Victim | Greg Bashaw

The Death of Greg Bashaw

"For the last 10 years I was fooling myself regarding the services I was taking there, and whether they were advancing me. I wanted them to be... In retrospect, I would have been better the last ten years to have focused on simply building a family life, and on work, as most people do... Being on the services the whole time was almost unbelievably demanding in terms of time, money and commitment. The fact that it did not 'pay off' has been an exceptionally bitter pill to swallow. The fact that at the end of the road I ended up in worse shape than I'd ever been in my entire life... well, that has been completely unreconciliable with any concept of reality."

Within a few weeks of writing that letter, unable to reconcile himself to the reality that "the tech" had never been anything but a scam invented by a nutty sci-fi hack, Greg Bashaw was dead by his own hand.

While the shock and grief of his son's suicide were still fresh, Bob Bashaw read back through their decades-long correspondence, looking in particular for references to Scientology. "I wanted to see what there was here I missed," he says. His son Greg had been a member of the Church of Scientology for more than 20 years. During that time other relatives, fearing he belonged to a cult, had voiced concerns. But Bob supported his son's choice, because he believed people should be free to practice their religion without getting hassled about it - and because he couldn't find a good enough reason not to. That changed in November 2000, when suddenly,  he says, Greg broke into "a hundred pieces." He'd recently lost his job in advertising. And now, Greg told his father, his church had excommunicated him. Seven months later, more than $50,000 in debt, he ended his life on the shoulder of a Michigan road, leaving behind a wife of 20 years and a teenage son, to whom he'd written a brief, unemotional note.

In the year since, Bob has struggled to reconcile Greg's final act with the life he lived. "I had to understand it," he says, "because I knew him and this wasn't him. He was a loving person - kind, and paid his bills, and showed affection. Hugged and kissed. What the hell happened here?"

Bob is a young 74, tall and agile, with a ruddy complexion and a full head of hair that's wavy on top. Greg wasn't quite as tall or as thick around the middle, but people told them they looked alike. Greg was Bob's firstborn, the only one of his three children he'd been close to.

When Bob was 46, the age at which Greg committed suicide, his life had been turned upside down too. He'd lost his job, filed for divorce after 22 years of marriage, been diagnosed with skin cancer, and been told he needed a gingivectomy or he'd lose some teeth. But as bad as it got, he says, he never considered suicide. So at first he couldn't understand why Greg hadn't been able to imagine a different end to his suffering or why he'd been unresponsive to the efforts of many to help him. But after Greg's death Bob discovered things about his son he hadn't known. And he learned quite a bit about the Church of Scientology. "I think his final choice was the only one he felt he had left," Bob wrote to his younger son a few months after Greg's death. "And maybe he was right."

Bob says Greg was writing ad copy for a firm on Michigan Avenue when he met Laura, the woman who would become his wife. Greg seemed  willing to do whatever it took. Early on he borrowed thousands of dollars from his father for Scientology-related endeavors. Bob says Greg used one of the loans to go with Laura to the church's Los Angeles complex for course work; he paid it back with interest, explaining that he'd felt pressured by the church to cough up the money. "What happened," he wrote Bob on January 21, 1981, "is that our financial officer for the Church informed us we would need another $1700 to pay for the package we were securing. It was imperative to get it this past week; otherwise the annual price increase, which he had held off for us through administrative fancywork, would go into effect. Simply put, if we didn't send the money Wednesday, the prices would have gone up on us by $500."

In March 1981 Bob received a letter from Greg's mother, who'd read a disturbing article about Scientology in *Reader's Digest*. "Scientology: Anatomy of a Frightening Cult" depicted Hubbard as a megalomaniac "surrounded by aides who cater to his every whim," including young women "who light his ever-present cigarettes and catch the ashes." The writer stated that the church operated its own "punishment unit," the Rehabilitation Project Force, and kept detailed records of intimate things people revealed during auditing sessions in order to blackmail them should they decide to defect or denounce the church.

