Slaughter still had no idea; from what she"d been told, Lisa may have died of meningitis. But she did know that Lisa had died while in the Church of Scientology"s care. Right or wrong, Scientology had to be protected from scandal; more than any other Scientologist in Clearwater, Slaughter, who"d spent the better part of two years networking tirelessly with local politicos and community leaders in hopes of improving Scientology"s image, understood the potential ramifications.
So she told what L. Ron Hubbard called an "acceptable truth." Lisa had fallen sick at work, Slaughter explained to Fannie. She"d begun feeling ill around noon and then "just kept getting sicker and sicker" until they finally took her to a hospital. By then, said Slaughter, it was too late. The doctor concluded she"d had "fast-acting meningitis."
"I just fell to pieces," Fannie later told police.
Slaughter also told Fannie that Lisa had wanted to be cremated. In her shock and grief Lisa"s mother agreed, though she later "regretted it a million times," said Fannie"s sister, Ann Carlson. "Bennetta had said it was her last wish. Well, I don"t know why a thirty-six-year-old girl would be discussing cremation and her death, you know? Why would she be?"
At Lisa"s memorial service on December 11, 1995, Dallas"s Restland Memorial Funeral Home was "filled with Scientology people that we"d never seen before," said Carlson. Some had come from Clearwater, and arrived in a white limousine. They hovered over the family "like vultures," another one of Fannie"s sisters, Dell Liebreich, later told the police. "They didn"t talk too much, [but] every time we would try to talk to each other or anybody, they were just ... listening." The Scientologists even followed them into the restroom, she said.
Fannie"s sister Ann, who was seventy-six years old, had always felt there was something strange about these Scientologists. Now she was sure of it. The way they lingered was unnerving, but there was more to it than just that, Carlson believed. Lisa had died on the evening of December 5, 1995; Fannie wasn"t told until the middle of the next afternoon. Why had Bennetta Slaughter waited so long to call her? And had Lisa really been at her office when she got sick? Slaughter said yes. But when Carlson asked Brenda Hubert, she said that Lisa had been at a seminar in Orlando. A third Scientologist friend later told Carlson that Lisa had gotten sick at her apartment. Who had taken Lisa to the hospital? "An acquaintance," the family was told. Which acquaintance? No one would say.
On December 16, 1995, ten days after Lisa"s death, Fannie McPherson and her sisters Ann and Dell flew to Tampa and arrived, unannounced, in Clearwater. As they pulled up to Lisa"s apartment on Osceola Avenue, Lisa"s roommate, Gloria Cruz, rushed out to greet them. "Hi, Fannie!" she said.
"How she knew us I"ll never know," said Carlson. Neither Fannie nor her sisters had ever met Cruz, who did not go to the memorial service in Texas. The women had taken pains not to tell Bennetta Slaughter or anyone else in Clearwater that they were coming. Yet Cruz seemed to be waiting for them.
Cruz and several friends were carting out boxes from the apartment. She was moving, Cruz told the women from Texas. And she, or someone, the women thought, seemed to have taken whatever they wanted.* Lisa"s stereo was gone, as were her television, answering machine, telephone, and plants. Fannie looked in vain for Lisa"s jewelry, but that was missing too. "I had given her a little diamond ring that she treasured very much; I didn"t get that. Her daddy"s wedding band she wore on her right hand, I didn"t get." The expensive clothes that Lisa wore-silk pajamas, designer jeans, dresses from Neiman Marcus-all gone. "We saw one roll of toilet tissue, a newspaper laying on the floor, and a roll of paper towels on the sink," said Carlson.
Lisa"s bank statements and laptop computer were also missing. But one box, tucked inside a hall closet, had been overlooked. Inside, Carlson found Lisa"s diaries, her 1994 tax return, and the police report from the accident on November 18.* This was the first the women knew of Lisa"s accident. On the report was the phone number of the driver of the vehicle that Lisa had rear-ended, a local mechanic named Joe McDonald. Carlson called him.
McDonald told the women a variation of the story that the paramedic Bonnie Portolano later told police. Fannie was beside herself. "I didn"t know she"d had the wreck and I didn"t know she"d cracked up," she later told police. "They hadn"t contacted me ... or told me she was sick or anything."
Hoping to learn more, the family went to the Clearwater police station. They were told that an investigation was in process-a "matter of routine," the police explained-and that the medical examiner was still awaiting the results from certain tests. The women were shown a copy of the preliminary autopsy report. There was no mention of meningitis. Rather, the cause of death was listed as a pulmonary embolism-an arterial blood clot.
For days, the McPherson family searched for answers. Few were forthcoming. Most of Lisa"s friends from Scientology seemed as much in the dark as they were. Those who may have known more were not talking. "She asked to go there," Bennetta Slaughter said about the Fort Harrison, where she"d finally admitted Lisa had been taken after "b.u.mping her leg on a desk" at work. "She just loved it there." As to what had occurred during those two weeks, Slaughter claimed she had no idea.
