PASTOR'S STORY.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19159, 16 November 1927, Page 12

PASTOR'S STORY.

FALSE CONFESSION MADE. (by cable— press ASSOCIATION—COPYRIOHT.) (AUSTRALIAN AND N.Z. CABLE ASSOCIATION.) (Received November loth, 11.40 p.m.) MELBOURNE, November 15. The trial of Pastor Evan Thomas at Warragul, on a charge of offensive behaviour, furnished another sensation when he said that his alleged confession was not true. He added that three men did actually abduct him, and he made a false confession to save the name of the Pentecostal Church.

[Pastor Evan Thomas, a Welsh evangelist and faith-healer, belonging to the Pentecostal Church, Eichmond, who had been holding meetings at Warragul, told the police that three men accosted him in the main street of Warragul and asked him if he were a faith-healer. On receiving an affirmative reply they re- | quested him to see a woman who was i seriously ill, and took him in a car. He I said he received a heavy blow on the head, and when he recovered consciousness he found himself stripped of his clothing and alone in a paddock. Later he stated that when he went to Warragul he heard that certain elders of the Pentecostal Church intended to denounce him, and in order to avoid one of them he took a walk along a road, where he saw a tin of pitch. He then got the idea, stripped himself of his clothes, and spread pitch over his body. He also found a coil of fencing wire, with which he bound his hands behind his back.]