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

details of our conversations; questions that occurred to me after we spoke; thoughts I scrawled in the dark, awake next to my sleeping husband, on whatever scrap of paper I could find without turning on the light; notes taken during interviews; legal documents; police records—and that’s just the directly pertinent material. There’s context, as well, information sifted and indexed and highlighted in the hope of discerning the pressures that drove Billy to kill his family as well as aspects of his experience, whether external or internal, that might have loosened the power of taboo, allowing Billy to give himself permission to murder: Demographic analyses of Medford, including its residents’ education, ethnicity, and per capita income. Books on the fundamentals of tree work. Jackson County lumber industry reports. Tables comparing the percentage of Oregon’s population who hunt and therefore keep shotguns versus those who fish and do not. Graphed statistical correlations between alcoholism and parricide, between child abuse and parricide, sexual abuse and parricide. Opinions of experts in the legal snarls parricide inspires. Mid-nineteenth-century ship passenger lists that include the name Gilley. Civil War casualty lists that include the name Gilley. The top one hundred songs played on the radio in 1982, 1983, and 1984. A list of all the network television shows during those same years. A report ordered from the National Weather Service containing meteorological data collected at the Medford-Ashland airport station during April of 1984.
    Can it possibly matter what phase of the moon hung over the murders? I err in the direction of inclusion. “Gilleyalia” is the name I give my crates of files when I e-mail Jody, joking about the glut of information I have pertaining to her, her family, her hometown. Compulsively, I organize information into outlines and, especially, timelines.
    Between April 2005 and February 2006, I make five timelines of the Gilley family’s history. Each begins, roughly, with the 1963 marriage of Bill and Linda and continues on into the present. Each is bisected, cut in two by a red line running through the night of April 27, 1984. Before. After. The first timeline is about five feet long, made from a roll of white drawing paper. I bring it to an early interview with Jody, so I can record events as we speak of them. Later, when I realize that five feet is too short, I start over, with a ten-foot piece of the same white paper, happy for the opportunity to neatly transcribe what I’ve had to erase and move while making adjustments to the previous one. I carry this second timeline, rolled in a tube, when I visit Billy in prison, and I work on it in my hotel room, cross-referencing Jody’s memories with what Billy tells me. Linda’s one uncharacteristic day of heavy drinking; Billy’s sneaking into Jody’s bedroom; the electrical fire that destroyed Jody’s attic bedroom—these and other events are hard to sequence because Jody’s and Billy’s accounts don’t coincide. I move them around enough times that again the paper gets smudged and creased.
    The final timeline is transcribed onto oversize, twenty-four-by-thirty-six-inch sheets of quadrille paper, taped together into an unmanageably long accounting of events both momentous and negligible. I think very carefully about how I fill in the dates so that I won’t end up having to redo it again. Perhaps I imagine the blue-ruled one-by-one-inch squares will impose order and help make it readable—not
see
able but
read
able, like a narrative.
    I can’t not make the timelines. Not any more than I could stop myself from reviewing over and over each minute of my father’s visit the year I turned twenty: conversations mostly, and gestures, tone of voice. Over and over I replayed every word I could remember. I read and reread the few tentative letters my father and I exchanged in the year before that visit, looking for subtexts I maybe missed.