going-clear-scientology-hollywood-and-the-prison-of-belief-by-lawrence-wright-2

ecause I was in league with the doctors,” Sara recalled, in her deathbed tape. “He
thought I had thrown in with the psychiatrists, with the devils.”
On the night of February 24, 1951, Sara went to the movies and left her baby in the
care of a young man named John Sanborne, who was studying at the foundation. Alexis
had become a kind of celebrity, or at least a curiosity. Hubbard had been touting her as
the world’s rst “dianetic baby”—shielded since birth against any engram-forming
disruptions or parental conict. As a result, Hubbard boasted, Alexis talked at three
months, crawled at four, and had no phobias. At about ten o’clock, eleven-month-old
Alexis began crying in her crib, so Sanborne picked her up to comfort her. Suddenly, the
infant said in a hoarse whisper, “Don’t sleep.” Sanborne was startled. He didn’t think a
baby could talk like that. “It went through me in a funny way,” he later said. “The hair
raising on the back of the neck type of feeling.”
At eleven p.m. there was a knock on the door. One of Hubbard’s aides appeared,
wearing a topcoat, with his hand in his pocket. Sanborne believed he was carrying a
gun. The man said that Hubbard was here to take his daughter. Hubbard himself then
came through the door, also wearing a topcoat, with his hand in his right pocket. They
took the child and disappeared.
Later that night Hubbard returned with two other men to abduct Sara. “We have
Alexis and you’ll never see her alive unless you come with us,” Hubbard said. They tied
her hands and dragged her out of bed into a waiting Lincoln. She says that Hubbard had
her in a chokehold to keep her from screaming. Hubbard’s assistant, Richard de Mille
(son of the famous movie director and producer Cecil B. DeMille), drove aimlessly, while
Hubbard and Sara, who was wearing only a nightgown, sat in back. She warned him
that kidnapping was a capital offense.
In San Bernardino, Hubbard ordered de Mille to stop at the county hospital so he
could have Sara committed, but it was the middle of the night and no doctor would talk
to him. Eventually, Hubbard and Sara negotiated a truce. Hubbard told her where Alexis
was hidden—he had hired a nurse in West Los Angeles to watch her—and Sara signed a
note saying that she had gone with Hubbard of her own free will. Hubbard and de Mille
went to the Yuma, Arizona, airport and ew to Phoenix, while Sara drove the Lincoln
back to Los Angeles in her nightgown to pick up Alexis. When she arrived at the nursing
center, however, she was told that a young couple had just left with the baby.
Hubbard and de Mille ew on to Chicago, where Hubbard voluntarily presented
himself for a psychological examination in order to counter the accusation that he was a
paranoid schizophrenic. The psychologist administered some diagnostic tests, including
Rorschach inkblots, and later provided a report that said that Hubbard was a creative
individual who was upset by family problems and depressed about his work. Hubbard
was extremely pleased; he would often mention that he had been given a clean bill of
health by the psychological profession. Sara remembered that he then called her and
told her that he had killed Alexis. “He said that he had cut her into little pieces and
dropped the pieces in a river and that he had seen little arms and legs oating down the
river and it was my fault, I’d done it because I’d left him,” Sara remembered.
Hubbard and de Mille then traveled to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where the Dianetics