Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [118]
Vangrondelle told Goldsberry-Weber that she'd written a report. (No log from Vangrondelle was ever found, or included, in the official record.) Other caretakers also grew concerned. Lisa, several noted, had "lost a lot of weight," "looked thin," and her skin had become jaundiced and bruised.*
By the end of November, one caretaker, seventeen-year-old Heather Petzold, was "frantic," as she'd later say. Lisa had by now regressed to an infantile state. She was urinating and defecating on her bed. "I wouldn't say there was any day that she ate sufficiently," she noted; by the first of December, Lisa's caretakers were spoon-feeding her bites of mashed banana, sometimes forcibly opening her mouth.
Petzold had never spoken to any of the other caretakers about her concerns—remarkably, none of Lisa's minders spoke to one another about their experience, despite the fact that several felt so distraught, they cried in Lisa's room. Instead, Petzold sat down and wrote a letter to Alain Kartuzinski, explaining that Lisa was neither eating nor sleeping. "I said, hey, we need to change something," she recalled. Petzold herself didn't know how to handle the situation. "I was there, I was doing the watch [sixteen hours at a time], and I had eight hours to go home, sleep, and come back in. It wasn't like I had an extra hour to figure out what else could be done."
Petzold delivered her report to Kartuzinski's office, as she had been instructed to do. She never received a reply. Later she'd regret that she hadn't said enough. "If I had gone to higher terminals ... if I would have walked to the senior-most terminal there and said, 'Listen.'" But despite misgivings, neither Petzold nor any of the other caretakers took it upon themselves to call a doctor or go to a hospital—as several would later admit, taking that kind of initiative wasn't their job and would have broken with Sea Org protocol. "She had been seen by a doctor in the hospital," Rita Boykin, another minder, later said. "She signed herself out, and she didn't want to be there. She wanted to come back to the church."
In the early hours of Saturday, December 2, Boykin wrote in her log that she had given Lisa four valerian-root capsules, four other herbal sleeping tablets, and approximately six ounces of Cal Mag. At 3 A.M., Lisa was "still awake and talking," she wrote. "She has scratches and abrasions all over her body & on elbows & knees has pressure sores."
By late that night, Boykin wrote, Lisa, who'd tried to stand several times without success, was no longer moving herself, but being "moved" by her caretakers. She also accused her caretakers of being "psychs"—psychiatrists—"or other enemies who wanted to kill her," Boykin said. This psychosis extended into Sunday, December 3.
Boykin made another entry: "4:30 She had about 2½ hours of sound sleep—interspersed with restlessness. At one point it seemed she wanted a sweater on. I put it on her & she thanked me."
This is where the log ends. There are no other records for the remainder of December 3 or for December 4 or 5. However, the caretakers later testified that during those days, Lisa's condition declined dramatically. By the morning of December 5, she was lying in bed and barely moving. "There was one time when she rolled over ... and she fell on the floor," Petzold said. "So I picked her back up and put her back on the bed, of course."
Lisa also wasn't talking much, which Petzold immediately noticed. "Prior [to this] it was like a broken record, just all of the time." Now Lisa was mumbling. "That's when I got pretty worried," Petzold said.
That afternoon, Petzold and Laura Arrunada, the other caretaker, decided to give Lisa a bath. She was too weak to walk to the tub, so the women carried her. As they were putting her in the tub, Lisa's sphincter muscle relaxed. "She shit herself," Laura Arrunada later said.
A relaxed anus is a sign that the body has begun