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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In the meantime Railey stayed in his hospital suite, meeting friends and going through the mail. Lucy came to visit him, carrying a single red rose. One day he received telegrams from both Jesse Jackson and Billy Graham, and he went in to tell Peggy she had made “ecclesiastical history.” She looked at him with open, unseeing eyes. Her brain was damaged but not dead. What she comprehended no one could even guess. Friends played videos of her harpsichord concert and papered her room with pictures drawn by Ryan and Megan. There was some hope, in those early days, that something inside Peggy would stir to life.
“Peggy, it’s Diane.” Peggy’s face was still puffy and discolored the first morning Diane Yarrington got to see her. “The children are with me. It’s just fine. It’s all right.” A tear rolled out of Peggy’s eye. Later others would see her crying—Walker did, even Detective Silva—and they would wonder what she knew or felt. The truth was locked inside Peggy and could never be expressed, but that did not mean that it couldn’t be experienced. What an unendurable tragedy that would be, to be alone with the truth.
The inconsistencies and omissions in Railey’s story had accumulated to the point that Silva telephoned the hospital and told the officers guarding Railey’s room that he wanted to question Railey. When they went to his room they found the door locked. They broke in and found Railey’s unconscious body and his suicide note.
Once again John Yarrington would be standing in the same emergency room, this time over Walker’s body as doctors pumped the drugs out of his stomach. Fortunately, Walker had not taken all the pills that were on his bedside table. Like Peggy, he had fallen onto that ledge of deep unconsciousness between life and death. Unlike her, he had not suffered a loss of oxygen and glucose to the brain, which doctors said probably would prevent her from recovering. She was wrapped in a cocoon from which few ever emerge.
For the next five days Walker lay in intensive care in a room opposite Peggy’s. “It was bizarre and weird,” says John. “You would go to your left to see Walker and go to your right to see Peggy. They essentially looked much the same.” On the Wednesday after the Friday he had attempted suicide, Railey awakened, and the first thing he remembers is seeing his friend standing vigil at his bedside. He had absolutely no recall of anything. It was two more days before he fully resurfaced. Railey asked John then whether he could regain the pulpit. John was startled by the question. “I think it’s very iffy,” he said. Walker seemed surprised and wanted to know why. “Well, number one, you tried to commit suicide. And number two, a lot of people think you strangled Peggy.”
The police had enough evidence to disbelieve Walker Railey but not enough to charge him. After he got out of the hospital, Railey checked into Timberlawn Psychiatric Center while his attorney, Doug Mulder, arranged for him to take a privately administered polygraph. The test indicated that Railey did not attack his wife and did not know who did. The next day at the police department Railey took a polygraph which proved inconclusive, although Railey “showed deception” about the threatening letters. Mulder and Railey arranged for a third polygraph, the results of which they have never made public. Norm Kinne, the frustrated chief criminal prosecutor in the district attorney’s office, convened a grand jury investigation and warned Railey in front of television cameras to either “come before the grand jury” or “leave the country”—an odd injunction to be directed at the main suspect in the case. Railey appeared and took the Fifth Amendment 43 times. No indictments were handed down, but so much of the testimony was leaked to the press that it appeared that the grand jury was called for no other purpose than a public shaming of Walker Railey.
With the justice system at an impasse, a group of Methodist clergymen wrote a letter to Bishop John Russell, asking for a church inquiry into Railey’s relationship with Lucy. The bishop began a lengthy private negotiation with Railey. On September 2 Railey surrendered his credentials, which voided the church’s jurisdiction over him. That meant there would be no embarrassing church trial, but it also meant that Peggy’s insurance would lapse after twelve months. In October Railey signed over guardianship of Peggy to her parents, who had placed Peggy in a Tyler nursing home. Peggy’s father says that Railey has visited his wife “three or four times—that’s about it.” The Railey children continue to live with the Yarringtons.
I knew I was going to meet with Walker Railey because periodically he emerged from seclusion to proclaim his innocence to reporters and give his own version of the tragic events. The meetings were highly circumscribed, and when Railey finally answered one of my messages, I agreed to the same conditions: We would not talk about the case, and we would not talk about Lucy. “Are you a coffee drinker?” Railey asked cheerfully on the phone. He said he would have a pot waiting for me when we met in the morning in his Lake Highlands home.
There was no For Sale sign in front of the white brick house on Trail Hill Drive, although the house was on the market for $279,000. The sole business that was keeping Walker Railey in Dallas was the need to dispose of his property. He had gone through the police, the grand jury, the bishop, and the local reporters, and there remained only me.
Railey opened the door and greeted me. The house was comfortable and spacious, with the sun glinting off the pool in the back yard and making wrinkled shadows on the living room ceiling. Perhaps it was simply the absence of family detritus—toys and books and newspapers—that made the house seem so impersonal. Outside it was warm, but the house was unaccountably chilly—”like a mausoleum,” as Railey observed while we sat at his kitchen table, drinking coffee.
He had been monitoring my presence ever since I had arrived in Dallas two weeks before. “I know that you have a couple of layers of subjectivity that are influencing your writing of this story, one having to do with your opinions about me and one having to do with your inner quarrels with the institutional church,” he told me, quite accurately. I realized that we had been stalking each other with a growing sense of recognition and mission. His mission, old and by now habitual, was to get me to believe in the church—and in himself. Mine was to tear away the many veils of falsity and hypocrisy and get to the truth, whatever that was.
He already knew who I was. But did anyone, even Walker Railey, know who he was? “I get depressed,” he admitted. “I see my psychiatrist twice a week and have been doing that since May, and he helps me look inside myself.” He spends his days now reading the Psalms, playing golf occasionally, “trying to let my soul and my body get together.” A few days before, he had enjoyed “kind of a joyous highlight” because he had played golf with former district attorney Henry Wade. “It was a fun time. And I thought he showed personal sensitivity to me.” Railey said he was worried about the future, about his prospects for a job. “For the first time in my life, at forty, I have no earthly idea what, where, when, how, or anything else. So there’s an element of fear.”
He spoke of his ambition. “Most of the reports have written that I was drooling on my tie waiting to become a bishop, but that’s not entirely true.” Bishops are elected for life, he pointed out, and “you can only bless the opening of Sunday school units so many times until you get tired.” His secret ambition was to stay at First Church another decade, then take early retirement and go to law school, so he could set up a practice in South Dallas to defend underprivileged minorities. I regarded that statement as gratuitous and unlikely; on the other hand, I never did understand the appeal of being a bishop.
“I had three books coming out in ‘88.” Railey was boasting. “I was speaking all over the nation. I had been the Protestant Hour preacher—I’d just finished taping the sermons.” Under Railey’s tenure First Church had become “one of the real turnaround stories in the nation.” Everything that he had been working for was coming to fruition. “So you know, I was beginning to feel that my future was okay, but I was trying to get out of the future and more into the present—maybe for the first time in my life.”
“And now, all that’s lost to you,” I observed. “You’ve resigned from the church, the books have been put on hold, your family has broken apart, and your future is in serious question. You’re a man who’s suffered tremendous losses. Why do you think this has happened to you?”
This question had been given to me by psychologists I had consulted, on the premise that Railey might be insane. If he is, he has done enough psychological consultation of his own to dodge the paranoiac response. “I’ve always tried to avoid asking ‘why’ questions because I don’t think ‘why’ questions get you anywhere,” he said, giving me his most defiantly honest stare. “If I’m asking any question, it’s how I can feel the presence of God’s healing power in my life right now, when, for the first time in my life, I can’t even tell you where I’ll be tomorrow.”
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