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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He began to recount the events of Tuesday, April 21, leading up to the discovery of his wife’s attack. “I went to the library and started at Bridwell down on the south part of the campus.” He was checking footnotes for his book of sermons. When he finished there, he “walked up to Fondren,” the main library. “On the way to Fondren I stopped by Lucy’s house”—which is directly behind the campus—”for about forty minutes and back to Fondren after getting a Coke at a Texaco station and filling up the car. Worked at Fondren until a little after midnight, about twelve-fifteen or so, I called Peggy to let her know that I was on the way. And I got home about twelve-thirty. I came into the garage and found her.”
Until that point he had told the story in a rapid, shorthand manner—so fast that I completely missed the contradiction between his “walking” to Fondren and filling up his car with gas. He had said he would not talk about the case, and obviously he wanted to skate past this portion. I thought to myself: Here’s a man who has avoided the police and the grand jury. I can’t let him get by me that easily.
“The police said you had been drinking that night.”
“Peggy and I had a glass of wine,” he said.
“At what time?”
“Quarter of seven. And I had a wine cooler when I stopped at the Texaco.”
“I thought you said you had a Coke at the Texaco.”
I said ‘Coke’ but that was just a Coke break, a coffee break,” he replied. “I went up there to get something to drink. I refer to that as ‘getting a Coke.’”
He would not be trapped. He started to talk again about finding Peggy. “Come here, I want to show you,” he said, with a certain demanding eagerness. “I want you to see.” We walked into the garage, which was large and empty of cars. Against the back wall were several storage closets. “I want you to understand that there’s a freezer, there’s a refrigerator, and there are toys that the children use, like the tricycle,” Railey said, pointing out the clutter of an ordinary suburban family, which lined the side of the garage. “In the evening it was not uncommon—six, seven or eight times a night—for one of us to come out here.” He showed me the latch he said Peggy was working on early in the evening of her attack. Somehow it had gotten bent. “How it got bent, I don’t know.” Railey’s voice, even though it was nearly a whisper, reverberated in the vacancy of the garage. “Anyway, when I pulled in, the door was about up to here”—he indicated the height of his knee—”and Peggy was right here.”
She would have been just behind her Chrysler, between her tool closet and the door that led into the house. As Railey explained how Peggy’s body was oriented—”heels here, head here”—I thought what an intimate crime strangulation is, what a gruesome and prolonged dance. “I was actually horrified,” Railey was saying. “I have never seen any such thing. Let alone my wife. Her face was purple and bloated, and her body was heaving from the waist up. Those were reflex actions, seizures, I later came to realize. I tried to shake her, tried to get some kind of response…and I couldn’t get anything and ran in and checked on the children. Megan was lying down in front of the television.” We walked back into the house. The family TV sat beside the picture window that looked out on the pool. “The TV was on and muted and she was on the floor and my first impression was that she was dead. I picked her up and she said, ‘Daddy.’ She had her little fingers in her mouth, and she was okay. She had evidently gotten up, looking for Mommy, and the TV was on and she laid down in front of the television.”
“Had she found her mother?” I asked.
“I don’t think so, but I don’t know.” We went through the living room to the children’s rooms. “This is Ryan’s room,” Railey said. The room was still filled with Ryan’s dolls and toys. “His bed’s been moved over to the Yarringtons,” Railey explained, “but his bed was here, and he was three fourths of the way asleep but kind of in a fog.”
That was, I remembered, well after midnight, when the children would ordinarily be sound asleep. Perhaps the assailant had thought, as I did, that strangulation is a silent crime, but who knows how Peggy may have fought, what kind of racket she might have made. Did she wake the children? The awfulness of that scene played unhappily in my mind, along with the dreadful suspicion that the person who caused this tragedy was the same polite preacher who was giving me the tour of his home.
“So anyway,” Railey continued, “I came in and called the police. I called the Yarringtons and I went across the yard and got my neighbor and he came over. He stayed with Peggy. I brought the children into the den, sat them down on the sofa with me and held them. Both were extremely quiet, ‘cause they could obviously pick up on my panic. I was hyperventilating and scared to death.”
Railey and I went up to his special lair on the second floor. As a writer, I have a particular interest in the places people make for themselves to write in. Two walls were covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. There was an imposing desk of the sort that would belong to a bank vice president, and a more modest work area with a computer. One of Railey’s manuscripts sat on the table. Under a dictionary stand was a copy of The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. It was a handsome office, but once again I noticed an absence of personal effects. Only two items in the room caught my eye. One was an SMU basketball on the window ledge behind Railey’s desk. He had bought the house from an SMU coach, it turns out, and had written into the contract that a basketball would come with the house. The other item was a three-foot-tall doll that resembled Big Bird. Railey said he had bought the doll for Ryan when he was in New York, and he recounted the spectacle of himself walking through the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria with the doll under his arm. I laughed, but it struck me as curious that Railey, not Ryan, had the doll now. Railey sat in his easy chair, and I sat on a couch beside him.
“Tell me about your relationship with Peggy.”
“Well, we’d been married sixteen years. Peggy was a lot quieter than me. We had a respect for one another.
We were not the kind of couple that held hands and watched television on the sofa. When we went on vacation, before the children came, and went out on the beach, we’d both take a book and read and listen to the sea gulls and watch the waves.
“We were married eleven years before we had children, and once the children came, we became more and more committed to parenting. Peggy had a great love for the church, and the impression that she didn’t enjoy being the pastor’s spouse and stuff I think is unfair to her. She was a private person and didn’t talk a lot about the inner parts of herself. I think her best friend on the face of the earth was her mother. I don’t know how else to answer. We didn’t have a lot of arguments.”
“Did she know about your affair?”
“We—that never came up.”
“She didn’t know?”
“I can only say it never emerged.”
“Did she suspect?”
Railey took a steadying breath. “I have no way of knowing, regarding that, that she suspected at all, about anything.”
I knew I was crossing the line he had drawn. I started to press further, but he cut me off. “I’ve told you I would not talk about Lucy,” he said.
“Do you plan to divorce Peggy?”
“That is not a question I will answer.”
I observed that because of his stature in the community both the church, through the bishop, and the city, through the district attorney, had advised Railey to leave town to avoid being an embarrassment to them. “I guess you could interpret it like that,” he said. “They don’t really have to ask me to leave. I just feel like I got in a situation, and it’s time for me to go.”
“Would Lucy join you?”
“I don’t care to answer that.”
“You’re going to California?” I asked. Friends of his had said that was his plan.
“No, not necessarily. I’m looking for a place to work, Larry.”
More than once, Railey asked me for information about my business, which was unsettling to me because I already felt a greater sense of identification with him than I cared to feel. Several times he had even urged me to “push harder,” to do a better job—the job he might have done on me if our roles had been reversed. We were the same age. In many ways the difference between writing and preaching was not so great; nor, really, was the difference between belief and disbelief—it was the intensity of the struggle that mattered. The lesson I had drawn from Walker Railey’s life so far was that good and evil are not so far apart either. They were both inside Walker Railey, warring for control—as they were in me as well. Whether or not Railey was guilty, he had caused me to look in myself and see the lurking dangers of my own personality.
My Library
