Part One (3) -- continued

XXI

A lot might have been different if Leatha Hein's house near Wichita hadn't been damaged by a severe windstorm in June of 1990. But that's one of the hazards of living in Kansas.

It was a mobile home, where Hein and her husband Norman were staying until they could build their own house nearby without having to borrow money from banks.

"It wasn't a tornado," she recalled, "but straight wind, 120 miles an hour." What weather forecasters call a "severe thunderstorm." They heard it was coming on the radio, but before they could react a tree smashed through their kitchen window.

"About that time we figured it would be safer in our garage," she said, "so we grabbed the dog and headed for the door. It took both of us pushing to get it open. Once we got to the garage I crawled under the car, and we just stayed there, listening to the wind sucking and banging at the big garage doors."

A half an hour later, it was over. When they emerged from their garage, five big old elm trees had been knocked over on the mobile home.

As if that wasn't enough, later that same year Leatha's father and father-in-law both became seriously ill.

All the time involved in rebuilding and caring for ailing parents meant Hein was pretty preoccupied for the next year or so, and not able to pay much attention to the demands of being a Trustee for Mid-America Yearly Meeting. She had been appointed as Clerk of the Trustees at the sessions the same summer of the windstorm, but she didn't get to meetings much for a year or so.

By the time she did, MAYM was well into a cycle of sending money to Productions Plus, at Maurice Roberts' urging. The first yearly meeting deposit came in December of 1989, for $5000; by the end of 1991, the yearly meeting had sent six more checks, for a total investment of $242,000.

In August of 1991, Deters sent MAYM a check for $13,474, the first "disbursement" on their investment. After that, in addition to MAYM's own deposits, Roberts began freelancing, recruiting other investors, individuals and churches, combining their checks in the yearly meeting accounts. YouthQuake was one of them, in April, 1992 along with $2000 from Renovare, the spiritual growth group established by popular devotional author Richard Foster, a longtime MAYM member.

"Since [I] was acquainted with Deters," Roberts later explained, "[I] felt it would be easier for MAYM to collect the investor funds and forward them to Productions Plus." Through January, 1993, he sent in four such "bundled" checks, from eleven churches and groups, totaling $197,000.

It was also easier not to bother telling the Trustees about these transactions. As his name was on his name was on the Yearly Meeting accounts, Roberts could cut and sign checks without the Trustees' knowledge.

If direct oversight was lacking, though, there was no dearth of questions. The Trustees were not stupid. "How does this program work?" Hein asked, as did others. "What do you mean, she doubles your money in a year? How could she do that?"

None of the Trustees had as yet met Deters, so these questions went to Roberts. His explanations were varied, but unsatisfying. At one point, paraphrasing language in Ed Steele's letter about an endowment of several million dollars, Roberts told them Deters was independently wealthy and had a trust, set up to help a selected few nonprofit groups, like theirs. Other times there were references to the electronic sign business.

The sign business deserves a brief description here. The signs are more properly called "LED moving message color signboards." That's what Phillip Deters called them, and he should know. He had been working on this part of the business since 1985, in various guises, joined by his brothers Randy and Bryan.

The signs carry moving, blinking messages and images, and can be programmed to receive satellite news broadcasts as well as advertising. It was the ads that were supposed to make them a gold mine: the signs were to be placed in stores and other high-traffic areas, drawing the attention of passersby with the news, and then delivering ad messages in between.

Deters ballyhooed these signs as the wave of the marketing future, said she was in on the ground floor, and could hardly keep up with their explosive growth and profits. In 1992 she set up a division of Productions Plus, called Channel Q Communications, to deal with it. (She told Leatha Hein the Q stood for Quaker.)

However, her own records and statements show that after several years of such promotional hype, as late as the summer of 1995 this purportedly burgeoning enterprise existed in a single 40 by 40 office suite in a Rancho Cucamonga mall. Further, ChannelQ then owned exactly 12 of these signs, and her son Phillip acknowledged that "at this time no display signboards are in operation as sales activities have not been undertaken...." Her financial records include no indication of income from this "business" (or any other).

Sales may have poor, but the wages were good: Between 1992 and 1994, Philip and his two brothers shared an average of $125,000 in annual pay for thus "working" at Channel Q. (Channel Q was still at the same location as of mid-1998, and even had its own webpage:

http://www.citivu.com/channelq/.)

Even without these data, Leatha Hein was not the only one of the Mid-America Trustees who had doubts about the sign business as a reliable source of 100% annual profits. Another was a young banker, Rodney Pitts. But when Roberts stonewalled the committee, Pitts made some inquiries on his own, using a banker's tools. (Pitts declined to be interviewed, but this account of his actions is based on sources with firsthand familiarity with them.)

Pitts came back to the Trustees genuinely alarmed, and with reason: he had asked Dun and Bradstreet to check on Productions Plus, and their report raised several red flags: Deters had declined to be interviewed about the business and refused to furnish even basic financial information about it. However, a check of bank records had shown that it was deeply in debt, with several outstanding bank loans secured, not by inventory or business receivables, but by savings. And it further disclosed that the certificates of deposit which were supposedly keeping the yearly meeting's money safe were not in the yearly meeting's name, but Priscilla's.