The article also referred to "fanatic operatives" within the church who'd "engaged in burglary, espionage, kidnapping and smear campaigns to further their goals." It said that after losing its tax-exempt status the church had inundated the IRS with lawsuits and that top-level Scientologists had gone so far as to investigate and harass agents, infiltrate government offices, and steal documents pertaining to Hubbard and the church. In 1979, the year Greg became involved in Scientology, Hubbard's third wife, Mary Sue, and several other top-level Scientologists were convicted in federal court of theft and conspiracy in connection with the church's battle with the IRS. (In 1993 the agency reversed itself without explanation after top Scientologists paid an unscheduled visit to the IRS commissioner; it granted the church tax-exempt status again, even though the Supreme Court had upheld its earlier decision to revoke it.)

The *Reader's Digest* article also cautioned that auditing could have detrimental effects: "As defectors have attested, subjects become hysterical and psychotic in their auditing. Then they are locked in isolation. Not surprisingly, suicides occur." Greg's mother said in her letter that when she'd questioned their son about the article, he claimed it had been planted by "psychiatrists engaged in a conspiracy against Scientology." As Bob would later realize, Greg had already swallowed the party line.

Greg's mother, who's now deceased, also wrote in her March 1981 letter that she wasn't the only one concerned about Greg's interest in Scientology. Bob says that after Greg got engaged to Laura he started "getting heat" from her family for getting her involved in the church. The letter from Greg's mother said that Laura's mother was particularly upset: "Greg said they had to go out early the day of Laura's shower to calm [her mother] down and explain things."

The Bashaws had gone through a bitter divorce. Bob says he rarely had civil contact with his ex-wife, so this letter from her stood out for its lack of hostility. He thought she was imploring him to do something, but he didn't know what he could do. Greg had chosen his religion, and he was 26 - too old to have his parents managing his affairs. Life was full of choices, and Bob trusted that his intelligent, thoughtful son would make wise ones. Greg was trained as journalist. He asked questions.

Greg and Laura were married in Barrington Hills by a Scientology minister in the summer of 1981. Bob, who'd remarried After becoming clear, Greg was considered an "Operating Thetan." No longer plagued by engrams, OTs audit for other purposes - namely, the church says, to further their spiritual development. Greg stayed at Flag through the holidays, straining his budget. His wife and son had planned to join him, he wrote to Bob the day after Christmas, "but we decided we'd better not spend the money, which is now very tight. I'm economizing as much as possible while here - staying in a shared room, etc."

In a letter he sent after New Year's, Greg implied that the gains were worth the financial burden and time away from his family. "Scientology has saved my ass, that's for sure," he wrote. "I was *totally* stuck in that thing from the past, not even knowing what it was. Now I'm unstuck, in the know, and working towards completion. It will be a new life when I get back."

Greg also told his father he'd finished two short stories since he'd been in Clearwater - the first fiction he'd written in a while - and said he planned to put together a collection of stories about the suburbs, not "from the point of view of an outsider cynically looking in, but an insider looking around."

Then he said something that gave Bob pause. Greg, who believed he'd retrieved long-lost native skills since becoming clear, said he had the ability to communicate with the dead. "It's easy," he wrote, "like talking on a telephone, when you have the hang of it." Bob noticed the first major changes in his son in December 1999, when Greg seemed wholly uninterested in the books Bob had given him from Christmas. A couple of months passed, and Greg still hadn't even opened them. Bob grew concerned because Greg usually read books quickly, and one of them was a book on filmmaking, which was partially relevant given that Greg was working on a script for a documentary about missionaries in Ecuador - a freelance assignment for his friend Jim Hanon, who had an ad agency in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Bob says that around this time he noticed that Greg wasn't holding up his end of the conversations anymore. He usually just rephrased whatever Bob had just said.

Hanon too noticed that Greg wasn't his usual self. Longtime creative collaborators, they'd worked together at Leo Burnett in the early 90s. Hanon, an art director, had always thoguht of Greg as "a deep thinker, a great writer, a poet." But now he thought Greg's "creativity was not at the same level of consistency." Greg agreed with Hanon and said the change was "connected to the auditing."

In September 2000 Greg told his father he was returning to Clearwater. "He'd always let me know when he was going, but he'd say, 'I'll be back in two weeks,' and it was always four, five weeks." This time, Bob recalls, "I said, 'Greg, you're spending a hell of a lot of time down there. I don't understand it. You're spending time away from your job, and you're spending time away from your family.' And his answer to me was, 'You're right, dad. You don't understand it.'"

