7#QFYPFX X X X X X.tXXXX XXXXxXYJ YjY*YX YYYYY0YYYYYY htk/dektk The church is rocking. An aging blonde in gold lam and spike heels enters waving a white Bible. She dances briefly to the driving gospel beat, collapses on the wine-colored carpet and remains supine for the rest of the service, occasionally raising her bejeweled hands heavenward to signal for a microphone to convey a message from God's mouth to her ear. The congregation stops its dancing and shouting to listen, and some stoop to touch handkerchiefs to the "anointed oil" on her glistening arms and forehead when she is done. From a videotape of a Knoxville House of Faith service led by Sister Pauline Turpin, circa 1987 by Betty Bean Sister Polly's voice still croaks out holy ghost and fire on AM radio weekday afternoons at 1. Her flock still seeks miracles at the church in Fourth and Gill. The lights still burn in her rambling white brick rancher at 421 Cherokee Boulevard, next to the even whiter brick two-story that fronts on Kingston Pike. Her yellow Jaguar still sits in the driveway. It's almost as if she never left. But the Anointed Prophet of God, who sought to control her followers' minds, pocketbooks and health, is gone. "If you receive the Prophet in the name of the Lord, you'll receive a prophet's reward," the Jaguar-driving, Lilli Rubin-wearing, Cherokee Boulevard-living, Regas-eating Pauline Turpin used to say. And even though she assured her flock she'd be taken "straight up, like Elijah" into heaven at the appropriate time, she died in a most ordinary fashion last Nov. 4 in a bed in the cardiac care unit at University Hospital. Former members of Turpin's Knoxville House of Faith insist that something called "a reading of the will" took place shortly after her death, but Knox County Probate Court records show that Pauline Turpin died without a will, leaving personal property officially valued at $50,000. This figure raises eyebrows among those who remember her as a hoarder of material goods who commonly carried $100,000 worth of jewelry, including a $30,000 wristwatch, around in her purse. Not listed were the houses on Cherokee Boulevard, which technically belonged to the non-profit foundation Turpin set up in 1979 to avoid paying taxes on her considerable assets. News that Sister Polly is dead comes as a surprise to Forest Norville, a lawyer with the State Board of Equalization in Nashville. "Pauline Turpin's dead?" asks Norville, whose office granted a property tax exemption on Sister Polly's house at 421 Cherokee Boulevard in 1993 on the grounds that it was a parsonage. A similar request for her son's house at 415 Cherokee Boulevard was rejected. "Nobody notified us that she died," says Norville. This is a matter of more than passing interest to his office because a parsonage must have a parson in residence to avoid property taxes. And there's something else Norville didn't know. Six weeks after Sister Polly's death, according to documents in the office of the Knox County Register of Deeds, the Knoxville House of Faith and Pauline Turpin Foundation sold the houses at 415 and 421 Cherokee Boulevard to the Knoxville New Covenant Love Fellowship Outreach Center Inc. for the sum of $10. The KNCLFOC Inc's officers are listed as Sister Polly's son, Paul Dewey Turpin, and his wife, Tona Turpin. Its address is 415 Cherokee BoulevardPaul and Tona Turpin's home. Paul Dewey Turpin, who identified himself as "a minister of the Gospel" during a brief telephone conversation, insisted that he and his wife had "nothing to do" with the House of Faith for years. "Who authorized you to write about this?" he asked shortly before he terminated the conversation. However, the Turpins are listed on a corporate warranty deed dated Dec. 22, 1994, as president and secretary of the Knoxville House of Faith and Pauline Turpin Foundation, with current pastor John Tousell and his wife, Tammy, listed as "acting president" and "acting secretary." The Turpins and the Tousells signed off on the transfer of the Cherokee Boulevard propertya major asset of the Knoxville House of Faith, purchased with offerings given to the church by its members. Paul Turpin also applied for a property tax exemption for the Knoxville New Covenant Love Fellowship Outreach Center Inc., the listed address of which is his home at 415 Cherokee Boulevard. On July 28, 1995, a board of equalization lawyer wrote Paul Turpin requesting information including the congregations size, location and schedule of services and the 1994 income tax records of the Knoxville New Covenant Love Fellowship Outreach Center Inc. Paul Turpin has not responded. "He was Paul. But I am Pauline." The Rev. Pauline Turpin For Mary DeVault and Virginia Wolaver, Sister Polly's death stirred complicated and painful memories. "I rejoiced when she died," says DeVault, who joined Turpin's congregation when she was 12 years old and remained a dedicated member for 23 years. "It's not that I'm glad to see anyone die. It's just that I know she can't hurt anyone else, ever again," she says, struggling for words to explain how she feels about the woman who used to tell her how to think, where to work, what to wear, whom to marry, and never, ever to see a doctor. "I never missed a