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Crimes of the Times
The Forgotten Prophet of Los Angeles
00:30:44
Aimee Semple McPherson built a religious empire in Los Angeles and became one of the most influential evangelists in America. When she vanished from a California beach and reappeared weeks later with an unbelievable story, the scandal that followed threatened to destroy everything she had built.
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- [00:01]
Christopher Goffard
This is an la times studios podcast. When she disappeared in May 1926, Amy Semple McPherson was already one of the most famous women in America. She was equal parts prophet and performer. A charismatic Canadian farm girl who had stormed into boomtown Los Angeles with $10 and a tambourine, as she put it. She built a lavish and temple in Echo Park, a church that stands today a century later. It had a spectacular dome. It had stately pillars. It had elements of the Roman Colosseum and a movie palace. It was the biggest church in the United States, a precursor of the modern megachurch. Inside, she preached to 7,000 people a day with a brass band and an orchestra. She reenacted the Scriptures with live camels, lions and lambs. She was flamboyantly draped in robes and gowns. She topped her church with radio towers to reach the sinning masses. She wrapped old time religion in Hollywood razzmatazz. She made Pentecostalism mainstream and the Bible a vaudeville show. She was the biggest spectacle in a town rapidly building its identity on spectacle.
- [01:27]
Gary Krist
She would do these illustrated sermons. She would dress up as a motorcycle cop in order to arrest sin or put sin under arrest.
- [01:37]
Christopher Goffard
Gary Christ is the author of a 2018 book called the Mirage Illusion, Imagination and the Invention of Los Angeles. In it, he makes the case for McPherson as one of the formative figures in the creation of Los Angeles, along with movie titan D.W. griffith and Aqueduct engineer William Mulholland.
- [01:58]
Gary Krist
She would dress up as a USC football player to carry the ball for Christ. So all of these things were really enormously popular because she really was a show person. Even Charlie Chaplin at one point took her aside and said, like it or not, you are an actress.
- [02:18]
Christopher Goffard
People did not go to her for the fire and brimstone rhetoric that other preachers specialized in. She had a sunnier, more optimistic message. She was said to have healing powers at her touch. People said the sick were healed and the blind gained sight. During the Great Depression, she fed thousands.
- [02:39]
Gary Krist
You know, there were things going on every day, all day long. There were various groups, women's groups, and prayer groups. There was a prayer tower where somebody was praying 24 hours a day. But if you were lucky enough to attend one of her famous illustrated sermons, you would see a play essentially with actors and sometimes even like live animals on stage. It was quite a show. And this was one reason why the temple became the number one tourist attraction in Los Angeles at that time. There's a wonderful story where she had a parrot on the. On the stage. I call it a stage I don't think she would have called it a stage, but. And the parrot had this habit of uttering curses and obscenities. She turned it into a sermon on sin and how the. The parrot could go to hell. But she was going to find a way to save the parrot from this. It's a horrible fate, but the parrot had obviously been misled morally at some point in its life.
- [03:52]
Christopher Goffard
McPherson was one of the most famous women in America. But tantalizingly sphinx like then and now,
- [04:00]
Claire Hoffman
you kind of can't put your arms around her.
- [04:03]
Christopher Goffard
This is Claire Hoffman, who wrote the most recent macpherson biography, Sister the Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Amy Semple McPherson.
- [04:13]
Claire Hoffman
There's this kind of unknowable aspect to her.
