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

“Long way to come for a visit,” he said.
    Billy doesn’t seem to consider himself a subject of my writing, or if he does, it’s a role incidental to others. In relation to the book I tell him I’m working on, the one for which he’s consented to be interviewed, he calls himself a “research assistant” or an “advisor on child abuse,” or, because of his efforts to locate and access documents and files from various social service agencies, a “private investigator.” The files are those he needs for his appeal, but, he rationalizes, since I want to see them he’s acting as my private eye.
    “If I wasn’t acting as your investigator,” he writes in the cover letter that accompanies those files he’s allowing me to Xerox, “there were a lot of documents I wasn’t going to send you, because they talk trash about me. However, I’m not my client, you are.”
    In return for his help, I’ve given him a subscription to
TV Guide,
bought him a few books from Amazon, helped him pay for a new pair of glasses, and lent him the money he needs to make multiple color Xeroxes of the illustrated children’s books he’s written and wants to submit to publishers. In 2006, when Billy loses his prison janitorial job, which pays $25 a month, out of which he must purchase toiletries, stamps, stationery, snacks, anything he wants beyond his uniform and his meals, I make him another small loan that I don’t anticipate he’ll pay back. I don’t think he imagines I expect to be reimbursed. The word
loan
is a means of saving face, that’s all. When Billy gets fired by one of the “screws,” guards he describes as unjust and eager to exercise their power, he has to wait ninety days before he can put his name on the waiting list for another job. Of necessity, he’s thrifty, lest he find himself unable to pay for essentials like soap and toothpaste, but it’s hard to save when you make $25 a month.
    “So?” family and friends ask when I return to my home in the East. “What was it like?”—
it
being conversing with a man who murdered his parents and little sister,
it
being visiting a man in prison. It’s both easier and harder than I imagined it would be.
    Easier, because for each of our six three-hour interviews, Billy is punctual, cooperative, and eager to please. Beyond his desire to cultivate my generosity, he seems desperate for contact with the world beyond the prison, even with a stranger who asks difficult questions. I can’t bring myself to inquire outright—it strikes me as both painful and perhaps shaming to be as abandoned as Billy appears to be, by both family and friends—but I think I may be the only visitor that Billy’s had in all his years in jail, the only one other than his attorney or the psychologists who examined him for his appeal. Not that he spends his days alone. When he isn’t being punished for breaking a rule—“thrown in the black box,” as he calls solitary confinement—Billy is housed in the general population of Oregon’s largest prison, a three-thousand-bed facility. The Snake River Correctional Institution was completed around the time that the state’s Ballot Measure 11 established minimum mandatory sentences for sex crimes, swelling prison populations and raising the ratio of inmates who are sex offenders from, Billy estimates, 20 percent to 60 percent of the men with whom he lives. Measure 11, Billy tells me, has made life in jail “a lot more boring than it used to be. Less violent and chaotic, but more boring.”
    “Because it’s less chaotic?” I ask. “That’s what’s made it boring?”
    “No, no.” He shakes his head, his expression that of a teacher assisting a surprisingly backward student. “The problem is, sex offenders are terrible conversationalists. They’re morose. They’re self-involved, self-pitying. And most of them are pretty ignorant. You can’t talk about anything with any of them for even a minute before they’re back on how they