For years New Yorkers dropped coins into the tambourines of young women in black nuns' habits who stood in Times Square, outside Macy's and in the subway stations from Harlem to Crown Heights. They were not nuns. They worked for Devernon LeGrand, who called himself a bishop and ran what he called the St. John's Pentecostal Church of Our Lord out of a four-story building at 222 Brooklyn Avenue in Crown Heights. The women kept what they collected except for $2.50 a day, later doubled to five dollars, which went to the church, and the racket cleared well over a hundred thousand dollars a year. His first women on the street were his first wife, Helen, and his sister, Sarah Moloney, and in 1953 they and others were arrested for solicitation and fraud.
He recruited girls and young women with promises of money and alcohol, by later accounts plied teenagers with drugs, seduced them and put them in habits to beg. One was Elizabeth Brown, fifteen, whom he picked up at an amusement park in College Point, Queens, in 1974, drew into the life through sex and angel dust, and who was never seen again after 1977. In 1975 LeGrand and his son Noconda were convicted of raping a young woman in the Brooklyn building.
Gladys and Yvonne Stewart, teenage sisters who belonged to the church, had testified against him, and they disappeared. By the Associated Press's account he killed them in the Crown Heights building to keep them from testifying in the rape case. Their dismembered remains were found in 1975 at a property he owned in the Catskills, and on March 6 of the following year bones and cartilage were recovered from Briscoe Lake while raiding parties in Brooklyn found human bloodstains in the townhouse. By April state police were confident he had killed a dozen or more people, among them three of his wives, two stepchildren, the Stewart sisters and two men who worked for the church. Accounts of the sisters' ages, and even their surname, vary; one gives them as Gladys, sixteen, and Yvonne, eighteen.
In May 1976 LeGrand was indicted on four counts of murder, for the Stewart sisters and for two of his wives, killed in 1963 and 1970. His son Steven, twenty-six, was charged with the Stewart murders and with the killings of two men his father employed as pimps. Father and son were convicted together in the Stewart case in 1977, the verdict dated March 6 in one account and May 7 in another, and each was sentenced to twenty-five years to life. The Daily News reported that neither showed much emotion. One Associated Press report says he was also convicted of murdering his wife in 1970; another describes his record as rape and three counts of murder.
The Brooklyn district attorney, Michael Gold, believed LeGrand had killed as many as twenty girls and women, among them Ann Sorise and Ernestine Timmons as well as Elizabeth Brown. None of those deaths was charged. In 2001 a parole board refused him release, telling him, "Your conduct indicates a depraved indifference for human life and no respect for the law." He died at Green Haven Correctional Facility in 2006, at eighty-two. Noconda LeGrand, released from prison in 1980, went on running the church, and when a woman related to the family by marriage was later photographed begging in a habit in Little Italy, New York's attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, subpoenaed its records.