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First Baptist Church West Palm Beach:
Heiress accuses West Palm Beach church of exploiting her mental illness
WEST PALM BEACH — Had Lucinda Bennett not gotten swept away in a wave of religious fervor, she could be living in an oceanfront condo in Palm Beach, her only worry how to spend her $1.8 million inheritance.
Instead, having given away the condo and the bulk of her great-grandmother’s fortune to the venerable First Baptist Church West Palm Beach, the 37-year-old is living in a small house in rural northeast Florida and worrying about putting food in her mouth and gas in her car.
In a lawsuit expected to go to trial in the next month, there is no dispute that over 11 months in 2000 Bennett gave the bulk of her inheritance to the wealthy church and a former pastor who regularly told the faithful of the blessings they would receive if they embraced biblical teachings to tithe.
However, there is vast disagreement over what prompted the newly minted millionaire to give not just 10 percent of her inheritance but nearly the entire wad to people who say they barely knew her.
To attorneys representing the church and its former head pastor, the Rev. Keith Thomas, Bennett was merely exercising her First Amendment right to religious freedom when she wrote checks to the church, Thomas and at least one other former pastor who now teaches at Palm Beach Atlantic University.
To Bennett, who goes by the name Cinda, she was systematically manipulated by people who knew she was rich and easy prey.
“I’m mad at the Lord, and I’m mad at these pastors that took my money, and took advantage of me knowing I was mentally ill,” she said during a November 2005 deposition.
Sometimes, she testified, the anger was overwhelming.
“I’m so angry now I can’t control my car when I’m on the road. I was so angry a couple of years ago I almost drove my car off the road. I was suicidal, and I’m figuring this is getting to the point now where I cannot manage myself because I’m working so hard and the prosperity hasn’t come in that these pastors said, ‘Oh, you’re going to outgive God, and God is going to give back to you.’”
When the promised divine intervention didn’t materialize, she turned back to the church.
But when she called Thomas in March 2001, three months after her final donation of $520,000, he said he told her a refund wasn’t possible.
“I said, ‘Lucinda, all that money’s been used already, we don’t have that money here,’ ” said Thomas, who along with his wife and four children received a $60,000 “love offering” in $10,000 increments from Bennett.
Two years later, she tried again, asking Kevin Mahoney, the church’s executive pastor, for money to get treatment for what she feared was cancer.
“We do give toward basic needs, but in the case of Lucinda, she had called and asked for assistance in paying her medical bills, and you know that was not a basic need for a person’s presentation,” Mahoney said during a deposition late last year.
The strange tale has festered in the court system for nearly three years. Thomas, who oversaw a $10.2 million building program during his 13 years at the helm, left the church along the Intracoastal Waterway in 2003 to take over a mega-church in Mobile, Ala. Some of the other pastors have also moved on.
None of the principals in the lawsuit returned telephone calls for comment. The story, however, is spelled out in dueling court documents. Church officials claim they had no idea Bennett suffered from mental illness and weren’t aware of the full breadth of her contributions. Bennett’s attorneys counter that there was no way they couldn’t have known.
Bennett’s association with the church began in 1997, when she moved to Palm Beach to care for her great-grandmother, Elsie Hauptfuhrer. A self-made woman, Hauptfuhrer ran a successful women’s clothing store in Trenton, N.J., for 40 years and capped that success by operating an antiques shop, The Selective Eye, on Worth Avenue for a decade.
Bennett, who attended an exclusive Episcopal boarding school in Minnesota, quickly became immersed in the First Baptist Church. She sang in the choir. She taught Sunday school. She went on mission trips. She volunteered at the church’s pregnancy crisis center.
With almost the same alacrity, pregnancy crisis center officials became concerned about her.
“Lucinda’s behavior and/or conversation tended to extremes,” said Kim Kerr, the center’s director at the time.
When Kerr learned Bennett had taken a young couple into the church sanctuary for counseling, she decided that Lucinda’s behavior signaled deeper problems. Bennett said the session occurred in the ladies bathroom of the sanctuary. Regardless, Kerr told Bennett that if she wanted to continue to volunteer, she had to seek help from a church member who is a Christian psychologist.
She also learned that in 1999 Bennett had been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital while visiting her sister in North Carolina.
