Night and Day

On March 20, 2005, she sent Arlington an e-mail, explaining her interest. "Were I to consider your life and what came to pass during that life, it would not be my appropriating your story. No one can do that," Harrison wrote. "I'm just trying, as you may be yourself, to understand, to get some kind of hold on what happened to you, and how it is that you continue in your life, when that life was violently interrupted and had to be begun again." Harrison ended with, "I can't tell you how your story has preyed on me -- but I'll try."

When Arlington received the e-mail, she was immediately, if cautiously, interested. Harrison is the author of six novels and five nonfiction books, most notably the controversial 1997 memoir The Kiss, which chronicles the four-year sexual affair she had with her father starting at age 20. Arlington had read The Kiss and admired Harrison's "fearlessness and her willingness to go places I wouldn't go," she says. "I was intrigued with the idea of the story getting written by someone with such writerly gifts, who could crack the puzzle I could not."

A few weeks later, Arlington met Harrison at Sake Club on Connecticut Avenue NW. Sitting in the restaurant that evening, the two must have appeared to be sisters -- slight women with long hair who talked about the most intimate things. Indeed, Harrison says, she felt a strong kinship with Arlington from the beginning. As Harrison sees it, both have pasts marked by a taboo so powerful that it sets them apart; both, as she writes in While They Slept, "had a previous self who no longer exists."

When Arlington decided to cede her story to Harrison, she felt a huge sense of relief, a lightening of her psychic load. "I don't think there is anyone who would be as interested and engaged in the material as she would be," says Arlington. "She was willing to become obsessed with it."

On an evening this spring, Arlington and her husband, Cordes, are holed up in their cozy Georgetown apartment, eating takeout Asian food and laughing as they speculate about a movie version of Harrison's book. "In my fantasy," says Arlington, "Sofia Coppola directs, and Dakota Fanning plays me."

Arlington rented this apartment when she returned to Washington and furnished it in one fell swoop out of the Ballard Designs catalogue. "I literally looked at a picture of an entryway in their catalogue and ordered everything and set it up just like the picture," she says. When Cordes moved in in 2004, he immediately said Arlington's "dentist office art" had to go. It's been replaced with several pieces the couple has collected, the most striking of which is "Easy Bake Bear" by Ana Bagayan. In the painting, everything is awry: A mouse ignores a hunk of cheese; a rabbit is blind to a carrot within easy grabbing distance; and a little girl has just baked the dismembered head of a teddy bear in her Easy-Bake Oven. "I love this painting because everyone in it is at war with themselves," says Arlington.

The apartment is devoid of Gilley family mementos save one -- a tiny, framed photograph that sits on an end table in the living room. In it, Arlington is 5 or 6 years old, wearing a princess costume and holding a stuffed horse. Her mother is behind her. The few other artifacts she'd once had from her life as Jody Gilley -- including the journals she'd written in almost daily since high school -- are gone. "After 9/11, I was just struck by all of the paper floating from the sky, and all of a sudden those boxes in my closet seemed burdensome," she says. "I needed to get rid of them." One day she carried the boxes out to the curb for the garbage collectors to haul away.

The second bedroom in the apartment houses artifacts from the couple's college days -- Arlington collected Batman figures, Cordes collected pirate toys -- and their ongoing collection of graphic novels. It also serves as a studio for Cordes, an artist and musician. There he is working on drawings to accompany a story Arlington wants to create as a graphic novel, one her mother often told her when she was younger. "It's about a time when I was little and pre-verbal, and Billy and I were playing out front of our house, and our parents were inside," she says. "All of a sudden, my parents heard me screaming. They run outside and find me completely covered in [excrement]. I had fallen into an open septic tank hole. Billy had no trace . . . on him -- he hadn't pulled me out of the hole. He said an angel pulled me out." Amid the chaos and horror of Arlington's family history, the story represents a miraculous moment, and a rare flight into fantasy for someone who describes herself as practical and "utilitarian to a fault." It's also a moment that predates Arlington's fear of her brother.

Cordes and Arlington met at a 2004 gala for the National Archives that she helped plan, and within a year, they'd eloped. "It sounds cheesy, but when Jody told me her story, immediately there was this common link that we got through our difficult childhoods," says Cordes, 38. He says his own past includes being separated from his mother at age 5 and suffering three months of sexual abuse while on a sailing trip at age 13.

At first, Cordes reacted more hesitantly than Arlington to Harrison's interest in writing a book about the murders. As an artist himself, he understood that Harrison would write from her own point of view. But he ultimately supported the idea because he knew his wife wanted the story to be told and because he saw her relief at shedding the responsibility to tell it herself.