Convinced that something sinister had happened to Lisa, the women returned to the Clearwater Police Department and met with Detective Ron Sudler, who was investigating the case. Sudler, a burly cop in his late twenties, looked uneasy. "Look, I want to tell you something," he said. "You can"t bring Lisa back, so why don"t you just take what you can and get out of town."
"But we think something bad has happened to her," said Carlson.
Sudler had been called in to this case just a week or so earlier. He had, however, lived in Clearwater a long time. "We"re going to do our best," he promised. "But if I were you, I"d go home."
In his quiet suburban home in Dunedin, near Clearwater, Special Agent Allan "Lee" Strope put down his morning newspaper. It was December 1996, and Strope, a taciturn detective with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, had just read a story about Lisa McPherson on the front page of the Tampa Tribune with the headline "Mystery Surrounds Scientologist"s Death." The story fascinated him. A healthy young woman got into a minor car accident, stripped naked, asked for help, and went to the hospital. A few hours later, she checked out of the hospital against medical advice and left with members of the Church of Scientology, who brought her to the Fort Harrison Hotel for "rest and relaxation." Seventeen days later, she was dead.
Though the woman had died over a year ago, Strope realized, there had been no obituary in the local papers and no public police report on Lisa"s death. Neither the McPherson family nor the Clearwater police seemed to have any idea of what had happened to her. The police had been so stymied in their investigation, in fact, that in the fall of 1996, nearly twelve months after Lisa"s death, they"d finally posted a note on the Internet looking for help in finding three Scientologists, including the medical officers Laura Arrunada and Susanne Schnurrenberger, who they believed had contact with Lisa during her stay at the Fort Harrison.
Strope had lived in Clearwater for more than ten years, but he knew very little about the Church of Scientology. Like most local residents, he"d taken note of the church"s uniformed staffers, who milled around downtown. Out of curiosity, he"d even purchased a copy of Dianetics but found the book dense and concluded it was "gibberish." By his reading, Scientologists were a clannish bunch, not very friendly to outsiders. Now he began to wonder if there was something more ominous about the group.
The condition of Lisa"s body was particularly disturbing to Strope. So was that fact that she"d been taken to a hospital in Pasco County, more than twenty miles away, when Pinellas County had several closer hospitals, including two right in Clearwater.
The detective considered the matter while he drank his coffee. Then he showered, dressed, got into his government-issued Chevy Monte Carlo, and drove to the Clearwater field office of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, or FDLE, where he suggested the state agency help the local police with the Lisa McPherson investigation.
The FDLE is a small but powerful investigative body whose members often work in tandem with local police forces on major criminal cases. Lee Strope, forty-nine years old, was one of its best agents. Like many investigators, he"d come up from the streets, walking a beat in his native Detroit in the 1970s, then working as an undercover narcotics agent and later as a homicide investigator. He joined the FDLE in 1988, after moving to Florida, and two years later distinguished himself as the lead agent in one of Florida"s most notorious and high-profile cases: the August 1990 serial murder and mutilation of five Gainesville college students by an itinerant criminal named Danny Rolling, often known as the "Gainesville Ripper" case. Strope frequently consulted with the Clearwater Police Department, which late in 1996 had a.s.signed one of his golfing buddies, Sergeant Wayne Andrews, to be the lead detective on the McPherson case.
If Strope was new to Scientology, the same was not true for the Clearwater cops. At their headquarters, just around the corner from the Fort Harrison Hotel, the police had ama.s.sed nearly a roomful of investigative files on the Church of Scientology, dating back to the late 1970s. Some of the key complaints in those files came from former members, many with a personal ax to grind, though their claims-fraud, intimidation, harsh punishment, even some unreported deaths-made them hard to overlook.
Lisa McPherson was not the first Scientologist to die in Clearwater, nor was she the first to die in the Fort Harrison, as police knew. There had been at least eight cases since the 1980s, including one fifty-one-year-old woman who had gone off her lithium, upon the insistence of church officials, and then drowned after walking, fully clothed, into Clearwater Bay, and a man who"d died of a seizure after replacing his anti-seizure medications with a Scientology-endorsed regimen of vitamins and minerals. But in all of these cases, there had never been sufficient proof of wrongdoing to warrant an arrest, let alone an indictment.
The same had held true with regard to Lisa McPherson. There had been no crime scene. When the police first arrived at the Fort Harrison after Lisa"s death, they found room 174 thoroughly cleaned and decorated, with a king-sized bed, a pitcher of water, and a fruit basket in place. "There did not appear to be any clothing, any medications, or other indications that the room had previously been occupied," Detective Ron Sudler had written in his report.
