The
Life & Death of a Scientologist
After 13 Years
and Thousands Of Dollars, Lisa McPherson
Finally Went 'Clear.' Then She Went Insane.
By Richard Leiby
Washington Post,
Dec. 6, 1998
CLEARWATER,
Fla.—"I am L. Ron Hubbard," the
woman on the hotel room bed announced in a
robotic voice. "I created time 3 billion
years ago." She rambled on and on, every
outburst dutifully scribbled down by those
assigned to watch her.
"I can't
confront force . . . I need my auditor . . . I
want to take a toothbrush and brush the floor
until I have a cognition."
The jargon of
Scientology was instantly familiar to anyone who
entered that room in the Fort Harrison Hotel,
part of an elite training center and retreat
established here by Hubbard, the science fiction
writer and self-styled religious leader. It was
also obvious to her fellow Scientologists that
Lisa McPherson had cracked up.
"Out of
control," one wrote.
Beginning Nov. 18,
1995, Scientology staffers -- following Hubbard's
regimen for dealing with psychotic members --
kept McPherson isolated in that room 24 hours a
day, refusing to speak to her, trying to
force-feed her, plying her with vitamins and
herbal concoctions and injecting her with
sedatives, according to several accounts that are
now part of court records. She furiously
resisted: She pounded the walls, tried to escape,
attacked a staffer with a potted plant. In her
delirium, records say, she defecated on herself
and drank her own urine.
Within 17 days,
McPherson -- who'd spent most of her adult life
and tens of thousands of dollars as a devotee of
Hubbard's teachings -- would be dead. The
once-voluptuous 36-year-old -- she stood 5 feet 9
and wore a size 12 dress -- lost an estimated 40
to 50 pounds during the ordeal, dropping to 108,
her bruised body pocked by insect bites and
scabs.
She was never seen
by a licensed physician during that time. An
autopsy attributed her death to a blood clot that
developed due to "severe dehydration"
and "bed rest."
Last month, after
more than two years of investigation, the state
attorney here filed two felony counts against the
Scientology organization, alleging abuse or
neglect of a disabled adult and the practice of
medicine without a license. (No individuals were
charged; to obtain their testimony, all
Scientology witnesses were given immunity by
prosecutors.) A criminal conviction would only
bring fines of up to $15,000, but also would
allow a court to order restitution to the
victim's family and payment of law-enforcement
investigation costs.
The church has
pleaded not guilty. Mike Rinder, senior spokesman
for Scientology, would not respond to any
questions about McPherson, but issued a statement
calling the "circumstances" of her
death "unfortunate," and contending
that the church had no "intent to do any
harm" to its devotee. Church lawyers would
not comment.
Meanwhile,
McPherson's aunt has filed a wrongful death suit
against the church, saying McPherson suffered
"extreme torture" as "a prisoner
of Scientology." Church officials have said
they were honoring McPherson's religious
preferences; Scientology vehemently denounces all
forms of psychotherapy.
This weekend, to
mark the anniversary of McPherson's death,
Scientology defectors and other activists
picketed near the Fort Harrison Hotel. Since its
founding 45 years ago, the Church of Scientology
has endured more than its share of bad publicity,
but the McPherson case puts on stark display a
side of the religion far removed from the glowing
testimonials it receives from Hollywood adherents
like John Travolta, Tom Cruise and Isaac Hayes.
If, as Hubbard
decreed, the ultimate aim of Scientology is its
adherents' "total freedom" and
"survival," then what went wrong in the
case of Lisa McPherson?
"At last,
here is a book . . . which provides the answers
to the problems of the human mind," pledged
Hubbard's 1950 bestseller, "Dianetics: The
Modern Science of Mental Health." It was the
cornerstone of the religion he later founded.
Once "cleared" of their troublesome
brain "engrams," followers would be
happy and healthier, have higher IQs and become
"stable mentally," Hubbard believed.
