Peggy Railey Has Died (Top Dallas Scandal of the 80s/90s)

[Leonard Rouse]

Photo by Mark Graham
Peggy Railey in the Tyler nursing home where she's spent the last 20 years

Twenty-Four Years After She Was Left to Die, Peggy Railey, Wife of Walker, Is Gone

By Robert Wilonsky Tue., Dec. 27 2011 at 2:49 PM

In 1989, two years after the attack that left her in a vegetative state, People described Peggy Railey's existence as "death-in-life." Our Mark Graham documented as much years later when he visited her in the Tyler nursing home where she has spent the last two decades; today, he told me, spending time with her was eerie. "Her eyes would follow you," he said. "And she made anguishing sounds whenever they combed her hair or brushed her teeth. She was in a vegetative state, but you wondered: Was she still in there?" But her tortured existence has come to an end: The Tyler Morning Telegraph is reporting that she has died, and that her body has been taken to the Tyler Memorial Funeral Home.

Even if you were not in Dallas in April 1987, you likely know what happened: She was found strangled in the garage of the home she shared with her husband, First United Methodist Church senior pastor Walker Railey. Peggy's family told former Observer columnist and Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, then at the Dallas Times Herald, they were certain who'd put that wire around their daughter's throat: Walker, who, it was revealed, was having an affair with a woman named Lucy Papillon. Ella Renfro, Peggy's 87-year-old grandmother, told Laura there was motive: "A divorced man doesn't get to be bishop."

Railey and his attorney, Doug Mulder, always maintained his innocence; Walker said he'd lied about his whereabouts that night to cover his affair. Mulder, the former prosecutor, told Mike Shropshire in the fall of 1987: "If you're going to create an alibi, you'd better create a better one than Walker did." After he was acquitted of attempted murder in 1993, Walker hit the lecture circuit. Laura, whose coverage of the trial won her and this paper awards, wrote in 1996 that the only reason Walker walked was because of "the egregious handling of this case by our own Dallas County District Attorney John Vance ... who was ill and clueless at the time of the Railey trial [and] sent two shrubs to San Antonio to lose the case."

Walker was last seen on Facebook, claiming to work for a California church. But now, finally, Peggy Railey is at peace.

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Comments

Perry Moore 5pts Dec 28, 2011

"If you're going to create an alibi, you'd better create a better one than Walker did."

My first memory of Walker Railey, some time before his wife's strangulation, was a news report that his fiery sermons against racism had provoked death threats. Those threats were later traced to a typewriter found, I believe, at his church. It appears that he was working on a better alibi.

http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfa...ter_she_wa.php