[citation needed] 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.

After the reward expired, on June 5, newspaper headlines announced McPherson had been found in Canada, as given by Inspector Middleton of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, which shook up Los Angeles.

[32] The parade back to the Temple even elicited a greater turnout than President Woodrow Wilson's visit to Los Angeles in 1919, attesting to her popularity and the growing influence of mass media coverage.

The Chamber of Commerce, together with Reverend Robert P. Shuler leading the Los Angeles Church Federation, and assisted by the press and others, became an informal alliance to determine if her disappearance was caused by other than a kidnapping.

[citation needed] The second inquiry, amidst frenzied publicity, started on August 3 in response to new developments suggesting that rather than being held by kidnappers, McPherson was cohabiting with her former employee Kenneth Ormiston in the resort town of Carmel-by-the-Sea.

[62] The grand jury met a second time in late July after new evidence was received appearing to place McPherson at a northern California seaside resort town during the first part of her disappearance.

The columnist further added:[79] The most important witness, who says he is an engineer by profession, was compelled to admit on the stand that the woman he saw at Carmel he first took to be one that he knew, and later he revised his opinion when he read the newspaper stories of the disappearance of Mrs. McPherson, and after seeing her once on the street there, he came to Los Angeles 75 days later, and declare he identifies her.A lawyer later noted the Carmel-by-the-Sea witnesses were being called to identify a woman they saw two months earlier when nothing of an unusual nature took place at the time which would help fix her image in their memory.

In a letter he wrote to the Los Angeles Times a few months after the case was dropped, the Reverend Robert P. Shuler stated, "Perhaps the most serious thing about this whole situation is the seeming loyalty of thousands to this leader in the face of her evident and positively proven guilt.

During the time of McPherson's disappearance, newspapers freely speculated about him and the Los Angeles DA office initiated various manhunts accompanied by front-page headlines, searching for the elusive radioman.

Annoyed, Ormiston sent a letter from New York to Asa Keyes denouncing the treatment received from newspapers and officials as “nasty publicity and subsequent persecution by self-styled investigators," and that he had no intention of appearing before the Los Angeles grand jury.

On October 29, after the defense rested its case, District Attorney Asa Keyes announced the September discovery of a large blue steamer trunk allegedly owned by Ormiston and thought to be full of McPherson's clothing.

[125] In early January 1927, Ormiston testified and gave the name of Elizabeth Tovey, a nurse from Seattle, Washington, as the person who was "Miss X" and his female companion and the woman who stayed with him at the seaside cottage on May 19–29 in Carmel-by-the Sea.

[citation needed] As the grand jury inquiry progressed, Wiseman-Sielaff implicated one of McPherson's lawyers, Roland Rich Woolley, for inappropriate conduct when they lived in another state where she said they went to school together.

[143][144] It has been suggested by sources within the Foursquare Gospel Church that McPherson's work ran contrary to corrupt police interests and in part may have been a motivating factor in the prosecution's unconventional handling of the grand jury inquiry.

The defense contended that both Ryan and his father-in-law, Captain Herman Cline, neglected their duty by disregarding evidence unearthed by border authorities that substantiated McPherson's version of her re-appearance.

Nancy Barr Mavity, an early McPherson biographer, wrote of the drunk driving incident "an error not altogether unprecedented to members of the police departments as to other human beings.

That she should have become a target, as she saw it, of such an intense legal smear puzzled her, and she framed it in the context that the Los Angeles prosecution was being controlled by diabolical forces seeking to bring herself and the Angelus Temple to ruin.

[164] Biographer Daniel Mark Epstein explained that Keyes was a public servant, responding to the pressures of many in the Los Angeles constituency who thought that McPherson was making their city a laughingstock.

Guido Orlando, a promoter who made Greta Garbo a legend, wrote of McPherson: "She was not a bigot, she did not pry into people's private lives,... She was in all the time I knew her incapable of malice toward anyone.

"[189] Mollifying taxpayers over failure to bring the case to trial in spite of considerable expense, prosecutor Asa Keyes, in his closing statement, made it clear that the investigation was assisted and largely underwritten by the area newspapers.

Though many thought the newspaper investigations showed that McPherson was in Ormiston's company at Carmel-by-the Sea during the period of her disappearance,[190] Keyes stated that evidence collected there was too vague and inconclusive to pursue further action against anyone on a perjury charge.

"[192] Judge Arthur Keetch of the Los Angeles Superior Court, who presided over one of investigating grand jury bodies he later dissolved, stated on a later date that he thought that the papers "were running pretty wild at that time."

That she would choose to jeopardize her two-million-dollar establishment and undermine her career as a credible religious leader of 30,000 faithful followers to travel about the coast disguised in goggles and a cap made no sense.

[214][215] Even in later years, when McPherson had a falling-out with her mother, Mildred Kennedy, and daughter, Roberta Star Semple, with unkind remarks traded through the press, the latter two always insisted her 1926 disappearance was the result of a kidnapping.

[223] On June 29, 1926, an El Paso Herald reporter asked Emil Lewis Holmdahl, an American infantryman turned soldier of fortune, whether he had been involved in the alleged kidnapping of famous California evangelist McPherson.

Holmdahl, who fought extensively in earlier Latin American turmoil wars and was cleared by a Mexican judge as a suspect in the February 6, 1926 theft of Pancho Villa's head, enigmatically replied regarding McPherson, "Well, maybe I did and maybe I didn't."

[224] On October 8, police sergeant Alonzo B. Murchison of Douglas, Arizona, was questioned by the defense counsel about a report he submitted tending to substantiate the existence of "Steve" and "Rose," two of the alleged kidnappers McPherson described.

[227] The Record stated "the McPherson sensation has sold millions of newspapers, generated fat fees for lawyers, stirred up religious antagonism ... advertised Los Angeles in a ridiculous way."

[100][229] In 1929, after a failed request by the state senate to reopen the older 1926 case,[230] Journalist Morrow Mayo noted it was the last chance in California to "ruin that red-headed sorceress", and "she is free to serve the Lord until the Marines are called out.