Category Archives: Signs of the Times

Church Frauds & Related Crimes, Current Affairs, Divergent Friends, Remarkable Friends, Signs of the Times, Weird & Peculiar

Fleecing The Faithful – Prelude: Down the Garden Path & Opening Pandora’s Box

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The 1989 Friends Ministers Conference was the fourth in a series that were held every five years. The event had started out as the Friends Pastors Conference, but this was changed for the 1984 gathering in a bow to traditional Quaker nomenclature, and to accommodate the sensibilities of the handful of attenders who came from the non-pastoral Quaker groups. (I was one.)

The 1989 gathering was scheduled for Denver. The planning committee’s chairman was Eugene Coffin. Priscilla Deters’ introduction to the committee was succinctly described by an Investigator for the Kansas State Security Commission, Gary Fulton. Writing in 1994, he explained that:

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Fleecing The Faithful: An Exclusive In-Depth Investigative Report

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How Religious Con Artists Stole $35 Million Dollars from Quakers, Nazarenes and Other Churches, And How They’ll Steal From YOU If You Let Them

An In-Depth Investigative Report by
Chuck Fager

INTRODUCTION–February, 1998

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.
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