Religion & Crime

Crimes tied to churches, faith leaders or religious belief.

16 cases

The Security Chief

Chris Coleman guarded world-famous televangelist Joyce Meyer for a living, yet couldn't seem to protect his own family from an anonymous letter-writer's threats — until police climbed through a window of his Columbia Lake home into a scene reeking of spray paint.

God Chose Us

Two days before her high school graduation, Shari Faye Smith's little blue Chevette sat idling at the end of her family's long South Carolina driveway, the driver's door open and the mail scattered — and seventeen-year-old Shari was gone.

The Homeschoolers

Eleven-year-old Hana Alemu was adopted from Ethiopia into Larry and Carri Williams' strict homeschooling household of nine in Sedro-Woolley, Washington — a rescue rooted in faith, and in the harsh discipline of a book called To Train Up A Child.

The Amish Killer

Ed Gingerich never fit the plain, machine-less life of his Old Order Amish community, so Bishop Rudy Shetler arranged a marriage to his niece Katie — a match that ended in the tragedy of March 18, 1993, one so dark much of Rockdale Township's Amish moved away.

Murder in the Sacristy

On Holy Saturday 1980 — her seventy-second birthday — Sister Margaret Ann Pahl went early to prepare the chapel at Toledo's Mercy Hospital, intending to confront Father Gerald Robinson about his sermon; a bloodstained cloth on the chapel floor was the first sign something was wrong.

The Carnival Cult

Johnson County police wrote off the pentagrams and '666' graffiti around Whiteland, Indiana as harmless heavy-metal kids — but Mark Goodwin's homegrown cult, Satan's Disciples, had begun recruiting among the traveling carnival crews.

The Llama Farm Murder

Seventeen-year-old Leanna Walker told friends she planned to run away with Sky McDonough, a self-styled Rastafarian who quoted Bible verses about killing a wife who leaves. When she vanished from Milford, Pennsylvania, the search closed in on the woods around a llama farm.

Better Off in Heaven

To her Pittsburgh-area church and school colleagues, Laurel Schlemmer was sweet, kind-hearted, and devout — a woman who had never wanted the children her husband Mark insisted on. One morning, with their grandmother watching television downstairs, Laurel ran a bath for the boys.

The Christadelphian

Springfield, Vermont, seemed like a postcard New England town until thirteen-year-old Sherry Nastasia vanished in August 1979. Over the next four years more young girls were taken — and the clue that finally broke the case was a church sweatshirt.

Sacred Trust

Thirteen-year-old Danny Croteau was found dead along the Chicopee River in 1972, and suspicion quickly settled on a family friend no one dared accuse: Father Richard Lavigne, the parish priest. The case would stay open for nearly fifty years.

The Vanishing

During a family night program at a St. Paul church in November 1981, six-year-old Cassie Hansen asked her mother for permission to use the bathroom just steps away. She never came back — and an abduction inside a sanctuary changed how the city thought about safety.

The Killer Poet

For twenty years, Chicago knew J.J. Jameson as a beloved poet, church historian, and community fixture. When state troopers walked into the Third Unitarian Church in 2005, they knew him as someone else: Norman Porter, a double murderer who had escaped a Massachusetts prison.

The Stanford Cold Case

'Hey, we've got a stiff in here.' Security guard Stephen Crawford's oddly detached radio call summoned police to Stanford Memorial Church at dawn in October 1974, where newlywed Arlis Perry lay dead beneath the stained glass. The hunt for her killer would span forty-four years.