The relief Arlington felt, however, was soon tempered by the actual process of collaborating on the book. Not only did she have to spend more time than she'd anticipated talking about her past to communicate her version of the events that led to the murders, she also had to directly confront Billy's version -- which is not only different from hers, but based on what she calls several "pathological lies."

Billy crafted some of these stories in the direct aftermath of the murders to spread the guilt, Arlington says. And some, she says, he crafted years later to support his appeal for a new trial, in which he argued that the murder was a classic parricide case -- that he'd killed their parents (and, inadvertently, Becky) as a direct result of their abuse of him and Jody. Billy denies that he molested Jody, claiming instead that their father raped her -- and that he tried in vain to protect her. This Arlington adamantly refutes, saying, "Why would I deny my father raping me when I admit that he propositioned me and that my brother molested me?"

In 1999, at the request of a federal public defender working on Billy's appeal for a new trial, Arlington completed an affidavit in which she corroborated Billy's account of physical and emotional abuse inflicted by their parents. She refused, however, to validate his characterization of himself as her protector. "Some of the most threatening letters he sent from prison said, 'You have to tell them how I protected you and Becky,'?" says Arlington. "He never once did." In one letter Harrison quotes in While They Slept, Billy writes, "If you refuse to help me I will still get out, but it may take longer and cost you your freedom."

But the points at which Billy's and Jody's stories clash most powerfully are in his claims that on the evening of the murders he told her he was going to kill their parents and that she signaled her approval. She counters that, while she and Billy had occasionally fantasized about the deaths of their parents, she was neither aware of his plan that night nor in support of it. In Billy's version, Jody is complicit, if not in acting with him, then in not acting against him. In Jody's version, she is unknowing -- as shocked by the murders as the victims themselves.

To Harrison, the clash is just one of many in the "Rashomon"-like saga. "I was working with a brother and a sister who had conflicting versions, and I wanted to remain faithful to both of their versions and yet also try to reveal whatever truth I could," she says. "There were only two people in the house that night, Jody and Billy, who can tell what happened. Those are the people who saw what happened and know what happened, and that's all we have left. And maybe they don't even know. Memory is so slippery."

Just as Arlington had predicted, Harrison became obsessed with the murders, immersing herself in what she came to call "Gilley-alia." She traced both sides of the family several generations back, tracked down records of Billy's numerous interactions with police and caseworkers, interviewed friends and neighbors of the family, drew one timeline after another to chronicle the progression of events leading to the murders. And in November 2005, Harrison traveled to Snake River Correctional Institution in eastern Oregon to interview Billy, who was 40 years old and had served 21 years of his 90-year sentence.

"I had no idea who I was going to meet," says Harrison. "When you think of a murderer, you think of a hardened character. This is a man who is self-effacing, soft-spoken, thoughtful. I never had a sense that I could ask him a question that would rattle his equanimity. But I think that's because he's less honest than Jody. So much of his telling his story to himself has been coming up with a narrative that excuses his behavior. Because he's being punished by the world, he's in a position to justify himself."

Arlington "is out in the world, free, in the position to question herself," Harrison says. "She has a permanent inquisitory trial set up against herself in which she searches for moral culpability."

In fall 2006, Harrison sent Arlington the first draft of While They Slept, expecting her to correct factual errors and perhaps take issue with some of the book's conclusions. What Harrison got instead, she says, was a 27-page, single-spaced, e-mailed list of bulleted points from "someone who felt suddenly naked and terrified -- and misjudged."

"Her first response was like an immune response -- she had a really powerful negative response," recalls Harrison. "Billy is the problematic character. I mean, he bludgeoned his family with a baseball bat. My effort to humanize him, to make him a person, created a first draft that leaned more toward his telling of things. That was upsetting to her."

Harrison's first draft wasn't just upsetting, says Arlington -- it was inaccurate. Harrison "wanted a 'he said/she said,'?" says Arlington. "But to say it's a 'he said/she said' ignores the body of evidence presented by the state of Billy's previous criminal record and behavioral disorders. There was a record from a doctor saying Billy had a personality disorder and wouldn't learn from his mistakes. It showed he had an ongoing personality disorder long before the murders occurred. That really sounded like the Billy I had grown up with."

In a way, her feelings about Billy's mental instability echo something she said to the 911 operator 24 years ago.

"Do you know why he [Billy] would do something like this?" the operator asked.

