BACK TO LIBERTY

Otago Witness, Issue 3774, 13 July 1926, Page 30

BACK TO LIBERTY

MRS MTIIERSON’S ADVENTURES. LOS ANGELES, June 23. A message from Douglas, Arizona, says that Mrs Aimee Semple MTherson. the noted Baptist evangelist, of Los Angeles, who mysteriously disappeared while bathing at Santa Monica, has reached there from Mexico in a taxi-cab. She was in a dazed condition. The taxi-driver said that he picked her up in the Mexican city of Aguaprieta. Mrs MTherson has been taken to a hospital, where she is being treated for bruises and hysteria. She soon asked the attendants to call her mother Mrs Kennedy, in Los Angeles, by long-distance telephone. Mrs Kennedy immediately stated that she recognised her daughter's voice. Undoubtedly it was Aimee. Mrs MTherson told a vivid story of kidnapping. She said she was bathing at Santa Monica, when a child called to her from the water: “My mother wants you to come and see my sick sister.” She said she threw a wrap round her shoulders and walked to a waiting motor-car. In a moment she was thrown back among the cushions and chloroformed. With her captors Mrs MTherson travelled all that day and night across the border and into iower California and Mexico, finally reaching Sonora. There she escaped and walked across the hills to Aguaprieta. She suffered great privations, and her feet were badly cut and scarred. A man and a woman kidnapped her, Mrs MTherson said. They called each other Steve and Rose. Another man acted as her guard at Sonora. She escaped from him at noon on Tuesday, ran to the outskirts of the town, and then made her way across country till she fell exhausted. Finally Mrs MTherson sighted a mountain, which the police identify as Niggerhead Peak, 15 miles from Sonora. She reached the mountain just before dark last night, and found a road. During her flight she repeatedly dropped from fatigue. When it becamo dark she sighted the glare from the copper smelters in Douglas # Mrs MTherson approached a Mexican house, calling for help, but nobody cam© to her assistance, and she was picked up unconscious by a passer-by, who sent her across the United States border to hospital. Mrs Kennedy has left for Douglas to bring her daughter home. She says that she received a threatening letter last night, from persons who said they had kidnapped Aimee. and demanded a ransom of £50,000 or they would kill her. , “But I paid little attention, said Mrs Kennedy, “because we got scores of letters from persons who claimed they were holding her.” The letter last night was signed “Steve.” evidently being sent by the man whom Aimee mentioned on her return to Douglas. The kidnapping apnears to be almost a duplicate of that related a year ago by Virginia Lee Cookson, the authoress, who claimed that she was carried into Mexico and held in an underground den lhe police at the time disbelieved this story. MEXICAN PRISON DISCOVERED. LOS ANGELES, June 28. A message from Douglas, Arizona, states that tlie police have found a oabin 15 miles from the international boundary in Mexico where Mrs Aimee MTherson evidently was held captive. The windows were barred and Mrs M'Pherson’s footprints were found nearby. The former occupants evidently had decamped in a great hurry. . Crowds such as California had never seen before greeted Mrs MTherson on her return, and yesterday’s service at her “million dollar soul factory” took the form of a tremendous thanksgiving. “Before God, I have not deviated one hair’s breadth from the truth, and I must be vindicated from the whisperings that are being circulated,” said the evangelist to-day. She threatens to take legal action against certain newspapers.