“I’m all right. Don’t worry.” She skipped out of the room. In the bathroom, Lawrence asked Sanders to help her dress. Abruptly, she turned aggressive. “GET AWAY!” Lawrence shrieked, shoving Sanders into the wall.
Lawrence’s co-workers began leaving frantic messages for Booth at home; he had no cell phone. No one knew he was sitting in his car on the street below, wondering where his wife was. Figuring she’d taken the train, he drove home.
Back at the office, Lawrence had again stripped naked and swayed next to an open window. Two paramedics approached but she cursed and shrieked. “I love you, David,” Lawrence said. And then: “I know I am going to jump.” No one had time to react. She never put her arms out to brace her fall.
In the ICU, Booth clutched his wife’s hand until it grew cold. Then he called a Turning Point official. “What have you done?” he demanded. The official, Booth says, told him the group had done nothing wrong.
He wishes he had gone into her office instead of driving home. He wishes he had agreed to have her child. “It broke her mind,” Booth, now 42, says of the course. “Fractured her mind somehow. And I don’t understand it.”
He hopes the coroner will recommend regulation of the self-help industry, but says whatever Turning Point officials may have done was not intentional. “I know she’s around,” he says, looking out over the harbor they loved. “I know she exists somewhere else on the other side. And I know I’ll see her again.”
On the last day of the inquest’s hearings, the Web site for People Knowhow was taken down. In its place was a message: “the company is reviewing its programs and systems.”
Our new Web site,” it promises, “will soon be launched.”
Narrative scenes in this article were reconstructed based on interviews with Rebekah Lawrence’s husband, David Booth, and sister, Kate-Lawrence Haynes; documents in her court file, including transcripts of police interviews with witnesses, Turning Point officials and students, Lawrence’s therapist Helen Mitrofanis, family members, co-workers and friends; police evidence including police reports, crime scene photos and Lawrence’s autopsy report; copies of e-mails between Lawrence and family members; psychiatrist Michael Diamond’s report to the inquiry; court transcripts; and the reporter’s own observations in coroner’s court.
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