Aimee Semple McPherson

Aimee Semple McPherson

Aimee Mcpherson founded the FourSquare church, of which we have several locally. Vanity Fair even featured Aimee 'cutout dolls'(click here) Her 'kidnapping, for which she was indicted, is described as follows,by USC:

The citizens of Los Angeles, and particularly her large congregation, were stunned to learn on May 18, 1926, that Aimee had disappeared while swimming near Venice Beach. Members of her congregation went into the waters where she disappeared, with one person drowning and another dying of exposure. Not a trace of her body could be found. Police investigated hundreds of leads, including a ransom note, signed by "The Avengers" and demanding $500,000 for Sister Aimee's safe return.

After 32 days, Aimee stumbled out of the desert near Douglas, Arizona. She claimed that she had been kidnapped, tortured, drugged, and held for ransom in a shack in Mexico. It was only after the kidnappers became careless that she managed to escape and walked for some 13 hours back to civilization.

It was soon noted that her shoes showed no sign of a 13 hour hike. And the shack where she claimed that she was held could not be found. There was also no satisfactory explanation for the fact that she disappeared in broad daylight in a swimming suit, but showed up fully clothed, right down to her corset. In support of her story, there had been threats against Aimee's life in the previous year, and a plot to kidnap her had been foiled in September 1925.
Rumors abounded about what had really happened to her. Some claimed that she had disappeared to have an abortion, or that she had run off with a lover. Others claimed that she had been in seclusion to recover from plastic surgery. Ultimately so many questions were raised, and so few answers provided by Sister Aimee, that the district attorney charged her with perjury. In the trial that followed the prosecution introduced a string of witnesses who said that she had been in various hotels with an Angelus Temple radio operator named Kenneth Ormiston. In the Twenties, the incident ended, as did the Jim and Tammy Baker/Jimmy Swaggert cases in the last 2 decades, the public's trust of evangelists.

Listen here

Leaving Los Angeles for New York, and the boat, upon which we sail immediately, I was met en route by multitudes of our friends. Among them ever was a liberal sprinkling of newspaper men. And in each city, they asked the same question: “Sister McPherson, what do you think of Prohibition?” It was rather difficult to answer the question in such a few words as one must use then, but I told them, that the case about Prohibition here in the United States, reminds me of the story of the lecturer who gave a marvelous address on prohibition. And he wound up in a blaze of glory that brought everyone to their feet enthusiastically. “Why is it my friends, if I had my way, do you know what I’d do? I’d take every barrel of liquor, every bottle of booze, every crate, and I’d empty it in the river. Yes sir.” Then he said, “Shall we now close our meeting by rising and singing, ‘Shall We Gather at The River?’” He’d spoiled it all. And that’s the way perhaps with us over her in America: we teach it, but so often those who profess to make the laws do not quite live up to them, and back them themselves. I wish that you could all have the joy of going with us this Easter tide to the Holy Land, where we shall visit on Easter Day, the tomb of our risen Lord.

Corvallis Community Pages