The Dead Minister Who Lived
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Talitha Cox waits by the phone. It's January 1st, 2001, her 17th birthday. She's anticipating one call in particular. It's one she's been waiting for her entire life. Today, Talitha's getting a phone call from her father. She's heard about him. She knows his name, but she's never met him. After all, he's been legally dead for nine years.

Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod, and we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. We'd like to give a special thanks to one of our listeners for suggesting today's story. Stay with us.

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It's the end of a sweltering day out on the plains of rural North Texas. It's July 1984, and the state is in a drought. Normally, this desolate area doesn't see much traffic. But on this particular evening, the farm road just outside the tiny town of Tuxedo is swarming with cops. A local called them about an Oldsmobile abandoned on the side of the road.

It's taken a beating. The front and rear windshields and other windows are busted. The keys are locked in the trunk, along with an empty beer can. There's some men's clothing in the back seat and some Christian cassette tapes beside the car. A search of nearby roads yields an empty wallet. Contents scattered nearby, but no cash. A license plate search confirms that the wallet belongs to the owner of the Oldsmobile,

31-year-old Wesley Barrett Cox. Wesley Barrett Cox's friends call him Barry. He's a youth minister in San Antonio, where he lives with his wife, Beth, and daughter, Talitha. Barry's professional and family life is just beginning. He became a husband, minister, and father in just the last two years. Talitha is only six months old.

This summer, Barry has spent some time away from his new job and family. He's been working on his doctorate in art education at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, about a six-hour drive from San Antonio. Beth and Talitha had visited him a few times, and now, Barry was finally done with the program and on his way home. Beth last spoke with Barry the previous night.

He talked about the toys he was bringing home for their daughter and how excited he was to play with her. This time, when the phone rings in their San Antonio home, Beth picks up expecting to hear Barry's voice again. He should be home any time. Instead, it's a sheriff on the other end. As Beth gets up to speed on the investigation over the next day or so, she and authorities agree, Barry might have been the victim of foul play.

He was carrying cash that's now missing. The empty beer can in the trunk also feels ominous because Barry wasn't a drinker. Even more strange details emerged surrounding the last known sighting of Barry. A little less than 24 hours before his car was found, he'd stopped at a gas station. He actually walked there in the middle of the night carrying empty jugs. His car ran out of gas two miles away.

The clerk who served Barry described him as courteous and friendly, and some folks saw him with a blue helmet. He got the gas he needed, along with water and a 7-up. Barry mentioned his wife liked the soda, so the clerk assumed she was waiting for him in their car with the empty gas tank. A police officer offered him a ride back to his car, which he accepted.

The officer didn't see anyone else in the Oldsmobile, but he did notice a motorbike in the trunk. Barry told the officer that he purchased the motorbike for his wife. After Barry put a little gas in the tank, he returned to the same gas station to fill it up. The police officer watched him continue along in the same direction toward where the Oldsmobile would be discovered the next day. In addition to the confusing comments Barry made about his wife,

A couple other details strike Beth and investigators as odd. First is his route. Barry was not driving toward home. Instead of heading south toward San Antonio, Barry was headed east out of Rotan in the general direction of Dallas. Beth also can't explain the motorbike. It doesn't seem like Barry to purchase such an exciting gift and not show it off.

She thinks he would have at least mentioned it to friends around the church. And now, the bike is also missing. So investigators treat it as another lead. They're not just looking for Barry, they're looking for this motorbike too. The sheriff organizes a search. Law enforcement, local volunteers, and Barry's friends and family from all over Texas descend on the barren landscape. They search half the county over three days, on foot and by air.

They don't see any sign of Barry, but other people do. In the days following Barry's disappearance, a few people north of the wrecked Oldsmobile report seeing a man fitting his description. Two women running a convenience store remember selling a man in a motorcycle helmet a pair of sunglasses. It was a quick interaction, but the man was memorable because he had a piece of tape on his nose.

like he was recovering from nose surgery. A couple of days later, another convenience store clerk remembers a man arriving on a small motorcycle late at night. He was wearing a blue helmet, just like the one the police officer saw in Barry's trunk. The man in the helmet looked beat up. He had a cut on his lip, a bandage on his nose, and two black eyes.

