Brother Arthur broke the news to Mother Kennedy. This one-time Methodist minister, perhaps the most beloved and respected staff member Angelus Temple ever had, serving from the opening of the church until his death in 1935, found Aimee Semple McPherson's mother in the parsonage adjoining the Temple. “God bless you,” he stammered, then continued, “! don't know how to tell you. Sister went swimming this afternoon at twenty minutes to three and she hasn't come back yet.” "Sister" was the title by which most of Mrs. McPherson's flock called her.
Mother Kennedy glanced ata clock. It was after five. J.W. Arthur communicated what news Emma Schaeffer had sobbed over the phone. Mrs. Kennedy jumped to the Conclusion her daughter had drowned. It was almost ironic, for Sister had rescued her mother from the surf on that same stretch of beach the previous year.
“She is drowned,” pontificated the parent, an opinion she cherished stubbornly, despite rumors and ransom notes to the contrary, until she recognized the voice of her daughter over the telephone wire from Douglas, Arizona thirty-six days later. Once Mother Kennedy made up her mind about something, it took unprecedented contradiction to change it. So she attached no connection at this time to the fact that on Sunday morning, May 16, a prominent Los Angeles pastor reportedly told his congregation, “We are ready to put the skids under Aimee Semple McPherson and her Angelus Temple.”
That night, while some Temple workers hastened to the beach to set up search headquarters to look for the body, Mrs. Kennedy ministered heroically in her daughter's place, narrating the travelogue and informing the congregation of the evangelist's “homegoing.” At one point she presented Mrs. McPherson's daughter by her first husband, who had died in China. Sixteen-year old Roberta told the packed auditorium, “It is my ambition to take up Mother's work just where she left off and if possible to do as much in the service of God as she did.” She solicited prayers for strength and guidance.
Sister's son by Harold McPherson, who had divorced her some years earlier, was not in Los Angeles. Rolf, who in 1944 succeeded his mother as leader of the Foursquare churches instead of Roberta, who left the work in 1937, had been staying at Winters, a Yolo County town, on the Pleasants’ ranch. Roberta, by the way, is an enthusiastic rooter for her brother. “If had stayed,” she told me in 1971, “I might not have been the strong leader my brother is.” At any rate, Mrs. Kennedy determined to protect her grandchildren as best she could through the ordeal. She sent Roberta to be sheltered by Mrs. David Coleman at her home on North Los Robles Avenue in Pasadena. Mrs. Coleman had designed and decorated the award-winning floats Angelus Temple had entered in several January 1 Tournament of Roses Parades in her city. She also had decorated Angelus Temple for Sister's return from her Holy Land vacation on April 24. And when reporters descended en mass upon the Pleasants’ ranch, she accepted Harry Hollenbeck's offer to travel to North California and bring the boy home. Hollenbeck was the builder of the Bible School Building next door to Angelus Temple, then receiving its finishing touches, He would later be mistakenly identified as accompanying the evangelisttoa toad house in Agua Prieta, Mexico, five days before her reappearance.
Mother Kennedy couldn't bear to go to Ocean Park until a week after the presumed drowning, but thousands of Temple people, plus the curious, thronged the sands as the sea search for the lost body continued. From the beginning the police paid lip service to the drowning theory, and the public assumed the evangelist had perished. Flavia Gaines Leitch substituted a heavy-black-bordered box enclosing the words, “To Aimee Semple McPherson. IN MEMORY,” for her regular column in the Los Angeles Examiner for May 20 and penned an eloquent tribute to the evangelist which appeared elsewhere in the same issue.
Immediate assistance seemed required to beef up the pulpit personnel at Angelus Temple. Mrs, Kennedy wired evangelist Paul Rader - probably as famous a clergyman as anyone in America except for Billy Sunday and Mrs. McPherson. Rader had filled the Temple pulpit while Sister had gone to Palestine. But previous commitments prevented him from returning immediately. The next night, May 22nd, a church member from Pasadena interrupted the Saturday night services by jumping to his feet and hurrying down the aisle toward the platform waving his arms and shouting that he was ordained by God to take Mrs. McPherson's place. Church workers corralled the disturber and led him, shouting “Hallelujah!”, outside where some police stood on duty. They told the man they would release him if he would go home. He agreed. But fifteen minutes later he created another sensation with a similar interruption. The police wanted to commit him for observation, but Temple workers prevailed upon them to let them take him home. The man had joined the church about a year before. Mrs. Kennedy finally engaged Dr. Charles Shreve of McKendree Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., where Mrs. McPherson had conducted great meetings, and Watson Argue from Winnepeg, Canada, to fill the pulpit.
