Inside Scientology (33 page)

By the summer and fall of 1995, when Lisa McPherson was struggling most profoundly, Miscavige, though not a highly trained auditor (by all accounts, the leader's experience with auditing others stopped after his teenage forays at Saint Hill in the early 1970s), began to take control of the auditing delivered at the base. One summer evening, Headley was in the Flag auditorium when Miscavige held a briefing. In attendance were all of Flag's top auditors, men and women who were revered throughout the church for their years of expertise in counseling and understanding the intricacies of Hubbard's processes.
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The leader was infuriated, as Headley recalled, by the slowness and, as he viewed it, the arbitrariness of auditing at Flag: some clients advanced very quickly, while others floundered for years. As an example, Miscavige cited the case of Lisa McPherson, who, he told his staff, had paid for a large number of services and should be treated with the best of care.

The leader began to leaf through Lisa's auditing folder, pointing out things that had been done wrong concerning her case. As Headley recalled it, "He told the staff that he was going to review her folders and make sure that she was being handled correctly."

Whether Miscavige took an interest in Lisa's case purely by chance, or because of his budding friendship with Bennetta Slaughter—several ex-officials suggest the latter not long after this meeting, Tom De Vocht, who headed the Commodore's Messenger Organization at Flag, recalled Miscavige personally supervising several of Lisa McPherson's auditing sessions.

Standing in a control room, with video feeds from several different counseling rooms, Miscavige could see everything that went on during Lisa's counseling. As De Vocht recalled, "He's watching live with the video cameras every session that she's in and [supervising], saying 'Do this next, do that next' and so forth."
He watched Miscavige make notations on Lisa's auditing folder, which De Vocht also saw being taken in and out of Miscavige's office in Clearwater, which was next to his own.

Another former top Flag official, Don Jason, said he witnessed Miscavige watching one of Lisa's sessions; Miscavige then took off his headphones and announced that she had achieved the state of Clear. According to Jason, Miscavige wrote a note to Lisa's auditor, declaring her new status. "He wrote out a very lengthy four-page communication to her ... by hand, I watched him do it," Jason told me. "Then it was typed up and she went into session and was told she was Clear." It was notable, he said, because Scientology staffers are required to take a special course to help them identify a person who's become Clear. He wasn't aware that Miscavige had completed that course.

Marty Rathbun was also at the Fort Harrison on the day that Lisa became Clear. He'd been walking down a corridor of the closed-off floor where auditing sessions were held, when a door to one of the auditing rooms suddenly kicked open and a woman's voice could be heard whooping with joy. Rathbun was shocked—noise of any sort is strictly prohibited near auditing rooms—but there was something more than that, a strange quality to Lisa's voice. When he returned to the RTC office later that day, he mentioned Lisa to Angie Trent, the RTC official in charge of supervising Flag's technical training. "You've got somebody up [at the Fort Harrison] who just attested to Clear who looks to me to be on the verge of psychosis," Rathbun said.

Trent told him to mind his own business. "That's Lisa McPherson. David Miscavige is programming her case," she said. In other words, as Rathbun interpreted it, he ought to "buzz off."

Six weeks later, Rathbun and other top-level staff were informed that Lisa McPherson had suffered a psychotic break and that Miscavige, who was now in Los Angeles, would be directing the staff on how to treat her. De Vocht and Jason said they were aware of this as well. "People at Flag knew that DM had case-supervised her, but no one said anything," De Vocht told me. "You're talking about the pope of Scientology."

Though it has long been policy that when a member suffers a breakdown, the church's international management, specifically the RTC, must be informed,
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says De Vocht, "for Miscavige to be personally handling Lisa's Type Three situation was astounding." And it was because of Miscavige's personal investment, he and others believe, that officials who intervened at the hospital on Lisa's behalf did not make arrangements to have her brought to her apartment or to stay with friends or family. Instead, Lisa was driven to the Fort Harrison Hotel, where she would to undergo the Introspection Rundown for the second time, under the supervision of Scientology's international management.