And he seemed to be disoriented and confused. He tried to hand the clerk $4 when he owed less than one. Barry's family and law enforcement have different reactions to these sightings. Barry's family is uplifted by them. All the witness details about Barry's polite demeanor are reassuring. Even if Barry's gone through some kind of trauma or injury, the heart of the person they love seems intact.

And though some of the witnesses aren't absolutely positive that the man they saw was Barry, his family continues chasing down every lead. Beth speculates that Barry might be suffering from some kind of cognitive impairment that left him confused about who or where he is. But as definitive sightings dry up, law enforcement brings up another theory, one that's less palatable to his loved ones.

Perhaps Barry intended to disappear. They point out that if Barry did suffer some kind of injury, either as a result of foul play or an accident, it didn't happen in the Oldsmobile. There was no blood at the scene and no sign that he was injured before he left the car. Investigators feel confident that Barry left his car and drove north on the motorbike and

But if he were truly incapacitated or wanted a reunion with his family, he would have been found by now. Instead, they feel further from finding Barry than when they started. A Texas Ranger tells a reporter that they haven't found Barry because he doesn't want to be found. Right around this time, Beth gets word that she's received some mail from Barry back at their house in San Antonio. It's a note.

dated the day before Barry disappeared. He writes about how excited he is about their friend's wedding in a few weeks. As the active investigation in North Texas dries up, Beth tells reporters that she's still praying for a reunion with her husband. She maintains her theory that he's suffering from memory loss or is perhaps being held against his will. Beth says she doesn't agree with the theory that Barry planned his own disappearance,

But she hedges this a bit, saying, if he's had that much pressure, I want him to have the freedom. She also says that she and Barry's employers at their community church are prepared to welcome him back. They want him to know he can return no matter what the circumstances of his disappearance are. It takes well over a decade for him to come back, and it's not by choice.

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After Barry Cox disappeared in the summer of 1984, authorities speculated that he staged his own disappearance. Although his family initially held out hope they'd see him again, time starts to chip away at that faith. Six months later, as Beth celebrates Talitha's first birthday in San Antonio, she knows life there is unsustainable without her husband.

In January 1985, she moves to California where family can help support them. Several more years pass. In 1991, Beth has Barry declared legally dead and her marriage is dissolved. But Barry's absence continues to burden his family. Talitha's anger about growing up without a father builds to a boiling point when she's 13.

Beth resorts to sending her to a boarding school. As difficult as it is to live without Barry, it's something they have to accept. It's reality. Until suddenly, it's not. On December 10th, 2000, the members of White Rock Community Church fill their sanctuary in Dallas, Texas. There's a sense of anticipation. Today, they're going to hear from a new pastoral candidate.

The church has been searching for someone to fill this role for almost a year. It's been tricky finding a candidate who is qualified but also willing to serve their parishioners. The congregation practices evangelical Christianity but is also predominantly gay. So their church is considerably more progressive than others of the same faith. When church leaders met a minister named James Simmons, it felt like divine intervention.

James holds degrees in theology and divinity, and his easy charisma wins over everyone. Today is the final step of the hiring process. He'll take to the pulpit for a trial sermon. James is confident in front of a crowd and with a microphone as he shares his incredible life story. He says, although he's 49, he only remembers the last 16 years of his life.

In the summer of 1984, children playing in a junkyard found him in the trunk of a car. He was unconscious, beaten within an inch of his life. James woke up in a Memphis hospital after a two-week coma with zero memory of who he was and unable to speak. He needed help regaining his ability to walk.

Eventually, he wanted to learn his true identity and grew discouraged when the efforts of local law enforcement failed. He felt as though his family, whoever they were, had abandoned him. So he started on an odyssey to find himself and ended up hitchhiking to Virginia. Along the way, a hardware store advertisement caught his eye. He took his new last name, Simmons, from the chance encounter.

From there, he held a few different jobs before discovering that if someone said the first few words of a Bible verse, he could always complete it. So he chose a new first name for himself, James, from the New Testament's Book of James.

Later, he felt called to pursue an education in theology and enrolled in Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary located in California. James' performance there was outstanding.

In addition to completing two master's degrees, James was voted student body president, won numerous academic awards, and was hired to run the seminary's housing department. The story goes over well with the White Rock Community Church congregation. They seem taken with the prospective new minister. But one parishioner needs to know something personal before they're convinced. Is James gay?

