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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Yes, I was angry at Methodism because I thought it had turned into Nothingism and was only in business to stay in business. My particular quarrel with Methodism began here in First Church, however, where for so much of my adolescence I had felt confused and bewildered and overlooked. It had seemed to me then that the special quality of my church was to float above the real world of lust and violence, passion and broken hearts, in a higher atmosphere of untroubled Christian behavior. Human failings were seldom addressed. I recall when the assistant pastor left his family and ran off to Colorado with a ski instructor. His name was never mentioned again. All that remained of him was some intoxicating vapor of sin and forbidden desire—an intimation of another world I was not supposed to know about. The church was like a timid old woman hiding behind shutters, shielding herself from confusion.
I had seen Walker Railey preach on Christmas Eve, 1984, when I was back in Dallas to see my parents. It was a tormented moment for me, a time when I had been confounded by my own behavior and eager to seek forgiveness. In that raw condition I experienced what so many would later speak of: the sensation that Railey was preaching to me, that those large and expressive blue eyes that swept across the sanctuary like a searchlight were looking for me.
Now, after the attack on Peggy Railey, I had come back inside the old sanctuary, had listened to another sermon that refused to acknowledge what had happened within the church’s own family. Week after week had passed with one revelation after another and only the most oblique references from the pulpit about what was transpiring in the world beyond the stained glass windows. Nothing was said of Railey’s attempted suicide. Nothing was said of the sensational revelations of Lucy Papillon’s grand jury testimony, in which she talked about their affair, which had gone on for more than a year, their marriage plans, and their assignations “while he was out preaching”—they had even arranged to meet in England when Railey returned from a World Methodist Council meeting in Nairobi. Nothing was said of Railey’s refusal to cooperate with the police or his decision to plead the Fifth Amendment before the grand jury. The church was in a state of delirium (“We’re fine, the church is fine, everything’s going to be fine,” a member of the board assured me). I fought an impulse to stand up and shout Walker Railey’s name out loud.
On the night of April 21, 1987, at 6:30 in the evening, Railey drove into the family garage. He says he found his wife working on a garage door latch with a bar of soap. The spring on the latch had been sticking, and Peggy was trying to lubricate it. According to Railey, he sat on the hood of Peggy’s Chrysler for a few minutes, talking to his wife. She and the children already had eaten dinner, and Walker wasn’t hungry, so the two of them shared a glass of wine. He then left, still in his business suit—ostensibly to spend the evening at the SMU libraries to write footnotes for his book on preaching.
At 6:38 Railey called the time from his car phone. Everyone knew that Railey did not wear a watch; he had given it up when he came to First Church, partially because of his habit of wearing French cuffs, which frayed when he kept pushing up his sleeve to check the time. The phone had just been installed that day, at church expense. It was another of the many security measures the church provided him, including a home alarm system and a separate private telephone line. Railey says he spent the next thirty minutes at Bridwell Library at the theology school, searching for a biography of Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher. At 7:26 he was back in his car, calling Janet Marshall, a family friend who was going to baby-sit for the Railey children while Walker and Peggy went to San Antonio for the weekend. At 7:32 he called Lucy Papillon, then drove to her house, where he stayed for about forty minutes. He says he went there to get some relaxation tapes to help relieve his stress.
A librarian at Bridwell remembers seeing Railey sometime after eight, when the minister asked what time the library closed. At 8:30 Railey called Peggy from a pay phone, and she told him she was putting the children to bed. After that Peggy talked to her parents in Tyler until 9:14. Meanwhile, Railey had left the library. He purchased gas at a Texaco station on Greenville Avenue at 8:53 and also bought a wine cooler, which he says accounts for the fact that police would later report him as intoxicated when they came to his house four hours later.
At 9:30 a jogger saw a man in a business suit running through a yard two streets away from the Raileys’ house. Between 10:15 and 10:30 a neighbor heard rustling noises in the alley behind the Raileys’ house.
