The Sins of Walker Railey
I had to know: Did the minister of the church I grew up in try to murder his wife? I told him I thought he was guilty. “I hear what you’re saying,” he said.
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Looking out from the pulpit, he saw three thousand parishioners in their Easter finery, filling the sanctuary and spilling out into the hallway, where uniformed policemen had just arrived to guard the exits. It was no longer the predominantly elderly congregation that had greeted him on his first sermon in this pulpit seven years before. Who could deny that Walker Railey had put his stamp on this church and invigorated it with the force of his personality? And yet hovering over the sanctuary was a ghost that haunted Railey and would never let him feel entirely at home here; it was the ghost of Robert Goodrich. All the things Railey wanted, all the honors he sought, Goodrich had achieved. Goodrich had been elected bishop in 1972 and was succeeded in the First Church pulpit by Ben Oliphint, who also became a bishop eight years later. It was Goodrich with whom Railey was compared, however, and not always favorably. “In many ways I’ll always consider that piece of wood up in front of the sanctuary as Bob Goodrich’s pulpit,” Railey would admit. Perhaps it was an act of charity or perhaps it was cleverness on Railey’s part that he brought Bishop Goodrich back to Dallas in his final years of life, when he was ill and doddering, and placed him once again on the staff of his old church, where everyone could compare the old frail man with his lively young successor.
In the congregation on Easter morning was Bishop Goodrich’s elegant widow, Thelma. I should note that she and her husband were close friends of my parents and that she is a woman whose dignity I have always admired. Thelma was sitting with Lucy, the second of her four children. Despite the mascara and frosted hair, one look at Lucy and you could see she was Bob Goodrich’s daughter. She had that knotted Goodrich chin, his thin, drawn smile, and the dark eyes that were his most distinctive feature—eyes that seemed remote but also searching and intelligent. It was a strong face, like her father’s, and if in some lights it appeared hard, in others you could detect a vulnerable and even wounded soul who had lived past the point where life surprised her. When she was younger, Lucy played the piano in the Sunday school class that my father taught. Now Lucy was 45, with two teenage children, but she was still slim and youthful, with the athletic carriage that was also a Goodrich legacy. She had been through two marriages before going off to California and becoming a clinical psychologist. She had come home to Dallas to set up a practice specializing in eating disorders. Along the way she acquired a new last name, one of her own invention: “Papillon,” which means “butterfly” in French. Dr. Papillon once explained “the metaphor of the butterfly” to Reverend Railey when he interviewed her on Faith Focus, his weekly television show: “The caterpillar’s crawling around, feels like the world’s okay, but if they really want to fly, they’ve got to go through the darkest thing they’ve ever seen, which is the cocoon.” According to the local press, soon after Lucy Papillon returned to Dallas, she became Walker Railey’s mistress.
Mrs. Walker Railey sat in a pew halfway back, next to a woman police officer who happened to be a member of the church. It had become unusual to see Peggy in the congregation. Over the last year she had withdrawn from the choir and the children’s Sunday school class that she taught, then from the board suppers and picnics and retreats, and finally from the main Sunday service. Walker explained her absence as illness or a need to be closer to five-year-old Ryan and two-year-old Megan. Although it was true that Peggy had suffered a bout of walking pneumonia earlier in 1987, she had recovered from that; and as for the children, other mothers in the congregation wondered why she couldn’t leave them in the nursery, as they did. Peggy, however, always had seemed a remote personality—as introverted, friends said, as Walker was extroverted—so her retreat from church society was only partly noticed. “She was certainly much less visible than any other pastor’s wife I’ve ever seen,” says a member of the pastoral staff.
