User:SteamWiki/Reported kidnapping: Short Version

Reported kidnapping

(from main article which can even be edited for more brevity, most of the details can be placed on the main article page Kidnapping of Aimee Semple McPherson. )

Kidnapping from Venice Beach

The Kidnapping of Aimee Semple McPherson caused a frenzy in national media and changed the life of McPherson and course of her career. After disappearing May 1926, she was found in Mexico five weeks later, stating she had been held for ransom in a desert shack there. The subsequent grand jury inquiries over her reported kidnapping and subsequent escape precipitated continued public interest in her future misfortunes.

On May 18, 1926, McPherson went with her secretary to Ocean Park Beach north of Venice Beach to swim. Soon after arriving, McPherson was nowhere to be found. It was thought she had drowned.

For a time, Mildred Kennedy, McPherson's mother, offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the return of her daughter.

The ransom demands sent included a note by the "Revengers" who wanted $500,000 and another for $25,000 conveyed by a lawyer who claimed contact with the kidnappers. A lengthy ransom letter from the "Avengers" arrived around June 19, 1926, also forwarded to the police, demanded $500,000 or else kidnappers would sell McPherson into "white slavery." Relating their prisoner was a nuisance because she was incessantly preaching to them, the lengthy, two-page poorly typewritten letter also indicated the kidnappers worked hard to spread the word McPherson was held captive, and not drowned. Kennedy regarded the notes as hoaxes, believing her daughter dead.

After emerging from the Mexican desert, McPherson convalesces in a hospital with her family in Douglas, Arizona 1926. District Attorney Asa Keyes stands to the far left with Mildred Kennedy (mother) next to Roberta Star Semple, middle left (daughter). On the far right Deputy District Attorney Joseph Ryan is alongside her son, Rolf McPherson.

Shortly thereafter, on June 23, McPherson stumbled out of the desert in Agua Prieta, Sonora, a Mexican town across the border from Douglas, Arizona. She claimed she had been kidnapped, drugged, tortured, and held for ransom in a shack by two men and a woman, "Steve," "Mexicali Rose," and another unnamed man. She also claimed she had escaped from her captors and walked through the desert for about 13 hours to freedom.

Following her return from Douglas, Arizona, McPherson was greeted at the train station by 30,000–50,000 people, more than for almost any other personage. The parade back to the temple even elicited a greater turnout than President Woodrow Wilson's visit to Los Angeles in 1919, attesting to her popularity and the growing influence of mass media entertainment.

Already incensed over McPherson's influential public stance on evolution and the Bible, most of the Chamber of Commerce and some other civic leaders, however, saw the event as gaudy display; nationally embarrassing to the city. Many Los Angeles area churches were also annoyed. The divorcee McPherson had settled in their town and many of their parishioners were now attending her church, with its elaborate sermons that, in their view, diminished the dignity of the Gospel. The Chamber of Commerce, together with Reverend Robert P. Shuler leading the Los Angeles Church Federation, and assisted by the press and others, became an informal alliance to determine if her disappearance was caused by other than a kidnapping.

Between 30,000 to 50,000 people greeted McPherson at the train station following her return from Douglas, Arizona, the town she convalesced in after stating she escaped from kidnappers.

Some were skeptical of her story since McPherson seemed in unusually good health for her alleged ordeal; her clothing showing no signs of what they expected of a long walk through the desert. This was disputed by most Douglas, Arizona, residents, the town where McPherson was taken to convalesce, including expert tracker C.E. Cross, who testified that McPherson's physical condition, shoes, and clothing were all consistent with an ordeal such as she described.

Trial after Return

When McPherson was interrogated in Douglas, Arizona by Prosecutor District Attorney Asa Keyes and Deputy District Attorney Joseph Ryan, both seemed empathetic to her story. Ryan said he could make the desert trip without scuffing or marking his commissary shoes. McPherson therefore presented herself in court as a victim of a crime seeking redress. Pressured by various influential Los Angeles business, media, political and religious interests Keyes and Ryan instead opened the grand jury inquiry with insinuating questions, implying McPherson and her mother were involved in a deception.

In Los Angeles, ahead of any court date, McPherson noticed newspaper stories about her kidnapping becoming more and more sensationalized as the days passed. To maintain excited, continued public interest, she speculated, the newspapers let her original account give way to rain torrents of "new spice and thrill" stories about her being elsewhere "with that one or another one." It did not matter if the material was disproved or wildly contradictory. No correction or apology was given for the previous story as another, even more outrageous tale, took its place.

A grand jury convened on July 8, 1926, but adjourned 12 days later citing lack of evidence to proceed with any charges against either alleged kidnappers or perjury by McPherson. McPherson was told they would be open to receive any evidence submitted by her should she desire to further substantiate her kidnapping story.

The grand jury reconvened on August 3 and took further testimony along with documents from hotels, all said by various newspapers to be in McPherson's handwriting. These, though, were later revealed to be Elizabeth Tovey's, a woman traveling with Ormiston, whose handwriting did not at all resemble McPherson's. McPherson steadfastly stuck to her story, that she was approached by a young couple at the beach who had asked her to come over and pray for their sick child, and that she was then shoved into a car and drugged with chloroform.

California grand jury members are bound by law not to discuss the case to protect the integrity of the process in determining if there is sufficient cause for a formal juried trial. The Reverend Robert P. Shuler was told as much by a newspaper in response to an open demand he made for more disclosure in the ongoing inquiry. In the McPherson case, proceedings became quite public, as observed by journalist H. L. Mencken. A vocal critic of McPherson, Mencken wrote of her, "For years she toured the Bible Belt in a Ford, haranguing the morons nightly, under canvas. It was a depressing life, and its usufructs were scarcely more than three meals a day. The town [he refers to Los Angeles] has more morons in it than the whole State of Mississippi, and thousands of them had nothing to do save gape at the movie dignitaries and go to revivals" (from The American Mercury, 1930). Mencken had been sent to cover the trial and there was every expectation he would continue his searing critiques against the evangelist. Instead, he came away impressed with McPherson and disdainful of the unseemly nature of the prosecution.

The defense rested its case on October 28 and the judge, on November 3, decided enough evidence had been garnered against the evangelist and her mother for a jury trial case in Los Angeles, set for mid-January 1927. The charges were a criminal conspiracy to commit acts injurious to public morals, to prevent and obstruct justice, and to prevent the due administration of the laws, and of engaging in a criminal conspiracy to commit the crime of subordination of perjury. If convicted, the counts added up to maximum prison time of forty-two years.

Regardless of the court's decision, months of unfavorable press reports fixed in much of the public's mind a certainty of McPherson's wrongdoing. Many readers were unaware of prosecution evidence having become discredited because it was often placed in the back columns while some new accusation against McPherson held prominence on the headlines. In a letter he wrote to the Los Angeles Times a few months after the case was dropped, the Reverend Robert P. Shuler stated, "Perhaps the most serious thing about this whole situation is the seeming loyalty of thousands to this leader in the face of her evident and positively proven guilt."

Some supporters thought McPherson should have insisted on the jury trial and cleared her name. The grand jury inquiry concluded while enough evidence did not exist to try her, it did not indicate her story was true with its implication of kidnappers still at large. Therefore, anyone could still accuse her of a hoax without fear of slander charges and frequently did so. McPherson, though, was treated harshly in many previous sessions at court, being verbally pressured in every way possible to change her story or elicit some bit of incriminating information. Moreover, court costs to McPherson were estimated as high as US $100,000 dollars. A jury trial could take months. McPherson moved on to other projects. In 1927 she published a book about her version of the kidnapping: In the Service of the King: The Story of My Life.