Railey says he had gone to the Texaco station because he was thirsty and had returned to his research in the main library. The police say they have indisputable evidence that he was lying about his whereabouts from the time he left the Texaco station until a librarian saw him sometime between 11 and midnight. At midnight Railey attempted to give his business card to a Nigerian student at the checkout desk. On the back of the card was a message to the research librarian, asking for help in finding the Sullivan biography. He had also written the time, which was noted to be 10:30.
After leaving the library Railey phoned his home from his car, but this time he called the listed line, which was connected to answering machine and did not even ring in the house. “I don’t have my watch on,” said the man who never wore one, “but it’s about ten-thirty or ten-forty-five.” Telephone company records show that the call was actually made at three minutes after midnight. “If you want to, go ahead and lock the garage door, and I’ll park out front.” At 12:29 he called his answering machine again, giving the correct time and saying he was on his way home. The theory of Railey’s guilt presumes that Peggy was strangled sometime around 10:30 and that the calls were meant to establish both an alibi for himself and a reason for Peggy to go to the garage.
Eleven minutes after the second call Railey drove into the driveway and found the garage door partly open. The garage was dark; mysteriously, the bulbs had been removed from the overhead light of the automatic door opener. Railey said he left his headlights on and got out of the car. He found Peggy lying behind her Chrysler, writhing in convulsions. Her face was hugely swollen and discolored, yet her hair was scarcely mussed and her glasses were in place. At 12:43 a police dispatcher received a call from Railey, who said, “Uh, I just came into the house, and my wife is in the garage.… Somebody has done something to her.” The dispatcher inquired, “Has she been beat up or what?” “I don’t know,” Railey replied. “She’s foaming at the mouth or something.”
“The phone rang about twelve forty-five,” says Diane Yarrington. “It was Walker. He said, ‘Diane, something awful has happened to Peggy. Come quick, come right now.’ We literally raced over there. By the time we got there, the ambulance had arrived. Walker was inside holding Megan. Ryan was sort of sitting on the couch. I talked with Walker briefly, and then I said, ‘I’ll take the children,’ and I asked the kids what they wanted to take with them. They each grabbed a pillow and a stuffed animal. Walker said, ‘Don’t leave me.’ And John said, ‘I’ll be here. I’m like your second skin.’”
John Yarrington accompanied Walker to the hospital, and after he had gotten his friend settled, he went to speak to the doctors. “I did not know what had happened. I knew she had been hurt, but I didn’t know how,” he says. “At that point the doctors’ assessment was that Peggy’s neck had been broken. And I asked how would that happen? ‘Well, she was strangled.’ That was the first I knew.”
John went into the emergency room where Peggy lay. “It’s a terrible thing to see; it’s Technicolor in my brain. I’ll never forget her lying on that table, with that blotchy color, a terrible color, a terrible thing to see on someone you love.”
For most of the seven years the Yarringtons had known the Raileys, they had been the closest of friends. Diane and Peggy were like sisters. They spoke several times a day on the phone and sat next to each other in the choir. Peggy accompanied John’s rehearsals every Sunday night. Walker had been John’s boss and also his spiritual guide and soul mate. Several months before the attack on Peggy, the couples had pledged that if anything were to happen—if one of the couples were to die in a plane accident or some other tragedy would befall them—then the other couple would take care of their children. John had made the pledge in all sincerity, but who could believe that so suddenly and so grotesquely it would come due?
The next day Railey went to the police station with a lawyer friend to talk to investigative officer Rick Silva. It is the only time Railey has talked to the police. His story then was that he had come home, spoken briefly to Peggy while she was working on the garage door latch, then spent the rest of the evening in the libraries. He said he had no idea who might want to harm her, except for the author of the anonymous letters. Silva indicated that he would like to set up a polygraph examination, and Railey said he would be happy to cooperate.
During the next week the police learned about the telephone call to Lucy, they listened to the tape on Railey’s answering machine, they discovered a credit card slip from the Texaco station, and they examined the garage door, which seemed to work fine. They found no evidence that the latch had been lubricated; in fact, they learned that the Raileys had complained to the manufacturer and had had a new automatic door opener installed only a few days earlier.
My Library