- [04:18]
Christopher Goffard
The enduring mystery of McPherson's life remains what motivated her vanishing act. During a five week period from May to June 1926, McPherson was 35 at the time. She was sitting under an umbrella on Venice beach working on a sermon called Light and Darkness. As far as her panicked secretary could tell, she then walked into the water and never came out. A May 19, 1926 edition of the Los Angeles Record featured five front page stories about the disappearance and presumed death of the world's greatest woman evangelist. One story reported that the ocean opened its arms and and embraced in death the pastor. Thousands crowded the beach as divers searched for her. Hoffman says one diver died of hypothermia and a despairing disciple drowned herself. Two days after her memorial service, the prophetess was back. She had emerged from the Mexican desert claiming she'd been kidnapped. In keeping with her style, the story was flamboyantly, dazzlingly draped. There were outlaws, there was a daring escape. There was a perilous trek across the sand. None of it could be verified. However, Los Angeles prosecutors dragged her into court and accused her of staging the disappearance to bilk money out of her flock. There were stories of a secret affair with her married radio operator. It was irresistible. Newspaper copy. A sex scandal involving a living saint to the end of her life. Sister Amy stuck to her story and it has divided biographers for generations. Hoffman says that books about her tend to fall into two categories. On the one hand are the hagiographies that emphasize her influence on American worship and minimize the scandal.
- [06:21]
Claire Hoffman
And then, on the other hand, you have these books that paint her as this just absolutely con artist, right, who was calculating and scheming and every move she made was a fraudulent one. And she was, you know, an absurd trickster and so is not taken seriously as a figure in American religion not taken seriously in terms of her faith. And so I honestly am just my book is kind of like, hey, I think both of these things are true. I like a feminist pathbreaker who's not perfect. Like, I think she's she's kind of she's good and she's bad, like Sister Sinner.
- [07:09]
Christopher Goffard
Today on Crimes of the Times, the mystery of Amy Semple McPherson, the evangelist who helped shape Los Angeles and American religion in major ways, but whose legacy has a bizarre question mark right at its center. I'm Christopher Goffard.
- [07:42]
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- [08:47]
Christopher Goffard
reminding you that the stories you hear on this podcast are based on original reporting by LA Times journalists like myself, and with deepfakes and AI generated content on the rise, it's more important than ever to support reporters on the ground. Help support our newsroom by subscribing to the LA Times. Head to latimes.com getlat to get started. That's latimes.com get latin during one of
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- [10:19]
Christopher Goffard
When the evangelist Amy Semple McPherson reappeared after a month long disappearance in 1926, the story she told was as superheated as any piece of pulp fiction. She claimed that, and that she had been writing a sermon on the beach near Venice when she went for a dip in the Pacific in her swimsuit and bathing cap. When she emerged, a couple lured her to their car by claiming they needed the touch of her healing hand on a sick baby. Then she said she was drugged and imprisoned in a desert shack. Her captors threatened to sell her into slavery if her church didn't produce a $500,000 ransom. But 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. The story was full of holes. Police looked hard, but never could find the shack or the kidnappers. She had not shown any special thirst after her supposed ordeal in the desert sun. And her skin wasn't sunburned and her feet had only a couple of blisters. It just did not add up. In her new biography of McPherson, Clare Hoffman withholds conclusive judgments about whether the disappearance was a hoax, but she considers it likely.
- [11:48]
Claire Hoffman
The case against her was pretty damning. There were certain things for me that felt pivotal. I couldn't quite unsee them.
- [11:56]
Christopher Goffard
One detail that undermined the abduction story, in Hoffman's view, was the thin wristwatch a camera captured on the evangelist soon after her reappearance. If she had walked into the sea in just a swimsuit and bathing cap, where had the watch come from?
- [12:14]
Claire Hoffman
There's those who have, like, a more cynical view that she did it as a publicity stunt. And I don't. I don't get that feeling. It wasn't so well executed. Yeah.
- [12:26]
Christopher Goffard
She'd take off the wristwatch at least.
- [12:27]
Claire Hoffman
Yeah. Yeah.
- [12:30]
Christopher Goffard
I mean, she. She wrote plays.
- [12:31]
Claire Hoffman
Yes.
- [12:32]
Christopher Goffard
You knew how a plot unfolds.
- [12:34]
Claire Hoffman
Yes.
- [12:34]
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- [12:34]
Claire Hoffman
You have to have continuity work.
- [12:36]
Christopher Goffard
Right. Right.
- [12:37]
Claire Hoffman
Yeah. She would have been dirtier, like she would have done a better job. There's something about it. That feels like kind of very spontaneous to me, but it's. That's just. Those are all just my guesses.
