THERE’S a new twist to tale of the group of delusional American missionaries who travelled to Haiti to bag themselves a bunch of orphans.
The Age reports that eight of the ten Baptists in custody on child abduction charges have signed a note saying that they had been misled by Laura Silsby, the leader of the group.
A scribbled note handed to a producer for NBC News said:
Laura wants to control … We’re afraid.
The in-fighting came amid a shake-up in the legal representation of the Americans, who have been charged with trying to remove 33 Haitian children from the country without government permission. Edwin Coq, who had been representing the group, said he stepped down in a fee dispute. But another lawyer, Jorge Puello, who is based in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, said he fired Coq after Coq had tried to buy the Americans out of jail in a $60,000 extortion scheme.
Laura Silby, left, pictured in a Haitian slammer with several other barmy Baptists
Meanwhile, the Telegraph reveals that Silsby’s life was in a mess before she left for Haiti – and is probably the last person on the planet to be trusted to take care of others.
Just days before Christmas the 40-year-old debt-ridden divorcee had her house repossessed, and former employee has brought a law suit against her alleging unfair dismissal and unpaid wages.
In 2008, just before the property market crash, Silby, a mother of three, paid $358,000 for a large mustard-coloured home in the new Shepherd’s Creek development in Meridian near Boise, in western Idaho.
But just before Christmas, the family packed up and left overnight, departing so abruptly that they left a 15-ft Chistmas tree in one of the windows.
A “For Sale” board declares that the property is being sold in foreclosure proceedings.
There were few regrets from other residents, said neighbour Chris Wentzel.
They were not popular at all. They didn’t look after the property and they had a vicious pit bull that used to get out. The police were called a few times.
She had that nice house and a convertible blue Lexis sports car so we figured she was making good money. It was a real shock when she just bailed out like that and now we hear about all these financial problems.
She added:
And I was just amazed to see she was down in Haiti, saying she was trying to save orphans. She never struck me as the do-gooder type.
Silby is a member of Central Valley Baptist Church. Even as her business affairs plunged deeper into turmoil, she had been drawing up plans to build an orphanage for Haitian children and run an adoption programme
For loving Christian parents who would otherwise not be able to afford the cost.
Over the last year, Mrs Silsby and her live-in nanny Charisa Coulter, 24, made several trips to Haiti and the neighbouring country of Dominican Republic, where she had ambitious plans for an orphanage with resort facilities on a north coast beach.
But after the devastating January 12 earthquake struck Port-au-Prince, she went to her church pastor and asked for volunteers to join her and her assistant Coulter on a fast-track mercy dash.
The goal, according to her written submission for funds, was to “rescue Haitian orphans” and:
Share God’s love with these precious children, helping them heal and find new life in Christ.
The emotive appeal was flash emailed around the close-knit Baptist community of Idaho, a deeply conservative and religious state. It brought immediate results.
Three other worshippers from Central Valley – including a mother and her 18-year-old daughter – volunteered. So did three members of the Eastside Baptist church 140 miles away in Twin Falls – the pastor Paul Thompson and his son Silas, 18, among them – and two of Mr Thompson’s relatives from Texas and Kansas.
But the journey went so disastrously wrong that the families of the ten, who just two weeks ago were praying alongside them in church, were instead praying for their release from a hellish Haitian prison where they are being held on child kidnap and criminal association charges. If convicted they face jail terms of up to 15 years.
The Freethinker was founded in 1881 by GW Foote, an outspoken critic of religion. After the publication of 
February 9th, 2010 at 10:13 pm
Mmmmm..haiti…orphans…god-squadders .. unpaid bills and a house repossessed
Put it all together and what do you get $$$$$$$$$$ Kiddy Trafficking
Looks like we were right all along….. now all the fundies (as her co-prisoners are doing already) will be trying to distance themselves from here…
Religion is yet again to be proved to be about the abuse of power, control and CASH $$$
February 9th, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Just as many of us suspected–it had nothing to do with helping innocent children and everything to do with stealing them for Jesus. What a bunch of sick freaks.
February 10th, 2010 at 4:19 am
Let’s hope the Haitian authorities make an example of them to deter any other potential abductors.
Stealing children. How evil can you get? Let’s hope they feel the full weight of the law and more. Not just bankrupt Silsby but the other interfering twats just for being there. They could have donated twenty quid to a competent aid organisation instead of kidnapping “orphans” to boost the brainwashed congregations of their whacky churches.
Cnuts.
February 10th, 2010 at 5:26 am
Hmm, actually a question is whether one person (or possible two) in the group was stealing them for profit or is she being made a scapegoat for the others who were definitely planning to take them for Jesus (but not for profit).
I do feel a bit sorry for the two teens taken along by their parents. Though officially adults I suspect they didn’t have much input into the decisions made.
February 10th, 2010 at 10:29 am
Wonder if Ivey, from the original thread on this story, still stands by her comment:
‘They were trying to take these kids out of a country that’s in turmoil. There’s limited medical care, food, electricity, and clean water. Those monsters wanted to take them to the Dominican Republic where they could have a bed to sleep in and maybe even take a bath! Bastards!’
Nice one, Ivey.
February 10th, 2010 at 11:00 am
I wouldn’t be too harsh on Ivey, and others who expressed similar views, as we don’t know the full facts even now. I doubt somehow that this woman was actually “child-trafficking” in the strict sense of the word, despite her financial situation, but she does remind me of Christians that I knew of personally who either found themselves in straitened circumstances, or who couldn’t hold down a proper job for one reason or another, and then, quite miraculously, heard the “call” to full-time Christian service! In the cases that I was aware of, however, more responsible Christians saw straight through the subterfuge and knocked the idea on the head immediately!!
