Say what you will about L. Ron Hubbard, the notorious founder of Scientology. Despite his many flaws, or perhaps because of them, he was a true Hollywood visionary, a shady pioneer in the dark arts of packaging, branding, and synergy.

In the 1950s, following a string of personal and professional failures, he spun his half-baked science-fiction fantasies into a best-selling self-help manifesto called Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. Then he repackaged his adaptation into a “religion,” with a killer third-act reveal, involving alien spacecraft, humanoid slaves, and an intergalactic warlord named Xenu. In the meantime, in order to establish multiple revenue streams, he branded a series of proprietary commercial tie-ins, among them “the E-Meter,” a Rube Goldberg gizmo said to “confront areas of spiritual upset.”

By 1969, Hubbard had established a permanent beachhead in Hollywood. There, in a grand Norman-revival chateau that had in the past variously housed Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, and Cary Grant, among others, he established Scientology’s Celebrity Centre International—a spiritual mecca for “artists, politicians, leaders of industry, sports figures and anyone with the power and vision to create a better world.”

The center was a synergistic vehicle for “Project Celebrity”: an internal church newsletter advised the flock to “hunt” for A-list “quarry” such as Greta Garbo, Walt Disney, and Orson Welles. Although none evidently proved amenable, Hubbard stuck with his business model. “Celebrities are very Special people,” he wrote in 1973. “They have comm[unication] lines that others do not have.”

By the time of Hubbard’s death, in 1986, Scientology was the offbeat “It religion” in the Age of Celebrity. It could boast of two tentpole movie stars (Tom Cruise and John Travolta) and featured a solid supporting cast (Kirstie Alley, Anne Archer). By the mid-1990s, the Church of Scientology claimed a membership of eight million.

And yet, as Hubbard would no doubt have realized had he lived long enough, Hollywood is a cruel mistress. Lately, multiple celebrity-related messes have sullied the Scientology brand. Travolta’s private life has been the source of endless scrutiny and controversy. Tom Cruise appeared an unreliable ambassador with his bizarre pyrotechnics on Oprah’s sofa and rants against psychiatry.

Then, in 2011, The New Yorker published a story by Lawrence Wright (later expanded into the 2013 book Going Clear) about the Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis, a longtime Scientologist who had defected from the church. The piece, which a spokesman for the church called “a stale article containing nothing but rehashed, unfounded allegations,” made the case that Scientologists are systematically brainwashed, fleeced, and abused by the church generally and by its current leader, David Miscavige, specifically.

Miscavige is the anti-Hubbard. With darty eyes and the bland good looks of a televangelist, he hawks the word of L.R.H. with ruthless efficiency. By this summer, a semblance of order had been restored, as Cruise had more or less rehabbed his image, when the tabloids exploded again. The story was Leah Remini, a TV star best known for playing Kevin James’s ballbuster wife on the CBS sitcom The King of Queens. Remini, a Scientologist who was raised in a family of Scientologists, wasn’t just another high-profile defector. She was a defector raising hell about the boss’s wife.

Or was it ex-wife? Or late wife? Or missing wife?

For decades, Shelly Miscavige had been the First Lady of Scientology. Graceful and smiling, she was always by Miscavige’s side—during virtually every meeting, every trip, every photo op.

Then, in August 2007, she was suddenly gone. Without a trace.

Since that time, there has been fevered intrigue and speculation as to her whereabouts—among outsiders, anyway. Sources say that church members rarely ask about her, because to ask nosy questions is to invite consequences of the sort that befell Remini. The more she pressed, sources say, the harder she was cursed, interrogated, and shunned. Every time she inquired about Shelly, “she got the runaround,” a source says. “They’d say, ‘Oh, she’s on a special project’ or ‘Oh, she’s visiting a sick relative.’ ” (Church spokespersons have repeatedly denied that Shelly is missing.) Finally Remini quit the church and filed a missing-persons report. The L.A.P.D. soon announced that the case had been closed, and ruled the missing-persons report as “unfounded.” It also said that it had met with Shelly, but gave no further information.

