Inside Scientology (34 page)

"You're right," Ghiora said. He was not a member of the Commodore's Messenger Organization but a new Flag security trainee.

"You can't tell me what to do," Lisa said.

"You're right," Ghiora said again. He knew he'd broken protocol by speaking to her, but he was momentarily shocked: How had she just walked out of the room? Where were her minders? Ghiora gently put his hand on Lisa's shoulder and steered her back toward her room. She stopped at the threshold. "I just don't know what's happening," she said.

Ghiora said nothing.

"Could you help me?"

Nothing.

"I need help," she said, and slowly entering her room, shut the door.

On November 29, about a week after she'd taken her turn on the watch, Alice Vangrondelle went to see Judy Goldsberry-Weber in the medical liaison's office. "I want to know how a person would act if they didn't get enough to eat or drink," she said. "What are the symptoms of dehydration?"

Goldsberry-Weber took out some medical books and gave Vangrondelle a list of symptoms, which include dry skin, loss of appetite, flushed complexion, dry mouth, weakness, chills, and in more serious cases, fever, increased heart rate and respiration, confusion, chest pain, and unconsciousness. "Have you ever taken care of anyone like that?" Vangrondelle asked. "How would they behave?"

Goldsberry-Weber told her that it would not be uncommon for a patient in this condition to behave "irrationally" for a short period, but given enough fluids, the condition could be turned around in a matter of hours. "If you have concerns, you need to let it be known what your concerns are to the proper people," she said. "And sooner, rather than later."

Vangrondelle told Goldsberry-Weber that she'd written a report. (No log from Vangrondelle was ever found, or included, in the official record.) Other caretakers also grew concerned. Lisa, several noted, had "lost a lot of weight," "looked thin," and her skin had become jaundiced and bruised.
^*

By the end of November, one caretaker, seventeen-year-old Heather Petzold, was "frantic," as she'd later say. Lisa had by now regressed to an infantile state. She was urinating and defecating on her bed. "I wouldn't say there was any day that she ate sufficiently," she noted; by the first of December, Lisa's caretakers were spoon-feeding her bites of mashed banana, sometimes forcibly opening her mouth.

Petzold had never spoken to any of the other caretakers about her concerns—remarkably, none of Lisa's minders spoke to one another about their experience, despite the fact that several felt so distraught, they cried in Lisa's room. Instead, Petzold sat down and wrote a letter to Alain Kartuzinski, explaining that Lisa was neither eating nor sleeping. "I said, hey, we need to change something," she recalled. Petzold herself didn't know how to handle the situation. "I was there, I was doing the watch [sixteen hours at a time], and I had eight hours to go home, sleep, and come back in. It wasn't like I had an extra hour to figure out what else could be done."

Petzold delivered her report to Kartuzinski's office, as she had been instructed to do. She never received a reply. Later she'd regret that she hadn't said enough. "If I had gone to higher terminals ... if I would have walked to the senior-most terminal there and said, 'Listen.'" But despite misgivings, neither Petzold nor any of the other caretakers took it upon themselves to call a doctor or go to a hospital—as several would later admit, taking that kind of initiative wasn't their job and would have broken with Sea Org protocol. "She had been seen by a doctor in the hospital," Rita Boykin, another minder, later said. "She signed herself out, and she didn't want to be there. She
wanted
to come back to the church."

In the early hours of Saturday, December 2, Boykin wrote in her log that she had given Lisa four valerian-root capsules, four other herbal sleeping tablets, and approximately six ounces of Cal Mag. At 3
A
.
M
.
, Lisa was "still awake and talking," she wrote. "She has scratches and abrasions all over her body & on elbows & knees has pressure sores."

By late that night, Boykin wrote, Lisa, who'd tried to stand several times without success, was no longer moving herself, but being "moved" by her caretakers. She also accused her caretakers of being "psychs"—psychiatrists—"or other enemies who wanted to kill her," Boykin said. This psychosis extended into Sunday, December 3.

Boykin made another entry: "4:30 She had about 2½ hours of sound sleep—interspersed with restlessness. At one point it seemed she wanted a sweater on. I put it on her & she thanked me."

