Truth Plays False as Divine Healer

1901

Offers Kisses for the Fair Sex

Denver's Divine Healer Rakes in Coin by Practice Until Gathered in by Authorities

Denver, Col., July 23 — Francis Truth, alias William A. Bennis, was arrested here on complaint of Edith Sampson, who charges him with obtaining money by false pretenses and with practicing medicine without a license.

Truth poses as a divine healer, advertised extensively, and offers treatment free, but those who fail to make a "free will offering" have to wait all day. Part of his treatment is to hug and kiss good looking young women who apply for treatment. Two offer to testify that he kissed them. He requires his patients to take his treatment with their eyes shut.

Truth was imprisoned in the Massachusetts penitentiary according to Mrs. Stewell, who handles the crowds which throng his house in fashionable Capital hill. Several indictments for using the mails to defraud were found against Truth last year in Boston. He pleaded guilty to five and was fined $500 on each. The other two were suspended.


1913

How Cowards Were Punished

Many of the devices by which military indifference to life has been matured and sustained are curious.

In ancient Athens the public temples were closed to those who refused military service, who deserted their ranks or lost their bucklers, while a law constrained such offenders to sit for three days in the public forum dressed in the garments of a woman.

Many a Spartan mother would stab her son who came back alive from a defeat, and such a man, if he escaped his mother, was debarred not only from public offices, but from marriage, exposed to the blows of all who chose to strike him, compelled to dress in mean clothing and to wear his beard negligently trimmed. In the same way a horse soldier who fled or lost his shield or received a wound in any save the front part of the body was by law prevented from ever afterward appearing in public.

Divine Healer Stops Flow of Blood Following Fight

Indianapolis, 1917
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A divine healer demonstrated to Sergt. Thomas and a squad of police Saturday night his power when he stopped the flow of blood from a number of stab wounds which Mattie Brown, colored, 715 West Thirteenth street, suffered. It is said the stabbing was done by Grant Lightfoot, colored, of the same address, who alleged the woman owed him 50 cents. The Brown woman ran to 416 Cora street where the police were called. Lightfoot escaped.

The woman was lying on a bed bleeding profusely from the wounds. The police said a young negro approached and asked to be permitted to see her. The crowd that had gathered around the woman was ordered back by the police and the negro approached and waved his hands over the wounded woman while he mumbled strange words. The police said the bleeding stopped in about a minute. When questioned by the police all the man would say was that he was a "divine healer." The woman was sent to the City Hospital, where it is said her condition is serious.

--The Indianapolis Star, Indianapolis, November 12, 1917, page 8.