February 10th, 2010 at 11:30 am
Dig a little and you usually find the fundie “we are pure and only want to do good” is a patina of festering malice and self interest based – with acknowledgement to barriejohn – on deeps of ignorance you would find hard to imagine, never mind believe. Confucious/Broga say “when the shit hits the fan with the fundies loyalty goes out the window.”
February 10th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
The real tradegy in this whole affair is that orphaned children who desperately need taking out of haiti to get life saving medical care are now tangled up in red tape because of these bible bashing lot.
February 10th, 2010 at 1:46 pm
“Laura wants to control … We’re afraid.”
Religion in a nutshell.
February 10th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
She’s been declared bankrupt and morally bankrupt, I wonder which hurts a good christian woman like her the mo$t?
February 10th, 2010 at 5:59 pm
@Wurble: Gimme a clue? Oh, I see you have already done that.
Another distinction in “good christians” is their shallowness of thinking. All they need is to mouth the babble and for them it is game on. It is so, so simple. No study, reading, education needed – “Listen up, folks, I know and you gotta follow.”
February 10th, 2010 at 11:00 pm
barriejohn has the story. In the tracts, Christ saves those who have hit bottom, but just as often it’s those who have run out of hustles.
February 11th, 2010 at 12:40 am
Like I always say – - -
With friends like God, who needs enemas?
(Pretty good,huh?)
February 11th, 2010 at 12:50 am
I live in Boise, Idaho, USA. And as the threadhead said, this is a weird ass place to live, where god is a given. Even though I do not put it past these zealots to abduct children as future congregates, as that would also fill future contribution boxes and tything plates, I suspect that Silsby thought that the fact that her life was collapsing around her was an indicator that she had not done what her lord and savior had expected of her. As a desperate attempt to restore herself to god’s favor, who, like Job, would restore her previous lifestyle, she went on a poorly considered crusade to accomplish some heroic act in the name of her god.
But, this is simply a product of her religion induced insanity. Now, her troubles are deeper, and did not produce the miracle, that sign from god that she had won his favor. Big surprise. Who could have seen it coming?
In the face of Will Jones, I will shout, since this website terminated a thread before I got a chance to answer his protestations of the merit of religion in society:
Religion is a stone dragging humanity toward barbarism. Stifling science and freethought. If you want to keep your mind open, be an agnostic or a humanist, but don’t defend these butchers throughout history!!
NeoWolfe
February 11th, 2010 at 2:21 am
There is nothing more irritating in life than a naive idealist. Whilst naivety and idealism are cute characteristics in children, they are, in adults, undoubtedly the sickening symptoms of a feeble mind. How can one possibly sympathise when a Baptist missionary shepherdess and her sheep bumble their way into an international quagmire of criminal child-stealing? What could they possibly have been thinking?
I was reminded of the half-baked disciples of James Arthur Ray, who, at Mr Ray’s suggestion, cooked themselves in sweat lodges, only to emerge fully-baked and in some cases dead. Mr Ray is now facing manslaughter charges.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2.....3065.shtml
Where do these lemmings come from?
February 11th, 2010 at 11:10 am
Most of these delusional folk are equavalent to mental infants.
Deliberately held in a retarded state by a fraudulent church, supported by a government that encourages the intellectual cripplement of the populace, and preyed (prayed?) apon by a desperate charlatan.
Although, unusually in this case, the power-hungry fraud was neither pastor nor Pope!
February 11th, 2010 at 8:05 pm
I agree with MKG. These people may be deluded but that doesn’t make them evil. Not all fundies are the “God hates Fags” type, most are just very simple individuals. Mrs Silsby, according to the article was a successful business woman until recently, she traveled to Haiti prior to the quake with the intention of setting up an orphanage. Her behaviour after the quake though sounds more than strange.
February 12th, 2010 at 10:56 am
What is all that about Atheists and humanists not having morality?
February 15th, 2010 at 9:20 am
According to the slightly more in-depth feature in saturday’s Guardian, many of the kids weren’t even orphans; they were handed over by impoverished parents in poverty-stricken village outside of the city. The parents were told their chidren were being taken to a better life. The villages were not particularly damaged by the earthquake.
But, despite these seemingly suggestive facts, it does look like Laura Silby’s intentions were good, however deluded. As others have pointed out, it’s not uncommon for believers whose lies have nose-dived to suddenly find their ‘calling’. I think Silby’s actions will prove to be the desperate displacement activities of a woman who’s hit rock-bottom.
She acted on faith and with the best intentions. She represents a good analogy for the god-deluded as a group.
Her problem is a mental one; if she’d lashed out and killed someone she could probably have pleaded temporary insanity.
That may not save her from a jail term!
February 16th, 2010 at 11:45 pm
I hope that this criminal religious fundamentalistic bitch and her friends will be imprisoned forever! The world does not need stupid US-fundamentalist. Stay home and leave the world in peace!!! You are much too primitive!
you’d better bring the criminals G.W Bush, Mr. Cheney and Ramsfeld to court and condem them to life imprisonment! Then the world would perhaps recognise your country. Before it is just a nice country with a hell of a lot of primitive people!
March 8th, 2010 at 5:03 pm
So Laura Silby isn’t perfect. How many of you stand a chance of having your home repossessed. It is a sign of the times.
This woman was doing what the Lord asked her to do.
Those so called Christians who turn against her are no better than the average gang member. Judas, remember him?