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

and encouraging what would become Linda’s preoccupation with her appearance, if not exactly vanity. Jealous of this interloper, with whom they shared no blood, David Glass’s children never let Linda forget that her real mother was insane and had murdered her father.
    Whatever excuse the Glasses gave when they refused to give their daughter permission to marry Bill Gilley, his family understood that they had been judged and found wanting, and in turn voiced their disapproval of the teenagers’ plan. But young love can draw at least as much energy from obstacles as from encouragement. On Thursday, November 28, 1962, Linda wrote to Bill, who was serving a drunk driving sentence in the San Luis Obispo county jail, that the dean of girls had called her stepfather in for a meeting at the high school and told them both that she was at risk of being expelled if her grades didn’t improve. As Bill was himself a dropout, the threat was not as great as her parents would have wished, and rather than waiting to be dismissed, Linda quit.
    All Linda wanted, she wrote the boy she loved, was to “get out of the house and find a way up there” to be near him, a plan Betty thwarted by sending Linda to what was in essence a juvenile detention home for girls whose parents had run out of patience with their sexual independence if not outright delinquency. There Linda would remain, against her will, for two long months, time enough, her parents must have hoped, to cool her ardor for Bill Gilley. That Linda had decided to drop out of school for love of him only confirmed that Bill was a bad influence on her. But not one whose spell could be broken by reform school. Linda came home even more intent on marrying Bill Gilley than she had been when her parents sent her away. If she’d learned anything while she was gone, it was to regard her mother and father as enemies to her happiness.
    She was nearly seventeen, she reminded her parents. In little longer than a year, the law would allow her to marry whomever she pleased, no matter what they or anyone else thought of him. Betty knew when she was beaten. She hadn’t changed her mind about Bill; she still thought he was common, ill mannered, and, to use Billy’s word, “bone-lazy”—incapable of keeping a job if he managed to get one. But given Linda’s determination, which made it impossible to guess where love left off and pigheadedness took over, their continuing to fight about Bill could accomplish nothing but further estrangement between mother and daughter.
     
    On the eve of Valentine’s Day, 1963, Bill Gilley and Linda Higdon were married in Las Vegas, Nevada, with the grudging approval of her parents. The groom was six months shy of twenty, the bride still sixteen, a lovely-looking girl, as Jody remembers from photographs of her mother taken around the same time, with big, dark eyes, olive skin, and tumbling masses of black hair. But beauty is no guarantee of happiness, and Bill and Linda’s wasn’t a match made in heaven, not any more than Betty predicted. The handwriting, if not on the wall, was still there to be read: two problems that would prove insurmountable for the young couple were those they’d spelled out for themselves in the letters they exchanged while Bill was in jail.
    The first was alcoholism, which had made it necessary for the couple to communicate by mail while Bill served out a DWI sentence that seems not to have been an occasion for shame or concern. In fact, Jody remembers the incident that led to her father’s arrest described as if it had been a cartoon misadventure, in which “silly Daddy had driven off a curve and landed on the roof of a house,” an unexpected frolic rather than evidence of a serious problem. Nineteen is young to be enslaved to a disease that typically develops over the course of years, but Bill was the son of an alcoholic, and his mother and stepfather were drinkers as well, who, Billy tells me, encouraged grandchildren as young as