Suzanne got used to Rick being around. And one Sunday night at church, something odd happened.
Rick stood up before the congregation to “testify,” to give a little speech on how God was working in his life. He talked about Suzanne. She was the most wonderful woman he had ever met, he said. He loved her deeply, and he’d do everything in his power to make her love him.
It came straight from Rick’s heart, passionate and moving. And when he finished, Suzanne stood up and said, “I love you. I’ll marry you.”
The congregation erupted with joy.
Rick and Suzanne married a week later at a justice of the peace. Suzanne would later say she knew right away she’d made a mistake, but everything moved so fast... And even though she didn’t love Rick, he seemed to really care for her. He seemed so sure, so righteous.
When her term expired, Suzanne didn’t reenlist in the Air Force. She was pregnant within a few months, and Jeffrey was born on July 26, 1982. After that, it seemed that every time Suzanne called her mother or sisters it was to announce another pregnancy.
Mothering was the only thing that made Suzanne feel alive, but children were not enough to keep her marriage going or make her life meaningful.
By the time they moved to North Carolina, Suzanne was dead inside, she told the counselors. But now, under Jane Whaley’s mentorship, she was coming alive again. Maybe that’s why she felt so free to disclose so many details to these ladies.
She finished, and the room fell quiet. No one seemed to know how to respond.
“I think we all agree you two need a bit more counseling,” Reynolds said, “especially now that you’re in leadership.”
The women closed their notebooks. The counseling session was over. They’d meet again in a week.
Rick and Suzanne left the office. Not a word was spoken, but the next move was clear. Rick knew that he’d have to change, or Suzanne was going to leave him.
He’d have to get them out of his mother’s house. They didn’t have money to buy their own place, but he would find something. God would provide, if he’d only believe.
3
A FOX IN THE FLOCK
Pete Evans peered into the rearview mirror.
Powell Holloway pulled off the road and killed the engine. He turned to Evans and smiled. “You ready?”
Evans nodded. He bounded from the station wagon, opened the tailgate, and pulled out a folded-up tent, knapsack, and a bicycle.
Holloway left him with some encouraging words: “You can handle this,” he said. “Remember, you’re doing the Lord’s work. You’re never alone. I’m praying for you, man.”
Evans watched the taillights disappear. He felt very alone. This was his most important undercover assignment yet, and so far there wasn’t anything glamorous about it. Evans and Holloway were Christians, garden-variety mainstream evangelicals. They worked for the Trinity Foundation, a Dallas, Texas, watchdog group that investigated allegations of religious abuse.
The Trinity Foundation was created in the early 1970s by Ole Anthony, a charismatic minister in the evangelical “Jesus Movement.” It began as a small Bible study group and grew into a witty Christian humor magazine and a ministry to the city’s homeless population. But by the late 1980s, Anthony was seething at public scandals involving wealthy televangelists like Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, a North Carolina couple who created, then lost, a religious broadcasting empire.
The Bakkers were the darlings of the televangelist world from the late 1970s through the mid-1980s. Their “PTL Club” national cable network reached an audience of millions. Americans were attracted by Bakker’s lively, apocalyptic preaching and his wife’s cheerful, mascara-tinged tears.
As time went on, the Bakkers dipped into the offering plate to fuel an opulent lifestyle—their air-conditioned doghouse made national news. Heritage USA, their 2,300-acre Christian theme park outside of Charlotte, North Carolina, offered skyscraper lodgings, giant waterslides, a shopping mall, and Christian counseling, and at its peak drew six million visitors per year—all of it tax-free. But it all came crashing down in 1987, when word leaked of Bakker’s affair with a church secretary, and the PTL Club money he used to pay her off. Bakker later served five years in federal prison for defrauding his followers.
Ole Anthony felt the Bakkers made a mockery of Christ and Christianity. He didn’t have anything to do with their downfall, but he was determined to help root out similar religious charlatans. He and his companions began secretly working with news organizations to expose ministries they believed were corrupting God’s Word and defrauding the credulous.
And that was what put the thirty-eight-year-old Evans on the Rutherford County roadside in late August 1994. The Whaleys were in the Trinity Foundation crosshairs.
Evans, a longtime Christian believer, had been a member of the Trinity Foundation since the mid-1970s, when he was a student at Austin College. After graduating in 1976, Evans drifted from job to job. In 1989, Anthony offered Evans full-time work in the ministry. Evans used his carpentry skills to build a guesthouse on the group’s property in Dallas. He helped with a homeless housing program.
Evans had proven himself a capable undercover investigator with a small operation in San Antonio, and now he was after a bigger fish: televangelist Robert Tilton, whose Success-N-Life show had aired on more than two hundred US television markets. Tilton wrote inspirational bestsellers like The Power to Create Wealth and How to Be Rich and Have Everything You Ever Wanted.
But it was his TV show that brought him national fame. His shows were part revival and part infomercial, with a message built on money. Tilton told viewers that donating to his church was an investment that would pay off in answered prayers and financial success. Tens of thousands of followers mailed Tilton heartfelt prayer requests along with cash, checks, and gifts, certain that miracles would follow. Tilton’s ministry flourished.
Anthony had long suspected that Tilton was fleecing his flock. In 1991, Trinity Foundation opened an investigation. They covertly attended services and combed through dumpsters at the mail depot in Tulsa, where Tilton’s prayer requests were processed.
Investigators learned Tilton’s staff had stripped valuables, checks, and cash from the envelopes, and dumped the prayer requests without opening them. Anthony shared his findings with ABC News’s Primetime Live.
The broadcast triggered federal and state fraud investigations and Tilton’s empire tottered. But the case wasn’t over. Trinity learned that Tilton had ties to a secretive North Carolina church called Word of Faith Fellowship.
When Anthony asked Evans if he’d go undercover to investigate, Evans jumped at the chance.
Evans knew all about Tilton. One of the televangelist’s former followers had filed a civil suit against the ministry, and Evans had been sitting in on the fraud trial. He was pretending to be a transient from Texas who was looking for better odds in North Carolina. Holloway, his contact and driver, was staying in Asheville, North Carolina, about an hour west of Spindale. Holloway was Evans’s “emergency exit” if things went sideways.