The Scientology life — and Scientology death — of Romey Beliles
1. Owensboro
Romey Lance Beliles wanted you to know two things about him. First, that he was from Owensboro, Kentucky where his high school had voted him “most friendly” in the class of 1990. And second, that he owned at least one weightlifting record which still stood, years after he had played football for the Owensboro Red Devils.
He stood 5 feet 10 and worked hard in the weight room his senior year, besting several records. The fact that one of those marks still stood decades later was one of Romey’s proudest achievements and said something about his grit and determination, he thought.
He was from a deeply Christian family living in America’s Bible Belt. Everyone he knew growing up was an evangelical Christian, he noted at one point, except for three Jewish guys. His father was a barber, whose father had been a barber before him. His mother had been a homemaker, and they had split up and remarried by the time Romey was in high school. Romey had three step-siblings and a cousin he was particularly close to, named Shane.
And Romey had a maternal grandmother, the matriarch of the family, who spoke in tongues when the spirit moved her. He mentioned it occasionally, as if it summed up who he was and where he was from: He was a nice guy from Kentucky in a deeply Christian part of the country, his grandmother spoke in tongues, he had set weightlifting records at Owensboro High School, he was good looking and had an easy charm, and girls were drawn to him.
As high school graduation neared, Romey knew his options were pretty well defined. There was a strong pull to follow his father into the hair-cutting business. He had been around it his entire life and could make a steady, if modest, living at it.
College was a possibility, and although the cost might seem out of reach, he could make it less expensive by attending a community college before transferring to Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green, where some of his friends were headed.
And there was another avenue, which two of his football buddies told him about. They planned to enlist in the military, and were aiming for a program that would make them engineers in the Navy’s nuclear corps.
While he was considering his options, something happened that changed everything for Romey, in a way that was so fundamental it would affect the rest of his life.
During his senior year someone gave him a copy of a book that had been on the shelf in the high school’s library and told him to read it.
It was a recent paperback edition of a 1950 bestseller, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health.
The author, L. Ron Hubbard, had been known as a successful writer for the pulps in the 1930s and for science fiction in particular when his career was interrupted by the Second World War. Although he didn’t see combat, Hubbard was hospitalized at the end of the war and made some key insights into the way the human mind worked, he said, by talking with other patients.
In Dianetics, he proposed that the human mind operated something like a modern computer, with memory banks and circuits, but that it was divided into two halves. One half, the analytical mind, could record things flawlessly and operate at incredible efficiency. But people are held back by the other half, the “reactive mind,” where we store traumas and other negative thoughts in discrete memory packets Hubbard called “engrams.”
Through counseling which consisted of bringing up those memories — the most important of which happened while one was still a fetus in the womb — subjects would talk about them in a process called “auditing” in order to lessen their pain. Through auditing, engrams could be eliminated and eventually so could the reactive mind itself. At that point, a person would be a “Clear,” operating only with the powerful analytical mind, and would enjoy perfect eyesight, raised IQ, and moral clarity as well as other benefits.
Although Hubbard offered no scientific evidence of a reactive mind or engrams or the state of Clear, his ideas enjoyed a brief boom after Dianetics came out in May 1950, and he formed foundations where people could pay for the counseling he’d described. But soon, interest subsided and Hubbard lost the use of the name Dianetics in bankruptcy. With the help of a wealthy Kansas oil man, Hubbard regrouped in 1952, renamed his movement “Scientology,” and then in December 1953 incorporated the first Church of Scientology, hoping that trying out the “religion angle,” as he called it, might help increase his fortunes.
By then, Hubbard’s modest number of followers were no longer satisfied with merely trying to remember what they had gone through in the womb, they wanted to go back earlier — to previous lifetimes. So while Dianetic counseling remained focused on engrams and one’s early life, Scientology asked subjects to remember what happened to them hundreds or thousands of years ago in previous lives, or perhaps millions or billions of years ago on other planets.
As Scientology expanded through the early 1960s, Hubbard and his followers developed a number of practices that had nothing to do with auditing or engrams, but were instead intended to create compliant responsiveness in strict, rote answer-and-question programs. These “training routines” had Scientologists sitting for hours in staring contests and barking at each other in order to shake the other person’s concentration. A kind of faith healing called “touch assists” was developed, as well as a detox regimen that involved a sauna, called the Purification Rundown.
By the late 1980s, Dianetics itself was going through a new round of popularity, thanks to some very effective television ads that featured an erupting volcano. Hubbard died in 1986, but by 1990, with centers around the U.S. and in many foreign countries, Scientology was at its greatest ever extent, and former executives estimate that it had about 100,000 active members planetwide.
It was at this moment that Romey Beliles discovered Dianetics at the Owensboro High School library, and was seized by what Hubbard described about the human mind. He had no way of knowing that Scientology, forty years after the book’s first publication, had metastasized in numerous directions away from what Hubbard described in the book.
We asked Chris Shelton, a former Scientology executive, what was in Dianetics that might have made such a lasting impression on a Kentucky high school senior.
“The idea that there’s a mechanistic way of dealing with your mind, like a computer program, to put it into an optimum state. It’s really appealing for some people, especially if they have a hard time dealing with others. And Clear is the ultimate place, where you will always be on your best game. Who wouldn’t want that?” Chris said. “And if you’ve only read Dianetics, Clear seems godlike.”