Besides the Dun and Bradstreet report, Pitts had alarming news from an attorney, with whom he had consulted about something called the Kansas Uniform Management of Institutional Funds Act. This law set standards for financial trustees of nonprofit organizations. Pitts reported to the MAYM Trustees that with what they already knew--and didn't know--about Deters, they were a long way out of compliance with these standards. This meant that if things went sour and there were lawsuits, the trustees could be liable.

Pitts demanded that the Trustees confront Roberts with all this; he said he would take the lead, and make his case. In a special meeting on March 1 of 1993, he finally got his wish, laying out his concerns in a three-page memo.

Roberts was ready with a 4-page defense, stressing that Deters had thus far delivered, sending money when requested. He also spoke at length about various tests of spiritual discernment he had applied to this situation, including the visit by his wife to Priscilla, and her prayerful sense of Deters' rectitude. Roberts reaffirmed his confidence in Productions Plus, and when the meeting ended, the Trustees were not yet agreed to challenge him.

Shortly thereafter, Rodney Pitts resigned from the Trustees. Leatha Hein pleaded with him to stay on, but he was adamant: further association with the group, he declared, could result in a threat to his banking career. It wasn't worth the risk.

XXII

Of all those who were eager to cash in on Productions Plus's largesse, none was more eager than the Houston Graduate School of Theology (HGST).

This small evangelical seminary, founded in 1983, was related to Mid-America Yearly Meeting, and Maurice Roberts sat on its board. In may of 1991 it was still operating out of rented quarters, and its founder and President, Delbert Vaughn, knew exactly what Productions Plus could do for the school: finance the building of a campus of its own.

The familiar faces of Gene Coffin and Maurice Roberts were there to recommend Productions Plus. Vaughn, who calls Deters an old family friend, leaped aboard her program, sending $100,000 in May of 1991.

This initial deposit was followed up with several more over the next two years. Exact figures are not available, but Deters' records indicate that at least $430,000 was put in by the school, and this is likely a low figure, because individuals probably added funds which are not clearly identified in her books.

This is a particularly hefty amount for a school whose total budget in 1995 was $524,000. Yet in that same year, Vaughn was confidently reporting to MAYM that he fully expected their "endowment" to provide for the building of a new campus "within the next two or three years."

In pursuit of this ambition, and with the help of Deters' early "disbursements," the school bought 53 acres of land. And in the rush to fatten the "endowment" for building on it, Vaughn looked for help from other friends of the school. One of his most willing helpers came from the other end of the South, in North Carolina.

XXIII

In 1975, when Billy Britt made his debut address to a North Carolina Yearly Meeting (NCYM) session as Superintendent, the minutes record that he declared that "to experience growth, North Carolina Yearly Meeting must have an evangelism explosion."

During his twenty years in the office, however, there were no signs of any such explosion. By 1995, NCYM membership had fallen by more than twenty per cent. The causes for such a decrease are complex, but it is evident from the record that continuing factional conflict was a significant factor. NCYM has both an evangelical and a quite moderate wing, and jockeying between them was chronic and occasionally quite bitter.

One focus of this conflict has been the shape and location of Quaker theological education for pastors. Many of the most moderate, even liberal pastors came to North Carolina from the Earlham School of Religion(ESR) in Richmond, Indiana. But the evangelicals saw ESR as far too soft on such matters as the Bible, Christ as the only way to salvation, training in mass evangelism, and hot button issues like homosexuality and "feminist" or "New Age" spirituality. Some of these critics gravitated toward the Houston Graduate school of Theology. In the fall term of 1994, Houston established an outpost in NCYM, located at John Wesley College, a small holiness school in High Point. The extension was headed by Frank Scurry, a NCYM pastor.

Billy Britt generally sided with the evangelicals, and he served on the Houston Board. (He has more recently joined the ESR board.) When Houston's Delbert Vaughn asked for his help in finding money to put into the Productions Plus "endowment" plans, Billy was happy to do what he could.

As it turned out, he was able to do a good bit.

If NCYM's membership had lagged, its own endowment had been steadily growing, such that there were nearly four million dollars in its accounts by 1993. Britt thought it ought to be possible to tap some of these funds for the Houston work

It was possible, yes, but not easy. NCYM officers with direct financial responsibility reacted with proper caution: When Britt approached both the Clerk of the Trustees, Scott Parker, he reportedly got the response that, "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is," and a firm negative. So he turned to Carter Pike, chair of the NCYM Executive Committee. What about making use of some of the yearly meeting's excess cash? Carter was equally opposed.

What then? There was also an Investment Committee, on which Carter Pike served with two others, who were more loyal to Britt. So Britt scheduled a meeting of the Investment Committee with Priscilla Deters, in the autumn of 1993. Carter Pike was not notified of the meeting, however, and was not present.

One of the members who was there, Kay Coltrane, recalls that Deters was "very persuasive," with charts and graphs and printed material to pass out. The proposal was for a three-cornered transaction: If NCYM deposited $100,000 with Productions Plus, she would put the money in a CD for safekeeping, pay NCYM fifteen percent interest on it, and direct the additional matching funds to Houston for its campus. Coltrane also recalls being called by a Houston faculty member (David Robinson, now its new president), who urged support of the plan.

