The Good Boy : IN THE FLASH OF A LUCKLESS ENCOUNTER, A SHELTERED EAGLE SCOUT BECAME BOTH VICTIM AND KILLER IN A CHILLINGLY BRUTAL CRIME.

THE VOICE IN THE BACKGROUND OF THE SEATTLE POLICE Department tape recording is garbled, but its message is not. Both shrill and guttural, the voice is beyond gender. Though it speaks--shrieks--words, it is beyond language, too. It is a howl of human anguish, almost too painful to hear.

From a seventh-floor window of an apartment building in Seattle’s Capitol Hill district, the screams woke a sleeping neighborhood at 2:40 a.m. on April 15, 1991. In less than 10 minutes, the 911 emergency dispatcher received a dozen calls from alarmed residents in a three-block radius of 17th Avenue and East Howell. Exactly where the screams were coming from they could not say. Nor did the callers agree on whether it was a man or a woman. But they all heard the same desperate plea: “Help me! Please help me!”

Awake in her bed, a neighbor listened for a minute or two before dialing 911. She frequently heard cries in the dark; a mental health clinic is a block away, and this is not a quiet family neighborhood. She opened her bedroom window to peer outside. Though she couldn’t see anyone, she could tell that the screams were coming from the Olive Ridge Apartments across the alley. They were so loud they are audible on the tape of her 911 call.

“She’s saying, please help me, I don’t want to die,” the neighbor tells the 911 operator. “She said she’s locked in, she can’t get out.”

“Yell at her and ask her what’s wrong,” the operator prompts.

“What’s wrong?” she yells out her window. “They want to know what’s wrong!”

“He kidnaped me!” the voice screams back, quite clearly now.

“Stay on the line, OK?” the operator instructs her. “Tell her the police are coming, to just hang on.”

The neighbor was still on the phone when Seattle police officers Berndt Kuerschner and Ronald Cotter arrived at the Olive Ridge, a drab Seattle Housing Authority apartment building that houses low-income elderly and physically or mentally disabled people. They made their way to Apartment 700, where someone--it sounded like an hysterical woman--seemed to be locked inside, frantically rattling the doorknob and pounding on the door. The voice inside begged the cops to break the door down, but the manager was already coming with a key.

Cautiously, the officers unlocked the door. Facing them across the threshold was no woman but a barefoot teen-age boy, fresh blood on his hands and toes. He pointed to a dark-haired man sprawled motionless on a daybed in the living room, his feet touching the floor, his head and torso covered with blood. There was no pulse.

It was an incongruous homicide scene: an obviously brutalized victim and a terrified killer, a slight, bespectacled kid so hysterical that his adolescent voice had soared to a falsetto. After radioing for medics and homicide investigators, Kuerschner sat the kid in a chair and tried to calm him down. “You’re OK now,” he told him. “You’re OK.”

The boy’s name was William James Harris, age 17, known to his family and friends as “Billy,” and he was so anxious to explain what had happened that Kuerschner had to stop him to read him his Miranda rights. Billy wound up telling it twice: first, in a rush of words, and again, more slowly, with Kuerschner squatting beside his chair and writing as fast as he could. A homicide suspect’s first statement to the police will almost certainly be the last before the lawyers intervene, and Kuerschner wanted to get it all down.

“The story to my parents,” Billy began, “is that I was in the library downtown all day. . . .”

BILLY HARRIS’ STORY COULD BE ANY CHILD’S NIGHTMARE. You’re a good kid who always does the right things--you go to church, you respect your elders, you work hard in school. “Make good choices” is your mantra--though you’ve had precious few chances to make bad ones. Then one day you screw up. As fast as a bad dream, everything goes terribly wrong.

At 11 a.m. Billy was taking Communion at the Catholic church where he had built a shrine to the Virgin Mary as his Eagle Scout project; at 11 p.m. he was in bed with a disturbed homosexual Hungarian Gypsy who liked to pick up teen-age boys. Twelve hours after leaving the Seattle Public Library that afternoon, with his notes for a high school research paper tucked in his book bag, he had killed 36-year-old Lajos Janko in what the police would say was the coldest of blood.

