Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [124]
The FDLE is a small but powerful investigative body whose members often work in tandem with local police forces on major criminal cases. Lee Strope, forty-nine years old, was one of its best agents. Like many investigators, he'd come up from the streets, walking a beat in his native Detroit in the 1970s, then working as an undercover narcotics agent and later as a homicide investigator. He joined the FDLE in 1988, after moving to Florida, and two years later distinguished himself as the lead agent in one of Florida's most notorious and high-profile cases: the August 1990 serial murder and mutilation of five Gainesville college students by an itinerant criminal named Danny Rolling, often known as the "Gainesville Ripper" case. Strope frequently consulted with the Clearwater Police Department, which late in 1996 had assigned one of his golfing buddies, Sergeant Wayne Andrews, to be the lead detective on the McPherson case.
If Strope was new to Scientology, the same was not true for the Clearwater cops. At their headquarters, just around the corner from the Fort Harrison Hotel, the police had amassed nearly a roomful of investigative files on the Church of Scientology, dating back to the late 1970s. Some of the key complaints in those files came from former members, many with a personal ax to grind, though their claims—fraud, intimidation, harsh punishment, even some unreported deaths—made them hard to overlook.
Lisa McPherson was not the first Scientologist to die in Clearwater, nor was she the first to die in the Fort Harrison, as police knew. There had been at least eight cases since the 1980s, including one fifty-one-year-old woman who had gone off her lithium, upon the insistence of church officials, and then drowned after walking, fully clothed, into Clearwater Bay, and a man who'd died of a seizure after replacing his anti-seizure medications with a Scientology-endorsed regimen of vitamins and minerals. But in all of these cases, there had never been sufficient proof of wrongdoing to warrant an arrest, let alone an indictment.
The same had held true with regard to Lisa McPherson. There had been no crime scene. When the police first arrived at the Fort Harrison after Lisa's death, they found room 174 thoroughly cleaned and decorated, with a king-sized bed, a pitcher of water, and a fruit basket in place. "There did not appear to be any clothing, any medications, or other indications that the room had previously been occupied," Detective Ron Sudler had written in his report.
There was also no body—cremation had left the few tissue and fluid samples taken during the autopsy as the only physical evidence—nor were there material witnesses to offer firsthand knowledge of her condition. Lisa's co-workers, roommate, boss, and even Lisa's ex-boyfriend, Kurt Paine, had no idea what had happened to her at the Fort Harrison. Dr. David Minkoff claimed he'd never had anything to do with Lisa's treatment prior to the night she died. Janis Johnson and Alain Kartuzinski had at first told the police they'd barely known Lisa. When they were re-interviewed in the spring of 1996, Johnson admitted she'd seen Lisa but insisted that Lisa had simply been "upset" and was in no way mentally incapable. Kartuzinski said she'd simply been a "regular hotel guest" and he had almost nothing to do with her. The two other witnesses the police had identified, Arrunada and Schnurrenberger, had vanished: the church had told the police they'd left the country, and Scientology, and church officials had no idea how to contact them.*
As a result, Strope and Andrews were left with a small and largely inconclusive investigative file and numerous statements from church officials that Lisa was a hotel guest who "suddenly took ill." But the postmortem photographs of Lisa suggested a much different story. They were gruesome, showing Lisa's starved-looking, hollow face, cracked lips, and arms and legs scarred by abrasions and what looked to the coroner to be cockroach bites. Her