Inside Scientology (35 page)

"[Bennetta] cried a lot," said Cook. "I tried to comfort her some ... We were all a little freaked out."

The next day, the Clearwater police paid a visit to the Hacienda Gardens apartment complex, the church-owned property in Clearwater where Janis Johnson and other Scientology staffers lived, to question Johnson. Several other cops went to the Fort Harrison, where they questioned Alain Kartuzinski, Paul Greenwood, and Laura Arrunada. All four Scientologists maintained that Lisa had been a regular hotel guest who'd checked in for "rest and relaxation" and had suddenly taken ill.

Marty Rathbun, meanwhile, sought out Lisa's caretakers. Most of them were quarantined in an apartment at the Hacienda Gardens, where they'd been sent until it could be determined whether or not Lisa had died of an infectious disease.
^*
Interviewing them was like walking into a disaster area, Rathbun recalled. "They all looked devastated, they lacked sleep, some of them had scratches and bruises from getting hit by Lisa, [and] all of them were extremely emotionally distraught, because each one of them put it on her shoulders that she had done something wrong."

Rathbun then interviewed Alain Kartuzinski and Janis Johnson, both of whom pointed the finger at each other for botching Lisa's care. Johnson, in particular, worried Rathbun. Having practiced medicine in Tucson for six years, Johnson had come under suspicion by the Arizona Board of Medical Examiners for abusing painkillers and other drugs, and had voluntarily agreed to withdraw from medical practice. In 1994, her Arizona medical license lapsed, and Johnson had never renewed it. How had she been posted to the medical liaison's office in the first place? And why in the world did Kartuzinski put her in charge of Lisa's health care? "It was the worst possible perfect storm of incompetence and irresponsibility," Rathbun later said.

Worse still was that Miscavige's handwriting was allegedly all over Lisa's auditing files. While Rathbun was interviewing the caretakers, another RTC official, he said, was charged with "getting rid of any evidence of Miscavige's handling of the deal."
^*
Once that was accomplished, a night or so after Lisa's death, Rathbun and Tom De Vocht once again called Jason Knapmeyer to the West Coast building. Looking grave, Rathbun handed Knapmeyer a set of sealed folders with the name "Lisa McPherson" written on them. They were Lisa's preclear, or auditing, folders. "These need to go to Int," Rathbun said. Knapmeyer took the folders, got in his car, drove to the Tampa airport, and boarded a flight to Los Angeles. An OSA representative met him at LAX and took possession of the folders. Then he told Knapmeyer to go home. "Don't tell anyone about this trip," he said. The Messenger agreed and flew back to Florida on the next plane.

***

It was just after two o'clock on the afternoon of December 6, 1995, when Fannie McPherson's telephone rang in Dallas. "Fannie," a woman said, "it's Bennetta Slaughter."

"Bennetta?" Fannie had a bad feeling. "Is Lisa all right?"

There was a pause. "Fannie, Lisa's dead."

"She's
what
?" Fannie began to cry. "What in the world happened?"

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 "bumping 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 assigned 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 amassed 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.
^*