I could barely breathe as I read the story. It was just a couple of paragraphs in the newspaper, yet they leaped at me. On May 29, in rural Ohio, an 18-year-old boy named Scott Moody had methodically shot six people, four of them members of his own family, before turning his gun on himself. There was only one survivor, Moody's 15-year-old sister, Stacy. Shot in the neck, she managed to call for help and was taken to a Columbus hospital.
The details were all too familiar. Twenty-one years ago, when I was 16, my brother roved from room to room in our home in rural Oregon, killing my mother, my father and my little sister, leaving me to live with the consequences. Like Moody, he was 18. Our family, like Moody's, lived in an isolated house and had endured hardships and economic woes that threatened the family farm. Both Stacy Moody and I were confronted by a bloodied brother who had just annihilated our families. There was just one difference. My brother spared both himself and me. Or did he?
In the aftermath of a parricide -- a child's murder of one or more parents -- most of the attention focuses on the killer and the deceased parents. Little, if any, attention falls to any siblings who may have been left behind. It was with no small amount of dread that I felt the memories of my family tragedy resurfacing as I read Stacy's story.
I knew that only a handful of people, myself among them, could shed light on some of the daunting challenges she may face if she survives her physical wounds. The psychic wounds take much longer to heal and require a lot of arduous work. But first, she must survive the day-to-day. She'll have to overcome depression and despair, complete and utter alienation -- and guilt. Personal and profound, the trademark tattoo of the sole survivor, that guilt will sometimes be overwhelming. Why didn't she see what he was planning? What could she have said or done to prevent it? She will spend years looking into the abyss, ever searching for the answer. I know, because that's what I did.
In the early morning hours of April 27, 1984, I was awakened by the sound of my 11-year-old sister, Becky, screaming. Minutes before, my brother, Billy Frank Gilley Jr., had picked up an aluminum baseball bat and killed our parents, Bill and Linda Gilley. Interrupted by Becky, he killed her, too.
The screams and pounding I heard downstairs convinced me that Billy had done something terrible. I listened transfixed as he climbed the stairs to my room. Clearly, I was next. But when my brother entered my bedroom covered in blood, he was not carrying the bat. Agitated and pale, he kept repeating the same phrases over and over: "We're free. I'm not crazy. Do you think I'm crazy? It was so bloody. I'm not crazy."
Before the murders, my brother had accumulated a long and increasingly violent police record. Starting with fights and drug use, he graduated to larceny and arson before dropping out of school and working fulltime for my father's failing tree service.
My parents were uneducated, poor and religious fundamentalists. They exerted a twisted combination of control and abuse. Yet their incessant belittling and physical retribution toward my brother had mostly abated after Billy dropped out of school. I never imagined that he could kill my parents or my sister. Until that moment.
I remember thinking: Please tell me this is not really happening. I had always turned to books to escape. Now I looked up at the familiar row of paperbacks on my shelf. This is only a story, I told myself. I'm simply a character in a book who needs to figure out a way to call the police, which I eventually did.
Hours later, Billy was arrested. I was the sole material witness at his trial. He was diagnosed as a sociopath, convicted of three counts of aggravated murder and given three consecutive life sentences in prison.
Billy's life, like my parents' and my sister's, was effectively over. But I was going to go on living. It was unclear to me at that point whether this was a gift or another version of a life sentence. My future stretched before me formless, colorless and forbidding. I stuffed my emotions deep inside, hoping one day to have the ability to really deal with what happened. And slowly, painfully, over time, I did.
At first, I stayed with neighbors, who wanted to adopt me. But when we went to the local legal aid society for guidance, the executive director there decided to take me in, somehow seeing the salvageable amid my broken spirit and poor grammar. Eventually he and his wife became my legal guardians -- the first and best in a long line of caring adults who invested enormous personal and financial resources in helping me survive.