service for 23 years, and I did not have an aspirin until I was 25 years old. I didn't go to a dentist either," DeVault says, opening her mouth to show even, capped teeth. "I had a mouth full of rotten teeth. I've got $10,000 worth of dental work to show for it." Wolaver is more subdued: "All I could think of when I heard she had died was 'I wonder if she's O.K. now,'" says Wolaver, who is battling severe depression and has been under the care of both a psychologist and a psychiatrist since she broke with Turpin five years ago. For both women, the relationship with Pauline Hicks Turpin came to define their lives. Here is some of what they, and others, know about her: She grew up in a big family near Sweetwater, and died just shy of her 71st birthday. She was the best-known of West Knoxville's legendary "Seven Sisters"a gaggle of siblings known as much for their business sense, flashy white cars, bouffy blonde hair and flamboyant wardrobes as for their religious bent, though at least two others are or have been preachers. One, Evelyn Stafford, pastors a church called the Seven Golden Candlesticks and is listed under P. for Pentecostal in a yellow pages display ad promising "miracles every service." Another sister, Cookie Rutherford, owns the popular Ham n Goodys restaurants. Yet another sister, Beatrice Carpenter, made the cover of Metro Pulse in 1993 when her fight against the annexation of her Alcoa Highway home was featured. Pauline's life took its extraordinary turn after the 1962 death of her husband, a sheet-metal worker who did not share her growing religious fervor. In fact, she told Virginia Wolaver and DeVault that he had become abusive by the time the Holy Ghost first moved on her. She was sitting at her kitchen table studying the Bible and meditating when something knocked her onto the floor and under the table, where she remained until two angels picked her up and propped her in her chair. Turned out, they were the Head Angels in Charge. "They told her they'd always be with her and that she would do great things," Wolaver says. "Sister didn't mess around. It was Michael and Gabriel." Turpin said the angels promised "deliverance" from her worsening marital situation, and in due time Ross Turpin was felled by a fatal heart attack. Wolaver and DeVault say "deliverance" became a code word for getting shed of bothersome spouses. When Virginia's former husband, psychiatrist John Wolaver, disapproved of her relationship to Sister Polly, Polly began to speak of "deliverance. When the angels didn't come through, she encouraged Viriginia to divorce him. "I got to the point where I could see (the angels) behind her," Wolaver says. "She would send angels for people. She would send angels to do everything. She said she had command of them. They'd go on out ahead and find her parking places, and she sent a million angels when the IRS started contacting her. "I went with her to the IRS when they decided she owed them more money. She probably sicked a hundred million on me when I left." After the death of Ross Turpin, Pauline began to preach. She was nearly penniless. "I remember her preaching with holes the size of quarters in the soles of her shoes," says Mary DeVault. In the early 70s, Sister Polly began to preach from a church house off Middlebrook Pike, popularly known as The Little Church by the Railroad Tracks. Both DeVault and Wolaver still believe in miracles, and they still believe the early healings were for real, as did many others who were exposed to Sister Polly's great charisma. She made so great an impression on a group of New Yorkers that she was able to establish a branch of the House of Faith there in the mid-80s, traveling to New York City every other week to minister to her flock. There are startling recordings of voices with dem and dose accents speaking in tongues and testifying in the breathless, gasping cadences generally associated with Southern fundamentalism. "Sister decided she wanted that house, and she said God would bless anyone who helped her get it. I thought, 'I want in on some of those blessings.' And who was I to step on God's toes?'" Virginia Wolaver It is Virginia Wolaver about whom people gossip when they speak of the big white houses on Cherokee Boulevard: "There was this prominent psychiatrist's wife who bought that house for her..." And it is true. Wolaver deeded over three pieces of property in Fort Sanders to the Knoxville House of Faith and Pauline Turpin Foundation in 1979. In 1983, with Wolaver's approval, the church traded the Fort Sanders property (which had been converted into a parking lot) for the rancher on the Boulevard and the property where Paul Turpin later built his house. The value of the property was listed as $325,000. This was not Wolaver's only gift to Sister Polly over the years, just the most expensive one. She bought Polly a Lincoln Mark V with gold coins she and her husband had buried in the ground. She helped buy the Jaguar, bought video equipment for the church. She looks back on that time as though it were something that happened to somebody else. "I feel strangely remote from it all, she says, like it's some other idiot they're talking about." She met Sister Polly not long before she