Religion: Return

It is more than a month since Aimee Semple McPherson, famed and wealthy evangelist, owner and builder of the $1,000,000 Angelus Temple, Los Angeles, dove into mystery through a broken wave (TIME, June 7). She was taking her second dip of a June afternoon; her secretary sat reading on the beach; thousands of people were bathing all round her, but with that dive Aimee McPherson vanished as completely as if she had stepped through a looking-glass into the Never-Never Land. Last week Aimee McPherson, in a gingham gown spattered with mud, tottered into the police-office of Douglas, Ariz., and told her story. “Mrs. McPherson!”

Rising from her dive, she saw a woman standing on the shore. Would Mrs. McPherson come with her to see a dying baby? In a sedan parked by the shore, another woman sat holding a bundle baby-wise; she got into the car, a coat was thrown over her head, a sickly sweet odor sickened her. . . . She woke somewhere in a cot at dawn. Two men stood over her. One of them was named Steve. The woman’s name was Rose. They told her that she could gofree as soon as her mother (Mrs. Minnie Kennedy) or her congregation raised $500,000 ransom. . . . (Later version—$50,000.)

Time became a jumbled cinema— weird faces, threats, and curses . . . long drives by night in the sedan. She was always bound and gagged. Her captors burned her fingers with cigars to make her help them get the ransom. If she did not . . . Steve and his fellow rogue murmured apart, spoke of selling her to a man named Felipe. They cut off her hair, threatened to cut off a scarred finger and send it to her mother. “I prayed constantly and talked to them of God. I’ll bet they were tired of hearing my preaching. . . .” Then the cabin, somewhere beyond Mexicali, where they left her alone for an unguarded hour; she sawed through her rope on a tin can, wandered all night over cactus and mesquite … At last the road to Douglas … a Friend . . . safety . . . escape . . .

When scrutinized, Evangelist McPherson’s account seemed not to jibe with the discovery of a one-piece bathing suit identified as hers in her automobile, shortly after she disappeared. She made no mention of having been hastily divested of that garment in order that the kidnappers might spirit it into her car before driving off with her to Mexico. Moreover, Evangelist McPherson was not markedly sunburned, last week, though she described vividly her sufferings while crossing burning sands. Speaking from her pulpit at Angelus Temple, she compared her escape to that of Daniel from the lions’ den.

Mr. K. Ormiston, adept operator of the Angelus Temple radio, unaccountably absent for some weeks, was likewise present at Los Angeles last week, but was not communicative as to where he had been. His wife recently sailed for Australia after filing divorce papers in which the name of Evangelist McPherson is bruited to be conspicuous.

Mr. B. H. Greenwood, City building-inspector at Tucson, Ariz., sought Evangelist McPherson last week, and declared in the presence of Detective Chief Clive of Los Angeles that he recognized her as a woman whom he had seen on the street in Tucson during her “disappearance.”

The congregation welcomed her as one all-but-divinely resurrected at a loud and joyful prayer meeting.