This cryptic explanation only fueled the mystery. Had Shelly fled the church? Was she in hiding? Some Scientology defectors believe she was exiled to one of several secretive and heavily guarded bases the church owns in remote western locales. There, the sources say, those who are banned endure lives of isolation, menial labor, and penury. The reason, they claim, is simple. “The law [in Scientology] is: The closer to David Miscavige you get, the harder you’re going to fall,” says Claire Headley, an ex-Scientologist who, along with her husband, Marc, worked closely with the Miscaviges. “It’s like the law of gravity, practically. It’s just a matter of when.” (The church of Scientology declined Vanity Fair’s repeated requests to interview the Miscaviges. In so doing, church representatives dismissed most of V.F.’s sources as disgruntled apostates, and called V.F.’s questions “ludicrous and offensive.” Additionally, the representatives described Shelly Miscavige as a private person who “has been working nonstop in the church, as she always has.” They also point out that I have written critically about the church in the past.)

In Deep Water

Scientology, during the mid-1970s, was literally adrift. The feds unearthed two criminal conspiracies in which Scientologists had endeavored to retaliate against investigations by journalists and to infiltrate law-enforcement and assorted government agencies. Hubbard, in a quest to find a remote location, had fled to international waters years earlier. He took up residence aboard an old transport ship he named Apollo, where he discovered that the life of a seafaring nomad was not without its charms. In his ascots and long denim jackets, “the Commodore,” as he liked to be called then, strolled the decks, regaling his crew with tales of his past heroism. Outfitting his staff in naval uniforms, he created a vaguely paramilitary organization called Sea Org. Membership was restricted to the highest-ranking and most devoted Scientologists, among them Hubbard’s third wife, Mary Sue, whom he had married in 1952. Sea Org also included a group called the Commodore’s Messengers Organization. Most of the Messengers happened to be comely teenage girls dressed in hot pants and halter tops. They were at the Commodore’s beck and call, fetching him drinks, recording his utterances, relaying his commands to others, drawing his bath, and lighting his Kools.

Among Hubbard’s most devoted Messengers was the youngest one on board: Michelle “Shelly” Barnett. In photographs from that era, she is revealed to be a willowy beauty with strawberry-blond hair. She became a Messenger in the early 1970s when she was around 12.

Shelly’s father, Barney, was a handyman who struggled to find work, according to the Headleys; her mother, Flo Barnett, had emotional issues. Such was the couple’s faith in Scientology that they left Shelly and her older sister, Clarisse, in Hubbard’s care. From then on the kids’ early education consisted of little beyond the gospel of L.R.H., which held that people are immortal beings, or “thetans,” trapped in human bodies. Thetans are encumbered by traumas, or “engrams,” accumulated during past lives. Only through a proprietary therapeutic process known as “auditing” could thetans be cleared of engrams.

The Messengers were devoted to Hubbard. He was, after all, their de facto parent. But Shelly, according to several sources, worshipped the man, hanging on his every word and following his orders with a precision that belied her young years and girlish appearance. “You’d see this pretty young girl with blond hair and sneakers,” recalls former Sea Org executive Mike Rinder. “But suddenly she’d be interrogating people with ‘What are you doing and why are you doing it?’ ”

Shelly left the ship in the mid-1970s. A few years later, 11 church members, including Mary Sue, were charged with conspiracy and burglary. All were eventually convicted and served prison sentences. Although the Commodore escaped charges, prosecutors branded him an “unindicted co-conspirator.”

Spooked by the ongoing investigations, Hubbard spent the final decade of his life in paranoid madness. He saw persecutors and turncoats—“apostates,” in Scientology terms—around every corner. He created an “All Clear” team to defuse legal threats. Although the team was composed mostly of hardened Sea Org veterans, its leader was a fresh-faced 21-year-old named David Miscavige.

Miscavige, who is about five feet five inches and was chronically asthmatic, had always defied his physical limitations. In the middle-class suburbs of Philadelphia, where he was raised, he had pursued his family’s passions—from football to Scientology—with terrier-like aggression. By the age of 12, he was conducting auditing sessions with adults. At 16 he dropped out of high school and, like all new Sea Org members, signed a billion-year contract that locked him in full-time and forever.