For days the beach search continued for the body. Several alleged witnesses gave contradictory reports of seeing the evangelist virtually here, there and everywhere in the vicinity before the disappearance. There would not have been time for hardly any of the meanderings reported during the brief period of Emma Schaeffer's absence. One man announced he had seen Sister struggling in the surf and heard her calling for help. But why did he not do something about it at the time? The rumor swept the crowd that the evangelist died in an underwater struggle with a sea monster! Then a Venice woman reported seeing a whale! A reward of $500 for the recovery of the body spurred searchers - and also rumors. Twenty-six year old Robert Browning swam to his death off Manhattan Beach attempting to reach an object which he imagined was the body. Airplanes and divers entered the effort, but all to no avail. An elderly man had to be restrained by police when he professed to see a vision of Mrs. McPherson rising from the waves and beckoning him to come to her!
On May 29 a telegram, addressed not to Minnie Kennedy or the Temple, but to Los Angeles Police Captain Herman Cling, who was heading the investigation of the disappearance, arrived from Harold McPherson of Ocala, Florida. Rolf's father wired, “Have just learned of Aimee Semple McPherson’s disappearance. Was her husband, but now divorced. was formerly in work with her and will be glad to give information or assist in any way to clear up this case. Please mail me Los Angeles papers for past week.”
Two minor sensations erupted and ebbed. Eddie Barry, the hotel bell-boy at Ocean Park who procured the orange
McPherson on the beach, disappeared the same night the evangelist was feared drowned. Hotel manager Lanagan scoffed at any connection between the two disappearances, advising that Barry had been planning to leave for some time without naming a definite date. Police, however, reacted with suspicion and commenced.an investigation. District Attorney Asa Keyes announced he wanted to interrogate the bell-boy. It turned out, however, that Eddie had simply eloped to San Diego, where he was found working in the Salvation Army hotel. An analysis of the candy and orange juice Barry had provided proved both pure, so no foul play was suspected on that account. °
Officials were puzzled on May 24 when a search of Mrs. McPherson's automobile turned up a black bathing suit and green bathing cap. The evangelist had worn a green swimsuit on the beach. When Mrs. Kennedy learned of the discovery she laughed that the apparel was “mine, not Sister's,” and reported leaving it in the automobile on May 14th when she had accompanied her daughter to the beach. “Upon our return,” she explained, “only one suit was taken from the car, the other being left in the car because it was not wet.” She added, “It is not unusual to have bathing equipment’ in the car. The Los Angeles Examiner of May 25 displayed a picture of Mother Kennedy dangling the swimsuit.
Meanwhile, the cauldron of rumors began boiling over. J.W. Buchanan, manager of the Burns Detective Agency retained by the Temple, told the church and radio audience, “The air is full of wild rumors and that is all there is to it.” Newspapers reported that several thousand rumors surfaced in the first six days!
Mother Kennedy vigorously denied Suggestions her daughter had committed suicide, documenting Mrs. McPherson's success in deterring hosts of others from their announced self-destructions. Sister's beliefs, insisted the parent, absolutely precluded any possibility of suicide. But the rumors persisted. Mrs. Kennedy also scoffed at continuing speculations that financial difficulties at the Temple had led to her daughter’s disappearance. A false report gained circulation that the body had been found, but the facts soon exploded that rumor. Dr. Gustave Haas, who had treated the evangelist two years previously, commented concerning rumors of amnesia, terming it “possible” and “not untenable.” Dr. Haas stated, “Mrs. McPherson had a splendid physique but was undoubtedly working too hard. She was doing the work of three women, in addition to being almost constantly under the emotional and psychological strain of her type of work. We frequently find in the cases of religious enthusiasts or, in fact, enthusiasts along any line, that their zeal carries them actually past the point of physical endurance and for a time makes it possible for them to go on. But when that force snaps, as it is quite likely to do, there is no reserve strength. Merely as a theory, should say it would have been possible for Mrs. McPherson to have gone farther down the shore than the watchers realized, to have suffered a stroke of amnesia, and to have come out of the water and wandered on down the beach, apparently in a normal condition, actually in possession of her faculties, but with her mind a blank as to whom she really was.”