Greg, who was now on OT7. the second-highest level, didn't return until November. When he did he told his father he'd been fired, though a spokesperson for Foote, Cone & Belding says that his departure was a "mutually agreed upon" decision.

On November 30 the phone woke Bob at 4:30 AM. Laura was on the other end, asking him to stop by to see Greg. Neither the tone of her voice nor the hour of the call suggested urgency - Bob was known as an early riser, though on most days he slept until at least 5. The drive from his home in Glen Ellyn would take about 40 minutes. He promised Laura he'd visit later in the morning, then got out of bed and made some coffee. The phone rang again around 6:30. This time it was Greg, telling his father not to bother coming over. An hour or so later Bob was summoned again. He didn't ask why he'd been invited, disinvited and reinvited. He thought Greg probably "had some anxiety at being out of a job." He figured his son wanted to talk

When Bob arrived Greg greeted him warmly. "His demeanor was just normal as could be," Bob recalls, "an all of a sudden he breaks down and says he was preparing to kill himself." He'd even come up with a plan - to drive to the nearby forest preserve and drink a bottle of Drano. "I was in such shock," Bob says. The contrast between the image Greg had been projecting and his emotional reality was stark. "I'm holding him, and he's saying he failed everybody, he isn't worth anything, he's a total failure."

The trip to Clearwater had been a disaster. "They threw him out," Bob says. Greg told him the church staff had said he had some kind of medical or physical condition they couldn't help him with, then sent him away, telling him never to return. "That's when I said, 'Hey, holy shit. Look what he's been involved in.' This is when the whole thing hit the fan with me. I realized what the hell it had done to him." Greg asked if he could sleep at Bob's that night, but Bob wanted his son safe in the care of psychiatrists. He urged Greg to check himself into a hospital, and he says Laura did too, after returning home from her job as a naturalist at a private school. "That surprised me, but I was glad to hear it," says Bob, who believes that by this point Laura had left the church.

Greg reluctantly checked himself into the psychiatric ward of Good Shepherd Hospital in Barrington, not out of the belief the staff could help him, but because he had nowhere else to spend the night.

It was late when Bob got home. After so many hours in crisis mode he couldn't sleep. He wrote a note informing Greg's doctor about his involvement in Scientology, then outlined what he would say to his son the next day. The following morning in the psych unit, the first thing he told Greg was that Scientology was evil and that it was his enemy. Bob says he'd never denounced something dear to his son or expressed disapproval of his choices, and Greg appeared shocked and wounded. "It was as if I'd slapped him in the face."

Every two or three days Bob wrote family members, updating them on the situation and asking them to help Greg find the strength and courage to continue living. He says that Greg and Laura considered the letters and invasion of their privacy. But reaching out to the rest of the family came naturally to Bob, and he figured Greg would need all the support - as well as assurances that others would do what they could to help his son. He wanted Greg to know that his life mattered. "I wanted to keep you alive," he wrote after Greg had reproached him for spreading the news and Laura had declared him "persona non grata."

Bob says Greg forgave him, but Laura didn't. From that point on, Bob says, he was "out of the loop" and didn't see much of Greg. They kept in touch primarily by letters. Bob preferred them to phone calls or E-mail, because he thought Greg would be more likely to think through what he was saying instead of firing off placating remarks. "In one sense I thought, I don't want any more bullshit about 'Hey, everything is OK,'" says Bob. "Laura called it 'Greg's PR.'"

Greg tried to commit suicide twice by overdosing in the next couple of months. In January his 17-year-old son found him on the floor, barely alive. In February he E-mailed a suicide note to Jim Hanon. Hanon got it within 20 minutes and alerted Barrington police, who arrived in time to save Greg's life.

Bob's attempts to get information about Greg's condition were futile. Desperate, he visited the now defunct Lisa McPherson Trust. Not far from Scientology's headquarters in Clearwater and staffed by high-level defectors, the trust had been founded to expose the church's "abusive and deceptive" practices and to provide support to ex-Scientologists attempting to readjust to life outside the church. It put Bob in touch with former Scientologists who'd reached the same level as Greg, OT7. One of them, Greg Barnes, remembers receiving a desperate call from Bob: "He was a father who was lost. A distressed man going, 'What do I do?' - reaching out to everyone and anyone who could help his son."