In September 1995,
Lisa McPherson proudly attested to reaching the
state of "clear" at a Scientology
ceremony. Within a few weeks, her mind began to
unravel. After 13 years of intensive study, she
was still failing as a Scientologist; indeed, she
had become one of the worst kinds of problems --
in church lingo, a "Potential Trouble Source
Type III," or what Hubbard also called an
"insane being."
Out in the real
world, around non-Scientologists, McPherson was
dramatically breaking down, becoming a public
embarrassment. Scientologists weren't supposed to
do that.
The Founder, a
flame-haired, swashbuckling figure, died in 1986,
but his every utterance and writing is viewed by
Scientologists as consecrated, immutable
scripture. Hubbard seemed to take a dim view of
those who suffered breakdowns.
"We have
nothing to do with the insane whatsoever. The
insane, well, they're insane!" he once
declared in a rare television interview. Little
could be done for psychotics. "Provide a
relatively safe environment and quiet and rest
and no treatment of a mental nature at all,"
he wrote in a 1965 policy letter.
"There will
always be some failures," he continued, and
"sometimes [they] can't be kept alive."
McPherson grew up
in Dallas, the daughter of an insurance man and
his homemaker wife, attending Baptist churches.
She had an older brother she loved, named Steve.
When Steve was 16
he shot himself in the head in a gas station rest
room. Lisa was 14. The suicide was apparently
connected to a dispute with another teen,
although the details remain vague to Lisa's aunt
and closest living relative, Dell Liebreich. But
Liebreich knows one thing: "I'm sure it had
a traumatizing effect on Lisa. Her father never
recovered from it. He committed suicide 10 years
later." He too used a pistol.
After high school,
McPherson went to work at Southwestern Bell,
where her family says a supervisor recruited her
into Scientology. A vivacious brown-eyed blonde,
fond of frosting her hair, McPherson had an
early, troubled marriage that lasted only a few
years. But she did well at the phone company, and
she avidly studied Hubbard's techniques.
"She was always going to the mission, taking
courses," recalls Liebreich, who signed on
to the lawsuit against Scientology after Lisa's
mother, Fannie, died last year.
The church's
account of McPherson's tenure has required
criminal investigators and civil case lawyers to
learn another language -- Hubbard-speak. For
example, a Scientology-prepared report on
McPherson says that in "Dec. 86/Jan. 87 she
had a PTS Rundown (items were Mom, Don and
Theresa). . . . This was followed by a large
amount of wordclearing, False Data Stripping and
O/W write ups."
Translation:
Using an E-meter,
a lie detector-like device that Hubbard invented,
a counselor discovered that McPherson was a
"potential trouble source" in
Scientology because of her connection to three
"suppressive" people, including her
mother. In confessional rituals, a parishioner
must declare his O/Ws -- "overts and
withholds" -- immoral acts that include
harmful, undisclosed transgressions against
Scientology. Any miscomprehensions about anything
-- including the the church and its teachings --
are "false data" that must be stripped
away.
In Hubbard's
cosmology, traumas in past lifetimes, contact
with alien beings, drug use and involvement with
"suppressive persons" (who include
enemies of the church) all can be impediments to
a "pre-clear's" success. They must be
located and removed by "auditing."
According to the
church, McPherson took her first courses in 1982,
when she was 23, and tried but failed to go
"clear" in 1986. She took a staff job
and married a member of the church. In 1989, she
also committed herself to serving Scientology for
a "billion years," signing up for its
Sea Organization, an elite group whose members
wear nautical uniforms and follow a militaristic
command structure, working long hours for
salaries of $50 a week.
A World War II
Navy lieutenant, Hubbard ran his sect for several
years from aboard a 320-foot converted cattle
ferry, sailing the world before establishing what
he called the Flag Land Base at Clearwater, a
placid town of white sand beaches on the Gulf of
Mexico. The Commodore, as Hubbard was known,
lived nearby briefly in the mid-1970s. He told
aides he planned to pose as a photographer in the
tourist industry.