That Billy would be capable of such a deed seemed as preposterous as the notion that he would go home with this particular man to begin with. “You thought of all the kids at school who might get in that situation. Billy wasn’t even on the list,” says one of his teachers. “I’ve thought about what makes a kid go with a guy like that,” says Billy’s stepfather. “I keep thinking when I was a kid, there was no way. Maybe the more naive you are, the more protected, maybe the more danger you face.”

A gentle youth with a sudden, blinding smile, Billy is the cherished only child of his mother and stepfather, Toni and Peter Mueller, who married when Billy was 6 years old. Peter, who has no other children, is a devoted father figure--working on cars with Billy, going to his soccer games, helping him with Scout projects. He heads the regional office of a federal agency for which he has worked all his adult life; Toni switched from a full-time job to part-time hours several years ago to spend more time with Billy. His natural father is an attorney in Washington, D.C., where his son visits him twice a year.

Billy’s friendships, schoolwork and activities were always closely monitored. “I had four miscarriages and nearly lost Billy,” says his mother. “He’s the only child I could ever have. When you only have one kid . . . I’m sure I was overly protective. Billy was always very immature--he never outgrew building forts in the woods. His immaturity probably stems to a great extent from the way we protected him.”

The family’s home is on the forested shore of Bainbridge Island, a 35-minute ferry ride from downtown Seattle. The semirural island has become a sort of promised land for professional men and women whose jobs are in Seattle and whose families are buffered from the city’s ills by the moat of Puget Sound. Schools are excellent (eight out of 10 high school seniors plan to attend college); property values strong, crime far less a concern than the density of new development.

In this insulated environment, Billy spent his boyhood. Not a natural athlete, he skied and went out for soccer every year. Not an outstanding student (he is mildly dyslexic), he maintained--with the help of his parents, tutors and his own hard work--a solid B average. He had a small circle of good friends, excelled in Scouts, was an altar boy active in the local Catholic Youth Organization and had been chosen to spend this year as a Rotary exchange student in Belgium. He still preferred hiking in the woods to going on dates.

But 14 months ago, Billy’s good life ended. “In a way, I lost my child last April,” Toni Mueller said. “He lost his childhood. For better or worse, he’s an adult right now. He’s different.”

“I’ve handled a lot of murder cases and they’re all tragic,” says Billy’s defense attorney, John Henry Browne. “This one is probably the most horrendous. It’s not only what Janko did to Billy, but what Billy did to him--it was a nightmare. What the system did to Billy was even worse. This is a story about how innocent people get prosecuted; how if Billy didn’t come from a family that could have afforded to hire us, he’d probably be in prison by now.”

Browne may be overstating his case, as defense attorneys are wont to do. But Billy and his family also believe that if it had not been for Browne, Billy would be behind bars today instead of packing for college.

Billy’s is also a story without a conclusion. “It’s not over when he got released. Maybe it’ll never be over for him,” said the father of one of Billy’s friends last fall.

“I’m tired, Peter’s tired, we’re just emotionally beat up. We don’t know where Billy is going at this point,” Toni said several months ago as she struggled, vainly, to restore the predictable patterns of her family’s former existence. Ever the optimist, she had hoped to close the book on this woeful chapter in their lives. Now she knew better. “It’ll never end,” she said.

FROM THE OUTSET, BILLY HARRIS’ CASE DEFIED EASY categorization. Based on the information in Billy’s statement to the police, Janko was a relatively rare sexual offender--the archetypal dark stranger, neither a relative nor a friend to the boys he picked up--and the rarest of victims, an aggressor on whom the tables got turned.

Small wonder that in the course of the police investigation, a more familiar scenario developed: that of a gay murder, the messy coda of a relationship, however brief, between two consenting males. The Bremerton Sun reported that Billy had “bludgeoned and stabbed his homosexual lover to death . . . according to Seattle police.” The Seattle Times cited a prosecutor’s statement that Janko and Billy had argued “over what type sex was to be performed.” At a juvenile court hearing, the prosecutor concluded that Billy had been leading a double life that took him down a violent path.

