The ‘Hell’ Hustler
Mary K. Baxter made a killing on a trip through the afterlife.
I’m trying to follow along. One day in 1976, she was at home in in Belleville, Michigan, “praying in the Spirit for days,” a light fills the room, etc., and Jesus appears and takes her to Hell.
His purpose? She can warn sinners before it’s too late! That’s the story of Mary K. Baxter’s bestselling book A Divine Revelation of Hell. They made the trip forty times.
But the detail that I’m focusing on is that he calls her Kathyn. Jesus tells “Kathryn” that she’s been chosen to bring the world to repentance.
Did Jesus get her name wrong?
That would be embarrassing for him and her both I guess. Maybe the story is that he appeared to Mary thinking she was Kathryn? Awkward.
I’m looking over all biographical documents available about Mary K. Baxter. That’s the name on her obituary, and the name she most often used in public. But in databases, she’s linked to a huge number of names:
Mary Paxter, Mary Bletcher Baxter, Mary Katherine Baxter, Kathy Baxter, Kathryn Baxter, Mary Baxtor, Mary Baxter Fletcher, Kathryn M. Baxter.
I’m getting the feeling that this is the story of a woman who changed identities regularly. What was her real name?
She’s listed as being born in Chattanooga on February 19, 1940. I spot her in the 1940 census. In the Chattanooga area, there was a Roy and Mary Fletcher, and a newborn daughter: Mary C. Fletcher.
So her name was never ‘Kathryn’.
But maybe that’s a clue to the hoax that’s happening. She took the name ‘Kathryn’ in 1976, the year the faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman died.
Mary grabbed a name that her religion associated with a woman with “gifts,” and ran with it, telling a goofy story about Jesus showing up and taking her to Hell.
Mary doesn’t make it easy to learn about her.
Supposedly a prophet of God, her life’s details are mostly on view in a couple of newspaper clips over time. She was apparently raised Pentecostal. A news clipping notes that she got ‘backslidden’, but by age 19 was back “serving Him faithfully,” whatever that means.
She married in 1968, at age 28. That’s a curious matter. Her husband of 22 years, William L Baxter Jr., isn’t noted on her website biography or obituary. It seems Mary divorced him, and then erased him.
The man who really matters to her story, however, isn’t Jesus or her husband. He isn’t mentioned in her self-reported histories. But I notice his name in a very special place: the copyright page.
The owner of A Divine Revelation From Hell was not Jesus or Mary, but…T.L. Lowery?
That’s quite a trip down white supremacy memory lane.
Lowery was a well-known Church of God pastor, and noted for Nazi-level racism. There he is in The Church of God: a Social History (1990), where a pamphlet by him is quoted:
“When man tries to overstep the purposes of God and break down the barrier between the races, he only brings trouble, discord, confusion, malice, and murder.”
A Divine Revelation From Hell includes an endorsement from him. He endorsed the book that he owned? No wonder he liked it.
On his death in 2016, Lowery’s church provided a “detailed biography” of him, but there was no mention, likewise, of Mary K. Baxter. They created a religious phenomenon together — and didn’t even refer to each other?
I take a moment to review his life.
Born in Georgia in 1929, Lowery would say he’d “pastored” four churches by age 25. Then got the “call” to be a traveling evangelist. But I notice a 1978 news story with different information: “In the midst of a highly successful career as a sales executive, Lowery decided to become a minister…”
A 1979 newspaper story cites five institutions of higher learning he attended, getting a “Doctor of Divinity” from West Coast Bible College. I email the school. They reply that they have no record of him.
A con artist made it up as he went along.
In the 1960s, he was the “internationally known evangelist T.L. Lowery” as he went from city to city. He promised healing, and packed up to 10,000 people into a tent.
In 1963, a reporter covers a Lowery event, more noticing the appeals for money.
In the 1980s, Mary travelled around with her one-woman show.
In newspaper ads, I see her listed as Kathryn Baxter, the prophet who “tells her story weeping.” She was realizing she could work the religion. In 1987, she filed for a corporation, ‘Kathy Baxter Ministries, Inc.’, in Florida.
But on her own her act didn’t go far. She used ‘A Divine Revelation of Hell’ as a title of her live show, but I don’t see any mention of a book.
In the preface to the book, she says she finished A Divine Revelation of Hell in 1983. The Library of Congress has it copyrighted and published in 1997.
She seems to have met Lowery around 1990.
That year, she’s listed as a ‘minister’ at his National Church of God in Washington D.C. Per news reports, Lowery’s megachurch was being expanded to add a 4000-seat sanctuary and an apartment complex.
Sounds like a lot to have to pay for.
Suddenly, Mary appeared with a book that Lowery owned, as was published by his publisher, with the National Church of God doing her publicity.
I’m thinking that Lowery saw her act and thought it had potential. He gave Mary a pastor gig, a ghostwriter, publisher and publicist.
In exchange, he got the copyright.
When the book sold a million copies, I bet she was pissed.
I doubt Mary ever wrote anything except her signature on checks.
Call her what you want—a grifting bitch, whatever, I don’t care—but please do not suggest this woman could write books. Mary was dumb.
Watch her YouTube videos. She was next to illiterate.
Lowery was a practiced salesman and showman. He’d authored many books, but none went far. He didn’t have an angle, a chracter.
He was another grinning evangelist, but Mary was a prophet who’d travelled through Hell. He needed some of that fuckery to fleece his flock. He made her a deal with the devil, and naturally, she agreed.
For years, the “visions” kept flowing.
With “Dr. T.L. Lowery” as a regular co-author, the Mary K. Baxter brand continued to develop. Lowery is called a ‘Dr.’ on the covers of several books when he has no possible claim to this title.
I wrote to their publisher, Whitaker House, saying that what they’re doing is wrong. They blow me off. Welcome to Christianity, where everyone’s a doctor. It’s an award you give yourself.
For decades, Mary and her wigs toured the world as a ‘prophet’ .
She asked for repentance and donations with every waking breath. She’s sometimes identified as ‘Dr.’ — a graduate of Faith Bible College. This is an unaccredited diploma mill in Independence, Montana. I write asking when their prophet student ‘graduated’. No reply.
Even Mary’s blurbs were by frauds. Her 2003 follow-up, A Divine Revelation of Angels, has one from David Yonggi Cho. He’s the pastor who embezzled $12 million from a church in South Korea.
She did her kook show for decades and died in 2021.
Then I guess she did see Hell, except I don’t think Jesus was there. She was greeted by someone else. 🔶
