Hamilton Burger could have defeated Perry Mason if somehow the fictional opponents had been able to switch roles, putting Perry in the prosecutor's place and Burger as defense counsel, in a court duel over the charges real life Asa Keyes prosecuted against Aimee Semple McPherson.
On the basis of available evidence, when it is all weighed, it is possible to state not only that a jury would have had to acquit because the prosecution could not prove her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but also that the facts of the case, divorced from rumors and innuendoes and exploded accusations, prove the evangelist and her mother inngcent beyond any reasonable doubt.
Burger would have won hands down with the evidence Gilbert had. Mason would have lost big with the evidence Keyes had.
No claim of Aimee Semple McPherson concerning her disappearance is independently impossible. The unlikeli-hood of such an incongruous concatenation of events being fit together is in and of itself a demonstration of the truthfulness of her story. Had she been faking she would have invented a far more believable yarn.
She said she was kidnapped. Others have been kidnapped. Kidnapping is an infrequent crime, but it does happen. If the stories of other kidnapping victims had been treated as the Los Angeles authorities treated the evange-list’s, few if any kidnappers would ever be apprehended. Moreover, threats of kidnapping had been levelled at the evangelist in 1925.
The circumstances of the disappearance are believable. Often Sister was accosted to minister to the sick. Her routine was interrupted not only at the Temple but when horseback riding and on other errands or recreational outings. This is what happened at the beach. Steve and Rose snatched Sister.
Ransom notes — real or pretended — fail to shake Mrs. Kennedy's certainty of drowning. Only the evangelist's own voice over the wire from Douglas convinced Mother that her daughter was alive. These circumstances seem credible.
Sister proved four times in demonstrations after her return that she was capable of sawing the ropes binding her wrists without cutting herself. How much more proof is needed?
Witnesses on the scene in Douglas testified emphatically, as did the Gonzales’ in Agua Prieta, that Sister was ina state of collapse upon arrival. Ryan and Cline did not arrive until Thursday from Los Angeles, by which time the evangelist's physical vigor had begun to reassert itself, but other witnesses claim she still looked in bad shape. Her wrists had welts from bonds. Her feet were blistered. Even after the return to Los Angeles on Saturday, the Examiner photo carried a caption calling attention to details of her features which exhibited the ordeal she'd suffered.
Desert trackers testified that Cline and Ryan really were not looking for footprints when they toured the Mexican desert by car on Friday. But others found her tracks up to eighteen miles from Agua Prieta. Where her tracks were, she must have been! And those tracks should be sufficignt to establish that she was there even if her condition upon reaching Douglas had been even better than Ryan claimed!
Was the shack ever found? It may well have been, though this is disputed. It's possible the evangelist's upset condition after weeks of captivity distorted her memory of details, so that her description was less than totally accurate. It’s possible, on the other hand, that the kidnappers dismantled the shack or that it was a temporary structure, perhaps somewhat portable. Steve had time to erect such a shelter during the period he was gone from the first captivity house and the time Rose and — let's call him Wilson — brought the evangelist to the second hut. And it is: also possible that one of the shacks the trackers discovered that summer may have been the captivity shelter in Mexico. Many shacks were discovered in that area which no one knew about before. j
Ryan and Murchison testified that no one could have made the trek Mrs. McPherson claimed and arrive in clothes and shoes in the condition her's were when she reached Douglas. But hosts of desert people gave the lie to that fiction, and proved their point by displaying their own garments and footwear.
If you once grant the likelihood that there was an abduction, there is no circumstance in Sister's story which is not compatible with possibility.
Now for the Carmel evidence. Keyes had no more on September 27 when he started the preliminary hearing than he had on August 1 when he claimed that evidence had collapsed. None of Keyes’ identification witnesses had the opportunity to observe Mrs. Mcintire at Carmel as closely as did Town Marshall August England who testified Sister was positively not that woman, except for William McMichaels, the stonemason on the property line who also denied the evangelist was the Carmel woman he saw often. Ralph
Hersey thought the woman he saw was Mrs. Liston. The identifications Ryan forced by flashing pictures all break down upon close scrutiny. Most of those witnesses never had a chance closely to scrutinize Mrs. Mcintire. Benedict was positive she was not the evangelist. So was Considine, Horton and Williams. Why didn't any of the others claim the reward they knew about?
