Free While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family by Kathryn Harrison

stay away from home and from his brutal father, his sense of self was so impaired that he no longer believed in the possibility of his freedom—not so long as his parents were alive.
    T HE SNAKE RIVER CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTION, WHERE Billy has spent the last nine of his twenty-one years of imprisonment, is ten miles north of the town of Ontario, just inside Oregon’s eastern border. The closest airport is in Boise, Idaho, where, on November 29, 2005, I rent a car and drive west and then north, in all about sixty miles of Interstate 84. It’s desolate country, southern Idaho; at least it is at the end of November. Outside of Boise the land is flat and brown, save the occasional stubble of dry yellow cornstalks, and wind catches up loose flakes of fallen snow and spins them along the shoulder of the road. A single billboard with a verse of scripture marks the midpoint of my trip—1 Corinthians 13:7, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” I try to read the small print to see which church has sponsored the message, but I’m driving too fast and have to keep my eyes on the road.
    Maybe it’s the barren, plowed ground beyond the billboard, the way each scrape of the harrow is crusted with a line of old snow, that leaches the familiar words of comfort. By the time I arrive in Ontario it’s dusk, and after so many miles of brown the lit-up signs of businesses appear riotous with color. I don’t need the map lying in the empty passenger seat to find my hotel; the trademark green Holiday Inn logo is visible among the rest, a Staples and a Wal-Mart, a Kmart, an Arby’s, a Taco Bell, a Rite Aid, a couple of diners and auto repair shops, Midas, Jiffy Lube. It’s a small town, without much to recommend it.
    Early the next morning at the correctional institution, a few minutes before the first visiting period begins, at 8:15, I stand outside the locked double doors waiting for admission. It has snowed heavily all night, slowing travel and, I gather, shortening the usual queue of visitors to a small cluster of mostly women who huddle at the entrance to the prison, talking among themselves about the inadequately plowed roads and predicting who is likely to have been delayed or prevented from coming. Their conversation makes it clear that they know one another, and I move a little to one side, not wanting to intrude while we wait for the guard to open the doors and begin the security clearance. A couple of the women give me friendly looks, perhaps meant to encourage me to explain my unfamiliar presence. The rest ignore me, or they exchange raised eyebrows with one another, inquiring silently if anyone knows who I am.
    After handing my driver’s license and completed visitor’s form to the officer at the security desk, I strip off my gloves, coat, earrings, and watch, and leave these and my purse in one of the lockers provided for visitors. “Don’t forget you can’t wear a bra with an under wire,” Billy wrote me in anticipation of my visit, and for this occasion I’ve bought a new one, without any metal to set off the prison’s hypersensitive detector. I give my boots, snow still melting and dripping from between their treads, to the guard and pass through the arch of a security apparatus so excitable that the woman in line behind me suggests I go to the restroom and wet my hair beforehand, lest static electricity set off the alarm. Once through the detector, I tug my boots back on and wait in a holding room between the security desk and the visiting area. When Billy’s name is called, I’m ushered, still under scrutiny, through a set of silently sliding metal doors so thick they inhibit even fantasies of escape.
    I haven’t seen a photograph of Billy more recent than his mug shot, taken when he was a wiry-looking kid with brown eyes, brown hair, and a sparse mustache. Now he’s paunchy and clean-shaven, the angles of his face softened to the point that they’re no longer