James answers in the affirmative. One of his earliest memories after waking up from his coma is of a crush he had on a male nurse. The congregation laughs. The deal is sealed. A large majority votes him in as the new pastor. But one parishioner has a very different experience from the rest. When Blaine Huffnagle first sees the prospective minister, he only looks vaguely familiar.

But as James tells his life story, Huffnagle makes the connection. He approaches James Simmons after the service and tells the minister he recognizes him. His real name is Barry. Huffnagle grew up in the same town as Barry, and it doesn't take long for word to get back to Barry's mother and brother George, and then his ex-wife Beth.

After speaking to George on the phone, Barry meets his mother and brother on New Year's Day 2001. They immediately recognize him, but to Barry, they're strangers. Yet something in his mother's house triggers his emotions. A chair. He finds himself crying as he looks at it, and he can't explain why. The same day, Barry calls Talitha, the daughter he didn't know he had.

Talitha is thrilled. Speaking with her dad is something she's always dreamed of. A few days later, Beth asks Abilene Christian University to host a press conference to field media requests about Barry's story. The university, abbreviated ACU, has special significance for the Cox family. Beth and Barry met there.

And when Barry went missing, many of their friends from the institution joined in the ground search for him. The representative from ACU frames Barry's reappearance and amnesia delicately, admitting that there are still a few missing pieces to the story. The media are not so diplomatic. Within days, reporters identify three main issues with Barry's story. First,

He claims that he's lost over 30 years of memories, but he has no other apparent neurological or physical impairments. There were witnesses who saw Barry with facial abrasions in the days following his disappearance, but according to some doctors, an injury that resulted in such all-encompassing amnesia would have left him with other significant disabilities that Barry doesn't seem to have.

Second, his new identity. Barry may have come upon his current first and last names by chance, as he claims, but there is also another James Simmons who attended Texas Tech University like Barry. Now, that could just be a coincidence, except the original James Simmons was audited twice and got a call from the FBI. They let him know that his identity had been stolen.

It seems like Barry was using someone else's name and social security number illegally. And finally, the most significant issue, there is not a single public record that backs up Barry's story about being found comatose in a Tennessee junkyard.

The police department, FBI field office, and hospitals in Memphis all come up empty. None of them have any documentation of an injured John Doe being found or treated in the summer of 1984. It's looking more and more like the original investigator's theory was correct. Barry staged his own disappearance, and now he doesn't want to admit it. If that's true...

He's not the only one. A few days after the initial press conference, media coverage reaches a frenzied level. Beth Cox calls her own press conference to tell reporters that despite all the holes in Barry's story, she believes it. Quote, I want to and I don't have any reason not to.

Barry's brother George feels the same way. He stands by his brother and doesn't believe he's capable of lying. That's not all. Barry's brand new congregants and employers at White Rock Community Church also stand behind him. Some of them feel honored that their church facilitated the miracle of Barry finding his true identity. They all have faith that he'll be able to clear everything up as soon as he's ready to talk.

About two weeks after the story makes news, that faith gets put to the test. Barry invites reporters to the community church, where he'll be taking questions from inside his new sanctuary. Members of his congregation are present as well, hoping to get clarity on exactly who they've hired to be their new pastor. Anyone hoping for big revelations is disappointed. Barry attempts to field questions,

But his answers aren't satisfying to everyone. When asked to provide more details on the hospital where he stayed, or the family he says helped him out during his time of need, Barry says he can't remember their names. He claims he doesn't really remember anything before hitchhiking in Virginia. Reporters also press Barry on his apparently stolen identity.

He says that he ended up with the original James Simmons social security number through a combination of good intentions and misunderstandings. According to Barry, when he needed a social security number so he could get a job, his landlady contacted Texas Tech University. Why did she happen to call the very university that Barry and James Simmons once attended?

Barry mentions that his landlady had a niece enrolled there, and she noticed that he had a Texan accent, but that's the only explanation he offers. Somehow, that phone call resulted in Barry, then James Simmons, obtaining the other James Simmons number. After using that for three years, Barry approached Virginia Congressman Norman Sisiski about getting another number.

Representative Sosiski confirmed that Barry asked for help but declined to get into any further details. This also doesn't line up with what Barry shared with his new employers. They thought he got his new social security number through the FBI as they worked together to determine his true identity. Then there's the story about searching fruitlessly for the truth about his past.

