{“ We let a W olf in…”}
The 66-year-old Virginia native was an ordained minister, held a master’s in divinity degree, had served in the U.S. Navy and had run his own medical supply business. Tall, trim and bespectacled, with closely cropped gray hair and a steady blue-eyed gaze, “Bill” appeared soft of voice but firm of religious conviction, quoting scripture and sprinkling his speech with biblical observations. He laughed readily and shook hands firmly, appearing if not gregari- ous, then highly personable. ¶ The elders hired him immediately, and Drumheller and his wife, Joyce, moved from their North Carolina home into the church’s parsonage. The new minister brought to the little congregation his gentle homilies, with titles such as “Overcoming Discouragement,” and amusing, self-dep- recating tales about his golf game and family life. ¶ “We all loved him,” said Cathy Thomas, the elder’s wife. “He could sell snow to an Eskimo.” ¶ Then, early this summer, after a series of angry con- frontations with the elders, sparked by scriptural interpretations about what becomes of the soul after death, Drumheller noticed that Robert Thomas and Rexrode had added their names to the list of trustees without a vote by the congregation. Drumheller notified the local court, secretly called a meeting of a few trusted church members and orchestrated a coup, stripping both elders of their positions. Drumheller and the new board moved the church’s $30,000 of savings into new bank accounts. In a later interview, he referred to the elders as a “dictatorship” and accused them of having “coronated” Rexrode’s wife, Gilda, as church treasurer.
Thomas and Rexrode were so stunned that they hired
a private detective to check into Drumheller’s business dealings. The investigation unearthed a stunning revelation, which
soon made headlines in the Daily News-Record, the local newspaper: Drumheller — never mind his seemingly genteel nature
— had beaten his girlfriend’s 14-month-old son to death in 1970. There was more, too, lots more, for William Drumheller
was not at all the man he had presented himself to be. “I felt physically ill,” Thomas recalled late this sum-
mer, sitting at the kitchen table in his quiet country house a dozen miles outside of town, a cup of coffee and a plate of ba- nana-nut muffins on the table. Rexrode, sitting across from Thomas, gazed out the window and drummed his fingers on the wooden table. On that August day, with its brilliant sunshine still hold-
ing the promise of long, languorous afternoons, two things were clear. One, the Harrisonburg Church of Christ was in the hands of the mysterious stranger who had blown into town and enchanted them all. And two, this tale would have no easy, Sunday-school ending.
12 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | December 19, 2010
“Finally ou Joan Knight, who was part of a “We let a wolf into the church,”
Rexrode mused, “and now we can’t get him out.”
D
rumheller’s path from prison to the pulpit of the Harrisonburg Church of Christ was long and tumultuous, raising trou-
bling questions about the nature of forgiveness and redemption. The son of a railroad brakeman
and the child of divorce, Drumheller was raised mostly by his fundamental- ist Methodist grandparents in Clifton Forge, Va. He joined the Navy after high school and “explored the world and many of its opportunities,” he said in an interview. He married at 19 and had two children, settling in Illinois. The marriage wasn’t happy — his wife com-
plained to his father that he drank, couldn’t keep a job and was “being cruel” to their children, his father said in a letter to the Illinois courts pleading for leniency for his son. By 1970, Drumheller was working at a Shell station in the
Chicago suburbs when he began an extramarital affair with Mary Breitweiser, a 22-year-old divorcee who worked nights on the assembly line at the Chicago Rawhide Co., he later told a prison psychiatrist. He left his family for Breitweiser and her 14-month-old son, David. Three weeks later, Drumheller became angry when the
child wouldn’t come when called. He beat him to death. “I reached around in front of him and swung my hand (in a closed fist) and caught him in the stomach which jerked him off the floor up to me,” he told the court in a written statement. David’s “hands curled in and his legs drew up un- derneath him.” He lapsed into convulsions and died. The autopsy said the cause of death was “explosive rup-
ture of the stomach.” The child’s lungs also had burst. He had deep bruises on his thighs and buttocks. He had severe brain damage from a blow to the head. Drumheller acknowledged to the court that he had “chronically” abused the child. He was particularly angered, he told the psychiatrist, because the child would not cry when spanked.
for us and st the order in w
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