Inside Scientology (37 page)

Then the jazz musician Chick Corea, a longtime Scientologist, arrived. Roberto, church officials knew, idolized Corea. "It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen," Mercer said. "Roberto just turned into putty in front of all of us. It was like he was talking to God. All of a sudden, everybody's wonderful. He spent the rest of the night listening to Chick tell him all about Scientology, and by the end, it was as if there was a red carpet rolled out, where before there had been a locked door. His attitude was 'come into my office anytime.'"

Over the next few months, David Miscavige met several times with Roberto, who became the first Clearwater official to meet with Scientologists in a nonconfrontational setting.

In May 1998, the Church of Scientology was given the go-ahead for a sweeping new development plan, which included a seven-story auditorium and the Mecca Building. To some residents this suggested that the city, seeking investment dollars, had sold out. But Scientologists rejoiced. In a rare move, David Miscavige even agreed to sit for an interview with the church's archenemy, the
St. Petersburg Times,
and described himself as a conciliator. "I take a great deal of pride in creating peace,"
he said.

But the Lisa McPherson case refused to go away. When asked when he was made aware of the parishioner's death, Miscavige's ever-present certainty seemed to fade. "I would have heard about it sometime around the time period that she died," he said.

"That night?" the paper's interviewer asked.

"No. No ... That doesn't come to me," he replied. "At the time I don't think it was really thought to be that significant an issue. She died. People die."

On November 13, 1998, the state of Florida charged the Church of Scientology's Flag Service Organization with two felony counts in the death of Lisa McPherson, first, for "knowingly, willfully, or by culpable negligence abus[ing] and/or neglect[ing] a disabled adult," a second-degree felony, and second, for practicing medicine without a license, a third-degree felony. Combined, the charges carried a maximum fine of $15,000.

Agent Lee Strope, who'd waited close to a year for the state to reach a decision, felt "blindsided" by the charges. What had happened to charging the Flag officials with manslaughter?

The state attorney, McCabe, was blunt. "The evidence isn't there," he said.

What the state had, McCabe believed, was simply not enough to prove that any single individual was responsible for Lisa's death. Instead, they found a pattern of neglect and concluded it was more appropriate to charge the Clearwater church, as an organization. "I truly think Bernie didn't want to be the first prosecutor to charge the Church of Scientology with manslaughter," admitted a Clearwater law enforcement official. "So he went with what he felt was a safe charge—negligence."

Publicly, the church met these charges with "surprising calm,"
as one newspaper report noted. A week after the indictments were filed, the Church of Scientology broke ground on its Mecca Building. The "Hollywood-style ceremony," as the
St. Petersburg Times
described the event, "featured green lasers, colored spotlights, fireworks, and shooting flames, all choreographed with pulsating song." City Manager Roberto and other officials were in attendance, as were some six thousand Scientologists, seated in a grandstand erected for the occasion. Miscavige, tanned and smiling, served as the master of ceremonies and described Scientology's commitment to Clearwater as "now, tomorrow, and forever."
The Scientologists in the crowd roared their approval.

This was the public face Miscavige showed to Clearwater. Privately, Miscavige approached the prosecutor McCabe and offered him a deal: dismiss the charges, and the Church of Scientology would do everything it could to ensure that what had happened to Lisa would never happen again. It would hire a full-time, non-Scientologist medical doctor to serve at church facilities and would refer any serious injuries or illness to a local hospital. The church would donate half a million dollars to the county's emergency medical services "as a sign of its commitment to using available services whenever necessary."
It would also pay the full cost of the state's criminal investigation, an estimated $180,000.

But if the state refused, Miscavige added, a "holy war"
of litigation would rain down on the state attorney's office, tying up precious resources for years. Those who understood the tactics of the Church of Scientology, including many people in the prosecutor's office, did not see this as an empty threat. "We knew what to expect," said Assistant State Attorney Doug Crow, whom McCabe assigned to handle the case. Crow, regarded in legal circles as McCabe's best prosecutor, had worked in the state attorney's office since the late 1970s, back when Scientologists infiltrated the office as part of Operation Goldmine. "I knew they'd hire experts and pursue this defense with everything they had," he said.