Today, about 6,000
Scientology followers and staffers live in the
Clearwater area -- many based at the campus of
former hotels where Hubbard's "religious
technology" is offered at the most advanced
(and expensive) levels. Several
Scientologist-operated businesses also maintain
headquarters here.
McPherson migrated
to Clearwater in the early '90s after her new
Scientology employers relocated their publishing
firm here. She'd divorced again, and had left the
Sea Organization. But she kept attempting to
reach "clear." Records show she was
thwarted again in 1991 and 1994 because she was a
"potential trouble source" -- the
E-meter sessions revealed she'd been in contact
with suppressive, anti-Scientology elements.
At first McPherson
flourished as a sales rep at AMC Publishing; she
made $136,721 in 1994, according to her tax
returns, spending more than $55,000 on
Scientology courses and taking deductions for
them. (The IRS, after fighting hundreds of
lawsuits filed by Scientology, granted the church
tax-exempt status in 1993.)
Then, turmoil.
"In June 1995, Lisa caved in and actually
went into a spin (psychotic break)," says
the church report. This forced a brief
recuperation at the Fort Harrison Hotel and a
slowdown in her work. She was put into
"ethics handling" -- a regimen that
includes writing up "overts and
withholds."
Her aunt, an old
high school friend and others believe McPherson
was on the verge of quitting the church -- and
that was her undisclosed crime against
Scientology.
"She was
roller-coastering: up and down, up and down, high
emotions and low emotions," says Michael
Pattinson, a painter and recent Scientology
defector who got to know McPherson in the months
before her death. "She wanted to do
something more artistic in her life, and the
group's power and pressure were too much for her.
"She was
having a very, very rough time at work keeping up
with the quotas for sales," Pattinson
recalls. "She asked for my advice. I said,
'Lisa, follow your own goals, not someone else's,
or you'll end up in the soup.' "
Scientology
officials say McPherson was a devoted member. And
on Sept. 7, she finally reached her cherished
goal: "I'm from Texas and I'm Clear!"
she announced to a roomful of fellow members,
reading from a script now in court files.
"Being Clear
is more exciting than anything I've ever
experienced. I am so thrilled about life and
living that I can hardly stand it!"
McPherson's final
hurdle to Clear was an incident from a past life.
A saber-toothed tiger kept attacking and eating
her: "Not only did I see him, I was in a
cage with him for six months."
Auditing
"handled" that problem, McPherson told
her audience. But other problems arose.
By mid-October,
church records show that officials had declared
her a "liability" to Scientology,
apparently after her production dropped off at
her publishing job. In Hubbard's jargon, that
meant McPherson had "taken on the color of
an enemy" and could not be trusted. In a
memo, she said she was making "amends,"
and working seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to
10:30 p.m., in part to raise money for a the
church's "Winter Wonderland" holiday
event.
By November, she
began to act out in bizarre ways: At a business
conference in Orlando, she insisted to strangers
that they had to read L. Ron Hubbard's
"Dianetics." She interrogated a
co-worker about "suppressive people."
She rousted the colleague in the middle of the
night, raving about "something going on on
this planet that I didn't know about."
"When I woke
up at 7 a.m. I found her still in the bathroom
reading" Hubbard's works, the woman wrote in
a report to church officials. "She looked
like hell."
One year ago, on
the sidewalk in front of the Fort Harrison Hotel,
Scientology critics lit candles in a memorial to
McPherson. Their signs bore her grisly autopsy
photos. Their T-shirts said "Scientology
Kills."
A few blocks away
in a counterdemonstration, thousands of church
members staged a "civil rights" march
on the Clearwater Police Department and the local
office of the St. Petersburg Times, charging that
police and media investigations of the McPherson
case amounted to a hate campaign.
For many
residents, the long-running McPherson case has
revived unwelcome memories of Scientology's
controversial past here -- in the mid-'70s the
town's political, business and media
establishment were targeted for what Hubbard
memos termed "takeover" and
"control." In 1975, Hubbard moved his
sect ashore, secretly purchasing downtown
properties under the guise of a group called
United Churches of Florida.