The truncated committee approved the investment.

Britt had the check drawn up on New Years Eve, 1993. NCYM was supposed to get the CD for its files, and receive its first quarterly interest payment, $3750, in March of 1994.

Deters was not finished in North Carolina, however. In the early 1950s, Billy Britt attended Peoples Bible College in High Point, North Carolina. In 1993, Peoples had become John Wesley College, and Britt's wife Viola was a member of its board.

Frank Scurry, the NCYM pastor who also headed the Houston extension program there, told John Wesley's President, Brian Donley, about Deters and Productions Plus. Donley was interested. His school was in tenuous financial condition: in debt, unaccredited, and paying very low salaries to its faculty. Donley and his board could think of many uses for matching grants: retiring the debt, some new building, scholarships, you name it.

In short order the drill was repeated: Deters visited the campus, promised a threefold match in three years, and the board, after only cursory inquiries and the invocation of Eugene Coffin's name, voted to send her $100,000.

How cursory was their check of Deters' bona fides? She had given them a list of "referrals," which included Houston's Delbert Vaughn. Donley called Vaughn on December 13, 1993, and took notes of their conversation. Here is some of what Vaughn told him, which shows what con artists call the "roping" process in full swing:

I also spoke to Delbert Vaughn in November, 1997. With the con exposed, his responses then were somewhat different. He spoke rapidly but disjointedly. Here is a sample:

According to Deters' records, by the time Vaughn spoke to Donley, HGST had deposited $149,000, and received back $178,000. Thus they were ahead at that point, and his enthusiasm then is perhaps understandable, unencumbered as it was by any real information except bank balances. HGST already had 53 acres of land for its new campus complex, and Vaughn was confident the project would soon be underway, financed by future Productions Plus grants.

To that end, HGST sent Deters at least another $285,000, for a total of $434,453 by mid-1994. However, Deters records indicate they received back only another $5700, leaving a deficit of a quarter of a million dollars.

HGST's current President, David Robinson, declined to confirm these figures. But he acknowledged what I already knew, that the school has put the 53-acre property up for sale. In addition, Houston has been consistently late in sending the interest payments due to North Carolina Yearly Meeting, whose $100,000 loss it agreed to cover, and has twice asked for the interest rate to be reduced.

When I asked Vaughn if HGST had filed a claim with the receiver to seek recovery of its losses, his response was instant: "There's been no claim filed by the school in California. We never filed a claim against anyone such as that."

When I referred in passing to the losses suffered by other investors, Vaughn could not resist repeating the mantra of the Deters believer/victim: "Many people say that Priscilla Deters doesn't have any money, but I don't think they know." Asked pointblank if HGST had lost any money with Deters, he answered, "Not yet."

Vaughn's successor as President, David Robinson, was more straightforward, if not much more informative. He agreed that Vaughn has "a strong personal commitment to this, and urgently desires for this to work out. We all do. But," he added, "some of the rest of us are more understanding of the realities."

Whatever he knew or didn't know in 1993, Vaughn's recommendation weighed heavily with Brian Donley. John Wesley College sent $100,000 to Productions Plus in January of 1994. It was one of the last institutional deposits to be made.

XXIV

We have seen how much of the investors' money Priscilla Deters spent on her family. But their support was not her main goal. Throughout these years she came back again and again to Jackson Bailey's paintings, locked up in that Florida construction company's warehouse, and she became increasingly determined to have them. She was determined, and willing to spend money.

She paid Sylvester Singleton at least $77,000 to take over his management agreement.

She paid Jackson Bailey and his family members well over $600,000, in keeping with the terms of the agreement.

In April, 1992 she paid Theme Park Ventures $50,000 for an exclusive option to buy the paintings from them, for a total price of $500,000.

And by the end of 1992, she was spending freely on legal fees to gain control of the paintings.

The legal fees were necessary because in June of 1992, she filed suit against Robert Graves.

She had negotiated with Graves, in her fashion, for months since first meeting with him the previous October. According to Graves, she first tried to convince him that she owned the paintings, evidently by virtue of the clause in the management agreement about an "ownership interest."

But Graves was not impressed by this agreement. The last he knew, the paintings were owned by Theme Park Ventures, and they hadn't sold them to anybody. He said he insisted that Deters show him evidence of a clear title to the paintings before he would release them to her. This, of course, she did not have. But she resolved to get it.

In the meantime, she changed tacks, and tried to charm the paintings out of his grasp, by proposing to raise money for Graves' religious community, a million dollars worth, from her copious business profits, once he handed over the paintings. Graves told Deters his community would freely accept any contributions she wanted to make. But he wasn't interested in bartering the paintings for a promise.

Quakers and Nazarenes by the score had fallen for this line. But Graves did not. One wonders whether his affluent background combined with his priest's vow of poverty to help him see through the ploy. On the one hand, he says he knew that holding on to the paintings was the only chance he had of gaining any kind of settlement of what he felt his family was owed, and he wasn't about to let go of them otherwise.