Janko had been stabbed five times in the chest and bashed more than a dozen times on the head with a hammer. His hands and arms bore severe wounds from fending off the blows as he tried to rise from his bed. The ferocity of the attack was typical of gay murders, said Lt. John Gray, chief of the Seattle homicide unit at the time. “I don’t know why, but it is. I’m not saying all of them, but a lot.” Billy’s spotless reputation scored no points with the police. “When you’re a policeman, you get a little cynical. You believe anybody will do anything,” explained Gray, who is now retired. “I can find you a murderer in every category--(from) a business executive who goes to church, to a drug dealer on the corner. So Billy is an Eagle Scout and an altar boy. What does that mean?”

But you didn’t have to be a cop to wonder what it meant. Even as Billy’s family and friends rallied around him, raising money for his legal defense; even as his lawyer set in motion an investigation that would eventually free him from criminal charges, the questions nagged, persisted. How, in the name of all that parents do to secure their children’s future in an uncertain world, did a boy like Billy veer so far off track? What went wrong? What was wrong with Billy?

“The whole thing seemed too bizarre to have come out of the blue,” said one Bainbridge Island mother. “And I guess we want to assume it didn’t happen by chance or it could happen to one of ours.”

As for Billy, the truth of what happened in Apartment 700 was clear enough to him, but he was looking for answers, too. There were questions he kept asking himself, and he could not shut them off.

“I know what’s done is done and there’s nothing I can do about it,” he said wearily. “I’m still curious about what had happened if I had done some different choices.”

ON SUNDAY MORNING, APRIL 14, BILLY WENT TO MASS WITH his parents and ducked out after Communion to take the 11:15 ferry to Seattle so he could complete his research for an English paper at the downtown public library. A solo journey to Seattle is a rite of passage for most Bainbridge youth before they reach Billy’s age, but this was to be Billy’s first trip to the city coming and going on his own. His father drew maps showing where to park the car at the Bainbridge Island ferry terminal and which way to walk to the library, only five blocks from the Seattle terminal.

Despite these careful preparations, there was a glitch: On Sundays, the library doesn’t open until 1 p.m., so Billy had an hour to kill. His description of what happened next is contained in his three-page statement to the police and information provided by his attorney.

While waiting for the library to open, Billy fell into conversation outside the building with Lajos Janko (pronounced La-yosh Yahnko), who introduced himself as “Mike,” acted “real friendly” and offered to buy Billy lunch. Billy turned him down. He was so wary of Janko that once inside the library he took off a sock and filled it with coins he’d brought for the copy machine “so I could have it for a weapon if I needed it.”

When Billy left the library at 2:30, Janko was still hanging around. He invited Billy to come to his apartment and drink some beer. Now Billy’s fear abated; he thought “Mike” might buy him booze that he could take back to Bainbridge. Like most of his classmates, Billy had experimented with alcohol. For once, he thought, he could be the cool guy who brought the beer to those gatherings. So he got on the bus to Capitol Hill with Janko.

At 4 p.m., Billy called his parents from Janko’s apartment to tell them he’d been delayed at the library and would be on the 7 p.m. ferry. But by early evening Billy was, in his words, “really drunk.” Janko had served him beer, whiskey, rum and champagne, and then the older man’s mood turned ugly. He pulled a knife on Billy, held a broken glass to his throat, grabbed him by the hair and knocked him around. He forced Billy to take off his clothes, get in bed and perform oral sex, and repeatedly threatened to kill him. There would be more sex in the morning, he promised. Billy threw up several times--Janko gave him a towel to clean up the mess--and finally they both fell asleep on the bed.

Billy woke up first, long after midnight. He slowly eased out of bed so as not to wake Janko, put on his clothes and tried to open the door. But Janko had attached a “knucklebolt” to the door--a cast-iron clamp that locks over a doorknob.

The key to the knucklebolt was lying on a nearby table, but the room was dark and Billy was afraid to turn on a light. Janko had disabled the phones. The windows were seven stories off the ground--too high to jump out. Shortly before Janko woke, Billy found two hammers in the kitchen and several knives. As Janko began to stir, Billy repeatedly struck him so hard with a hammer that the top broke off--but Janko still struggled to get to his feet. Then Billy used a knife. Afterward, he careened around the apartment, screaming for someone to call the police, banging on the walls and front door, and tossing things out the window.