The guru's plan to
create a Scientology-run city -- part of an even
more grandiose scheme for global domination --
foundered after FBI raids and news reports
exposed his goals. Prosecutors used internal
church documents to help convict Hubbard's wife
and 10 other top Scientologists in a conspiracy
to infiltrate, bug and burglarize federal
agencies. Hubbard was named an unindicted
co-conspirator in that case.
Scientology
leaders, who say they purged the church of
criminals 15 years ago, claim it enjoys excellent
relations with the city. Last month, ground was
broken for a $45 million Scientology center in
the faded downtown; at 370,000 square feet, it's
the largest construction project in the church's
history. Only a few bigots and
"rednecks" oppose its presence here,
church officials say.
"The sun
never sets on Scientology," church leader
David Miscavige, quoting Hubbard, said at the
glitzy groundbreaking, which included a laser
light show. "Scientology now, tomorrow and
forever."
The dueling
demonstrations over the McPherson case coincided
with the opening of "Winter
Wonderland," an annual holiday display
erected by the church to collect food and toys
for the poor. Rocker Edgar Winter, a
Scientologist, welcomed the crowd and praised
"this wonderful gift to the community."
Bennetta
Slaughter, owner of AMC Publishing and a
Scientologist for nearly 20 years, spoke of the
church's dedication to children. She pointed out
that a $3,400 donation by her deceased employee,
Lisa McPherson, helped make it all possible.
"She was one
of my very good friends and I loved her very
much," Slaughter said later, bracing against
the breeze in a Christmas sweater and red velvet
skirt. "It's a farce that they're
demonstrating [against the church]. They're
desecrating her memory, not honoring her
memory."
Slaughter and her
company were initially named as defendants in
McPherson's aunt's suit, but were later dropped
from the action. "I absolutely know that
what occurred with Lisa -- " Slaughter
began. She paused. "She was not denied
anything. The things that have been said are
complete misrepresentations on the part of those
who would attack the church. They're
falsehoods."
And why would
people criticize her church?
"No
data," she quickly replied. "Obviously
there's an agenda."
"The real and
inexcusable danger in Dianetics lies in its
conception of the amoral, detached, 100 percent
mechanical man. This is the authoritarian dream,
a population of zombies, free to be manipulated
by the great brains of the founder, the leader of
an inner manipulative clique." -- A review
of "Dianetics" in The Nation, 1950
From the very
beginning, the therapies of L. Ron Hubbard have
been denounced by medical authorities as
quackery, hypnotism and brainwashing. One of the
first judicial investigations of Scientology,
conducted in Australia in the 1960s, deemed the
auditing process a form of "mental
torture" and resulted in a ban on
Scientology practices. "Sometimes preclears
are so distraught that they scream, develop
murderous feelings, have bouts of anger, grief .
. . their sexual passions are aroused, they act
insanely, laugh hysterically . . . they become
violent and try to escape and have to be
restrained," the report said.
"In
Scientology parlance, when such manifestations as
these occur, the preclear is being
'restimulated'; in fact he is being debased and
mentally crippled."
(By 1982,
Australia overturned its ban and recognized
Scientology as a religion. But an official
commission of top legal experts recently
recommended that significant psychological harm
inflicted by any religious group, including
Scientology, be made a crime.)
In 1978, a French
court tried Hubbard in absentia for fraud and
sentenced him to four years' imprisonment.
In 1986, a
California jury awarded $30 million to a former
Sea Organization member who said the church's
advanced regimens caused him to become psychotic
and actively plan suicide. (The award, later
reduced to $2.5 million, has been upheld by the
Supreme Court, but the former member has yet to
collect because of exhaustive litigation by the
church.)
In a 1984
decision, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Paul
G. Breckenridge said Scientology "is nothing
in reality but a vast enterprise to extract the
maximum amount of money from its adepts by
pseudo-scientific theories . . . and to exercise
a kind of blackmail against persons who do not
wish to continue with their sect. . . . The
organization clearly is schizophrenic and
paranoid, and this bizarre combination seems to
be a reflection of its founder."