Kerr said she alerted her boss, the Rev. Kenneth Winter, of her action. Winter reported directly to Thomas, so Kerr assumed the head pastor was aware as well, she said.
Kerr wasn’t the only one to voice concerns about Bennett to church officials.
Gail Brown had been Hauptfuhrer’s trust adviser at what is now Wachovia Bank. When Hauptfuhrer died in February 2000 at age 92, her $1.8 million trust and her South Ocean Drive condo went directly to Bennett.
Coincidentally, Brown also was a member of First Baptist Church and knew Bennett casually because they both sang in the choir.
Brown said she watched Bennett drain the trust fund. Starting with a $203,000 check she dropped in the collection plate shortly before her grandmother’s death, Bennett had given the church nearly $600,000 by the end of August 2000.
When Bennett told Brown she was going to give nearly the entire proceeds of the sale of her grandmother’s $610,000 condominium to the church, Brown became alarmed, she said. Bennett had already tithed $60,000 from the sale to the church and planned to follow that with a $520,000 gift. When she expressed her concern to Bennett, “She said she felt she was doing what God was leading her to do.”
So Brown took the unusual step of talking to Winter, she said.
“I was concerned there wouldn’t be anything left for her future, and I wanted him to know that I had this concern for her and could we work with her,” she said.
She and Winter hatched the idea of establishing a trust. Bennett could live off the income, and the church would inherit the principal when she died.
Winter said he took the idea to Thomas and Mahoney. He said he told them how much Bennett had given and that the planned $520,000 gift would wipe her out.
“Subsequently, the decision was to receive and accept the monies,” said Winter, who now works at the Richmond, Va.-based International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Bank records show the check was written on Dec. 20, 2000, and deposited the next day.
Thomas said he was never told church leaders had advised Bennett to receive counseling. Further, he said, Winter never discussed with him the possibility of establishing a trust for Bennett.
Mahoney, who worked as a certified public accountant before becoming executive pastor of the church in June 2000, said Winter talked to him about the trust. Thomas, he said, wasn’t involved in the discussion.
The conversation, Mahoney said, was brief. Once Winter told him that the trust officer didn’t have permission from Bennett to talk about the creation of the trust, he cut him off.
“I advised Pastor Winter that we should not be discussing anything that was confidential between the trust officer and their client,” he said.
When it came to money, many things weren’t discussed, church pastors said.
Jeffrey Fenster, who represents Bennett, suggested that when she dropped $203,000 into the collection plate one Sunday in February 2000, shock waves must have reverberated through the church.
Winter acknowledged that such large checks rarely appear in the offering basket. But contributions weren’t discussed among the pastoral staff out of concern for donors’ privacy, he said.
Likewise, pastors were not required to tell one another or lay leaders of private donations they received.
For instance, when the Rev. Tommy Weir left the church in May 2000, he received a $25,000 “love offering” from Bennett. Weir, who now teaches at Palm Beach Atlantic University, said he wouldn’t recognize Bennett if she walked into the room. He said he thinks he wrote her a letter of thanks.
Later that May, Thomas received six $10,000 checks from Bennett — one for himself, his wife and each of his four children. Thomas said he barely knew Bennett. While he had previously received five-figure gifts, he said his children had never been the beneficiaries of such largess. When he called Bennett to thank her, she assured him she just wanted to properly acknowledge his 10th anniversary as church pastor.
The five ministers deposed in the case said the church had no policies prohibiting them from accepting personal gifts or requiring them to report the gifts to lay leaders.
Such policies are common among charities, according to national fund-raising experts. The dictum is simple: “You don’t take anything,” said Pamela Davidson, a tax lawyer and former president of the National Committee on Planned Giving.
The prohibition assures donors that fund-raisers won’t exploit people for personal gain. Further, said Tom Cullinan, also a member of the National Committee on Planned Giving, accepting personal gifts from donors poses a conflict of interest because the money could have gone to the charity.
In the past several years, executives of several charities, foundations, universities and religious institutions have been fired for crossing that line.
In the religious community, a renowned case involves Monsignor John Woolsey, who persuaded a parishioner at St. John the Martyr Church in New York City to give him $100,000 and name him the sole beneficiary of her will. Prosecutors investigated and charged Woolsey with stealing more than $1 million from the church. Dubbed Father Flim-Flam by tabloids, he was sent to prison in September.