In Janko’s cluttered apartment, there was considerable evidence to support Billy’s story. On the floor were clumps of Billy’s hair, shards from a broken drinking glass and dirty towels. The main phone jack had been pulled from the wall, rendering the phones inoperable. There was blood on the living room light switch, indicating that the light wasn’t turned on until after Janko was killed. And in a cardboard box near the door, Billy’s childish weapon: his sock, containing 10 dimes, four quarters and two pennies.

But something didn’t fit. The elderly assistant resident manager of the Olive Ridge told police he’d seen Billy at the apartment house “once or twice” before. The young woman who worked part-time as the backup manager said Janko had even introduced her to Billy in the laundry room three months earlier one Saturday morning. She didn’t remember Billy’s name, but she recognized his face.

Their statements would be crucial to the case against Billy, who was arrested, handcuffed and taken to the juvenile detention center shortly before dawn. Officer Kuerschner called the Muellers and they learned that their son, whom they had reported missing eight hours earlier, was now a murder suspect. The eventual charge: first degree murder, marked by premeditation and extreme violence. A first-degree murder conviction would mean at least 20 years in prison, no parole.

THE MUELLERS WERE STUNNED WITH GRIEF AND DISBELIEF IN the days following Billy’s arrest. Could Billy be gay and they hadn’t known? They searched his room, finding nothing but a few Playboy-type spreads and wildlife pictures--”centerfolds and raccoons,” Peter said later. Like countless parents before them, they began to worry that the judicial system was far more interested in establishing Billy’s guilt than investigating his innocence.

“You have a detective who draws a singular point of view which any intelligent person could question, you get a couple of prosecutors whose job is to prosecute, they go before a judge and give him their seedy scenario that they become more and more enamored with, and the judge buys off on it,” says Peter. “If Billy had been some black kid without fitonial and community support, the system would have chewed him up and spit him out.”

Billy wasn’t going to be another number in the large caseload handled by the public defender’s office. At the urging of his father, lawyer, the family hired John Henry Browne, himself a former public defender and one of Seattle’s most prominent criminal defense attorneys.

The 45-year-old Browne, who once played bass guitar in a rock band, is known for his swashbuckling style and his masterly handling of juries. But there are no jury trials in juvenile court, so Browne seemed to welcome the bid by the juvenile prosecutor’s office to have the case deferred to the adult venue--Superior Court. “This case can’t be lost in adult court,” he promised. “The jury will give Billy a medal.” Browne’s goal was outright dismissal of the murder charge, based on self-defense.

In May, Billy’s family and friends raised his $100,000 bail, and he was released to the custody of his parents. In mid-June, his case was remanded to Superior Court; in the eyes of the law, Billy was now an adult.

To prove Billy had acted in self-defense, Browne needed to show that Billy had believed he was in imminent danger, and took reasonable action in response to that danger. “Reasonable” would be defined subjectively--from the perspective of a traumatized adolescent, not a rational adult. The subjective standard is important in battered-women cases, where psychological and physical abuse impairs the ability of the accused to act in a reasoned fashion.

In a classic defense strategy, Browne also planned to introduce information damning to the dead man, Janko. He would build his case on the premise that Billy, not Janko, was the real victim. To do so, he relied heavily on his chief investigator, Chris Beck, who estimates that she and her employees spent 250 hours on Billy’s case.

Chomping Nicorettes, thin as a whip, her short black hair slicked back and flashed with a Cruella De Vil white streak, Beck looks like the tough-cookie heroine of a detective novel. But she’s also the mother of a teen-age boy, and her heart went out to Billy when she first met him in his baggy green coveralls at the juvenile detention center, where he’d told one of the other kids he was in for knocking off parking meters.

“I have a lot of clients I like, but Billy is a special case,” she said. And she believed in him. Going home with a perfect stranger just to score a few bottles of beer was a stupid thing to do, but what else was new? “Kids that age make mistakes in judgment. The No. 1 cardinal rule is don’t go with strangers. They’re always taught that, and they still break the rule.”

