Browsing the news yesterday, I was fooled by a common name into clicking on an account of a couple-year-old murder. Then I saw something that made me keep reading.
“Whenever Chris Coleman reported the first death threat that he got from his e-mail account at w– at his work at Joyce Meyer Ministries, he came to us at the police department,” said Barlow.
The email read:
Tell Joyce to stop preaching the bull—- if I can’t get to Joyce, then I will get to someone close to her
“Huh,” I thought, “nasty televangelist hurt someone who believed in her. Ooh, boy. I wish people would learn from that.” Then I read on.
It was in January 2009, that a hand-delivered threat showed up in the mailbox at the Coleman family home. It read:
“F— You! Deny your God publically or else. No more oppurtunities [sic]. Time is running out for you and your family!”
“Deny your God”?!? Who says that?
Oh, wait. Atheist villains in the the Christian equivalents of dime store novels say that. Actual atheists don’t, because the whole construction implies that this god exists, but that hasn’t stopped bad dialog writers from using it.
That makes the threat something that should have raised the suspicion of any cop, any prosecutor, any jury who heard about it. It’s simplistic martyrdom fantasy. It’s pure persecution projection. It’s Old Testament and New. It’s the sort of nonsense that should have you looking very hard at the nearest Christian steeped in evangelical culture. In this case, that would be the husband with the televangelist boss.
The husband who was having an affair.
As investigators kept building their case, something was troubling them about that trail of threatening letters and emails.
“It read: “If I can’t get to Joyce then I will get to someone close to her,” said Det. Justin Barlow.
“We didn’t find anybody else who had received messages that were threatening to their family,” said Chief Joe Edwards.
The prosecution’s computer experts discovered there was good reason for that.
“Those threats were typed on his laptop,” Parkinson told Maher.
“The email threats that came to him originated from…”
“…his own laptop,” said Parkinson.
Coleman was sentenced to life in prison a year ago, based on a large amount of circumstantial evidence that it was he–and not some anonymous atheist–who killed his wife and his children. There was enough evidence that he would have been caught anyway, but it would have happened even sooner if anyone involved knew what atheists sound like when they’re not being called up out of central casting to play a villain.
Who knows? It might have even happened before the murders.
7 comments
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Crocoduck Hunter
May 7, 2012 at 9:38 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
All that proves is that the atheist villain TYPED IT ON COLEMAN’S LAPTOP. Also very textbook, like those movies where “We traced the call and it’s coming from INSIDE YOUR HOUSE.”
Jason Thibeault
May 7, 2012 at 10:40 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
@1: It was a double bluff! The atheist broke in, typed the letter in a manner that doesn’t sound like an atheist at all, and intentionally misspelled everything, from the televangelist’s own laptop, to get back at the televangelist who’d wrecked that poor atheist’s evening TV lineup! Gasp! Horrors!
Jason Thibeault
May 7, 2012 at 10:47 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Oops. I mean, from the televangelist’s employee’s laptop.
Ben Zvan
May 7, 2012 at 10:52 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
Except of course that most cops, most prosecutors and most jury members are working from the same assumption that god exists as the phrase “deny your god.” Oh, unfortunate reality, you disappoint me so.
George W.
May 7, 2012 at 11:55 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
no doubt in ALLCAPS or With random Capitalized words.
Liesmith
May 8, 2012 at 5:47 am (UTC -5) Link to this comment
The threats also made vague references to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.
kevinalexander
May 8, 2012 at 8:10 pm (UTC -5) Link to this comment
This man has been martyred. It’s obvious that some atheist hacker from godless china has murdered his family and framed him.
How do I know this? Because anyone who does the LORD’S work in Joyce Meyer’s
racketum,businessum, ministry can only be moved the needs of a loving Jesus.Unless Jesus hacked in because HE was in a hurry to get his family to heaven and give trials (in both senses of the word) to him to test his faith. In which case, never mind.