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

eight to sip freely from their glasses. Probably they’d given him a head start.
    The second was infidelity. Each of Linda’s letters to Bill reveals not only her fundamental insecurity but also doubts about the permanence of Bill’s affection for her. Having gotten a haircut, she told Bill how much older it made her look. “You think you’ll still love me in short hair?” she asked, betraying a concern that her looks might not be good enough to keep his interest. A first postscript excuses her messy handwriting; a second inquires if Bill would be angry if she were to go to a movie with a friend’s brother, for whom she had no romantic feelings—“Tell me if you object, O.K.?” the last ends with the entreaty, “Let’s not fight because I love you and I want us to be happy together forever.” The next day, Linda wrote Bill again, addressing him as “Babe,” and focusing on an unresolved—and, she seems to suspect already, irresolvable—conflict over his seeing other girls while demanding that she remain faithful to him. “I want to be your wife, but am I going to have a cheating husband?” she demanded.
    “Honey, I miss you so much I stay nerves [
sic
] all the time,” Bill replied, and apologized for having hurt her. “Its [
sic
] that I love you so much.” He couldn’t make any promises about getting married when he was in jail, where he “can’t even think straight,” and where, separated from her, he didn’t know what was “going on.” Resorting to a favorite rhetorical trick of philanderers, he implied Linda was the one who wasn’t to be trusted, alluding to a pessimistic account of his prospects from her friend Vicki. “If you don’t [love me] tell me so I can quit making plans about us,” he concluded, having avoided the issue of his cheating on her and threatening to abandon her if she wouldn’t reaffirm her love.
    Months before they were married, the pattern for their life together had been set.
    A RTICULATE, POISED, THE THIRTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD woman sitting on the couch across from my chair is hard to imagine as having once been the girl who spoke to the emergency operator, the one who said, for example, “He’d a probably went to 7-Eleven.” It’s in her diction, her impeccable syntax, and especially in her frame of reference. Greek myth, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Camus, Sartre: it’s a long list that accrues over the months of our continued conversations and correspondence, one whose disproportionate focus on warfare, cruelty—Elie Wiesel—torture, faith, apostasy—Bruno Bettelheim—justice, and moral responsibility bears witness to Jody’s struggle to understand the murders her brother committed. Not his motives, she knew those, but the meaning of an act that both defied and demanded explanation.
    Eventually I have the opportunity to study Jody’s bookshelves and to borrow from them, and I select a few that represent an array of responses—psychological, sociological, legal—to parricide, as well as a sampling of her college texts, passages from which she has underlined with the fervor of discovery. What emerges most palpably in speaking with her, in reading her books and following the paths she took through history, philosophy, and ethics, is the guilt she endured after the murders—guilt for having wished her parents dead, for hating them enough to have fantasized herself about the crime her brother accomplished.
    At sixteen, still a child, she was presented with an existential problem that would starkly define much of her life’s work, leaving her with questions that were all but impossible to answer. Should she judge herself on the content of her heart, find herself as culpable as her brother because she’d shared his desire for vengeance? And what about sins of omission? Surely they weighed in the balance. Was she responsible for having failed to prevent the murders? For having, in essence, abandoned the scene of the crime long before it occurred, left