This is where the log ends. There are no other records for the remainder of December 3 or for December 4 or 5. However, the caretakers later testified that during those days, Lisa's condition declined dramatically. By the morning of December 5, she was lying in bed and barely moving. "There was one time when she rolled over ... and she fell on the floor," Petzold said. "So I picked her back up and put her back on the bed, of course."

Lisa also wasn't talking much, which Petzold immediately noticed. "Prior [to this] it was like a broken record, just all of the time." Now Lisa was mumbling. "That's when I got pretty worried," Petzold said.

That afternoon, Petzold and Laura Arrunada, the other caretaker, decided to give Lisa a bath. She was too weak to walk to the tub, so the women carried her. As they were putting her in the tub, Lisa's sphincter muscle relaxed. "She shit herself," Laura Arrunada later said.

A relaxed anus is a sign that the body has begun to deteriorate. Petzold, a teenager with no medical experience, didn't know this. Arrunada, who had graduated from medical school in Mexico City but was not a licensed physician, might have been familiar with this warning sign. But as she told the police, Lisa "was not looking like she was [going] to die."

Arrunada was nonetheless concerned, and at six o'clock that evening, she called Johnson and told her that Lisa needed medical attention.

At approximately 7
P
.
M
.
, Dr. David Minkoff received yet another call from Johnson about Lisa McPherson. The girl for whom he had written the prescription, she said, was suffering from acute diarrhea, had lost an extreme amount of weight, and also complained of a sore throat. Johnson thought Lisa had strep and requested penicillin. This time, Minkoff refused to call in a prescription.

"If she's sick enough to need an injection, then she needs to be seen by a doctor," he said. And if she were seriously ill, they shouldn't bring Lisa to him, but to a closer hospital like Morton Plant.

"No, she's not that sick," Johnson assured him. She told Minkoff they'd be there within the hour.

Soon after, Paul Greenwood, a Flag security officer, was dispatched to room 174. With Janis Johnson and Laura Arrunada assisting, Greenwood put Lisa in a van. Johnson got behind the wheel and drove north, past Morton Plant Hospital, where she and the others dared not stop, fearing the doctors might call the psychiatrists. They drove past several other hospitals as well, bound for Minkoff's facility, the Columbia HCA Hospital in New Port Richey, about forty-five minutes away. No one spoke. "When someone is sick or injured you don't talk around them because it puts impressions in the mind which create things ... later on," said Greenwood.

Johnson later said she heard Lisa's breath become labored, then grow faint. Sitting with her in the back of the van, Greenwood monitored Lisa's pulse. It slowly dwindled. Then Greenwood couldn't feel it anymore.

At approximately 9:30 that evening, Dr. David Minkoff was just finishing his shift when he heard the doors to the Columbia New Port Richey Hospital's emergency room swing open and an orderly cry out for help. A disheveled-looking woman, draped awkwardly over a wheelchair, was wheeled into the trauma room. She was drastically, almost skeletally thin; her skin was papery, had a grayish pallor, and was marked with small dark brown lesions. One emergency room nurse, shocked by the woman's emaciated state, concluded that she must have AIDS; another, noting the multiple bruises and lesions on her body, wondered if she might have an infectious disease such as Ebola. To Minkoff, it looked like a classic picture of "meningococcemia," a devastating bacterial infection that can cause inflammation of blood vessels, organ failure, and meningitis.

Lisa McPherson, the robust, five foot nine woman described as "voluptuous" by the paramedic Bonnie Portolano, was dead. Her arms and legs were covered with bruises, she had scrapes on her face, and her weight had dwindled to an emaciated 108 pounds. She was also dirty—a nurse later said she wondered if Lisa had been abused. "I was appalled," Minkoff later told police. After trying to revive Lisa to no avail, Minkoff confronted Janis Johnson in the waiting area. "What did you bring me?" he said. "What did you do?"

At least one other person at the Columbia HCA Hospital wondered the same thing. That night, the head ER nurse at the Columbia Hospital, Barbara Schmid, alarmed by the condition of Lisa's body, called the local authorities. By the next morning, a "suspicious death" investigation would be officially launched by the Clearwater Police Department on the matter of Lisa McPherson.