Miscavige lived in a dormitory at the church’s national headquarters, in Clearwater, Florida. “He was kind of an asshole,” says ex-Scientologist Mark Fisher. “He would try to buddy up with you and be like ‘Hey, man, how’s it going?’ But he’d be quick to stab you in the back. If you did something wrong, he’d report you.” At one point, Fisher confided certain doubts to Miscavige about Scientology.

“He made sure that all of my stuff was taken out of our dormitory room and put into the hallway. He just moved me out lock, stock, and barrel, so I had no place to sleep.”

But Miscavige’s charisma played well with the Messenger girls who had decamped to Clearwater while Hubbard plotted his next moves. Among the girls was Shelly, who soon caught Miscavige’s eye. He was just nine months older—and she still seemed liked a typical 15-year-old, giggling and listening to the love ballads of John Travolta.

The romance between Shelly and Miscavige began around 1978, in a rustic bubble known as Int Base. There, in the scrubby ranchlands 90 miles east of Los Angeles, Team Hubbard had transformed a faded resort area into Scientology’s international headquarters. The state-of-the-art base included a film-production studio, heavy security, and Hubbard’s $10 million mansion.

While Miscavige had a hair-trigger temper that produced sudden fits of verbal and physical violence, according to several sources—at one point, he’d punched his own auditor—most of the time he was just a fun-loving wunderkind. (A representative for the Miscaviges characterized as “false” the assertions regarding David Miscavige’s alleged temper and fits of violence.)

The romance did nothing to improve Shelly’s standing with her peers. Some of the girls deemed her too young and status-hungry for their taste, and they often excluded her. “That really pushed her buttons,” recalls one former Messenger. “It was the one thing that really made her flash emotion, in a desperate sort of way. She was clearly a lonely girl who’d been abandoned all her life.”

But once Miscavige entered the picture, she focused on him. They married in 1982 in the Los Angeles area and instantly became the “It couple” of Sea Org. Emphasis on “couple.”

“Back then, Shelly was much less subservient, because she was in a position that was basically equivalent to Miscavige’s,” Mike Rinder recalls. “She was not in a junior position, and she was always a feisty sort of a person.”

And their timing was excellent. Hubbard was, by this point, a babbling Kurtzian figure. This created a power vacuum that required immediate attention. Miscavige expertly outmaneuvered his rivals and shooed them out of the picture. When Hubbard finally died, in 1986, Scientology’s future was placed in Miscavige’s hands.

Stand by Your Man

One of the first orders of business for Miscavige as chairman of the board, or “C.O.B.,” was to give Shelly a job befitting the First Lady of Scientology. He created the position of “C.O.B. Assistant,” which afforded her a large workspace connected to his extremely large one in Building 50, a $70 million facility built to Miscavige’s increasingly lofty specifications. “We were kids, and it was all exciting, and it was all the future, and it evolved and evolved,” says Mark “Marty” Rathbun, who at the time served as Miscavige’s top deputy. “The thrill lasted about three years after the old man died. After that time, it progressed to insanity.”

Basically, Shelly was in charge of the dozen-odd staffers who worked in the executive office. In real terms, though, according to Claire Headley, the job required her to be “whatever ‘the boss’ wanted her to be at any given moment.” Sometimes she was his unofficial counselor, at other times his valet. Such became the nature of their relationship that she’d hover within arm’s reach of him. There she nodded thoughtfully or flashed a huge smile, while Miscavige’s opposite elbow was manned by his second-most-important female accessory, Laurisse “Lou” Stuckenbrock. A statuesque New Zealander, she functioned as his “communicator.”

By this point, according to several ex-Scientologists, Shelly’s husband had come to seem more like her boss. When the couple went out at night, they were often accompanied by Miscavige’s bobbleheaded yes-men. When they came home, they retired to separate bedrooms, say several sources.