When asked about ethical concerns about accepting large donations, Thomas seemed nonplused.
“If it’s given with sincerity, I don’t have any reason to think that would be unethical,” he said.
Further, he said, he tithed $6,000 of Bennett’s gift to the church.
Still, Fenster asked, did it strike him as odd that a woman he barely knew gave him $60,000?
“Did you suspect she was whacko or had psychological problems?” Fenster said.
Thomas said he didn’t and indicated that her mental illness is new or exaggerated. “I never saw any of the kind of behavior that I saw in the last two depositions,” he said.
Her gift seemed heartfelt, he said.
“I did not think there was anything wrong with me receiving a gift from a person that was in the church and actively serving and expressing gratitude for what she saw happening in her own life and the life of the church.”
But Bennett’s days of devotion to church leaders are clearly over.
She has embraced Orthodox Judaism and wants to study to be a rabbi.
She works selling odor control equipment to sewage treatment plants and credit card machines to business start-ups. With little money coming in, she said she can barely afford gas to get to temple, much less the $4,000 cost of rabbinical studies.
Thomas, meanwhile, is at Cottage Hill Baptist Church in Mobile, where he is again engaged in a multimillion-dollar building campaign.
As for First Baptist, it reports robust financial health.
In a recent newsletter to members, leaders reported they expected to reach their goal of $4.25 million in offerings for the fiscal year that ended Saturday. That is nearly $400,000 more than was collected the previous year.
“Clearly our giving this year is beyond anything we anticipated,” they wrote. “To God be the glory!”
The banner year came despite the uproar that surrounded the sudden departure of Thomas’ replacement. The Rev. Steven Flockhart, whom a search committee tapped after a three-year search, was forced to resign after The Palm Beach Post discovered his re’sume’ was phony and he had left a previous church in near-financial ruin.
Despite the generous offerings, church leaders said they need more. Hoping to retire a $3.1 million debt and make $800,000 in improvements before a new pastor arrives, they asked members to dig deep.
“Would you consider giving sacrificially towards this heartfelt vision?” they asked in the newsletter. “We want to change our world for Jesus Christ, one life at a time.”
Heiress accuses West Palm Beach church of exploiting her mental illness
WEST PALM BEACH — Had Lucinda Bennett not gotten swept away in a wave of religious fervor, she could be living in an oceanfront condo in Palm Beach, her only worry how to spend her $1.8 million inheritance.
Instead, having given away the condo and the bulk of her great-grandmother’s fortune to the venerable First Baptist Church West Palm Beach, the 37-year-old is living in a small house in rural northeast Florida and worrying about putting food in her mouth and gas in her car.
In a lawsuit expected to go to trial in the next month, there is no dispute that over 11 months in 2000 Bennett gave the bulk of her inheritance to the wealthy church and a former pastor who regularly told the faithful of the blessings they would receive if they embraced biblical teachings to tithe.
However, there is vast disagreement over what prompted the newly minted millionaire to give not just 10 percent of her inheritance but nearly the entire wad to people who say they barely knew her.
To attorneys representing the church and its former head pastor, the Rev. Keith Thomas, Bennett was merely exercising her First Amendment right to religious freedom when she wrote checks to the church, Thomas and at least one other former pastor who now teaches at Palm Beach Atlantic University.
To Bennett, who goes by the name Cinda, she was systematically manipulated by people who knew she was rich and easy prey.
“I’m mad at the Lord, and I’m mad at these pastors that took my money, and took advantage of me knowing I was mentally ill,” she said during a November 2005 deposition.
Sometimes, she testified, the anger was overwhelming.
“I’m so angry now I can’t control my car when I’m on the road. I was so angry a couple of years ago I almost drove my car off the road. I was suicidal, and I’m figuring this is getting to the point now where I cannot manage myself because I’m working so hard and the prosperity hasn’t come in that these pastors said, ‘Oh, you’re going to outgive God, and God is going to give back to you.’”
When the promised divine intervention didn’t materialize, she turned back to the church.
But when she called Thomas in March 2001, three months after her final donation of $520,000, he said he told her a refund wasn’t possible.
“I said, ‘Lucinda, all that money’s been used already, we don’t have that money here,’ ” said Thomas, who along with his wife and four children received a $60,000 “love offering” in $10,000 increments from Bennett.
