![\"Criminal](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1762350551_216_\")
<\/a> <\/p>\nIn this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.<\/p>\n
Two days after her memorial service, the prophetess was back. She had emerged from the Mexican desert bearing a story decked out with elaborate and unverifiable potboiler detail.<\/p>\n
She claimed she had walked out of the Pacific Ocean and into an abduction plot. That she\u2019d been lured to a car by a couple who needed her healing touch on a sick baby. That she was drugged and imprisoned in a desert shack. That her captors threatened to sell her into slavery if her church didn\u2019t produce a $500,000 ransom. That she managed to saw through her ropes with the discarded lid of a syrup can, climb out a window and flee across 22 miles of desert sand to Agua Prieta, just south of the Arizona desert.<\/p>\n
It sounded like super-heated pulp, or more precisely the invented tale of a pulp-fiction character who hadn\u2019t thought things through. It was full of holes. Police looked hard but never could find the shack, or the kidnappers. Skeptics wondered why she hadn\u2019t shown any special thirst, after her ordeal in the desert sun, or why her skin wasn\u2019t burned, or why her feet had only a couple of blisters.<\/p>\n
![\"More](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1762350551_303_\")
<\/p>\n
More than 3,000 of her followers accompanied Aimee Semple McPherson on a visit to the California Pacific International exposition at San Diego. <\/p>\n
(Getty Images)<\/p>\n
Even before her disappearance, rumors swirled of McPherson\u2019s relationship with her married radio engineer, Ken Ormiston, a bald-headed dandy with alluring eyes and a bad limp. Soon after her reappearance, witnesses emerged to say they had spotted the pair at a \u201clove nest\u201d in Carmel during her missing month.<\/p>\n
The district attorney concluded she\u2019d made up the abduction story to hide the affair and bilk the faithful of money. Newspapers warred for scoops. A living saint in a sex scandal was irresistible copy. She endured a grand jury proceeding and a preliminary hearing, charged with conspiring to suborn perjury and obstruction of justice. Hints of her secret life played out in court. Witnesses described her wearing a disguise of thick goggles in her paramour\u2019s company. <\/p>\n
She portrayed herself as a persecuted prophet and blamed the prosecution on a conspiracy of Satanic forces. She had glimpsed L.A.\u2019s underworld, a \u201ckingdom which exists just beneath the thin-veneered surface,\u201d and the \u201chordes of darkness\u201d were coming for her.<\/p>\n
H.L. Mencken came to town, bearing acid. The journalist \u2014 a famous enemy of religion \u2014 called McPherson a \u201ccommonplace and transparent mountebank.\u201d Her temple was \u201clarge and hideous.\u201d Her sermons were \u201ctime-honored evangelical hokum.\u201d Commanding assistants on stage, she resembled \u201cthe Madame of a fancy-house on a busy Saturday night.\u201d She was popular because \u201cthere were more morons collected in Los Angeles than in any other place on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Aug.](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1762350551_450_\")
<\/p>\n
Aimee Semple McPherson is tended to by nurse Bessie Silva in August 1931, following what the Associated Press described as \u201ceither a nervous breakdown, blindness or overwork, or, as her mother says, recovery from a face-lift operation.\u201d<\/p>\n
(Associated Press)<\/p>\n
Yet Mencken considered the criminal prosecution obscene, since it hinged on whether she lied to disguise an affair. \u201cIt is unheard of, indeed, in any civilized community for a woman to be tried for perjury uttered in defense of her honor,\u201d Mencken wrote.<\/p>\n
The D.A. abruptly dropped the charges in January 1927 \u2014 possibly because McPherson blackmailed publisher William Randolph Hearst to use his sway with local prosecutors, a theory with some support in FBI reports. (The dirt on Hearst: rumors of a love-triangle murder on his yacht.)<\/p>\n
The scandal amplified McPherson\u2019s profile, and her following doubled. In the 1930s she was big enough to be name-dropped in the lyrics of \u201cHooray for Hollywood.\u201d But her tone grew darker and more paranoid, and her relationships curdled. Debt swamped her church. She became embroiled in lawsuits and alienated from her mother and daughter. She died in 1944 from an overdose of sleeping pills that may or may not have been accidental.<\/p>\n
Her life has since inspired musicals and novels, films and songs, and arguably the best episode of the original \u201cStar Trek,\u201d in which Captain Kirk falls in love with a version of her. The Foursquare Church she founded now has more than 8 million members worldwide, but her name has faded from textbooks. The Angelus Temple also endures, with twice-weekly livestreamed services, an innovation its tech-savvy founder would have embraced.<\/p>\n
![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1762350552_15_\")
<\/p>\n
The Angelus Temple, as seen on a vintage postcard.<\/p>\n
(Francine Orr\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
Hoffman\u2019s new biography withholds conclusive judgments about whether the disappearance was a hoax, but she considers it likely. A detail that undermined the abduction story, in Hoffman\u2019s view, was the thin wristwatch a camera captured on the evangelist soon after her reappearance. If she\u2019d walked into the sea in just a swimsuit and bathing cap, where had the watch come from?<\/p>\n
