December 2013 – Mary Kay Beard’s ability to crack safes and rob banks earned her a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. At the age of 27, she was arrested on 11 federal indictments and 35 charges. She was convicted of armed robbery and grand larceny. Expecting life in prison, Beard received a 21-year sentence. She served five-and-a-half years before being paroled early and unexpectedly.

The Christmas holidays she spent behind bars eventually led her to found Angel Tree, a nationwide ministry of Prison Fellowship that serves the children of inmates.

Criminal at heart
Beard, one of nine children, grew up on a farm in Alabama with her godly mother and her abusive alcoholic father. 

“So we had what I thought of as sort of a schizophrenic home,” Beard told AFA Journal. “I had a wonderful mother who took us to church. She brought us up … living a life of godliness in our presence. … [But] we were all impacted by my dad’s alcoholism.

“I grew very bitter and angry, and I resented him,” she said. 

After graduating high school at 15 and completing nursing school at age 18, Beard found her life taking an unplanned turn on a blind date. She met a man and married him nine days later. 

“I discovered after the fact that he was a career criminal,” Beard said. “He was one of the best safecrackers in the country.”

He taught her his “trade,” and Beard became her husband’s partner in crime for the next five years until he abandoned her when she was diagnosed with an operable cancerous tumor. After her recovery, she continued her criminal lifestyle out of anger and as means to prove herself. Her expertise in shooting anything from a .22 to a .357 Magnum that she acquired while hunting as a child was an asset to her solo career. But it did not keep the Mafia from putting a contract on her life. 

Her life of crime came to an end in June of 1972 when she was arrested by the FBI. 

“That’s a time when you reflect; you ask yourself what happened,” she admitted. “This wasn’t the way I planned my life. This is not what I had envisioned at all.”

But it was during the five months Beard spent in a solitary confinement cell that the unexpected happened.

God at work
“Scripture, memorized as a little girl in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School, began to come back to my mind,” she said.

She also began attending a Sunday School class while in jail. Every Sunday morning at 7:00, a group of people came to the Julia Tutwiler Prison in Wetumpka, Alabama. 

“I didn’t think they could teach me anything,” Beard said. “After all, I had been in church much of my life.” But she attended the class each Sunday morning because it was the only time she was allowed out of her cell.

“It was there that I was reminded again of the things that my mother had taught me and became convicted by the Holy Spirit of the choices I had made – that I made without Dad’s influence,” she admitted. 

“I began to wonder, is it too late? Would God save me? … I wasn’t concerned about whether God could but whether He would do anything for me,” Beard said. 

But God used a Gideon couple and their distribution of a Gideon Bible to lead Beard to a passage in Ezekiel 36 that would forever change her life for His glory. 

“I returned to the faith of my childhood and committed my life to Jesus Christ,” Beard said. 

Little did she know that God would use her time in prison to cultivate years of future ministry that would result in the founding of Angel Tree and later the creation of Encourager Ministries. 

“I believe God has given me the gift of encouragement,” Beard said. “I try to encourage families and inmates to look at the One who redeemed them, the One who created them, … and allow Him to change their lives. Because He loves us enough to change [us].” 

AFA promotes support of Angel Tree
Mary Kay Beard spent six Christmases behind bars. Every Christmas, churches would give small toiletry items to the inmates. 

“I would watch the women take those gifts, and they would sort them out and put them in little piles,” Beard recalled. “The number of piles each woman had, corresponded with the number of children she had.

“She might be a thief like me, a drug addict, or whatever, but that is the heart of a momma.”

Beard watched this happen each Christmas until her parole in 1978.

In 1981, Beard was recruited by a staff member of Prison Fellowship, a Christian prison ministry founded by Chuck Colson. She joined that ministry and became its first Alabama state director. Her first assignment was to create a Christmas project for the inmates.

“At that time, most everybody did the same thing,” she said. “They went to the prison, provided a Christmas program, maybe sang some Christmas carols and provided gifts to the inmates.”

But having been a mother behind bars herself, she knew the women would much rather gifts be given to their children instead of them.

Beard began visiting inmates and asking them to sign up their children to receive Christmas gifts that year. She then called the children’s caregivers and made a wish list for each child. Each child’s name and gift preference were written on one of 100 paper angel ornaments. The ornaments were then hung on a Christmas tree in Birmingham’s Brookwood Mall the day after Thanksgiving. Shoppers were encouraged to take an angel and buy Christmas gifts for that child.

All 100 angels were provided for that day. Overwhelmed by the response, Beard visited other prisons and enlisted more children. That Christmas, 556 children received presents, and the Angel Tree ministry was born. The next year it spread to 12 states. 

By 2012, 364,198 inmates’ children received gifts through Angel Tree. 

Though Beard later left Prison Fellowship for other ministry, Angel Tree has thrived. Now in every state, it extends year round through Christian mentoring and summer camps that function through local churches. 

AFA president Tim Wildmon said, “We consider it an honor to promote this beautiful Christmas project that touches the lives of families living with such great challenges.” 

Angel Tree not only provides gifts at Christmas, but makes children feel loved by their incarcerated parents. Yet, the heart of Angel Tree is to share the love of God with inmates and their families in hopes of birthing new relationships
with Christ.  

Mary Kay Beard’s full story is told in Rogue Angel, written by Jodi Werhanowicz, foreword by Charles Colson. Available online or by calling 205-777-3439.

For more information, visit prisonfellowship.org or call 800-55-ANGEL (800-552-6435).