Billy, she figured, “was struggling with the nerd image. He had just started to drink beer, he was only recently able to drive.” Based on Billy’s appearance (“not manly”), she said the cops wrongly assumed he’d gone home with Janko for sex, and failed to realize how naive he was. “Kids on the island lack street moxie. You don’t have people being knifed there. You don’t have this public commingling of different economic, social and racial groups. That contributed to Billy getting in a dangerous situation.”

Billy wasn’t the first kid to face danger at Janko’s hands, but he was probably the least experienced. Jerry Esterly, a former juvenile parole officer who now works for Beck, spent weeks tracking down three young males who said Janko had tried to assault them at knifepoint in his apartment during encounters dating back to 1987. They were American Indian youths (aged 13, 15 and 21 at the time) of slight stature, like Billy. All three hung out along a bedraggled strip a few blocks from Seattle’s famed Pike Place Market that is notorious for drug deals, prostitution, assaults and murders.

Only one of the incidents showed up on the police blotter. Less than a year before his death, Janko was arrested after the 13-year-old reported the attempted assault to police. Janko denied the attack, although he said that he had previously paid for sex with the boy’s older brother. The boy never signed a formal complaint, and the case was later closed with the notation that the alleged victim was a “street person” who “failed to cooperate.” Around the same time, Janko bought a knucklebolt lock.

POSSIBLY DRAWN TO SEATTLE BY ITS LARGE POPULATION OF EASTERN EUROPEAN immigrants, Janko had been under psychiatric care virtually ever since he entered the United States from an Austrian refugee camp in 1986. Washington’s Department of Social and Health Services categorized Janko as chronically mentally ill, making him eligible for public housing. From that time until his death, he lost countless jobs; he was kicked out of beauty school; he drank too much and flew into unaccountable, frightening rages.

Janko was a small man, no taller than Billy, but he had a muscular build. In his good moods, he displayed a certain cagey charm. “He was very much a street person, very streetwise. He was so alert,” says Marta Kosaly, a Hungarian-speaking psychotherapist who counseled Janko.

Two days after the 1987 stabbing incident, Janko showed up at Seattle’s Cabrini Hospital in a “near-psychotic state . . . afraid of losing control and harming himself or killing someone else,” according to the admission record. After a 10-day psychiatric evaluation, he was discharged with prescriptions for Desyrel (an antidepressant), lithium (for manic depression) and Xanax (a tranquilizer). Over the years, he also took several other powerful drugs to combat what was variously diagnosed as recurring depression, borderline personality and panic disorder, and a striking inability to control anger.

Without the drugs, said the hospital psychiatrist, Janko became “agitated, with the potential to harm himself or others.” But during the weeks before his death, Janko apparently stopped taking his medication. He was also having other difficulties. In early April, he lost another job. On April 8, he received a 10-day notice from the housing authority warning him that he faced eviction if he didn’t stop causing trouble. On both occasions, Janko pitched a fit.

“He went into an outburst like you wouldn’t believe,” recalls Sherill Thompson, who fired Janko from the hair salon where he had worked for only a couple of weeks. “I was really scared. There were customers in the shop. I told him, I’m really sorry but you’ll have to go now.”

Clearly, Janko had sexual and psychiatric problems. But how would the defense counter the charge that Billy had visited Janko at the Olive Ridge before?

Again, the classic way--by challenging the eyewitness accounts as confused and unreliable. One part of Browne’s strategy played a racial card: Boys came and went from Janko’s apartment at all hours; could the witnesses, Richard Amerson and Denise Ogans, who are both black, be certain it was Billy they saw and not some other white boy? And what about their own veracity as residents of a subsidized apartment building whose tenants Browne dismissed as “either senile or crazy”?

Amerson and Ogans both helped manage the Olive Ridge; they appeared to be competent enough witnesses. However, their statements to the police raised questions. The 70-year-old Amerson first said he had seen Billy several times before April 15, but later narrowed that to only once--and he didn’t remember the boy wearing glasses. (Billy is nearsighted and wears thick glasses.)

