Just a little of the story ....L.A. is a place you go to start over, to reinvent yourself. It happens in the movies all the time. It happens in real life too, and it happened to Walker Railey, who came to California in 1987, fleeing what had once been a perfect life in Dallas, where he was senior minister at First United Methodist Church. He had a pretty wife, Peggy, who played organ and sang in the church choir, and two children, Megan, two, and Ryan, five. And he was on the fast track to bishop. In a denomination not known for its color or flash, the liberal Railey provided plenty, and his passionate sermons energized a dwindling congregation. He was paid $100,000 a year, and he earned it.
In March 1987, though, Railey began receiving threatening letters, and on April 22, at 12:43 a.m., he called the police to say that "somebody [had] done something" to Peggy. Paramedics found her unconscious on the garage floor, her face bloated and her neck broken, obviously strangled. Yet there were no signs of a violent struggle—her glasses were on, and her hair was in place. Before following the ambulance to the hospital, Railey asked his friends John and Diane Yarrington to watch the children.
Over the next week, the police became suspicious of Railey. There were too many inconsistencies and omissions in his alibi—that he had been at the Southern Methodist University library—and evidence was beginning to surface of an affair he was having with Lucy Papillon, a beautiful blond psychologist. Eight days after the attack, when the police went to question Railey, they found him unconscious; he had swallowed three bottles of tranquilizers and left a suicide note. "There is a demon inside my soul," it read. "It has always been there. People have seen me as good. The truth is just the opposite. I am the baddest of the bad."
The police had no hard evidence to charge Railey; he gave up his license to preach, granted the Yarringtons temporary custody of his children, and moved to California, where Papillon had gone. This didn't stop Peggy's parents, Bill and Billie Jo Nicolai, from filing a civil suit against him for trying to kill their daughter, who lay brain-dead in a nursing home. Railey never showed up to contest it and lost an $18 million judgment. In 1992 investigators determined that Railey had written those threatening letters, and attempted murder charges were finally filed. The criminal trial, held in San Antonio, was notoriously mishandled by the prosecution (the two assistant DA's who tried the case hated each other and barely spoke for a month), and Railey was acquitted. The whole Railey chronology—a despondent, suicidal husband is the most obvious suspect in a horrible crime against his wife but then somehow goes free—would foreshadow the O. J. Simpson travesty one year later.
In California, Railey did what it took to make ends meet: He drove a forklift, worked as a telemarketer, delivered phone books, supervised security guards, and sold funeral insurance. He became friends with Kenneth Heaton, a Methodist minister in the city of Santa Ana, and even preached at his church one Sunday not long after leaving Texas. He got involved with Immanuel Presbyterian, an old church in downtown L.A., and eventually became its executive administrator, making more than $60,000 a year. |
