Trial starts in Ala. for evangelist accused of killing wife, keeping her body in a freezer

Evangelist on trial in Ala. in wife’s death

MOBILE, Ala. — People who heard traveling evangelist Anthony Hopkins deliver sermons in the rural Southern towns where he preached sometimes called him a psychic or even a prophet.

But prosecutors say the former soldier kept dark secrets while spreading God’s word. They accuse him of killing his wife, storing her body in a freezer for years and raping and molesting a young female relative.

Hopkins, 39, was arrested in 2008 while preaching a rural revival in Clarke County. The teenage relative allegedly pregnant with his baby led police to the body of 36-year-old Arletha Hopkins, a mother of eight ranging in age from an infant to late teens.

Investigators say Hopkins killed his wife in 2004 after she caught him having sex with the teenager, then stuffed the wife’s body into a freezer at the Mobile home he shared with her, six children and two stepchildren.

That female relative, now 21, sobbed Tuesday as she testified about years of sexual and physical abuse. The Associated Press generally does not identify possible victims of sexual assault.

The woman told jurors Hopkins began molesting her when she was 11 and continued until she fled the home in 2008 and left behind seven younger children.

The woman said her mother and Hopkins had a violent fight in their home in Mobile on Dec. 4, 2004. Hopkins ordered her and the other children to their rooms, but they heard their mother scream to call police because the man was going to kill her.

“Did you call the cops?” prosecutor Ashley Rich asked.

“I was confused. I didn’t know if I was doing wrong by calling the cops or not,” the woman said, sobbing.

She testified she later walked into the room and saw her mother gasping on the floor, a foot twitching. The daughter locked herself and her mother’s 1-month-old infant in a bathroom until Hopkins began knocking on the door.

“I just held the baby until (he) came and knocked on the door. He was crying and said he was sorry. I just knew she was dead. He let me know that he needed my help,” the woman testified.

Fearing for her own life, she helped Hopkins move her mother’s body from a remote area where he first buried her to another area behind a church, the woman testified. She recalled helping Hopkins dig her mother’s grave near the church and then cover her mother’s body with dirt.

Hopkins worried days later that dogs would detect the smell and dig at the grave, she said, so he bought a freezer, plugged it into a utility shed behind the family’s Mobile home and again had her help him move the body.

When the body would not fit inside the freezer, Hopkins jumped on top of the door and shoved the body inside, she testified. During a power outage caused by Hurricane Katrina the following year, the body unthawed and then refroze, she said.

Medical investigators have said the body was too badly decomposed to determine a cause of death.

The woman testified that many of Hopkins followers considered him a prophet. She said he used stories from the Bible to tell her why she needed to have sex with him and to keep it a secret.

“I thought I cannot put my mouth on a man of God and say anything because God would strike me down and I would be cursed for the rest of my life,” she said.

Defense attorney Sid Harrell asked jurors to keep their minds open and not be swayed by sympathy.

Harrell said Hopkins served in the U.S. Army in Kazakhstan the late 1990s and earned a medal for his service. Hopkins was previously arrested in Saraland, near Mobile, in 1998 for being absent without leave from the U.S. Army in Fort Bragg, N.C., from June 15, 1995, until April 6, 1998, but Harrell offered no information about the arrest.

“He tried to raise eight children doing what he could. He got involved in the church singing gospel where his children were all immensely talented,” Harrell said.

He faces life in prison.