Shane Beliles, Romey’s “double cousin” (their mothers were sisters, and their fathers were brothers), says that another reason Romey might have been quick to seize on the ideas in Dianetics was that, although they were immersed in such a heavily evangelical environment, Romey had witnessed behavior while growing up that made him skeptical of the religious people of Owensboro.
“I think he was looking for an alternative,” Shane says. “He had seen some behavior that struck him as very hypocritical in the Christian church.”
We also spoke to Claire Headley, a former top Scientology official, who said that Romey’s background in a religious community may have played a big part in why Dianetics made such an impression on him.
“My mom was brought up in a strict Catholic background, and she was rebelling against that when she read Dianetics, while she was pregnant with me. That’s why she decided to name me after Clear,” Claire says. “So yes, if Romey was having issues with his evangelical upbringing, Dianetics could have been a welcome alternative for him.”
Whatever it was that appealed to him, what Romey read in Dianetics grabbed him hard.
Romey’s edition of the book was a paperback that had been published in 1987. In the back, he found a listing of Scientology locations with addresses.
There was nothing anywhere near him in Owensboro, Kentucky. But he did find that there was a Hubbard Dianetics Foundation in Orlando, Florida on East Colonial Drive.
The Navy program that his friends were going to was also located in Orlando. Romey knew that if he followed his friends and enlisted, he’d be in Orlando for at least a few years, long enough, he hoped, to get auditing at the nearby Dianetics Foundation on his free nights so that he could go Clear at the same time that he was becoming a nuclear engineer.
He looked up the number for the Orlando Foundation and called, asking if a person could go Clear there. He was assured that this was the case.
It seemed like the perfect plan.
2. Orlando
Since 1976, the Naval Nuclear Power School had been located at the 1,125-acre Naval Training Center about four miles from Orlando’s downtown.
After getting through boot camp at the NTC, Romey settled into the courses required of a prospective engineer at the Nuclear Power School. He let his friends back home know that there was a hierarchy at the school among the new recruits, depending on the work they were going to be doing.
Half of the “Navy Nukes” were known as “MMs,” for machinist mates, and were more colloquially called “monkey men.” Another 30 percent were EMs, for electrician’s mates, called “wire biters.”
Romey had managed to get himself into a more elite group, the ETs — electronic technicians, known as extra-terrestrials, “or extra testicles, depending on who you asked,” he wrote. The ETs were the ones who would be at the control board in a nuclear-powered submarine “maintaining a radio silence with a full payload of nuclear deterrents.”
It was very serious business, it required skill and diligent study, and Romey was cruising through it without difficulty.
Meanwhile, he was itching to get to the Hubbard Dianetics Foundation in town to obtain the auditing he had read about in Dianetics so he could go Clear.
What he found there was a Scientology center that was eager to see him, but he was asked to go through other courses and experiences before he would get what he came for.
It was the start of a pattern that would color literally the rest of Romey’s life: What he wanted from Scientology was the auditing and the state of Clear he had read about in Dianetics, but what he experienced was a complex bureaucracy and layers of other programs and goals that Hubbard and Scientology had developed since the 1950 publication of his bestseller.
“It used to be a selling point, that they have so much more now,” Chris Shelton points out. “But for Romey, clearly it was a frustration.”
Initially, Romey did get some auditing, from an elderly woman on staff who seemed uncertain of what she was doing, but in general Romey considered it a promising start.
But then he was asked to go through something called the Hubbard Qualified Scientologist course, which would introduce him to the staring contests and other odd practices of the “training routines.”
“There’s no Dianetics in HQS. It’s Objectives, TRs, Assists. But no Dianetics,” Shelton says, referring to those various elements that had been developed after 1950. “All of this introductory stuff, all it does is extend the runway. What Romey wanted was basic Dianetics, to run some engrams, but he was being told, ‘After you get all this Scientology, we’ll get around to that.’ And he really had no choice at that point.”
For Romey, it was bewildering and disappointing. Not only was he being asked to sit and stare at other people for hours at a time, and then asked to touch walls and make repetitive motions at command, but it soon became obvious that the employees at the Orlando foundation had their own plans for Romey that had nothing to do with his desire for going Clear.
They wanted him on staff.
Shelton explains that one of the most important characteristics of Scientology, as an organization, is the crushing pressure of “statistics.” Every Thursday at 2 pm, Scientologist staffers, no matter where they are in the world, are required to turn in their weekly “stats,” and if those stats aren’t trending upward, they face harsh punishments.
The Orlando “Org” — Scientology churches call themselves orgs, short for organizations — was under heavy pressure to add to its staff, and that meant convincing Romey to sign a contract and begin working at the facility.
“I was asked if I wanted to help out in my spare time and volunteer some time on weekends,” Romey wrote later of his experiences in Orlando. “I agreed that I would like to help out and signed a staff contract.”
Meanwhile, Romey was cruising through his nuclear program at the Naval training center, working through physics and radar courses. He was literally only weeks away from graduating as an engineer who could run a control board on a submarine.
But the executives at the org then let Romey know that he needed to make a choice.
“I was warned by the Senior Case Supervisor that I would not be able to be in Scientology if I received my security clearance in the nuclear reactor program in the US Navy. I was told that I could not have Dianetics auditing but needed to be on a course as my next action,” he wrote.
The case supervisor told Romey that the Navy was a “suppressive” group that was against the aims of Scientology. He could not do both, maintain a security clearance as a nuclear engineer and work as a staffer at a Scientology org.
Claire Headley says that Hubbard had warned about allowing anyone in Scientology who had high security clearances, with the suspicion that the military was sending someone in as a plant. “It’s in the same category as someone being connected to a journalist or the FBI,” she says.
