During the 2006 campaign, Tom Sooter said that his campaign to become a state senator came about because of his daughter’s murder and his wife’s suicide. He said that getting elected to the state legislature would be “a way of helping people at a bigger level.”

During his campaign, Sooter told reporters that his daughter had been suffering from depression at the time of the murder-suicide.

That’s not what was described in a Kansas City Star article written about the violent crime immediately after it happened back in the year 2000. In that article, Detective Andrew Dorothy of the Kansas City Police told reporters Mary Lee Sooter had been “apparently was upset that her daughter, Jenny Sooter, 24, planned to leave the church and move out of her parents' home”.

The Sooters’ daughter had packed her possessions in boxes, as if she was about to leave the house. “Jenny Sooter had written a note to a church deacon explaining that she was leaving the church, Dorothy said. It was found in the home in a sealed envelope,” the newspaper reported.

Jenny Sooter, who was 24 years old at the time, wanted to finally leave her parents’ home and live on her own. She wanted to leave her parents’ church. Mary Lee Sooter could not tolerate the idea of her daughter becoming independent, and became furious.

Mary Lee Sooter had scrawled several Bible verses on pieces of paper near her bed shortly before murdering her daughter. On the same pieces of paper, Mary Lee wrote messages about how her daughter had become unacceptably rebellious, as if Jenny Sooter was a child, and not a young woman.

In 2001, Tom Sooter told reporters at the Salina Journal that Mary Lee Sooter had shot and killed their daughter Jenny out of love. “trying to save her from what sinful and wrong choices.” He said that his wife had murdered their daughter “out of motherly instinct, always wanting to protect her child from perceived harm.”

“We didn't feel she was quite ready to leave," Tom Sooter said in 2001, “and we were fearful she would put herself in situations that would be harmful for her.”

Did it occur to Tom Sooter that being murdered was more harmful to their daughter than leaving their church would have been? Tom Sooter may have thought his daughter was not ready to leave her parents’ home at the age of 24, but was she ready to be murdered?

In what kind of warped morality is murder described as a motherly instinct?

At the time, Reverend Carl D. Herbster told the Kansas City Star that it would be difficult for the Sooters’ church to lose the murderous Mary Lee. “This is a pastor's wife who has been very close and caring to a flock,” he said.

If church members had, in fact, been a flock of sheep, then Mary Lee Sooter’s refusal to allow a member of the flock to leave might have been understandable. Jenny Sooter was not, however, a herd animal. She was not a sheep. Jenny Sooter was an adult woman who wanted to live on her own terms, away from the strict control of her parents, who would not allow her to dance, or to listen to popular music, or to wear the same kinds of clothes other women her age liked to wear.

Just a little over three years after the murder-suicide, Aaron Hartzler, who grew up in the same larger Christian community as Jenny Sooter, and had known her during high school, remembered, “Far more concerned with haircuts and hemlines, the state of one’s soul was touted as the ultimate focus, when in reality it was of much less value than the outward, legalistic conservatism that one projected via clothing that adhered strictly to the dress codes.”

At the time of the murder, Tom Sooter told police that he had no idea that his daughter was planning to leave the church and go live independently. That claim was refuted by Aaron Hartzler’s father, who told Aaron on the day of the murder that “Sooter had been planning to resign for weeks due to his daughter’s desire to leave the church and move out of their family home.”

Tom Sooter had been extreme emotional distress, just like his wife, in opposition to allowing Jenny Sooter to leave the family home and church. Tom Sooter later admitted to this version of the truth in 2001, telling the Salina Journal that his daughter had showed him a note announcing that she was leaving.

Which version is correct, and why did Tom Sooter change his version of the events?

When Aaron Hartzler tried to talk with his father about Mary Lee Sooter’s murder of her own daughter, his father tried to argue that the murder took place because Mary Lee Sooter had lapsed from her Christian faith. “This just goes to show you that we are all capable of unspeakable evil when we take our eyes off the Savior,” his father said.