\u201cI couldn\u2019t unsee that,\u201d Hoffman told The Times in a recent interview. \u201cThe case against her was pretty damning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hoffman considers her a formative figure in 20th century American religion, a pathbreaker for women who became a cautionary tale about the corrosive nature of fame \u2014 and who remains forever elusive. \u201cYou kind of can\u2019t put your arms around her,\u201d Hoffman said. \u201cThere\u2019s this kind of unknowable aspect to her.\u201d <\/p>\n
Whatever motivated her disappearance, Hoffman doesn\u2019t believe it was staged for publicity. \u201cThere\u2019s something about it that feels very spontaneous to me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
![\"Evangelist](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1762350552_403_\")
<\/p>\n
Led by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, rear center, thousands of people drop to their knees and pray for an Allied victory at a bond-selling rally in Pershing Square on June 20, 1942.<\/p>\n
(IRA W. GULDNER\/AP)<\/p>\n
McPherson stuck to her abduction story, telling it and retelling it her whole life. For biographer Gary Krist, fatal to her credibility is the letter her mother received a month after the disappearance. It was supposed to be from the kidnappers, who called themselves \u201cThe Avengers.\u201d <\/p>\n
Instructing her to \u201craise the dough,\u201d it sounded less like a real note than the snappy slang of the hard-boiled imagination.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve moved her to a safe place now and have doped out a plan of ransom payment,\u201d the letter said. \u201cWe are sick and tired of her infernal preaching, she spouts scripture in answer to everything. We took her for two reasons \u2014 First to wreck the damned Temple and second to collect a tidy half million.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was such an obvious fake, and she tailored her story to that note, or rather the note was tailored to her story,\u201d Krist told the Times. His 2018 book \u201cThe Mirage Factory\u201d portrays McPherson as one of the visionaries (along with D.W. Griffith and William Mulholland) that built Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s perfectly possible she just had a mental break and said \u2018I\u2019ve got to get out,\u2019 and she didn\u2019t really think it through,\u201d Krist said. \u201cQuite soon she realized, \u2018I don\u2019t want to give up my life entirely.\u2019 So she had to construct this wild story to explain her absence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Daniel Mark Epstein, who wrote the 1993 biography \u201cSister Aimee,\u201d said the evangelist seems to have been overwhelmed by her own success and in a desperate state.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is kind of a classic case of \u2018be careful what you wish for, because you might get it,\u2019\u201d Epstein told The Times. \u201cShe needed to escape.\u201d<\/p>\n
But escape was the easy part; finding a way to come back was impossible.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that\u2019s the part where the lies come in. I think it undermined her own sense of herself,\u201d Epstein said. \u201cI think in some ways she never really recovered from that lie. I think it remained a psychic wound.\u201d<\/p>\n
The particulars of McPherson\u2019s wild narrative \u2014 of being abducted for sale into slavery south of the border\u2014reflected a well-known moral panic in 1920s America.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen McPherson tells that story, it\u2019s not coming out of thin air,\u201d historian Matthew Avery Sutton told the Times. \u201cShe\u2019s slipping into a trope that\u2019s very current at the time. As shocking as that seems to us today, it would have been less shocking in 1926.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Aimee](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/1762350552_953_\")
<\/p>\n
Aimee Semple McPherson in October 1938.<\/p>\n
(Associated Press)<\/p>\n
Many of her parishioners did not budge in their belief in her; on the contrary, the scandal might have deepened it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe see that over and over again with other evangelists and their scandals,\u201d said Sutton, who wrote the 2009 book \u201cAimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople want to believe that there\u2019s this diabolical scheme out there to bring down God\u2019s anointed.\u201d <\/p>\n
She almost certainly shacked up with Ormiston during the missing month, Sutton said, but it has remained a circumstantial case.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was never that smoking gun that proved once and for all she made up the story,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Aimee Semple McPherson was equal parts prophet and performer, a charismatic Canadian farm girl who stormed into boomtown…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[26908,7323,26902,26905,26909,26907,26903,48,52,51,1637,47,50,49,63,26901,26910,26906,26911,26904,3044],"class_list":["post-39182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-angelus-temple","tag-church","tag-disappearance","tag-evangelist-aimee-semple-mcpherson","tag-famous-woman","tag-h-l-mencken","tag-hoffman","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-life","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-los-angeles-times","tag-mcpherson","tag-missing-month","tag-new-biography","tag-old-time-religion","tag-sex-scandal","tag-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}