And on the other hand, where evangelicals like Maurice Roberts' wife were deeply moved by what they saw as her devout spirituality, Graves says she looked shallow and crooked to him from the beginning. Perhaps this was a difference in perception enabled by the distance between Wesleyan and Franciscan religious cultures. Or perhaps it was something that a recovering rascal nicknamed "Bubba" would recognize, through a glass darkly.

In the end, Graves believes that it was this seeing through her that sent Deters scurrying to file suit. "What really got her mad," he told me, "was at the end I laughed at her, and said, You know Priscilla, I've told you one thing, to get your attorneys to show me proof that you really own this art work. And you know what I think? I think all of that's a bunch of garbage.'

"That was it," Graves said. "I laughed at her, and she thought she was getting her sweet revenge. She got all flustered on the phone, and ended by saying, You will be hearing from my attorneys.'"

And he did. Deters formed an alliance with John Chambers and Theme Park Ventures, to hire a widely respected and aggressive law firm in Orlando, Subin, Shams and Rosenbluth, to take on the priest and wrest the paintings away from him. Over the next two years she was to pay Subin and Shams almost $200,000 in fees, and promise them a good deal more. She also retained a California attorney for the case, and paid him $35,000. She wanted those paintings.

Graves recalls this extended legal combat as a "nightmare," and it's no wonder. He lost every battle before the bar: the court ordered him to give up the paintings in June, 1992. Despite his appeals, they were finally moved out of his storage shed that fall. The judge in the case got so angry that he threatened the priest with fines and even jail.

By late 1992, Deters must have felt her dream was finally within her grasp: She commissioned Johnnie Carl, a musician at the Crystal Cathedral, to compose a musical score to go with the exhibition of the paintings, paying him $26,000. She threw $11,000 more at Ed Steele, for writing a narration script for the show.

But these plans proved premature. In the end, Graves outlasted Deters. He denounced her whole performance as "a con." Even after it was clear he wouldn't get anything for his family's estate, he was resolved to deny Deters control of the artwork. He kept up the struggle like an everglades guerilla.

When his case, built on his inflated bill for $2.7 million in storage fees, was thrown out, he hunted up old creditors who had loaned money to Theme Park Ventures, and persuaded them to sue Deters for payment of their liens. This challenge threw Deters on the defensive, and dragged out the process for months.

By late 1993 Deters and Theme Park Ventures had achieved technical legal control of the paintings, but all this really gained her was the opportunity to pay storage bills that topped a thousand dollars a month, while lawyers wrangled and her legal bills mounted. More than a year later, the painting still sat locked up in a storage warehouse in Orange County. Meanwhile Robert Graves was setting out to find someone else who could buy the paintings, and get them away from Deters for good.

"It was her just due," he said to me. "What hurt the worst about it was that she was doing all this in the name of religion, just like those preachers scamming people on TV."

Then he waxed briefly theological. "There are sins that are not heard about much, and they're the sins that cry out for God's justice."

Which ones? I asked. "The abuse of the innocent," he said, "like the defrauding of all those people by Priscilla Deters."

He also admitted that at the beginning, he had had a more worldly goal: "I wanted my family to get what was coming to them for a defaulted project and eight years of storage of the paintings. Instead, they tried to sue it all away from us for nothing."

Personally, I believed him on both counts.

XXV

Robin Johnston remains proud of his tenure as President of Barclay College, which was still Friends Bible College when he started. Ironically, in light of how it ended, one of the main goals of his administration was to put the college on a sound financial footing. Johnston is an engaging man, who spoke frankly about his experience with Productions Plus and what it has cost him.

Barclay is a small school, with barely a hundred students in 1993, in rural Haviland, Kansas. It began as an academy for evangelical Quaker youth, and became a college in 1916. "The College has always been in a tight financial spot," Johnston told me. "Sometimes we were behind on paychecks, but this was not unusual."

Penury was more than an unfortunate condition; it was also a kind of witness to simplicity, a sign that the school was staying on its course of training holiness missionaries, "soul-winners," and evangelistic pastors, and not going the way of the larger, secularizing Quaker colleges, going for growth and prosperity, and chasing anybody and everything to get it.

Still, austerity is one thing; chronic flirting with bankruptcy is another. The school, like John Wesley College in North Carolina, was deeply in debt when Johnston came, and he says he worked ceaselessly to pay off the loans, and get rid of the high interest payments that went with it. "We built a new education building, Jackson Hall," he said, "without going into debt." They were making progress. "And we were doing it while keeping the tuition low, so our graduates would not have to go so deeply into debt. But then," he admitted, "we had a hard time getting contributions out of them."

New donors, and steady ones, that's what Johnston was constantly looking for, and as much as anything else, that's what led him to Priscilla Deters, just as it had Brian Donley and Delbert Vaughn.

Oh, that and the usual: fulsome praise for her from Eugene Coffin, with whom he talked several times. And from Maurice Roberts, who sat on his board.

He even visited the Productions Plus "headquarters" in the mall at Rancho Cucamonga, and was taken through the room that was Channel Q, with the brightly blinking signs.

"She really snowed me," he said. "She said these moving billboards, they were going to be everywhere, there was just no end to the resources they were going to bring in. And that was how she could turn money over so fast." Oddly, though, no one was working in the office at the time except Priscilla's sister, Phyllis Beaver.