Indeed, harassment by lawsuit was not simply a matter of practice; it was a matter of doctrine. The purpose of a lawsuit, L. Ron Hubbard wrote in 1955, was "to harass and discourage rather than to win,"
and defending oneself against legal charges was "untenable," he added. "The only way to defend anything is to ATTACK, and if you ever forget that, then you will lose every battle you are ever engaged in, whether it is in terms of personal conversation, public debate, or a court of law."

McCabe had settled for lesser charges; he was not going to be bullied into dropping them entirely. The state attorney rejected Miscavige's proposal. On December 1, 1998, the Church of Scientology's Flag Service Organization pleaded innocent to the felony charges. In a letter to the court, the church's lawyer, Lee Fugate, promised a long legal battle. Fugate even went so far as to suggest the case be assigned a special docket to handle the "complex" and "voluminous" motions Scientology attorneys planned to file, which, he vowed, would require "a significant number of hearings and significant hearing time."

With these threats purveyed, on January 22, 1999, David Miscavige once again approached McCabe with an offer to "bring a peaceful resolution to the charges your office has brought against my religion."

McCabe again rejected Miscavige's plea.
If the Church of Scientology was seriously interested in reforms, he noted, then why had it not instituted any in the three years since Lisa's death?

The state of Florida's case against the Church of Scientology continued for the next year. During that period, recalled Tom De Vocht, Miscavige "worked day and night" to defeat the prosecution, meeting with church attorneys week after week to debate or redirect strategy. A trial was set for March 2000.

Meanwhile, the civil suit ground on at a steady pace. Compounding Miscavige's woes was the fact that the McPherson family sought to involve Miscavige personally in litigation. In December 1999, the family's lawyer, Ken Dandar, succeeded in adding Miscavige's name to the list of defendants and accused him of personally directing the Flag staff on how to treat Lisa McPherson, including having her "imprisoned" at the Fort Harrison for seventeen days.

The Church of Scientology had already spent millions of dollars fighting the Lisa McPherson case. While the attorneys filed motions and debated the case on constitutional grounds, David Miscavige pored over medical books and journals, trying to figure out how to counter the coroner's evidence. "That's when Dave learned how to use the Internet," joked the former Sea Org member Marc Headley, who was also at Flag during this period. "They had hundreds and hundreds of files, and medical books, and he was reading everything he could find."

With its long list of medical experts expanding by the day, the church produced thousands of pages of documentation refuting the coroner's evidence. Reports were produced questioning the quality of the coroner's lab equipment, stating that some of the tests on Lisa's body had been botched and that evidence had ultimately been contaminated. As their coup de grâce, church lawyers produced the sworn testimony of Dr. Robert Davis, the assistant coroner who had done the original autopsy on McPherson. He had since left his job at the Pinellas-Pasco County Medical Examiner's Office after falling out with Dr. Wood, and, after being contacted by the Church of Scientology and one of its investigators, now said that he "strongly disagreed" with virtually all of Wood's findings.
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Finally, the matter came down to a specific protein, known as ketone, which is usually found in someone who is severely malnourished and dehydrated. Wood's autopsy report found no evidence of ketones in Lisa's body, and Scientology's experts seized upon this as indicative that Lisa may not have been as "severely dehydrated" as Wood maintained. In February 2000, with Scientology's own toxicologist, Dr. Frederic Rieders, another former member of the O. J. Simpson defense team, standing by, Wood retested Lisa's bodily fluids and found ketones, once again, to be absent.

Shaken, Wood e-mailed a colleague, Dr. Jay Whitworth, begging for help. "URGENT!!!!!!!" she wrote in the subject line. "Life and career at stake!" She wrote, "Please don't let me down ... I will do whatever is right, but if we are vulnerable because [we] cannot explain absence of ketones, I will have to back down."

Wood had dug herself into a serious predicament by insisting that Lisa had been comatose prior to her death. Other medical experts hired by the prosecution posited a slightly less extreme theory: that Lisa had been unresponsive, though not truly comatose, thus leaving open the possibility that she might have received some form of nutrition, which would have explained why the ketone protein was missing. But with this one forensic declaration, Wood was cornered, and she knew it. And it would prove to be her undoing.

