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“Just give me the money, Hon,” the redhead drawls.
And the teller hands it over.
Only this is not a movie, but the real thing, and this “Bonnie” is Mary Kay Mahaffey, bank robber, safecracker, and her photo hangs in the post office on the FBI “Most Wanted” list.
For five years, Mary Kay was on the run, first with her husband, Paul, who taught her everything she needed to know about guns, safes, and bank alarms. When he ditched her, she teamed up with a couple of buddies, Joe and Ed. They pulled bank stickups and other thefts across the southern part of the U.S. for several years. But eventually, Mary Kay’s boldness and arrogance caught up. She crossed the Mafia on a diamond heist, and they put out a contract on her life.
Happily, the FBI found her first, arresting her in Peoria, Illinois. Within a few days, the warrants began arriving at the jail. In addition to 11 federal indictments, four states filed 35 charges against her, ranging from grand larceny to armed robbery. She was told she would spend between 75 and 180 years behind bars.
But she didn’t. Released after serving less than six years, she soon married ex-prisoner Don Beard and joined Prison Fellowship as an area director for Alabama, where she created Angel Tree twenty years ago this Christmas.
Today, she serves Impact Family Counseling as Lead Counselor and works with troubled youth in Alabama, trying to re-direct youngsters away from the prison experience she and Don faced. How did she do it? How did Mary Kay Beard go from America’s Most Wanted to Founder of Angel Tree?
Mary Kay credits her turnaround to the parable of the seed in Matthew 13:
“In that story, Jesus says that the Kingdom of Heaven is like the man who went and sowed good seed in his field. After a time, his servants came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where then, did these weeds come from?’ And they asked the master, ‘Shall we go and pull up the weeds?’ And he said to them, ‘No, lest in pulling up the weeds you also uproot the wheat along with the weeds.’ He allowed both to grow together and at the time of the harvest, his servants separated the weeds from the wheat and tied them into bundles to be burned.”
Mary Kay says, “That’s the story of my life. I’m grateful for the good seed that was planted in my life as a child. I have always known there is one God, maker of heaven and earth; there is only one way to God and that is through faith and the shed blood of His son, Jesus Christ. And it was also planted deep in my heart that the Bible is the Word of God for today.”
But as a child, Mary Kay endured a different kind of seed as well, an alcoholic and abusive father. That seed of rejection grew into a great root of bitterness towards him and would grow up and consume her life for many years.
Growing up in church and Sunday school, Mary Kay decided that if she could be just like her Momma, she would be everything God wanted her to be.
“Momma lived in a daily walk in her belief in God,” Mary Kay notes. “I decided early that if I was going to be like Momma, I had to get away from my dad.”
At age 15, she got her chance. She graduated at the top of her high school class and took off to live with a married sister in another state. By the time she was 18, she had completed nursing school, again at the top of the class, and became the youngest nurse ever licensed in the state.
She immersed herself in nursing, working with the Red Cross and serving on various nursing committees. Then she met Paul on a blind date. Nine days later, they married. “He was a promoter for a group of entertainers. We traveled a lot and I saw things I had never seen. Along the way, I began to get better acquainted with my husband. I found out that he was a professional gambler and an ex-con, he had been at Alcatraz when they closed it.”
“’Well,’ I said. ‘Everybody makes a mistake and that’s really in the past,’ and so I excused it, I forgot the Scripture lesson that bad company corrupts good morals.
“And I discovered that the FBI considered my husband one of the very best safecrackers in the country. And I excused it again,” she says. “It was easy to say, ‘He’s no worse than the corrupt policemen, politicians, judges, lawyers, and businessmen we’ve seen taking money under the table.’ Besides, it was good living—I had beautiful clothes, emeralds and a Rolex; I wore mink and drove a Lincoln. The only time I had a problem was when I went home to see Momma.
“Momma is real old-fashioned. She is so old-fashioned that she still has rules at her home. And one rule is, come Sunday morning, everyone goes to church. I had a lot of money now but it hadn’t bought me peace that passeth understanding. So I was never comfortable around Momma. And I didn’t go home very often or stay very long when I got there.”
At one point in time, Mary Kay had to spend several weeks in a hospital. When she got out, she found that her husband had walked out. “He just abandoned me, he was my life and I had built my life around him. I had given up my family and friends, even my nursing profession for him. I was devastated.”
Overwhelmed with bitterness, she drifted, returning to a lifestyle of crime, joining Ed and Joe; shooting Joe in the leg when he tried to hold back her share from one of their heists. “You’re crazy, lady,” Ed told her. “You really don’t care about anything.”
Mary Kay says, “He was right. I had hit the bottom, my only motivations were bitterness and revenge. I didn’t care about anything, life had been nothing but a series of disappointments.”
Finally cornered in June, 1972, Mary Kay found herself sitting in a jail cell, wondering what had become of her Christian mother and the Bible verses Mary Kay had learned in her childhood. She started attending the weekly church services held at the jail. She asked one of the volunteers why they got up at 5 A.M. to come minister to jail inmates. “Jesus loved all of us enough to go all the way to Calvary, “ the lady answered. “So we can love you enough to come here and tell you about it.”