Assuming command of Lisa's welfare was Flag's senior case supervisor, Alain Kartuzinski. Though he lacked medical training, Kartuzinski, the "minister" in charge of the spiritual welfare of the entire congregation, served as the point person for Lisa's treatment. Kartuzinski was a Class 12 auditor, an elite counselor in Scientology whose rank in the spiritual hierarchy is comparable to a church bishop's. It was he who had been in charge during the summer of 1995 when Lisa had suffered her first breakdown, recovered, and attested to Clear. Now Kartuzinski would review Lisa's confessional folders, direct the base's medical officers, and supervise her isolation. Behind the scenes, according to Rathbun and De Vocht, RTC officials in Clearwater, and ultimately David Miscavige in Los Angeles, were kept informed of Lisa's condition and had the final say over the details of her care.

Understanding how a woman suffering psychosis would be taken to the equivalent of corporate headquarters is crucial to understanding what happened to Lisa and why. Many said, "I have asked many, many former Sea Org members whether they would call 911 if they saw someone fall from a balcony at the church. The answer is always no, never. And that's because on that org board you've been chanting, chanting, chanting, as demanded by Hubbard's 'Chinese School,' only the security guard can call 911. So you would run to the security guard and tell him to do it."

It is this doctrinal principle—the principle of the org board— that determined the treatment of Lisa McPherson; its tragic outcome was determined by another precept, which reduced individual Scientologists to mere cogs by making autonomous thought, or speech, a crime. "There is a policy letter in Scientology that says that you are your job title," said Many. "I could not send a Telex or a report without citing L. Ron Hubbard. And it did not come from me; it came from 'LRH Staff Aide for Division Six,' which was my job title."

All of this, as Many pointed out, sprung from the mind of L. Ron Hubbard. But starting in the 1990s, these policies were meted out by David Miscavige, who, in his typical style, enforced them to an extreme. According to former Scientology officials, for David Miscavige, "keeping Scientology working" meant doing whatever it took to consistently generate profit, particularly at Flag.

A multitude of reasons—the dogmatism of Hubbard's technology, the exacting nature of Scientology ethics, the church doctrine governing public relations and self-preservation—explain why the next two weeks unfolded as they did. Above all was the fundamental tragedy that from the moment she left Morton Plant Hospital on November 18, 1995, Lisa McPherson put herself in the hands of the Sea Org rather than family or friends. By doing this, she ceded control to a group who, in their inexorable commitment to Hubbard's doctrine, believed they were doing the right thing. Instead, this commitment would lead to her death.

That night, Lisa arrived at the Fort Harrison from the hospital just before midnight. By all accounts she was calm, quiet, and physically healthy. According to Emma Schammerhorn, a Flag medical liaison officer who accompanied her, she had even told Kartuzinski that she was glad he'd come to retrieve her. She was given a room at the back of the hotel, next to the housekeeping office and far from most hotel guests.

To manage Lisa's physical care, Kartuzinski pulled Dr. Janice Johnson, a senior medical officer at Flag, from her regular duties. Susan Schnurrenberger, the medical officer who had cared for Lisa over the summer, initially supervised Lisa's day-to-day management. An aide named Gabriella Sanchez was tasked by Kartuzinski to staff the watch around the clock. About twenty women were ultimately assembled, generally low-level or interim employees with little or no medical experience, nor much background with the Introspection Rundown or isolation watches. "This wasn't supposed to go on very long," said Sanchez. "The whole purpose of it ... was just so that she starts to calm down, she can get some rest, start to eat and start to ... chill out."

The instructions for the watch were simple. The caretakers were to provide Lisa with water and whatever food was available from the cafeteria, plus daily doses of Cal Mag and various other vitamin and mineral supplements. The caretakers were to keep a log of Lisa's food and fluid intake and also note her behavior. If she needed to talk, they should let her, but, per Hubbard's guidelines, they could communicate with her only by writing notes. Every day they were to submit their log to the senior case supervisor, who would determine when Lisa was well enough to be audited. "This is what I was told," said Heather Petzold, then a seventeen-year-old who was one of the caretakers. "We need to get her enough food and enough sleep so we can get her in session."

By mid-afternoon on Sunday, November 19, her first day in room 174, Lisa McPherson was talking incessantly. By the second day of isolation, Lisa was refusing to eat, had barely slept, and was restlessly jumping in and out of bed. Her caretakers found it impossible to get her to drink any fluids.