Johnston had his young daughter with him on that visit. When they left, she turned to him and asked, "Daddy, what did that lady say for the last hour?"

Johnston said, "Sarah, I don't know."

Still, Barclay College sent Productions Plus $90,000 in October of 1991. Given the school's circumstances, that much money wasn't easy to find. "We pulled some money from this, that and the other thing," Johnston said. They were promised a return of $180,000 the following October.

Deters did send Barclay a check for $90,000 in November of 1992, with a letter telling them that was their match, and the original $90,000 was still on deposit. The board decided to leave it there, and planned on using that money especially for scholarships. Johnston admitted that "we didn't have the cash flow to have anything less than double our money back."

But Johnston and Barclay never saw another penny from Deters. By 1995, Johnston was reporting to Rocky Mountain Yearly Meeting that, "It is true that we are facing economic difficulties and we have been mandated by our accrediting agency to improve out economic status by November of this year." There were rumors that the school might be forced to close, and the impression one gets is that it was a near thing.

Johnston took the fall for the debacle, offering his resignation in the spring of 1995. He was kept on for a year as Alumni Director, then simply cut loose, in "downsizing." After a year's "sabbatical," he found a slot as pastor of the Berkeley Friends Church, in California. Talking with him, it sounded as if the year off, and the new job, had done him a lot of good. He was upbeat, optimistic, and admirably philosophical about what had happened. He expected to be called as a witness for Annette Gurney in Priscilla's trial.

XXVI

Is it merely a coincidence that June, 1992, was the twenty-fifth anniversary of Priscilla Kuhn Deters' graduation from Marion College, and in that same month she collected a $50,000 deposit from her alma mater? The contact person for the deposit in her records was the president, James Barnes.

In any event, the old school tie didn't get it any special treatment. The school, renamed Indiana Wesleyan University, is still waiting for its money.

XXVII

A multimedia religious art extravaganza. That's what Priscilla hoped to build around the Life of Christ paintings: there would be lights, music, video; a production worthy of the name. And she couldn't afford to wait until the hassles over ownership were worked out and she had physical control of the works.

She began assembling the pieces for a prototype. Priscilla talked of having Johnnie Carl's musical score recorded by a philharmonic in London, and even booked some recording studio time in England. A video of the paintings was made, and she obtained a set of what she called "vignettes," small versions of some of the big panels painted by Bailey.

It wasn't the real thing. But it was a start. And by March of 1992, she was ready for a trial run.

She chose a conference called "Sonrise," in Glorieta, New Mexico, organized by her childhood acquaintance, Tom Claus, for his Native American ministry. Several hundred people were on hand when she presented a concert, along with a slide show of the paintings (the video wasn't ready yet). The "vignettes" were displayed in an adjoining room.

Deters called the presentation a "Tribute to the Master by the Masters art and music spectacular." Jackson Bailey, billed as a "world renown artist," made a personal appearance at the event.

For the official record, Tom Claus called it "a great success..." But when I asked him about it, he recalled it somewhat differently.

He said a lot of his people were not impressed by the "vignettes." "Lots of them looked inferior, you know, not up to a high art standard." Besides, "Some of the figures in them were really dark."

Dark? You mean hard to see?

No, he answered; dark-skinned. "People didn't think the apostles looked that dark," he said. (Jackson Bailey was adamant on this point. "Jesus and the apostles were Arabs," he told me, "and by today's standards they'd be considered dark-skinned. I researched this, and I wanted my paintings to be true to history.")

As for the concert, the big spectacular amounted to not much more than Phyllis playing the organ, the sisters singing and showing slides, and then distributing copies of Bailey's "In God We Trust" poster to everyone.

Claus liked the slides of the big paintings. But overall, the concert was less than a stellar launch for the multimedia program.

Deters tried again later that year, this time in print, with The Life of Christ Coloring Book. The drawings were by Bailey's wife Brenda, and Productions Plus was the publisher. But again, performance was less than spectacular. Three years later, Deters acknowledged that "Productions Plus presently has an inventory of...24 cases of The Life of Christ Coloring Book from which sales are being made on a sporadic basis." (Wayne Ashworth said the Whittier Christian School bought some.)

Bailey's art, specifically "The Creation," appeared in print again the next year, on the cover of Productions Plus's other venture in publishing, a book called Founded on the Floods: A Scientist Looks at Creation, by Hugh Paine.

Paine was a religious physicist, and the book made a case for a modified form of creationism, namely that there were two great floods recorded in the Bible associated with the earth's early history. Noah and the Ark floated on the second flood, Paine contended. The first flood took place before the opening verses of Genesis.

Whatever the scientific or biblical merits of this thesis, the book must have been costly to produce, with its large full-color cover, including a snapshot of Jackson Bailey on the back. And its sales were also, as Deters' euphemistically put it, "sporadic." Deters said there were still 73 cases of Founded on the Floods in inventory in August, 1995.

Deters put on one more concert extravaganza, called "One Night of Greatness," in November of 1993, in Houston. Randy Littlefield, now pastoring nearby, helped with it, as did the Houston Graduate School of Theology. It was billed as a fundraiser for an inner-city ministry, and the first half brought together several local choirs and musical groups. After intermission, however, it was all Productions Plus: the video of the big paintings; musical arrangements by the Crystal Cathedral's Johnnie Carl; a tribute to Hugh Paine and Founded on the Floods; and again, Jackson Bailey was on hand, this time to hand out "vignettes" as awards to local church leaders.

