She died yesterday at her home near Kansas City, Missouri, of cancer, which she battled for years.
More:
Messner, weighing just 65 pounds, appeared on CNN’s Larry King show this month to say that she was relying on her faith in God to get her through the final stages of her life.
She is survived by her husband, and her two children with Bakker. Both followed their parents into the evangelism business: Tammy Sue Chapman is a Christian singer, and son Jamie Charles — known as Jay — branded his body with Jesus tattoos, created the Revolution Church and starred in a documentary series on the Sundance Channel called “One Punk Under God.”
Through the years, Messner called on her sunny Christianity to get through one crisis after another: Bakker’s imprisonment and the breakup of their 30-year marriage in 1992; her own addiction to tranquilizers; the 1996 conviction and jailing of her husband, Roe, for federal bankruptcy fraud; his battle with prostate cancer; and her own health problems, which began with colon cancer surgery in 1996.