Two years later, she tried again, asking Kevin Mahoney, the church’s executive pastor, for money to get treatment for what she feared was cancer.
“We do give toward basic needs, but in the case of Lucinda, she had called and asked for assistance in paying her medical bills, and you know that was not a basic need for a person’s presentation,” Mahoney said during a deposition late last year.
The strange tale has festered in the court system for nearly three years. Thomas, who oversaw a $10.2 million building program during his 13 years at the helm, left the church along the Intracoastal Waterway in 2003 to take over a mega-church in Mobile, Ala. Some of the other pastors have also moved on.
None of the principals in the lawsuit returned telephone calls for comment. The story, however, is spelled out in dueling court documents. Church officials claim they had no idea Bennett suffered from mental illness and weren’t aware of the full breadth of her contributions. Bennett’s attorneys counter that there was no way they couldn’t have known.
Bennett’s association with the church began in 1997, when she moved to Palm Beach to care for her great-grandmother, Elsie Hauptfuhrer. A self-made woman, Hauptfuhrer ran a successful women’s clothing store in Trenton, N.J., for 40 years and capped that success by operating an antiques shop, The Selective Eye, on Worth Avenue for a decade.
Bennett, who attended an exclusive Episcopal boarding school in Minnesota, quickly became immersed in the First Baptist Church. She sang in the choir. She taught Sunday school. She went on mission trips. She volunteered at the church’s pregnancy crisis center.
With almost the same alacrity, pregnancy crisis center officials became concerned about her.
“Lucinda’s behavior and/or conversation tended to extremes,” said Kim Kerr, the center’s director at the time.
When Kerr learned Bennett had taken a young couple into the church sanctuary for counseling, she decided that Lucinda’s behavior signaled deeper problems. Bennett said the session occurred in the ladies bathroom of the sanctuary. Regardless, Kerr told Bennett that if she wanted to continue to volunteer, she had to seek help from a church member who is a Christian psychologist.
She also learned that in 1999 Bennett had been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital while visiting her sister in North Carolina.
Kerr said she alerted her boss, the Rev. Kenneth Winter, of her action. Winter reported directly to Thomas, so Kerr assumed the head pastor was aware as well, she said.
Kerr wasn’t the only one to voice concerns about Bennett to church officials.
Gail Brown had been Hauptfuhrer’s trust adviser at what is now Wachovia Bank. When Hauptfuhrer died in February 2000 at age 92, her $1.8 million trust and her South Ocean Drive condo went directly to Bennett.
Coincidentally, Brown also was a member of First Baptist Church and knew Bennett casually because they both sang in the choir.
Brown said she watched Bennett drain the trust fund. Starting with a $203,000 check she dropped in the collection plate shortly before her grandmother’s death, Bennett had given the church nearly $600,000 by the end of August 2000.
When Bennett told Brown she was going to give nearly the entire proceeds of the sale of her grandmother’s $610,000 condominium to the church, Brown became alarmed, she said. Bennett had already tithed $60,000 from the sale to the church and planned to follow that with a $520,000 gift. When she expressed her concern to Bennett, “She said she felt she was doing what God was leading her to do.”
So Brown took the unusual step of talking to Winter, she said.
“I was concerned there wouldn’t be anything left for her future, and I wanted him to know that I had this concern for her and could we work with her,” she said.
She and Winter hatched the idea of establishing a trust. Bennett could live off the income, and the church would inherit the principal when she died.
Winter said he took the idea to Thomas and Mahoney. He said he told them how much Bennett had given and that the planned $520,000 gift would wipe her out.
“Subsequently, the decision was to receive and accept the monies,” said Winter, who now works at the Richmond, Va.-based International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Bank records show the check was written on Dec. 20, 2000, and deposited the next day.
Thomas said he was never told church leaders had advised Bennett to receive counseling. Further, he said, Winter never discussed with him the possibility of establishing a trust for Bennett.
Mahoney, who worked as a certified public accountant before becoming executive pastor of the church in June 2000, said Winter talked to him about the trust. Thomas, he said, wasn’t involved in the discussion.
The conversation, Mahoney said, was brief. Once Winter told him that the trust officer didn’t have permission from Bennett to talk about the creation of the trust, he cut him off.
