Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [109]
The confessions were exhausting. And yet, in letters to her friend Robin, she tried to be upbeat about the process, talking about her "cognitions" and "gains." Lisa expressed the same enthusiasm during a phone call she made to her friend Carol Hawk. "The conversation was a little different than our usual talks," Hawk recalled. "Lisa and I [generally] talked about things that were going on in our lives. She usually talked about Scientology only in terms of how she might respond to a particular situation or person and rarely pushed regarding the 'technology' of Scientology." But during this conversation, Hawk said, "she made a little speech about how 'great the tech was' and how every day she woke up 'wonderfully happy and ready to play.' She 'had never experienced anything like it,' and 'couldn't say enough good about the tech' ... I remember thinking she was a commercial for Scientology."
That was the last time Hawk talked to Lisa. Not long after, Lisa called another childhood friend, Kellie Davis, and apologized for having been out of touch for so many years. Davis had the impression that Lisa was going to leave Scientology. "She said she couldn't get into it over the phone but she said she had a lot to talk about,'' Davis later told the Tampa Tribune. "She said she would explain when she got here.'' Lisa told Davis that she was hoping to return to Dallas for Thanksgiving, but one way or another, she would be home, possibly for good, by Christmas. "She had made the decision to get out and come back here and she seemed happy," Davis said.
But on the phone with her mother a few weeks before Thanksgiving, Lisa sounded ragged. She was having trouble at work, she told Fannie, and cried. "Mother, I've let my group down," she said. "And that was the last time I talked to her," said Fannie.
The ethics handling that Lisa was receiving during this time was the very same method that had driven her to a breakdown just a few months before. "It was therefore extremely foreseeable," as Ken Dandar, an attorney for the McPherson family, later asserted, "that given Lisa McPherson's prior experience of being psychotic in June of 1995, coupled with her troubles in taking Scientology instruction, she would very likely experience another psychotic episode."
And she did. On November 15, 1995, Lisa was sent to a trade show in Orlando with several AMC colleagues. She packed numerous books by Hubbard that she hoped would help her with her job. But even before they left, Brenda Hubert, who was managing AMC's role in the trade show, found Lisa to be unusually disorganized. "She was very frantic," Hubert wrote in a subsequent memo to church officials. "She talked constantly and couldn't recall what she had just said." When they got to the convention, she began "disseminating" to total strangers, accosting a waiter at a local café and then another one later that night at the hotel restaurant, demanding that they read Dianetics—right that minute.
By the second day of the conference, Lisa had become more desperate. That night, Hubert awoke at 3 A.M. to find Lisa pinned on top of her. She was sobbing hysterically. "Get up!" Lisa said. "There's something going on on this planet that you don't know!"
Hubert tried to calm her, but it was useless. Lisa seemed disoriented. She was ranting, saying, "I'm afraid I'm going to flip out again like I did before." The next day, Lisa was sent back to Clearwater under Brenda Hubert's care.
At Bennetta Slaughter's request, Hubert wrote a lengthy memo detailing what had happened during the trade show. In this letter, Hubert noted that Lisa's ethics officer, Katie Chamberlain, had instructed