THE DETROIT NEWS, July 23, 1927

* The Israelite House of David religious commune
* King Benjamin Purnell scandal trial
* Benton Harbor, Michigan cult 

The front page has a nice banner headline for display: "BEN CALLS 'QUEEN' MARY FALSE" with subheads. (see images)
Complete with 18 pages, light toning and a minor wear at the margins, some binding holes along the spine, generally nice.

Background: August 13, 1927, marked the dramatic conclusion of one of the most sensational and unprecedented legal spectacles in early 20th-century America: the State of Michigan's marathon 51-day civil trial seeking to entirely dissolve Benjamin "King Ben" Purnell's Israelite House of David religious commune as a "public nuisance." The rarity of the case lay in the state's aggressive and highly unusual strategy to legally dismantle a wealthy, functioning religious sect based on overwhelming evidence that its self-proclaimed messiah orchestrated a systematic ring of fraud, forced marriages, and the sexual abuse of underage girls under the guise of spiritual "purification rites." Culminating on this mid-August day after generating a staggering 15,000 pages of transcript and 225 witness testimonies, the proceedings were made even more macabre by the physical deterioration of Purnell himself, who was dying of advanced tuberculosis and had to be brought into court on a stretcher. While the sheer volume of damning evidence ultimately led the judge to validate the horrifying abuse claims and order the commune into receivership that December, the trial's legacy was cemented as a bizarre legal anomaly when Purnell died just eleven days after the ruling; his death effectively abated the nuisance charges, forcing the Michigan Supreme Court to eventually overturn the dissolution and allowing the remaining followers to retain their empire.