Today in History - May 18 | America's most famous celebrity Christian vanishes without trace
Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson was one of the most famous people in the US in the 1920s and 1930s.
Known as "Sister Aimee", she pioneered the use of mass broadcast technologies such as radio to send her Pentecostal message to people around the country, and she drew tens of thousands of people to her faith healing events.
So when she disappeared on May 18, 1926, it caused a huge commotion.
McPherson vanished from Ocean Park Beach in Santa Monica, California, prompting fears she had drowned. However, a search was unable to find any sign of her.
On June 23, her church, Angelus Temple, held a memorial service for her - only for her mother Mildred Kennedy to receive a phone call from officials in Arizona to tell her that McPherson was alive and in hospital.
McPherson claimed to have been kidnapped and held captive by a couple who took her to a shack in the Mexican desert. The evangelist claimed to have eventually escaped through a window and walked for more than 30km through the desert before she was found collapsed outside the Mexican border town of Agua Pietra.
Her return to Los Angeles drew a crowd of up to 500,000 people.
However, officials and the press were sceptical, with prosecutors ultimately accusing McPherson of having a clandestine affair with a former employee, Kenneth Ormiston.
Los Angeles prosecutors convened a grand jury with the intent to charge McPherson and others, including her mother, with criminal conspiracy. However, the case collapsed as the prosecution's witnesses changed their stories, while Ormiston identified another woman as the person he had run off with.
All charges were dropped for lack of evidence.
A total of 38 children and six adults were killed when a massive explosion ripped through Bath Consolidated School in Bath Township, Michigan, on May 18, 1927.
The attack was carried out by 55-year-old school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe, who was angered by higher taxes and his defeat in the 1926 election for township clerk. Before the school explosion, Kehoe also murdered his wife and blew up his own house.
Kehoe (pictured) then drove to the school in a truck filled with shrapnel, blowing it up as rescue efforts began. He was killed in the second explosion.
Authorities later found a massive, undetonated bundle of explosives under another part of the school, indicating Kehoe had hoped for his massacre to be even greater.
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Liverpool merchant John Bellingham was hanged for the assassination of UK Prime Minister Spencer Perceval on May 18, 1812 - barely a week after the murder itself took place.
Bellingham had been angered by the government's failure to aid or compensate him over his earlier imprisonment in Russia for a trading debt.
He shot Perceval dead in the House of Commons itself on May 11.
Perceval's death, as media at the time reported, prompted a wave of macabre celebration, particularly among poorer UK residents.
The Tory PM - still the only UK prime minister to have been assassinated - had resorted to harsh measures to prosecute the UK's role in the Napoleonic Wars, leading to widespread poverty and unrest in parts of the country.
Crowds cheered Bellingham as he was taken to jail, with many trying to shake his hand.
Eight students and two teachers were killed when 17-year-old student Dimitrios Pagourtzis opened fire at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018, in what would become the eighth-deadliest school shooting in US history.
The attack took place in the school's art wing, with one witness claiming Pagourtzis sang lyrics from Queen's "Another One Bites The Dust" between shots.
Confronted by police, Pagourtzis continued to shoot and threaten them, but ultimately surrendered after he was injured.
Pagourtzis has repeatedly been found to be not fit to stand trial, most recently in January this year.
He remains in custody.
If he ever comes to trial and is convicted of capital murder, he could face up to 40 years in prison before he is eligible for parole.
Because of his age at the time of the attack, Pagourtzis is ineligible for both life without parole, and death penalty sentences.
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