Dr. Haas speculated further, “In that condition, she might even have gone on to the hills below Santa Monica and perhaps found refuge in some cabin.”
It didn’t take long for kidnapping rumors to escalate either. The next night after the disappearance investigators scotched the first of these. Fifteen year old Vina Parrish, a former member of Angelus Temple who lived in Edendale, a district on the street-car line which ran north in front of the church, professed to have information that Sister had been kidnapped. Judge Carlos Hardy of the Los Angeles Superior Court, a confidant of the Temple leadership, passed on the information to the police. Detective Lieutenant Ackley and Policewoman Vaughn questioned the girl. But her information was so vague that they took her to a receiving hospital for treatment for hysteria.
Meanwhile, a flood of communications poured into the Temple and police headquarters, suggesting the where-abouts of the evangelist. A mysterious telegram which gave no hint of the identity of the sender Proposed, “Suggest immediate search behind locked and unlocked doors at Ocean View Hotel,” the inn where Sister and Miss Schaeffer had changed into beach wear. Nothing turned up.
Mrs. Kennedy received a telegram seemingly signed “Dr. Merton” three days after the disappearance. The wire informed, “Daughter O.K. period. Do not worry period.” At the grand jury hearing:in July, Captain Cline complained that he had never seen this telegram, and attached sinister implications to its alleged cover-up, but Mother Kennedy chirped that the Examiner had published the wire on May 23, so there had been no cover-up. An effort to make “Ormiston” out of the signature proved inconclusive, and the identification of the sender was hazy.
About the time the “Dr. Merton” telegram was filed, a letter was mailed in Oakland by a woman who informed that Mrs. McPherson was in the bay city and would soon return to her congregation.
As rumors multiplied, allegations of the evangelist's whereabouts sent investigators scurrying after clues in three countries. The first report of Mrs. McPherson being seen away from the beach was filed by Detective Lieutenant M.O. Barnard, who claimed both he and his wife saw the evangelist and another woman driving past the Culver City studios of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in the direction of Los Angeles, not the beach. He stated the time was three p.m. He stuck to his identification in spite of beach witnesses who saw Sister enter the surf after that time.,Barnard declared that the evangelist was wearing her Temple uniform, a white dress under a black cape.
Mrs. Kennedy contradicted the detective, insisting that her daughter had left the parsonage in sports clothes, taking no other additional attire than beach wear. Lu Etta Sorenson, who had witnessed the departure, signed an affidavit describing the evangelist's clothing. It corresponded exactly with the garb Emma Schaeffer had brought back from the beach. Barnard’s identification was “exploded” — that is Lately Thomas’ term — later when Irene Hillsbrom of the Temple announced that she was the party the police detective saw. A statement from Alice Franck, who was with Irene at the time, corroborated their route and garb. lrene Hillstrom was known for affecting a resemblance to Mrs. McPherson in hair style and dress.
Soon rumors located Sister in Denver, but communications with civic officials there scouted her presence. The Colorado authorities spoke highly of Mrs. McPherson’s ministry in the city in previous years and were sure she wasn't there.
On May 22 a letter came from an unknown woman stating that Sister was being held for a huge ransom in a Santa Monica Canyon cabin. Deputy Sheriffs Walter Hunter and William Hanby joined Venice police in searching the Canyon, but found nothing to substantiate the rumor.
The same day two reports that the body had been found proved baseless. Aviator Arthur Goebel thought he sighted a corpse floating two miles off Crystal Pier. Herman Cline and other officers joined Captain E. Pritchard Smith aboard a speed-boat which rushed to the area. And Santa Monica Police Chief Webb and Identification Expert Mallory hurried north to the foot of Malibu Canyon near Inceville to investigate a body reported in the surf there. It turned out to be a dead seal.