Romey had gone to Orlando hoping to do two things: Learn to work on a nuclear submarine for the Navy, and to go Clear at a Scientology center. Now, in July 1991, he was being told that unless he quit the Navy before receiving his security clearance, he would never receive the auditing he wanted and would never go Clear.
Incredibly, with only a few weeks to go before his certification as a Naval nuclear engineer, Romey decided that he had to find a way out of his six-year military commitment based on what the case supervisor at the Scientology center was telling him.
But how to do it? He didn’t want a dishonorable discharge on his record. So Romey did some research, and found a way out.
He got blind drunk.
He went with some fellow students to the beach, and then purposely drank to excess until he got sick and blacked out. He then reported it to his superiors saying that he had a problem, and he was directed to a drug and alcohol advisor who ordered him to take a two-week education program. He refused. And so he received a general discharge under honorable conditions, and was sent home to Owensboro.
His family was surprised to see him, especially when he told them that he was not intending to go to college, but instead to return to Orlando to work at a Scientology center. In fact, he was told by his bosses at the Scientology org that if he didn’t get back there soon, he would be “declared” a “suppressive person” — Scientology’s version of excommunication — and he would never receive the auditing he wanted to go Clear.
In September 1991, he returned to the Orlando Org, and went on staff full time.
By now, Romey had figured out that in some ways he’d chosen a real backwater when it came to Orlando. He didn’t know, when he was picking addresses out of the back of Dianetics, that a far more important Scientology center was located about a hundred miles west of Orlando in the gulf coast town of Clearwater.
It was here that L. Ron Hubbard directed his followers to build a new spiritual headquarters for Scientology after he’d run the organization from sea during the years 1967 to 1975 from a small armada with Hubbard aboard the “flagship,” a former cattle ferry he renamed the yacht Apollo. Using a fake front organization, Hubbard invaded Clearwater before the locals realized that Scientology was moving in, taking over the iconic Fort Harrison Hotel and Clearwater Bank building. It was the start of what Hubbard called the “Flag Land Base,” essentially his flagship on dry land.
“Flag,” as it was known, was supposed to have the best auditors and most “technical perfection” in the entire Scientology world. Romey was disappointed that this hadn’t been spelled out in the back of his copy of Dianetics. Instead, he was at the much less important Orlando Org, which was scrambling for new staff members and making them live in squalid conditions. It involved sleeping on the floor of a group home where the org executives took up the bedrooms, and newcomers like Romey grabbed whatever space they could.
“He makes it sound miserable, this staff house, with the same people working and living together,” Shelton says, after looking over Romey’s description of his Orlando days. “But it never seems to occur to him that it’s Scientology that is the problem. He’s always trying to use Scientology terms to understand this insane situation. He blames the individuals working there, that they aren’t maybe following L. Ron Hubbard’s orders correctly. I saw that all the time. Scientologists never consider that actually it’s Ron’s ideas that are the issue.”
For two years, Romey Beliles lived in squalid conditions, working full time at the Orlando Org for less than minimum wage. He describes having to pull fruit off of local trees in order to get enough to stave off malnourishment, smoking cigarette butts he found laying around, and having little free time.
He did manage to make at least one trip to Clearwater to visit the Flag Land Base. And while he was there in 1992, he was convinced to sign the billion-year contract of Scientology’s most hardcore inner elite, the Sea Organization, whose members are required to serve Scientology lifetime after lifetime with total dedication — although the contract was not yet “activated” since Romey was still working as a staffer in Orlando.
One person who remembers him from this time said that Romey was considered so friendly, he would be asked to wrangle the unruly children of Scientologists who were taking courses at the Orlando Org.
One woman, we’ll call her Sandra, appreciated that Romey kept her daughters occupied while she was on course, and also paid Romey to babysit her children a few times. Romey and Sandra ended up being friends for many years because of it.
And someone else was impressed by Romey when they came to the Orlando Org early in 1993: a visiting Sea Org executive from New York.
After that inspection, Romey suddenly got an order to learn how to become a “registrar” — a staff member who was essentially a salesperson, pressuring Scientologists to pay more for additional courses and other services — and his training would occur in New York City, at the Continental Liaison Office for the Eastern U.S., a regional power center for the church.
Romey felt that he had little choice but to comply.
3. New York
In 1993, Scientology’s Continental Liaison Office, Eastern US (CLO EUS) was at 349 W. 48th Street in Manhattan.
Romey was assigned to spend a week there learning how to become an aggressive Scientology salesman, something he really wasn’t all that interested in becoming.
At the Orlando Org, he had gone through some of Scientology’s introductory experiences up through the Purification Rundown, the sauna-and-vitamins regimen that Scientologists believe detoxes them spiritually. But Romey was still hungering for the thing he had first read about in high school, getting Dianetic auditing and going Clear. And by now, he had also decided that he wanted to get enough technical training to become an auditor and help others go Clear.
Learning the high-pressure tactics of a registrar wasn’t on his list of priorities. But he was going along with it, getting his first trip to New York City, and enjoying what at first blush seemed to be a much better situation.
He was, for the first time in a couple of years, getting three meals a day and a bed to sleep in at night.
At the end of the week-long course, after the final lecture but before he could make his way to the mess to have dinner, he was pulled aside by the CLO’s CO (commanding officer), a Sea Org official that we’ll call Barbara.