Barry claims he fixated on finding his family and felt frustrated those efforts weren't mutual, but there's no evidence he actually tried to find out where he came from. There is plenty of evidence that Barry's family and his church community tried everything to track him down, from handing out flyers to hiring a private investigator.

The sheriff who spearheaded the initial search also filed a national missing persons report. If Barry had ever reached out to federal law enforcement for help, they presumably would have used his dental records to identify him. As Barry continues to rely on vague language and memory loss to dodge questions, tension is rising in the room.

He's not winning over any skeptics. He's only reinforcing their doubts. At one point, Barry seems to acknowledge how incredible his story is, saying that, quote, I don't know if I would believe myself if I heard this story. After Barry can't plug any of the plot holes in his amnesia story, the goodwill surrounding his reappearance dissipates.

Nevertheless, he doesn't waver. He sticks with the explanations he's given, even though almost nobody believes them. Even though Barry knows it's unbelievable. Sometime in the weeks following Barry's disappointing press conference, he fails to win a two-thirds vote of confidence from his congregation at White Rock Community Church.

He resigns from his position as pastor and eventually founds his own church in a storefront just outside Dallas. His ex-wife Beth chooses to overlook the child support payments he owes her. She just asks him to contribute to the cost of Talitha's college education, which is coming up. Beth and Barry negotiate for a year, but no payment is made.

Beth has no choice but to pursue the child support payments in a court battle. Then, Barry files an application to reverse his death certificate and have the value of his estate restored to him. Back in the 1990s, Beth collected Barry's inheritance on some family real estate. She used the money to support Talitha. Now it's gone. If the court sides with Barry, Beth would have to repay that money.

But she says that would bankrupt her. According to Barry, regaining his estate is about showing respect for his immediate family. He also says the process is a way to integrate his two identities as recommended by a therapist. It takes several months, but the court settle in Beth and Talitha's favor. Barry has to pay child support for a few more years, and Beth does not owe him the money from his estate.

Despite the legal battle, Barry and Talitha's relationship remains positive. Beth tells reporters that their contact is mostly over the phone, but that it's been beneficial for their daughter. Because Barry maintains that he can't remember the details of his disappearance, questions about what really happened in the summer of 1984 remain unanswerable. The empty beer can in the trunk of the Oldsmobile, for example,

Did Barry plant it there to suggest someone else had been on the scene? Or did he drink it? And was alcohol consumption just one more thing he hid from his family? Then there are the facial injuries that witnesses noticed after his disappearance. Did he crash his motorbike accidentally? Were the injuries self-inflicted, meant to bolster a story about a beating?

Or maybe the tape on his nose was just supposed to make him harder to identify. We'll never know. No matter what conclusions people reach about his disappearance, Barry was in the end able to live openly as his true self, a gay man. The dramatic exit might seem like a bit much to achieve that goal, but let's take a deeper look at the context in which it happened.

It's hard to overstate the prevalence of homophobia in 1980s Texas. At the time, the AIDS crisis was exacerbating existing prejudices. In 1983, prominent televangelist Jerry Falwell said that God had created AIDS to punish gay people and the people who supported them. In 2001, Beth told reporters that soon after Barry disappeared...

The church in San Antonio where Barry worked as a youth pastor hired a private investigator. While the PI was searching for Barry, he found out he'd been secretly interacting with other gay people. Beth refused to believe it. Her mind couldn't process how the person she knew, her devout minister husband, could also be gay. She thought that even considering it felt disrespectful to his memory.

She went on to say that she regrets that Barry didn't share his true feelings with her. At one point during the 2001 media frenzy, Beth told the press she wished this had never happened. But maybe it won't happen again. Today, even among evangelicals, there is support for same-sex marriage.

Hopefully now, young people like Barry won't feel as trapped as he may have. Coming out shouldn't require staging your own disappearance.

Thank you for watching Conspiracy Theories. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. If you're watching on Spotify, swipe up and give us your thoughts or email us at conspiracystories at spotify.com.

For more information on Wesley Barrett Cox, amongst the many sources we used, we found coverage by the Abilene Reporter News extremely helpful to our research. Until next time, remember, the truth isn't always the best story, and the official story isn't always the truth.

This episode was written and researched by Hannah McIntosh, edited by Mickey Taylor and Connor Sampson, fact-checked by Laurie Siegel, and video editing and sound design by Alex Button. I'm your host, Carter Roy.