There was also no body-cremation had left the few tissue and fluid samples taken during the autopsy as the only physical evidence-nor were there material witnesses to offer firsthand knowledge of her condition. Lisa"s co-workers, roommate, boss, and even Lisa"s ex-boyfriend, Kurt Paine, had no idea what had happened to her at the Fort Harrison. Dr. David Minkoff claimed he"d never had anything to do with Lisa"s treatment prior to the night she died. Janis Johnson and Alain Kartuzinski had at first told the police they"d barely known Lisa. When they were re-interviewed in the spring of 1996, Johnson admitted she"d seen Lisa but insisted that Lisa had simply been "upset" and was in no way mentally incapable. Kartuzinski said she"d simply been a "regular hotel guest" and he had almost nothing to do with her. The two other witnesses the police had identified, Arrunada and Schnurrenberger, had vanished: the church had told the police they"d left the country, and Scientology, and church officials had no idea how to contact them.*
As a result, Strope and Andrews were left with a small and largely inconclusive investigative file and numerous statements from church officials that Lisa was a hotel guest who "suddenly took ill." But the postmortem photographs of Lisa suggested a much different story. They were gruesome, showing Lisa"s starved-looking, hollow face, cracked lips, and arms and legs scarred by abrasions and what looked to the coroner to be c.o.c.kroach bites. Her neck, shoulders, and upper back were red and blotchy, as if she"d been hit or struck. She had several large bruises on her leg. "There"s not a jury in the world who won"t look at this and say someone is guilty of something," Strope thought.
The Pinellas-Pasco County medical examiner, Dr. Joan Wood, felt similarly. Due to the typical slow pace of a metropolitan area coroner"s office, Lisa"s autopsy had taken several months to complete. Most of it had been conducted by Dr. Robert Davis, the a.s.sociate medical examiner for Pinellas-Pasco County, though Wood had weighed in early, and also toward the end, concluding that Lisa"s embolism had been caused by "bed rest and severe dehydration." On January 14, 1996, a week or so after the FDLE formally joined the investigation, Wood, a longtime friend of Strope"s, asked him to come down to her office. Having served as the county medical examiner for twenty-two years, the fifty-year-old Wood was bothered by what she saw as a Scientology-orchestrated "campaign of misinformation" about McPherson. In numerous media accounts, the church maintained that Lisa died from a fast-moving staph infection and had been fully conscious, even talking, when the decision was made to take her to the hospital. Seeing Dr. Minkoff in New Port Richey was her idea, church officials explained. "Lisa at first didn"t want to see a doctor, but we talked her into seeing a doctor," the Scientology spokesman Brian Anderson told the media. "She knew Dr. Minkoff and he is an expert in infectious diseases, so that"s why she was taken there.""
That was simply impossible, said Wood. Lisa"s autopsy results showed that she been so dehydrated, she may have been without fluids for five to ten days. She was almost certainly comatose for a day or two before her death, the coroner said. This was not a sudden death, but rather a chronic decline-for a week, said Wood, it would have been obvious that Lisa needed help. That no one had called 911 was negligent to such an extreme that Wood thought Lisa"s death a homicide.
Going public with these concerns would certainly kick the investigation into higher gear; it would also no doubt anger the Pinellas-Pasco state attorney, Bernie McCabe, by putting pressure on him to bring charges against the Church of Scientology. McCabe"s office had agreed to a.s.sist the police and the FDLE in their investigation, but Strope and Wood knew there wasn"t a prosecutor in Pinellas County eager to take on the church in court. Wood, described by the local press as a "plainspoken" medical examiner, had never been shy about voicing her opinions.
"I"m thinking of issuing a press release," Wood told Strope. "I"m not sure if that"s the right thing to do."
Strope told Wood to trust her instincts.
On January 21, 1997, Wood appeared on Inside Edition and later spoke to several newspapers, maintaining that Lisa McPherson had not died a natural death. "This is the most severe case of dehydration I"ve ever seen," she said.
In most homicide cases, compiling a list of witnesses poses more challenges to police than getting those witnesses to talk. In the Lisa McPherson case, Strope and Andrews quickly a.s.sembled a full list of Lisa"s friends and co-workers, as well as the church staffers and officials who"d seen her in the last weeks of her life. But getting access to these people was daunting.
No one they sought to speak with at the Fort Harrison was "available," the detectives were told. The same was true at the Hacienda Gardens apartment complex, where Strope and Andrews, hoping to talk with Janis Johnson and other residents, knocked on several doors, receiving no reply. A few days later, they returned to the Hacienda to find eight-foot-tall wrought iron gates behind the manicured hedges. The fencing had gone up in less than a week. There were also security guards posted at the entrance to the complex. "That"s when we realized this wasn"t going to be easy," said Strope.
Then the detectives began hearing from lawyers. The first was Morris "Sandy" Weinberg, an ex-federal prosecutor now representing the church, who paid a special visit to police headquarters to inform the detectives that the Church of Scientology was a "new church" run by "new people" and was perfectly willing to a.s.sist with the investigation. But Weinberg refused to hand over many of the files, notably Lisa"s auditing folders, which police requested. Scientology was a religion, he explained; anything that Lisa said or did in the church, including records of her financial donations, were private religious doc.u.ments, protected by "priest-penitent privilege." Would they ask a Catholic priest to reveal the confessions of one of his parishioners?
