A life in his own words
Posted on Wednesday, November 21, 2007
The following is an excerpt of the Don LaRose story found on www. donlarose. com a Web site registered to Centerton Mayor Ken Williams. Williams admitted to writing the story but said some of the account is fictional or slightly inaccurate.
I was pastor of the First Baptist Church of Maine, New York a quiet, pleasant farming community in a beautiful valley not far from the Triple Cities of Binghamton-Johnson City-Endicott, near the Pennsylvania line.
The people were wonderful country folks, and I am told by all concerned that I loved them, and they loved my family and myself very much. I say, I am told, because as you will discover later, I now have no memory of ever having lived in Maine, New York.
Two years after starting his first pastorate, a rather unusual letter arrived.
It was addressed to me. 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. I dont know exactly what the message was, but it accused me of blaspheming Satan and committing sacrilege against him. A few days later a second letter arrived.
Then, on Election Day, 1975, I disappeared. The police were called in, and after several weeks were unable to produce any clues as to what had happened.
Occult experts, men from the church and a private detective from Grand Rapids, Mich., joined the investigation.
He arrived in his Lincoln Continental, with his expensive suit and suave talk, and just took these unsuspecting country folks by storm. However, it didnt take my wife long to figure out the direction he was going. He was going to explain his inability to find me by proposing that I had planned my own disappearance.
Despite further efforts to find out what happened, the case is closed, saying LaRose planned the events.
The story picks up in Chicago with Bruce Williamson, a homeless drunk. He would awake to find a tape recorder next to him playing some senseless gibberish that meant nothing to him. The next day would be the same as the one before.
Williamson then suddenly finds himself in Minneapolis with an apartment. He tries to make a life there, getting involved in a church and finding a job. And then he was found.
When he was reunited with his wife, he did not remember having ever seen her before. When Bruce looked up, she smiled and said, Don ! Bruce looked at her with a rather blank stare, then responded, My names not Don, its Bruce.
They even had pictures of them, with me in the pictures along with them. In addition, there were the two children they said were my daughters.
He was taken back to the East Coast with his family, met with a psychiatrist and the police who still did not believe his abduction story before heading back to Chicago with his family trying to piece together the Williamson days. He then visited a doctor in Carroll Stream, Ill., who gave him truthserum injections to help him figure out the past.
I began by telling the doctor of the events that occurred on Election Day, 1975. I said that I was working in the church office when a man came into the office. He named someone I knew from the church that needed help, and the two of us got into my car and drove toward the home outside of town. As we left town, a man with a gun emerged from the floor of the back seat. The two forced me to drive to a wooded area along a dirt road behind the Broom County Airport not far from Maine, where there was a van waiting. Once inside, I was connected to an electronic gadget, some sort of portable shock treatment device.
After several sessions of truth serum, LaRose contacted the New York State Police but was met with skepticism.
LaRose and his family settled in the Midwest hoping to start over. They lived in northwest Indiana for several years and got involved in a new church.
But soon, the past caught up with him, and he was again threatened by mysterious letters.
So instead of facing those threats, he bought a bicycle, backpack and camping equipment. LaRose left town, moving from Des Moines, Iowa, to Omaha, Neb., to Denver to Cheyenne, Wyo.
He found odd jobs and used the Williamson identity.
I finally figured out that I could take a job, make up a Social Security number, and jump to another city or town every three or four months. But I still kept thinking I recognized faces of people I met on the streets.
The story continues as LaRose / Williamson bounces around the country, trying to piece together his past and running from it.
The story concludes with a piece copyrighted in 2004 with LaRose visiting Israel in 1994 as part of a Holy Land tour.
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