"I mean, there's been a lot . . . We have had a lot of, um, family problems," Jody Gilley replied. "But I never think anything bad enough to actually kill them."

That is yet another point of conflict between Billy Gilley's and Arlington's versions of the truth. In Billy's telling, their parents were villains, and the children were innocent victims. As Arlington sees it, her parents were certainly not loving or nurturing, but they were victims, too -- victims of their own troubled upbringings, of extreme poverty, isolation, social alienation and lack of education. "People really do change. I've changed over the decades," she says. "I can't discount that they might have changed, too."

In many ways, Arlington's "immune response" to Harrison's first draft paralleled her reaction several years earlier to a play her friend Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa wrote based on her family's slayings. Arlington and Sacasa had met and become close at Georgetown -- Sacasa proposed marriage to Arlington, even though he is gay. After college, he entered Yale University to study playwriting, and when he told Arlington that he wanted to write about the murder of her family, she was supportive. However, in his play "Ghost Children," which had its New York premiere at Second Stage Theatre in 2004, Sacasa changed the facts of the murders "to heighten the drama," he says. In his version, after "Ben Gilley" brings Becky up to "Abby Gilley's" bedroom, Becky asks to get into bed with Abby. Abby refuses and sends her back downstairs to her death.

When Arlington saw the play, she burst into tears, as Sacasa recalls. "I said to Roberto, 'That is the most critical thing in my life, and you made it a tawdry thing,'?" says Arlington. "There's a million years of guilt in that."

Sacasa explained to Arlington that he'd only written a play -- not the definitive story of her life. But he was rattled nonetheless. "To see her emotional response, it was kind of a shock. It was the first time I saw the deep wounds there," he says. "I was very scared when it happened, scared that our friendship would be irreparably damaged, scared that I had ruined the story for Jody." But the friendship survived, and "Ghost Children" continues to be performed around the country.

Sacasa, who also writes comic books and for the HBO series "Big Love," recently read the beginning of While They Slept and says he and Harrison share a fascination with Arlington's story. "I've always been a little like Kathryn Harrison," he says, "attracted to dark or crime stories, lurid stories, horror stories." And, too, at the time he and Jody became friends, he was still in the closet and struggling with wanting to become a writer despite his parents' wishes that he pursue law. "I never endured what she did," he says, "but I fostered a kinship with Jody as a fellow outsider." As Arlington says, "I am a muse to everyone."

After receiving Arlington's 27-page e-mail, "I think I went to bed for a month," says Harrison, only half-joking. Indeed, as it had for Arlington, the book turned out to be a more difficult collaboration than Harrison had expected. Even though Harrison acknowledges a thirst for true crime and "pulpy accounts of murder," she found the Gilley family's story harrowing. "You're always looking for redemption," she says. "There isn't much in this story."

And interviewing Arlington was, she discovered, uncomfortable. "I'm not a journalist," says Harrison. "I'm not somebody who is used to hammering at people. I'm perfectly comfortable vivisecting myself, but it's an entirely different thing to ask someone difficult questions again and again." Harrison found she needed to repeatedly ask Arlington for minute and painful details about her family's home life and the murders. "We would march over the same territory," she says. "Partly because the story is so shocking and disturbing, I had to have it told again and again in order to internalize it, the same way you go over anything disturbing."

As time went on, the process got easier, Harrison says. "She trusted me more, and I trusted myself more. I knew there'd be a time when I would ask a question that was painful -- actually, most of the time -- but they weren't questions intended to inflict pain," says Harrison. "I was doing it in service of a project we both believed in."

At first, Harrison says, she had the "romantic idea" that Jody and Billy might come together through her book. Instead, Harrison has become what she calls a "weird sort of liaison in that I have a relationship with the two of them and they don't have one with each other." Arlington has not seen her brother in 24 years, and has not had any contact with him in nearly 10 years -- nor does she plan to. Harrison has continued to correspond with Billy since visiting him in prison.

In 2006 and 2007, Harrison sent Arlington four drafts of the book. "Every time a draft would land, I would dread having to read it," Arlington says. However, the later drafts were progressively less upsetting to her, she says, and the end result is a book she is satisfied with.

But Harrison's telling is an account of the murder of the Gilley family, not the survivor's tale Arlington first decided to write back at Georgetown. And, after wanting so badly to shed the burden, she now feels an even more powerful need to write that tale. Even if she risks fracturing her carefully constructed life, Jody Arlington may still, one day, give voice to her own story.

Laura Wexler, a Baltimore writer, is the author of Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America. She can be reached at laura@laurawexler.com.