married John Wolaver, with whom she had been living for some nine years after becoming involved with him when she was still in college. Eighteen years her senior, he was a collector of gold coins, Swiss bank accounts, real estate, and fatefully, his own plane. "It all began when I was learning to fly," Virginia Wolaver says. "I met a woman who said she'd been healed of cancer at the Little Church by the Railroad Tracks near Middlebrook Pike. I took her for a flight, and she started telling me about this stuff. It really got my interest up." The woman who believed she'd been cured of cancer talked Wolaver into going to a service and introduced her to Pauline Turpin. The minister she says, "was just like a little bright lightwhite blonde hair, white clotheseverything about her was shiny." At first, Virginia says she wasn't particularly taken with the shouting, dancing, hand-clapping services, so different from the staid Methodism of her childhood. But the relationship grew gradually, finally reaching the point where Virginia, at the urging of the friend who'd taken her to that first service, gave Sister Polly substantial gifts of money. "And that," Wolaver says, "was the end of John." They were divorced soon afterward. She would be a member of the Knoxville House of Faith for 13 years, serving as the church's secretary, chief benefactor and Turpin's personal assistant. For a time, she lived with Pauline Turpin in the 10-room house at 421 Cherokee Boulevard. "I don't have to have insurance; I have blessed assurance" Sister Pauline Turpin Although DeVault and Wolaver had broken with the church before Turpin's death, DeVault attended Sister Polly's funeral. Wolaver, who says she's become something of a recluse, did not. "I walked into the funeral home with my two sisters, who hadn't spoken to me in four years because Polly had driven a wedge between us," DeVault says. "We were back together. I wanted it to end just like it had begunwith my family back together." Tears stream down her face as she speaks of the way her family shunned her when she left the church. She says she worries about Wolaver, who was divorced, broken in health and spirit and stripped penniless by the time she left the flock of perhaps 400 members in December, 1990. She says knows what's it's like to have been fleeced by Pauline Turpin. Once upon a time, she tithed on the gross income of her beauty salon, Mary Lam Hair Designs, which Turpin lent her $5,000 to establish. She says she can remember writing checks to Sister Polly for as much as $1,200 a week, and regularly for $800 to $900 weekly. All the while she was blocking off two hours every Monday morning to "do" Sister's elaborate bleached blonde coif for free. After awhile, DeVault cut back on the amount and began to base her tithes only on her personal income. "She started bitching at me, wanting to know if business had fallen off," DeVault says. "She'd say, 'God won't open up the windows of heaven unless you give till it hurts.'" DeVault says she remembers exactly when she began to break away. It was after Polly's regular Monday morning appointment, and DeVault was walking her pastor out the door and to her car, as usual. "I had just written her a check for $500 on my salary, and she turned to me and said, 'I've just got to tell you this. The Lord said to tell you you will not be blessed unless you tithe.' "She got into the Jaguar and was backing out of the lot when I turned around and started for the door to the shop. Just before I got to the door I heard this voice: 'Don't you ever give that woman another penny.' "At first, I thought it was the devil, and I said, 'Devil, I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.' But then it came so clear to me that it was the voice of God I was hearing, and I can honestly say I never did give her another penny, not even the $2,000 I still owed her." In a letter to Virginia Wolaver's lawyer in 1992, her psychologist, who does not wish his name to be used, says that Virginia found with Sister Polly the loving family she'd been seeking all her life. "During the early years, it is clear that (Virginia) was indeed happy Unable to value herself, she overvalued Sister and bought her expensive gifts, including substantially purchasing Jaguar and Lincoln Continental sedans, and her current home on Cherokee Boulevard. (She) amassed a significant debt attempting to match and maintain the lifestyle Sister had come to enjoy." At the same time, the psychologist says, Sister Polly enjoyed "an extensive wardrobe of top-of-the-line clothing, furs and jewelry. The house is reportedly overflowing with expensive furniture, rugs and antiques all given by God through the people who support her ministry ... Sister became the single most important person in (Virginia's) life." In the early 80s, Virginia went to work as a state probation officer, a job she held for nine years, until her physical and emotional health began to break. She had begun to notice too many disturbing things. Like the family from the New York church who had a terrible wreck on their way down for the holidays. The father was killed. "Sister was concerned people would think the family shouldn't have come down. She was afraid it wouldn't look