In 1978, an eighth grader killed his teacher. After 20 months in a psychiatric facility, he was freed. His classmates still wonder: What really happened?
After years of counseling and prayer, John Ray decided he had finally developed the emotional fortitude to revisit the formative trauma of his youth. He started a private Facebook group, titled simply “Murchison/Mr. Grayson 40 Years Later,” and invited former classmates and teachers to join. Ray wasn’t entirely sure how his outreach would be received. He knew only that he couldn’t confront the past alone.
For one thing, Ray barely remembered the details of that day—May 18, 1978—when a friend at his Austin junior high school walked into class and, in front of Ray and twenty other eighth graders, shot and killed their teacher, Wilbur “Rod” Grayson. In fact, Ray barely remembered a single thing about that entire year. Much of it had been buried in the far reaches of his subconscious, where over the years it had massed like a tumor.
Ray, now 56, lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, with his wife and three daughters. As an ordained nondenominational minister, he is decidedly unorthodox: he tends to preach outdoors, in natural settings; he wears cowboy boots and untucked denim shirts; and he has a Christlike mane of hair. He spends much of his time offering spiritual solace to those who have experienced trauma—people who, according to Ray, “have suffered and know my suffering and will call me on my bullshit.”
It occurred to him that he might be able to comfort his Murchison Junior High classmates, even as he leaned on them. So in February 2018, Ray created the Facebook group, and he waited. Several of his classmates who had been in the room that morning didn’t respond to Ray’s invitation. But others, including some who hadn’t witnessed the shooting, thanked him for initiating the collective remembrance.
Many shared memories of Mr. Grayson, as they still called him—how he had once taken the entire class to New Orleans to see a King Tut exhibit; how he had helped his students launch a magazine called Serendipity Doo-Dah; how he was “sharp and interesting and challenged us to think outside our normal convention.” Someone posted a forty-year-old newspaper clipping with the headline “Gifted Student Shoots Teacher” and, beneath it, a photograph of their thirteen-year-old classmate shielding his face from cameras.
“That was such a traumatic time,” a former student wrote. “I was on the field just outside the window when it happened.”
“It was a defining moment in my life,” added Marilyn Eichenbaum DuVon, Grayson’s teaching partner at Murchison.
Someone posted a chart that Mitsuno Baurmeister, now living in Northern California, had painstakingly diagrammed, days after the tragedy, of where each of them was sitting when the shooter stepped through the doorway.