- [12:52]
Christopher Goffard
Even before her disappearance, rumors swirled of McPherson's 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 love nest in Carmel during her missing month. Gary Criss, the Mirage factory author, told me that to him, the detail that seemed fatal to McPherson's credibility was the letter her mother received a month after the disappearance demanding that she, quote, raise the doe. It was supposed to be from the kidnappers who called themselves the Avengers.
- [13:37]
Gary Krist
There's actually a typewritten transcription of it on the wall at the parsonage, which is, you know, now her museum where she lived at the time. So they're proud of it. But it really is quite a remarkable document. I mean, there are parts of it that seem to come straight out of a Damon Runyon short story or something like that.
- [14:00]
Christopher Goffard
We've moved her to a safe place now and have doped out a plan of ransom payment, the letter said. We are sick and tired of her infernal preaching. She spouts scripture in answer to everything. We took her for two reasons. First, to wreck the damned temple, and second, to collect a tidy half million. It sounded less like a real note than the snappy slang of the hard boiled imagination.
- [14:28]
Gary Krist
At one point they say something like, we know you got to show the letter to raise the doe for the. For the. To get her back for the ransom. And later on they say, we sure doped out a corker of a. A plan. That's apple pie for us. But then at other points in the. In the note, it almost sounds like it was written by an Oxford don. I mean, there's one sentence that says, but though we've treated her respectfully, in fairness to her position and value to us, what the future holds for her is entirely up to you. So there's really this inconsistent tone throughout the whole thing, that. Which makes me think that it's a fictional document. But. But even worse than that is that they actually reveal their whole modus operandi. At one point they say, it might interest you to know how we did this, what we did on the beach. Well, we had inside workers in the temple who kept us informed about her whereabouts, et cetera, et cetera. And really what real life criminals would deliberately put police on the scent of their accomplices like that? So all of these things combine to make me think that this is a fictional creation by someone who knew how to tell a story. I mean, that was largely the secret of Amy's success. So I think when she was in this tough spot where she had, you know, this, she had allegedly been kidnapped and she decided, well, I've got to get back. How do I do it without, you know, getting myself in real trouble? She kind of concocted this story.
- [16:12]
Christopher Goffard
Do you hear her voice in that ransom letter? You think that's her?
- [16:16]
Gary Krist
I do, I do. You know, if you, if you look at some of those illustrated sermons, she would act out the role that she was playing. So as the motorcycle cop, she was a little bit tough, you know, as. And in the football players, likewise. So I do think that, you know, that could explain the wavering tone because there were times where she said, oh, I've got to, I've got to sound like a kidnapper, you know, a low class criminal. But the mask slipped a few times and her real voice came out.
- [16:50]
Christopher Goffard
But what kind of desperation was she feeling in May 1926 that made it seem necessary to escape the empire she had so single mindedly built? Was it some kind of mental break? Was it a realization that her imprisoning celebrity had deformed any hope of ordinary human contact? She's trapped in this role, right? She's in love with this guy. You could see how a dramatist would create a scenario where she feels forced into a corner. Like this is the rational thing to do.
- [17:24]
Claire Hoffman
Somehow you get the sense that she's psychologically a complex figure, you know, like, and she's, she seems psychologically different. Actually, even before her disappearance, she had a number of what she called mental breakdowns and, and afterwards quite a few. You know, I mean, she had a sort of what you think of as like an artist's Persona in a lot of ways. Right. Like she would have to go and lay in the dark for a number of months, you know, just drink orange juice and you know, even the sound of waves bothers her. So, you know, this high sensitivity. She didn't like to be one on one with people. She preferred the stage. So there isn't a lot of like close friendships. There weren't a lot of letters or personal notes. Like, you know, the idea was that everything that she thought or felt just was immediately channeled out to her people, whether it was the newsletter or in sermons or the radio. And I can imagine somebody who is like that kind of came up with her own internal logic and motivation for how she would go about doing it.
- [18:36]
Christopher Goffard
Though McPherson was surrounded by armies of people, it's easy to envision her as very much alone.