Barnes spoke on the phone with Greg about seven times. They had much in common. They were the same age, and each was married with one son. Each had spent more than 20 years in Scientology and had become an IAS patron. Barnes says he and his wife had left the church of their own volition a year earlier, after deciding that it had altered Hubbard's teachings.

Greg told Barnes he'd been under extreme pressure during his last visit to Clearwater, and that church officials had said he couldn't leave until he completed certain regimens. "He had to get back to work. He was stressed, and he communicated that he was stressed," Barnes says. "They took that to mean  he was unstable." He says Greg was then sent to an auditor, who made things worse.  "If you misapply this technology you can drive someone insane. You can cause someone to become psychotic."

Greg also told Hanon about the auditing he'd done on his last trip to Clearwater. "He confided in me that in one of these sessions he opened himself up spiritually," Hanon says, "and he felt something in his mind break." Defectors say that when something goes wrong in Scientology there's only one person to blame, and it's not L. Ron Hubbard. "His technology -they call it his tech now - his tech always works," says Jim Beebe. "If you don't get the results that he claims you will get, there is something wrong with you."

As a good Scientologist, Greg blamed himself. He told Hanon he'd known that there was a psychological risk in doing "mental training" and that the church had given him a waiver to sign stating as much. "I feel I have been irreparably damaged by my participation in the advanced courses," he wrote his father after his February suicide attempt, "but such damage happened by my own hand, by my own decisions and approaches to things. Thousands of people do these courses and do very well; this tremendous suffering is something that I engendered through my own substandard auditing, and an approach to things that was not ethically sound." In short, he wrote, "I screwed *myself* up, using their technology."

Greg said he shouldn't have been on the advanced levels. "This was actually told to me in early 1981," he wrote, "but I continued pursuing these levels through the '80s and '90s, against church policy. (Anyone who has had psychiatric counseling and/or psychiatric drugs, as I had had at college, is not supposed to be able to receive *any* auditing, let alone the advanced levels at Flag.)"

Barnes put Greg in touch with other high-level defectors. One had spent seven years trying to get through 0T7. She says Greg wasn't coping well. "He was having dark thoguhts about himself and felt he was covered with BTs," she says. "He felt he couldn't get rid of them."

Greg did feel a glimmer of hope after speaking to a former member of the church's Sea Organization, which is made up of full-time employees who hold its "most essential and trusted positions." Greg got the impression that the man could use Scientology practices on him to correct the damage that had been done. After speaking to him, Greg promised his father he wouldn't kill himself.

The former Sea Organization member, who has asked to remain anonymous, wasn't as optimistic. Greg, he says, was "really stuck." He sensed that Greg wanted "more than anything" to get back into the church. He knew that would never happen - Greg had told him he'd failed a "security check" in Clearwater and had been declared a Potential Trouble Source. "Because of what happened with Lisa McPherson," he says, "they're very paranoid about the chance of anyone flipping out."

Barnes worried that Greg was beyond help. "The only place he could ever reach his spiritual freedom was gone," he says. "His dreams were gone. Life was taken away from him." He'd been led to believe Scientology was the only solution for his problems. "He was taught to believe psychiatry was evil -now he was in the hands of the most vicious, perverted people."

The church's Mary Anne Ahmad, who knew Greg "fairly well," says "What really troubles me and is really ironic is the fact that the two things that he detested the most were the two things that dogged him until the day he died - psychiatry and deprogrammers." She denies that the church excommunicated Greg. "He seemed to be having some rather large trobules," she says, "and he left the church to go sort out his life. And basically the only thing I know, his troubles seemed to be family based. His father and maybe his mother-in-law had objections to some of his choices in life, and so he had a lot of pressure on him. To add to that, even though he was offered help, he declined and decided to go with whatever his family was pressuring him into, which was psychiatry. Frankly, no Scientologist would ever seek psychiatry as a solution to their problems."

