"The last time I saw my husband," Mrs. Truefaith told authorities, "he was a dead Jesus up on a cross at the Passion Play. I was so proud of his acting. I mean, by the end of that play he looked so dead it was unreal! I nudged the woman next to me and wondered how he could act like that. I mean, I've seen actor's cry, which is all well and good, but I've never seen even those Hollywood folks act so good that their skin starts turning blue. It was a sight to see. Now, I did wonder why he didn't rise from the dead at the end like Jesus did last year, but I just figured that they were just trying to change the story a bit to keep everyone's attention."

Every year Landover Baptist hosts the nation's most famous and expensive Easter Passion Play. And it is a spectacle fit for the King of Kings, with glamorous production numbers that would shame a Carnival cruise.

"I tell you," said Pastor Deacon Fred with pride, "we've got so many actors that when we get to that big scene when all those bloodthirsty Hebrews are screaming for Pontius Pilate to kill Jesus, it looks like we've got more Jews than Beverly Hills. And our Jews dance! I tell you, when it comes to famous Passion Plays, those Huns in Oberammergau may have history, but we've got money. And, as any God fearing American can tell you, money trumps culture every time. Cause money can buy you some culture. For instance, we've paid for that oily little English guy to write us some tunes for Jesus."

Indeed, last year marked the introduction of a new Passion Play score exclusively penned for Landover Baptist by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Mr. Webber made significant changes to the story of Jesus' life, including the excising of Christ's monotonous character development and the parables that nobody follows anyway. These cuts allowed for the addition of a runway dance number by roller-skating camels and two instantly recognizable tunes that the audience felt as if they have heard a million times -- because, by the end of the second act, they had. The $3,450,000 production was a marvel of pageantry, stage engineering and animal husbandry, featuring 873 actors, a procession of 15 white elephants and a gold donkey carrying the Mother of Jesus, played by born-again actress Dyan Cannon. The only mishap was when a tap-dancing Mary Magdalene, played as a passive-aggressive extrovert by Kathy Lee Gifford, slid on a wet, sloppy mound in the middle of the stage and splattered the orchestra and several people in the $2,500 seats with elephant feces.

"Well, last year was a problem when Kathy Lee fell on her butt just when we were getting to the real serious part," recalled Mrs. Judy O'Christian. "And the dry cleaner never got all that dung out of my silk Easter dress -- although I have to admit, that stuff did wonders for the condition of my hair. But at least no one died last year."

After reviewing the DVD of the performance (available free from Landover Baptist for a love offering of $1,200), it was clear to the police that the actor Pastor John Truefaith really died only moments before his character Jesus was schedule to pretend to die on stage.

"Girl, it was a little smidgen of a problem," recalls costumer Ronnie Tinahead, who had watched the performance from the wings.

"Oh, I know," recounts his roommate and show make-up artist Bruce Leatherbottom, "he was supposed to say our Lord's final words on the cross and we waited and waited. You could feel the anxiety in the audience; I almost snapped a Mabeline pencil in two! But we all just thought he'd fallen asleep. But I mean he-loo? He was dead!"

"Well, it was just as well," added Mr. Tinahead. "You can't believe the arguments we'd gotten from the Ladies of Landover over what Jesus' last words on the cross would be. The Bible has at least three versions and everyone had their favorite. Some of them were getting vicious about which one we would use. Some wanted 'Why God have you forsaken me' from Matthew. But some thought that was taking that whole Trinity schizoid thing way too far and they were lobbying for the simple 'It is finished' from John. There was a lot of bad blood over that decision. Sister Taffy told me that she had brought her megaphone and was going to shout out 'it's finished' if Jesus didn't do it her way. So, frankly, if he was going to pick any time in the play to stop breathing, that was a good choice."

"It is really sad that he had to die," observed Judy O'Christian. "Not Jesus -- he had to die so's I could get to Heaven. I mean Pastor Truefaith. You know I would never say an unkind word about a Sister in Christ. But I blame Betty. Yes, I do."

Several Landover Baptist members pointed the finger at Betty Bowers when asked what had cause the death of Pastor Truefaith. "I love Betty like I love my nonrepeating hand-printed Chinese wallpaper in my dining room," said Mrs. James Higgins, "but she is the most pretentious woman who ever walked the Earth. Well, accept for Joni Mitchell – but people still listen to Betty. Last year's show was fabulous. Everyone loved it. But not Betty. She said Wayne Newton's Jesus was an insult to the memory of some guy called Konstantin Stanislavski and insisted that she be involved in the casting and direction of this year's show."

For this year's show, Mrs. Bowers had flown in her good friend Uta Hagen to act as director for the production. Ms. Hagen worked tirelessly with the tyros in the cast to allow them to become the characters they were playing. Recalls Mrs. Bobby Thompsonville, who was Mary's understudy: "By the second week of rehearsal, I started acting, like, so totally Jewish, I was afraid they weren't going to let me in the country club!"

"Uta was amazing," adds Mr. Hulbert Harding, who played a Roman guard at the foot of the cross. "She had us really feeling our roles. She told us to get lost in our characters and become whom we were playing. By performance day, I was so ready to kill Jesus. It was beautiful."

Indeed, it appears that the Roman actors became so immersed in their characters that they actually did kill Jesus in scene 32. The autopsy of Pastor Truefaith revealed acute toxicity of the liver, which was attributed to the 3 quarts of apple cider vinegar the "Roman Soldiers" force-fed the actor while he was on the cross. Added Sergeant Lewis: "And the decision to use real nails certainly didn't help."

"Well, any time you do a production this big," said Pastor Deacon Fred, "you are going to have problems. Last year, it was a couple lap-fulls of elephant turds. This year, it was a dead Jesus. As anyone in show business or religion will tell you, it is hard to manage that many people. And we had 934 live actors this year! Well, 933."