SYMHC Classics: The Vanishing of Sister Aimee

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Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Evangelist Amy Simple McPherson disappeared while out for a swim on May eighteenth, nineteen twenty six, so ninety eight years ago today if you're listening on the day this episode came out, So for today, we have our episode on her and her disappearance as Today's Saturday Classic. This originally came out on November nineteenth, twenty fourteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: Hello One, Welcome to the podcast.

00:00:41
Speaker 1: I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V.

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Speaker 2: Wilson, and we're going to talk about an evangelist today, an evangelist who broke all kinds of barriers and rose to incredible popularities in the nineteen twenties and then vanished. And there are still mysteries surrounding that disappearance, but they might not be the mysteries you would expect. Just in the interest of expectations management, we're not really going to dig particularly deep into this evangelist's religion and doctrines. We'll talk about it as it relates to the events of her life and sort of how she became famous and then had this sort of huge public turning point. But in the interest of time and sticking to history rather than theology, we're not going to break down her views in relation to other Christian views. And there were certainly some debates and disagreements within the church about sort of how she handled things versus how other sects handled things, and we're not really digging into that. She's also a person whose life is extremely well documented. So if you have heard of this person and you may know her story, you may be like, hey, they didn't mention X, Y or Z. That's because this podcast runs very long already, and we're kind of just trying to cover what sort of led, as I said, to her fame and sort of how that built up and then how her life shifted pretty suddenly. So if we've left anything out, it's really for the interest of time and kind of trying to keep the story on track, because there are many, many different things we could talk about in relation to her. But the person we're talking about, in case you were wondering or maybe even guest, is Amy Simple McPherson, and she was absolutely a really extraordinary figure in early twentieth century religious landscape. She preached both in the US and abroad, and at a time when most women were expected to stick to the roles of wife and mother, Amy dedicated herself above all to her ministry and opened the door for other women to be religious leaders on that sort of huge scale public level. So first we will talk about sort of her origins.

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Speaker 1: Amy Elizabeth Kennedy was born on October ninth, eighteen ninety in Ontario, Canada. Her parents were James Morgan Kennedy and Mildred Pierce Kennedy, and they were very religious. James was the organist and choir director of their Methodist church, and Many, as her mother was called, had been raised by Salvationists after being orphaned as a child, and Amy was a little bit rebellious by nature. Early on in her life, she kind of went through a phase where she eschewed her parents' religion. Dad appears to have been brief.

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Speaker 2: And kind of just one of those developmental phases where like young adults sort of test their parents in their boundaries, because later she rebelled even more vehemently against the teaching of evolution in her school. She really spoke out against the theory of evolution a lot throughout her life. That's another thing that we're not going to go into depth in, but if you wanted to research that, there's certainly a wealth of information about it. By the time she graduated high school, though, Amy was very devoted to her faith.

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Speaker 1: When Amy was just seventeen, she got married for the first time. Her groom, Robert Semple, was an Irish Pentecostal missionary that she'd met at a revival that had been really pivotal in cementing her commitment to her religion. He was ten years older than she was, and the two of them got married on August twelfth, nineteen oh eight, and the Kennedy's Apple Orchard. Robert's missionary work took them to Stratsford, Ontario, and then London, Ontario, and eventually Chicago, Illinois in early nineteen oh nine, and there they were both ordained as ministers. They started touring the United States and Canada on evangelical tours, and back when Robert and Amy were still courting, they had actually hatched this dream together of serving as missionaries in China, and after their were datement and their early faith tours in North America, they really felt like they were ready and it was time to make their move. Into international ministry, so in nineteen ten, they left Chicago. In her autobiography The Story of My Life, Amy described the final exchange in their decision to leave for Asia as her husband putting his arm around her and saying, Darling, I feel the time has come for us to leave for China, and her reply was I am ready, Robert, anywhere in the world with you.

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Speaker 2: And the Simples did not go directly to China. They first went to Belfast, Ireland to visit Robert's home and his family, and from there they traveled to London. They also traveled to the Suez Canal before eventually making their way to Asia, and they arrived in Hong Kong in June of nineteen ten, and at this point Amy was pregnant. She was very pregnant. She was into her third trimester.

