Read While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family for Free Online

While crossing the highway to get to the liquor store on the other side, William was run over by a truck. Having returned home from war with his body intact, he lost both of his legs, belatedly joining the ranks of veterans whose limbs had been sacrificed in a more honorable pursuit. Two stories elaborate on William’s eventual death; both are set on the end of a pier. In the one Jody tells me, her grandfather is fishing from his wheelchair when a thief creeps up from behind, lifts his wallet, and pushes him into the water. In the other, Billy’s version, William isn’t fishing but rolls himself off the end of the pier intentionally, choosing death over the indignity and impotence he’d brought upon himself. In the absence of any evidence, the difference between the two accounts is significant only for what it reveals about the siblings. Jody attributes her grandfather’s death to a malignant force outside of his volition. Billy presumes it to have been a suicide: a culminating act of self-destruction; an admission of despair, of defeat. Whether Billy is making a judgment against his father’s father and thus his own male inheritance or projecting his self-loathing onto his grandfather, Billy has decided William’s death was one he brought upon himself.
    Widowed, Bill’s mother, Essie, found a man less inclined to hit her when he was drunk, and she married him. According to Billy, the two made a contentious if not physically violent couple—Jody remembers visits to their house as comparatively peaceful—and while Bill’s new stepfather didn’t beat him, neither did he show him the interest or affection that might have compensated for his own father’s lapses. Bill quit school after the tenth grade. He knew how to make a car run and how to dig a spud out of the ground. He may never have considered it: how it was possible to come all the way across an ocean, from the old world to the new, just to go on picking potatoes and drinking yourself to death.
     
    Linda’s father, like Bill’s, had also drifted west during the thirties, joining the general exodus of the Dust Bowl years and settling in California. When Linda was born, her father, Lonnie Higdon, gave his occupation as “transfer man” for the McCloud River Lumber Company in Mount Shasta, California. Linda’s mother, Phyllis Lorraine Tallerico, came from Oakland, a “pure-blooded Italian,” Billy calls his grandmother, who remained in northern California all her life. That the surname Phyllis used, Tallerico, was neither her husband’s nor her father’s suggests she may have had an earlier marriage, which, given she was only twenty-four at Linda’s birth, would have to have been brief. As temporary, perhaps, as the one that followed it, to Lonnie. Linda wasn’t even a year old when her mother discovered that Lonnie was cheating on her and shot him dead, earning herself the epithet by which she’d be remembered long after people forgot her real name: the Crazy Italian. Found legally insane, Phyllis Tallerico was sent to a state mental institution and remained there for seven years. Upon her release, she moved to San Francisco, where she lived alone, writing letters and sending cards to her little girl, who never received them.
    Lonnie’s sister, Betty Jo Higdon Glass, had taken her niece, Linda, to raise as her own daughter, without allowing even so remote a contamination as a birthday greeting from her crazy mother. Betty, who had married a widowed school bus driver named David Glass, was unable to conceive a child of her own. Tragic as Linda’s circumstances were, Betty received the news of Lonnie’s murder and her sister-in-law’s imprisonment as an annunciation. Fate, if not God, had circumvented biology and delivered a baby into her arms. An attractive woman, her career as a model noted in a caption under her picture in a small-town paper from northern California, Betty dressed Linda like a doll, favoring her niece over her two stepchildren