“I never, ever, ever saw them kiss,” says Marc Headley, who worked closely with the Miscaviges. “I was there for 15 years. . . . So I had plenty of opportunities to witness them together and never, ever saw them affectionate with each other. . . . I’m talking about in a room with four other people. Informal. We’re all just chatting, and he isn’t touching her.”

“Odd, odd couple,” says another former Sea Org member, Tom De Vocht. “There was obviously a working relationship, but odd. I don’t think I once saw Miscavige hug or kiss or anything Shelly. I spent a lot of time with them. There was no real affection.”

Maybe the Miscaviges were simply modest church folk honoring the conservative policies of Sea Org, which forbade almost everything sexual, from pre-marital petting to masturbation. By some accounts, though, Miscavige was no stranger to graphic sexual imagery. When angry, he’d unleash a torrent of filth, in his rapid-fire Philly-guy manner. “You’re a cocksucker,” he’d say. “I’ll rip your balls off, you dirty cunt.”

According to several sources, Miscavige relished reading transcripts of auditing sessions in which Tom Cruise discussed his sex life, while Shelly would just blush, shake her head, and say, “That’s gross.” (Scientology representatives have disputed this account and said that Miscavige has always maintained strict confidentiality at the church.)

Several sources say Shelly started to obsess over her makeup, her hair, her weight. Rigid adherence to an all-natural diet made her increasingly gaunt. And her relationships with certain female colleagues grew strained. Tom De Vocht recalls an incident involving his then wife, an attractive Sea Org member prone to wearing snug tank tops. “I’m sitting in my office, behind closed doors, and one evening the door swings open with a crash and slams shut,” he says. “I turn around and it’s Shelly, and she goes, ‘You get your bitch, cunt, fucking whore wife away from my husband! She’s always hanging her tits in his face, and I’m just telling you, they’ve got something going on!’ ”

There is no evidence that either Miscavige or the woman was unfaithful, and Miscavige’s ex-colleagues say they never saw him philandering. Instead, they describe him as surrounding himself with servile young beauties.

The Hubbard parallels were not lost on Shelly, who, former colleagues say, was determined to roll back the trend. She would not become another Mary Sue—a loyal wife who was summarily abandoned by her husband. Shelly found guidance from L.R.H., in an essay he’d written about 19th-century war hero Simón Bolívar and his mistress Manuela Sáenz. Because Sáenz had not adequately supported her man, Hubbard argued, Bolívar had died a failure.

Miscavige, like Hubbard, evidently developed a siege mentality. His first big trigger involved the case of Lisa McPherson, a Scientologist who suffered a fatal pulmonary embolism after 17 days of a Scientology auditing process designed to treat her mental instability. The church faced two felony charges, but they were later dropped when the medical examiner changed the cause of death from “undetermined” to “accident”; in order to settle a civil suit, the church paid McPherson’s family an undisclosed sum.

Then there was the P.R. nightmare caused by a gathering stream of defections, including some from the highest levels of Sea Org. Scores of defectors have said that Miscavige would systematically terrorize, humiliate, and abuse Sea Org members, especially those he suspected of being “suppressive persons” (S.P.’s); that when he himself wasn’t punching, choking, or shoving his staff he ordered his lieutenants to do so; that perceived transgressors were routinely spirited to secret detention facilities reminiscent of North Korean-style re-education camps; that to be in one of these facilities was to spend months or years eating a subsistence diet (rice and beans), performing menial tasks (reportedly scrubbing bathrooms with your tongue, in one case), and seeing no one outside the base (including your family); and that to escape from Sea Org—to “blow,” as they say—would generally necessitate a mad dash past armed guards and spiked fences, followed by harassment and disconnection from all the family members and friends you’d left behind.

Defectors like Jefferson Hawkins, a longtime Sea Org member, say Miscavige meted out his harshest abuse to those in his inner circle, whom he blamed for the scandals. Lieutenants were often sentenced to a squalid makeshift prison called “the Hole,” where they were compelled to fight for their jobs—sometimes literally, and once in a game of musical chairs set to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.

