The two reappearances of Don LaRose
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/bcdr/News/55965/
• March 11, 1940 — Donald Lester LaRose is born in Allentown, Pa., according to a Hammond Police report.
• September 1958 — LaRose begins classes at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, but leaves in 1961 before finishing his studies.
• 1972 — LaRose becomes pastor of the First Baptist Church in Maine, N. Y., moving his wife and two young daughters with him to the small town near Binghampton.
• Nov. 4, 1975 -- LaRose disappears from Maine. His family and parishioners are shocked to learn three months later that he is living in Minneapolis, where he claims a Satanic cult has erased his memory and given him a new identity, Bruce Williamson.
• 1977 — Reunited with his family, LaRose resettles in Hammond and eventually becomes pastor of Hessville Baptist Church.
• June 9, 1980 — LaRose vanishes again. The missing persons report says friends believe “ he may have been kidnapped by a cult that has kidnapped him before. ”
• 1986 — LaRose, now going by the name Ken Williams, marries his wife Pat. His assumed identity is a slightly modified version of the name he says his abductors gave him in 1975, which was stolen from a man who died in Middleport, N. Y. in 1958.
• 2001 — The man known as Ken Williams is appointed mayor of Centerton, Ark.
• November 2007 — Confronted by newspaper reporters bearing photos of LaRose from 1978, the mayor of Centerton admits he is the twice-vanished pastor. He explains he fled the second time of his own will, because his captors had been threatening him again.
Sources: Times of Northwest Indiana interviews, Daily Record research, Hammond, Ind., police records, and www. donlarose. com.