Disappearance of teen tests a family's faith
Thomsens feel betrayed by pastor they once considered their friend
By BRIAN LIBERATORE

Article appeared March 30, 2006 on page 1A

A week after the Thomsen family's 15-year-old daughter disappeared with the 54-year-old pastor of their church, the family agreed to meet with me. I drove with a photographer to their Chenango County farm to meet them. After a few hours with the family, we went looking for people who knew the runaway pastor, Lewis Lee. Voting records gave us Lee's old address. From there, we were able to track down his friends, who gave us an insight into the man accused of abducting Elizabeth Thomsen.

This series of articles won third place for continued news coverage in the 2005-06 New York State Associated Press Association contest.

TOWN OF COLUMBUS - Michael Thomsen has always lived a life of faith.

A poster board of the Ten Commandments leaned in front of his family's farmhouse, while a print of the Last Supper hung on the wall behind him as he sat with his wife and two of his six children at the kitchen table. He held his 1-year-old son, Joseph, on his lap.

But it's been 10 days since his 15-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, went missing. Police across the country are searching for the man they believe abducted Elizabeth - 54-year-old Lewis J. Lee, once a family friend and the former pastor at the Thomsens' church.

"My faith has been stretched thin," said Thomsen, looking away.

Elizabeth disappeared March 18. She took her birth certificate, her Social Security card, a set of clothes and some money she had been saving, her mother said. "I don't feel loved," Elizabeth wrote in a note she left for her parents.

Lee is wanted on one felony count of first-degree custodial interference. State and national law enforcement have been alerted to the search for Lee and Elizabeth.

Elizabeth called her grandmother on Monday, Thomsen said, to say she was all right. The phone message from their daughter was "rehearsed" and "very brief." It offered little comfort to a family that feels betrayed by Lee, a man they once trusted.

Lee had helped out on the Thomsens' 350-acre dairy farm, located down a narrow dirt road in the Town of Columbus. He hunted with Mike Thomsen and spent time with their children.

"He used to say he loved working on the farm," said the Thomsens' oldest son, David, 17,. David sat at the table, clenching his jaw when the conversation turned to the man accused of taking his younger sister.

Looking back, the family said Thomsen twisted their faith and their friendship to earn their daughter's trust and turned her against them. A pattern of manipulation emerged in the wake of their daughter's disappearance, they said.

A week and a half after Lee disappeared, the congregation members were fighting to reconcile their memory of a charming Southern preacher with that of a man who allegedly would leave his family, betray his faith and abduct a teenage girl.

A trusted minister

Lee drove from Maryland to Chenango County in 2002 at the request of the Christian Baptist Church's 50member congregation. The church is a tiny single-story building about 3miles north of Sherburne, a town of about 4,000 people. A wooden cross with the words "Jesus Saves" sits atop the building.

Lee, a retired General Motors employee, was a graduate from a Bible college and an active minister for a Baptist church in Maryland, said Tom Taylor, a chairman of the Sherburne church's deacon board.

"He was the perfect candidate," said Taylor, who has been conducting services since Lee resigned in January.

Lee provided a resume and several contacts, Taylor said. As part of the interview, he conducted a service at the church.

"We liked him," said Catherine McNitt of Sherburne. "He seemed like a very likeable person. We had been to the church; he and his wife came to our house."

"Nicest guy you'd ever want to meet," said McNitt's husband, David.

The McNitts sat at the kitchen table in Peggy Winton's3.000> home on South Hamilton Road, a few hundred yards from the church. Winton's father built the church in the mid 1960s3.000>. Lee and his wife had lived in a small house next door to the Wintons.

When Lee and Elizabeth Thomsen disappeared, Peggy Winton said, the church was shocked.

"He didn't seem the type," said David McNitt.

"I really didn't believe it," Peggy said. "I could just slap him so hard."

Catherine McNitt suggested Lee might not have started out with bad intentions. "Sometimes things start off very innocently and then they just go awry," she said.

Taylor had a different explanation.

"I would have to say looking at it from the perspective that we have now, that this was intended," Taylor said. "I don't honestly see a 54-year-old man going about his duties with his mind in the right place and falling head over heels for a 15-year-old girl."

A premonition

Taylor couldn't remember the time when Lee's behavior toward Elizabeth first grew inappropriate.

"There was no evidence of anything at the time," Taylor said. "When things started to go wrong, I really don't know. He kept it very well-hidden, underground. He always had an explanation. He was a very smooth talker. He could explain it away."

Marsha Thomsen remembers how things started to spiral out of control. Lee, she said, would make hand gestures toward her daughter during church services, signing "I love you" and looking at Elizabeth.

"He had a relationship with all the kids," Marsha Thomsen said. "But the one with Elizabeth was a little more intense."

Marsha said Lee had told them Elizabeth reminded him of his granddaughter, who had died when she was very young.

Lee told Elizabeth that she was being treated unfairly, that she shouldn't have to work on the farm and that her parents weren't paying her enough for doing her chores, Mike Thomsen said.

"The fact of the matter is it's a family farm," Mike Thomsen said, "and we're all going to work."

The children are home-schooled; while the state provides the curriculum, Mike and Martha Thomsen teach their children. And while the family works together, they also spend leisure time together. Elizabeth's new snowmobile sat in the back of the farmhouse; the family had gone to northern New York last winter to go snowmobiling together.

The family spoke to Lee about his behavior several times. Each time, Mike Thomsen said, Lee would twist their words around and try to make them feel guilty for suggesting anything indecent. Eventually, Mike Thomsen said, he had had enough. He told Lee to stay away from his daughter.

In the middle of the night on Jan. 31, two weeks after Lee resigned from his position as pastor, the Thomsens found Lee standing outside Elizabeth's bedroom window. Lee was charged with stalking and trespassing.

"She (Elizabeth) seemed kind of scared the night that he was here," Marsha said.

The court granted an order of protection barring Lee from contacting Elizabeth.

Lee later moved back to Maryland with his wife until March, when he and Elizabeth disappeared. Telephone records revealed that Elizabeth continued to speak to Lee until March 18, Chenango County Sheriff Thomas Loughren has said. Lee's wife and two grown daughters, according to officials from the Sheriff's Office, have been cooperating with police.

"They've been betrayed," said Winton of Lee's family.

Since Elizabeth left, the Thomsens are "just going through the motions" of running a dairy farm, Mike Thomsen said.

Melba Jenne, a longtime friend who lives on a farm "over the hill," has been staying with the Thomsens, waiting near the phone for news of Elizabeth. The Thomsens' 6-year-old3.000> son, Edwin,3.000> is named after Jenne's son, who died in 1998. "They're just a really good family," Jenne said of her friends. "I would want somebody to do the same for me if it was on my end."

A shocked community

At the D & D Diner on Main Street in the Village of Sherburne, a poster is taped to the cash register with a picture of Elizabeth under the words "missing child." Below the word "wanted" is a picture of Lee.

"A lot of people would like to hang him," said Ace Parry of Sherburne, speaking of Lee. "Not for nothing - I'm a father myself."

Mari Underwood, a waitress at the diner, said she, too, is a mother. "I know I would be devastated if it was myself," she said.

The disappearance has dominated conversation in a community she said is not accustomed to tragedy.

"We don't see a lot of things like this here," Underwood said.