But Mary Kay was convinced that she couldn’t become a Christian: Her heart was too hard. Then she picked up a Bible and read, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26, 27)
The words held out a hope that she had never felt. Mary Kay prayed her first prayer since childhood: “OK, God, I’ve made a mess of it. If you mean what you say here in Ezekiel, please change my heart.”
And her life changed. A new inner peace replaced her bitterness; she stopped fighting with other inmates and asked their forgiveness. Though her sentences totaled 180 years, she pleaded guilty to the charges. Miraculously, she was sentenced to only 21 years in Alabama; one by one, all of the other states dropped their charges.
Mary Kay used her prison time to attend classes at Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama. She graduated from junior college with a near-perfect average and was granted a scholarship to Auburn. Four years later, she completed that, with honors, and began graduate studies.
She was unexpectedly paroled in 1978. “I became the first inmate in the history of Alabama to be paroled more than two years early, and I never met the parole board. They’re not real sure how it happened, and I didn’t ask for an investigation.” Remaining in Auburn, she finished her masters degree in education in 1982.
Then she received a new challenge—from Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship—to become their first Alabama State Director and the first woman to serve in a PF state leadership position. After carefully praying about the offer with friends at her church, Mary Kay joined the PF staff in April of 1982.
One of her first jobs was come up with a Christmas project. Her churches and volunteers asked which prisons they would visit and what gifts would they take. “I said, ‘Everyone does that. Let’s do something different.’”
She remembered the six Christmases she had spent behind bars. “Some Christian groups would come to the prison, and they would bring little trial size tubes of toothpaste, bars of soap, and bottles of shampoo. I noticed that women who never went to chapel or did anything Christian always went to those programs.
“I thought they were just greedy, but I saw them bring the items back to their cells and start organizing the stuff and trading with each other. And then they would divide the items up into piles and I realized that each pile was for one of their children. They would gather bits of colored paper and would wrap those items. That’s what they would give their children as Christmas gifts because it was all they had. And I thought, ‘Just because she’s a thief or a drug addict, or possibly even a murderer, doesn’t mean she doesn’t love her children. Doesn’t mean she’s a bad Momma.’
“The week before Christmas, the children would come to the prison for their annual visit with their mothers, and they would receive these little gifts. The children would tear the wrapping off and barely glance at the gift but would throw their arms around their mother and say, ‘Oh, Momma, thank you, thank you.’
“You see, children don’t care about things if they know they are first of all loved.”
That Christmas, Mary Kay went back to the same prison where she had spent seven years and gathered names and addresses of children. Then she, her sister, and a handful of volunteers put up Christmas trees at two malls, in Montgomery and Birmingham.
“And we made paper angels—red for girls and green for boys—and on each angel we wrote the name and age of a child. And then we put them on the tree, an Angel Tree! That’s how we got the name.
“And I submitted an article to the newspapers about how children are the real victims of crime, they are not responsible for what their adult parents do and yet they suffer. Children who have one adult in prison are six times more likely to get into trouble themselves as other children. So we advertised for the public ‘to come by and purchase a Christmas gift for an angel.’ I hoped that we could get Christmas for two or three hundred children. I had no idea what God would do with that project.
“Within six days we were out of names and I had to go back to the prison to get more. At the end of that first Angel Tree in 1982, 556 children had received up to four different gifts each.”
Then Mary Kay saw something else happen. “In January, all of my Bible study groups at that prison doubled or tripled. The newcomers were the inmates whose children had received gifts. They said, ‘Anyone who would get my child a gift is something special, so I decided to come and listen to this Bible study.’
“Well, many of those men and women came to Christ because you, the Body of Christ, the Christians on the outside, bought a gift for a child. You may never go inside a prison and yet the gift you purchase for a little child may be the very thing that God uses to touch a stony heart and redeem it for eternity.
“So the seed was planted at that county jail, where I was first incarcerated, Christmas, 1972, when I thought about Christmas away from home. I was in prison and yet it was the church that remembered me. The Church is the only one to have the message of redemption, we are the only ones to have the answer to crime, we are the only ones who can reach people for eternity. You don’t necessarily have to go to a prison. Sometimes it is just going out to the mall and buying a few gifts, but it can have eternal consequences.”
She saw another result, too—families reunititng as children who had not heard from dad for now received gifts from him.
“Angel Tree was not my project, it wasn’t even my idea. It was God’s idea. He just allowed me to be the instrument that He used to plant the seed. It was the church, the Body of Christ, who come along to water and to nurture it.”
The program branched to 12 states the following year and was soon restructured as a church-based program. Nearly 600,000 children were reached at Christmas, 2000, bringing the cumulative total to more than five million children served by Angel Tree since Mary Kay Beard first thought about those little tubes of toothpaste.
When told those numbers, Mary Kay Beard smiles. “I am both awed and humbled to have been any part of something so enormously effective. Being there at the beginning—I consider it one of the highest privileges of my life. And Jesus Christ is still in the business of changing lives, I know.”
Yes, that’s true. Mary Kay Beard’s life is a continuing witness to that.