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Speaker 1: Just a few weeks after they got to Hong Kong, both Amy and Robert got sick, and they had both contracted malaria. While Amy recovered, Robert eventually died from his illness on August nineteenth, nineteen ten. So young missus Semple found herself pregnant and penniless in a foreign country and a widow at the age of nineteen, and because at this point she was so late in her pregnancy and she was still in a week in state from her own bout of malaria. She had not recovered fully, but she was close to recovery. Amy had to stay in Hong Kong even after Robert had died, and so she gave birth to her daughter, ROBERTA. Starr, just a month later, still in Hong Kong, on September seventeenth. And although Robert was gone, he continued to be a really significant influence in her life. Yeah, there have been some discussions if you read in various autobiographical accounts of hers and also biographies written by others, that kind of hinted the fact that because Robert died when they were still very early in their marriage and she was very young, and he became a little bit idealized in her head and kind of became this model of perfection. And there have been some debates among historians about if Robert had lived, would she have still held him in the same high esteem for the rest of her life, or would they have settled into a more mundane sort of equals relationship instead of sort of the hero worship that she carried with her, but not long after the arrival of her daughter. About a month after Roberta was born, Amy made her way back to the United States, and this time she settled in New York City and her mother joined her there, both to help the new mother out and because Many had an interest in working with the Salvation Army, Amy also did the same thing, and they both worked to collect money, like they would go into movie theaters and collect money, and they also served food and the rescue mission there. It wasn't long before she met an accountant named Harold Stewart McPherson in the city, and the two of them became friends and then gradually started courting. Many wasn't really enthusiastic about the relationship. She was concerned that Amy's involvement with Harold would lead her away from her religious calling. Yeah, all of their work with the Salvation Army had really cemented, certainly for Minni and to Amy as well, that you know, ministry of one form or another was going to be her her life's work. And even though Minni did not oppose Harold as a person, since she didn't find anything wrong with him, she was just worried that, like falling in love again was going to kind of derail the vision that Amy had for her life, and in fact that kind of came true for a bit. In nineteen eleven, Amy moved with her daughter Roberta, to Chicago, where she married Harold on October twenty fourth of that year, and less than a year into their marriage, the McPherson's moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and on March twenty third of nineteen thirteen, the couple welcomed their son, Ral Potter McPherson. He eventually his middle name changed from Potter, which had been I believe the doctor who delivered him, to Kennedy, which had been her maiden name, and away from Potter. Amy had been involved with their church in Chicago, but her religious fervor really intensified after Roth was born. She made a go of a life as a housewife and Providence for several years, but to be really blunted, she was unhappy. Harold had hoped that she would find fulfillment in motherhood and life as his wife, but it just didn't work out that way.

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Speaker 2: And at one point. One thing that comes up repeatedly throughout any biography of hers is that she sort of had like a long series of just odd health struggles. And at one point during this time, Amy became very very ill. She required a hysterectomy, she had to have surgery for an appendicitis. Her condition was very grave. They had called her mother to the hospital because they thought she was going to die, so Harold had made sure the family note was going on. And during this time, when she was you know, lingering near death, Amy describes being called to by a voice, which she believed to be God, saying now will you go, and she felt that she would answer with yes, she would indeed go. She knew it would either be to the afterlife or to ministry, and at that point she just gave herself over to whatever was going to happen. And she immediately, she said, felt the pain leave her body. And after that, over the course of the next several weeks, she made a full and rather rapping into some description's almost miraculous recovery.

