We have just a minor update on the Cathriona White story today, but it’s something we haven’t seen anyone else report despite the feeding frenzy of news about the 30-year-old woman’s suicide.
Sometime between Thursday, September 24 when actor Jim Carrey reportedly broke up with her, and Monday night September 28 when her body was found, Cat White reportedly ended her life with a drug overdose. There are some lingering questions, at least in our estimation, about how Cat’s body was found, so we thought it made sense to at least identify the person who first found her that night. It was her friend Den Bradshaw, a corporate trainer.
We’ve told you about Cathriona’s friend Jenny Burpee, a former Scientology Sea Org worker and lifelong church member who was one of the people who reportedly encouraged Cathriona to take courses at the Hollywood Celebrity Centre. And Jenny has spoken to the press about finding Cat’s body. But she’s been pretty explicit that it was her friend Den who actually first found Cat and saved the others — Den’s wife Lena, Jenny, and Jenny’s niece — from stumbling on the tragic scene themselves.
This is how Burpee described the scene to an Irish newspaper: “We checked her bedroom, which is quite open with a large window and she wasn’t there. Then Den checked the second bedroom and she was there, on the bed. My niece had been running down the hall shouting ‘Cat, Cat!’ Thank God we were behind him [Den] and didn’t see.”
For some reason, the newspaper held back Den’s full name. But we called him last night to see if he wanted to provide some further details and corroborate what Jenny has been saying.
We wanted to know if it was true that when the four of them arrived at the house, the front door was open. We also wondered if Jenny did call the police right away, as she said. And we wondered about Jenny’s claims about checking days of footage on Cat’s security system. When did that occur?
Jenny hasn’t answered our messages to her. And we told Den that we had heard that he wasn’t a Scientologist, and so he might be interested in talking to us.
“I’m not a Scientologist, but I’m still not interested in discussing this,” he said to us before hanging up. Well, that’s a shame. As we said yesterday, there are some very odd things about the investigation into Cat White’s suicide that we’d like to get cleared up. We’ll just have to find another way.
OUR CAT WHITE COVERAGE:
Sept 30: Jim Carrey’s Scientologist girlfriend on ‘SRD’ when she killed herself: Friends
Oct 1: Cathriona White’s Scientology ‘twin’ on grueling courses was an actor named Travis Case
Oct 4: Meet the young Hollywood types who introduced Cathriona White to Scientology
Oct 6: Scientology spied on Jim Carrey to get him on the ‘Purif,’ says former exec
Oct 6: Cathriona White was married to Scientologist Mark Burton
Oct 7: A secret Scientology wake, a ‘Snow White’ link, & more odd twists emerge in the Cat White story
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Chris Shelton finishes his great series on Robyn Capella
Underground Bunker contributor Chris Shelton comes to the end of his terrific six-part interview with former Sea Org worker Robyn Capella. Here’s the description that Chris sent over…
This is the final episode in my 6-part series with Robyn Capella, which I’ve called The Scientology Experience because it details Robyn’s time from when she was 15 years old and first recruited into Scientology and the Sea Org, through her time in management and eventually working for the Office of Special Affairs. This has given us a unique insight into what goes on at every level of Scientology and what a “normal” Sea Org existence entails. Nothing that Robyn encountered in her time there was at all unusual, strange, or unique in terms of the crazy schedule and work loads, the financial travails and problems of eking out a living and of course, getting pregnant and being treated as a second-class citizen before finally being kicked to the curb because she wanted to have the same rights that everyone else outside of Scientology has: freedom to think and act and just live her life on her own terms. That sort of thing is completely unacceptable in the Scientology world, especially for someone who was once a part of the Sea Organization.
In this episode, we cover what happened to Robyn after that first court case she was involved in, what sorts of things she had to do as a DSA in the San Jose, California area in the mid-to-late 1990s. We talked about another court case against a Church critic, stalking and instigating local black ops against that critic and others, as well as the routine paranoid nonsense that OSA International makes its DSAs do in their ever-present fear of the Church being criticized in the media. In the end, Robyn finally ran into a level of evil within the Church that she wasn’t prepared for, even after all of the things she had seen and done as a DSA and this is what got her on the road out of the cult forever.
