away.
    Kathy had brothers, but they were younger than Billy, thirteen and fourteen, and they were good kids, normal anyway. They didn’t cause the kind of trouble Billy did—didn’t get kicked out of Bible camp for smoking in the woods, didn’t get arrested for breaking into cars or setting people’s living rooms on fire. They didn’t sneak into Kathy’s room at night to put their hands between her legs.
     
    After they got dressed that day, the girls rode the bus to Medford High, but, as Jody would tell Detective Richard Davis the morning after the murders, they never entered the building. “We went to Games People Play [a video arcade] for a while and then we went over to a guy’s house. And we stayed there for a while and then we went to Pappy’s and got potatoes and then we walked home.”
    Jody had skipped school before. According to Kathy Ackerson, interviewed in 1999 by a private investigator, Jody cared about her grades and made straight A’s—“B’s,” Jody corrects—but she was sixteen years old, and it was hard to have to answer to someone every minute of every day. A few unstructured hours, safe from the strife at home and apart from the demands of her teachers, must have presented a significant temptation.
    “Mrs. Gilley was very controlling,” Kathy explained to the private investigator dispatched by Billy’s attorney for appeal. “Jody had to sneak around to do things she wanted to do,” things most parents considered harmless. Not only did Jody have “more than her share of household chores…the laundry, the dishes, and the cooking,” but while Jody worked, her friend remembered, Linda Gilley just “sat around and smoked cigarettes.”
    The way Kathy saw it, “there was a war going on between Jody and her mother.” She “never heard anyone in the Gilley family say ‘I love you’…never heard either parent, Mr. or Mrs. Gilley, compliment or give positive strokes to any of the kids.”
    That Thursday, after Kathy came home to discover the school had telephoned to report her absence, she called the Gilleys’ house to see if Jody had gotten in trouble, and if so, how much. She knew Jody’s brother was beaten severely when he disobeyed or was caught in a lie, and although Jody doesn’t remember having been whipped the way Billy was, not by the time she was in high school, anyway, it was Kathy’s impression that Jody suffered her share of physical abuse. She remembered bruises, she told the private investigator. Once, she thought she’d seen a cigarette burn.
    But when Kathy called the Gilleys’ house, she didn’t get to speak with her friend. Instead, Jody’s mother, Linda, “answered the phone and said that Jody was grounded until she was eighteen and then slammed the phone down.” For the rest of the evening the phone was busy—Kathy presumed it had been taken off the hook—and she didn’t see Jody again until 1:34 the next morning.
    The idea of being grounded for two years wouldn’t have struck the teenaged Jody as unlikely. The way things turned out, she was pretty much always in trouble, she tells me. Punishments overlapped; they were subject to her mother’s capricious revisions. On any given occasion, whether Jody was actually grounded or not made little difference. If Linda didn’t want her daughter to go out, she’d just say Jody hadn’t done the dishes the right way, or had forgotten to dust the living room, or to pick up after Becky, or whatever else came to mind—it didn’t matter what.
     
    With a few significant exceptions, Jody’s memory of the afternoon of April 26 aligns with what her brother recounts for me when I visit him in prison the following fall, and with his sworn statement: the affidavit he prepared in 1996 for his appeal for a retrial.