Bare-Faced Messiah (PDF) - Apologetics Index

friend to provide independent corroboration of his rapidly deteriorating health. She put her parents
address in Pasadena on the top of the letter.
'I have known Lafayette Ronald Hubbard for many years,' she began, inauspiciously and
untruthfully, 'and wish to testify as to the condition of his health as I have observed it since his
separation from the Navy.
'Before the war, he was an extremely energetic person in excellent health and spirits . . . Since his
return in December last year he is entirely changed. He cannot read because of his eyes, which
give him much pain. He is rather lame and cannot take his accustomed hikes . . . He has tried to
work at three different jobs and each he has had to leave because of an increase in his stomach
condition. He seems to need an enormous amount of rest . . .
'I do not know what he is going to do for income when his own meagre savings are exhausted,
because I see no chance of his condition improving to a point where he can regain his old
standards. He is becoming steadily worse, his health impaired again by economic worries . . .'[29]
In fact, a short-term solution to his economic worries was immediately and obviously at hand: the
Harpoon. Faced with the impossibility of repaying the mortgage, Ron decided to sell the boat in the
hope of clearing his most pressing debts. Solvent again, temporarily at least, he asked Sara to
marry him. She accepted unhesitatingly. At the beginning of August the lovers left Florida and
caught a train for Washington DC. On 10 August 1946, twenty-one-year-old Sara Northrup and L.
Ron Hubbard were married in a simple ceremony at Chestertown, Maryland.
By a curious coincidence, Chestertown was only thirty miles from Elkton, where L. Ron Hubbard
had married Polly Grubb in 1933. Sara knew nothing of Polly and had no idea that her new
husband had been previously married. Still less did she know he had never been divorced.
Similarly, Polly, in Bremerton, had yet to learn her husband was a bigamist.
Back at South Orange Grove in Pasadena, Parsons sold the old mansion for development and
moved into the coach-house with his scarlet woman, Marjorie Cameron, whom he subsequently
married. It was to be a tragically brief alliance. On the afternoon of Friday 20 June 1952, Parsons
was working alone in the garage of the coachhouse, which he had converted into a laboratory. At
eight minutes past five there was an enormous explosion. The heavy stable doors were blasted
from their hinges, the walls blew out and a huge hole was torn in the floor timbers. When the dust
had cleared, a partially dismembered body could be seen still bleeding in the rubble.
Further horror was to follow. Police traced Parsons's mother, Mrs Ruth Virginia Parsons, to the
home of a crippled woman friend in West Glenarm Street. Informed of the accident and her son's
death, Mrs Parsons returned to the room where her friend was sitting in an armchair. She sat down
in another chair out of reach, unscrewed a bottle of sleeping tablets and, watched by her helpless
and appalled friend, rapidly swallowed the entire contents. Unable to move from her chair, the
terrified cripple watched her friend slowly die.[30]
The inquest found that the explosion had been caused by Parsons accidentally dropping a phial of
nitro-glycerine. But because of his known interest in the occult, there were inevitably rumours of
suicide or even murder; none of his friends could believe that a man so experienced in handling
explosives would have dropped nitro-glycerine accidentally.
Whatever the truth, no black magician could have wished for a blacker departure from the world.