Inside Scientology (31 page)

This softened some of the skeptics in town. Sandra Mercer described their reaction: "'Oh, they celebrate Christmas? We didn't know that—they're just like us!' Of course we didn't really celebrate Christmas, but that was part of the overall 'safe pointing' strategy."

"Safe pointing" is a specific Scientology policy about how to create allies. L. Ron Hubbard frequently urged his followers to present themselves as "stable, reliable, expert [and] productive,"
which would then allow them to disseminate Scientology more effectively. Slaughter prosecuted this strategy with gusto.

Lisa McPherson was a vastly different sort of person. "She was just a sweetheart," Mercer recalled with affection. She'd met Lisa for the first time at a Scientology event in early 1994. "She was not at
all
the intense person that Bennetta was." But Lisa was the top producer at AMC, after Slaughter herself. It was Lisa's steady productivity that allowed Slaughter to busy herself in town. "In Scientology, Lisa was what we'd call a 'working installation,'" Mercer explained. "She was a workhorse. And Bennetta worked her and used her."

For ten years since she'd become a Scientologist, Lisa McPherson's goal had been to go Clear. But a variety of obstacles, including her previous lack of financial resources, always stood in the way. Now, with a newly tax exempt church encouraging members to "move up the Bridge even faster" by claiming their Scientology courses and auditing as tax-exempt donations, Lisa began climbing the Bridge in earnest. In 1993, she earned more than $136,000 at AMC and donated $57,000 to the church, claiming a $17,000 refund on her taxes for "charitable deductions"—more than four times the average for taxpayers in her income bracket, the
St. Petersburg Times
would later note.
Lisa also received a bill of $75,000 for auditing fees.
^*
Though the money she spent on Scientology still claimed most of her earnings, Lisa never spoke of it as a financial sacrifice.

Scientology sells itself as a self-betterment program—a route to eternal happiness. But its processes target a member's weaknesses. And, as Mercer explained, there is always a weakness that can be exploited. "You might think you've solved your big problem, but wait—your boyfriend broke up with you, or your boss is giving you a hard time, or something else. There is always
something
that is ruining your life and needs fixing." It is this cycle of problem–realization–cure–new problem that ultimately melds a person with Scientology's collective mindset. "It's an ongoing process," Mercer said. "After a while, your self-esteem is so low, you think everything is a problem."

For Lisa, the problem was often men. She had suffered a string of failed romances, and in the spring of 1995 had broken up with a man named Kurt Paine, whom she'd once planned to marry. Between her sadness and work pressures, she began to appear "downstat." Her sales plummeted, and her commissions, once averaging between $4,000 and $6,000 every two weeks, now sank to just $600 or $700. With her statistics in the tank, Lisa was given an ethics handling at work and was also being audited at church. She told her auditor that it was "bullshit" and also resented the increasing pressure to put in more volunteer hours on projects like Winter Wonderland. Tensions with Bennetta Slaughter began to boil over. In his notes, her auditor wrote that Lisa was "fixated on Bennetta."

"Bennetta was totally focused on getting Lisa to do what she wanted, all the time," said Michael Pattinson, a Scientologist who was working in Clearwater that spring, overseeing the design of the Slaughters' new house. "She was the boss, the money-maker, the FSM, and now she was the ethics officer as well—she had a vested interest in getting Lisa to make more money for the company and for Scientology, and for her." At one point, Pattinson recalled, "she said, 'I'd much rather go back to Dallas and just pursue my own life and my own career, and just be myself.' So I said, 'Listen: you should follow your own purposes in life and not someone else's purposes.'"

But Lisa had lost track of her own purposes. In her auditing sessions, she complained that she was unable to "find" herself. She was despondent, racked with guilt, and confused—Scientology, in which Lisa had so fervently believed, had stopped working. "God damn it I feel so
desperate,
" she told her auditor. "[I] don't want to do this anymore."

As the former Scientology official Jesse Prince, who examined Lisa's auditing records in 1998, points out, telling your auditor you don't want auditing or that it is not working is a crime in Scientology. Once a person makes these assertions, the director of processing, who manages all auditing for the church, "retrieves" the person from his or her usual auditor and places the person in an "auditing repair program." This program, says Prince, "is designed to repair past auditing mistakes. Lisa McPherson had several of these programs, yet they did not work."