A devout Catholic himself, Strope took deep offense at the comparison between his church and the Church of Scientology. "This is about Lisa, not about the Church of Scientology," he said.
"We"ll go all the way to the Supreme Court before we turn over any of those files voluntarily," said Weinberg. "If you want them, file a subpoena."
So the detectives filed subpoenas. The doc.u.ments arrived with pages missing; some of the most crucial data, the caretaker logs from the last fifty-three hours of Lisa"s life, never materialized at all. "We have given the police everything we have," Weinberg told a Tampa Bay news channel in July 1997. The missing files, he said, had simply vanished.*
The church was no more cooperative when it came to turning over witnesses. Virtually every person the police sought was represented by counsel, many of them former prosecutors like Weinberg, who refused to allow the detectives access to their clients without a subpoena. Ultimately, twenty-six individual attorneys, hired by Morris Weinberg and the Church of Scientology, represented some fifty to sixty witnesses, ranging from church janitors to Lisa"s caretakers to Bennetta Slaughter and her employees at AMC.
In exchange for their sworn testimony, close to forty of these witnesses were given immunity. "We really argued against that," said Strope, "but if we didn"t give it to them, the lawyers and their clients would get up and walk right out of the room."
In addition to this obfuscation, the church attempted to block and intimidate the police in other ways. Detective Andrews noticed unmarked cars parked across the street from his house, and had once or twice found a man rifling through his trash. His sixteen-year-old daughter told him that a man she"d never seen before had followed her to school.
Strope too found a man sorting through his trash. Then his son, a fifth-grader, began receiving Scientology literature addressed to him at his private Catholic school. Unmarked cars began to follow Strope as he drove around the city. The hardened cop began to wear his gun more prominently, check his rearview mirror, and take alternate routes home at night. "Let me tell you something," Strope says. "I know the streets, I"ve worked organized crime cases, biker gangs-but I worried less about them than I did about the Scientologists."
But the police were undeterred. At the end of November 1997, Strope and Andrews concluded their investigation. The Church of Scientology, they found, had been the sole caregiver to Lisa McPherson, and Alain Kartuzinski and, notably, the two doctors, Johnson and Arrunada-who "did little more than merely observe as Lisa"s health deteriorated during her watch"-were, through their failure to act, culpable in her death.
On December 5, 1997, two years to the day from Lisa"s death, the Clearwater police and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement submitted their findings to the state prosecutor. They recommended that Janis Johnson and Laura Arrunada be charged with practicing medicine without a license, and all three primary caregivers, including Alain Kartuzinski, be charged with manslaughter.
Shortly after the FDLE launched their investigation in early 1997, Marty Rathbun met with Church of Scientology staffers at the Office of Special Affairs headquarters on Sunset Boulevard. There they reviewed the caretakers" logs of Lisa"s seventeen days at the Fort Harrison. The logs painted a devastating portrait-particularly those written during Lisa"s final two days. One log contained a caretaker"s recommendation that Lisa be taken to a doctor. It was a recommendation that Rathbun knew had been ignored until the very last minutes of her life.
"If it isn"t written, it isn"t true," L. Ron Hubbard had always told his followers.
Rathbun gathered the three or four most incriminating logs. "Lose "em," he said to an aide. Then he walked out of the room.*
From the day after the Tampa Tribune ran its first December 1996 story on the case, the Church of Scientology went on the attack, using every technique in Hubbard"s a.r.s.enal. Its officials accused the Clearwater police of hara.s.sment and religious discrimination and insisted that the rigorous coverage of the case in the St. Petersburg Times was meant to "forward an agenda of hate." They also accused Dr. Joan Wood of "lying" on Lisa"s autopsy report and then sued for her medical records. After a Pinellas County circuit judge allowed the church to see five pages of Wood"s records, Scientology hired its own forensics experts to review her findings.
Agents Strope and Andrews, in the meantime, continued to a.s.sist the state attorney as he debated whether to bring criminal charges. The investigators and attorneys knew that the Church of Scientology would view that as a declaration of war. It might also prove difficult to refute the church"s experts, which soon included such luminaries as Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner for New York City and a former member of the O. J. Simpson defense team. With a seemingly bottomless war chest, the church apparently had no problem paying Baden, who"d testified during the Simpson trial that he customarily worked for $2,000 to $3,000 per day.
These were the challenges facing the state. Complicating matters for the church was a civil suit filed in February 1997 by Lisa McPherson"s family, charging the Church of Scientology with wrongful death. The church"s Los Angelesbased lawyer, Elliot Abelson, called the suit "an extortion attempt" and maintained that Lisa would be outraged by the actions being taken in her name. "Lisa McPherson loved the church, and the church loved Lisa," he said.