She took him to an empty room on the first floor and began using the same high-pressure techniques that he’d just been taught, pushing him for hours.
Barbara wanted Romey on staff at the CLO, which would mean not only leaving his Orlando Org contract, but also activating the billion-year Sea Org contract he had already signed at Flag so he could become a full-blown Sea Org member there in New York City.
He tried his best to resist. He had too many loose ends to tie up in Orlando, he said, and he was still, after three years, no closer to getting what he had wanted in the first place, Dianetic auditing and going Clear. He knew that becoming an around-the-clock Sea Org worker at the CLO in Manhattan wouldn’t get him any nearer to it.
For four hours, Barbara pushed Romey as he felt hungrier and hungrier for the dinner that he had missed. Finally, under her pressuring, he agreed. He would go on staff at CLO after he returned to Orlando to take care of some things. No, she said, no need for you to go back. You can start your new contract here in the morning.
The next day, he began the Sea Org boot camp program, called the Estates Project Force. Perhaps because he was still conflicted about it, it took him two months to complete, about twice as long as expected.
And the more time he spent at the CLO, the more he began to think it was no better than the Orlando Org as far as organization and efficiency.
This was reinforced when he was sent to the nearby New York Org, on 46th Street, where the public was brought in for beginning courses, and Romey got the same impression of a poorly run facility.
He had been sent there to inspect the org’s Central Files and Addresso system, which was how Scientology kept up a massive database on current and former members for its constant mailers.
“New York Org was just as bad,” he wrote later. “With lost boxes of mail, and letters hidden in different parts of the org.” And among all the clutter, he found something on the wall that shocked him.
“I could see an LRH quote framed in the hallway signed by ‘LRH, Admiral.’”
Romey knew that L. Ron Hubbard was known as the Commodore in Scientology, for his years running things from his flagship in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Caribbean. But admiral?
Romey looked into it, and learned that on his deathbed in 1986 Hubbard had supposedly signed a directive naming two of his final caretakers, Pat and Annie Broeker, to be “Loyal Officers” who would be his successors, and naming himself admiral. But the directive was then pronounced a fake by Hubbard’s actual successor and the current leader of the church, David Miscavige, and it was rescinded.
Romey was stunned. On the wall of the New York Org was this debunked reference, something Romey considered “squirrel.” (Hubbard referred to anyone trying to do Scientology practices outside the official church as “squirreling” and anyone doing it “squirrels.” It was one of the worst things a Scientologist could say about anyone.)
“It was the cherry on top of a mound of disgrace,” Romey wrote, thinking back to that “admiral” quote on the wall at the New York Org. And when he returned to the CLO and reported it to Barbara, she “acted as if it was just a decorating flaw and issued an order to have it removed. I guess I was expecting more from an LRH Birthday Game winner than a simple wave of her hand.”
It cemented for Romey what he had already decided in just a few months at the CLO: The sloppy work he saw there and at the New York Org just wasn’t for him. He was wasting his time, he still wasn’t getting the auditing he wanted, and he decided it was time for him to leave.
He put in the paperwork to begin the complex and lengthy process of getting out of his commitment. In the meantime, overworked and lonely, he was getting to know a woman who had also recently arrived at the CLO to take up an important position there, a single mom named Sylvia, the new Hubbard Communication Office Area Secretary (HAS).
Both of them were exhausted, overwhelmed, and looking for companionship.
“Sylvia and I were a thing for a little while, just some light kissing, nothing heavy. We abided by Sea Org regulations about our relationship. It was awkward. I was routing out of the Sea Org and she was the new Senior HAS EUS and one of the only terminals that I could talk to about it,” he wrote, using the word “terminal” that Scientologists say to mean a person.
And before long, as he was trying to get his leave from the place, he found out that he was in big trouble.
He learned it from Barbara’s “personal communicator,” Scientology’s version of an executive secretary, in this case a man named Mike Ellis.
Ellis said something to Romey that puzzled him for the rest of his life: “We have enough to declare you but we’re not. The CO just wants you to leave.”
As far as Romey knew, he had only engaged in a little light “out-2D” (kissing and light petting) with Sylvia, which was not enough to get him “declared” a “suppressive person” (excommunicated). What did Ellis mean?
At least with Barbara, the CO, washing her hands of him, Romey was free to go, and he returned to Kentucky.
Some 15 years later, he was stunned to hear that Barbara, during the 2008 Anonymous war with Scientology, went public as an “anon” who had been a high official in the church and was now a fierce critic of the organization.
He puzzled over it again and again: Was part of his ongoing issue with Scientology caused by the fact that Barbara, secretly suppressive, had sabotaged him, and was her problem with him simply that he had been making out with Sylvia instead of her? And what did Ellis mean when he said they had enough to declare him?
It would become even more of an obsession for Romey after Mike Ellis went on to a much higher post in Scientology that put him in a position of deciding Romey’s Scientology fate.
But that was years in the future.
In 1993, after his several months in New York and his brief stint in the Sea Org, Romey was heading back home to Kentucky, still trying to figure out what to do with his life.
4. Nashville
Shane Beliles speaks fondly of the next four years with his cousin Romey. After Romey’s return from New York, the two of them lived together in a house in Bowling Green, Kentucky with three other close friends.
The housemates, except for Romey, were working on degrees at Western Kentucky University. Romey was delivering pizzas, and taking a few classes here and there, Shane says.
“It was only after the rest of us got done with school in 1997 and moved away that Romey got serious about it himself. I never really understood that,” he says.