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Speaker 1: Her health turnaround convinced Amy that the only path for her was full time ministry. She packed up the kids and left Harold while he was out one night in June of nineteen fifteen. First she went to her parents' farm in Canada, where she dropped off the children, and then she sent Harold a telegram that read, I have tried to walk your way and have failed. Won't you come now and walk my way. I'm sure we will be happy. Amy had basically chosen the ministry over Harold, and in turn, Harold, when he received this note, decided he would choose Amy over life. In Rhode Island, he followed her, and he joined her in her ministry, traveling from tent revival to tent revival, and he would travel ahead of her to the new sites and make sure that they had all the required permits to have these revivals, and that you know, tents were set up and all the needs are arranged, so that her ministry could just run smoothly and she could focus on the religion and her message and not have to worry about all the sundry, mundane sort of nuts and bolts of setting up these events. After the first two years of traveling revival ministry, Amy also started up a magazine called The Bridal Call to spread her messages and her teachings through the written word, so much as a modern day personality might try to expand their reach using social media to engage with an audience. Amy's magazine drew her new followers.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, it was very popular. And while she felt that she was following her calling and doing all of this, Harold really always felt like he was just following Amy. He continued to hope that she would somehow find happiness in their family and fulfillment in their marriage, but his hopes never manifested. You know, he sort of recognized that he was just kind of a secondary part of her life. And Amy remained devoted to her ministry, agree to her deceased first husband who had really sparked this passion for evangelical preaching in her, and those elements combined with this life on the road, which was really rudimentary. You read about them kind of washing their clothes and streams and sleeping outside at night and having to deal with, you know, bugs out in camping situations and just you know, it was not a life of luxury by any means, and it really started to take a toll on their marriage. So Harold eventually returned to Providence and they were divorced late in the summer of nineteen twenty one.

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Speaker 1: From nineteen nineteen on, Amy's ministry really took off, and her approach had always been really entered denominational, but she wound up being credentialed by a number of churches as though she was actually affiliated with their official ministries, even though she had never sought out those credentials. She was very well liked and gained a devoted following, so a lot of churches just wanted to have her associated with them in some way, And in addition into being welcoming to all people, her revivals and sermons were different from a lot of what had come before in that they were very positive in tone. She focused on the loving, accepting image of Jesus rather than preaching as many ministers did at the time, and had for many years of sort of the more vengeful fire and brimstone vision of God. And faith healing was also an important part of her ministry, and her sort of uplifting spirituality and her passionate but upbeat and cheerful approach to the whole thing was incredibly appealing in post World War One America. It was different and it was fresh, and people were really drawn to it. On top of her traveling ministry and her magazine, Amy also started publishing books in the late nineteen teens. She was a prolific writer and produced numerous volumes about herself and her teachings over the years, including This Is That and Divine Healing Sermons.

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Speaker 2: In nineteen twenty one, Amy decided that it was really time to find a permanent home for her ministry, and she bought land near the Echo Park neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, to begin fulfilling a mission that she believed God had given her, which was building the Angelus Temple there. And this was a time when Los Angeles was growing at a really incredible rate, so Amy was sort of smart slash fortunate one or the other or both to secure the land for the temple. When she did, she kind of got in just as the real estate market was really about to explode. To raise funds for the construction, she spent the next two years on a rigorous tour, first driving back and forth throughout the United States, traveling as was usual, with her mother and children in the car. Then she expanded her ministry and the financing of the temple with a tour of Australia. And it was while she was touring the US in nineteen twenty two, so during this sort of fundraising tour that Amy, while she was giving a sermon in Oakland, California, was inspired to envision what would eventually become the Four Square Church, which she found, and this was based on the four identities of Jesus that she was preaching about as a savior, as a healer, as a baptizer in the Holy Spirit, and as the coming King. Finally, on New Year's Day of nineteen twenty three, the Angelus Temple was dedicated. It could seat five three hundred people, and the Four Square Church was founded there, although it took several years for that to be formally incorporated, and later in nineteen twenty three, she also founded the Lighthouse for International Four Square Evangelism Bible College so that she could educate others to be evangelists.