Such conclusions
strike especially close to the heart of
Scientology, a belief system whose strongest
rhetoric is reserved for its criticism of
psychiatry. Hubbard said he wanted to control
"absolutely the field of mental healing on
this planet in all forms." He denounced
shrinks as crackpots and butchers who killed
patients' souls with electroshock therapy and
drugs.
But there may have
been a deeper source of the Founder's ire. His
eldest son, L. Ron Hubbard Jr., once swore an
affidavit saying his father "ended up in
psychiatric hospital at the end of the war."
(Hubbard Jr. is dead; the church says the Founder
never received treatment and that the son
recanted his criticism.)
In a letter
written to the Veterans Administration in 1947,
Hubbard senior admitted to suicidal tendencies
and asked for psychiatric help.
Denouncing
doctors, Hubbard claimed his research revealed
the true nature of the mind. "All of these
things are scientific facts, tested and rechecked
and tested again," he wrote in
"Dianetics." But his son said the
findings -- initially published in the pulp
magazine Astounding Science Fiction -- was
without scientific merit: "My father wrote
his books off the top of his head based on his
imagination. There were no case studies."
"He audited
me and it didn't help," says Richard de
Mille, a Dianetics believer from 1950 to 1953.
"I came to understand that it was all his
imagination, just a story he was telling."
De Mille, 76, son
of the famous director, says Hubbard transformed
his self-help discoveries into a religion to
avoid having to prove them: "It became a
religion very suddenly and all his magical ideas
jumped back into it."
The apex of
Scientology spiritual counseling is at the
secret, so-called OT Levels, which promise
superhuman powers. Here, members pass through
what Hubbard described as the Wall of Fire.
Parishioners -- who have already spent thousands
to go clear -- pay several thousand more to learn
that their spiritual traumas stem from an
intergalactic holocaust perpetrated 75 million
years ago by an alien overlord named Xenu.
During a space
battle, Hubbard teaches, our spirits became
infested with evil alien spirits, called
"body thetans." There could be untold
numbers of such bad thetans fomenting problems in
each of our minds. Only through rigorous auditing
can they be removed -- allowing the untormented
Operating Thetan -- the OT -- to emerge.
In 1995, church
financial records show, McPherson paid nearly
$42,000 in "donations" for top-level
courses -- including "Wall of Fire,"
the "Flag OT Executive Rundown" and
"OT Preparations and Eligibility."
On Nov. 10, 1995,
court records show, the devotee purchased her
last religious item from the Church of
Scientology. It was a 1996 calendar featuring L.
Ron Hubbard. Price: $100.
"No one told
me I was a prisoner, but I knew that I wouldn't
just walk out the door. . . . It's embedded over
the years that, once you're a Scientologist,
there's nowhere to go; you just don't
leave." -- Former church staff member Lori
Taverna, testifying to the Clearwater City
Commission in 1982.
After a minor
traffic accident, McPherson stripped off her
clothes and walked naked down well-traveled
Belleview Boulevard. She told stunned paramedics
she wasn't crazy but just wanted to get their
attention: "I need help. I need to talk to
someone." She spoke in a monotone, as if
programmed, and said she didn't need a body to
live.
"I'm an
OT," she said. An Operating Thetan.
It was shortly
after 6 p.m. on Nov. 18, 1995. McPherson had
driven her '93 Jeep Cherokee into a boat being
towed on a trailer. She wasn't hurt.
The paramedics
took her to nearby Morton Plant Hospital. Nurses
there said she looked calm, but they noticed her
fixed stare. McPherson disclosed that her brother
and father had committed suicide, but denied she
wanted to kill herself or anyone else.
By 6:50, a group
of Scientologists had arrived. By the church's
account, McPherson had phoned her friend and
boss, Bennetta Slaughter. (Hospital records
contain no mention of McPherson making any
calls.) The Scientologists explained that a
psychiatric consultation would violate
McPherson's religion.
