HAVING FAITH Chapter Eight RETREAT

 

I think most people in 1926 Los Angeles knew the District Attorney's case rested on Lorraine Weiseman-Sielaff  - the woman who was supposed to have saved Sister Aimee, but now threatened to destroy her.  But few knew how unstable the lady was. She was under the care of a psychiatrist, and had already spent time in a sanitarium. 

When no one came forward to bail her out of jail, and confronted with proof she'd been passing bad checks in L.A. during the last week of May, the very week her affidavit swore she'd been in Carmel-by-the-Sea, nursing the mysterious “Miss X”, companion to the limping bald playboy radio engineer Kenneth Ormiston,  Lorraine changed her story. Now she claimed to have been promised $5,000 for signing the false affidavit, and perhaps more for convincing her twin sister to claim being the mysterious “Miss X” .  This lady had more stories than Mother Goose.

But the prosecution had more than one unstable lady.  There was Walter Lambert, the owner of a shirt store on Hill Street in downtown L.A., across from the Hotel Clark, and the hotel's doorman Thomas Melville. 

Both men swore they saw Sister Aimee entering the 12 story hotel at about ten on the morning of 18, May -  the day of her drowning.  She only stayed 30 minutes. Kenneth Ormiston had been staying at the hotel since leaving his wife in January -  the same time he left the Angelus Temple. 

In an experiment, detectives left Venice Beach at about three in the afternoon (the time of Aimee's drowning) and drove the 300 miles north to the “love nest” cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea. They arrived at just about one-thirty the next morning, the same time Ormiston had admitted arriving there on 19 May, supposedly  in the company of the mysterious “Miss X” and her nurse.

There were half a dozen witnesses from Carmel who had seen and/or spoken with a woman they recognized as Aimee, or said “resembled” McPherson, and Kenneth Ormiston as well.  

There were  Dennis Collins and Louie Mandrillo, graveyard shift mechanics at a Salinas garage. They testified that the owner of a sporty little Studebaker sedan (above), left in their garage for a refuel and fluid check, had picked up his car at two on the morning of 29 May. The man signed the receipt as Kenneth Ormiston and he was accompanied by a woman wearing a heavy black veil on a very dark night.

And then there was the testimony of Bernice Morris, secretary to a lawyer named Russel McKinley, who worked for Sister Aimee. Bernice had no direct knowledge of any conspiracy, but she had come to suspect that the kidnapping story had actually been concocted to fool Aimee's mother. She believed this because, at one point in a conversation with the mother and daughter (above), at the Angeles Temple, Russel McKinley had suddenly reminded Aimee (left) that one of the kidnappers had rubbed her neck to relieve a headache.

Bernice said Aimee had looked startled, but had turned to her suspicious mother and said, “Why mother, I do remember that perfectly. I forgot to tell you that. You know I’m always having trouble with my neck.” 

Morris added she did not think Mrs. Kennedy (above) believed her daughter.  Only later did it occur to Bernice Morris that Russel McKinley was must have been blackmailing Sister Aimee, and just wanted to remind her that he could pull the rug out from under her at any moment. But if that had been the lawyer's intent, Aimee's secret was protected when, a few day's later Russel was killed in an automobile accident.  Still, Morris's testimony was damning.

But, to my mind, the case against Aimee McPherson rested on a single question D.A. Keyes had asked her back in August, in front of the grand jury.  He had admired her watch, and then pointed out, “I seem to have observed a photo of you wearing that wrist watch which was taken in Douglas, five weeks after you went bathing on the beach. You are sure you did not have it with you?” Aimee could only reply, “I guess the watch must have been brought to me in Douglas by my mother.” A few minutes later, the hearing was interrupted when Aimee fainted. But here, in open court, Keyes would not have a chance to ask that question again, because at least in this preliminary hearing, Aimee would never have to take the stand.