But he was grateful to have his cousin around, and Romey fit in well with the rest of the group. And during these years, Shane says, Romey would sometimes talk with him about his interest in Scientology.
Shane made it plain that he wanted nothing to do with Scientology, but he didn’t mind talking to his cousin about his interest in it, and Romey’s unflagging desire to go Clear.
“I think he was really the best listener I’ve ever known. He would walk you through stuff. He was super caring,” Shane says.
One of the things Romey was excited about, Shane added, was that in 1993, Scientology had managed to get tax exempt status, a longtime church goal. Shane says Romey told the story about how, he believed, Scientology officials had met with IRS officials in DC, read their minds, and made things happen with their sheer mental power. “They overwhelmed them with it,” Romey told him.
“He was drawn to the supernatural. To having abilities and powers,” Shane says.
But for the most part, Romey kept that stuff to himself. “He led a sort of secret life,” Shane says. And he kept secrets from Shane, too.
He says that Romey never told him what happened in Orlando and why he had left the Navy.
And records show that during this period, Romey was working hard to pay off “freeloader debts” he owed to both the CLO EUS in New York and the Orlando Org.
In Scientology, employees on staff or in the Sea Org are told that if they ever leave, they will be saddled with huge debts for the training that they received on the job. These freeloader debts are not enforceable in court, but Scientologists tend not to know that. And they are made to believe that if they don’t pay them, they can be prevented from making any more progress on the scheme of courses and auditing known as the “Bridge to Total Freedom,” or can even be cut off from other Scientologists.
Romey no longer wanted to be an employee of the church, but he didn’t want to leave Scientology itself. He was now known as a “public” since he was no longer on staff or in the Sea Org. But he was still paying for those experiences.
An invoice from CLO EUS in 1993 shows that Romey was told he owed a total of $5,030.00. Two years later, he still had a balance of $2,200.00
Shane didn’t know at the time that Romey was working off those debts. He only knew that Romey was always looking for ways to take on more jobs and to try out new opportunities.
In the summer of 1995 Romey drove to Connecticut, where some Scientologists were selling sunglasses by the side of the road, a small operation run by Patty Moher. (Yes, our Patty, the regular contributor to our weekly Group Therapy podcast.)
The Hartford Courant interviewed Romey for a piece in June 1995 about selling sunglasses for Patty. She remembers him, of course.
She had started the venture based on a plan by some Florida Scientologists who imported the cheap Chinese-made sunglasses. She thinks Romey must have heard about it through the Scientology grapevine, because he just showed up one day.
“Romey heard about these sunglasses and they hooked him up with me. He didn’t stay with it very long. I remember only good things about him. He was very good looking and had long hair past his shoulders. Women were drawn to him. And he was a good guy, a nice kid. He was from the South and had good manners,” Patty says.
Soon enough, Romey was back in Bowling Green. And Shane says that his cousin didn’t miss a rent payment while he was away.
In 1997, after four years of rooming together, Shane went back to his hometown in Muhlenberg County, and the others in the house also scattered as they finished their degrees.
Romey stayed behind in Bowling Green. There was no Scientology org there, so in 1999, he started going to the org in Nashville, which had a Celebrity Centre and was about an hour away by car.
In 1955, L. Ron Hubbard announced “Project Celebrity,” his idea for recruiting prominent figures to the church in order to make it look more mainstream. In 1969, one of his followers took that idea to another level and opened a Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles in order to cater specifically to these VIP members. More “CCs,” as they were called, then opened in places like New York and Nashville as Project Celebrity began to pay off and Scientology did attract figures like John Travolta (1975), Kirstie Alley (1979) and Tom Cruise (1986).
And a “public” like Romey Beliles could also take courses at a Celebrity Centre, adding to its luster. In 1999, his freeloader debts paid off, Romey was now looking to increase his involvement in Scientology again and, as ever, hoping to get what he initially came for, Dianetic auditing and to go Clear.
On September 6, 1999, Scientology’s membership organization, the International Association of Scientologists, issued Romey a lifetime membership card, which cost him $5,000.
What motivated him to make such a big payment, he wrote later, was the news out of Columbine, Colorado about the deadly high school massacre there.
“I had gotten a lifetime IAS membership in 1999 to help out when there had been trouble in Colorado and money was needed to lobby to keep psychs out of every high school in the nation due to some shooting or rage incident out there,” Romey wrote, sounding like the dedicated Scientologist that he was.
L. Ron Hubbard hated psychiatry and considered the “evil psychs” to be the most pernicious influence in the universe. High-level Scientologists are taught that psychiatrists have been booby-trapping the minds of innocent people literally for trillions of years. Even ex-Scientologists, years after leaving the church, can find it difficult to go against their previous indoctrination and seek out professional mental health help because of Scientology’s deep hatred for psychiatry.
Romey paid to redo the Purification Rundown at CC Nashville, and he was also sending money to the Flag Land Base in Clearwater in order to pay for more advanced courses on the “Bridge” when he was able to go there.
Romey’s ardor for Scientology also included some credence that he gave to otherworldly effects that it could produce.
At one point, becoming frustrated thinking about a stepbrother he believed was involved in the meth trade, Romey imagined while driving home from CC Nashville that he had directed a mental “lightning bolt” that knocked his stepbrother down. The next day, he heard that his stepbrother was acting strangely at his stepfather’s auto body repair ship, and had been running in circles, talking to himself and falling down. Romey believed that it was a result of his directing energy at him.