“You had to walk a really, really careful line, and you could not challenge him in any way,” says Hawkins, who “blew” after Miscavige allegedly attacked him during a meeting. (A representative for David Miscavige denied this allegation, saying that Hawkins “has no credibility” and “waited years after the alleged event before he first ‘remembered’ it.”) Hawkins adds, “I have no indication that he was ever abusive to Shelly—but if not, she would have been one of the exceptions.”

None of the prominent defectors interviewed by V.F. said they’d ever seen Miscavige touch his wife in anger. But many of them agree that she endured verbal abuse. “I’ve seen him yell at her for not doing his bidding,” says John Brousseau, who has known the Miscaviges for three decades. “He’d admonish her: ‘How dare you undermine what I just told them to do! You go back and fix it right now!’ And she would go off and eat her words and tell people an amended version of what to do. . . .

“As Miscavige rose to power and became more and more bitter, Shelly sort of emulated it,” Brousseau adds. Photos that belong to the Miscaviges’ former fashion designer of choice, Claudio Lugli, seem to show a hardness in Shelly’s features. She became prone to sudden outbursts. Sometimes she’d call then Sea Org member Jan Weiss, allegedly one of her only close friends, to bark an order and then slam the phone down. One time, Weiss recalls, she hissed, “You don’t care about any fucking body but yourself!”

“But if you knew her, which I and a lot of people did, you could kind of get through that,” Brousseau says. “A lot of people will tell you about what a horrible bitch she was, and how she was just as bad as Miscavige—which, in a lot of respects, is true. She was doing his bidding. But a lot of people who knew her personally will say that, underneath it all, she was actually a nice person.”

Shelly’s core decency seemed clear to other former colleagues as well. She encouraged staff to volunteer and help the local community. Whenever a Sea Org member fell ill, she was the one who made sure the person received ample care. Her niece Jenna Miscavige Hill recalls a conversation in which Shelly inquired about Hill’s parents, who had fled the church. Hill assumed she was fishing for intel. “No, I’m not interested in that,” Hill recalls that Shelly said. “I just mean how are they doing personally?”

Hill detected a strong maternal instinct in Shelly, who didn’t have children of her own. According to Hill, she seemed to compensate by mentoring Messenger girls.

Even in adulthood, Shelly proudly wore a necklace with Hubbard’s Messenger symbol on it. “She told me a lot of fucked-up things that really messed with my mind,” says Hill, who blew in 2005. “But she believed those things because she had to, to live that life. Her mom ditched her. She was royally screwed over and a misfit, from what I understand. She wasn’t just the butt-kissing zombie that a lot of others there were. I feel like what she did was because of her faith in Hubbard, not to improve her own status.”

Even those who disliked Shelly couldn’t help but feel sorry for her, former colleagues say. Because most church members wouldn’t dare approach the First Lady, and because she was inherently shy, she often appeared lonely and isolated. Jan Weiss noticed how few friends she had when the two were stationed at Int Base in the late 80s. “She was sitting at a breakfast table all by herself,” Weiss recalls. “It was a Saturday, so I went up to her and said, ‘Do you want to do libs?’ ” That’s church-speak for free time. “I was kind of shocked when she said yes.”

After a fun day’s shopping in Palm Springs, they had dinner at Benihana. A chef asked whether they were sisters. “No,” Weiss says Shelly replied. “We’re best friends.”

Although Shelly rarely discussed her family, Weiss says, she had indicated that her early childhood had been “horrible.” Her parents had divorced. Although Shelly still knew and loved her father, according to the Headleys, her mother had been out of the picture for years.

In 1985, while struggling to recover from surgery for an aneurysm, Shelly’s mother became involved with a Scientology splinter group that defied and enraged David Miscavige, former church executives have testified. Later that year, she was found dead of what police deemed a suicide. Although some observers wondered how a five-foot-three woman could shoot four bullets into her own chest and head—with a long rifle—Shelly’s reaction when she learned of the death was clear, according to multiple people. Former church member Karen de la Carriere remembers Shelly saying, “Well, good riddance to that bitch.”