- [18:44]
Gary Krist
She was doing everything. Particularly at this point in 1926.
- [18:49]
Christopher Goffard
This is Gary Crist again.
- [18:50]
Gary Krist
She was being pulled in so many different directions by so many different people, and she felt that she had to do everything. You know, whether her disappearance is explained as a romantic rendezvous with her radio engineer, Kenneth Ormiston, which a lot of people believe, or what I think is maybe a little bit more likely is that she just at that point said, I have to get out. I am just drowning here figuratively. And she had almost like a psychic break and said, I've got to get out. And she didn't think ahead. And at a certain point she said, well, I've made this. I've taken this step. I've disappeared. Now I have to explain it.
- [19:34]
Christopher Goffard
Los Angeles authorities did not buy her story. The district attorney charged her with conspiring to suborn perjury and obstruction of justice. She endured a grand jury proceeding and a preliminary hearing. Hints of her secret life played out in court. Witnesses described her wearing a disguise of thick goggles in her paramour's company. McPherson stuck to her story. She portrayed herself as a persecuted prophet. She blamed the prosecution on a conspiracy of satanic forces. She had glimpsed LA's underworld, she said, describing it as a kingdom which exists just beneath a thin, veneered surface. She was being pursued by what she called the hordes of darkness. The evangelist got some support from unexpected places, including from the acerbic Baltimore City journalist H.L. mencken, who was never a fan of her church, much less religion. But he thought the case against her was an obscenity. That, and the fate of Sister Amy after the break.
- [21:02]
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- [22:58]
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already paying more for just about everything. The cost of groceries, rent, childcare and health care continue to rise. And now Sacramento lawmakers are considering a proposal that could make health coverage a lot more expensive. The governor's proposed budget includes a managed care organization, or MCO tax that would increase the cost of health coverage by 1.5 billion. Who pays? Employers who provide coverage for their workers, working families who rely on that coverage, and Californians who are already struggling with rising costs. The proposal will add more than $100 per person per year to the cost of health coverage. For a family of four, that's hundreds of dollars in additional costs every year. California should be making health care more affordable, not more expensive. Learn more about the MCO tax on health coverage at YourPlan, your advocate.com and urge lawmakers to reject the $1.5 billion health care tax to support affordable Medi Cal funding without raising costs on California families, workers and employers paid for by California association of Health Plans.
- [23:56]
Christopher Goffard
The Baltimore sun journalist H.L. mencken came to Los Angeles in 1926 to cover the criminal proceedings against evangelist Amy Semple McPherson. He did not particularly admire her. He described her as a, quote, commonplace and transparent mountebank whose sermons were a, quote, time honored evangelical hokum. He described the church she'd built, Angelus Temple and Echo park, as Large and hideous. He watched the way she commanded assistance on stage and compared her to the madam of a busy brothel. Why was she so popular? Because, Mencken said, there were more morons collected in Los Angeles than in any other place on earth. Yet Mencken considered the criminal case against her a travesty. The DA accused her of having staged her kidnapping to swindle her followers. But Mencken believed it was as simple as her need to lie to disguise an affair. He wrote, it is unheard of indeed in any civilized community for a woman to be tried for perjury uttered in defense of her honor. The DA abruptly dropped the charges in January 1927, possibly because McPherson blackmailed publisher William Randolph Hearst to use his sway with local prosecutors. It's a theory with some support in FBI reports. The dirt on Hearst, Rumors of a love triangle murder on his yacht. So did the scandal wreck McPherson's ministry? Far from it. Her following doubled in the 1930s. She was big enough to be name dropped in the lyrics of Hooray for Hollywood. But her tone grew darker and more paranoid.
- [25:45]
Claire Hoffman
And so she saw just like much more dark forces at work. Right. You know, when she accused the law enforcement in Los Angeles as being kind of like dark agents of the Pope, you know, like, she just used a lot more paranoid and more divisive language.
- [26:04]
Christopher Goffard
McPherson's relationships with her family fell apart. 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.
