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."