On the other hand there was Arthur Betts, a bell boy at the Hotel Clark who was supposed to identify Aimee as having entered Ormiston's room. On the witness stand he suffered a total memory loss. Two other prosecution witnesses suffered such a similar  memory failure under oath. And there was another problem, which the defense brought up in cross-examination with all the witnesses from Carmel. If they were so certain the woman in the “love nest” had been the famous evangelist, why had none of them claimed the rewards offered by newspapers for information on Aimee's whereabouts?

Then there was the lack of physical evidence. The Carmel “Love Nest” produced lots of fingerprints, but none belonging to Aimee Semple McPherson. And the grocery lists, recovered from the back yard, and identified as being written in Aimee's handwriting, had gone missing.  Photo-stats remained (above), but the defense never ceased in pointing out prosecution experts were now only working from copies. Besides, they had their own experts who insisted, it was not Sister Aimee's handwriting.

 

Aimee's kidnapping story was always a problem for Aimee's lawyers. Her escape from the kidnappers was just not believable. As D.A. Asa Keyes put it, “That was 20 miles in blistering, 120-degree sun…and yet she wasn’t blistered. Her clothes weren’t soiled. She wasn’t perspiring. Her heels weren’t broken. She didn’t ask for water. Taken to a hospital in Douglas, Arizona...she wasn’t dehydrated."

Author Louis Adamic argued in his monthly column (above), “The only way she can convince me that she made that... hike across the desert...is to do it all over again, and let me ride behind her in an automobile equipped...with a huge canteen of water; and if she asks me for a single drink or a lift, I’ll give it to her and then laugh right in her face. “

Still Aimee's version of events never varied by an inch or an instant, under oath or from the pulpit. When challenged Aimee (above) would always say with a beatific smile, “That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.” She repeated that line so often it was eventually used with great effect by vaudeville and movie star Mae West, whose entire career was a parody of "the world's most pulchritudinous evangelist", Sister Aimee McPherson.. 

On Wednesday, 3 November, Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Samuel Blake concluded the hearing by telling the small courtroom (above) he found ample evidence that Aimee Semple McPherson, her mother Mildred Kennedy, and Mrs. Lorraine Weiseman-Sielaff. were indeed involved in a “criminal conspiracy to commit acts injurious to public morals and to prevent and obstruct justice.” It was assumed Weisman-Sielaff would at some point plead guilty to a lesser crime, in exchange for her testimony against the other two . Aimee and Mildred were facing a possible 42 years in prison, each. In Spartenburg, South Carolina, humorist Will Rogers was traveling with Queen Marie, of Romania. Referring to the queen, Rogers wrote, “Bless her heart. America owes her a debt of gratitude for running...Aimee McPherson back among the want ads.”

And then, while the shock waves were still roiling back and forth across Los Angeles' culture, the unstable Lorraine Weisman-Sielaff (above) changed her story again.

- 30 -

HAVING FAITH Chapter One - Drowning

 

I believe the watch made the lady a liar. She vanished into the Venice, Californian surf attired in a modest one piece green bathing suit and cap.  She miraculously reappeared five weeks later and five hundred miles away, dry as a bone. She said she had been kidnapped. But in the intervening five weeks the lady had acquired new shoes, a new dress and a corset...and her old wrist watch. 

Now, why would a kidnapper risk attracting notice by entering a busy hotel, break into a locked hotel room, just to steal an inexpensive watch with a plain leather band, all for a victim they professed to despise? To me that watch on her right arm is proof the popular evangelical radio minister Aimee Semple McPherson (above) had not been kidnapped. But that remains just my personal opinion, because in 1926 the Los Angeles County Prosecutor was a major league sleaze ball.

“Through green-white breakers swift I leap,

Sun-sparkled seas by body keep;
Bearer of Gospel-Glory I
With singing angels in my sky...”

At just about 3:30 in the afternoon of Tuesday, 18 May, 1926,  a rather plainly dressed middle aged woman, wearing no makeup, walked up to the front desk of the Ocean View Hotel, in Santa Monica, California. She gave her name as Miss Emma Shaffer (above), and explained to the deskman that she was the  private secretary to Sister Aimee Semple Mcpherson.  Sister Aimee had earlier rented a room, where she changed into her modest bathing suit. Aimee also left her wrist watch on the dresser before they exited the hotel. 

