Reported kidnapping of Aimee Semple McPherson

Aimee Semple McPherson
Prior to her 1926 reported kidnapping, Aimee Semple McPherson was little known outside of Southern California. After she fled her described captors and "emerged from the desert," she was a page one story cabled abroad by foreign corespondents.

On May 18, 1926, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappeared from off Venice Beach, California after going for a swim. She reappeared in Mexico five weeks later, stating she had escaped from kidnappers holding her for ransom there. Her disappearance, reappearance and subsequent court inquiries regarding the allegation that the kidnapping story was a hoax carried out to conceal a tryst with a lover precipitated a media frenzy that changed the course of McPherson's career.

On May 18, 1926, McPherson went with her secretary to Ocean Park Beach north of Venice Beach to swim. Soon after arriving, McPherson was nowhere to be found. It was thought she had drowned.

McPherson was scheduled to hold a service that day; her mother Minnie Kennedy preached the sermon instead, saying at the end, "Sister is with Jesus," sending parishioners into a tearful frenzy. Mourners crowded Venice Beach and the commotion sparked days-long media coverage fueled in part by William Randolph Hearst's Los Angeles Examiner and a stirring poem by Upton Sinclair to commemorate the tragedy. Daily updates appeared in newspapers across the country and parishioners held day-and-night seaside vigils. One parishioner drowned while searching for the body, and a diver died of exposure.

Kenneth G. Ormiston, the engineer for KFSG, had taken other assignments around late December 1925 and left his job at the Temple. Newspapers later linked McPherson and Ormiston, the latter seen driving up the coast with an unidentified woman. Some believed McPherson and Ormiston, who was married, had become romantically involved and had run off together.

McPherson's children, Roberta Star Semple and Rolf McPherson; were scrutinized by suspicious news reporters trying to ascertain their degree of distraughtness. Roberta hid in the basement of her parsonage home as news reporters entered the building and began searching though McPherson's room and belongings looking for clues to her whereabouts. Rolf, who was boarding in a remote farmhouse for the past three years had been besieged by reporters who heard a rumor he might have talked to his missing mother by telephone,