Ogans, 26, was a close friend of Janko’s; he died wearing the necklace she had given him. She was certain she had seen Billy at least twice after their alleged meeting in the laundry room on a Saturday three months earlier--once leaving the apartment building about 3 a.m., and most recently only four days before before Janko was killed. She had also stopped by Janko’s apartment and saw the boy she identified as Billy sitting in the living room. His glasses were lying on a nearby table, Ogans said. Early the morning of April 15, she was in the lobby of the Olive Ridge when the police took Billy out of the building. “He looked at me, I looked at him. He knew I knew him,” she said.

But her recollections were at odds with Billy’s crowded schedule, which left little time for a “double life.” On every Saturday but two since early January, he was either skiing (the ski bus left the island at dawn every Saturday morning and returned after 9 p.m.) or on a Boy Scout camp-out. On the other weekends he was at a Rotary event and on a college tour with his parents. Billy’s soccer coach confirmed that he was at practice after school until 5 p.m. on April 11; he ate dinner at home, and met with his math tutor at 7 p.m. He was either practicing or playing soccer every afternoon that week.

The ferry schedule also tended to support Billy’s story. If Billy had sneaked out late at night to take the ferry to Seattle, he would have had to leave Capitol Hill by 1:45 a.m. to return to the island on the 2:10 a.m. ferry. The next boat left Seattle at 6:20 a.m., which would have gotten him home long after his mother and stepfather awoke. In a sworn affidavit, they said Billy had never been absent in the morning. “Either there was a cover-up and the whole family was involved, or you had to conclude he was telling the truth,” said Esterly.

The defense team prepared a huge chart detailing Billy’s daily schedule since Jan. 1, a blur of supervised, organized activities. The chart was displayed at an unusual meeting that took place July 11 in Browne’s office with Browne, Billy and the new Superior Court prosecutors for Billy’s case. The best exhibit may have been Billy himself, who answered questions from the prosecutors for more than an hour.

Three weeks later, the prosecutor’s office announced it would not file a murder charge against Billy because it could not prove he hadn’t acted in self-defense. “The information that is unrebutted is that he truly believed that when Janko found him out of bed and fully dressed, he would kill him, or make him perform a sex act,” prosecution spokesman Dan Donohoe told a reporter. Though he avoided faulting the police investigation, Donohoe later said “some of the new evidence that came to light”--including alibis for Billy’s whereabouts--”had an influence” on the decision to drop the case.

The prosecutor’s announcement was a bitter pill for homicide detective Gene Ramirez, who handled the investigation. “If you’re going to write a story about how we railroaded some innocent kid, we have nothing to discuss,” snapped Ramirez in December. “People forget who the victim is here.” He referred all questions to Lt. Gray, his supervisor.

In an interview shortly before his retirement at the end of 1991, Gray said that of all the homicides investigated by the Seattle Police Department during the past dozen years--about 600--Billy’s was the only case in which the murder charge evaporated completely.

“I’m not on a crusade to get Billy Harris charged or to get John Henry Browne,” said Gray. “I’m not sure there’s any one thing that’s implausible about (Billy’s) story. There’s just enough evidence that should go to a jury . . . . If his parents tuck him in at night and get him up in the morning, they can get up and testify they do that every night. Why do we take that as the truth? Why do we assume the eyewitnesses are wrong or they’re lying?”

The police also discount Browne’s emphasis on the ferry schedules. It is possible to drive to Seattle over a bridge, though the trip would take about two hours.

Gray still considers Billy’s case “an open homicide,” meaning it could be reactivated if new evidence emerges. “I still feel his case could go to trial. A disservice was done to everyone by not committing the case to a jury of his peers. He’s left in limbo. It’s like a cop who shoots and kills somebody. The last thing he wants is there to not be an inquest. (Billy) is going to go through life and people are going to wonder what really happened. I don’t see that as any service to the kid.”

That kind of talk sends Browne up the wall. Billy, he contends, should never even have been arrested. “They don’t arrest people in self-defense situations all the time. If this was a case involving a young woman, would she be arrested? What irritates me is why anybody still has any questions about it. This case was so bad they had to make up scenarios: Billy went there for sex, he’d been there before. Let’s say he had been gay--what relevance is that?”