After crossing the Venice Boardwalk, the two women settled on a large towel under a rented umbrella. Sister Aimee had immediately gone into the ocean for a swim, while Miss Shaffer remained onshore.  When Aimee returned, she dried herself, sat on the sand and begun to dictate to Emma notes for her Sunday sermon  Then, just before three,  she sent Miss Shaffer into the Ocean View to phone Sister Aimee's Church of the Four Square Gospel to see if there were any urgent matters which required her attention.

There were none, but when the Emma returned to their umbrella on the crowded beach, Sister Aimee was gone. Assuming her employer was taking another swim, Emma waited perhaps twenty minutes, before running into hotel and asking for help.

“The cripples to my temple crowd,

I heal them, and they shout aloud.
A thousand miles my raptures go
Upon my magic radio.”

Hotel staff searched the beach and the surf,  but there was no sign of Sister Aimee. The police were called. A tracking dog had no trouble finding the missing evangelist’s towel, but only Aimee's scent remained on the sand.  One of the most famous women in Los Angeles was missing.

It was too late to make the evening editions of the battling daily newspapers. But overnight The Los Angeles Times, and William Randolph Hearst's  Herald American assigned dozens of reporters to the "beat".  Within 24 hours 500 reporters from across the nation would be chasing this story.  The morning headlines back east shouted, “Evangelist Feared Drown.”

“What's this? A terror-spasm grips

My heart-strings, and my reason slips.
Oh, God, it cannot be that I,
The bearer of Thy Word, should die!...”

It is hard to overstate Aimee Semple McPherson's influence in 1926. One in ten of Los Angeles' one million citizens claimed to be a member of her evangelical Pentecostal Church of the Four Square Gospel (above), with perhaps three quarters of a million adherents nationwide, thanks to her nation wide radio broadcasts.

That Tuesday evening Aimee's mother, Mrs Mildred Kennedy (known as Sister Minnie), preached in Aimee's stead at the Temple on Glendale Avenue (above), delivering the same muscular vibrant faith healing fundamentalist theology, but without the theatrical flair the faithful had come to expect from Aimee. And the first public acknowledgment of Sister Aimee's absence came at the end of the service, when Sister Minnie told the congregation that “'Sister went swimming this afternoon at 20 minutes to three, and she has not come back. Sister is gone. We know she is with Jesus.”

“My daughter's voice, my mother's kiss!

My pulpit-notes on Genesis!
Oh, count the souls I saved for Thee,
My Savior-wilt Thou not save me?”

The next morning, two air planes crisscrossed the stretch of sand (above), a half dozen life boats scoured the waters. A Coast Guard Cutter even sent down divers. By noon the worried crowd was reported at fifty thousand.  The Los Angeles Times reported in its Wednesday evening edition that overnight, “To the hundreds of men and women who wait in a huddled and silent mass beneath the open sky...Through the fog-bound, chilling night and then through the weary scorching hours of the day, the followers of the evangelist have kept their places on the sand..."She can't be dead. She can't be dead....God wouldn't let her die. She was too noble. Her work was too great. Her mission was not ended. She can't be dead."...

“Ten thousand to my aid would run,

Bring me my magic microphone!
Send me an angel, or a boat…

The senseless waters fill her throat.”

“In some manner word was spread about,” reported the Times, “that promptly at 2:30 p.m. Mrs. McPherson (above) would arise from the sea and speak to her followers. The appointed time came and many arose to look further out to sea. But it passed without the miracle... At noon, search of the sea was halted as hopeless. The long seine nets stretched from boat to boat which had dragged the ocean floor since Tuesday night were taken in.

"A boat containing life guards continued the search alone for a little while longer and then also gave up. The tide was left to do its own work....Only an occasional swimmer ventured into the water near the spot where Mrs. McPherson is supposed to have been drowned during the day. The place seemed to be shunned by bathers...”