Lisa's friend Susanne Reich, who'd help watch her that Sunday night, was horrified. "I would not stay with Lisa alone for one second," she later told the police. "The way she was, in my eyes, I thought she would kill me." That afternoon Reich wrote a report, marked the word
rush
on the document, and sent it to Kartuzinski. She never returned to Lisa's room. Not long after, Susan Schnurrenberger followed suit.

One member of the Flag medical staff who
did
want to look after Lisa was Judy Goldsberry-Weber. She had been one of the officials who'd gone to the hospital after Lisa's accident and had helped convince the doctors at Morton Plant to allow Lisa to be released into her care. They had not been easily won over, she recalled later. "I'm holding you personally responsible," an angry Dr. Flynn Lovett at the hospital had told Goldsberry-Weber before agreeing to the discharge. "And if anything happens, I'm gonna nail you."

Goldsberry-Weber promised Lovett that she'd personally take responsibility for Lisa. But no sooner had she made this promise than one of the OSA officials informed her that she should return to her job as the staff medical officer. "I was angry about that," said Goldsberry-Weber. "If I promise somebody I'm going to do something, I take that promise very, very seriously. And it upset me greatly that my promise was being trashed."

Nonetheless, Goldsberry-Weber returned to her post. She assumed that Lisa was being well taken care of at her apartment, under the watchful eye of Schnurrenberger, until she was asked to drive to a drugstore and pick up what she was told were "sedatives" for Lisa McPherson. She thought it was strange that the drugstore was located in Largo, almost half an hour away, rather than the usual Eckerd's pharmacy Flag used in Clearwater. Upon her return to the Fort Harrison, Goldsberry-Weber was told to give the prescription to a Flag security officer. Now realizing that Lisa was staying at the Fort Harrison, she once again offered to care for Lisa; again she was rebuffed.

Goldsberry-Weber was a nurse with experience in Hubbard's techniques, including the Introspection Rundown. But from what she could piece together, Hubbard's policies weren't being followed. There were no set caretakers, to begin with. Instead, Janis Johnson and others were apparently scouring the base to find people to take part. Goldsberry-Weber had even heard that some of the caretakers didn't speak English.

She was right: there were multiple caretakers looking after Lisa, including some who didn't speak English, and none of them stayed for very long. One of them, Lesley Woodcraft, the British-born personnel manager at Flag, was pulled onto the watch on November 22 and almost immediately passed the responsibility to her roommate, Alice Vangrondelle, the Flag librarian.

Vangrondelle complained that it wasn't her job but grudgingly got out of bed. She found Lisa talking gibberish, freezing cold, with blotches on her face that looked like those caused by measles. She'd run around the room in a frenzied manner; later, exhausted, she'd collapse on the bed. At one point she rested her head on the librarian's shoulder. "E.T., go home," Lisa cried. "E.T., go home."

When Vangrondelle returned to her room later that day, she wrote a "Knowledge Report" on Woodcraft, whom she felt had improperly posted her to the watch. The report contained a lengthy description of Lisa's mania and noted that Lisa's breath was "foul." This is a sign of a toxic condition called uremia, caused by poor function of the kidneys. She also wrote that Lisa looked feverish.

This report, dated November 22, 1995, is the last one detailing Lisa's condition for several days. There are no logs for November 23–25, a period that was marked by an upsurge of violent behavior, as Lisa's caretakers later testified. Lisa, they said, pulled things off shelves, destroyed furniture, broke lights, threw a ficus plant at one of her watchers, screamed, and banged her head on the wall, floor, and bed. One minder recalled her gouging at her own face with her fingernails. Another stated that she drenched the floor with water, stripped naked, and lashed out with her fists. Security personnel removed everything breakable or dangerous, including the lamps, leaving Lisa in total darkness.

At three in the morning on November 24, Sam Ghiora, a Flag security staffer, was seated on a small bench outside of Lisa's room when he heard the doorknob rattle. Slowly, the door to room 174 opened, and Lisa stood at the threshold, fully dressed.

"Hey," she said calmly, walking a few steps toward him. "You're not CMO."