On 14 July 2000 the group was splashed across the front page of the British tabloid Daily Express, which declared that members Susan and Roland Gianstefani had kidnapped a 16-year-old boy, Bobby Kelly. Bobby had picked up a Jesus Christians cartoon book called "The Liberator" in Romford High Street, Essex, near the end of June 2000, and gone home to tell his grandmother about the Christian man he met. Bobby went out again that afternoon and returned to tell his grandmother he wanted to join the Jesus Christians. A few days later "an Australian couple with their young son, a German and two English men" from the group visited and met Bobby's grandmother. In the first two weeks of July while Bobby was with the group, before the scandal had hit the headlines, Bobby visited his youth worker from St. Peters Anglican Church in Harold Wood. He had previously attended that church. The youth worker, David Whitehouse, told the press a week later, "The group has a veneer of respectability, but there is something very disturbing about them. When I saw Bobby a week ago, he was with three of them, and he seemed very scared, which was unlike him".