“Ten million tons of waters hide

A woman's form, her Faith deride;
While thousands weep upon the shore,
And searchlights seek…and breakers roar…”

That Wednesday, a teenage girl saw Sister Aimee struggling in the waves, and raced into the surf to her rescue. But there was no Aimee, and the girl drown. After that the desperate amateurs were replaced by professional hard hat divers, who walked the sea bed from the Santa Monica Pier to the north, to Ballona Creek, three miles to the south. One of the frantic hard hats, a diver named Ed Harrison, succumbed to exhaustion and died. That meant two had died searching for Sister Aimee, but still the search continued and no body was found.

By the first of June, the desperate Minnie (above, left) had calculated the exact location of her daughter's remains, and in defiance of California Fish and Game regulations, four dynamite charges were set off in the waters, hoping to free Sister Aimee's body from the bottom sands. Nothing floated to the surface except a few sacrificial fish. The faithful lined the bay for weeks, spaced a hundred yards apart, walking back and forth, waiting for the sea to give up her dead. 

And then, 33 days later, Aimee's body reappeared five hundred miles away, in the middle of the Mexican Sonora desert. And as was to be expected, miraculously, she was alive.

“Oh, gallant souls that grope for light

Through matter's blind and lonely night!
Oh, pity our minds that seek to know
That which is so—
And piteously have forgot
That which is not! “

Upton Sinclair, “An Evangelist Drowns”

The New Republic, June 30, 1926

                                    - 30 - 

HAVING FAITH Chapter Eight RETREAT

 

I think most people in 1926 Los Angeles knew the District Attorney's case rested on Lorraine Weiseman-Sielaff  - the woman who was supposed to have saved Sister Aimee, but now threatened to destroy her.  But few knew how unstable the lady was. She was under the care of a psychiatrist, and had already spent time in a sanitarium. 

When no one came forward to bail her out of jail, and confronted with proof she'd been passing bad checks in L.A. during the last week of May, the very week her affidavit swore she'd been in Carmel-by-the-Sea, nursing the mysterious “Miss X”, companion to the limping bald playboy radio engineer Kenneth Ormiston,  Lorraine changed her story. Now she claimed to have been promised $5,000 for signing the false affidavit, and perhaps more for convincing her twin sister to claim being the mysterious “Miss X” .  This lady had more stories than Mother Goose.

But the prosecution had more than one unstable lady.  There was Walter Lambert, the owner of a shirt store on Hill Street in downtown L.A., across from the Hotel Clark, and the hotel's doorman Thomas Melville. Both men swore they saw Sister Aimee entering the 12 story hotel at about ten on the morning of 18, May -  the day of her drowning.  She only stayed 30 minutes. Kenneth Ormiston had been staying at the hotel since leaving his wife in January -  the same time he left the Angelus Temple. In an experiment, detectives left Venice Beach at about three in the afternoon (the time of Aimee's drowning) and drove the 300 miles north to the “love nest” cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea. They arrived at just about one-thirty the next morning, the same time Ormiston had admitted arriving there on 19 May, supposedly  in the company of the mysterious “Miss X” and her nurse.

There were half a dozen witnesses from Carmel who had seen and/or spoken with a woman they recognized as Aimee, or said “resembled” McPherson, and Kenneth Ormiston as well.  

There were  Dennis Collins and Louie Mandrillo, graveyard shift mechanics at a Salinas garage. They testified that the owner of a sporty little Studebaker sedan (above), left in their garage for a refuel and fluid check, had picked up his car at two on the morning of 29 May. The man signed the receipt as Kenneth Ormiston and he was accompanied by a woman wearing a heavy black veil on a very dark night.

And then there was the testimony of Bernice Morris, secretary to a lawyer named Russel McKinley, who worked for Sister Aimee. Bernice had no direct knowledge of any conspiracy, but she had come to suspect that the kidnapping story had actually been concocted to fool Aimee's mother. She believed this because, at one point in a conversation with the mother and daughter (above), at the Angeles Temple, Russel McKinley had suddenly reminded Aimee (left) that one of the kidnappers had rubbed her neck to relieve a headache.

