Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [119]
Arrunada was nonetheless concerned, and at six o'clock that evening, she called Johnson and told her that Lisa needed medical attention.
At approximately 7 P.M., Dr. David Minkoff received yet another call from Johnson about Lisa McPherson. The girl for whom he had written the prescription, she said, was suffering from acute diarrhea, had lost an extreme amount of weight, and also complained of a sore throat. Johnson thought Lisa had strep and requested penicillin. This time, Minkoff refused to call in a prescription.
"If she's sick enough to need an injection, then she needs to be seen by a doctor," he said. And if she were seriously ill, they shouldn't bring Lisa to him, but to a closer hospital like Morton Plant.
"No, she's not that sick," Johnson assured him. She told Minkoff they'd be there within the hour.
Soon after, Paul Greenwood, a Flag security officer, was dispatched to room 174. With Janis Johnson and Laura Arrunada assisting, Greenwood put Lisa in a van. Johnson got behind the wheel and drove north, past Morton Plant Hospital, where she and the others dared not stop, fearing the doctors might call the psychiatrists. They drove past several other hospitals as well, bound for Minkoff's facility, the Columbia HCA Hospital in New Port Richey, about forty-five minutes away. No one spoke. "When someone is sick or injured you don't talk around them because it puts impressions in the mind which create things ... later on," said Greenwood.
Johnson later said she heard Lisa's breath become labored, then grow faint. Sitting with her in the back of the van, Greenwood monitored Lisa's pulse. It slowly dwindled. Then Greenwood couldn't feel it anymore.
At approximately 9:30 that evening, Dr. David Minkoff was just finishing his shift when he heard the doors to the Columbia New Port Richey Hospital's emergency room swing open and an orderly cry out for help. A disheveled-looking woman, draped awkwardly over a wheelchair, was wheeled into the trauma room. She was drastically, almost skeletally thin; her skin was papery, had a grayish pallor, and was marked with small dark brown lesions. One emergency room nurse, shocked by the woman's emaciated state, concluded that she must have AIDS; another, noting the multiple bruises and lesions on her body, wondered if she might have an infectious disease such as Ebola. To Minkoff, it looked like a classic picture of "meningococcemia," a devastating bacterial infection that can cause inflammation of blood vessels, organ failure, and meningitis.
Lisa McPherson, the robust, five foot nine woman described as "voluptuous" by the paramedic Bonnie Portolano, was dead. Her arms and legs were covered with bruises, she had scrapes on her face, and her weight had dwindled to an emaciated 108 pounds. She was also dirty—a nurse later said she wondered if Lisa had been abused. "I was appalled," Minkoff later told police. After trying to revive Lisa to no avail, Minkoff confronted Janis Johnson in the waiting area. "What did you bring me?" he said. "What did you do?"
At least one other person at the Columbia HCA Hospital wondered the same thing. That night, the head ER nurse at the Columbia Hospital, Barbara Schmid, alarmed by the condition of Lisa's body, called the local authorities. By the next morning, a "suspicious death" investigation would be officially launched by the Clearwater Police Department on the matter of Lisa McPherson.
Chapter 12
The Greatest Good
GET THE FUCK over here." Tom De Vocht, commanding officer of the Commodore's Messenger Organization in Clearwater, barked into the phone at his twenty-year-old aide, Jason Knapmeyer. It was late in the evening of December 5, 1995, and De Vocht was calling from his office in the West Coast Building, on Fort Harrison