May 22 proved a banner day for rumors. Carter B. Cordner reported he saw Mrs. McPherson in person in Altadena, a town above Pasadena. She accosted him on the street there, he said, and laughed, “A great joke, isn't it?”, and then hurried away. An intensive search in the area continued well into the night. This same Saturday a private detective believed he saw the evangelist emerge from the Southern Pacific Railroad depot at Third and Townsend Streets. The woman — whoever she was — entered an auto which had no license plates. He trailed the car, driven by some man, to the California Hotel at 1390 California Street. The driver went into the hotel and came out a bit later with another woman wearing brown attire. The detective then goofed. He went into the hotel to seek to learn who the other woman was. When he returned to the street, the auto and its occupants had vanished. Kenneth Ormiston’s parents resided at the time in the hotel, but there seemed no connection with this.circumstance in that fact. The woman from the hotel was not Ormiston's mother. The “identification” was in San Francisco.
According to a clerk at the Pismo Beach Hotel, about ten miles south of San Luis Obispo on the Central California coast, Mrs. McPherson had registered there a few days after her disappearance, using the name of Mrs. A. Ferguson. Another woman and two men were with “Mrs. Ferguson,” whom the clerk supposed was trying to avoid recognition. The clerk reported the group continued north after leaving the hotel. One wonders why, if he really recognized the evangelist, the clerk did not summon the authorities.
One week after the disappearance a flash from El Paso, Texas advised that Deputy Sheriff Boquer was investigating a report that Sister had been seen crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico there in a car with California license plates. Mexican authorities pursued a massive search which turned up nothing.
The day before, a Mrs. Catherine Neighley had a strange experience at Victoria Hall in Los Angeles, the auditorium where Mrs. McPherson preached first in the city upon her arrival on the west coast in December 1918. A drunk woman was laying on the floor creating a commotion. A man weighing about 200 pounds, according to Mrs. Neighley's estimate, accompanied her. Mrs. Neighley gave a rather complete description of the man. He was “very dark complexioned” with “broad shoulders, black hair, combed straight back, black eyes with a peculiar look to them, and hands very rough.” The man claimed he was a carpenter. Mission authorities had the man arrested as a “suspicious character,” but took the woman into Brother McCullough's office where the pastor and another woman listened to the story. “Why did you come to Victoria Hall drunk?” they inquired,
“| came to tell you where Sister McPherson is,” Mrs. Neighley recalled the woman's reply. “Sister McPherson is not drowned. Two men and a woman went down to the beach and took her to their car, the woman doped her, they put her in the car and took her to Watts and kept her in a hut all night.” Then the kidnappers took her to Mexico to hold her for a ransom.
At the time Mrs. Neighley thought the tale was fantasy. “She would have told more, but made her keep still at that point,” she reported. Ethel Irene Cox signed as a witness to Mrs. Neighley's signed statement given after Mrs. McPherson's return.
This conversation occurred the day before the first ransom note was mailed in San Francisco. If it unfolded as sworn, this drunk may have had some connection with the authors of that “Revengers" letter. It seemed noteworthy that the “Avengers” letter that came later, demanding the same amount of ransom, boasted that the authors had been planting rumors of Mrs. McPherson's whereabouts in different places during the period they claimed to have her in captivity. Police never followed up on this tip.
Mrs. Neighley explained why she did not advise Mother Kennedy of the conversation. She recalled that the man accompanying the drunk woman admitted he had been doping her for immoral purposes and keeping her in his home, concluding, “Knowing that should the newspapers get this report, which involved characters from the underworld, they would magnify it and we did not feel it wise nor fair to Sister McPherson's mother, children, and loved ones who mourned her as dead at this time to have this story appear. We therefore withheld the facts until we knew Sister McPherson was alive and felt there may be significance in the woman's story.” -
Herman Cline hurried north to San Francisco after a Mrs. Francis B. Marshall, of the Wayfarers Pentecostal Mission there, reported she saw Mrs. McPherson in an auto on Market Street with several other persons. She called out to Sister, but the car sped away. The next day she got a mysterious phone call from a man who dictated a statement to be given to the newspapers in order “to stop ridiculous rumors.” The message informed that Sister was not dead, nor kidnapped, nor sick. “There is a reason for her remaining in seclusion which must not be known now.” The voice, which Mrs. Marshall thought she recognized as belonging to one of the highest ranking Temple officials whom she would not, however, name, protested, “She has a right to live her own life in privacy. She will return to Angelus Temple about June 16th with reasons for her actions.” Mrs. Marshall refused to tell more to Cline, but stubbornly insisted she had seen the evangelist.