00:15:37
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty four, she gave a sermon on the radio for the first time at Los Angeles station KFSG. Later she'd become the first woman to be issued a license to operate a radio station. And yeah, she was really reaching out into new markets. She often talked about as something of a contradiction because in many ways she was preaching really like you know, old school values, but with a very sort of modern approach to how she was spreading this word, and so like the magazines and the books and the radio appearances, it was all sort of Some people found it hard to reconcile her traditionalist values and her modern approach to spreading them. But basically, her popularity was soaring, and just as it reached a fever pitch, she was one of the most famous people in the United States, and indeed she had a pretty big global following, she vanished. And before we talk about what happened and sort of how that all played out, do you like to take a word from a sponsor. I would.

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Speaker 2: By the mid nineteen twenty she was preaching up to twenty sermons a week, and her writing was regularly published. She was overseeing the training of her ministerial proteges, and she was sort of running the business of the church, and she was, as we said before the ad break, just incredibly popular.

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Speaker 1: On May eighteenth, nineteen twenty six, Amy, who was working on a sermon, went to the beach at the urging of her mother to take a much needed break from working. She went with her secretary, Emma Schaeffer, so that she could keep working on her sermon. In reviewer notes, Amy decided she needed a break and she went into the water for a swim.

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Speaker 2: And she did not return from that swim. At the services that were scheduled that evening for Amy to prechat, she did not appear, and instead her mother, Minnie, gave the sermon in her place. And at the end of the service, many quietly announced what had already been rumored throughout the city all afternoon, and it was now appearing in the local evening papers. Sister, as Amy was called in her ministry, had gone to the beach at Ocean Park and had vanished while swimming. Sister is gone, Many announced to the congregation, we know she is with Jesus.

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Speaker 1: The next day, a full tilt investigation went into year. There were dozens of reporters and hundreds of onlookers that appeared on the beach to see what was happening. As the investigation got underway.

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Speaker 2: The Coast Guard had boats traversing the coastline. They were looking for something, anything that might offer a clue as to what had happened to this beloved evangelist. Teams of divers scoured the waters in search of a body or of clues, and one diver actually lost his life in the search effort. There was also another fatality when a young woman who had been a member of the Church of the Four Square Gospel, who was just grief stricken at the loss of their spiritual leader, actually drowned herself. On Memorial Day, which was twelve days after the disappearance, the Angelus Temple was packed. More than twenty five thousand people showed up at the beach where Amy had vanished to grieve and set out remembrances. Police were concerned at what might happen if her body were to be found that day, so they worked on action plans for handling that kind of grim discovery. It did not happen, but they were definitely like ready to kind of address potential crowd control issues, and eventually, you know, this was now a couple weeks in church members finally accepted that Amy must have died, and in effort to recover the body, they actually the church actually paid to have the bay dynamited in the hopes that the body would surface somehow, but it did not.

00:19:24
Speaker 1: Some members of the church believed that she would be resurrected, and so they prayed and waited for her to return, and Minnie her mother arranged a memorial service at the temple, and that was scheduled for June twentieth, and more than seventeen thousand people showed up, far too many than they could fit in the building. While all of that morning was going on, there had been a whole other school of thought about what had happened to Amy. Rumors began to circulate that Amy had probably not died, but had instead purposely removed herself from the public eye for some possibly nefarious person reason. There were whispers of plastic surgery, talk of affairs, a pregnancy that she might intend to abort, and all of these rumors made their way around California and eventually the country. Really a detective claimed to have spotted her at a train station, and more sightings started to crop up after that. This will no doubt sound familiar if you've listened to our Judge Creater episode or any other missing person story. Almost every day throughout the United States, papers ran stories of the latest Amy sightings.

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Speaker 2: There were also two ransom letters that came about. The first one that Minnie Kennedy Amy's mother received, made it clear that police should not be involved and that she should turn over fifty thousand dollars if she wanted to see her daughter again. The second letter, which came a bit later, said that Amy was going to be sold into slavery if a ransom of half a million dollars wasn't paid, but they really thought she was dead at this point and that these might be hoaxes. Three days after her mother memorial service, Amy Simple McPherson emerged from the Mexican desert in Agua Priezza, Sonora, a small Mexican town just south of the border from Douglas, Arizona. She collapsed after telling a couple that she had escaped from kidnappers and had been traveling on foot for hours. Amy was of course rushed to the hospital and after that a phone call was made to her mother, and authorities working with her mother were able to confirm the evangelist's identity based on information Many provided about a scar that was on Amy's finger, and after Amy was able to provide the name of her pet pigeon, which Mini wanted for validation that it was the correct person. So at this point the lost beloved administer was found.

