When McPherson entered room 174, she was a lovely, shapely young woman. She underwent an Introspection Rundown, the same procedure that Hubbard had developed on the Apollo two decades earlier to treat psychotic behavior. It involved placing McPherson in solitary confinement and providing her with water, food, and vitamin supplements. All communication had to be in writing. Instead of calming down, McPherson stopped eating. She screamed, she clawed her attendants, she spoke in gibberish, she fouled herself, she banged her head against the wall. Staff members strapped her down and tried to feed her with a turkey baster.
On December 5, McPherson slipped into a coma. When church members decided to take her to the hospital that night, they bypassed the Morton Plant Hospital, just down the street, where McPherson had originally been seen, and drove her forty-five minutes away, passing four other hospitals, to the Columbia New Port Richey Hospital, where there was a doctor affiliated with the church. The woman they finally wheeled into the emergency room was skeletally thin and covered with scratches, bruises, and dark brown lesions. She was also dead. She had suffered a pulmonary embolism on the way to the hospital. In the eyes of the world press, Scientology had murdered Lisa McPherson. She was one of nine Scientologists who had died under mysterious circumstances at the Clearwater facility.
The night after McPherson died, Rathbun got word from church officials to wait for a call at a pay phone at a nearby Holiday Inn. “Why aren’t you all over this mess?” Miscavige demanded, when Rathbun answered the call. “The police are poking around. Do something.”
Rathbun discovered that church officials in Clearwater had already lied in two sworn statements to the police, claiming that McPherson hadn’t been subjected to an Introspection Rundown. The church’s official response, under Rathbun’s direction, was to continue to lie, stating that McPherson had been at the church’s Fort Harrison Hotel only for “rest and relaxation” and there was nothing unusual about her stay. In the meantime, Rathbun went through the logs that McPherson’s attendants had kept. As many as twenty people had been rotating in and out of McPherson’s room; some of them were scratched and bruised from trying to subdue her; that was hardly the isolation and absolute silence and calm that the Introspection Rundown called for. Rathbun noted that, among other entries in the logs, one of the caretakers admitted that the situation was out of control and that McPherson needed to see a doctor. In the presence of a Scientology lawyer, Rathbun handed several of the most incriminating logs to a church executive, and said, “Lose ’em.”
The McPherson case loomed over the church for five years, with an ongoing police investigation, protests in front of Scientology facilities, lawsuits on the part of the family, and endless unwanted press. Embarrassing details emerged, including the fact that McPherson had spent $176,700 on Scientology services in her last five years, but she had died with only $11 in her savings account. Rathbun and Mike Rinder, the church’s spokesman, were responsible for managing the situation, but Miscavige supervised every detail. The level of tension was nearly unbearable.
Rinder had the particularly unrewarding task of defending the church to the public. He was articulate and seemingly unflappable, and he had a talent for disarming hostile interviewers. He had been a Scientologist since he was five years old, in South Australia, when the religion was banned. He had sailed with Hubbard aboard the Apollo. Few had a deeper experience of the religion than he and no one was more publicly identified with it. But even Rinder could not quell the furor that arose from the McPherson affair.