Meanwhile, Dennis Collins saw someone other than Sister with Ormiston in Salinas during the period in question. Possibly Miss X was the same woman who registered with Ormiston as his wife in February at a Venice, California hotel. That couldn't have been Aimee Semple McPherson, because she was in Europe at the time. Yet at that time scandalous rumors circulated to the effect that Ormiston was abroad with the evangelist. Someone started those rumors. Was it the beginning of a plot to discredit the Temple pastor? The Avengers’ letter threatened to blacken her reputation. Even if the ransom had been paid, that might have been only a diversion on the part of the kidnappers who could have released Sister under circumstances which would have made her story sound incredible anyway. Thus they would have their money and have gotten her, too.
There is not any evidence to connect Joe Ryan and Herman Cline with such a plot, just the allegations of their bootlegging protection associations, which could be untrue. But the statement Ryan's neighbor attributed to him on the day he left for Douglas — that the deputy was going there to “get” Mrs. McPherson — affords support to those who want to suspect Ryan's involvement in a vicious conspiracy against the evangelist.
Asa Keyes denounced his “confession” woman, Lorraine Wiseman-Sielaff sufficiently to dispel any need for discussion here. Her obvious lies about Mrs. McPherson's hair and the evangelist’s alleged coaching of her to duplicate its style cast doubts on every other allegation about the coaching charged. And Bernice Morris’ alleged underworld connections and admitted framing of evidence in the Joe Watts picture, plus Watts’ disavowal of the phone call Bernice reported, rob the legal secretary's testimony of credence.
The facts seem plain. The desert escape and hike were proved possible. Mrs. McPherson insisted she made them. She certainly could have made them, so why not believe her? The Carmel Miss X was certainly somebody else. Why not take Ormiston’s word that it was Elizabeth Tovey? In view of Mrs. McPherson's repeated denunciations of the radio man while he was a fugitive, Ormiston would have had no reason to lie to protect her. He could have made a mint out of a “confession” sold to the press, far more than he received for the one he sold a Los Angeles newspaper identifying his companion as Elizabeth Tovey.
The hotel associations the prosecution postulated proved to be without foundation. No witness authoritatively linked Sister and Ormiston at any of the inns. If they were in the same hotel, it was doubtless coincidental — unless as Wooley suspected, Ormiston was in cahoots with the kidnappers and conspired to leave a trail to embarrass Sister. Ormiston went to his grave with his denial of this association intact.
The only story in the whole affair which remained stable was that of Aimee Semple McPherson. The District Attorney could not prove her guilty in 1926 and 1927. But the media has been proclaiming her guilty ever since. A case in point is the Readers’ Digest’s “Family Encyclopedia of American History.” On page 705, under the evangelist’s name, this “reference book” states categorically, “Her reputation was badly compromised by scandal when she falsely claimed to having been kidnapped rather than admit openly to having had a secret tryst.” Whoever wrote that reported lies as facts. Yet many will believe those lies because they are backed by the authority of the Readers’ Digest!
It’s time that the truth be known. If the charges against Mrs. McPherson are to be rehashed in the press, shouldn't the facts in her favor at least be given equal exposure? They never have been, not in 1926, not since then, not now. If mentioned at all, they trail the sensational rumors and accusations and claim but a fraction of the space the unfavorable materials command. What is the policy of American justice? Should the media — which went so far as to lie that an operating telephone was kept installed in her coffin — be able to get away with reversing the American judicial policy from “innocent till proven guilty” to “guilty until proven innocent,” as has happened in the McPherson kidnapping coverage? Actually, the situation may be “guilty even after proven innocent” in this case, for if ever a defendant produced evidence sufficient to command exoneration, Mrs. McPherson did.
Asa Keyes was almost a prophet when, upon throwing in the towel, he said in effect that he was submitting the case to “the court of human opinion.” He evidently sized up the situation accurately when he anticipated that eventually the public would accept the guilt of the evangelist, although in 1927 public opinion was solidly in her favor, as Mencken and others observed. Judge Stafford's words, quoting a phi-losopher, that a lie with an hour's head start have turned out to be a masterpiece of understatement. Some lies in this case have a fifty year start! It's time the truth challenges them.
Aimee Semple McPherson said she was kidnapped. Compare her character and ministry with those of her detractors. Her career had been tarnished by not a whisper of scandal in her seventeen year ministry up to 1926. She continued for another eighteen years with her preaching and social service ministries in spite of innuendoes and scandals which the kidnapping case charges unleashed as from a Pandora's box. During the depression, her commissary fed and clothed over a million and a half of Los Angeles’ needy —without question about race or creed. It’s positively unthinkable that she would have staged a drowning stunt to cover an affair! But no other motive has ever been seriously pressed to contradict her story. The only credible explanation of her disappearance is that she was kidnapped as she said.
She proved herself innocent beyond a reasonable doubt The defense rests.