Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [122]
So she told what L. Ron Hubbard called an "acceptable truth." Lisa had fallen sick at work, Slaughter explained to Fannie. She'd begun feeling ill around noon and then "just kept getting sicker and sicker" until they finally took her to a hospital. By then, said Slaughter, it was too late. The doctor concluded she'd had "fast-acting meningitis."
"I just fell to pieces," Fannie later told police.
Slaughter also told Fannie that Lisa had wanted to be cremated. In her shock and grief Lisa's mother agreed, though she later "regretted it a million times," said Fannie's sister, Ann Carlson. "Bennetta had said it was her last wish. Well, I don't know why a thirty-six-year-old girl would be discussing cremation and her death, you know? Why would she be?"
At Lisa's memorial service on December 11, 1995, Dallas's Restland Memorial Funeral Home was "filled with Scientology people that we'd never seen before," said Carlson. Some had come from Clearwater, and arrived in a white limousine. They hovered over the family "like vultures," another one of Fannie's sisters, Dell Liebreich, later told the police. "They didn't talk too much, [but] every time we would try to talk to each other or anybody, they were just ... listening." The Scientologists even followed them into the restroom, she said.
Fannie's sister Ann, who was seventy-six years old, had always felt there was something strange about these Scientologists. Now she was sure of it. The way they lingered was unnerving, but there was more to it than just that, Carlson believed. Lisa had died on the evening of December 5, 1995; Fannie wasn't told until the middle of the next afternoon. Why had Bennetta Slaughter waited so long to call her? And had Lisa really been at her office when she got sick? Slaughter said yes. But when Carlson asked Brenda Hubert, she said that Lisa had been at a seminar in Orlando. A third Scientologist friend later told Carlson that Lisa had gotten sick at her apartment. Who had taken Lisa to the hospital? "An acquaintance," the family was told. Which acquaintance? No one would say.
On December 16, 1995, ten days after Lisa's death, Fannie McPherson and her sisters Ann and Dell flew to Tampa and arrived, unannounced, in Clearwater. As they pulled up to Lisa's apartment on Osceola Avenue, Lisa's roommate, Gloria Cruz, rushed out to greet them. "Hi, Fannie!" she said.
"How she knew us I'll never know," said Carlson. Neither Fannie nor her sisters had ever met Cruz, who did not go to the memorial service in Texas. The women had taken pains not to tell Bennetta Slaughter or anyone else in Clearwater that they were coming. Yet Cruz seemed to be waiting for them.
Cruz and several friends were carting out boxes from the apartment. She was moving, Cruz told the women from Texas. And she, or someone, the women thought, seemed to have taken whatever they wanted.* Lisa's stereo was gone, as were her television, answering machine, telephone, and plants. Fannie looked in vain for Lisa's jewelry, but that was missing too. "I had given her a little diamond ring that she treasured very much; I didn't get that. Her daddy's wedding band she wore on her right hand, I didn't get." The expensive clothes that Lisa wore—silk pajamas, designer jeans, dresses from Neiman Marcus—all gone. "We saw one roll of toilet tissue, a newspaper laying on the floor, and a roll of paper towels on the sink," said Carlson.
Lisa's bank statements and laptop computer were also missing. But one box, tucked inside a hall closet, had been overlooked. Inside, Carlson found Lisa's diaries, her 1994 tax return, and the police report from the accident on November 18.* This was the first the women knew of Lisa's accident. On the report was the phone number of the driver of the vehicle that Lisa had rear-ended, a local mechanic named Joe McDonald. Carlson called him.
McDonald told the women a variation of the story that the paramedic Bonnie Portolano later told police. Fannie was beside herself.