But the McPhersons" trial lawyer, Kennan Dandar, sued for access to church doc.u.ments, and soon Scientology"s sanitized version of events-Abelson long argued that Lisa had luxuriated in four-star comfort during her stay at the Fort Harrison-began to wear thin. In July 1997, a Florida court ordered the church to release the caretaker logs, which, save the few that Rathbun had ordered destroyed, were intact, amounting to thirty-three pages. Their exposure sent church attorneys scrambling to revise their version of events. Yes, Lisa had been "psychotic," the church admitted; but the Scientologists had done the best they could for her. "What the doc.u.ments demonstrate are very caring women who went to extraordinary lengths to care for a person who was deeply mentally ill," said the attorney Morris Weinberg. "They knew they could not take her to a psychiatrist because of their religious beliefs ... People weren"t trying to hurt her; they were trying to help her."
At Scientology"s International Base at Gilman Hot Springs, in the vast California scrubland near Hemet, David Miscavige, by all accounts, was obsessed by the Lisa McPherson case. A man known to "react really insanely to bad media," as Rathbun said, the leader of Scientology was now reading about the death of this one Florida parishioner every day. Each new development, whether in the criminal investigation or the civil suit, was covered relentlessly by the Tampa Bay media. McPherson"s death had also been reported by national publications such as Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, and it was getting significant play abroad, particularly in Germany, where Scientology was considered a potentially dangerous cult.
Critics of Scientology discussed the case in Internet chat rooms and set up anti-Scientology websites in Lisa McPherson"s name. Former Scientologists from as far away as Greece and Australia contacted the Clearwater police, offering tips or insight into the church and its precepts. By the summer of 1997, anti-Scientology protestors, many carrying signs plastered with Lisa"s photo, had once again begun to appear in downtown Clearwater, disturbing what for fifteen years had been a fragile peace between the church and the community.
This, Miscavige knew, could be catastrophic, for Scientology had big plans for Clearwater. A religious training center was slated to be built across from the Fort Harrison Hotel. This, a 300,000-square-foot structure, referred to as the Mecca Building, was intended to be Scientology"s biggest church in the world.
More important, within the intricately worded IRS agreement of 1993 was a requirement that Scientology guarantee, each year, that neither the church nor any of its employees had committed a crime that could jeopardize its status as a tax-exempt religious organization. Though the decision would always be up to the IRS, Scientologists that feared any criminal conviction could put their exemption at risk.
Deciding to take matters into his own hands, Miscavige gathered a sizable entourage, including his wife, Sh.e.l.ly, several female a.s.sistants, his private chef, his personal trainer, and several bodyguards-and left California for Clearwater in early 1998. He spent the better part of the next two years there.
The first item on Miscavige"s agenda was to ingratiate himself with civic leaders, specifically Clearwater"s new city manager, Michael Roberto, who was a champion of downtown development. Bennetta Slaughter had laid the groundwork the previous fall, hosting a c.o.c.ktail party for Roberto at her home. About fifty of the most elite local members of the Church of Scientology attended the catered event: wealthy investors, artists, business owners, lawyers, and dentists, as well as a number of church executives. Sandra Mercer and her husband were there, and Sandra Mercer recalled that though it was a warm night, Roberto arrived wearing an overcoat. He seemed visibly uncomfortable and standoffish.
Then the jazz musician Chick Corea, a longtime Scientologist, arrived. Roberto, church officials knew, idolized Corea. "It was the most amazing thing I"d ever seen," Mercer said. "Roberto just turned into putty in front of all of us. It was like he was talking to G.o.d. All of a sudden, everybody"s wonderful. He spent the rest of the night listening to Chick tell him all about Scientology, and by the end, it was as if there was a red carpet rolled out, where before there had been a locked door. His att.i.tude was "come into my office anytime.""
Over the next few months, David Miscavige met several times with Roberto, who became the first Clearwater official to meet with Scientologists in a nonconfrontational setting.
In May 1998, the Church of Scientology was given the go-ahead for a sweeping new development plan, which included a seven-story auditorium and the Mecca Building. To some residents this suggested that the city, seeking investment dollars, had sold out. But Scientologists rejoiced. In a rare move, David Miscavige even agreed to sit for an interview with the church"s archenemy, the St. Petersburg Times, and described himself as a conciliator. "I take a great deal of pride in creating peace," he said.
But the Lisa McPherson case refused to go away. When asked when he was made aware of the parishioner"s death, Miscavige"s ever-present certainty seemed to fade. "I would have heard about it sometime around the time period that she died," he said.
"That night?" the paper"s interviewer asked.
"No. No ... That doesn"t come to me," he replied. "At the time I don"t think it was really thought to be that significant an issue. She died. People die."
On November 13, 1998, the state of Florida charged the Church of Scientology"s Flag Service Organization with two felony counts in the death of Lisa McPherson, first, for "knowingly, willfully, or by culpable negligence abus[ing] and/or neglect[ing] a disabled adult," a second-degree felony, and second, for practicing medicine without a license, a third-degree felony. Combined, the charges carried a maximum fine of $15,000.
