Maine, New York was a quiet pleasant farming community in a beautiful valley not far from the Triple Cities of Binghamton, Johnson City and Endicott, just north of the Pennsylvania line. The First Baptist Church sanctuary building dated back into the 1800's. It was beautiful, having been remodeled several times over the years. Next to it was a two story educational unit. Across the street was the church parsonage, a spacious old home that also dated back to the previous century. It had been recently remodeled also. Behind the parsonage, in a large yard with plenty of space for a large garden, was a barn that had been remodeled into a fellowship hall complete with a kitchen for church events.
The people were wonderful country folks, and Don loved them, and they loved Don and his family very much. Don does not remember that today. As a matter of fact Don does not remember ever having lived in Maine, New York, nor does he remember the last few years at the radio station in Syracuse prior to moving to Maine.
Two years flew by, and Don was the happiest he had ever been. The church was growing. A week of revival services had just been completed, and church members were discipling several people who had made decisions for Jesus Christ. Some of them were folks Don and his family had been praying for since first arriving in the community.
Then one day, out of the clear blue, a rather unusual letter arrived. It was addressed to Don. However, the letters that made up the address had been cut out of magazines and newspapers and pasted on the envelope. Inside was a piece of black paper with a pasted up message on it. The message accused Don of blaspheming Satan and committing sacrilege against him. A few days later a second letter arrived. There were several other pastors in the area who had also received the same type of letter. On top of that were the telephone warnings. One of them was answered by one of Don's daughters. Other pastors received similar calls.
Then, on Election Day 1975, Don vanished. The police were called in, and after several weeks were unable to produce any clues as to what had happened. Don's car was found a week after his disappearance, abandoned in a run-down warehouse district in Binghamton about 20 miles away. According to police, it was found locked and wiped clean of all fingerprints.
An individual who had made a study of the occult, told the church at Maine that the area where the car was found was an area frequented by Satan worshipers. This individual also said that Satan worshipers often met in the forested hills around the community of Maine, and that likely, on the next full moon, they would bring the pastor's body back to town and dump it on the front steps of the church.
By this time, the story of the missing pastor and the possibility that a satanic group might be involved had hit the news media across the country. Shortly thereafter, a private detective from Grand Rapids, Michigan "volunteered" his services for $10,000. He claimed never to have failed to find a missing person. Don's parents came up with $5,000, and the church sacrificed to come up with the other $5,000. He arrived in his Lincoln Continental, with his expensive suit and suave talk, and just took these unsuspecting country folks by storm. However, it didn't take Don's wife long to figure out the direction in which he was going. He was going to explain his inability to find the missing pastor by proposing that he had planned his own disappearance, "and those are the most difficult to find," he would say.
The detective made a number of false accusations. He claimed that Don had opened a checking account using a false identity about nine months before disappearing. He said that the pastor had sold $3,500 worth of stock he owned in the Syracuse radio station just two months before disappearing and had taken the money with him, and a month before vanishing, had taken a $675 cash advance on a credit card. He also said that Don had purchased a piece of carry-on luggage on a Sears credit card five months before disappearing. Then, linking all of these things together he said that, "Don LaRose was the type of person who might have planned his own disappearance." His statement was read to the church, which was crushed by what they accepted as fact. His statements also appeared in the local newspapers. As for him, he was off, back to Grand Rapids with is ill-gotten gain. It would be nearly six months later before it was discovered that there had been no false identity used in opening the bank account, and that there was no missing money. It would take even longer to find out that the piece of carry-on luggage was purchase for a purpose at the time of its purchase and that it was not missing either. All of the detective's allegations were false!
After news of the detective's findings were published in area newspapers, a private investigator from Syracuse, New York offered his services free of charge. He brought a friend, Norm Hinkle, with him. Norm had been Treasurer and a founding member of Mars Hill Broadcasting Company. Together they conducted a very thorough investigation, debunking all the findings the previous detective had reported. Their findings, however, did not play well with the media because they did not hold the sensationalism of the first private investigator's report. But they still seemed to come to one dead end after another. They turned all of their findings over to the New York State Police.
Finally, the State Trooper assigned to investigate the case said he would rather believe that Pastor LaRose had planned his own disappearance, then to believe that something supernatural could have happened. To back up his recommendation that the investigation be deactivated, he presented what he said was evidence that LaRose had pasted up the threatening letters and sent them to himself. The fact is that the investigators from Syracuse had discovered, from the State Police, that the letters were taped on the black paper, and that the very clear fingerprints on the back of the tape did not belong to the missing pastor. But that didn't seem to make any difference to anyone at the time.
In our next chapter, we will leave the quiet, beautiful community of Maine, New York (we'll come back later), and travel to Chicago, Illinois, and then to Minneapolis, Minnesota as we meet the next character who plays into this strange but true story.
For Chapter 2, click on the "Chap. 2" tab on the upper left of this page
