On May 18, 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson went missing from Ocean Park Beach in Santa Monica while swimming. For more than a month her Angelus Temple congregation held prayer vigils, and one distraught follower drowned searching for her body. On June 23, 1926, McPherson reappeared in Douglas, Arizona, with an account of having been chloroformed, shoved into a car and held in a shack in Mexico before escaping on foot across the desert.
Los Angeles prosecutors did not accept the account. Investigators advanced a competing theory: that McPherson had spent the missing weeks with Kenneth Ormiston, a married radio engineer formerly employed at KFSG, and had staged the disappearance to cover the absence. Prosecutors pursued charges against McPherson, her mother and others for obstruction of justice and conspiracy to manufacture false evidence, built around witness testimony placing a woman answering her description at a rented cottage with Ormiston. On January 10, 1927, a grand jury dropped all charges for insufficient evidence, a legal outcome that resolved the case without resolving the underlying question.
The disappearance became inseparable from her public image, generating more newspaper coverage than any sermon she preached and setting a template, an evangelist's private life becoming as newsworthy as the ministry itself, that later broadcast preachers would repeat under far less ambiguous circumstances. She died in Oakland, California, on September 27, 1944, from an overdose of Seconal sleeping pills, ruled an accident by most biographers though the exact circumstances were never fully settled.