At 7:30, a
psychiatric nurse went to McPherson's bedside,
where she was surrounded by church members. Again
she spoke in that monotone, telling the nurse,
"I want to go home with my friends from the
congregation."
An emergency room
doctor decided, after talking by phone with a
psychiatrist, that the patient could not be
involuntarily committed. "Her friends at
scientology will watch her 24 hours and be sure
that she gets the care that they want her to have
and the patient wants to have," the doctor
typed in his report. But he seemed uneasy,
adding: "I told her I could not be
responsible . . . I will have the patient sign
out against medical advice."
Around 8:30, she
was taken to the Fort Harrison Hotel and put in
Room 174. She would not leave again until the
night of Dec. 5.
Scientologists
loaded McPherson's nearly lifeless body into a
church van. Instead of calling an ambulance or
driving her to Morton Plant, five minutes away,
she was taken 45 minutes north to Columbia/HCA
New Port Richey Hospital.
Her watchers had
decided it would be best if McPherson were
treated by a Scientology doctor -- an OT-course
graduate named David Minkoff who worked in the
emergency room at the New Port Richey hospital.
Minkoff had earlier prescribed Valium for
McPherson without seeing her, according to a
Florida Department of Law Enforcement affidavit.
(Minkoff, initially named in the wrongful death
suit, authorized his insurers to settle with
McPherson's estate for $100,000 -- what his
attorney called a "pittance in comparison
with the millions and millions they were asking
for.")
McPherson never
got the Valium. Staffers told investigators that
they feared any drug might interfere with her
future auditing. So instead they loaded aspirin
and Benadryl into a syringe and forced it down
her throat. McPherson's "case
supervisor" believed the aspirin "might
assist in blocking Lisa's formation of mental
images," the prosecution affidavit says.
Through the 17
days since her naked stroll down Belleview
Boulevard, McPherson had been attended by Janis
Johnson, an unlicensed anesthesiologist who
served as the Flag base medical liaison officer,
by a dentist and by staffers with no medical
training, including a 17-year-old. One woman
assigned to McPherson's room broke down, sat in a
corner and cried, records show.
The Scientologists
injected McPherson with magnesium chloride and
gave her the sedative chloral hydrate -- both
substances apparently endorsed by Hubbard. By
Dec. 1, she was so dehydrated that she needed two
liters of fluid, according to Johnson's notes.
The medical examiner later said it appeared that
she'd gone without water for at least five days.
The watchers' records are spotty, and church logs
of her final 53 hours were lost or destroyed,
according to the prosecution affidavit.
A reconstruction
of events that Scientology turned over to lawyers
for McPherson's estate, as well as prosecutors'
findings, describe McPherson's final day:
By Dec. 5, she
couldn't walk. She'd been lapsing in and out of
consciousness, barely moving. That morning,
Johnson thought McPherson looked
"septic," as if suffering from a
massive infection. Around 7 p.m., Johnson called
Minkoff, requesting he issue a prescription for
penicillin.
Minkoff says he
refused and advised that the patient be taken to
the nearest hospital. But Johnson said,
"Lisa was not that sick." She would
transport McPherson 24 miles to New Port Richey
instead.
McPherson's
breathing grew heavy and labored on the trip. She
was loaded into a wheelchair when they reached
the hospital around 9:30. Minkoff said he was
shocked by her "horrific" appearance.
He pronounced her
dead on arrival.
According to the
charging document, "This inexcusable delay
in seeking emergency help... deprived Lisa of her
only opportunity for survival."
A Scientology
report on the incident begins this way:
"Lisa McPherson, Flag public living in
Clearwater, FL., dropped her body this evening
while being taken to a hospital."
On Aug. 6, 1996,
eight months after she died, the church mailed
Lisa McPherson a statement showing a credit of
$3,000. Her next course, called "OT Debug
Service," was paid for and waiting.
©
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
|
OCCUPIED CLEARWATER