He also believed that if he stared at someone in the distance and inspected their “emotional tone,” he could affect them and they would look up and around in odd ways.
“They don’t have to see me looking,” he wrote. “They must be able to feel the intention of an onlooker.”
While his interest and dedication to Scientology was gaining strength — and his personal library of Scientology materials was growing — he was becoming disappointed in the Nashville Celebrity Centre, as he had with the Orlando and New York facilities previously.
In 2000, he noted, CC Nashville had no auditors at all after the only one they had transferred away.
It stunned him. So, based on a suggestion someone there made, he decided that he should turn his attention to the most important CC of all: Celebrity Centre International, the Hollywood Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles.
“I put money on account at Flag and CC Nashville and then transferred it all out to CC Int because CC Nashville did not have an auditor. CC Nashville did not have an auditor!” he wrote in astonishment.
He put in a request to have his personal files forwarded to CC Int in LA. (Scientology even today has resisted computerization, and notes of auditing sessions are still taken in longhand. Over a Scientologist’s career voluminous files are produced of every step on their path as a “pre-Clear,” file folders which are supposed to follow them wherever they go in the Scientology world.)
Romey also began saving up the money not only for flying there and accommodations, but also for two full “intensives” of auditing. (Auditing is sold in 12.5-hour increments called intensives that can cost many thousands of dollars depending on the level of counseling being delivered.)
At the end of the year 2000, Romey had enough saved up for the trip to LA and two intensives of auditing, and he had a very definite idea of what he was hoping the auditors of Hollywood could help him with.
It was something he had told very few other people. He was still, more than ten years after graduating high school, very hung up on something that had happened to him in Owensboro.
His first great love, a woman we’ll call Sarah, had cheated on him with a member of the high school basketball team. It still bewildered him ten years later, and was the source of great pain. It was, for Romey, his most intense “engram,” and he wanted the kind of auditing he figured he could only get in Hollywood to help him deal with it and take that pain away.
He scheduled his trip, and was told his auditing would begin on February 14, 2001. Valentine’s Day.
He considered it a good omen.
There was one serious problem, however. After asking for his folders to be forwarded to CC Int, he was told that they couldn’t be found.
Somewhere along the line, after his time at the Orlando Org and then at the CLO in New York, his files had been misplaced.
It was a troubling detail, but there didn’t seem to be anything he could do about it.
He flew to Los Angeles as planned anyway.
5. Hollywood
One of L. Ron Hubbard’s notions that Scientologists consider a breakthrough of great genius was the idea that each of us go through life interacting with different “dynamics.”
The first dynamic is one’s self. The second, family. (And specifically, when Scientologists refer to “2D” they tend to be referring to a romantic relationship.) The third dynamic is a group, like the Scientologists you know at your org, and the fourth dynamic is people in general.
When Romey flew to Los Angeles in 2001, what he wanted was “2D” auditing to help him with the pain he felt from the high school heartache with Sarah.
And at first, he was encouraged by how things went. He was asked to stay at a hotel some distance from the Hollywood Celebrity Centre itself, and he initially went through some “word clearing” (agreeing on the definition of terms) with a member of the CC staff, to get oriented.
Then, he was assigned an auditor, named Dave. But if Romey was hoping for 2D auditing, instead what he got from Dave was a “PDH Sec Check.”
Chris Shelton explains that it was very early on, in the 1951 book Science of Survival, that L. Ron Hubbard proposed that some people were being subject to “pain-drug-hypnosis” controls by nefarious organizations.
A 24-question security check (interrogation) had been developed that was used to find evidence that someone was under the influence of this kind of “implant” and was a danger to Scientology.
Both Shelton and Claire Headley tell us that even though Romey had left the Navy in 1991 short of getting his security clearance, Scientology was probably still wary that he might have been subject to a PDH implant, like a Manchurian Candidate, and it would have been Dave’s job to find evidence of it with the checklist and the E-meter.
It was the most frustrating and confusing experience that Romey ever went through in his Scientology career, and what made it seem worse was that he was paying so much money for it.
During the sec check, Dave would read from a prepared list of words, watching the needle on the E-meter as Romey held its sensors, which resemble soup cans. Dave was looking for the needle to react when he read out a word, and when it did, he would ask Romey, “Did you have a thought there?”
Romey would say that he did. But when he would tell Dave what the thought was, whether it was related to his romantic troubles or some other issue, Dave would invariably tell him that wasn’t what he was looking for.
This confused Romey, because he had been taught that Scientology auditors were not supposed to “invalidate” the person they were auditing, but go with whatever the person said they were thinking or feeling.
Romey thought he was supposed to be getting auditing that explored his memories and feelings. What he didn’t seem to understand was that Dave was actually interrogating him and didn’t care about the things he wasn’t specifically looking for.
Over and over, Dave asked what thoughts he was having, Romey would answer, and Dave would tell him it wasn’t what he was looking for. For hour after hour, until it had eaten up nearly all of the 25 hours that Romey had paid for, at a total of more than $6,000.
“Dave seemed like he was intentionally ignoring my originations over and over again while in session,” Romey wrote later. “He would ask a question, get a meter read, ask me what my thought was, I would tell him what my thought had been, he would correct me and tell me that was not what he was asking, we would go over it again and again, do demos and clear words but he would never accept my origination! My thought, which he asked for, he would not accept!”
Alarmed and upset, Romey complained but got nowhere. He flew home in a terrible state, and was “spinning” for weeks, feeling “robotic.”