Many members regarded Shelly as Sea Org’s most valuable “shock absorber.” For starters, she was a master at back-channel diplomacy. Marc Headley recalls, “D.M. would come in and say, ‘You guys fucking suck! I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you! You’re going to the Rehabilitation Project Force!’ ”—the punitive re-education program. “Shelly would come in five minutes or an hour later and say, ‘O.K., guys, you aren’t going to the R.P.F. Let’s figure out how we can get this done.’ ”

Gary Morehead, a former Sea Org member, who was head of security at Int Base, says many church members had no idea just how much Shelly protected them. On the sly, he says, she would “adjust” some of the church’s most outrageous policies. When one of Miscavige’s rages portended violence, Shelly was the first and final line of defense. “She was the only person I ever saw try and put a check on his outbursts,” says Claire Headley. “She was the only person that would even try to intervene.”

She’d try to be discreet, employing a light nudge or a soothing whisper. Other times, she’d try to gently steer him out of the room: “Let’s go. Let’s not do this.” “There were times when he’d hit somebody, knock them off a chair, kick them,” Rathbun recalls. “When he’d go in for more, she would restrain him.”

By 2004, Headley says, “Shelly was cowed. She was always stressed. She was never sleeping. She was just run ragged. Because of that, she was often in a bad mood, and that’s where some people would just say they hated her. . . . But she was never an evil person, and I thought she really cared. It was just a god-awful situation.”

The Lady Vanishes

In late 2006, according to multiple sources, Shelly was tasked with a Sisyphean project. Already various Sea Org officers had tried and failed to satisfy Miscavige’s wishes for a new and improved “Org Board”—a corporate reshuffling, basically. Shelly, despite months of round-the-clock drafting and re-drafting, fared no better. Miscavige rejected everything.

At this point they were communicating from afar. Rather uncharacteristically, Miscavige had felt a strong and sudden need to spend time in Los Angeles, which housed the church’s publishing unit, about to peddle its latest book of Hubbardisms. In the meantime, at Int Base, Shelly went back to the Org Board. Then, for reasons known only to her, she made two executive decisions. Without Miscavige’s O.K., she disseminated the chart and informed people of their new titles and duties. Additionally, in order to facilitate renovations on Miscavige’s living quarters, she had some of his belongings boxed up and moved to a temporary housing unit, according to John Brousseau.

Within days, former colleagues say, Shelly seemed to know she was living on borrowed time. “She puttered about for maybe a week or two, being very sheepish and withdrawn,” Brousseau recalls. “Not really contributing. Telling her domestic staff not to bother taking care of her—that she could make her own meals. She’d say, ‘It’s all right,’ and sort of be very undeserving, knowing that she was in a crap-load of trouble.”

Mike Rinder, having just seen Miscavige, was cornered by Shelly. “She asked me whether he was wearing his platinum wedding ring or his gold one,” Rinder says, “like she didn’t want to ask if he was still wearing his wedding ring.”

Soon Shelly was stripped of her duties and was shadowed by a watchful handler while attending her father’s funeral, according to Marc Headley. There she went to the bathroom and was approached by a former Scientologist who had been declared an S.P. and didn’t know where to turn. “Listen to me,” Headley claims Shelly said. “I fucked up, and I’m not going to be able to help you.”

At around this time, it began to seem as if the First Lady of Scientology had never existed. Claudio Lugli says he was told, “You don’t have to do Shelly’s [clothes] anymore, because she’s on a special project.” Sea Org never discussed her sudden disappearance, and its members were loath to ask. The rare exception was Leah Remini, whose famed brassiness proved problematic for Sea Org. At Tom Cruise’s wedding to Katie Holmes, in November 2006, Remini couldn’t help but notice a glaring absence. She wondered aloud, “Where’s Shelly?”

Remini, according to a source close to her, was told to shut up and mind her own business. But when Christmas came and went, and she failed to receive her traditional thank-you note from Shelly, Remini’s questions became more insistent. The harder she pressed, the more the church stonewalled. The stalemate lasted for nearly seven years, during which time Shelly’s whereabouts was largely unknown by the outside world and not spoken of by her husband. Now in the head office it was just Miscavige and Lou Stuckenbrock.

