Amid all the chaos and candle lighting and incongruity of that muggy February night, a gaping 33 years ago in Panama City, there was this sobbing at the front door.

No pensé que lo harían! "I didn't think they'd do it!"

The young Panamanian - let's call him "Jose" - was inconsolable. So shaken that friends could not coax him into the crowded sixth-floor apartment on Espinosa Street, the home of missionaries Gil and Jean Reimer. And so there he kneeled, in a heap on the hallway tile, his grief bathed by a single glaring light bulb.

"I didn't think they'd do it!"

Jean Reimer never heard the hysterics. Inside the vigil-like living room, inside her mind, the shell shock was deafening. The mutilated, decomposed body of her husband - the father of her two children - had turned up earlier that day, eight miles and an eternity away. A police cruiser, on routine patrol in the U.S.-operated Canal Zone, had frightened off a pack of vultures from the ...

Even in chains, the mission's first ex-Muslim convert made a scene.

As a descendant of the Prophet Mohammad, he was called "Si" Mehdi - a sign of respect in Morocco. Much to the chagrin of the Muslim establishment in this closed society.

Mehdi Ksara lived a scandalous, persecuted life - as the first Muslim-born convert of Avant missionaries in the late 1920s. Just hours before his death last June, Moroccan believers from the underground national church drove a frail Mehdi - worshipping all the way - to the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, where they could safely ensure him a Christian ...