Feeling betrayed by both CC Int and CC Nashville, Romey tried to make a new start somewhere else, spending a brief time in Gainesville, Florida and Clearwater before returning to Bowling Green.
His finances had taken a heavy blow from the Los Angeles trip, and at this point he moved back in with his mother. He was surviving on what he could make at a campus job at Western Kentucky University, and some student loans.
In early 2003, he decided to try again with Scientology, but instead of the closer Nashville Org, which was an hour drive south, he drove nearly four hours north to the Cincinnati Org.
While he was there, he got a strange diagnosis after an interview with the E-meter: He was “Out-Int.”
Even for Scientologists, Chris Shelton explains, it’s a bizarre situation that’s difficult to understand. One of Scientology’s bedrock principles is the idea that you are not the body you walk around in. You are a “thetan,” a being that has existed for trillions of years, and you just happen to be going through one of countless lifetimes. With Scientology processing, you as a thetan can learn to “exteriorize” from your body and see it from the outside.
“If you exteriorize out of your body, Hubbard says that you can restimulate earlier times of leaving the body because of engrams. And this has an earlier beginning of going into the body before you can go out of it. So the earlier part is called interiorization. And that also could be connected with an engram, such as birth. So being Out-Int means that you have restimulated those times of going in by the action of going out. It’s a little hard to wrap your head around even for Scientologists, but that’s what it means,” Shelton says.
It didn’t make much sense to Romey, either. And he didn’t have the money they were asking for at the Cincy Org to fix his problem.
Then, in May, he suffered an immense shock.
One of the students he knew at Western Kentucky, a freshman he had worked with in one of his campus jobs, was sexually assaulted and murdered in an attack that made national news for its depravity.
Katie Autry had been raped and set on fire by her attacker and died three days later. It was a horrific case that still gets written about and is the subject of documentaries and countless true-crime videos.
Distraught and very unwell, Romey returned to the Cincinnati Org and demanded help for his “Out-Int” condition, but his behavior alarmed the workers there and they told him to leave, and he even got into a scuffle with one of the workers outside the building. He was told to stay away from the org, and his confusion and anxiety grew even worse.
Katie Autry’s death had affected Romey deeply and left him emotionally unstable. His mother, concerned about his state of mind, had him hospitalized for a week’s observation, during which he was prescribed an anti-psychotic medication, a big no-no for Scientologists.
But then, things began to even out for him. Over the next few years, as Romey took classes at a technical college, he also began working toward becoming a member of a pipefitters union, he drove for a trucking company, and he delivered pizzas at night. Whatever emotional rollercoaster he was on, Romey tended to throw himself into multiple jobs and long hours.
He was working, making money, and was developing artistic skills at the technical college.
He was 35 years old, and seemed to be getting a grip on things.
Then, in 2007, he got a surprising message from the Church of Scientology.
After fourteen years, his folders had finally been located.
6. Cincinnati
It turned out that in 1993, the CLO in New York had sent his folders to a New Jersey facility, where they had been forgotten.
But to Romey’s dismay, when his folders were found, they were then sent to the Cincinnati Org, the most recent facility he was associated with.
Still angry with the Cincy Org for the way he had been treated there the last time, however, he wanted his folders to be sent on to CC Int in Los Angeles. It was the Hollywood Celebrity Centre that had done him such a disservice in 2001, and that Romey thought should make things right.
“I am attempting to get my PC folder sent to CC Int so it can be CSed [case supervised] and help me to get back onto the Bridge,” he wrote to the Cincy Org in December 2007.
But as 2008 progressed, Romey was getting more and more upset, sending messages and making calls to Cincinnati, Nashville, and Los Angeles, demanding that his folders get sent to LA, that his case get reviewed, that he be allowed to get back onto the Bridge and finally, once and for all, get the Dianetic auditing so he could go Clear, what he had wanted now for 18 years since he was finishing high school. Why was no one listening?
Then, on November 13, 2008, Romey sent a long, aggressive, and very unwise email to the Nashville Celebrity Centre after talking to a woman there named Anne.
Anne, you seem like a nice person. We’ve had pleasant conversations over the phone. Do you have any idea why I am getting stonewalled about my situation?
He described the fiasco of his auditing at CC Int, how his folders had been missing since 1993, how strange he felt after he came back from LA, how much it affected him that his friend had been killed in such a brutal way, and how, around that same time, he had also lost his maternal grandmother, the one who spoke in tongues and was the matriarch of the family.
He wrote about how he had been hospitalized, and he’d been kicked out of the Cincinnati Org. And that he was being treated like a criminal.
I haven’t killed anybody or raped anyone and I am not undercover working for any suppressive orgs. I would kind of like to know what the hell the problem is and why I cannot be given actual information as to why I was 1. given a PDH Sec Check [instead of auditing] and 2. [not allowed] to be patched up afterwards… I’ll...just ask, how can I get back onto the Bridge?
He then reviewed how he had been asked to leave the Navy by the Orlando Org, and if he had wanted to sue the org for failure to pay minimum wage, he could have done that years ago, but he didn’t.
Then Romey got very dark.
I myself own both a 12 gauge, which I’ve mentioned to the staff at CC Int and CC Nash already, as well as a Charles Daly 1911 model 45 automatic pistol. (It’s what everybody usually pictures when they picture a pistol that isn’t a revolver.)
R2-45 - yeah, a lot of fun! A squirrel gun and a ‘standard’ side arm for both extremes!