On February 23, 2000, Dr. Joan Wood, emotionally exhausted after being deluged with what some associates recalled as more than six thousand pages of contravening evidence provided by the Church of Scientology's experts, amended Lisa McPherson's death certificate. She continued to assert that Lisa had died of a blood clot in the lung. But her death, Wood now maintained, had been "accidental"—there was no mention of bed rest and severe dehydration as causes. Instead, Wood suggested, just as Scientology's experts had asserted, that the clot had originated from a bruise on Lisa's left leg. She listed "psychosis" and "history of a car accident" as factors in her death.

Scientology quickly moved to have the charges dismissed. "If that death certificate, as it exists now, had been issued originally, there wouldn't even have been an investigation, let alone charges," the church spokesman Mike Rinder stated. "Nobody investigates a pulmonary embolism that comes about as a result of an accident."

Over the next several months, McCabe's deputy, the prosecutor Doug Crow, reviewed all of the evidence supporting the criminal charges. He also questioned Dr. Wood as to why she had altered her findings. Wood, said Crow, offered no plausible explanation. She had been a close friend of his for twenty-five years; Crow stated that her "inability to coherently explain her decision even under benign questioning by me is completely perplexing."

Wood's equivocation, and what Crow called the "very real possibility"
that the cause of death originally listed by the medical examiner was incorrect, led the assistant state's attorney to conclude that her testimony could not be presented at trial. Without it, all the state had to go on was the testimony and notes of Lisa's caretakers. And the notes were incomplete. "The likelihood that these witnesses would still be available to us was something we couldn't control," Crow said. These and other "existing problems with the case" led Crow to an inevitable conclusion that the state could no longer pursue the prosecution.

On June 12, 2000, the state of Florida, unable "to prove critical forensic and causation issues beyond and to the exclusion of reasonable doubt,"
dropped all criminal charges against the Church of Scientology. As for Dr. Joan Wood, the case had "taken a toll far greater than anything else in my life,"
she told the press. On June 30, 2000, Wood resigned. She was later checked into Morton Plant Hospital after suffering a nervous breakdown. To this day she has never commented about the McPherson case or the rationale behind her amended decision.

Almost a year after the criminal charges were dropped, in April 2001, a Scientologist from Chicago named Greg Bashaw wrote a strongly worded letter to Flag's Captain Debbie Cook, complaining of treatment he'd received at Flag the previous fall. A Scientologist for more than twenty years, and an OT 7, Bashaw, a former vice president of the Leo Burnett advertising agency, had suffered a psychotic break during a "review session" with a Scientology auditor on October 31, 2000. Bashaw told his auditor and his case supervisor, expecting help; to his shock, he was told to pack his bags and was promptly sent home.

Initially, Bashaw blamed himself for his instability, just as Lisa McPherson had: the technology was fine, he believed; he just hadn't been in the right state to receive it. But he also considered the facts: he had gone to Flag for what he believed would be a routine "refresher" but had been kept there for two months; upon his return to Chicago, he'd lost his job. Now, having spent even his retirement funds to pay for Scientology services, he was facing bankruptcy. The church offered no assistance
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other than to suggest he visit a doctor to find a physical cause for his problems—to his horror, his case supervisor had recommended Bashaw try "pep drinks"
to restore his lost vitality. Finally, upon his family's urging, Bashaw had sought help in exactly the place Scientology warned against: the psychiatric ward of his local hospital. But that too had proved ineffective. What had been "broken" at Flag, Bashaw was convinced, could only be fixed there, so he was doomed: the organization had kicked him out.

"I understand the need for the organization to protect itself," Bashaw wrote to Cook. "If someone falls into psychosis during his services, Flag is worried about lawsuits, about its responsibilities, about more situations like the one with Lisa McPherson ... But I was completely abandoned in my time of most urgent need. I did not come to Flag in psychosis ... I got
into
the psychosis at Flag." As a result, he said, "I am now the worst state I have been in my entire life."