Texas Monthly: How an Alleged Child Predator Remade the Nation's Second-Largest Faith Group in His Image

[AStern]

Duane Rollins needed to be careful. The winding drive through Houston’s tony West Oaks neighborhood took only a few minutes. But he could easily draw suspicion from constables patrolling the sprawling lawns and manors of the city’s elite. One swerve or rolled stop could foil his vengeance plan. They’d pull him over, smell the booze on his breath, and unearth the vodka bottle and pistol shoved under his seat. And then he would go straight back to prison.

It was 2016, months since Rollins had last been released and plunged back into the addictions that had kept him behind bars for much of his adult life. He’d turned fifty in a cell and always expected he’d return. This time, he’d have something to show for it.

Though it was late, surely Paul Pressler would welcome him. Rollins had been a standout in Pressler’s church youth group, earning special visits from the Southern Baptist icon, Republican kingmaker, and prominent judge. They’d traveled the world together in between Rollins’s arrests. He was Pressler’s “dear brother” and longtime assistant, tasked with writing his letters, running his errands, and safeguarding a secret that could destroy his pious legacy. No more. Squinting and weaving past immaculate mansions, he imagined how it would feel to press the pistol against Pressler’s bug-eye spectacles. To demand answers—to free himself.

Soon enough he was approaching the three-story redbrick house. He thought he was ready, but it was too much. In an instant he became that kid again. Terrified. Trapped. So he parked nearby and did what he knew best: He drank and drank and drank until he passed out.

When Rollins awoke hours later, his head was spinning and his hands shook. But his adrenaline-fueled mania had given way to the kind of clarity that can follow a total breakdown. As the first rays of sun bled through the suffocating dawn, he recognized that he couldn’t change the terrible things that had been done to him. But he wouldn’t sacrifice what remained of his life for the man who had nearly destroyed it. Justice would have to come another way. He retraced his route through the neighborhood, weeping as he drove back to his sleeping mother’s house. Duane Rollins had no idea how many lives he’d soon change.

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/quiet-collapse-southern-baptist-convention/