Monday, August 20, 2007
Page 7
PERSPECTIVES (Column)
Keyes Changes His Mind, Decides to Prosecute Aimee Semple McPherson
By ROGER M. GRACE
Forty-Fifth in a Series
ASA KEYES, Los Angeles’ district attorney, clearly did not want to prosecute evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, who had seemingly faked a kidnapping to cover up for the 35 days she was missing, off on a frolic with a married man.
Focusing today on Keyes retiscence to act, followed by his eventual bringing of charges against the celebrity pastor, I’ll start by recapping, with elaboration, some of what appeared here last week.
An investigation by Keyes’ office began on June 23, 1926, the day McPherson—who had been presumed the victim of an accidental drowning at Venice Beach—appeared in Agua Prieta, a town in Mexico. She had allegedly cut the ropes that bound her while her three captors, two men and a woman, had left her unattended in a shack. (They left unguarded the subject of their $500,000 ransom demand, who was secured only by knots?) McPherson had supposedly made her way to the town through the desert in a 17-hour trek, on a day when the heat reached 125-degrees…yet, without signs of perspiration on her dress, without her shoes being scuffed, without being sunburned. She was taken across the border to a hospital in Douglas, Ariz. where there was found to be no cause to treat her for dehydration.
Keyes’ investigation ended June 28, without explanation. On July 3, he met with the grand jury and, as the Times tells it in its edition the next day:
“Mr. Keyes was reported to have assumed a pessimistic attitude toward the evidence in the case and the possibility of a conviction. It was reliably reported, however, that the grand jury unanimously considered the present evidence too important to warrant a dropping of any phase of the case.”
It urged Keyes to continue his investigation.
With virtually no additional gathering of evidence, Keyes asked the grand jury on July 6 to institute proceedings…prematurely, it would seem. That body opened its hearings two days later; after 12 days of testimony, it found that it had no one to indict.
Further facts came to light, however, pointing to McPherson having engaged in a covert five-week sex-spree with the engineer at her radio station, Kenneth G. Ormiston, a married man, with her wearing goggles or other devices to disguise herself, and the two posing as “Mr. and Mrs.” This-and-That. Deputy District Attorney Joseph Ryan located persons in Carmel who identified the duo as occupants of a cottage in that Monterey County seaside community during part of the time McPherson was missing. A grocery list was uncovered there in McPherson’s handwriting.
But when fingerprints recovered at the cottage proved to be too smudged to be identified and some of the identifications appeared shakable, Keyes was readily willing to call off further digging by office…despite mounting evidence that McPherson’s story was phony, and that her testimony was thus perjured.
That brings us to the issuance of a public statement by Keyes, which is where I left off last time. I erred in saying the statement was “issued” on Aug. 6, 1926; actually, that’s when it was reported by newspapers, but it was issued the previous day. Anyway, the statement appeared to lend as much finality to the matter as Porky Pig’s pronouncement at the end of Looney Tunes cartoons, “Th-th-th-that’s all folks.”
Portions of Keyes’ statement were related here last week; he pointed to the lack of fingerprint evidence, noted “that the witnesses are not positive,” and expressed concern over the ill-effects that would ensue from a hasty prosecution, including “plung[ing] this county into a religious turmoil.”
Also in that statement, Keyes recited that the Grand Jury, three days earlier, had accepted his view that the matter should be laid to rest, saying:
“I have told the jury that, after careful examination, I do not, at the present time, find myself as district attorney in possession of the weight of evidence which the law requires to disprove testimony of an alleged abduction.”
Of course, the present inability of the DA’s Office to prove a case against McPherson was no impediment to his continuing to gather evidence.
The district attorney also said in his statement:
“The investigation of this matter has been one of the most difficult ever presented to a prosecutor. Because of the prominence of the persons involved, the sensational features of Mrs. McPherson’s disappearance and return, and the unfortunate entanglement of religion, this case has been investigated in the full flare of publicity.”
His desire to avert “religious turmoil” may explain, to some extent, Keyes’ attempt to squelch the matter. Soon after her reappearance, McPherson had become the target of Robert “Fighting Bob” Shuler, a rousing rival radio reverend. The June 28 edition of the Times recounts Shuler’s sermon the day before, a Sunday, from his pulpit at the Trinity Methodist Church:
“He said he had heard Mrs. McPherson’s sermon yesterday afternoon and she compared her own case with the Biblical happenings.
“Mrs. McPherson said, Mr. Shuler continued, that the three Hebrews came out of the fiery furnace without their shoes being burned. For a person to wander through twenty miles of desert heat without clothing being torn and catching thorns or cactus is either a miracle or an alternative, he intimated.”
It was the day on which that article appeared that Keyes called off his investigation, refusing to tell why.
Robert Bahr, in his 1979 book, “Least of All Saints,” says of Keyes:
“He was a politician of skill and shrewdness born of many years in the arena, and he recognized at the first word of Aimee’s reemergence in Douglas a conflict so potentially volatile that many a career including his own could perish, should the conflagration erupt. It was therefore no ineptness on his part, but rather a long-pondered decision that inspired Keyes for several weeks to take no action whatever. It was his earnest though little anticipated hope that the remarkable Mrs. McPherson, who had campaigned for every charity, helped win pay raises for city employees, distributed countless thousands of dollars to the poor and needy, and no doubt had more influence in the city than Keyes himself, would quietly slip back into her previous life and let the matter rest. He hoped, also, that by some miracle the newspapers would abandon what had proved the best-selling saga in the city’s history and that Bob Shuler would do the same with a gimmick that had already doubled the attendance at his church and incalculably increased his notoriety.”