Meanwhile, the Sacramento Union newspaper was getting into the act. This was perhaps the first paper out rightly to state disbelief in the drowning. On May 28 the Union claimed confidential information assuring that Sister was not dead: “Information was received yesterday that an automobile belonging to a man under suspicion of being implicated in the mysterious disappearance was found and identified at a point in the Valley. From the inception of the search for the body of Mrs. McPherson, the press of the state and local authorities have been dubious about the drowning of the pastor.”
Yet in Los Angeles County, both District Attorney Keyes and Police Captain Cline were being quoted as confident that the drowning story explained the disappearance.
The Sacramento Union wired Los Angeles’ Sheriff Traeger, soliciting a request from him to the Yolo County Sheriff that a search be carried out for the evangelist on the ranch at Winters, owned by James Pleasants and his brother Ansel. Evidently the paper expected Mrs. McPherson would be found there. However, Los Angeles authorities decided the evidence was insufficient to justify such a search and notified the Sacramento newspaper that they were convinced the evangelist had drowned at sea. Rolf would be the only McPherson found then at the Pleasants’ ranch.
Another Sacramento “clue” reported that on Friday, May 28th, three women at a Sacramento hotel fled from a detective hunting for Sister. The group were registered as Mrs. L.P. Benson of Los Angeles, Mrs. Simpson of Los Angeles, and Mr. and Mrs. R.L. McEtena of Los Angeles, although the last name of the couple was so badly scrawled it could have been something else. The next day a phone call came to the hotel asking for three different names. The manager said those parties had never registered at the Regis Hotel. The caller then described the women he sought. The manager recognized their description as fitting Benson, Simpson, and McElenas, but advised they had left. Alfred Gropp heard the caller protest, ‘| must get in touch with the three women. It’s a matter of life and death. Tell them to call Capital 1332-W as soon as they appear.”
Capital 1332-W turned out to be the phone number of William Yeomans, a former organist and business agent for Mrs. McPherson, who now worked as a sewing machine salesman in the Sacramento Valley. Yeomans denied flatly that he had anything to do with the telephone call, but confided, “| believe Mrs. McPherson was kidnapped,” a statement he made over and over again when quizzed about the incident.
A desk clerk at a hotel at Jacomba in the San Diego mountains “recognized” Mrs. McPherson as occupying a room there on May 29 or 30, according to an unsigned letter which reached the Temple authorities considerably later. The desk clerk told a guest who occupied the same room several days afterwards that the evangelist was with one woman and two men but was “so doped she did not know anyone.” The letter stated, “The men rented the cabin but forgot the linen so the clerk went there to give them the linen and he saw this woman sitting in chair. He spoke to her but she did not even move her eyes. When the clerk got back to hotel desk he started to think about it and then recognized her as Mrs. McPherson, but could not investigate until 4 a.m., but when he got to their cabin they had already departed.” Again, why didn’t the clerk alert the authorities?
On June 2nd a policeman discovered, on a street, a note scribbled apparently in a woman's handwriting. Presumably someone had thrown it out of a moving auto. The note read, “Help! They took me to cabin in Bouquet.” Officers assumed this meant Bouquet Canyon about forty miles northeast of Los Angeles, above the town of Saugus. They did finda cabin which showed signs of residence. One of the two slightly mussed beds displayed a pink crepe de Chine nightie. But there was nothing to connect the place or the gown with the evangelist.
On June 5th word came to the Temple that “Inspector Middleton of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police” had located Mrs. McPherson in Edmonton, Alberta. Mrs. Kennedy enlisted Zelma Argue of that Canadian city, the brother of Watson Argue who was helping fill the Temple pulpit, to investigate. The identification turned out to be another farce of mistaken identity. Zelma Argue talked to the woman involved and knew she was not the evangelist.
June 11 was the date. a woman was found wandering in El Centro. Police Chief Sterling Oswalt later would “partially identify” Mrs. McPherson as being that woman, but his opinion was not released until after her reappearance.