00:21:46
Speaker 1: After she was able to recuperate, she gave an account of what had happened to her. She said she'd been lured by a couple to their car as she got out of the water from swimming. They told her they had a sick baby that they wanted her to pray over, and when she leaned into the back seat to see the child, which was not there, she was pushed down into the floorboards and then drive it away.

00:22:10
Speaker 2: And according to her account, she had been held by a woman named Rose, a man named Steve, and another man. And she said that she had been drugged and tortured and kept in a shack, and that she had eventually escaped. She wriggled out of the ropes that she had been tied with and ran through the desert and estimated twenty miles before she reached Agua Prieta Douglas, Arizona, where Amy was hospitalized, became the focus of national attention. Reporters and followers poured into the town. The telegraph lines were overloaded with well wishes, and her story was headline news. But for some people the tide actually turned. Similar to how there were people that didn't think her disappearance quite added up. There were some people that thought her reappearance also had some suspicious elements to it. The Coachee County sheriff was suspicious of her story. He thought that the condition of her clothing was far too tidy to have been through what she claimed it happened. Additionally, police from both Douglas and Agua Prieto were unable to find any traces of the kidnappers or a shack in the area that she had described. She even accompanied search teams into the desert, but was unable to find the shack herself. McPherson had, however, received multiple threats through the years as her fame grew, so some people sort of held that up as you know, evidence that this was entirely plausible. There had been people threatening to do things to her, to kill her, and even to kidnap her for a while. Just a year prior to the disappearance, a plot to kidnap amy had been discovered and foiled by the LAPD.

