Say What 5

[CrimsonTide4]

VERY VERY LONG ARTICLE about an unscrupulous pastor in Dallas, TX.

http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2006-09-21/news/feature_full.html (pictures as well)

On judgment day, the bishop's women have all come together in one exquisitely cold place: the 372nd District Court in Fort Worth, where a jury has just agreed on a sentence for the Reverend Terry Hornbuckle.


The 44-year-old pastor has been convicted of drugging and raping three women, two of them former members of his Arlington megachurch. And while a hyperactive air conditioner generates a frigid breeze in the courtroom, a capacity crowd awaits the jury's decision.

The bishop's women are arrayed in various places in state District Judge Scott Wisch's courtroom. There is the wife, Renee Hornbuckle, cocoa-skinned and immaculately finished in a brown pantsuit, who stares an empty stare at her husband, a man known to many of his congregants simply as Bishop.

The bishop wears a tailored suit with a thigh-length jacket, the sort he'd choose for any occasion in the spotlight. For 20 years, he sat beside his wife on a church stage, enthroned like a king with his queen. She was the delicate ornament on display, he was the dark-skinned, street-talking black preacher of humble southern Dallas origins whose charisma landed him in a world of money, minor celebrity and access to the occasional Dallas Cowboy.

To this world he later added the ingredients of sex--with scores of women, judging by the accounts of former church members--and drugs. Today it is about to come crashing down.
Renee sits literally at the bishop's right hand, two rows back. She brings a little purple pillow to cushion her on the wooden bench reserved for the defendant's family. She has sat in precisely the same spot every day through the five-week trial, expressionless behind mirrored glasses. In her hands is a small, green leather-bound Bible with an inscription in tiny gold italics: "Pastor Renee Hornbuckle." She makes no statements to the gathered media; all she's been heard to say is an occasional under-the-breath comment--"I'm gonna need some No-Doz to stay awake through this thing." Mirrored glasses and the Word: These are her shields against an outside world that desperately wants to know why she continues to stand by her man.