Agent Lee Strope, who"d waited close to a year for the state to reach a decision, felt "blindsided" by the charges. What had happened to charging the Flag officials with manslaughter?
The state attorney, McCabe, was blunt. "The evidence isn"t there," he said.
What the state had, McCabe believed, was simply not enough to prove that any single individual was responsible for Lisa"s death. Instead, they found a pattern of neglect and concluded it was more appropriate to charge the Clearwater church, as an organization. "I truly think Bernie didn"t want to be the first prosecutor to charge the Church of Scientology with manslaughter," admitted a Clearwater law enforcement official. "So he went with what he felt was a safe charge-negligence."
Publicly, the church met these charges with "surprising calm," as one newspaper report noted. A week after the indictments were filed, the Church of Scientology broke ground on its Mecca Building. The "Hollywood-style ceremony," as the St. Petersburg Times described the event, "featured green lasers, colored spotlights, fireworks, and shooting flames, all ch.o.r.eographed with pulsating song." City Manager Roberto and other officials were in attendance, as were some six thousand Scientologists, seated in a grandstand erected for the occasion. Miscavige, tanned and smiling, served as the master of ceremonies and described Scientology"s commitment to Clearwater as "now, tomorrow, and forever." The Scientologists in the crowd roared their approval.
This was the public face Miscavige showed to Clearwater. Privately, Miscavige approached the prosecutor McCabe and offered him a deal: dismiss the charges, and the Church of Scientology would do everything it could to ensure that what had happened to Lisa would never happen again. It would hire a full-time, non-Scientologist medical doctor to serve at church facilities and would refer any serious injuries or illness to a local hospital. The church would donate half a million dollars to the county"s emergency medical services "as a sign of its commitment to using available services whenever necessary." It would also pay the full cost of the state"s criminal investigation, an estimated $180,000.
But if the state refused, Miscavige added, a "holy war" of litigation would rain down on the state attorney"s office, tying up precious resources for years. Those who understood the tactics of the Church of Scientology, including many people in the prosecutor"s office, did not see this as an empty threat. "We knew what to expect," said a.s.sistant State Attorney Doug Crow, whom McCabe a.s.signed to handle the case. Crow, regarded in legal circles as McCabe"s best prosecutor, had worked in the state attorney"s office since the late 1970s, back when Scientologists infiltrated the office as part of Operation Goldmine. "I knew they"d hire experts and pursue this defense with everything they had," he said.
Indeed, hara.s.sment by lawsuit was not simply a matter of practice; it was a matter of doctrine. The purpose of a lawsuit, L. Ron Hubbard wrote in 1955, was "to hara.s.s and discourage rather than to win," and defending oneself against legal charges was "untenable," he added. "The only way to defend anything is to ATTACK, and if you ever forget that, then you will lose every battle you are ever engaged in, whether it is in terms of personal conversation, public debate, or a court of law."
McCabe had settled for lesser charges; he was not going to be bullied into dropping them entirely. The state attorney rejected Miscavige"s proposal. On December 1, 1998, the Church of Scientology"s Flag Service Organization pleaded innocent to the felony charges. In a letter to the court, the church"s lawyer, Lee Fugate, promised a long legal battle. Fugate even went so far as to suggest the case be a.s.signed a special docket to handle the "complex" and "voluminous" motions Scientology attorneys planned to file, which, he vowed, would require "a significant number of hearings and significant hearing time."
With these threats purveyed, on January 22, 1999, David Miscavige once again approached McCabe with an offer to "bring a peaceful resolution to the charges your office has brought against my religion."
McCabe again rejected Miscavige"s plea. If the Church of Scientology was seriously interested in reforms, he noted, then why had it not inst.i.tuted any in the three years since Lisa"s death?
The state of Florida"s case against the Church of Scientology continued for the next year. During that period, recalled Tom De Vocht, Miscavige "worked day and night" to defeat the prosecution, meeting with church attorneys week after week to debate or redirect strategy. A trial was set for March 2000.
Meanwhile, the civil suit ground on at a steady pace. Compounding Miscavige"s woes was the fact that the McPherson family sought to involve Miscavige personally in litigation. In December 1999, the family"s lawyer, Ken Dandar, succeeded in adding Miscavige"s name to the list of defendants and accused him of personally directing the Flag staff on how to treat Lisa McPherson, including having her "imprisoned" at the Fort Harrison for seventeen days.
The Church of Scientology had already spent millions of dollars fighting the Lisa McPherson case. While the attorneys filed motions and debated the case on const.i.tutional grounds, David Miscavige pored over medical books and journals, trying to figure out how to counter the coroner"s evidence. "That"s when Dave learned how to use the Internet," joked the former Sea Org member Marc Headley, who was also at Flag during this period. "They had hundreds and hundreds of files, and medical books, and he was reading everything he could find."
