While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family by Kathryn Harrison Read Free Book Online

in spirit if not in body?
    A character who arrives in our first conversation and who will continue to inform our dialogue is perhaps an obvious one, Ivan Karamazov, the intensely moral, cerebral, and tormented brother in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov.
In Ivan, Jody found a means of analyzing why she felt as she did in the wake of her family’s murder. Ivan’s logical atheism and his philosophical rejection of any morality that is based on fear of punishment by God—if it’s based on fear it cannot be true morality—leads Ivan to espouse a premise he’s never tested: there is neither good nor evil; hence, “all is permitted,” even the most depraved acts. Because Ivan shares this idea with the brother who goes on to kill their villainous father, Ivan becomes convinced that he is responsible for this murder he didn’t commit. Wasn’t the murderer simply the “instrument”—the fulfillment—of Ivan’s beliefs?
    And if Jody hated her mother and father and wished them both dead, if ultimately she benefited from the freedom Billy’s murders purchased for her, then wasn’t her brother the instrument of her anger and fantasies of vengeance as well as of his own? Perhaps it was her pain and sense of endangerment that galvanized his resolve. Even if she hadn’t, as her brother claimed after his arrest, planned or directed the killings, perhaps her rage empowered Billy to take an action he wouldn’t have taken for himself alone. The legal system would conclude that Jody was without blame, but the standard to which she held herself, the one that considered the content of her heart before acts she did or did not commit, was less forgiving.
    It’s a compelling question that Jody frames within an hour of our first meeting, and I understand why I stopped reading
The Brothers Karamazov
when I did, just after college and fully in my father’s thrall, and why I must go back to the novel and read it through to the end. Long after I’d forgiven myself for not having been strong enough to turn away from my father, after I no longer felt I was made permanently unclean by incest, I still found it difficult to manage my guilt over the pain our relationship caused my mother, with whom I had been furious for abandoning me. By claiming the exclusive attention of my father, who she made clear was the only man she’d ever loved, I caused my mother great unhappiness, and her misery had satisfied my anger with her. Hadn’t my father, then, been the instrument of my rage, my desire for vengeance?
    I want to lean forward across the table and tell Jody that no, of course she hadn’t participated in her parents’ and sister’s murders, that emotions are not equivalent to actions, but I can’t. The feelings we hold for people are not without power. Jody’s brother freed her from tyranny and abuse, from parents who had become her persecutors as well as his, and from whom she’d drawn apart in every way she could. Her brother damaged her, too, of course, and gravely. He orphaned her and subjected her to trauma and notoriety that even her second self can never completely overcome. But the two—his freeing her, his damaging her—don’t cancel each other out. They coexist; in tandem they unfold through time. I know this because the damage my enslavement to my father did to me existed alongside the anger I bore toward my mother; the fact that I suffered does not redeem the injury I caused.

    What is it that I want from Jody, from Billy, and from all the other people to whom I speak about the murders? In the beginning—maybe in the end, as well—I just want to get the story straight. I want to know what happened, and the exact order in which everything happened, and I dedicate the better part of a year to this goal, collecting and creating more documents than I have room to store in my study. Binders filled with chronologically arranged correspondence between Jody and me, between Billy and me; notebooks filled with