“I advised Pastor Winter that we should not be discussing anything that was confidential between the trust officer and their client,” he said.
When it came to money, many things weren’t discussed, church pastors said.
Jeffrey Fenster, who represents Bennett, suggested that when she dropped $203,000 into the collection plate one Sunday in February 2000, shock waves must have reverberated through the church.
Winter acknowledged that such large checks rarely appear in the offering basket. But contributions weren’t discussed among the pastoral staff out of concern for donors’ privacy, he said.
Likewise, pastors were not required to tell one another or lay leaders of private donations they received.
For instance, when the Rev. Tommy Weir left the church in May 2000, he received a $25,000 “love offering” from Bennett. Weir, who now teaches at Palm Beach Atlantic University, said he wouldn’t recognize Bennett if she walked into the room. He said he thinks he wrote her a letter of thanks.
Later that May, Thomas received six $10,000 checks from Bennett — one for himself, his wife and each of his four children. Thomas said he barely knew Bennett. While he had previously received five-figure gifts, he said his children had never been the beneficiaries of such largess. When he called Bennett to thank her, she assured him she just wanted to properly acknowledge his 10th anniversary as church pastor.
The five ministers deposed in the case said the church had no policies prohibiting them from accepting personal gifts or requiring them to report the gifts to lay leaders.
Such policies are common among charities, according to national fund-raising experts. The dictum is simple: “You don’t take anything,” said Pamela Davidson, a tax lawyer and former president of the National Committee on Planned Giving.
The prohibition assures donors that fund-raisers won’t exploit people for personal gain. Further, said Tom Cullinan, also a member of the National Committee on Planned Giving, accepting personal gifts from donors poses a conflict of interest because the money could have gone to the charity.
In the past several years, executives of several charities, foundations, universities and religious institutions have been fired for crossing that line.
In the religious community, a renowned case involves Monsignor John Woolsey, who persuaded a parishioner at St. John the Martyr Church in New York City to give him $100,000 and name him the sole beneficiary of her will. Prosecutors investigated and charged Woolsey with stealing more than $1 million from the church. Dubbed Father Flim-Flam by tabloids, he was sent to prison in September.
When asked about ethical concerns about accepting large donations, Thomas seemed nonplused.
“If it’s given with sincerity, I don’t have any reason to think that would be unethical,” he said.
Further, he said, he tithed $6,000 of Bennett’s gift to the church.
Still, Fenster asked, did it strike him as odd that a woman he barely knew gave him $60,000?
“Did you suspect she was whacko or had psychological problems?” Fenster said.
Thomas said he didn’t and indicated that her mental illness is new or exaggerated. “I never saw any of the kind of behavior that I saw in the last two depositions,” he said.
Her gift seemed heartfelt, he said.
“I did not think there was anything wrong with me receiving a gift from a person that was in the church and actively serving and expressing gratitude for what she saw happening in her own life and the life of the church.”
But Bennett’s days of devotion to church leaders are clearly over.
She has embraced Orthodox Judaism and wants to study to be a rabbi.
She works selling odor control equipment to sewage treatment plants and credit card machines to business start-ups. With little money coming in, she said she can barely afford gas to get to temple, much less the $4,000 cost of rabbinical studies.
Thomas, meanwhile, is at Cottage Hill Baptist Church in Mobile, where he is again engaged in a multimillion-dollar building campaign.
As for First Baptist, it reports robust financial health.
In a recent newsletter to members, leaders reported they expected to reach their goal of $4.25 million in offerings for the fiscal year that ended Saturday. That is nearly $400,000 more than was collected the previous year.
“Clearly our giving this year is beyond anything we anticipated,” they wrote. “To God be the glory!”
The banner year came despite the uproar that surrounded the sudden departure of Thomas’ replacement. The Rev. Steven Flockhart, whom a search committee tapped after a three-year search, was forced to resign after The Palm Beach Post discovered his re’sume’ was phony and he had left a previous church in near-financial ruin.
Despite the generous offerings, church leaders said they need more. Hoping to retire a $3.1 million debt and make $800,000 in improvements before a new pastor arrives, they asked members to dig deep.
“Would you consider giving sacrificially towards this heartfelt vision?” they asked in the newsletter. “We want to change our world for Jesus Christ, one life at a time.”
