Plumber Finds Envelopes Of Cash Hidden In Walls Of Joel Osteen's Church Years After $600k Robbery
Joel Osteen has some explaining to do.
Wikimedia Commons / Justin Brackett, CC BY-SA 4.0 Is Joel Scott Osteen the next Jim Bakker?
The famous American pastor, televangelist, and author, from Houston, Texas might have some shady business going on after a Plumber found thousands of envelopes stashed with cash.
Osteen's sermons rake in millions of people, earning him a net worth of over $50 million, with his church taking in $43 million a year in collections.
The plumber called into a Houston morning radio show, "100.3 The Bull" that he made the discovery when he went to the church on November 10th.
The Plumber found cash and checks 7 years after Joel Osteen's churh was robbed.
The Plumber, named Justin, was at Osteen's megachurch to fix a loose toilet but after removing it from the wall, along, with some insulation, envelopes came pouring out.
“There was a loose toilet in the wall, and we removed the tile. We went to go remove the toilet, and I moved some insulation away and about 500 envelopes fell out of the wall, and I was like ‘Oh wow!’"
Justin explained that there were around 3,000 envelopes filled with cash, which have all been recovered.
Lakewood Church confirmed in a statement that the discovery of an “undisclosed amount of cash” during plumbing works did in fact happen and that the Houston Police Department had been notified.
This new discovery comes seven years after $600,000 worth of checks and cash were reported missed and stolen from Osteen's church in 2014.
The Lakewood Church robbery remains unsolved.
No arrests were made in the robbery though it remains unclear if the cash discovery is connected to the 2014 incident.
The host of the radio show, George Lindsay, couldn't help but have questions after hearing about the case.
“Don’t you want to know what happened, I mean they stole the money, but they didn’t get it out of the wall. Did they have an accident, you know what I mean? It’s like, why did they never go back? If it’s that money, why did they never go back?”
In 2014, Crime Stoppers of Houston also offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the suspect who stole the $600,000.
Lindsay said that he thinks the plumber should be rewarded because "he’s the one who found it."
“If he never had been doing that work behind that toilet, they would have never known that money was there,” Lindsay said.
However, Housten TV station KPRC 2 spoke to Crime Stoppers of Houston who said they only offered the reward for information leading to a suspect’s arrest.
Therefore, in order to receive a reward, the tipster would need to contact Crime Stoppers and be able to give identifying information on the suspected thief leading to an arrest.
They also said the statute of limitations has expired since the case that opened in 2014, so the plumber who made the discovery will not receive any reward money.
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Megan Hatch is a writer at YourTango who covers news & entertainment, love & relationships, and internet culture. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.