Night and Day

Arlington has also created a satisfying personal life in Washington. She is married to Franck Cordes, director of marketing and administration for the Foundation for the National Archives, and has a circle of loyal and loving friends who make up what she calls her "found family." On weekends, she wears her auburn hair in pigtails and knocks around Georgetown. She drinks Starbucks lattes, reads trashy novels as well as serious literature, watches movies in bed on a jumbo-size, flat-screen TV. She is both ambitious and goofy. She laughs often. She is, as she says, "shockingly normal."

But normalcy is a significant accomplishment for someone whose past contains one of the most abnormal acts imaginable, as the world will learn this week with the publication of While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family, a nonfiction account of the Gilley family killings written by Kathryn Harrison. It is the story of a brother who claims he committed murder to protect his oldest sister; and it is also the story of that surviving sister, who views her brother as a tormentor -- not a protector -- and so must live as the recipient of an unwanted "gift." In delving into murder, psychology and family dynamics, the book explores terrain similar to that of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. But, in While They Slept, the murderer and victims share the same blood, creating a tale at once gothic and Greek, Freudian and Shakespearean, taboo and tragic.

As much as Arlington wants the story to be told, and as much as she hopes some greater good will come of it, this is an unsettling moment for her. Within the pages of the book, she is reunited with Jody Gilley -- her former self -- and with Billy Gilley Jr., the brother she hasn't seen since she testified for the prosecution at his murder trial 24 years ago. She has also learned that Billy recently won the right to a resentencing hearing on the basis of ineffective counsel during the sentencing phase of his trial. In 1984, he was sentenced to 90 years in prison without parole: three consecutive life sentences for his three murdered family members. The resentencing hearing, which is expected to take place within a year or so, presents the possibility that he could be freed after serving 60 years, or 30 years, or even sooner, a possibility Arlington wills herself not to dwell upon. "With Billy out of prison," she says simply, "I wouldn't feel safe."

For nearly a quarter-century, Arlington has survived -- has thrived -- by racing toward a future of her own making. Now her past is racing toward the present.

IN THE WAKE OF THE MURDERS, people advised Jody Gilley to return to normal as quickly as possible, "but there wasn't a normal to go back to," she says. Nearly every trace of what had been her life was obliterated on that April night in 1984. And, too, life in her family had never been normal or happy or nurturing -- it was nothing she wanted to return to.

Linda and Bill Gilley Sr. were high school dropouts and itinerant farm workers who married young and immediately began the pattern of frequent and frequently violent fights over Bill's drinking and infidelity that would characterize their entire marriage. After years of living hand-to-mouth, migrating between Oregon and California for seasonal work, the Gilleys settled in a rented house in Medford, then a small, rural town in southwestern Oregon, in 1970, and Bill Sr. found work as a tree trimmer. That led to more financial stability -- in 1976, the family bought the clapboard house at 1452 Ross Lane, where the murders would occur eight years later -- but not to more emotional stability. The fights between Bill and Linda continued, now with an exacerbating factor: Billy Jr. By the time Billy was in second grade, as Harrison writes, he was having trouble in school and difficulty getting along with other kids. By age 10, he was the leader of a shoplifting ring. At 15, he was arrested for burglary and arson and described as a "very troubled young man" by a caseworker. At 16, he'd dropped out of high school.

In addition to the offenses Billy committed that were recognized publicly, there were others known only by Jody. Soon after the Gilleys moved into the Ross Lane house, 12-year-old Billy discovered a stash of prescription drugs left by the home's previous owners. Stocking his Hot Wheels miniature car case with the bottles of pills, Jody says, Billy planned to take the case to school and style himself as a drug dealer. When Jody discovered the case and hid it as a preface to telling their mother, Billy "chased me around the house and the yard, wrestling me down and sexually attacking me," she says. By attack, she means that he put his hand up her skirt and tried to shove his entire hand into her vagina. "I didn't tell my parents because I was too afraid of him."

She was 9 then. Soon afterward, she began waking up at night with the unsettling sense that she'd been touched while she was sleeping. "Eventually, I found Billy in my room in the middle of the night, and he'd have lame excuses, and I put two and two together," she says. "When I saw it was real, it was a relief." This time she did tell her mother. "But then my parents didn't believe me."

Linda and Bill Sr. bullied their children, as well as each other, Jody says. While Billy faced the brunt of his father's physical abuse -- whipping, hitting, punches in the face, often accompanied by demeaning taunts -- Jody fell prey to her mother's outbursts and bizarre punishments. Linda Gilley would sit on Jody and blow cigarette smoke in her face and limit her daughter's access to books, sometimes tearing them up in public if Jody brought them on family outings. She would ground Jody for months on end for small infractions. Her mother's behavior toward her was psychologically abusive, Arlington says. "There isn't really a way to convey the atmosphere, the unrelenting chaos and unpredictability and meanness."

But what devastated Jody most was that her mother didn't believe her when she told her parents that Billy was molesting her. And later, when Jody told her mother that her father had propositioned her -- that, six months before the murders, she says, her father had offered her "all the money in his pocket if he could fool around with me" -- her mother also did not believe her, at least not at first.

In Billy's mind, Harrison writes, their shared suffering at the hands of their parents made him and Jody allies. But because she felt victimized by Billy as well as by her parents, Jody says, she viewed him as a predator -- not a defender or even a fellow prisoner. He was another threat she had to guard against, another reason to escape into a world of her own, when her mother allowed it. "My allies," she says, "were the alternative realities in books."

So, in the wake of the murders, there was no "normal" to return to. Instead there was shock, grief, worry and guilt -- and also opportunity. Suddenly, orphanhood had freed Jody Gilley to re-create herself and her life. She chose a guru to help in that re-creation: Thad Guyer, her legal aid attorney, who would become her legal guardian.