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.*
As a result, Strope and Andrews were left with a small and largely inconclusive investigative file and numerous statements from church officials that Lisa was a hotel guest who "suddenly took ill." But the postmortem photographs of Lisa suggested a much different story. They were gruesome, showing Lisa's starved-looking, hollow face, cracked lips, and arms and legs scarred by abrasions and what looked to the coroner to be cockroach bites. Her neck, shoulders, and upper back were red and blotchy, as if she'd been hit or struck. She had several large bruises on her leg. "There's not a jury in the world who won't look at this and say someone is guilty of something," Strope thought.
The Pinellas-Pasco County medical examiner, Dr. Joan Wood, felt similarly. Due to the typical sl
ow pace of a metropolitan area coroner's office, Lisa's autopsy had taken several months to complete. Most of it had been conducted by Dr. Robert Davis, the associate medical examiner for Pinellas-Pasco County, though Wood had weighed in early, and also toward the end, concluding that Lisa's embolism had been caused by "bed rest and severe dehydration." On January 14, 1996, a week or so after the FDLE formally joined the investigation, Wood, a longtime friend of Strope's, asked him to come down to her office. Having served as the county medical examiner for twenty-two years, the fifty-year-old Wood was bothered by what she saw as a Scientology-orchestrated "campaign of misinformation" about McPherson. In numerous media accounts, the church maintained that Lisa died from a fast-moving staph infection and had been fully conscious, even talking, when the decision was made to take her to the hospital. Seeing Dr. Minkoff in New Port Richey was her idea, church officials explained. "Lisa at first didn't want to see a doctor, but we talked her into seeing a doctor," the Scientology spokesman Brian Anderson told the media. "She knew Dr. Minkoff and he is an expert in infectious diseases, so that's why she was taken there.''
That was simply impossible, said Wood. Lisa's autopsy results showed that she been so dehydrated, she may have been without fluids for five to ten days. She was almost certainly comatose for a day or two before her death, the coroner said. This was not a sudden death, but rather a chronic decline—for a week, said Wood, it would have been obvious that Lisa needed help. That no one had called 911 was negligent to such an extreme that Wood thought Lisa's death a homicide.
Going public with these concerns would certainly kick the investigation into higher gear; it would also no doubt anger the Pinellas-Pasco state attorney, Bernie McCabe, by putting pressure on him to bring charges against the Church of Scientology. McCabe's office had agreed to assist the police and the FDLE in their investigation, but Strope and Wood knew there wasn't a prosecutor in Pinellas County eager to take on the church in court. Wood, described by the local press as a "plainspoken" medical examiner, had never been shy about voicing her opinions.
"I'm thinking of issuing a press release," Wood told Strope. "I'm not sure if that's the right thing to do."
Strope told Wood to trust her instincts.
On January 21, 1997, Wood appeared on Inside Edition and later spoke to several newspapers, maintaining that Lisa McPherson had not died a natural death. "This is the most severe case of dehydration I've ever seen," she said.
In most homicide cases, compiling a list of witnesses poses more challenges to police than getting those witnesses to talk. In the Lisa McPherson case, Strope and Andrews quickly assembled a full list of Lisa's friends and co-workers, as well as the church staffers and officials who'd seen her in the last weeks of her life. But getting access to these people was daunting.
No one they sought to speak with at the Fort Harrison was "available," the detectives were told. The same was true at the Hacienda Gardens apartment complex, where Strope and Andrews, hoping to talk with Janis Johnson and other residents, knocked on several doors, receiving no reply. A few days later, they returned to the Hacienda to find eight-foot-tall wrought iron gates behind the manicured hedges. The fencing had gone up in less than a week. There were also security guards posted at the entrance to the complex. "That's when we realized this wasn't going to be easy," said Strope.
Then the detectives began hearing from lawyers. The first was Morris "Sandy" Weinberg, an ex-federal prosecutor now representing the church, who paid a special visit to police headquarters to inform the detectives that the Church of Scientology was a "new church" run by "new people" and was perfectly willing to assist with the investigation. But Weinberg refused to hand over many of the files, notably Lisa's auditing folders, which police requested. Scientology was a religion, he explained; anything that Lisa said or did in the church, including records of her financial donations, were private religious documents, protected by "priest-penitent privilege." Would they ask a Catholic priest to reveal the confessions of one of his parishioners?
A devout Catholic himself, Strope took deep offense at the comparison between his church and the Church of Scientology. "This is about Lisa, not about the Church of Scientology," he said.
"We'll go all the way to the Supreme Court before we turn over any of those files voluntarily," said Weinberg. "If you want them, file a subpoena."