Priscilla produced the concert, in a large auditorium. Evidently the event went off reasonably well; but the turnout was disappointing. Randy Littlefield admitted that "the main hall...was not as full as we had hoped."

(Priscilla's son Loren, in an unguarded moment a few years later, was more blunt: "my mom's understanding," he said, "was that they would provide the people in the seats, and she would do all the up-front work, as usual. And when it came time to put people in the seats, there was no one there.")

Depending on your point of view, it is possible to see in these events a progression toward a polished performance which, once the paintings were incorporated, could have credibly contended for "spectacular" status.

As it turned out, though, the Houston concert was just about the last hurrah for a dream that was coming under increasing, and increasingly irresistible pressure, from several directions.

XXVIII

Was July 11, 1993 the turning point for Productions Plus, its Gettysburg? That's how it looks to me. Priscilla Deters visited her bankers that day. She told them she wanted to borrow money--a lot of money, $357,000.

The bankers were willing, as bankers are, provided she could offer appropriate security for the loan.

She had security, in the form of seven certificates of deposit at the bank, in amounts large enough to cover the loan. She signed them over, got the money, and left.

What was this loan for? Well, there were the huge legal bills in Florida, of course, where Robert Graves still had the Life of Christ art mired in legal swamps. Then there was $129,000 paid to Jackson Bailey and members of his family that year; and $200,000 paid to her four sons. This is not to mention the calls from various of her "beneficiaries" for payments of their promised "matched funds."

Money was still coming in, of course, and by the end of that year, or a little after, she would have some of her biggest scores: the $100,000 from North Carolina Yearly Meeting, followed by an equal sum from John Wesley College. But these were among the last of her new suckers. Meanwhile, the cash was flowing out an at alarming, and unsustainable rate.

In June, Deters had reported to Maurice Roberts that the $22,000 deposited in 1989 by the Friends Ministers Conference Committee had ballooned to $280,000, which he could count on for financing the conference the following spring. She followed up this report in September, with a check for $35,000 to Roberts for Mid-America Yearly Meeting, as the "match" for one of its many outstanding deposits. It was, however, the last payment the yearly meeting ever received from her.

In November she put on the under-attended, money-draining Thanksgiving concert in Houston.

And on December 3 of that year, Gary Fulton, of the Kansas Securities Commission, opened a formal investigation of Productions Plus.

XXIX

The first interest payment of $3750 on North Carolina Yearly Meeting's $100,000 deposit, which was intended to benefit the Houston Graduate School of Theology, was due in March of 1994. It did not arrive.

That same month, Billy Britt announced to the Representative Body meeting that he planned to retire as Superintendent not later than June 30, 1995. At the same meeting, partisans of the Houston Graduate School of Theology proposed to eliminate the Earlham School of Religion from eligibility for yearly meeting student loans; but this effort was defeated.

XXX

Who called Gary Fulton?

It was almost certainly someone from Mid-America Yearly Meeting, but Leatha Hein, who was clerk of their Trustees, insists it wasn't she. "By the time I talked to Gary," she says, "he was already working on it."

Hein was working on it too. The Trustees had been pressing for a meeting with Deters, to get some firsthand information about this woman who had taken in so much of the money under their care. And on January 28, 1994, they finally had their chance. Maurice Roberts brought Deters to the MAYM office in Wichita, and the Trustees spent several hours listening to her talk vaguely and in circles about her plans, her vision, and her immensely profitable enterprises.

This session was a disaster for Deters. Afterward, the Trustees, even those who had been most loyal to Roberts, agreed that MAYM should have nothing further to do with Deters and Productions Plus, and that they needed to act to get their money back as soon as they could.

There was another important meeting earlier that month, January 12, when Gary Fulton called on Roberts, to gather information about Deters. At the end of March, Fulton wrote to Deters in California, requesting documents about the business. Deters called him a few days later, to say her attorney would have the information for him soon.

Now events began to speed up. The 1994 Friends Ministers Conference was scheduled for Memorial Day weekend. Maurice Roberts, in his other capacity as Clerk of the Conference Planning Committee, requested a disbursement of some of the $280,000 Deters had told him were waiting for the group, to pay the advance expenses. He did not get an immediate response. When he did hear from Priscilla, she talked about her many problems and the attacks of enemies, and said she would have $140,000 for them soon, in time for the gathering in Orlando.

The Friends Ministers Conference was not the only gathering seeking money from Deters then. YouthQuake 1994 was scheduled for December in New Mexico, and its planning committee needed funds to print a publicity poster and deal with other advance costs.

Royce Frazier, who was Clerk of the Committee and Maurice Roberts' Assistant Superintendent, told the group he would get some of the matching grant they were due from Productions Plus. No one was worried; they had a total of $20,000 coming. And Frazier soon came through, with checks drawn on MAYM accounts for a total of $10,000. The Committee figured this was the matching part of their investment, and plans for the gathering proceeded.

