The vanishing evangelist : the Aimee Semple McPherson kidnapping affair
"During the afternoon of May 18, 1926, an auburn-haired woman whose name was virtually an American household word went for a swim in the Pacific. She was not seen to come out of the water. Thousands of Californians who had thronged to hear the dynamic Aimee Semple McPherson preach at her floodlit Angelus Temple were stunned at the news of her disappearance. Two people died in the attempt to find her body. Services were held for her at the Temple and a memorial fund was collected. Meanwhile, however, letters had begun to come in, demanding 500,000 dollars ransom for the return of Sister Aimee. And five weeks after she vanished, Aimee turned up in a Mexican border town with a circumstantial story of having been kidnapped and then imprisoned in a desert shack, and of having escaped on foot across miles of sandy wastes. The missing shepherd was welcomed back to life with great rejoicing by the Temple flock. But certain skeptics — among them the Los Angeles district attorney — had doubts about her story. Why was no shack to be found that would fit her description? Why was she neither sunburned nor thirsty when she returned? And who was the mysterious “Miss X,” so remarkably like the evangelist, who had occupied, with a “Mr. McIntyre,” a rented honeymoon cottage at Carmel-by-the-Sea while Aimee was gone? These questions led to a grand-jury investigation with sensational surprises of its own, and eventually brought the evangelist and certain others into court, where the disclosures made were as startling — and as hilarious — as anything that had preceded. The Los Angeles District Court was turned into a three-ring circus; newspapers fought pitched battles for witnesses. A judge was eventually impeached as a result of the furor, and half a dozen public figures were ruined. But Aimee’s story was never shaken." -- Dust jacket
Print Book, English, 1959
Viking Press, New York, 1959