Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [126]
A devout Catholic himself, Strope took deep offense at the comparison between his church and the Church of Scientology. "This is about Lisa, not about the Church of Scientology," he said.
"We'll go all the way to the Supreme Court before we turn over any of those files voluntarily," said Weinberg. "If you want them, file a subpoena."
So the detectives filed subpoenas. The documents arrived with pages missing; some of the most crucial data, the caretaker logs from the last fifty-three hours of Lisa's life, never materialized at all. "We have given the police everything we have," Weinberg told a Tampa Bay news channel in July 1997. The missing files, he said, had simply vanished.*
The church was no more cooperative when it came to turning over witnesses. Virtually every person the police sought was represented by counsel, many of them former prosecutors like Weinberg, who refused to allow the detectives access to their clients without a subpoena. Ultimately, twenty-six individual attorneys, hired by Morris Weinberg and the Church of Scientology, represented some fifty to sixty witnesses, ranging from church janitors to Lisa's caretakers to Bennetta Slaughter and her employees at AMC.
In exchange for their sworn testimony, close to forty of these witnesses were given immunity. "We really argued against that," said Strope, "but if we didn't give it to them, the lawyers and their clients would get up and walk right out of the room."
In addition to this obfuscation, the church attempted to block and intimidate the police in other ways. Detective Andrews noticed unmarked cars parked across the street from his house, and had once or twice found a man rifling through his trash. His sixteen-year-old daughter told him that a man she'd never seen before had followed her to school.
Strope too found a man sorting through his trash. Then his son, a fifth-grader, began receiving Scientology literature addressed to him at his private Catholic school. Unmarked cars began to follow Strope as he drove around the city. The hardened cop began to wear his gun more prominently, check his rearview mirror, and take alternate routes home at night. "Let me tell you something," Strope says. "I know the streets, I've worked organized crime cases, biker gangs—but I worried less about them than I did about the Scientologists."
But the police were undeterred. At the end of November 1997, Strope and Andrews concluded their investigation. The Church of Scientology, they found, had been the sole caregiver to Lisa McPherson, and Alain Kartuzinski and, notably, the two doctors, Johnson and Arrunada—who "did little more than merely observe as Lisa's health deteriorated during her watch"—were, through their failure to act, culpable in her death.
On December 5, 1997, two years to the day from Lisa's death, the Clearwater police and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement submitted their findings to the state prosecutor. They recommended that Janis Johnson and Laura Arrunada be charged with practicing medicine without a license, and all three primary caregivers, including Alain Kartuzinski, be charged with manslaughter.
Shortly after the FDLE launched their investigation in early 1997, Marty Rathbun met with Church of Scientology staffers at the Office of Special Affairs headquarters on Sunset Boulevard. There they reviewed the caretakers' logs of Lisa's seventeen days at the Fort Harrison. The logs painted a devastating portrait—particularly those