Carter Roy

She was in Mexico, in a small town called Agua Prieta, about 650 miles southeast of LA.

The police took Amy to a hospital in Arizona, where she reunited with her mother and her two teenage children before her triumphant return to LA.

When she recounted her ordeal to assembled churchgoers, she asked them to raise their hands if they believed her story.

Nearly every hand in the room shot up.

Historian Matt Sutton notes that the crowd had plenty of reason to believe it.

At the time, the FBI had been investigating kidnapping rings in Southern California.

including one case where a wealthy victim from LA was brought down to Mexico.

But while her followers believed her, the newspapers were selling a different story.

It was all a hoax, a massive cover-up for what Amy was really doing.

Did she really drown?

Where was her body?

Why was her church fundraising at a time like this?

Rumors crisscrossed Los Angeles, splattering the pages of newspapers, particularly the Los Angeles Examiner.

They published reports saying Amy was everywhere from Arizona to Argentina, and that she was making secret phone calls to her 13-year-old son.

People suspected she'd hit her head and had amnesia, or she was secretly getting plastic surgery or having an abortion.

Maybe she'd been kidnapped by a rival pastor.

One man even suggested she'd been eaten by a sea monster.

And believe it or not, the articles kept the papers selling.

And though some rumors were provably untrue, for example, the abortion theory, Amy couldn't have been pregnant.

She'd had a hysterectomy when she was 23.