Ummmm..., reminds me of Aimee Semple McPherson... :-)
On May 18, 1926, McPherson went to Ocean Park Beach, north of Venice Beach, with her secretary, to go swimming. Soon after arrival, McPherson disappeared. It was generally assumed at the time that she had drowned.
According to PBS’ American Experience segment “Sister Aimee”, which aired on April 7, 2007, McPherson was scheduled to hold a service on the very day she vanished. McPherson’s mother appeared and preached at the service in her place, and at the end announced, “Sister is with Jesus”, sending parishioners into a tearful frenzy. Mourners crowded Venice Beach, and the commotion sparked days-long media coverage of the event, fueled in part by William Randolph Hearst’s Los Angeles Examiner, and even including a poem by Upton Sinclair commemorating the “tragedy”. Daily updates appeared in newspapers across the country, and parishioners held day-and-night seaside vigils. A futile search for the body resulted in one parishioner drowning and another diver dying from exposure.
Around the same time, Kenneth G. Ormiston, engineer for KFSG, also disappeared. According to American Experience, some believed McPherson and Ormiston, a married man with whom McPherson had developed a close friendship and had been having an affair, had run off together. About a month after the disappearance, McPherson’s mother, Minnie Kennedy, received a ransom note, signed by “The Avengers”, which demanded a half million dollars to ensure kidnappers would not sell McPherson into “white slavery”. Mrs. Kennedy later said she tossed the letter away, believing her daughter to be dead.
On June 23, 1926, just weeks after her disappearance, McPherson stumbled out of the desert in Agua Prieta, Sonora, a Mexican town just across the border from Douglas, Arizona. She claimed that she had been kidnapped, drugged, tortured, and held for ransom in a shack in Mexico, then had escaped and walked through the desert for about 13 hours to freedom.
Several problems were found with McPherson’s story. Her shoes showed no evidence of a 13-hour walk; they had grass stains on them after a supposed walk through the desert. The shack could not be found. McPherson showed up fully dressed while having disappeared wearing a bathing suit, and was wearing a wrist watch given to her by her mother, which she had not taken on her swimming trip. A grand jury convened on July 8, 1926, to investigate the matter, but adjourned 12 days later citing lack of evidence to proceed. However, several witnesses then came forward stating that they had seen McPherson and Ormiston at various hotels over the 32-day period.
There were five witnesses that claimed to have seen Aimee McPherson at a seaside cottage at Carmel-by-the-Sea, which was rented out by her former employee Kenneth G. Ormiston for himself and his mistress. Mr. Hersey claimed to have seen Mrs. McPherson on May 5 at this cottage, and then later went to see her preach on August 8 at Angelus Temple to confirm she was the woman he had seen at Carmel. His story was confirmed by Mrs. Parkes, a neighbor who lived next door to the Carmel cottage, by a Mrs. Bostick who rented the cottage to Mr. Ormiston under his false name “McIntyre”, by Ralph Swanson, a grocery clerk, and by Ernest Renkert, a Carmel fuel dealer who delivered wood to their cottage.
The grand jury re-convened on August 3, and received further testimony, corroborated by documents from hotels in McPherson’s handwriting. 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. However, when she was not forthcoming with answers regarding her relationship with Ormiston (who was recently estranged from his wife), Judge Samuel Blake charged McPherson and her mother with obstruction of justice. During this time, to combat the bad publicity in the newspapers, she refused to take an oath of secrecy and spoke freely about the court trials on her private radio station. This worried the district attorney who believed McPherson had the ability to shape public opinion and thus the direction of the trial.
Theories and innuendo abounded: she had run off with a lover; she had had an abortion; she was recovering from plastic surgery; she had staged the whole thing as a publicity stunt.[citation needed] No satisfactory answer was reached. Ironically, shortly after The Examiner erroneously reported that Los Angeles district attorney Asa Keyes had dropped all charges, Keyes did just that, on January 10, 1927, due to a lack of reliable and consistent evidence.
The tale inspired a satirical song, “The Ballad of Aimee McPherson”, popularized by Pete Seeger. The song explains that the kidnapping story was unlikely because a hotel love nest revealed that “the dents in the mattress fit Aimee’s caboose”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_Semple_McPherson
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Let’s hope that it doesn’t turn into this kind of a thing with the governor... LOL...
bump for later reading.