Tomorrow is the day, when exactly five years ago Lisa McPherson tried to flee from the murderous SO. 'Well, I wanted for people to think I was crazy because I need help.' But finally she came under the care of scientology and after two weeks, she died.
How it happened:
At a celebration five years ago on September 7, 1995, she was awarded the certificate for "clear" and she read from a piece of paper, which today is found among police documents, "Being clear is more exciting than anything I've ever experienced.
I am so thrilled about life and living I can hardly stand it!" Not three months later she was dead. A death seen to in room 174 of the Scientology headquarters, the Fort Harrison Hotel in Clearwater.
5 years ago:
The magnificent changes and improvements which Lisa thought she was going to get by obtaining her state of "Clear"
in September had not materialized. Just the opposite, she had several failures, including on the job. She telephoned her mother and told her about them.
By mid-October, as can be seen from the documents, she was assigned a condition of "liability" by Scientology, one step below "non-existence," because of falling statistics.
The official Scientology definition of this circumstance:
"The being has ceased being simply non-existent as a group member and has taken on the color of the enemy." It is a liability, as the groups documents say, to leave such a person unwatched.
Lisa again got counselling from the SO, part of which included an accusation that she had "taken her eyes off the object."
The accusation meant that she could not longer communicate with people in the Scientology manner, nor even with objects, it meant she was looking only inward. Confused, Lisa tried to defend herself from this verdict, because in plain language it meant nothing other than she was insane, that she had become introverted - and the cure she faced was called the "Introspection Rundown."
November 17.: A desperate attempt to flee Lisa tried everything to avoid having to take the route to the Introspection Rundown. She had to obligate herself, through specific actions, to make up for the harm which she allegedly had caused. For Lisa, those actions included having to work from 7 in the morning to 10:30 at night; part of that was to earn money for a Scientology PR operation called "Winter Wonderland" - a sort of Christmas fair for children.
In the event that she held out and did the work, then she would have been able to get back into the group with full rights, after she fulfilled yet another condition: she had to get personal, written agreement from the majority of the Flag Land Scientologists in Clearwater - several thousand - in order to be accepted back into the group.
Was she overworked and overwhelmed in her actions of reconciliation?
Was she exhausted? Would she have stepped on the brakes too late otherwise? She ran into a boat trailer towed by a vehicle which had stopped for another accident. Emergency medical personnel who were already at the site of the accident also looked at the people who were in the smaller car accident.
Everything was taken down by the police. Everything was well monitored. Lisa was not injured. She could drive her car to the side of the road herself, behind the emergency rescue vehicle.
Lisa had already signed the piece of paper for the emergency medical technicians in the ambulance that she had not been injured and did not need First Aid. The medical technicians were getting ready to drive to their next call.
Then Mark Fabyonic looked in his rear-view mirror to see Lisa running up to them, undress and tear the clothes off her body. Bonnie Portolano, a good technician, asked Lisa (I'm quoting from the public record in which the technician was questioned, "'Why did you take off all your clothes, what's wrong?' And she said, 'Well, I wanted for people to think I was crazy because I need help.' And from that point on we talked about help, what had gone wrong for her, and a whole lot of other questions. And her answer was basically, 'I am a bad person.' And I asked her, "Why do you think you're a bad person?" and She said, "Because I found out that I have bad thoughts. I do bad things in my thoughts.' ...."
The SO had found out that she had done something wrong, but she didn't know what it was herself. The medical technician then took Lisa into the ambulance, covered her with a blanket, and went on to sympathetically ask about her problems and continued talking with her.
She reported, "And Lisa said the main reason she had been acting wrongly was that her eyes had turned away from the object. That is a quote, 'I took my eyes off the object.' That appeared to be a really big thing for her."
This Good Samaritan gently kept up the conversation with Lisa. By and large, according to the record, Lisa said she wanted help. She knew she needed to recuperate. She knew that she could not continue as she had. "She said literally, 'I need someone to talk with.' I am a medical technician. I told her that I could not stay with her, but that I could bring her to another place where people would listen to her. 'You can speak with them there. Is that what you want?'" And Lisa said "yes."
Originally she had said something like, "'No, no, I am OK.' But I told her, 'Everything you're saying sounds like there's a lot wrong with you.' And 'It would be good for you to take some time and talk.' Because she said that she wanted to talk, but maybe not an this point in time.
Lisa needed help and we brought her to a hospital where they could check out patients psychologically." When they got to emergency, Bonnie told everything to the nurse who was on duty there.
It appears that Lisa was well taken care of. And so this story could have ended up like the story of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel. But it didn't.
Re-captured - The Introspection Rundown begins A Scientology search party quickly tracked Lisa down and retrieved her, against express medical advice, out of the hospital. That is because the SO claims that it has treatment much better and more effective for people suffering a nervous breakdown than does psychotherapy, specifically, the Introspection Rundown.
In the emergency room, however, the Scientologists said nothing about that treatment, only that Lisa would find rest and recuperation in the Fort Harrison Hotel, the headquarters of the SO in Clearwater, Florida.
When the medical technician Bonnie checked by the hospital a couple of days later to see how Lisa was doing and she found out that the hospital had released Lisa to the custody of the Scientologists, she said, "It seemed to me that she had been sent back to the source of her difficulty.
That is just about the same thing as me bringing a battered wife to the hospital and her husband goes to the emergency room and said, 'Oh no, don't treat her, she is OK, I'll take good care of her and see to it that she is OK.'"
After her release from the hospital, Lisa was given an Introspection Rundown. That is a type of pseudo-therapeutical treatment Hubbard developed for nervous breakdowns. This Introspection RD includes isolating the subject, even if against her will. According to Hubbard, the Introspection RD borders on the miraculous; he said it was the biggest technical breakthrough of 1973.
The first step of the Rundown is "On a person in a psychotic break isolate the person wholly with all attendants completely muzzled (no speech). ...When it is obvious the person is out of his psychosis and up to the responsibility of living with others his isolation is ended."