Scientology - A Question of Faith

Did A Mother's Faith Contribute To Her Murder?

(CBS) 
Trey Johnson, a close friend and classmate, remembers him fondly. “He was quiet. I mean, nice kid, do anything for you,” Johnson recalls.

But Gabrielle Carlson had a different impression. "I thought Jeremy Perkins was very weird," she says." He didn't seem like he could interact with anybody.”

Gabrielle has always been suspicious of Scientology but her brother Jeff joined the Buffalo church. In 1996, Jeff married Danielle Perkins, Jeremy’s sister.

Jeremy’s behavior had not yet become a problem for the church but its handling of another member’s mental health at Scientology’s spiritual headquarters in Clearwater, Fla. would soon erupt in crisis.

Thirty-six-year-old Lisa McPherson had died after spending 17 days undergoing Scientology’s treatment for a nervous breakdown.

“It's essentially - isolate them. Don't speak to them. Put them in a quiet environment," Kent says.

Autopsy photos showed Lisa’s body emaciated, scratched and bruised. Investigators discovered she had been physically restrained.

"They were trying to force-feed her food and water. They were giving her different combinations of Scientology vitamins and so on," Kent says.

Lisa’s aunt Dell Liebreich brought a suit against the church, in which Kent was a paid plaintiff’s expert. The church settled that case without admitting wrongdoing, insisting that Lisa’s death was triggered by an injury from a recent traffic accident.

Years after her death, Lisa was still making headlines in Florida. And in Buffalo, Scientologists were starting to wonder if they had a problem of their own.

Ever since he was a teenager, Jeremy’s dream was to be a rock drummer.

Reagan Worling was close friends with Jeremy through the late 1990s, and the guitar player in their heavy metal band, the "Tenth Plague.”

Worling says Jeremy was serious about his music and his religion. "He did everything based on the church,” he says.

Jeremy was living at home, working for his father’s contracting business, and helping his mother with her glass painting. He was clearly functional, but Worling says he was definitely strange. “When he was like 24, he had told me that he heard voices and that he told his father that he heard voices. And that his father told him to tell the voices to be quiet,” Worling remembers.

Instead of sending Jeremy to a psychiatrist, the Perkins family sent him to California to join an elite group within Scientology known as the “Sea Org.”