The bottom line, says Browne, is that Billy was brutalized, and believed Janko was going to kill him. “The reality is he had no option.” If Billy remains in an untenable position, Browne knows who to blame. “He wouldn’t have been in that position in the first place if the police had done their job properly.”

AT AN INTERVIEW EIGHT MONTHS AFTER THE “INCIDENT,” AS HE and his family call it, Billy Harris still looked incredibly young for his age. He was midway through his senior year in high school and stood 5 feet, 5 1/2 inches tall and weighed 125 pounds. Though he was candid and articulate, he was also obviously depressed, and there were few signs of his trademark wry humor.

“He’s not a class clown, but he always had a sense of humor. He could make you laugh--your sides would hurt,” said a girl who is one of his close friends. But since school started in the fall, “he always looks a little depressed. He just doesn’t look well.

“I think the whole shock of what happened is hitting him now. On top of that, Bainbridge High School is a hard place to be accepted socially. That’s a given fact. People want to accept him, they just don’t know what to say to him. I tell them, it’s OK, you can talk to him. You don’t have to talk about it .”

When Billy first came home under what amounted to house arrest last spring, he found he was no longer “a nobody,” as one of his teachers described him, but a minor celebrity. “The first week, I had 30 visitors from school. . . . I was a fad. It was cool to come see me. There was curiosity about what happened.”

That curiosity faded, and so did Billy’s newfound popularity. One longtime friend visited a lot at first, “but when he found out I wasn’t some changed warped psycho, he got bored and never came back.” After the murder charge was dropped and Billy was finally free to leave the house, he stopped by the home of another friend and was met at the front door by the boy’s father, who told him to keep the visit short. “The parents said, frankly, we don’t want you here.”

When school started last fall, “it got worse,” said Billy. It isn’t so much a complaint as a statement of fact. “This year everybody passed a judgment about me. For a while they thought I was gay. Then people were saying, no, he’s not. People don’t believe that anymore--at least I don’t think they do.”

He sighs and runs a comb through his hair, a nervous gesture he repeats dozens of times during the interview. “It’s really, really hard to know what somebody thinks about you when they don’t tell you. Here, nothing is ever said. You’re just always being looked at. People are just thinking.”

Part of the problem, he believes, is the dichotomy between his Goody Two-Shoes image and the events of April 15. “That’s why there’s such a space between me and other people. They can’t reconcile that,” he said. “People are not physically afraid of me--they just don’t want any involvement.”

Soon after his release, Billy went into counseling, and he came to realize some things about himself he didn’t particularly like. “I was a mama’s boy,” he says ruefully. He also learned he has “a very, very hard time expressing what I feel, or (having) the oomph to say it. Like if I were in a checkout line buying something and the person at the cash register shorted me on the change, and I knew it, I would put the money in my pocket and just walk away without saying anything.”

The way Billy told it, all those years of twice- and thrice-weekly church attendance and altar boy service were “a joke. I was there because my parents said I had to be. Even when Eagle Scouts wasn’t something I really wanted to do, I did it because they were always right and I was always wrong. . . . I can never be me, be myself. I have to be what somebody wants me to be.”

Yet those same activities yielded satisfactions. He has rediscovered his Catholic faith and relished his spotlighted role at a church youth conference in Seattle where no one knew his story. He loved making a speech last year (before his arrest) to a scout gathering attended by prominent business leaders. He has found that his natural shyness disappears when he’s on stage.

By late October, Billy’s search for self was on a collision course with his mother’s urge to hover, which he now found intolerable. “He felt smothered at home, which is a terrible rejection for us as parents,” Toni said. “Part of it is his age. But after we nearly lost him, it’s doubly hard as a parent to accept it.” Billy moved into an apartment near the high school, and for a few weeks, his spirits seemed to lift--until he fell ill with pneumonia and moved back home.

