Inside Scientology - Janet Reitman [99]
Lisa, Fannie knew, fervently believed that L. Ron Hubbard was a savior. She wrote letters to the Founder. She referenced Hubbard's sayings on issues ranging from stress at work to more abstract notions such as "truth." Lisa tolerated no dissenting opinions, no criticism. She refused to read the newspapers or watch the news. When, in December 1985, CBS aired an episode of 60 Minutes that presented an investigative report on Scientology, featuring interviews with recent defectors from the church, Lisa said it was "entheta," or harmful to her spiritual well-being, and she declined to watch.
The defectors featured on this broadcast, and in other stories like it, were for the most part people who'd joined Scientology in the 1960s as part of a spiritual quest, as Jeff Hawkins had. Lisa McPherson had come to Scientology out of desperation—she later said she'd joined the church to help her "get loose from the criminal psychotic I was connected to," Don Boss. "I think Lisa saw Scientology as her strength," said Carol Hawk. "She had done well there, she felt better. Whether there were any larger concepts of doing wonderful things for the world, I don't know ... but I know that she felt very strongly that it was what was going to make her whole."
And, by all appearances, it had. Lisa found a community at the Dallas mission, where she began working part-time in 1983, helping administer personality tests and volunteering at church phone drives and fundraising events. In the goal-oriented environment of the organization, Lisa's energy and sales talents were appreciated, and she made scores of new friends, including Bennetta Slaughter, one of the most prominent Scientologists in Dallas.
Slaughter, a tall, handsome woman with a cascade of wavy dark brown hair, had an unmistakable air of power—or what Scientologists call "purpose." She and her husband, a Scientologist and successful businessman named David Slaughter, were partners in a brokerage firm called the Atlantic Financial Mortgage Corporation. Dallas, the center of high-tech industry in Texas, was in the midst of a real estate boom, and the Slaughters by every account made a killing during the mid-1980s. They bought a house in suburban Plano, one of the wealthiest communities in the United States, and became prominent on church boards and committees. Scientology has always moved prominent donors up the spiritual ladder more quickly; the high-status Slaughters rocketed to the top of the Scientology food chain. Before long, they were Operating Thetans.
In 1985, Lisa, eager to "expand and make more money to go up the Bridge," as she put it, quit her job at the phone company and went to work for the Slaughters as a loan officer at Atlantic Financial. There is a certain type of personality that flourishes in sales, and Lisa, charming and well mannered, "aggressive without being obnoxious," as one co-worker put it, possessed it in spades. Soon she was making roughly $70,000 per year.
Lisa had remarried; her husband, Gene Skonetski, was a Scientologist she'd met at the mission. Now they began to acquire the trappings of wealth: a new condo, new furniture, new clothes, a diamond necklace, a new Porsche, a $700 vacuum cleaner. Virtually everything was bought with Lisa's salary, as Gene worked full-time at the Mission of the Southwest as a registrar. "You make almost nothing" in such a job, said Greg Barnes.
By 1986, this arrangement was beginning to cause problems. Gene appeared disinclined to earn a living, yet he was in charge of the couple's finances. Then, at the end of 1987, the Dallas real estate market collapsed because of the savings and loan crisis, and the Slaughters, looking for new opportunity, decided to relocate to the San Francisco Bay area, where real estate values had skyrocketed. Left without a job when the Slaughters departed, Lisa was also $40,000 in debt, having "squandered a lot of my earnings," as she confessed in a church report, while borrowing substantial amounts of money to pay for her auditing.
Usually registrars would pitch a new product