The next day, assistant editor Gray of the San Francisco Examiner sought the help of Mrs. Mabel Isenberger of San Jose to identify a lady in the Bay City whom he suspected was the evangelist. Gray showed Mrs. Isenberger the woman’s handwriting and stated it had nine points like Mrs. McPherson's. “I'm willing to bank my reputation of twenty years (in newspaper work) that this is Mrs. McPherson's handwriting.”
Gray and Isenberger went to this woman's apartment. She had glasses on when she admitted the visitors and gave her name as Mrs. Macdonald. Mrs. isenberger asked her to remove her glasses, and she did. The woman denied Gray's suggestions that she was the evangelist, and Mrs. lsenberger knew she was not. Later she accompanied Gray to the homes of some friends who also denied she was Mrs. McPherson. The woman — who admitted that Macdonald was an alias — confided to the Examiner editor that her husband was involved in narcotics traffic and that she was in hiding for her life. She expressed the belief that Mrs. McPherson had been kidnapped. Mrs. Isenberger gave this Lovato ji an affidavit, which included a copy of a long er from Gray, sworn before i i oe ae y, Notary Public F.M. Spinning, In mid-June a report came from Coos Bay, Oregon that a badly-decomposed body had washed ashore nearby. Officials there suspected it might be Mrs. McPherson and sent an inquiry concerning the fillings in her teeth. Mrs. Kennedy averred her daughter had no fillings in her teeth. The Coos Bay corpse did, so that ended that. Mother Kennedy also scoffed at the idea thata body could be carried almost a thousand miles north.
Two sightings of Mrs. McPherson were supposed to have been made on June 18, one at a Lowell, Arizona hotel and the other at a road house in Agua Prieta, Mexico.;
So the rumors persisted. On one day the evangelist was reported seen at sixteen different places at once. Fifteen obviously were impossible, and possibly all sixteen were false. One which may have been authentic, however, was reported by Sheriff Homer M. Tate of Graham County, Arizona. The one problem concerning this identification is the long delay in reporting it. Sheriff Tate did not write to Mrs. McPherson from Safford, Arizona until December 24, 1926.
Here is what the Sheriff said: “Some few days before your appearance in Douglas, Arizona, happened to be in Bonita, Arizona on official business, when an automobile bearing a California license drove up and inquired the road to Douglas. There was a man driving, and a woman in the back seat was holding on her lap another woman that seemed to be sick. The sick woman was lying on a pillow on the other woman's lap. There is also another man here that saw them and talked to them.” Sheriff Tate located Bonita as “a little country Post Office located in Southern Graham County on the highway.” He offered to investigate further and secure this evidence for the expected Superior Court trial. However, the case never got to court, so the Sheriff's letter was buried in the copious files at Angelus Temple, and never received any publicity that know of. The Sheriff declared he had said nothing to anyone about this incident, other than the man who could confirm his observation, and requested the matter be kept confidential until the evidence was offered in court. Evidently Tate hadn't expected the evangelist to be bound over for trial, for he stated, “(I) didn’t really think you needed more evidence than you had, but the way it appears now you might need help of this kind.” Mrs. McPherson and her attorneys did claim they had considerable new evidence, confirming her story, ready to present a jury, but they never got the chance.
Because of the rash of rumors, and not because she believed anything could materialize, Mrs. Kennedy offered a $25,000.00 reward for the return of Aimee Semple McPherson alive. Mother announced the reward “as a challenge to the sincerity of the publication of various rumors.” Captain Cline kept urging the withdrawal of the offer, insisting it could only multiply the number of sightings. Mrs. Kennedy was willing to yield on Friday, June 4, "but owing to the wild reports arriving in this city from all parts of the world” (only a few of which are here reported) she decided to continue the offer until midnight, Saturday, June 12. Some wiseacres had greeted the initial report of the withdrawal to the unwillingness of the Temple to risk its money! Cline wasn't happy with the week's extension. And it did have the effect he expected. Yet in later years the withdrawal of the reward was cited by skeptics of Mrs. McPherson's story as evidence that Mother Kennedy knew her daughter was in hiding. Had Mrs. Kennedy had her way, the offer would have continued indefinitely, for she was certain her daughter was dead and insisted stubbornly on this point right up to the reappearance.