Barely two weeks after Priscilla had heard from Fulton and knew she was under investigation, Deters confronted Leatha Hein again, on April 15, 1994 at an airport lounge near her office in Walnut, California.

Priscilla planned a full-court press for the session: she brought Eugene Coffin and George Brown, two of her "Board." Roberts accompanied Hein. When Deters arrived, her son Randy followed in his mother's wake, pushing a cart on which was a portable VCR, ready to show a new video--probably the video of the paintings.

But Hein was having none of it. She had not come to California for a dog and pony show, she declared. She was there to ask questions, on behalf of the MAYM Trustees, and she wanted answers.

Deters immediately launched into a rambling, rapid-fire response. But when she mentioned that she had a new plan to achieve her overall goals, involving Maurice Roberts' helping her to canvass every church in MAYM and getting all the pastors' retirement money invested with her, Hein cut her off.

"Excuse me," she barked, "you need to understand this. You're not dealing with Maurice Roberts anymore, because he does not have fiduciary responsibility. You're done dealing with him, and you're done dealing with Mid-America Yearly Meeting." There would be, Hein made plain, no canvassing of pastors. Nor would Maurice Roberts be promoting Productions Plus again.

That stopped Priscilla in mid-flight, Hein recalls. "She sort of looked at me like, What did you just say?' I think she knew she'd been told."

That same month, the trustees talked to Gary Fulton. Then they hired their own lawyer.

XXXI

Friends were not the only ones anxiously expecting payments from Priscilla. Her Florida attorney, Ralph Losey, wrote to John Chambers on December 8, 1993, that "it is her intention to conclude the purchase of the painting [from Theme Park Ventures] prior to the end of this year."

It didn't happen. But in mid-January, 1994, Attorney John Chambers, representing Theme Park Ventures, prepared a Bill of Sale as if the deal was again imminent. It didn't happen then either.

XXXII

On may 26, 1994, the Fifth Friends Ministers Conference opened in Orlando, Florida on schedule. Priscilla Deters was on hand, as were others who had things to sell to Quaker pastors. Prominent among the numerous exhibitors were Phil and Steve Harmon, insurance agents from Northwest Yearly Meeting, who manned a booth and touted their National Friends Insurance Trust, a health insurance plan which many yearly meetings were part of.

Deters may have been briefly taken aback by Leatha Hein's pronouncement that she wold not be permitted to canvass pastors in MAYM about investing their retirement funds. But she rebounded quickly and adroitly. Priscilla simply told Maurice Roberts she wanted to do her canvassing in Orlando, where there would be more ministers on hand anyway. To make sure she was allowed to do her prospecting, she said there would be no advance "disbursement" of matching funds; instead, she would bring a check for $80,000 to the conference with her, and send $60,000 more shortly afterward.

She did bring the $80,000 check, which she kept in her pocket until Sunday, the last day of the conference. Then she told Roberts not to deposit it until the following Wednesday. The Conference Treasurer, David Brock, the Superintendent of Indiana Yearly Meeting, was not concerned about the delay, at first. "She looked real professional in Florida," he said. "She convinced us that she knew what she was doing." Then on Tuesday, she called Roberts and told him to hang on to the check for a few more days.

In the meantime, however, the hotel staff had presented its bill, and told David Brock he could not leave until the bill was paid.

Now Brock was concerned; he needed $80,000 cash, and he needed it now. He got on the phone to the clerk of his Trustees, and arranged an emergency loan of $80,000 from Indiana's reserves, to pay the bill so he could get home.

This experience was unsettling enough. But the wait for clearance to deposit the $80,000 check continued, until several weeks later when Brock was appalled to discover that Deters had stopped payment on the $80,000 check the day after she gave it to the Conference officials. He realized then that she had never intended for it to be paid.

It was after the Orlando debacle that the scales began to fall from the eyes of the leading pastoral Friends. After five years of confidence in Productions Plus, they suddenly realized that something was seriously wrong somewhere. $80,000 was a lot of money, and Indiana's Trustees wanted it back.

What to do? Key superintendents met by phone in October, and it was agreed that the two umbrella associations which had sponsored the conference, Friends United Meeting and Evangelical Friends International, would sign a note promising to pay the money back to Indiana.

But neither of these groups had the money to make good on the note, so a letter went out to all the participating yearly meetings, asking that they "voluntarily" contribute funds to pay off the note, according to the number of persons they had sent to the conference.

This was done. But it is a curious fact that nowhere, in any of the yearly meeting minutes of the period that I have reviewed, which includes most of them, is there any mention of this special, unexpected "fraud surcharge" or its basis.

Indiana's share, for instance, was $13,000. That's not a small amount, but there was no mention of the transaction in the yearly meeting minutes. I asked David Brock why not, and he couldn't say

Thus quietly, almost surreptitiously, the EFI-FUM note was speedily retired and the incident receded into the mists of silence.

As Conference Treasurer, Brock spent many hours on the phone with Priscilla that summer and fall, attempting to cajole the promised $140,000 out of her. He got nowhere; she took up much of the time complaining about sickness in her family, and attacks by a growing number of enemies.

By the end of that summer, though, Brock recalls that Deters suddenly changed her tune.