G
E
T
T
H
E
F
U
C
K
over here." Tom De Vocht, commanding officer of the Commodore's Messenger Organization in Clearwater, barked into the phone at his twenty-year-old aide, Jason Knapmeyer. It was late in the evening of December 5, 1995, and De Vocht was calling from his office in the West Coast Building, on Fort Harrison Avenue. With him was Marty Rathbun, the senior RTC official and deputy to Scientology's leader, David Miscavige. There was very little time, the men told Knapmeyer when he arrived, breathless, a few minutes later. "Something had happened" to a parishioner named Lisa McPherson, they said—neither Rath-bun nor De Vocht went into details—and, bottom line, the police might be by, asking questions. Before that happened, the office of the medical liaison, Janis Johnson, had to be totally cleared out, cleansed of any sign that Johnson, an unlicensed physician in the state of Florida, had been practicing medicine. "We've got to get all of this shit packed up," De Vocht said. "Any medicines, any needles, anything medical or medicine-related—just get it the fuck out of here."

Knapmeyer did as he was told. At the same time, another group of Messengers whom Knapmeyer knew were cleaning out Lisa McPherson's room. Knapmeyer combed every inch of Johnson's office for incriminating evidence, dumping everything he found in a large trash bag. Finally, he gave the bag to another Commodore's Messenger, who put it in the back of a blue Honda Civic and drove away. By morning, the police would arrive at the Fort Harrison.

***

Brian Anderson, the head of the Office of Special Affairs at Flag, was in a panic from the moment he received the call from Janis Johnson, still at the hospital in New Port Richey. The woman who'd been isolated in room 174 was dead, she informed him.

Johnson admitted the truth. "She seemed a lot worse when I saw her earlier tonight, and so we took her to the hospital and ... I'm not really sure what happened."

"What do you mean, you're not sure?" Anderson was livid. He'd known that Lisa McPherson was being treated at the Fort Harrison and asked Paul Kellerhals, the chief of security, for frequent updates on her condition. Recently, his deputies had reported that Lisa seemed to be getting better.

By midnight, all of the base's top executives had gathered in Anderson's office on the second floor of the West Coast Building, including the representative from the RTC. Many of the people gathered in Anderson's office were aware of David Miscavige's personal involvement in Lisa's auditing progress during the fall of 1995. Some aides maintained that, though Miscavige had returned to California by the time Lisa was brought to the Fort Harrison, he continued to monitor her situation through his RTC surrogates in Clearwater, who sent him regular reports. "You have to understand how controlling Dave Miscavige is, and how big a deal this was," said Tom De Vocht. How had Lisa broken down after going Clear? Though Alain Kartuzinski was ostensibly in charge of Lisa's care, De Vocht described him as "Miscavige's fall guy. All the direction came from RTC, and I can guarantee you the attitude was, 'we're handling this, not you.' The people who were on the ground were freaked out by the idea of Dave Miscavige getting upset, and they mishandled the situation. But they were under the threat of God from Dave."

Over the next several hours, Marcus Quirino, Flag's deputy chief officer, and Paul Kellerhals rounded up the caretakers and interviewed them. From these debriefing sessions and individual reports the caretakers were asked to write up, Quirino constructed a detailed memo summarizing the last seventeen days of Lisa's life. He gave it to Anderson, along with the caretakers' handwritten recollections.
^*

While this was going on, Flag's highest-ranking official, Debbie Cook, phoned Bennetta Slaughter, often listed as Lisa's "next of kin" on official papers, and broke the news that Lisa was dead.

Slaughter had known that Lisa was in the Fort Harrison since the day of her accident. In an interview with police, Slaughter later admitted that she'd found out about the accident when she drove by in her car and saw Lisa's Jeep parked by the side of the road. When Slaughter asked where Lisa was, a police officer told her that she'd been taken to the hospital. Slaughter decided not to go. "I was covered in paint from head to foot because I'd been working on the props for [Winter Wonderland]," she said. "I looked awful ... and frankly, hospitals are not my thing."

Instead, Slaughter phoned Lisa's chiropractor, Dr. Jeannie DeCuypere, and asked her to check up on Lisa. She also asked her husband, David, to drive over to Morton Plant, where he joined the other Scientologists in the waiting room. But after Lisa was taken to the Fort Harrison, the Slaughters had lost track of her, other than being informed by church officials that she was getting "rest, quiet, and relaxation," as Slaughter said.