Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have driven to the blond-brick house at Victor Street and Paulus Avenue. I’m no ghoul; in fact, I speed up when driving past auto accidents, so as not to be confused with the slimeballs who poke their heads out for a peek at a mangled body.
But this visit, this time, was more than rubber-necking. The house on Victor is no ordinary house. It is the murder house with the open windows, the place where a Baptist accountant apparently unhappy with his job smothered his Baptist accountant wife because, police say, she wasn’t unhappy with hers.
There were a dozen reasons why I wanted to park the car, get out and walk around: the husband’s brazen appearances on television and in the newspapers to ask for information regarding his wife’s “disappearance”; the countless neighbors and friends who literally plastered the neighborhood with posters describing the missing woman; the surrealism of her body hidden in the hall closet.
But even more compelling was – and is – how quickly the publicity dried up. This is the kind of story that can make a reporter’s reputation: two ordinary people leading ordinary lives in an ordinary part of town in an ordinary marriage somehow becoming involved in a most extraordinary murder.
Better yet, from a journalist’s perspective: No one still knows for sure why the husband killed his wife.
Supposedly, he confessed on a Wednesday, yet by Friday, no one reading either of the City’s daily newspapers or watching any of its TV stations could have known what happened or why.
Even more astonishing is that one of the handful of Dallas radio stations still broadcasting news all but ignored the story (although, for some reason, it aired a several-minute-long report on a luncheon for a charity activity).
Where were the in-depth interviews with psychologists and psychiatrists, probing the depths of the husband’s mind? Where were the camera-crew stakeouts of friends and family, which TV stations usually revel in? Where were the newspaper stories proclaiming all sorts of truths, supported only by the usual assortment of anonymous sources?
There weren’t any, and that’s surprising.
Walker Railey has never even been arrested for attacking his wife, and he still is pilloried in the media at every opportunity.
There usually are just two reasons why murders aren’t big news in Dallas, and neither applied in this case. The husband and wife weren’t black or Hispanic (in which case, the killing probably would get two paragraphs on an inside page of the daily newspapers), and they were not scions of important families (in which case, the killing would barely rate a mention).
No, I believe the reason the media dropped this case is that it was frightened to pursue the story. Maybe it wasn’t a conscious decision, but the media didn’t really want to know why the husband did what he did.
The dominant Dallas media organizations are run, for the most part, by white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants with backgrounds and upbringings not unlike that of the husband and wife.
If the husband – loyal spouse, devoted son-in-law, industrious employee – could find it within himself to strangle his wife in the dark of night, what does that say to every other middle-class husband in Dallas who lives in a similar neighborhood with a similar lifestyle?
It says to me that the media believes it’s a lot safer to run stories about cook-offs at the State Fair of Texas.