- [26:25]
Claire Hoffman
To me, it felt like a dangerous game that she was playing, playing a way that she was living. Taking prescription drugs like that and taking them in an uncontrolled way and so frequently that she would lose consciousness and continue to take more. She took, like, half bottle. So it's a. It's a lot. But I think more of the question is, like, how did. She was at a point where she was so out of it already that that was kind of status quo.
- [26:51]
Christopher Goffard
You know, psychologists call it sub intentional suicide. Right. Where you'll, like, dive into the waves and swim way out past where, you know, you can get back. It's not really suicide, but part of you knows what you're doing.
- [27:06]
Claire Hoffman
Yes, that would be how I would categorize it.
- [27:13]
Christopher Goffard
McPherson's life has since inspired musicals and novels, films and songs. It inspired arguably the best episode of the original Star Trek, 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 livestream services. It's an innovation that its tech savvy founder would have embraced.
- [27:47]
Claire Hoffman
She's so formative in all these big parts of culture, but, you know, I mean, I just cracked open my daughter's AP history book and she's not in there. You know, my theory of why we're not finding her in the AP history book is she was too complex.
- [28:06]
Christopher Goffard
Gary Christ, author of the Mirage Factory, argues that she's one of the people who invented the metropolis of Los Angeles as we know it.
- [28:14]
Gary Krist
I've written a series of books about how great American cities came to be. And Los Angeles is just an unusual case because there's really many factors mitigating against a large city being in that particular location. You know, the absence of water, the absence of coal, and other things to fuel industry. So the argument of the book is that it required a certain amount of both creativity and perhaps a little bit of deceptive advertising to get people to come to this distant corner of the country. And I focus on three figures. William Mulholland, who was the great engineer who built the aqueduct that made the city possible as a large city. D.W. griffith, who gave the city an industry by more or less, you know, being a pioneer in the motion picture industry. And Amy Semple McPherson, I think, is a good case of somebody who created this image of Los Angeles as a place of unconventional spirituality. And I think together these three figures, it required people like this, flawed though they may be, to really get the job done and make a city where all things say a city shouldn't be here. I mean, she was amazing celebrity in her day. By far the best known of the three characters I cover in the book. But of course, they are now much better known than she is.
- [29:52]
Christopher Goffard
Krist says that she did much to repair her name during the Great Depression when she fed the destitute, and during World War II when she raised money for the allied effort.
- [30:03]
Gary Krist
I think there were people who turned against her, but she won them back with real hard work. She really redeemed her reputation, I think, through sheer hard work and persistence. That's how she ended her life, being as popular as ever, really. There was a whole media campaign that she put on to depict herself as a persecuted victim. And in the immediate, immediate run up to the alleged kidnapping, she had been like exposing criminals and things like that. And so she was trying to suggest that maybe some of these people wanted to get even with her. For exposing them to the law. You know, she was, as I say, she was a storyteller and this made a good story.
- [31:11]
Christopher Goffard
From LA Times Studios, this is Crimes of the Times. To read more about these cases, check out Crimes of the times@latimes.com we also have a link to our video episodes in the show. Notes this episode was written and reported by me, your host, Christopher Goffard. Our Senior Producers are Mary Knoth and Jonathan Shiflett of Studio Phonic. Our editor is Cindy Chang and our Associate Producer is Jordan Patterson. Production help from Audrey Ngo. Our Camera operators are Michael Siegel, Josh Summers and Peter Grayson. Our Director of Post Production is Patrick Stewart and our Senior Sound Recording Engineer is Nick Norton with additional engineering by Jordan Patterson. Our Podcast Marketing Manager is Bryn Jura, our Senior Media Marketing Manager is Will Dobson and our Product Marketing Director is Becca Dorman. Our Podcast Senior Finance Manager is Jenner Canaleo. Special thanks to LA Times Studio President Anna Magzanian, President and Chief Operating Officer of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Argenteri and Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times, Terry Tang. Crimes of the Times is executive produced and co created by Darius, Derek Schon and me Christopher Goffer.
- [32:41]
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