Later, while she lay in the hospital, fighting for the marginal edge of life that had been left her, people would describe Peggy as cool and distant, but to those few who she had allowed to know her well, she was a warm and devoted friend. The pictures that would appear in the newspaper did her no justice, because Peggy Railey was quite a beautiful woman. Where Lucy was strong and stylish, Peggy was frail and demure, but with a natural attractiveness much like a fresh-faced milkmaid of her native Wisconsin. Peggy had a lovely singing voice—she was second soprano—although her true talents were in her fingers. She had studied organ at SMU, obtaining a master’s degree, and she might have pursued a career as a professional musician if she hadn’t chosen to give herself over to the humbler role of being a minister’s wife. In March, after she had recovered from her illness, she succumbed to friends’ urgings and gave a small lunchtime harpsichord recital at the church, with John Yarrington joining her at the end of the program to sing a Bach cantata. She appeared wan and there was a new hollowness about her cheeks, but in many respects she had never been more lovely. And yet what was most striking about this performance was Peggy’s trancelike behavior; she played robotically, and when the audience applauded her, she gave a sudden startled smile. Where was she? She seemed to be in some faraway sad place. Later people would remember that performance and wonder if Peggy had known about Lucy.
Another of Peggy’s talents was sewing. She had made many of the elegant seasonal stoles that the ministers wore over their robes—Walker was wearing one now, a white stole with the Greek letters alpha and omega appliquéd on either side. Beneath the stole was Walker’s black robe, and under the robe was his suit jacket, and under the jacket was the bullet-proof vest, so as Walker stood in the pulpit his first action was to mop his bulbous forehead with a handkerchief.
He began his sermon with a discussion of a book written in 1965 called The Passover Plot. The premise of the book was that the Crucifixion had been faked. Of course Railey went on to dismiss The Passover Plot—”If there’s ever a day you have nothing of substance to do, and you want nothing of substance to read, it would be a fine book to peruse.” Perhaps he was only using the book as a provocative introduction to the standard Easter rejoicing; the questions that he was posing about Jesus, however, were exactly the same ones that would later be asked of him. Was he truly a martyr—the man who was now standing in Bob Goodrich’s pulpit in a bulletproof vest, the man whose life for the next two weeks would be a march of catastrophe, from the attack on Peggy, followed by Walker’s evasive testimony to the police, and culminating in his attempted suicide? Or was he orchestrating his own martyrdom, creating a myth of himself that would raise him higher and make the drama of his own small life into something grander, something divine?
One could scarcely call me an objective reporter. From the moment I got into the story, I had trouble holding onto my neutrality. I bullied my way into an interview with Railey’s bishop, who said I was “beneath contempt.” I told preachers who refused to speak to me about the case that they were sanctimonious hypocrites. I excoriated the staff of First Church for not confronting the evil that had taken place in their own sanctuary. My behavior was hard to excuse and hard to explain.
In part it was anger at Dallas, a city were pious public faces often hid secret dirty appetites. But Dallas was an old war of mine, one that I had grown tired of fighting, to the point that I had subsided into an exhausted peace on the matter. The truth was that like any old contestant I had begun to sentimentalize the battles of my youth and had become grateful to Dallas for helping me learn who I am.
More than Dallas, there was Methodism. I have seen friends struggle to throw off the narrow-minded strictures of Southern Baptism or the ritualistic magic of Catholicism or the tribal creeds of Judaism. I have encountered religion in extreme forms, from Hare Krishnas and Amish farmers to snake-handling charismatics. And yet, with all my ambivalence about religion, what I feel about people who believe or disbelieve such stringent doctrines is a low-grade envy, for at least a hard-shell Baptist has the literalism of the Bible to react against, a Catholic has the pomp and mystery of the liturgy, and so on, but a Methodist struggles in a fog, not really knowing what is to be believed or disbelieved but learning in a subliminal way what is to be avoided.
I could not fairly hold Methodism responsible for the values of this city, because despite the fact that Dallas is a stronghold of United Methodism, only 7 percent of the population belongs to the denomination, a figure that represents less than half the number of Southern Baptists and is even behind the Catholics. This fact doesn’t alter my opinion that Methodism is the state religion of corporate America, of which Dallas is the purest and most fervent example. Methodism began in the slums of eighteenth-century London and the British coalfields, where John Wesley began his ministry to the underclass. It settled the American frontier in the form of the lonely, tireless circuit rider. And thus it took root in an ambitious, desperately poor frontier people, and it grew with them as their cities grew, as their generations prospered, and as their politics and values changed. So had the church grown and prospered and changed, becoming essentially the same institution its founder had rebelled against.
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