Night and Day

The access to power and wealth was exciting -- how far Arlington was from Medford, how far from Jody Gilley's attic bedroom -- but alienating. Arlington recalls Shrum once pointed at the TV and asked her if she recognized the man whose face was on the screen. When she said she didn't, he told her it was Henry Kissinger. Another time, she answered the phone at the Stevenses' house to hear Vernon Jordan ask, "What's George's handicap?" Later, she said to George Stevens, "I didn't know you had a disability."

"It was very surreal. It was the exact opposite of what I'd grown up with," says Arlington. "I came to D.C. with a suitcase of polyester clothes I thought were professional, but were too old for me. It took me forever to learn how to dress. I had to memorize Tiffany's Table Manners for Teenagers because sometimes the Stevenses would take me to the Palm. I had social anxiety and shame, but also a sense of pride for surviving."

Five years after the murders, Arlington entered Georgetown University, and, from her first moment there, she decided she had to make up for the first 16 years of her life by reading and learning all she could. Rather than gravitate toward subjects she loved -- theater, art or opera -- she sought to understand more fully what had happened to her and what the effects would be. To give herself the latitude to do that, she designed her own major in interdisciplinary studies and history.

"I took courses in memory and amnesia. I did an independent study in orphans," she says. "I really wanted to know, to the degree that it's knowable, what the signs of health and un-health are. I didn't want to get stuck. I didn't want to be depressed and limited by my issues." When she read All Quiet on the Western Front, she recognized herself in Erich Maria Remarque's descriptions of suffering in battle. "We see men living with their skulls blown open," he wrote. "We see soldiers run with their two feet cut off, they stagger on their splintered stumps into the next shell-hole."

"I felt like I was running on emotional stumps, like the foundation had been cut out from under me," says Arlington. "I obsessively collected quotes and passages from literature. When I got down, I would focus on the memorized quotes and lift myself out of it." Though she saw a therapist intermittently for several years at Georgetown, she says the therapy was far less instrumental in her healing than the comfort, understanding and inspiration she found in literature, particularly Holocaust literature.

She immersed herself in the works of Primo Levi, Bruno Bettelheim and Elie Wiesel. "I was trying to understand the human psyche in extreme situations," she says. "I saw that, given the right environment, we are all capable of terrible acts, but also great acts of courage and humanity." While the Holocaust represented an especially bleak moment in history, "how the survivors dealt with that darkness and turned away from the void and found hope and meaning was inspirational that I could, too." Through her Holocaust studies, Arlington also encountered a kind of cold comfort that what she'd suffered had in no way equaled history's worst suffering. "I had not been raped, mutilated, tortured, starved," she says.

She also looked to the writers of Holo-caust literature for insight into survivor guilt. She felt guilty because her anger at her parents on the day of the murders -- a day when she'd skipped school and they'd found out and threatened to punish her -- may have given Billy the impetus to carry out the killings. She felt guilty for not knowing to keep Becky in her bedroom that night. And she felt guilty because her life was better -- not worse -- after the murders than before. "There were all these wonderful experiences, and I thought, 'How can I enjoy this bounty?' " she says.

Like many survivors, Arlington felt a powerful need to testify about what she'd experienced. At first, she published personal essays under various pseudonyms in Georgetown's literary magazine. Then, as a senior, she decided to write her thesis about the murder of her family. Her initial plan was to write a straight memoir, but when she tried to begin, she felt paralyzed. So, instead, she wrote an odd and chilling document called "Death Faces" that narrates the murders in her brother's voice. In its amoral view of violence, "Death Faces" echoes Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho; in the way Arlington comments about herself through the character of Billy, it echoes Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas-- except that Arlington uses the technique of indirection not to enhance her greatness, as Stein does, but to excoriate herself. At one point in "Death Faces," the Billy character says, "Jody Arlington, the sister of a sociopathic killer who made it all possible, metamorphosed on the graves of her parents into an academically polished, richly cultured, well-traveled social climber." At another, he says, "I suspect Jody will never allow herself to give me my share of the credit for having blasted her free of the imprisoning gravity of that family which was already dead when I untethered its members from the rotting corpse." In "Death Faces," Arlington has Billy express her own worst fears about herself: that she is morally culpable for her family's deaths and morally reprehensible for benefiting from them.

When Arlington circulated her thesis to literary agents after she graduated in 1993, all reacted similarly: She had to write the story in her own voice if it were to have a chance of being published. Some also suggested that she needed to visit Billy in prison for the story to succeed. But she wasn't sure she could write a memoir and had no desire to visit Billy, and so she put "Death Faces" away. She moved to Spain, where she helped a friend launch a cycling tour, then lived in New York City, where she joined Equality Now, an international human rights organization working to end violence and discrimination against girls and women, before returning to Washington in the 1990s. In 2000, she says, she began a three-year attempt to recast "Death Faces" as a memoir, trying "every trick in the writer's handbook," and even working with several ghostwriters. "It was my Sisyphean task, and I couldn't do it," she says. "It was too painful. Whenever I would sit down to write it, I would fracture."

KATHRYN HARRISON FIRST HEARD ARLINGTON'S NAME 13 YEARS AGO during a phone conversation with her literary agent, Amanda "Binky" Urban. Urban told her she'd just met with a woman whose brother had killed their parents and younger sister and who wanted to write a memoir about it. "There was something about the story I found completely compelling. It didn't let go of me, and I kept thinking about it, and I really wanted to know why and explore it," says Harrison. "Every year or so afterward, I'd ask my agent whatever happened with that book, because I wanted to read it."

It came up again in early 2005, while Harrison was in a meeting with Urban and an editor at Random House in New York. "I said again, 'So, whatever happened to that book?' Binky said, 'Jody is never going to write that book.' "

"I'll write it," Harrison said.