Ahmad wouldn't say specifically what kind of help Scientology offered Greg. In a letter he wrote to his father on February 28, 2001, he mentioned that the church has proposed a "'review' session" while he was in Clearwater but that he'd declined, on account of the time it would take.

When asked why she thinks so many former members have launched impassioned campaigns against the church, Ahmad says, "There's only one reason and one reason only - they have lots of words they don't understand," which hampers their grasp of "what the religion is about."

In some of his letters from the spring of 2001, Greg seemed revitalized and hopeful. Hanon had arranged for him to work three days a week at his Grand Rapids agency, which put him up at a bed-and-breakfast. He and Hanon dined together once a week, and he spent extended weekends at home, doing yard work or taking his son to the Music Box to see matinees. At one point Greg even told his father he'd picked up an editorial writing assignment and was contemplating returning to journalism.

Bob wondered how much of what he was hearing was "Greg's PR." In a letter dated March 24, 2001, he reminded Greg of things he'd previously said - that his mental state "was not improving," that he was "irreparably damaged,"  that he'd screwed himself up. Bob had taken him seriously. He'd found a retreat  for cult survivors in Ohio called Wellspring. "The setting is residential, home cooked meals, private rooms," he wrote, trying to make it sound attractive. He passed on a phone number, an E-mail address, and a fax number.

Greg wasn't interested. "One of the things that happens when you have the bad experiences that I've had is that people assume your own beliefs are faulty and can be superceded," he wrote back. "Since one's life is in ruin, it's reasoned, one must have chosen beliefs that led here, and the beliefs are suspect." He said he wanted to work on getting better, but "deprogramming" at Wellspring wouldn't work. "I know I won't get better doing something I don't believe in at all... When you have a meltdown like I did, people then suggest their *own* beliefs as alternatives (Christ, prayer, therapy, etc.)" By the time you reached his age, he continued, "you have a pretty good idea about what you believe and what you don't. And in my case, a pretty informed idea. (Having been raised in and studied Christianity, undergone therapy, and tried prayer in college.)"

Some of Bob's subsequent phone messages to Greg went unanswered, and Laura returned one of his letters unopened. Bob was more forceful in his next letter, dated April 10. He wrote that he could respect, or at least tolerate, others' beliefs - as long as they were benign. "Suicide is not a positive result, and hence my strong intervention." In the past Greg had mentioned an affinity for Buddhist philosophy, and Bob, grasping at straws, implored him to see a Buddhist monk for guidance: "There are alternatives and solutions." When Greg finally responded on April 29 he made no mention of Bob's suggestion.

"Comments and thoguhts from you from my past two letters have generally not been acknowledged, which is OK," Bob wrote on May 6. "But after the series of messages and incidents last month" - the unanswered phone calls and returned letters - "I wonder if you are reading them."

Greg wrote back and assured his father he'd been reading the letters. With cautious optimism, he reported that he sensed "a little oasis of peace" growing in his mind, though he expected the recovery to be slow. "It's almost as if I had a stroke on a mental and spiritual level, and I have to start with learning how to use a fork again, metaphorically." He went on to share the conclusions he'd drawn about the role Scientology had played in his breakdown: "For the last 10 years I was fooling myself regarding the services I was taking there, and whether they were advancing me. I *wanted* them to be... In retrospect, I would have been better the last ten years to have focused on simply building a family life, and on work, as most people do... Being on the services the whole time was almost unbelievably demanding in terms of time, money and commitment. The fact that it did not 'pay off' has been an exceptionally bitter pill to swallow. The fact that at the end of the road I ended up in worse shape than I'd ever been in my entire life... well, that has been completely unreconcilable with any concept of reality."

Yet it seemed clear that Greg was thinking about a future. "I would like to get to a point where the focus of my life is not on my disability," he went on. "It's been very difficult talking to people lately, because typically the whole conversation pivots around how well I'm doing or not doing. If I haven't called very often, that's why."

But any optimism had pretty much vanished by June. Hanon says he noticed a change in Greg's personality and his ability to process thoughts. He says Greg told him he "had broken something that the Church of Scientology could fix, and the impression I got was that they weren't going to fix it."