Instead, the new program drove Lisa deeper into despair. Over and over, she spoke of leaving Scientology—"blowing," in the group's parlance; she also told her auditor that she'd been contemplating suicide. Scientologists believe very strongly that a person is fully responsible for their own condition in life, good or bad. Lisa repeatedly searched for reasons she had failed to get better. She saw herself as a "potential trouble source" to Bennetta, unhappy at work, wanting to leave. But she felt incapable of walking away. Her anger turned to despondency and finally to helplessness. "Nothing matters anymore," she told her auditor. "I just want to be left alone."

Depressed and exhausted, Lisa took a leave of absence from AMC and in late June 1995 checked into the Fort Harrison to begin an intensive auditing program known as the Introspection Rundown, which Hubbard designed to help members who were having emotional difficulties. If done correctly, the person should ultimately readjust his or her mentality and "extrovert," or focus attention less on the self and more on others, and the goals of the larger group. "The rundown is
very
simple and its results are magical in effectiveness,"
Hubbard had maintained.

At the hotel, Lisa was assigned a roommate named Susan Schnurrenberger, a Sea Org member who worked in the base's medical office. Schnurrenberger, who had a nursing background, was charged with watching over Lisa to make sure she ate, slept, and was "sessionable"—able to receive auditing. Schnurrenberger was also supposed to prevent Lisa from hurting herself, as she had repeatedly threatened suicide. During the first few weeks, Lisa's moods roller-coastered from upbeat and "gleaming bright," as one staff member wrote in a memo, to dark and depressive. She felt as if she had an "enemy" inside of her. "Susan," she told Schnurrenberger one night, "I think I'm going crazy."

Late that summer, however, she seemed to emerge from her confusion. The past few months had been a "blank," she wrote to Robin Rhyne on September 2, 1995, adding that she was finally out of the woods and feeling more hopeful. She was still at the Fort Harrison and being audited every day. "You will never believe the level of care and service I've received at Flag. I'm ready to go on tour and tell the world how anything CAN BE HANDLED!" she wrote.

Finally, on September 7, 1995, Lisa achieved her longtime goal and went Clear. The struggle, as she later described it, had been like "a gopher being pulled through a garden hose," but she attributed her success to the support of her friends "and of course LRH." "It has been ... worth every single thing I've had to go through ... I am so full of life I am overwhelmed at the joy of it all!" she wrote. "Now, I understand!" she added, underlining the word
understand
five times. "WOW!"

That evening, Lisa stood in front of an audience of fellow Scientologists at the Fort Harrison, where, framed certificate in hand, she announced her achievement. She looked thin; her short-sleeved black-and-white-striped dress hung loose on her frame. Her face, now framed by a short haircut, looked drawn. Yet her voice was strong. "Being Clear," she said, "is more exciting than anything I've ever experienced."

But Lisa's glow wore off quickly. She returned to AMC but found it hard to regain her momentum, and by October, her statistics had begun to dip once again. She worked harder, putting in long hours and pushing herself, even taking on the role of chief fundraiser for Winter Wonderland; yet sometimes she failed to raise money, a situation, she decided, that put her in a condition of "treason" to AMC. She now endured even more rigorous ethics handlings, writing painstaking confessions in which she blamed herself for her "case"—her psychological issues.

The confessions were exhausting. And yet, in letters to her friend Robin, she tried to be upbeat about the process, talking about her "cognitions" and "gains." Lisa expressed the same enthusiasm during a phone call she made to her friend Carol Hawk. "The conversation was a little different than our usual talks," Hawk recalled. "Lisa and I [generally] talked about things that were going on in our lives. She usually talked about Scientology only in terms of how she might respond to a particular situation or person and rarely pushed regarding the 'technology' of Scientology." But during this conversation, Hawk said, "she made a little speech about how 'great the tech was' and how every day she woke up 'wonderfully happy and ready to play.' She 'had never experienced anything like it,' and 'couldn't say enough good about the tech' ... I remember thinking she was a commercial for Scientology."

