While They Slept
An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family
In the early morning hours of April 27, 1984, in Jackson County, Ore., 18-year-old Billy Gilley killed his mother, father and the younger of his two sisters with a baseball bat. He and his 16-year-old sister, Jody, then left the house. At 2:51 a.m., Jody Gilley called 911 and reported the episode. Those are the just-the-facts-ma’am of the crime, as plainly as can be told, as true as facts can be. But those facts are not the story.
“I never embellish the scene,” Kathryn Harrison writes in “While They Slept,” even as she tries to imagine Billy and Jody, afterward, driving away from the house. “I don’t know how, or I can’t. The magnitude of the crime, of a tragedy that belongs to other people, not to me, makes it sacrosanct; it prevents me from taking license with what I’ve been told.”
Of course, Harrison does embellish, does take license in bringing us this tale. Good storytelling, even of “true crime,” demands a subjective shaping of fact, the infusion of perspective, the layer of interpretation. And the result of Harrison’s masterful embellishment is a fascinating and comprehensive examination of the before and after of a brutal triple murder, of the cyclical nature of violence and of the tragic ineffectiveness of our social support systems.
But “While They Slept” is less a forensic inquiry than a study of how the very act of storytelling serves as a powerful means of creating, re-creating and holding onto sanity and self. Having suffered years of vicious physical and mental abuse at the hands of his parents, Billy, now 42, continues to justify the murders (he claims he killed younger sister Becky “by accident”); Jody later made their family story the subject of her senior thesis at Georgetown University. Though Billy asserted that Jody either implicitly or explicitly approved of his plan, he alone was charged; he was found guilty and is currently serving a life sentence. Jody, who testified for the prosecution, denies knowledge of Billy’s intention. She corroborates much of his account of the family abuse but has also characterized Billy’s story as “a mythic scenario that fits the typical parricide case.”

latimes.com