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

I went over all I could recall of my first twenty years, including what seemed irrelevant—because how could I be certain I’d recognize relevance? And I couldn’t take the chance of overlooking the answer, which might be quite simple and not at all what I expected. I was sure that if I could reconstruct everything in the correct sequence then…then what? I’d know? I’d understand what happened, and why?
    Yes, that is what I thought—what I think. That if I can tell a story without missing significance or misrepresenting the order of events, I can understand what made things turn out as they did.
    On the other hand, if I don’t assemble the pieces exactly right, then the story will come apart. There won’t be an answer.
    W HILE BILLY AND JODY WERE TALKING IN JODY’S BEDROOM that afternoon, or while Billy was talking and Jody wasn’t paying much attention, their mother Linda opened the door at the foot of the stairs and told Billy “to get [his] ass downstairs…[that] when she was disciplining Jody or Becky [he] shouldn’t get involved.” It was at this moment, Billy recalls, that he promised his sister everything would be all right, and that Jody told him she was counting on him and not to let her down, statements Jody is sure she never made.
    Downstairs, Billy’s father poked his finger into his son’s chest and told Billy to butt out, and that “if he wants to beat Jody’s ass he’ll do it.” Then Bill told his son to get out of his sight, and Linda threw the bat at Billy and told him “to get [his] crap out of there.”
    Billy went outside to practice hitting. The only social interaction he had outside of the family was playing on a softball team his father’s employee Glenn Riggs had invited him to join. Having quit school, for the past two years Billy had worked full-time for his father, a period during which, Jody stated in her 1999 affidavit, “physical abuse lessened, perhaps, but psychological abuse intensified. For example, Billy was sometimes paid only in cigarettes, which were parceled out individually or, at best, a pack at a time. I perceived this as a way for my parents to keep control over him both financially and psychologically.”
    As bad as school had been for Billy, who failed most of his classes and got himself into constant trouble, at least it did provide an alternate environment. Most abused children are not vulnerable to their tormentors all day long; they’re safe in a classroom; they tag along to a friend’s house in the afternoon. Working for his father, Billy endured relentless verbal assaults. He was incompetent, his father told him, worthless. “You kids,” his father would say, including Jody and Becky in his taunts, “are so stupid, if I pulled down your pants there’d be shit all over them because you’re too dumb to wipe right.” As insults go, this one is a triumph of economy, offending so many sensibilities at once. Vulgar and demeaning, it’s also infantilizing, suggesting toilet training and its attendant humiliations. It assumes a father’s prerogative to subjugate his grown children and to breach—destroy—all boundaries, exposing their nakedness and effectively calling them his chattel. And, of course, it’s ugly; it conjures a shame that would have implicated everyone within hearing, especially, and perhaps most painfully, the children’s father himself. Nearly forty years old, Bill had yet to arrive at a level of discourse above that of a schoolyard bully.
    Although they’d dropped out of high school themselves, Bill and Linda made sure their son understood that they considered Billy’s quitting school to be what Jody calls “a momentous personal failure, giving them license to denigrate him even more frequently than before.” She recites for me what had become the refrain to Billy’s life: “That he was a loser who would only end up in prison. This was something he heard constantly.”
    It was an opinion Jody shared. She’d been taught