good for her, so she started trying to find excuses. She would say they must have let the devil come in. She was the Prophet of God, and you just didn't say, let me go over that again with you And other people began to die. Like "Chub," the sweet, rotund retiree who had signed her home over to Pauline Turpin. Chub suffered what probably was a stroke, and angered Sister Polly by attempting to call 911. Partially paralyzed, Chub lived an agonizing week without medical care. When she died, Wolaver and DeVault say Turpin allowed Chub's naked body to lie unclaimed at the funeral home. "Sister finally shelled out the money to bury her," says Wolaver. "I felt so sorry for Chub, and thought she was probably glad to be out of all that pain." There were others, as well, including a woman who died an agonizing death from untreated uterine cancer while Sister Polly kept promising miracles. The psychologist's letter tells of Wolaver's growing disillusionment: "While Sister railed against those who sought medical care as opposed to being cured by prayer alone, she herself sought cosmetic dental care, being taken secretly to a dentist out of town. (Virginia) began to feel depressed and empty ... it began to dawn on (her) that her own needs were being neglected and that she was putting on significant amounts of weight ... It was not possible to share this with anyone because to do so would be to somehow put in question the ministry of Sister who was supposed to cure all and be all for her flock. "About this time the IRS began investigating the discrepancy between Sister's lifestyle and the taxes she was paying ... Sister preached that she had nothing to hide, yet here was the IRS investigating her and insisting on back taxes being paid. Here also was (Virginia) making cash deposits given her by Sister in paper bags in amounts up to $20,000 at a time ... when (she) decided she needed help addressing her weight and joined Optifast (a medically supervised liquid diet requiring weekly check-ups) the die was again cast for a battle of autonomy as Sister vehemently opposed any contact with medical professionals which could compromise her influence..." Virginia says the world started closing in on her. "I felt I was really sinning, seeing that doctor. I was having a hard time functioning ... I had a job I loved, but I would find myself sitting in the wrong courtroom and not realizing where I was," she says. So she checked herself into the psychiatric wing at Park West Hospital. Her doctors barred Sister Polly. And the realtionship ended abruptly. Later, Wolaver attempted to recoup some of the money she'd lavished on Sister Polly, but her requests were ignored. "Everybody in that church knew Ginny bought Polly that house," says DeVault. And everybody in that church knew Ginny bought her that Lincoln Mark V. Everybody but Pauline Turpin, apparently. In a vitriolic letter to Wolaver's attorney dated March, 1992, Knoxville House of Faith lawyer Charles Susano (now an appellate judge) says Wolaver gave Turpin the real estate of her own free will and flatly denies that she purchased the Mark V. "Ms. Wolaver's personal problems are her own. It is ludicrous to suggest that Reverend Turpin and/or KHF was in any way involved in Ms Wolaver's divorce ... It is likewise preposterous to claim that Mrs. Wolaver was 'discouraged' by KHF or anyone connected with it from seeking medical attention..." Susano suggests that Wolaver is "harass(ing) my client in the hope that it will settle a claim totally without merit." "I don't need no headboard, sideboard nor footboard." Sister Pauline Turpin's opinion of boards of directors and other such church hierarchy. The Knoxville House of Faith bears a plaque proclaiming it the home of the Rev. Pauline Turpin and the Pauline Turpin Foundation. Inside, the services follow the same Pentecostal form as before: loud, gospel music, congregants being taken by the spirit, speaking in tongues and leaping to their feet to do a "dance" of religious ecstasy. The minister, John Tousell, like Sister Polly, is slain in the spirit and falls to the carpeted floor where he prophesies under the anointing while the faithful genuflect around him, touching him with hands and handkerchiefs to catch up the blessings. "Jesus is the best doctor," says Tousell, invoking the name of Sister Polly as he talks of healing the sick and the wounded. Someone brings in a kidney stone in a jar and hands it off to Tousell, who dances around the sanctuary holding it aloft. His is an imitation of the charismatic Polly. He lacks Sister's connection to the flock, and the congregation's not as large as hers was. But there is still the offeringthe joyful passing of the plate and the giving-till-it-hurts of tithes to open the windows of heaven. u Sun. Noon-9pm. Under $7. V/MC/AE. BYOB. Wings & Things Bombers 5103 Kingston Pike 588-1909 Beer Hall chock full of pool tables, video games and a big-screen television. Check out  ./$%&#&s&&/0L]LLLQFQI @@  O.  9 ? b6/01*Lhvn#&O !E!"$$$%%%%&#&t())k)*,-.|.///000001245567C89%9;e<=>?B@AhABBDbFH`FG-GHgHIIJKL\L]L^LLLLO>P4PQDQEQF D  PFQF0$7ABJPFP@P@o@P @4P QI)FQF*+ HH(FG(HH(d'@=/RH-:LaserWriter 8 New YorkGeneva):):):EE0COVER/FAITH/5.31 Jophus Scone Jophus Scone