During the last two weeks of Greg's life, Hanon's agency didn't have any work for him. He stayed home in Barrington Hills, his mental condition deteriorating. He owed his bank $27,000 and had racked up $29,000 on his credit cards. Bob says that in February Laura started talking about suing the church to recover money they'd paid in advance for auditing and course work. "I had been told," he says, "they had a balance of nearly $200,000 in credit."

Greg adamantly objected to suing. After Laura started talking about trying to get their money back, Greg wrote to his father that he didn't want to be a "poster boy" for the harmful effects of Scientology. "It would subject me and my family to a great deal of shame and embarrassment, and additionally such a stance does *not* reflect what I believe to be true."

One day in early June, Hanon received a desperate call from Greg. "He asked me, 'What can I do?' He was in torment. He felt like he was losing control. I didn't have an answer. I asked him to come here right away." Greg drove the four hours to Grand Rapids. When Hanon saw him he was surprised he made it there alive. "He arrived at my house, coherent but just barely hanging on," he recalls. Greg was shaking, he says, and had all but lost the ability to function. Hanon and his wife prayed with Greg, and after a couple of days Greg agreed to check himself into Pine Rest, a nearby hospital. At first, according to Hanon, he refused to take drugs or undergo counseling; "It appeared to me that he was conditioned, that part of his training was not to assign any value at all to what a psychiatrist would say."

For more than 20 years Greg had invested himself in Scientology, spiritually, mentally, and financially. He'd set out to lose his "reactive mind," but he lost more than he'd bargained for. "There were periods of time he was rational and he realized he was losing it," says Bob, "and it was a terror, a horrible thing to him."

Scientology "tells you it has the solution to all your problems," says Greg Barnes. "Then you realize most of the problems you had, Scientology created." Barnes says Greg knew this but couldn't accept it. "Greg Bashaw could not let go of the mental indoctrination he'd swallowed hook, line, and sinker. He was vibrant, upbeat, gave the appearance he was going to make it. But he had a hard time struggling with the fact that he'd been living a lie. Everything he thought was real wasn't real anymore."

Greg wrote to Bob for the last time on June 20. "I wanted to call on Father's Day but was hospitalized at Pine Rest here in GR, and had no calling card. My condition worsened dramatically three weeks ago. I have been in the hospital the last two weeks and am now moving to an intensive outpatient status." He begged Bob to persuade Laura not to sue the church. "They would put 50 lawyers on the case to the one Laura would hire. They would employ private investigators, and the like, to help win their case.

And the stress on Laura would be *enormous*... If you could get her to consider these points, as I have repeatedly over the last few months, it would be greatly appreciated." Greg went on to say that he would be checking out of the hospital that afternoon, though he felt his release would be premature. "I told them this morning I still felt depressed and suicidal," he wrote. "They are hurrying me into the outpatient program because I only have two days of insurance left!" He ended the letter, "P.S. Thanks for being a great dad."

Later that day Greg drove seven miles southwest of Grand Rapids to Grandville and checked himself into the Residence Inn. He stopped by Hanon's that night after dinner. It was a quick visit. Hanon says Greg appeared to have made a turnaround and seemed committed to starting the outpatient treatment.

Three days later Greg pulled onto the shoulder of a road in Montcalm County, northeast of Grand Rapids. Using duct tape, he attached a hose to the exhaust pipe of his Honda, then ran it through the passenger window, sealing off the opening with a towel. He reclined in the passenger's seat, folded his arms across his chest, and breathed in a lethal dose of carbon monoxide- just as L. Ron Hubbard's son had done 25 years earlier.

Police found the suicide note to his son on the nightstand in his hotel room. It consisted of a single sentence: "Goodbye [son], you were a good buddy. Love dad."

Greg's last letter to Bob arrived after the news of his suicide. Bob sat down and wrote a death notice for his son, which he published in the *Chicago Tribune*. "In memory of a trained journalist, disciplined and hard-working, an honored writer of substance and creativity and imagination, loved by family and friends, respected by his contemporaries, who in the prime of life, because of his needs and naivete trusted wrongly an entity that crushed his sweet and sharing spirit. He found his journey through life too painful to continue and was blind and deaf to all of those who loved him. My God bless you Greg, and may God bless us all."

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