In fact, as the scrawled Bible verses found at near scene of the crime demonstrate, Mary Lee Sooter was led to murder by her faith. Aaron wrote:

“Mary Lee Sooter didn’t ‘take her eyes off of God’ and then shoot her daughter! Her eyes were so full of God that she was blinded to the difference between shooting her daughter with a gun in north Kansas City in 2000 AD, and the ancient Levitical law that ordered rebellious sons and daughters to be stoned to death at the gates of the city… I weep for you, Jenny Sooter; not only for your death, but also for your life. I sat with you in those same pews. I heard those same sermons. I shook in the same fear of a vindictive God who would send me to an eternal punishment for renting the wrong movie, wearing the wrong clothes, listening to the wrong music, or sleeping with the wrong gender. And finally, I too saw the holes in the logic of the violent dogma we were brainwashed by, and I made an escape.”

There is no evidence that Tom Sooter was directly involved in the murder of his daughter, or the suicide of his wife. The strict, judgmental, controlling theology that he preached, however, contributed to the escalation of his wife’s anger into a murderous rage. The biblical literalism he insisted upon led his wife to take a gun blow his daughter’s brains out after reading the Bible’s instructions that rebellious children must be put to death.

After he buried his wife and daughter, Tom Sooter remarried. Deborah Sooter is now his wife, and she travels with him as the two work together as evangelists, delivering sermons about the evil plans of Satan to attack people who deviate from the strict teachings of their apocalyptic version of Christianity.

In 2015, Tom Sooter even gave a sermon under the title “Why Good Kids Go Bad”.

In 2006, Tom Sooter tried to use the story of the murder-suicide in his household into an arc of redemption, showing that his extreme right wing Christian ideology was somehow in the right all along. Sooter lost the election to his Democratic opponent, earning only 34% of the vote.

Now, in 2024, Tom Sooter has endorsed Donald Trump for President and joined Trump’s Iowa Faith Leader Coalition. It’s not difficult to see the common ground between Sooter and Trump, with Trump exhibiting on a national political scale the same controlling, authoritarian ideology that Sooter applied in his home and his church.

Once again, Sooter’s biblical narrative is leading toward a terrifyingly violent end. In a sermon delivered in February 11 this year at Bethel Baptist Church in Hartselle, Alabama, Tom Sooter warned:

“Prophetically, this particular verse tells us what we’re seeing coming about right now today, 21st century. There is coming a day, it’s called World War III, the Book of Revelation. It’s all about how five different nations, along with Russia, will come down and attack Israel. By the way, you see all of that working right now, and this huge battle, the battle of Armageddon, in the, Joel called it the Valley of Decision, will be fought. By the way, in my whole entire life, I have never heard politicians and people talk about, like everyday language, World War III. Have you heard that too? So, we’re approaching it much faster than we might think.”

One would have hoped that the murder-suicide of his daughter by his wife would have taught Tom Sooter not to hunger for violence. Unfortunately, it seems that Sooter didn’t learn that lesson. In this sermon, Sooter eagerly looks forward to World War III as the battle of Armageddon, what he believes will be a final expression of Christianity’s righteous violence, ending in the deaths of millions, even billions, of people, so that a final global Christian monarchy can be imposed upon our planet.

Sooter believes that this bloodbath will be a good thing. He’s hoping it happens. He wants it to come soon.

When Tom Sooter mentions that politicians are talking about World War III, he’s talking about Donald Trump.

In a December 2023 speech in Waterloo, Iowa, Donald Trump told his audience:

“We're very close. I don't know if you feel it, but we're very close to World War III when you see these discussions taking place, and this wouldn't be a war like with armies, tanks running back and forth shooting at each other, World War I, World War II. This would be obliteration.”

In January 2024, Donald Trump repeated this theme, declaring that “we are on the brink of World War III”. Just a few weeks later, Tom Sooter delivered his sermon looking forward to the End Times when World War III begins.

Christian Nationalists will often dismiss concerns about Christian violence by saying that it’s all metaphorical, just spiritual warfare. The problem is that most Christian Nationalists don’t believe that spirits are only real in a metaphorical sense. They believe in demons, and they believe that there will be a literal battle between humans, with one set of humans on the side of Jesus and everybody else on the side of the demons, resulting with a huge amount of human death.

Jenny Sooter’s death was not metaphorical, and Tom Sooter’s eager predictions of the imminent arrival of World War III are not metaphorical either.