Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [130]
With these threats purveyed, on January 22, 1999, David Miscavige once again approached McCabe with an offer to "bring a peaceful resolution to the charges your office has brought against my religion."
McCabe again rejected Miscavige's plea. If the Church of Scientology was seriously interested in reforms, he noted, then why had it not instituted any in the three years since Lisa's death?
The state of Florida's case against the Church of Scientology continued for the next year. During that period, recalled Tom De Vocht, Miscavige "worked day and night" to defeat the prosecution, meeting with church attorneys week after week to debate or redirect strategy. A trial was set for March 2000.
Meanwhile, the civil suit ground on at a steady pace. Compounding Miscavige's woes was the fact that the McPherson family sought to involve Miscavige personally in litigation. In December 1999, the family's lawyer, Ken Dandar, succeeded in adding Miscavige's name to the list of defendants and accused him of personally directing the Flag staff on how to treat Lisa McPherson, including having her "imprisoned" at the Fort Harrison for seventeen days.
The Church of Scientology had already spent millions of dollars fighting the Lisa McPherson case. While the attorneys filed motions and debated the case on constitutional grounds, David Miscavige pored over medical books and journals, trying to figure out how to counter the coroner's evidence. "That's when Dave learned how to use the Internet," joked the former Sea Org member Marc Headley, who was also at Flag during this period. "They had hundreds and hundreds of files, and medical books, and he was reading everything he could find."
With its long list of medical experts expanding by the day, the church produced thousands of pages of documentation refuting the coroner's evidence. Reports were produced questioning the quality of the coroner's lab equipment, stating that some of the tests on Lisa's body had been botched and that evidence had ultimately been contaminated. As their coup de grâce, church lawyers produced the sworn testimony of Dr. Robert Davis, the assistant coroner who had done the original autopsy on McPherson. He had since left his job at the Pinellas-Pasco County Medical Examiner's Office after falling out with Dr. Wood, and, after being contacted by the Church of Scientology and one of its investigators, now said that he "strongly disagreed" with virtually all of Wood's findings.*
Finally, the matter came down to a specific protein, known as ketone, which is usually found in someone who is severely malnourished and dehydrated. Wood's autopsy report found no evidence of ketones in Lisa's body, and Scientology's experts seized upon this as indicative that Lisa may not have been as "severely dehydrated" as Wood maintained. In February 2000, with Scientology's own toxicologist, Dr. Frederic Rieders, another former member of the O. J. Simpson defense team, standing by, Wood retested Lisa's bodily fluids and found ketones, once again, to be absent.
Shaken, Wood e-mailed a colleague, Dr. Jay Whitworth, begging for help. "URGENT!!!!!!!" she wrote in the subject line. "Life and career at stake!" She wrote, "Please don't let me down ... I will do whatever is right, but if we are vulnerable because [we] cannot explain absence of ketones, I will have to back down."
Wood had dug herself into a serious predicament by insisting that Lisa had been comatose prior to her death. Other medical experts hired by the prosecution posited a slightly less extreme theory: that Lisa had been unresponsive, though not truly comatose, thus leaving open the possibility that she might have received some form of nutrition, which would have explained why the ketone protein was missing. But with this one forensic declaration, Wood was cornered, and she knew it. And it would prove to be her undoing.
On February 23, 2000, Dr. Joan Wood, emotionally exhausted after being deluged with what some associates recalled as more than six thousand pages of contravening evidence provided by the Church