I want to thank Tony for publishing all of this on his blog and Robyn for her courage and determination to make her story known. it was a lot of fun and very interesting doing this interview, and hers is but one of thousands of similar stories out there waiting to be told. Every one of them are unique and valuable. It’s no longer a matter of wondering if Scientology is going down, it’s just a matter of when. The more of these stories we make known, the more of the truth we expose about the cult of Scientology, the faster this organization will reach its End of Days. And that will be a very happy day indeed.
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Bonus photos from our tipsters
Starting them young in Old Mexico!
From Tampa, actual caption: “Registration success! Mary Corbell is one happy public! Her success- “I haven’t moved on the Bridge in a really long time and didn’t think it was possible (but I always wanted to) and then my Tampa Registrar called me in and said she had found a solution. I showed up the next day and worked with the Reg and she helped me and my boyfriend work out both our Purif and Survival Rundowns and now I couldn’t be happier!”
In case you didn’t catch this clever retort last night to Karin Pouw’s latest ridiculous Baghdad Bob moment, we’ve preserved it for you. What it’s about: Karin is denying that Scientology’s latest creepy operation involves using a Freedom magazine reporter to contact Oscar voters and poison them against Gibney’s film “Going Clear,” and she piled on the stupidity by claiming that the story was manufactured by Gibney, who is obsessed with winning awards.
Hey, girl. Let’s talk about my Survival Rundown cert under a crisp Odessa night.
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BOOK NOTES
We didn’t get a chance to include photos in our book, so we’ve posted them at a dedicated page. Reader Sookie put together a complete index and we’re hosting it here on the website. Copies of the paperback version of ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely’ are on sale at Amazon. The Kindle edition is also available, and shipping instantly.
Tony Ortega’s upcoming appearances (and check out the interactive map to our ongoing tour)…
Oct 23: Sydney, Giant Dwarf Theatre (with Steve Cannane and Bryan Seymour)
Oct 25: Melbourne, The Wheeler Centre, 3 pm, free but reservations recommended (with Steve Cannane)
Oct 28: Adelaide, Wheatsheaf Hotel, (with Sen. Nick Xenophon)
Oct 30: Perth, Collins Street Centre, Collins St and Shaftesbury St, South Perth, 7 pm
Past dates: Santa Barbara (5/16), Hollywood (5/17), Orange County (5/17), San Diego (5/20), San Francisco (5/22), New York (6/11), Chicago (6/20), Toronto (6/22), Clearwater (6/28), Washington DC (7/12), Hartford (7/14), Denver (7/17), Dallas (7/20), Houston (7/22), San Antonio (7/24), Austin (7/25), Paris (7/29), London (8/4), Boston (8/24), Phoenix (9/15), Cleveland (9/23), Minneapolis (9/24), Portland (9/27), Seattle (9/28), Vancouver BC (9/29)
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Posted by Tony Ortega on October 8, 2015 at 07:00
E-mail your tips and story ideas to tonyo94 AT gmail DOT com or follow us on Twitter. We post behind-the-scenes updates at our Facebook author page. Here at the Bunker we try to have a post up every morning at 7 AM Eastern (Noon GMT), and on some days we post an afternoon story at around 2 PM. After every new story we send out an alert to our e-mail list and our FB page.
Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…
BLOGGING DIANETICS: We read Scientology’s founding text cover to cover with the help of LA attorney and former church member Vance Woodward
UP THE BRIDGE: Claire Headley and Bruce Hines train us as Scientologists
GETTING OUR ETHICS IN: Jefferson Hawkins explains Scientology’s system of justice
SCIENTOLOGY MYTHBUSTING: Historian Jon Atack discusses key Scientology concepts
PZ Myers reads L. Ron Hubbard’s “A History of Man” | Scientology’s Master Spies | Scientology’s Private Dancer
The mystery of the richest Scientologist and his wayward sons | Scientology’s shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill
The Underground Bunker’s Official Theme Song | The Underground Bunker FAQ
Our Guide to Alex Gibney’s film ‘Going Clear,’ and our pages about its principal figures…
Jason Beghe | Tom DeVocht | Sara Goldberg | Paul Haggis | Mark “Marty” Rathbun | Mike Rinder | Spanky Taylor | Hana Whitfield
