Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [120]
Knapmeyer did as he was told. At the same time, another group of Messengers whom Knapmeyer knew were cleaning out Lisa McPherson's room. Knapmeyer combed every inch of Johnson's office for incriminating evidence, dumping everything he found in a large trash bag. Finally, he gave the bag to another Commodore's Messenger, who put it in the back of a blue Honda Civic and drove away. By morning, the police would arrive at the Fort Harrison.
***
Brian Anderson, the head of the Office of Special Affairs at Flag, was in a panic from the moment he received the call from Janis Johnson, still at the hospital in New Port Richey. The woman who'd been isolated in room 174 was dead, she informed him.
Johnson admitted the truth. "She seemed a lot worse when I saw her earlier tonight, and so we took her to the hospital and ... I'm not really sure what happened."
"What do you mean, you're not sure?" Anderson was livid. He'd known that Lisa McPherson was being treated at the Fort Harrison and asked Paul Kellerhals, the chief of security, for frequent updates on her condition. Recently, his deputies had reported that Lisa seemed to be getting better.
By midnight, all of the base's top executives had gathered in Anderson's office on the second floor of the West Coast Building, including the representative from the RTC. Many of the people gathered in Anderson's office were aware of David Miscavige's personal involvement in Lisa's auditing progress during the fall of 1995. Some aides maintained that, though Miscavige had returned to California by the time Lisa was brought to the Fort Harrison, he continued to monitor her situation through his RTC surrogates in Clearwater, who sent him regular reports. "You have to understand how controlling Dave Miscavige is, and how big a deal this was," said Tom De Vocht. How had Lisa broken down after going Clear? Though Alain Kartuzinski was ostensibly in charge of Lisa's care, De Vocht described him as "Miscavige's fall guy. All the direction came from RTC, and I can guarantee you the attitude was, 'we're handling this, not you.' The people who were on the ground were freaked out by the idea of Dave Miscavige getting upset, and they mishandled the situation. But they were under the threat of God from Dave."
Over the next several hours, Marcus Quirino, Flag's deputy chief officer, and Paul Kellerhals rounded up the caretakers and interviewed them. From these debriefing sessions and individual reports the caretakers were asked to write up, Quirino constructed a detailed memo summarizing the last seventeen days of Lisa's life. He gave it to Anderson, along with the caretakers' handwritten recollections.*
While this was going on, Flag's highest-ranking official, Debbie Cook, phoned Bennetta Slaughter, often listed as Lisa's "next of kin" on official papers, and broke the news that Lisa was dead.
Slaughter had known that Lisa was in the Fort Harrison since the day of her accident. In an interview with police, Slaughter later admitted that she'd found out about the accident when she drove by in her car and saw Lisa's Jeep parked by the side of the road. When Slaughter asked where Lisa was, a police officer told her that she'd been taken to the hospital. Slaughter decided not to go. "I was covered in paint from head to foot because I'd been