"She said she really didn't owe us money at all," he told me. "She said we had mishandled her plan, and that she was now going to set up a matching plan in every community where we had a pastor, and she wanted me to give her their names, addresses and phone numbers.

"This," he concluded, "was crazy."

Brock also got calls during this period from our old reliable, Eugene Coffin. Coffin assured him that Deters would come through, and urged him not to cooperate with any investigations that were being hatched as part of the persecution of his friend and patron.

With the collapse of the Productions Plus bubble, Deters was not the only one who was in trouble. Among those in the know, many eyes were turning toward Wichita, to focus on her principle promoter in the heartland: Maurice Roberts.

XXXIII

When Mid-America Yearly Meeting gathered in August, 1994, Leatha Hein thought she knew just how much money the group had put into Productions Plus, how much it had gotten out, and what the outstanding balance was: $55,696. This amount represented only the difference between what had been put into Productions Plus through MAYM, and what had been returned; it did not include the "matching amounts," which would have been several hundred thousand dollars more.

Based on the expectation of receiving these matching funds, the yearly meeting had gone ahead with construction of a new headquarters building, and several other projects. Now, after Orlando, it was time for a reckoning.

Before Leatha Hein's regular report, Maurice Roberts spoke about Productions Plus. He reminded Friends that the yearly meeting had been involved with the program since 1989, but "Beginning in mid 1993," he acknowledged, "this matching gift program began to show signs of concern."

What kind of concern? First, of course, there was the obvious fact that payments had stopped. "Most recently," he said, " verbal reports [from Deters] have hinted that the money which has been received by Mid-America may be only the return of our original deposits, and not matching money at all."

I don't think Roberts yet realized it, but as far as Priscilla was concerned, he had joined the enemy, become part of the satanic forces that were attacking her from all directions.

When he finished, Hein continued, stating frankly that "The Trustees have filed a formal complaint with the Kansas Securities Commission...and we are presently working with the Commission in an investigation. You need to be aware that there could be a lawsuit in the future that names Maurice Roberts, Superintendent, and the Yearly Meeting Trustees."

This was not happy news. But when it was over, Hein figured she had done her job. Both the yearly meeting and the Trustees knew what the numbers were, and where they stood. The worst was over.

But it wasn't. Shortly after the sessions concluded, Hein got an envelope in the mail. Inside were copies of documents which showed that there were in fact several more transactions involving Productions Plus and MAYM which she and the Trustees had not known about, and for which the yearly meeting was liable. The total amount of these unadmitted and unpaid obligations came to $150,000.

That is to say, Roberts had been deceiving the Trustees about just how many deposits he had solicited, from whom, and on what terms.

Hein was shocked, and angry. If the yearly meeting were sued, the buck would stop with the Trustees; that was the law. They were being put at personal risk without their knowledge or consent.

This was an intolerable situation. Between the Trustees and the Superintendent, something would have to give. And soon.

XXXIV

Gary Fulton of the Kansas Securities Commission was still waiting for documents from Productions Plus in September, 1994, six months after his letter requesting them. But he did hear from Priscilla. She called on the 20th of that month to tell him again that her attorney was assembling the papers, which would be sent by the end of the month.

But she also said, among other things, that contrary to what had been told her depositors for years, "the money collected by Productions Plus was not an investment but earnest money as a gesture of good faith for her commitment to do fundraising for them."

This is similar to what David Brock was hearing about the same time in Indiana. It has the ring of a legal ploy. Deters' son Loren, who was paid so well by Productions plus while in law school, articulated the line quite well.

All of his mother's projects, he said, were in reality "joint ventures with nonprofit organizations," which were "a way to help nonprofit organizations raise money for the efforts that they were pursuing."

In such "joint ventures," he explained, "because Productions Plus would have to do the groundwork first, it's my understanding that they would need some kind of security from the group with which they were engaged in this joint venture so that if they [the group] backed out at the end, Productions Plus didn't suffer all of the losses."

If Fulton expected Priscilla to keep her pledge, he was disappointed. On September 30 a letter came. "In the letter," he reported, "Deters said her ninety seven year old mother had a heart attack and she was unable to send the requested information."

Three weeks later, Deters called Fulton again. This time she told him "a criminal element of people were trying to discredit her program through false information."

But that was not all. She told him that "the earnest money[s] she collected from participants in her program were never placed into Certificates of Deposit and she did not know where that type of information originated." Still, Fulton noted, she "again reassured [me] that her attorneys were working around the clock compiling the requested information and should have it sent shortly."

By December, in a dry, third-person statement, Fulton was reporting that he had "failed to receive any written documentation from Deters as promised."

I doubt he was surprised by such evasion and stonewalling. In any event, it did not deter him. There were other ways to get what he wanted.

Fulton had worked on several interstate fraud investigations, among them probes involving the California Department of Corporations. Fulton contacted an investigator he knew there, John Noonan, and in early December, Noonan applied for a warrant to search Deters' house in Walnut, with Fulton's help.

Citing the 1991 Desist and Refrain order, Fulton blandly told the judge that "it is apparent that Deters and Productions Plus have continued to operate their investment program in the State of California after the issuance of said California order." Fulton added that he "believes the records pertaining to this investment program are to be found" there. The judge agreed to let them find out.