With its long list of medical experts expanding by the day, the church produced thousands of pages of doc.u.mentation refuting the coroner"s evidence. Reports were produced questioning the quality of the coroner"s lab equipment, stating that some of the tests on Lisa"s body had been botched and that evidence had ultimately been contaminated. As their coup de grace, church lawyers produced the sworn testimony of Dr. Robert Davis, the a.s.sistant coroner who had done the original autopsy on McPherson. He had since left his job at the Pinellas-Pasco County Medical Examiner"s Office after falling out with Dr. Wood, and, after being contacted by the Church of Scientology and one of its investigators, now said that he "strongly disagreed" with virtually all of Wood"s findings.*
Finally, the matter came down to a specific protein, known as ketone, which is usually found in someone who is severely malnourished and dehydrated. Wood"s autopsy report found no evidence of ketones in Lisa"s body, and Scientology"s experts seized upon this as indicative that Lisa may not have been as "severely dehydrated" as Wood maintained. In February 2000, with Scientology"s own toxicologist, Dr. Frederic Rieders, another former member of the O. J. Simpson defense team, standing by, Wood retested Lisa"s bodily fluids and found ketones, once again, to be absent.
Shaken, Wood e-mailed a colleague, Dr. Jay Whitworth, begging for help. "URGENT!!!!!!!" she wrote in the subject line. "Life and career at stake!" She wrote, "Please don"t let me down ... I will do whatever is right, but if we are vulnerable because [we] cannot explain absence of ketones, I will have to back down."
Wood had dug herself into a serious predicament by insisting that Lisa had been comatose prior to her death. Other medical experts hired by the prosecution posited a slightly less extreme theory: that Lisa had been unresponsive, though not truly comatose, thus leaving open the possibility that she might have received some form of nutrition, which would have explained why the ketone protein was missing. But with this one forensic declaration, Wood was cornered, and she knew it. And it would prove to be her undoing.
On February 23, 2000, Dr. Joan Wood, emotionally exhausted after being deluged with what some a.s.sociates recalled as more than six thousand pages of contravening evidence provided by the Church of Scientology"s experts, amended Lisa McPherson"s death certificate. She continued to a.s.sert that Lisa had died of a blood clot in the lung. But her death, Wood now maintained, had been "accidental"-there was no mention of bed rest and severe dehydration as causes. Instead, Wood suggested, just as Scientology"s experts had a.s.serted, that the clot had originated from a bruise on Lisa"s left leg. She listed "psychosis" and "history of a car accident" as factors in her death.
Scientology quickly moved to have the charges dismissed. "If that death certificate, as it exists now, had been issued originally, there wouldn"t even have been an investigation, let alone charges," the church spokesman Mike Rinder stated. "n.o.body investigates a pulmonary embolism that comes about as a result of an accident."
Over the next several months, McCabe"s deputy, the prosecutor Doug Crow, reviewed all of the evidence supporting the criminal charges. He also questioned Dr. Wood as to why she had altered her findings. Wood, said Crow, offered no plausible explanation. She had been a close friend of his for twenty-five years; Crow stated that her "inability to coherently explain her decision even under benign questioning by me is completely perplexing."
Wood"s equivocation, and what Crow called the "very real possibility" that the cause of death originally listed by the medical examiner was incorrect, led the a.s.sistant state"s attorney to conclude that her testimony could not be presented at trial. Without it, all the state had to go on was the testimony and notes of Lisa"s caretakers. And the notes were incomplete. "The likelihood that these witnesses would still be available to us was something we couldn"t control," Crow said. These and other "existing problems with the case" led Crow to an inevitable conclusion that the state could no longer pursue the prosecution.
On June 12, 2000, the state of Florida, unable "to prove critical forensic and causation issues beyond and to the exclusion of reasonable doubt," dropped all criminal charges against the Church of Scientology. As for Dr. Joan Wood, the case had "taken a toll far greater than anything else in my life," she told the press. On June 30, 2000, Wood resigned. She was later checked into Morton Plant Hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown. To this day she has never commented about the McPherson case or the rationale behind her amended decision.
Almost a year after the criminal charges were dropped, in April 2001, a Scientologist from Chicago named Greg Bashaw wrote a strongly worded letter to Flag"s Captain Debbie Cook, complaining of treatment he"d received at Flag the previous fall. A Scientologist for more than twenty years, and an OT 7, Bashaw, a former vice president of the Leo Burnett advertising agency, had suffered a psychotic break during a "review session" with a Scientology auditor on October 31, 2000. Bashaw told his auditor and his case supervisor, expecting help; to his shock, he was told to pack his bags and was promptly sent home.