When he heard gossip that some of his erstwhile friends were plotting to get him in trouble by stealing his ID card and leaving it at the scene of a petty crime, Billy’s despair was complete. “Right now I really hate school,” he said. “Before, I made the effort. Now I couldn’t care less . . . . I can’t see myself having a normal, happy, healthy business tycoon future. I can’t see myself with any of that. After all the shit I went through, the future is just blank.”

There was an undercurrent of anger beneath his words, anger not only because of what had happened to him, but because of his own role in the disaster. When does the second-guessing stop? “I haven’t reached that point yet,” he replied.

And there were the dreams. In one, he found himself in a house “in a very helpless situation. There were two old men and they were hurting children, and there was nothing I could do about it. I ran upstairs and there was blood everywhere. All I could think was, not again.”

The dream was curious because when he awoke and envisioned the scene in Janko’s apartment, he didn’t see any blood. This puzzled him. “You want to figure out why--why you can’t see it. I don’t want everything to still be inside me so when I’m 30 years old I’m having a nervous breakdown.”

AT 58, PETER MUELLER IS A MEASURED MAN OF TACITURN Minnesotan stock, careful and practical. In contrast to his wife, who is quick to laugh as well as cry, he lets his emotions leak out a little at a time. Sitting in a cafe, he gulps black coffee as if it were water, and talks wistfully about what might have been.

He sees Billy in church that morning, he sees himself reminding Billy to leave in time to catch the 11:15 ferry. If only he had let him take the next ferry. If only he had checked the library schedule first. If only he had paid more attention when he and Billy were at the library just the day before. (“If there were a lot of seedy characters around, I didn’t have my eye out for them. It’s bothered me that I didn’t look.”)

The list goes on and on, a parent’s compulsive litany of regrets. Had they sheltered Billy too much? Should they have nudged him out of the nest, maybe pushed him to get a job? “Getting him into a situation where he had to work, something to give him a sense of accomplishment--would that have helped him mature? I’ve thought about that a lot. Our efforts were mainly to help keep his ship on top of the water until he did mature. We always worried about his ability to be on his own because he seemed to require so much attention from us.”

The details of what happened that April night remain largely unspoken between them. At first it was because the lawyers forbade them to discuss it in case the Muellers were called to testify against their son. Later on, it was because the subject was too painful.

“I’ve never sat down with Billy and said, why did you go with that guy?” says Peter slowly, his hand stroking his coffee cup. “There’s a time you’d like to know, when questions are being asked, but when that’s over--without knowing why, you just don’t get into it.”

At times Billy’s mental health has seemed precarious. In December, Billy underwent psychological testing that showed he was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. He began seeing a psychiatrist who specializes in helping adolescents recover from abuse and trauma, and responded well to therapy. The flashbacks, the bad dreams are fading.

“The doctor told him, you’re not crazy--and you can put this behind you. I think Billy really wanted to hear that,” says his mother. With the coming of spring, Billy emerged from his depression. He started dating, and now has a girlfriend. He kept his grades up, graduated with his class in June, was accepted at four different universities. In September, he will enroll at a Catholic college in Washington and major in general studies. And he got his first summer job--working as a clerk in the law office of John Henry Browne.

In the space of a few months, he also changed physically. He’s taller now, and more solid--he’s been working out with weights--and his dark eyes have lost their wary, startled look. “Things are so much better now,” says his mother. “Of course, it’s not all rosy and wonderful every day. But I don’t know how much of that is because he’s 18 or because of what he’s been through.”

It’s conceivable that Billy will be healed sooner than his parents, neither of whom has sought counseling. They have yet to break the news about what has happened to Billy to many family members. “You almost need for someone to sit down and say, this is what you’ve been through, and this is what should happen now. Nobody does that. It’s kind of a crap shoot,” Peter says.

In the Bainbridge High School yearbook, the seniors are each given a space for a favorite saying or quote to be printed next to their photographs. While he was living away from his parents, Billy came up with his own three-sentence statement, a poignant declaration of adolescent confusion and stubborn bravado. To grasp its deeper meaning, though, you need to know his story.

“We are a stone’s throw from madness and conformity tugs at our sleeve. Oh, what a psychological mess life is. But I’m getting an A.”