Night and Day

ON THE DAY AFTER THE MURDERS, Guyer was in criminal court in Medford on other business when Billy Gilley's arraignment came up. He remembers hearing the judge read the murder counts -- ending each with the statement "by killing said person with a baseball bat" -- but he didn't think much of it. "For me, it was just another murder," says Guyer. "I was back out at the office the next day, and I remember my receptionist coming in and saying: 'Hey, you know those murders? Well, the sister who escaped is out in our waiting room, just walking around. She wants to see a lawyer right away.' "

Jody had come to the county legal aid office for help applying to be adopted by a neighboring family with whom she was staying. "She was obviously a very intelligent girl," says Guyer, who was a 34-year-old Vietnam vet who had handled civil rights cases in the South before coming to Medford in 1982. "But you don't go from 'My parents were killed last night' to 'These people want to adopt me today.' I counseled her that what she should let me do was a guardianship."

A few days later, Jody asked Guyer to accompany her to the funeral for her parents and Becky. "If you're a criminal lawyer and see all kinds of horrible things, you're not affected by this situation," he says. "I think I was instantly the most credible person in her life because I was detached. I'm certain everyone else was asking, 'What happened?' . . . I didn't try to comfort her. I just did lawyerly stuff."

Within a few months, Jody's living arrangement at the neighbors' soured, and Guyer worked to find other options. One was with the local victim's assistance advocate, and two were with local families with children. "I said she had to pick," says Guyer. "She said: 'I don't want to live with any of them. I want to live with you.' "

Guyer told her his marriage was on the rocks, and he wasn't sure where he was going to be living. But Jody had identified him, she says, as "a rational, knowledgeable person who wanted to help me, treated me like an adult and provided counsel, while also being fun and cool, or trying to be cool. I was attracted to his level of insight and analysis," she says. "It felt right, for whatever reason."

Guyer relented, and soon Arlington was living with him -- first in the house he shared with his wife and then in a house he shared with a roommate -- flying to California in his private plane and attending rock concerts with him. It was on the way to a Billy Idol concert in Los Angeles in August 1984 that she chose her new name. In a few weeks, she would start 11th grade, and she knew that students whose last names started with the letters at the beginning of the alphabet got to enroll in classes first. So, she made a decision: The next street name she saw that began with A through F would be her new last name. Arlington Boulevard came into sight, and Jody Arlington was born.

Arlington's life with Guyer was far removed from anything she had ever experienced as a member of the Gilley family. Not only was she getting to fly in a private plane -- she was soon learning how to fly one herself. But the most radical change Guyer offered was his belief in her. He told her she was smart and talented, a "quality person." He had attended Georgetown University, and he said that, with strategy and determination, she could attend Georgetown, too. Guyer recognized that his arrangement with Arlington was unorthodox -- a 34-year-old, soon-to-be-divorced man acting as the guardian for a teenage girl. But for him it made sense as both an extension of his work as a legal aid lawyer, and as a kind of karmic payback to two adults who'd helped him in his younger years. When Guyer was 17 and homeless in Miami, a family took him in, fed him and gave him mentoring. And when he was a student at Georgetown, his debate coach, James Unger, offered him a place in his home for a modest rent, along with several other debaters. "He made me believe in myself and what I could achieve, and I did the same thing, exactly, for Jody," says Guyer, who continues to work part time for the legal aid office in Medford and also does employment and whistle-blower cases for his own law firm based out of Miami and Seattle.

For a while, Arlington floundered, skipping class and hanging out with "dead-end" kids. But by mid-semester of her junior year -- less than a year after the murders -- she had gotten serious about her future. "The jewel had been placed in front of me," she says. "Once I had a goal, I stuffed the pain away and said I'd deal with it later."

Of course, she couldn't stuff it away completely. There were times in her last two years of high school when she'd listen to Pink Floyd -- Roger Waters always made her feel better, she says, because he was so depressed -- and drive by the cemetery where her parents and Becky were buried. Once she thought she glimpsed her mother in a store, and sometimes she'd catch herself wondering when her father would return home from work. Several times, she saw a beat-up car pull into a parking lot and feared it might be Billy. And whenever she'd see girls Becky's age, she'd cringe because her sister wasn't among them. During the nearly two years Arlington lived with Guyer, he heard her talk about the murders and saw her cry only a few times -- and, when she did, it was almost always about Becky. Sometimes she would replay the time when the family was shopping at Kmart and Becky wanted to borrow $10 to buy a pair of parachute pants. "I had been babysitting, and I had the money, but I wouldn't lend it to her, and I really regret that," says Arlington. "Without a doubt, I shed the most tears for Becky. I had grief for what had happened to my parents. But I also had grief for what I hadn't gotten from them." But mostly she did not grieve, and mostly she did not look back, because her grief -- and her past -- was too complicated for her, as a teenager, to understand.

It was difficult for many in Medford to understand, as well -- a young man killing his entire family except for one sister? Since she'd been spared, she must be complicit, some assumed. "I had friends whose parents forbade them to be around me," says Arlington. "I was the bogeyman for some people." Rumors swirled that she was a nymphomaniac, that she ate babies, that she was a Satanist, as well as that school officials were taking bets on when she would crack up. "These things were bemusing -- I was confident in myself and the truth, and the opinions of strangers were mostly irrelevant to me -- but also very painful and infuriating. I was a teen who wanted acceptance and to fit in."

In the end, however, Arlington says she owes a debt of gratitude to those who doubted her. "Their having written me off and being so callous was so infuriating, it was a magnificent inspiration to 'show them,' " she says.

AFTER GRADUATING FROM HIGH SCHOOL IN 1986, Arlington flew to Washington to begin an internship on Capitol Hill that Guyer had arranged, and, for the next few years, a succession of Washington's elite took her under their wings. First, it was renowned Democratic political consultant Robert Shrum, a former mentor of Guyer's, who gave her a job at his firm. Then, it was Shrum's now-wife, writer Marylouise Oates, who arranged an interview for Arlington for an internship at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Then, it was TV and film producer and writer/director George Stevens Jr., and his wife, Liz, who offered Arlington a room in their Georgetown mansion and introduced her to social maven and event planner Carolyn Peachey, for whom she worked off and on for almost 20 years.