Dear Friend,
Welcome to the online edition of A Friendly Letter. In addition to back issues, there are some new reports as well. The major new report is about two multi-million dollar financial frauds, perpetrated on Quakers and other churches. Another new addition is a personal tribute to Bill Kriedler, a very fine Quaker minister who died in June, 2000.
Courtroom theatrics is not what the Harmon case is about. Its “bottom line” is the theft from 230 people, mostly elderly, of their life savings, and of health coverage from several hundred more. That’s what it’s all about.Nevertheless, when Harmon comes back to court on May 4 of this year, there ought to be some drama in the courtroom.
An In-Depth Investigative Report by
Chuck Fager
This report is about crime and churches. It is also about Mary Washburn.
Mary Washburn was a widow when she moved from Tyler, Texas back home to Cherokee, Oklahoma. She had been gone for thirty-three years, and she returned to the old home place mainly to be safe. “There were a lot of illegal aliens and colored down in Tyler,” she said candidly, “and seemed like there was a murder every weekend.”
Cherokee should have been safe enough; Oklahoma City was nearly a hundred miles away, and Tulsa, another fifty.
But it wasn’t. A criminal followed Mary Washburn to Cherokee, stalked her to her house, and stole all the money she had, $68,000. “There’s no way in the world I can get it back,” she told me.
Continue reading Fleecing The Faithful: An Exclusive In-Depth Investigative Report