On July 6, the same day Keyes appeared before the grand jury to ask for an investigation—quite likely aimed at bringing the matter to rest with the inevitable finding that no indictment could be handed up—the Executive Committee of the Church Federation of Los Angeles, representing a number of local Protestant churches, issued a resolution saying, in part:
“[I]t is apparent to all that either a crime of most terrible nature has been perpetrated against Mrs. Aimee Semple McPherson or else a fraud and hoax that is a shame to Christianity has been attempted, demanding in either case the most enthusiastic and honest efforts on the part of our public officials at a genuine solution of the situation now presenting itself and an official and authoritative statement from those whose duties it is to enforce the laws of the land and protect the citizens of this country by discovering and punishing what has actually happened….”
Shuler on July 22 sent an open letter to Keyes and to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Arthur Keetch, who was in charge of the grand jury, protesting that the blue ribbon panel had concluded its investigation with the simple finding that there was “insufficient evidence” of a kidnapping. He railed “against the suppression of any facts now known to the grand jury or any evidence which has been produced before that body,” and called upon Keyes and Keetch to appear before a mass meeting of his church to reveal the facts. The letter, widely published in the press, drew a response by Keetch in the form of a sedate public statement, rather than a direct reply to Shuler. He pointed out that maintaining secrecy is a grand jury’s normal operating procedure, and its duty.
Certainly, there was a bit of bickering within the Protestant community. Shuler had taken repeated potshots at McPherson, including a call, in his “open letter” to Keyes and Keetch, for a broad investigation by an “unbiased commission” of the doings of McPherson’s Angelus Temple. At one point, McPherson made an offhand comment not mentioning Shuler by name but, as the 1959 book, “The Vanishing Evangelist,” observes, “[t]he sinister inference was plain: Shuler had a hand in her abduction.”
However, Keyes cast in overly dramatic terms his desire to stave off “religious turmoil.” Surely Keyes did not envision Shuler and other ministers, along with their adherents, taking to the streets, aimed with clubs and stilettos, ready to do battle with McPherson and her followers.
Whatever concern he may have had over the prospect of escalated discord within the Protestant community if there were a prosecution of McPherson, any such unease just doesn’t seem plausible as the sole reason why he did not want to proceed.
There had to be something more to it. Was it a matter of a terror on Keyes’ part of losing a high-publicity case? Was it the product of political pressure, as alleged by Shuler…who noted the closeness of certain public officials, including the mayor, to McPherson and her church? A fear of losing votes of McPherson’s followers if he sought reelection? Or was it something else?
Whatever the reason for Keyes having held back, he did file complaints on Sept. 16 against McPherson; her mother, Minnie Kennedy; Ormiston, whose whereabouts were unknown; and one Lorraine Wiseman.
For that action, the reasons were plain.
•It was by then likely that a new grand jury would issue indictments.
Keetch had, on Sept. 2, fired the members of the 1926 grand jury based on persistent leaks. The judge announced that he had bounced this off colleagues and the consensus was that “this jury, as now constituted, cannot function and inspire that confidence which its dignity and importance demands.” Keetch said that while the majority of the members were blameless, the panel had to be dismissed as a whole.
He also alluded to certain evidence having “mysteriously disappeared.” (One juror took with her to the lavatory the grocery list in McPherson’s handwriting and—oops!—it somehow got flushed down the toilet.)
Keetch…who in 1912 was part of the team that assisted DA John Fredericks in prosecuting Clarence Darrow for bribery of a juror…might well have discharged the grand jury for the very reasons he stated, there being nothing more to it.
Or, it could be that the ex-prosecutor was aware that Keyes
was neglecting his duty by not pursuing the matter, and acted very much in the
manner of another Los Angeles Superior Court judge, and ex-prosecutor, Ronald
George, 55 years later. When the DA’s office moved to dismiss the case against
the “Hillside Strangler” in 1981, George turned the case over to the Attorney
General’s Office. That show of confidence in it, along with a desire to show up
the local prosecutors, motivated that office, and it won a conviction. Keetch
just might have had the objective of wresting the case from a grand jury that
had obsequiously deferred to Keyes’ wishes. That panel even drafted a letter of
commendation to Keyes for his handling of the case…the sending of which Keetch
blocked on
Aug. 5, rebuking jurors for their intended action.
Keetch intended to entrust the McPherson case (and other matters) to a newly constituted panel, which would have been well aware of the jurist’s displeasure with the predecessor body, and apt not to be swayed by Keyes.
•While the public’s belief in McPherson’s tale soared when a woman came forward to say that it was she who had been mistaken for McPherson, the bubble was soon to burst.
On Aug. 22, a woman identifying herself as Lorraine Wiseman told the press that she had been in the cottage in Carmel, caring for her sister, who was “Miss X”…the woman with whom Ormiston was carrying on an affair. Credence was lent the disclosure in the next morning’s Los Angeles Examiner which contains the side-by-side depiction of Wiseman and McPherson appearing at the right.
But on Sept. 12, Wiseman admitted that McPherson and Kennedy had paid her to fabricate her story. That, coupled with evidence that emerged on Sept. 15, prompted the reluctant DA to file the complaints the next day.
Copyright 2007, Metropolitan News Company