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Speaker 1: Before we talk about what happened after she got home, let's have a brief word from a sponsor. As Amy and her mother headed back to Los Angeles from Arizona, the train that they were in was basically greeted all along the way by well witchers, so whether they stopped or not, sort of every town that they went through there were people by the sides of the tracks kind of waving, throwing flowers, et cetera. But even as they got back to Los Angeles, the media circus around her alleged kidnapping was really just beginning. Not only did papers have new suspicious persons to mention on an almost daily basis that they thought could be, you know, the possible perpetrators of this kidnapping, but speculations about Amy's own possible involvement in some sort of deception were also abundant. An engineer at the radio station owned by Angelus Temple had disappeared at the same time as Amy, which led some people to speculate that the two of them had been having an affair. The man in question, Kenneth Ormiston, was married, so this would definitely have been scandalous. Eventually, he admitted that he was cheating on his wife, although he was adamant that the mistress was not McPherson. Police dusted a cottage in Carmel where Ormison and a woman had been spotted, but none of the prince matched Amy's and there was even a case assembled to press charges against McPherson for conspiracy and obstruction of justice. So there was a trial that was arranged for January of nineteen twenty seven, but the charges were dropped before then as the Los Angeles District Attorney named Asa Keys started to realize that many of the witness accounts that he had built his case upon were really not credible. And then, as another side story that sometimes comes up when you're looking at this, he had his own sort of legal problems bubbling up. But so basically the whole thing fell apart. No arrests were ever made in the kidnapping, which remains unsolved, and no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of Amy McPherson has ever come to light. She wrote about the event in her nineteen twenty seven book In Service of the King, The Story of My Life, And once the furor of the kidnapping and the alleged conspiracy had died down, Amy could still be found at her ministry. She had in fact been there all along, throughout all of these headlines and investigations. Basically she went right back to work as a minister and an evangelist and a faith healer when she returned home from Arizona. One of the things she became famous for is her work feeding the needy. In nineteen twenty seven, the Angelus Temple Commissary opened its doors, and this facility is credited with feeding more than one point five million people during the depression, even when it was struggling financially itself. Amy's community outreach through the Commissary was based, as her ministry on the principle that everyone was welcome, regardless of their position in society, their religion, or their color, and she also organized a lot of other charitable work through the Commissary and also just through her ministry. But despite all of the good work that was going on in the name of the Angelus Temple, Amy never really regained the popularity and the positive press that she had enjoyed in the early nineteen twenties, and she also found that she had some troubles at work that had not been there before. At one point, her mother quit due to arguments over the handling of the Angelus Temple finances. The choir also walked out. While many and many of the choir members returned, there was ongoing tension and strife. Some of it centering on how Amy's style had shifted to more modern and fashionable attire rather than the old style of dress that many felt her position really demanded. Many who really was indispensable to the Four Square Church resigned a second time in nineteen thirty and just a month later, Amy had a nervous breakdown. After the breakdown, she took a cruise to tour Asia with her daughter. They stopped in Honolulu and they went to Hong Kong to visit Robert's grave before eventually heading to India, where McPherson was planning on quote studying the women's movement in connection with the campaign for independence. In nineteen thirty one, McPherson married a third time to an actor in one of the Angela's Temple's plays. His name was David L. Hutton. He was nine years younger than she was, and he came with all kinds of baggage, including a woman seeking legal action against him for breach of promise, claiming that he had promised a betrothal to her before marrying McPherson. Hearing this news was such a shock to the minister that she passed out, hitting her head and fracturing her skull, and after she recovered from this injury, or was at least partially recovered, it was suggested that Amy go on a holiday, so she took a recuperative cruise to Europe, accompanied only by a nurse. While she was traveling, Hutton, much to the chagrin of the church administration, began using his status Amy's husband to promote himself in theatrical endeavors outside the church. He also had a reputation as a womanizer, and the whole union was viewed with just disease by the church, in part because it was frowned upon for a divorce person to remarry so long as their former spouse was alive. Harold McPherson was still alive, although he had remarried. In all likelihood, if Hutton had been better liked, this probably would not have been that big of an issue. Yeah, People just kind of saw him as a little bit of a con man. He was a vaudevillian, and you know, I think there was a general distrust of his sort of theatrical background and that he was just playing her. And on July eighteenth of nineteen thirty three, the Chicago Tribune ran a story entitled quote Hutton sues to divorce Amy for baby hoax. Hutton had filed for divorce while McPherson was still out of the country, claiming that he had been the victim of ongoing mental cruelty in the marriage. He said that Amy had told friends before she left for Europe that she was planning to divorce him when she returned, and that she tortured him by pretending to have given birth to their child while in Paris, when in fact she had undergone an abdominal surgery. And if you remember earlier in this episode, we talked about the fact that she had a hysterectomy years before this, So it's all kind of it takes on a very sort of soap opera e crazy, he said, she said, drama turn. At this point, Hutton was also plotting to sell emotion picture story that revolved around a female evangelist, but once the marriage was behind her, macpherson seemed to dismiss this as a huge mistake. Yeah, I think she started to see him the same way everyone else did, as someone who was just trying to take advantage of her name and make a few bucks off of it. And while Amy's work carried on. You know, she continued to minister. Media interest in her ministry really had been eclipsed by interest in the more sensational and sometimes CD and theoretical aspects of her life, like the ones that people were just sort of guessing it. Amy died in Oakland, California, in nineteen forty four at the age of fifty four a kidney ailment that had some complications combined with the ingestion of sikinol, which was sleeping pills, and she wound up dying due to an accidental overdose.

00:31:27
Speaker 2: With McPherson's death, the ministry passed to her son, Rolf, who served as president of the Four Square Church until nineteen eighty eight, at which point he retired, and the Four Square Church remains today. It has more than nine million members. It's still very popular, and it was all started by this one woman who had a vision and felt she had a calling. And it's kind of fascinating to me to see how this sort of grew and kind of juxtaposed against sort of modern evangelism. It's very interesting. She was really groundbreaking in a number of ways. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive. If you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed Dhistory, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.