That was the last time Hawk talked to Lisa. Not long after, Lisa called another childhood friend, Kellie Davis, and apologized for having been out of touch for so many years. Davis had the impression that Lisa was going to leave Scientology. "She said she couldn't get into it over the phone but she said she had a lot to talk about,'' Davis later told the
Tampa Tribune.
"She said she would explain when she got here.'' Lisa told Davis that she was hoping to return to Dallas for Thanksgiving, but one way or another, she would be home, possibly for good, by Christmas. "She had made the decision to get out and come back here and she seemed happy," Davis said.

But on the phone with her mother a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Lisa sounded ragged. She was having trouble at work, she told Fannie, and cried. "Mother, I've let my group down," she said. "And that was the last time I talked to her," said Fannie.

The ethics handling that Lisa was receiving during this time was the very same method that had driven her to a breakdown just a few months before. "It was therefore extremely foreseeable," as Ken Dandar, an attorney for the McPherson family, later asserted, "that given Lisa McPherson's prior experience of being psychotic in June of 1995, coupled with her troubles in taking Scientology instruction, she would very likely experience another psychotic episode."

And she did. On November 15, 1995, Lisa was sent to a trade show in Orlando with several AMC colleagues. She packed numerous books by Hubbard that she hoped would help her with her job. But even before they left, Brenda Hubert, who was managing AMC's role in the trade show, found Lisa to be unusually disorganized. "She was very frantic," Hubert wrote in a subsequent memo to church officials. "She talked constantly and couldn't recall what she had just said." When they got to the convention, she began "disseminating" to total strangers, accosting a waiter at a local café and then another one later that night at the hotel restaurant, demanding that they read
Dianetics
—right that minute.

By the second day of the conference, Lisa had become more desperate. That night, Hubert awoke at 3
A
.
M
.
to find Lisa pinned on top of her. She was sobbing hysterically. "Get up!" Lisa said. "There's something going on on this planet that you don't know!"

Hubert tried to calm her, but it was useless. Lisa seemed disoriented. She was ranting, saying, "I'm afraid I'm going to flip out again like I did before." The next day, Lisa was sent back to Clearwater under Brenda Hubert's care.

At Bennetta Slaughter's request, Hubert wrote a lengthy memo detailing what had happened during the trade show. In this letter, Hubert noted that Lisa's ethics officer, Katie Chamberlain, had instructed her to rigorously supervise Lisa. "I was told that she was just pretending to be incapable and need directions and orders and that I should not grant that any life or credence." Her own observations, Hubert said, "did not align with what I was told."

And yet, Hubert said she "did what I was told to do. I did try to impinge upon her by yelling at her a few times; I did tell her with force to knock it off; I did tell her that she was at risk of losing her job if she didn't straighten up ... I am afraid that I might have made this whole thing worse or further upset her and that was not what I wanted to have happen." Then she provided her phone numbers as a contact. "I love Lisa and want to see this get handled," she said. "Please do everything you can for her."

Hubert's concern was genuine. Despite her worry, however, she didn't alert a doctor or take Lisa to the hospital. Instead, she simply typed the letter and delivered it to the church, where she instructed an administrative aide to put the document in Lisa's preclear folder. Whether anyone read her note, Hubert never knew.

The next morning, back in Clearwater, Lisa seemed better. She spent the morning painting sets for Winter Wonderland with her ethics officer Katie Chamberlain, Bennetta Slaughter, and other volunteers at a downtown warehouse. But soon she began to appear "mentally tired [and] stressed," said Chamberlain, and by lunchtime she'd gone home to take a nap. Just before dusk, Lisa got back into her red Jeep Cherokee and headed toward the center of Clearwater. It was rush hour, and the line of cars was moving slower than usual, the result of a motorcycle accident at the corner of South Fort Harrison and Bellevue Boulevards, which had forced traffic into a single lane. As she approached the intersection, Lisa, perhaps distracted by the accident, rear-ended a boat that was fastened to the back of a pickup truck, which had stopped in front of her. "It was just a bump. It was nothing serious," recalled a paramedic named Bonnie Portolano.