To hear him tell it in sermons, Campbell has experienced trials and triumphs so epic, his life could be a tale out of the Old Testament.
He was 21 when he made a bargain with God after being ejected 56 feet in a car crash. His body slammed into a stop sign, he says, breaking his neck. Lying on a train track, he remembers praying: “You give me another chance … I will do anything you ask me to do.”
God spared him, he says, and in the years after, blessed him with the power of the Holy Spirit. He was given the gifts of prophecy and faith healing. Once, he says, he raised a man from the dead.
And in 1988, he convinced the men leading the Assemblies of God district council to take his side, just as Jackson had feared. They shared their conclusion in a letter, which Kloefkorn said he reviewed, and allowed Campbell to continue leading Versailles First Assembly.
Seven months after the hearing, he invited a new child into his home.
Phaedra Creed had never met her father. Her mother struggled with addiction and was living in another state. But her pastor wanted to take her in. She remembers jumping up and down and screaming after Campbell told her.
He and his wife went to court to make the guardianship official, and, in September 1988, they set up a room for Creed in the basement of their parsonage, a ranch home across a parking lot from the church.
The 14-year-old had caught Campbell’s attention while singing in the church choir, she said. He told her God had special plans for her. “Many are called,” he would say, quoting scripture, “but few are chosen.”
One night she was lying awake clutching her Bible after seeing Campbell cast a demon out of a man at church, shouting: “In the name of Jesus!” It terrified her. That night, the pastor came to comfort her, and she felt safe in his arms.
Within weeks, though, she wondered if the real demon was the one tucking her in at night.
It started with a bedtime kiss on the lips, she said, and quickly escalated. Three months later, Creed sat in an interview room at the Versailles Police Department. Afterward, the police chief typed his notes:
THE SUBJECT JOE CAMPBELL ENTERED THE VICTIMS BEDROOM AND HAD INTERCOURSE…
BETWEEN 15 AND 20 DIFFERENT TIMES…
CAMPBELL COMMENTED SEVERAL TIMES ON HER BEING HIS PRECIOUS BABY…
A doctor’s examination confirmed Creed had been penetrated. Campbell was arrested and released on $25,000 bond. After a preliminary hearing, a judge found sufficient evidence to send the case to trial.
While it was pending, Creed went to Springfield to testify in the same room where Jackson had stood. Confronted by the results of their earlier decision to let Campbell continue preaching, the Assemblies of God’s Southern Missouri District Council banned him from the denomination.
The months that followed were hell, Creed said. She moved in with her mother, who had returned to Missouri. Some church members accused Creed of seducing Campbell, whispering insults behind her back at the grocery store. They said Satan was using her to take down the church.
Back in Tulsa, Jackson and Williams said they received subpoenas to testify. The girls weren’t told the name of the alleged victim, but they were eager to support her.
They never got the chance.
Weeks before the case was set for trial in October 1989, Creed’s therapist warned her mother, Rita Aye, that testifying might break her daughter, who had moved to a group home for children suffering severe psychological distress. “She had gone through enough,” Aye said of their decision to not continue with the case.
When the charges were dismissed, Campbell’s lawyer accused Creed of fabricating the story, telling a local newspaper the teen did it to retaliate after “Mr. Campbell denied her request to marry a 32-year-old man.”
For years afterward, Creed panicked anytime a thunderstorm rolled in; it had been raining, she said, the night Campbell took her virginity. Eventually she learned to bury the memories, pushing the pain deep inside.
After being ousted from the Assemblies of God, Campbell says God gave him a new assignment: to start a church of his own and build a children’s camp on 40 remote acres in the Missouri Ozarks.
The Family Worship Center of Marshfield — later renamed Lakeside Family Worship — had only a handful of members when it opened in an old Methodist church in 1990 but grew into the hundreds. Campbell soon launched Camp Bell on a wooded lot 20 minutes away. Volunteers added a swimming pool, showers and dorms for the thousands of children who visited.
“For one week the kids are separated from the world and can focus on God, and it changes their lives,” Campbell told a newspaper years later. “They’re never the same.”
As he was rebuilding his career, the women who say he abused them were starting families and quietly struggling to cope with the lingering harm. Cheryl Almond, who says Campbell molested her around 1978, thought for decades she was the only one.
After returning to Eastland to raise her own children, Almond finally built the courage to tell someone. She confided in her spiritual mentor, a longtime church member.
The woman gasped: “Oh my gosh, you too?”
Almond froze: “What do you mean, ‘You too’?”
The woman told her about Jackson, whose family had long since left the church, and about others who had accused Campbell of abuse. Horrified to learn he’d found a new flock of believers in Missouri, Almond sent Campbell a letter at Lakeside Family Worship in 1999.
“After years of hiding this awful sin, God has instructed me to write this letter,” Almond wrote. “Such a great pain you have caused to me, my family, and so many other great children.”
She received no reply.
A year later, Almond felt God nudging her again: It was time to find Jackson.
Jackson was 27, newly divorced, raising a first grader and struggling with panic attacks that hit with such ferocity, they left her hyperventilating and vomiting. The first one came as she was walking near a forest; the smell reminded her of Campbell’s family farm in Missouri. Ever since, she’d been begging God to help her forget. Now Almond was on the phone, asking to meet.
Jackson invited Almond to her house; Williams joined them. Around a kitchen table, they shared their stories, finding parallels. After years of feeling trapped by grief that no one else could understand, each of them felt empowered. Together, they decided to channel their pain into holding Campbell accountable.
Remembering the subpoena she’d received in 1989, Jackson called authorities in Versailles and convinced someone to pass her number to the victim in the case. A few days later, Creed called.
And then there were four.
“Just knowing that I wasn’t alone,” Creed wrote to the women the next day. “I can’t even express those feelings.”
Over the following decade, emails between the women describe a flurry of efforts to alert authorities in Oklahoma and Missouri. A message to the FBI went unanswered. Tulsa police told them the statute of limitations had passed and suggested they file a report where Campbell lived now. When Jackson tried calling the sheriff’s office in Webster County, Missouri, she thought she heard Campbell’s brother on the other end. He worked in dispatch, they learned. They filed reports nonetheless, but it didn’t matter.
Years rolled by, with no results.