So the detectives filed subpoenas. The documents arrived with pages missing; some of the most crucial data, the caretaker logs from the last fifty-three hours of Lisa's life, never materialized at all. "We have given the police everything we have," Weinberg told a Tampa Bay news channel in July 1997. The missing files, he said, had simply vanished.*
The church was no more cooperative when it came to turning over witnesses. Virtually every person the police sought was represented by counsel, many of them former prosecutors like Weinberg, who refused to allow the detectives access to their clients without a subpoena. Ultimately, twenty-six individual attorneys, hired by Morris Weinberg and the Church of Scientology, represented some fifty to sixty witnesses, ranging from church janitors to Lisa's caretakers to Bennetta Slaughter and her employees at AMC.
In exchange for their sworn testimony, close to forty of these witnesses were given immunity. "We really argued against that," said Strope, "but if we didn't give it to them, the lawyers and their clients would get up and walk right out of the room."
In addition to this obfuscation, the church attempted to block and intimidate the police in other ways. Detective Andrews noticed unmarked cars parked across the street from his house, and had once or twice found a man rifling through his trash. His sixteen-year-old daughter told him that a man she'd never seen before had followed her to school.
Strope too found a man sorting through his trash. Then his son, a fifth-grader, began receiving Scientology literature addressed to him at his private Catholic school. Unmarked cars began to follow Strope as he drove around the city. The hardened cop began to wear his gun more prominently, check his rearview mirror, and take alternate routes home at night. "Let me tell you something," Strope says. "I know the streets, I've worked organized crime cases, biker gangs—but I worried less about them than I did about the Scientologists."
But the police were undeterred. At the end of November 1997, Strope and Andrews concluded their investigation. The Church of Scientology, they found, had been the sole caregiver to Lisa McPherson, and Alain Kartuzinski and, notably, the two doctors, Johnson and Arrunada—who "did little more than merely observe as Lisa's health deteriorated during her watch"—were, through their failure to act, culpable in her death.
On December 5, 1997, two years to the day from Lisa's death, the Clearwater police and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement submitted their findings to the state prosecutor. They recommended that Janis Johnson and Laura Arrunada be charged with practicing medicine without a license, and all three primary caregivers, including Alain Kartuzinski, be charged with manslaughter.
Shortly after the FDLE launched their investigation in early 1997, Marty Rathbun met with Church of Scientology staffers at the Office of Special Affairs headquarters on Sunset Boulevard. There they reviewed the caretakers' logs of Lisa's seventeen days at the Fort Harrison. The logs painted a devastating portrait—particularly those written during Lisa's final two days. One log contained a caretaker's recommendation that Lisa be taken to a doctor. It was a recommendation that Rathbun knew had been ignored until the very last minutes of her life.
"If it isn't written, it isn't true," L. Ron Hubbard had always told his followers.
Rathbun gathered the three or four most incriminating logs. "Lose 'em," he said to an aide. Then he walked out of the room.*
From the day after the Tampa Tribune ran its first December 1996 story on the case, the Church of Scientology went on the attack, using every technique in Hubbard's arsenal. Its officials accused the Clearwater police of harassment and religious discrimination and insisted that the rigorous coverage of the case in the St. Peters
burg Times was meant to "forward an agenda of hate." They also accused Dr. Joan Wood of "lying" on Lisa's autopsy report and then sued for her medical records. After a Pinellas County circuit judge allowed the church to see five pages of Wood's records, Scientology hired its own forensics experts to review her findings.
Agents Strope and Andrews, in the meantime, continued to assist the state attorney as he debated whether to bring criminal charges. The investigators and attorneys knew that the Church of Scientology would view that as a declaration of war. It might also prove difficult to refute the church's experts, which soon included such luminaries as Dr. Michael Baden, the former chief medical examiner for New York City and a former member of the O. J. Simpson defense team. With a seemingly bottomless war chest, the church apparently had no problem paying Baden, who'd testified during the Simpson trial that he customarily worked for $2,000 to $3,000 per day.†
These were the challenges facing the state. Complicating matters for the church was a civil suit filed in February 1997 by Lisa McPherson's family, charging the Church of Scientology with wrongful death. The church's Los Angeles–based lawyer, Elliot Abelson, called the suit "an extortion attempt" and maintained that Lisa would be outraged by the actions being taken in her name. "Lisa McPherson loved the church, and the church loved Lisa," he said.
But the McPhersons' trial lawyer, Kennan Dandar, sued for access to church documents, and soon Scientology's sanitized version of events—Abelson long argued that Lisa had luxuriated in four-star comfort during her stay at the Fort Harrison—began to wear thin. In July 1997, a Florida court ordered the church to release the caretaker logs, which, save the few that Rathbun had ordered destroyed, were intact, amounting to thirty-three pages. Their exposure sent church attorneys scrambling to revise their version of events. Yes, Lisa had been "psychotic," the church admitted; but the Scientologists had done the best they could for her. "What the documents demonstrate are very caring women who went to extraordinary lengths to care for a person who was deeply mentally ill," said the attorney Morris Weinberg. "They knew they could not take her to a psychiatrist because of their religious beliefs ... People weren't trying to hurt her; they were trying to help her."
Inside Scientology Page 27