Death in slow motion: Part 2 of 3 in a special report on the Church of Scientology
By Thomas C. Tobin and Joe Childs, Times Staff Writers
In Print: Monday, June 22, 2009
St. Petersburg Times
The night after Lisa McPherson died, the leader of the Church of Scientology sent word for one of his top lieutenants to wait by a pay phone at the Holiday Inn Surfside on Clearwater Beach.
When Marty Rathbun answered the ringing phone in the lobby, David Miscavige let him have it:
Why aren’t you all over this mess? The police are poking around. Do something.
“Yes sir,” Rathbun said.
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Rathbun and others say Miscavige was in Clearwater in 1995 to launch “The Golden Age of Tech,” an initiative aimed at raising the quality and precision of auditing at Scientology’s mecca.
Rathbun said he was assigned to help. Miscavige would look in on parishioner auditing sessions from a control room with video feeds from multiple counseling rooms.
One of the parishioners was Lisa McPherson.
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He said
he saw Miscavige view McPherson’s auditing sessions through a video feed and write notations in her counseling folder.
“I watched him personally,” De Vocht said. “A whole bunch of people watched him personally.”
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Three entries particularly troubled Rathbun.
One contained a bizarre sexual reference McPherson had made. Another revealed that no one thought to remove the mirror from the room of a psychotic woman bent on harming herself. The third was one caretaker’s opinion that
the situation was out of control and that McPherson needed to see a doctor.
Rathbun concluded the notes had to go.
“I said, ‘Lose ’em’ and walked out of the room,” he recalled, adding that the decision to destroy the records was his own.
“Nobody told me to do it and I did it,” he said. “The truth is the truth and right now I’m going to confession, and I really think it’s something that hurt the church more than it hurt the people that were trying to get recompense.
“But it is what it is, and I know it could potentially be a crime.”
In a recent interview, State Attorney Bernie McCabe said it was clear the records were missing because the church handed over entries for every day of McPherson’s stay except the final two before she died.
That the church appeared to be hiding something only fed McCabe’s sense that something was amiss.
Prosecuting Rathbun is not an option, because the time to bring destruction of evidence charges expires after three years, McCabe said. “We’re done.’’
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Scientology spent millions of dollars, and church lawyers filed thousands of pages of medical studies and consultant reports that said McPherson’s care at the Fort Harrison could not have caused her death.
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Among the details that emerged: In McPherson’s last five years, she had spent at least $176,700 on Scientology services and had $5,773 in the account she kept at the church. She died with $11 in her savings account.
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