Bernice said Aimee had looked startled, but had turned to her suspicious mother and said, “Why mother, I do remember that perfectly. I forgot to tell you that. You know I’m always having trouble with my neck.” 

Morris added she did not think Mrs. Kennedy (above) believed her daughter.  Only later did it occur to Bernice Morris that Russel McKinley was must have been blackmailing Sister Aimee, and just wanted to remind her that he could pull the rug out from under her at any moment. But if that had been the lawyer's intent, Aimee's secret was protected when, a few day's later Russel was killed in an automobile accident.  Still, Morris's testimony was damning.

But, to my mind, the case against Aimee McPherson rested on a single question D.A. Keyes had asked her back in August, in front of the grand jury.  He had admired her watch, and then pointed out, “I seem to have observed a photo of you wearing that wrist watch which was taken in Douglas, five weeks after you went bathing on the beach. You are sure you did not have it with you?” Aimee could only reply, “I guess the watch must have been brought to me in Douglas by my mother.” A few minutes later, the hearing was interrupted when Aimee fainted. But here, in open court, Keyes would not have a chance to ask that question again, because at least in this preliminary hearing, Aimee would never have to take the stand.

On the other hand there was Arthur Betts, a bell boy at the Hotel Clark who was supposed to identify Aimee as having entered Ormiston's room. On the witness stand he suffered a total memory loss. Two other prosecution witnesses suffered such a similar  memory failure under oath. And there was another problem, which the defense brought up in cross-examination with all the witnesses from Carmel. If they were so certain the woman in the “love nest” had been the famous evangelist, why had none of them claimed the rewards offered by newspapers for information on Aimee's whereabouts?

Then there was the lack of physical evidence. The Carmel “Love Nest” produced lots of fingerprints, but none belonging to Aimee Semple McPherson. And the grocery lists, recovered from the back yard, and identified as being written in Aimee's handwriting, had gone missing.  Photo-stats remained (above), but the defense never ceased in pointing out prosecution experts were now only working from copies. Besides, they had their own experts who insisted, it was not Sister Aimee's handwriting.

 

Aimee's kidnapping story was always a problem for Aimee's lawyers. Her escape from the kidnappers was just not believable. As D.A. Asa Keyes put it, “That was 20 miles in blistering, 120-degree sun…and yet she wasn’t blistered. Her clothes weren’t soiled. She wasn’t perspiring. Her heels weren’t broken. She didn’t ask for water. Taken to a hospital in Douglas, Arizona...she wasn’t dehydrated." Author Louis Adamic argued, “The only way she can convince me that she made that... hike across the desert...is to do it all over again, and let me ride behind her in an automobile equipped...with a huge canteen of water; and if she asks me for a single drink or a lift, I’ll give it to her and then laugh right in her face. “

Still Aimee's version of events never varied by an inch or an instant, under oath or from the pulpit. When challenged Aimee (above) would always say with a beatific smile, “That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.” She repeated that line so often it was eventually used with great effect by vaudeville and movie star Mae West, whose entire career was a parody of "the world's most pulchritudinous evangelist", Sister Aimee McPherson.. 

On Wednesday, 3 November, Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Samuel Blake concluded the hearing by telling the small courtroom (above) he found ample evidence that Aimee Semple McPherson, her mother Mildred Kennedy, and Mrs. Lorraine Weiseman-Sielaff. were indeed involved in a “criminal conspiracy to commit acts injurious to public morals and to prevent and obstruct justice.” It was assumed Weisman-Sielaff would at some point plead guilty to a lesser crime, in exchange for her testimony against the other two . Aimee and Mildred were facing a possible 42 years in prison, each. In Spartenburg, South Carolina, humorist Will Rogers was traveling with Queen Marie, of Romania. Referring to the queen, Rogers wrote, “Bless her heart. America owes her a debt of gratitude for running...Aimee McPherson back among the want ads.”

And then, while the shock waves were still roiling back and forth across Los Angeles' culture, the unstable Lorraine Weisman-Sielaff (above) changed her story again.

- 30 -