Evangelist stuck to her kidnapping story

June 1926.

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AIMEE SEMPLE McPHERSON starts a Bible-reading marathon at Angelus Temple in Los Angeles in 1931.

(Associated Press)

McPherson, 35, had been sitting under an umbrella on Venice Beach, working ona sermon called “Light & Darkness.” As farasherpan-icked 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 embraced in death the pastor.”

Thousands crowded the beach as divers searched for her. According to journalist Claire Hoffman's new biography, “Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson,” 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 bearing a story decked out with elaborate and unverifiable potboiler detail.

She claimed that she had walked out of the Pacific Ocean and into an abduction plot. That she’d been lured to a car by a couple who needed her healing touch on a sick baby. That she was drugged and imprisoned ina desert shack. That her captors threatened to sell her into slavery if her church didn’t produce a $500,000 ransom. That she managed to saw through her ropes with the discarded lid ofa syrup can, climb out ofa window and flee across 22 miles of desert sand to Agua Prieta, just south of the Arizona desert.