Initially, Bashaw blamed himself for his instability, just as Lisa McPherson had: the technology was fine, he believed; he just hadn"t been in the right state to receive it. But he also considered the facts: he had gone to Flag for what he believed would be a routine "refresher" but had been kept there for two months; upon his return to Chicago, he"d lost his job. Now, having spent even his retirement funds to pay for Scientology services, he was facing bankruptcy. The church offered no a.s.sistance* other than to suggest he visit a doctor to find a physical cause for his problems-to his horror, his case supervisor had recommended Bashaw try "pep drinks" to restore his lost vitality. Finally, upon his family"s urging, Bashaw had sought help in exactly the place Scientology warned against: the psychiatric ward of his local hospital. But that too had proved ineffective. What had been "broken" at Flag, Bashaw was convinced, could only be fixed there, so he was doomed: the organization had kicked him out.
"I understand the need for the organization to protect itself," Bashaw wrote to Cook. "If someone falls into psychosis during his services, Flag is worried about lawsuits, about its responsibilities, about more situations like the one with Lisa McPherson ... But I was completely abandoned in my time of most urgent need. I did not come to Flag in psychosis ... I got into the psychosis at Flag." As a result, he said, "I am now the worst state I have been in my entire life."
Two months later, in June 2001, Greg Bashaw committed suicide.
When Nancy Many heard the news, she was devastated. She herself had left Scientology in 1996 after suffering a psychotic break; for twenty-five years she had served the church with dedication. Like Bashaw, Many had felt her "mind break" during an intensive period of security checking in Los Angeles; later, on a Burbank street, she experienced a full-blown mental breakdown for which she was briefly hospitalized and then sent home to undergo a modified "baby watch" under the care of her husband, Chris. During that period, the church had offered no practical a.s.sistance other than a recommendation that Many take vitamins and chloral hydrate, a medication that Lisa McPherson had also been given.
Many recalled the day that Bashaw phoned her after being given her name by a mutual friend. He was looking for support. "It was tremendously cathartic, I think, for both of us to talk about this," Many told me. "We spoke a lot about the similarities in what had happened to us, and how it felt to be dumped by Scientology after all these years. We had both given our lives to Scientology: we"d volunteered for them, had never given them any trouble, and then, the one time we both needed help, they were nowhere, just nowhere."
Many recalled that a month or so after her breakdown, which church officials referred to as her "period of stress," an OSA representative visited her at home to present her with some doc.u.ments to sign, absolving Scientology of responsibility in her condition and affirming that Scientology "worked" and made people better. Laura Bashaw, Greg"s widow, received a similar visit, and similar papers, after her husband died, Many said. "What they learned from Lisa McPherson, if anything, was to cover their a.s.ses."
Today, at Flag, Scientologists hoping to receive auditing are asked to sign several new waivers. One gives the church full legal control over the subject"s auditing and other personal files, regardless of whether the person is alive or dead. Another form confirms the adherent"s desire that in the "unlikely" instance that he or she is judged by others to be in need of psychiatric treatment, they be "helped exclusively through religious, spiritual means and not through any form of psychiatric treatment ... regardless of what any psychiatrist, medical person, designated member of the state, or family member may a.s.sert supposedly on my behalf."
One particularly notable pa.s.sage in this latter form, often referred to by church critics as the "Lisa Clause," states this spiritual a.s.sistance might include the Introspection Rundown, "an intensive, rigorous Religious Service that includes being isolated from all sources of potential spiritual upset, including but not limited to family members, friends or others with whom I might normally interact." In addition the adherent agrees to "accept and a.s.sume all known and unknown risks ... and specifically absolve all persons and ent.i.ties from all liabilities of any kind, without limitation, a.s.sociated with my partic.i.p.ation or their partic.i.p.ation in my Introspection Rundown."
With that, the church protects itself from legal liability. But the church has never backed away from promoting Scientology as a cure for mental illness-indeed, even after Bashaw"s suicide in 2001, as the McPherson family continued to press on with their civil lawsuit, a Scientology promotion bragged that "a Flag Ship Cla.s.s XII [auditor] could turn a severe mental case from raving lunacy to not only sane but bright and normal in about 8 or 9 hours."
Many has since opened her home to Scientologists needing a place to recover from psychotic breaks, and in 2009, she self-published a memoir, My Billion Year Contract, in which she detailed her own collapse. In the previous year or two, she said, she has received hundreds of e-mails from former members detailing their emotional breakdowns. One was from a woman who"d spent thirty-six years in Scientology and millions of dollars in donations, and had reached OT 8, the highest place on the Bridge. She arrived at the Manys" door last year, suicidal.
"I could brush off my cognitive dissonance with the other Type Threes I had known of in the past, as they were all very low in Scientology. But here was someone at the top, the end of the Bridge, on my doorstep, wanting to kill herself," said Many.
As a young Sea Org member in Boston, Many helped spread the church"s anti-psychiatry agenda by putting up fliers that encouraged people to report malpractice by local psychiatrists and mental hospitals. "I thought I was doing something to help mankind. I never asked myself what Scientology had to put in its place-nothing," she says.