In time, a handful of journalists concluded that Shelly was being housed at one of the church’s secretive and tightly controlled outer bases. Most Sea Org members are never told about these outposts, which serve to protect the church’s most precious possessions and operations, and which can be found in California and New Mexico; a base in Wyoming is still under construction. For example, Trementina Base, in northeastern New Mexico, serves as a repository for Hubbard’s writings and films; the former are engraved on steel tablets, entombed in titanium casings, and buried in underground vaults, according to several former church members.

But most reports about Shelly’s whereabouts focused on a base outside Los Angeles. Located near Lake Arrowhead, about 90 minutes from the city, the roughly 500-acre site is known variously as Twin Peaks, Rimforest, or C.S.T. The first two are nearby towns; the third is an abbreviation for Church of Spiritual Technology—the wing in charge of Scientology’s copyrights and archival work. According to Dylan Gill, a former Sea Org member who oversaw much of its construction, the base includes, in addition to a luxurious “log cabin” primed for Hubbard’s return, a second structure designed to protect church V.I.P.’s such as Miscavige and Tom Cruise in the event of a nuclear Armageddon.

The only people who enter the vast base are the two dozen or so Sea Org members who live on it full-time. Most people assigned there consider the posting an honor because to be at Twin Peaks is to be safeguarding the word of L.R.H. Never mind that they are monitored by a security apparatus that includes armed guards, infra-red cameras, and spiked fences, sources say. “It’s isolated,” says Gill, who spent seven years at Twin Peaks. “You really don’t have contact with other Scientologists at all.” Mail and phone calls are monitored. “It’s a good way to have somebody disappear,” Gill adds.

Multiple sources say Shelly was sent to Twin Peaks straight from Int Base. A few weeks after her disappearance, John Brousseau says, Lou Stuckenbrock summoned him to the office Shelly had previously occupied. “Miscavige was standing there, looking very impatient and irate, and he said to me, ‘Hey, J.B., can you break into here?’ He was pointing to a sort of hidden panel that [concealed] a large walk-in closet with lockable file cabinets. Once you close and lock the panel, it looks just like a wall panel. He wanted me to break into it, because I guess they didn’t have the keys. Shelly was the only one who did.”

Immediately after he removed the panel, Brousseau says, Miscavige told him to leave. “A couple hours later, I get a call asking if I know how to pick locks,” Brousseau continues. “So I unlocked some of these file cabinets, and the minute I unlocked them, he said, ‘No, no, no, leave them. You can leave.’ A couple weeks later, when Miscavige was no longer at the property, I was summoned by another office secretary. She said I could repair the lock and get it re-keyed with the exact same key and make it look like nothing had happened. This is all while Shelly was still under heavy investigation.”

According to Mike Rinder and Mark Rathbun, who have firsthand knowledge of such procedures, the investigation would have involved a “sec-check,” in which security personnel would put her through repeated interrogations designed to elicit confessions, repentance, and submission. (Sec-checks are routinely administered for the smallest slight, sources say.) Everything she said would have been relayed to her husband, who ultimately banished her to endure several months of auditing and re-programming, Rathbun says, likely followed by several months of menial labor—until she finally evinced satisfactory degrees of contrition, obeisance, and “clarity.”

Although it’s possible Shelly was shuffled to another base, sources like Jan Weiss and Claire Headley, who knew her well, say she’ll most likely stay at Twin Peaks for as long as is required of her—not because she has to, but because she wants to. “She lives in a sort of demented altered universe,” says Karen de la Carriere. “Whatever she thinks of D.M., she is devoted to Hubbard. That’s the only life she’s ever known.”

The greater tragedy of Shelly, says Marc Headley, is that “she’s probably the one person who could just end it tomorrow. If she just walked away from the whole craziness and said, ‘O.K., this is where all the fucking bodies are buried—this is what he did with this, this is what he did with that—let’s fucking burn it down,’ it would be done.”