It’s fun to think about! Sure, I feel more dangerous, which is itself also effective as therapy (Ron mentions it once when talking about kids and dogs, letting them get your attention and acting like the dog is hurting you.) But I don’t want to slaughter an org. It is contra my intentions and I really want to go free!!!!
Plus, we had a comm cycle about aesthetics once or twice. I’d need to buy a different weapon to slaughter an org. Thompson machine gun for Cin Org, Saiga AK-47 for CC Nash — it’s a shotgun version of an AK, which is named after this really strange space-looking antelope that looks like a woolly goat — and for Orlando I’d go all out: Full body armor, high tec fully automatic belt fed on a tripod. Just walk in and set up and listen to bullets rip through the paper thin walls of the org and bounce off the back concrete walls in the back. And who has all of the extra cash to afford fully auto belt-fed machine guns and their licenses right now? I really don’t.
Imagination is one thing, but the reality is I don’t know why the fuck I can’t get an honest response from a Saint Hill-sized CLO/service org as to what the hell happened to my cycle and where I can get my next Bridge step done.
Romey Lance Beliles
L. Ron Hubbard first referred to an “R2-45” process — that a thetan could be separated from a body with the use of a bullet from a gun — in his 1954 book, The Creation of Human Ability: “R2-45 – an enormously effective process for exteriorization, but its use is frowned upon by this society at this time.”
He also referred to it in a 1959 lecture he gave in Melbourne, and then in 1968 denounced a dozen Scientologists with an announcement in The Auditor magazine with the title “Racket Exposed!” naming them enemies and declaring them subject to Fair Game: “Any Sea Org member contacting any of them is to use Auditing Process R2-45.”
Documents obtained by a researcher in 2015, meanwhile, showed that references to R2-45 were also used by Scientology to intimidate people it considered enemies. The term was familiar to most Scientologists, though most seem to have thought Hubbard was joking about it.
Romey had been around firearms his whole life, and had said on previous occasions that it was just part of growing up in Kentucky. It was completely normal for someone living in Bowling Green to have a shotgun and a pistol.
But even if he was simply a frustrated parishioner using his imagination about taking out his complaints in a shooting spree at an org, what he wrote was way over the line. And he made it even worse in the coming days.
On December 17, he sent another email to CC Nashville...
When something good happens to me I think about killing myself for everything that was taken from me when I was on staff at Orlando. Any ideas on what I should do to resolve this matter. Without gun fire, etc?
On January 10, 2009, he sent an email to The Way to Happiness Foundation in Los Angeles, a Scientology subsidiary that distributes a pamphlet by that name with Hubbard’s “moral code.”
I spend most of my time alone and attempting to not-is the squirrel groups... like Orlando Org and CC Nashville so I can mock up... a new future for myself without going ballistic and opening fire on a nearby class V org...
I would love to do the Happiness Rundown sometime... but if squirrels still prohibit my becoming a Clear... then I am more likely to kill myself in CC Nashville while executing its staff or Cin Org as they have also taken my money! Actually, I wouldn’t bother killing myself as it’s counterproductive, but I still have ideas as to what I could do to Class V org staff.
And finally, three days later he sent another email to The Way to Happiness Foundation.
I was in the nuclear reactor operator program in the US Navy when I walked into the Dianetics Foundation in Orlando, Florida... I was A/Dissem Aide EUS for a little while but I don’t seem to have found out the answer to this question and I’ve been to CC Int for auditing but only received a PDH implant sec check.
WHO FUCKING HEAD DO I NEED TO BLOW OFF TO GET THE FUCKING CHURCH TO AUDIT ME AS I HAVE BEEN TOLD I WOULD BE???
The next day, January 14, 2009, Romey was working in his pipefitters job at a school construction site when he was approached by an FBI agent.
“Mr. Beliles admitted he sent the emails,” says a subsequent court document, “but advised he did not consider the consequences of his actions. He further advised he had no intention of carrying out the threats. Mr. Beliles stated he sent the emails as a way to get attention, and ultimately the auditing/counseling he needed. The defendant advised he had devoted 18 years of his life to the Church of Scientology, and they had been unresponsive to his requests for help. He expressed regret at having sent the emails and said that he understood the seriousness of his actions.”
Romey turned over his firearms and his computer and was taken into custody before being released pending trial. A hearing was scheduled for January 28.
In the meantime, Romey was bewildered, mostly because Scientologists had done what L. Ron Hubbard told them never to do: Go to the FBI, perhaps the most suppressive organization on the planet.
Romey knew that Scientology’s “ethics” rules not only prohibited turning in a Scientologist to the FBI, but also that any dispute should be handled within the church.
But Scientology had gone to the FBI, and it isn’t hard to see why.
As his initial hearing neared, on January 19 Romey did something exceedingly strange, even by his standards.
He scrawled out a handwritten last will and testament on a single piece of paper, and had it notarized. This is its entire contents, although we have changed the name of the woman who was assigned as the beneficiary, the daughter of the woman we are calling Sandra, Romey’s friend from the Orlando Org.
1/19/2009
My Last Will and Testament (of myself, Romey Lance Beliles)
I do hearby bequeath all of my worldly goods to [Ana] who is also a good friend’s daughter, [Sandra], and an owner of [business] in Clearwater, FL, USA.
It is my wishes that this will be exicuted by Shane Beliles as he is my closest living relative and a close friend as my double first cousin. He has been like a brother!
His expenses for such should be covered with a traditional fee of two gold coins to be paid upon completion. The tradition by which those who ferry souls must be paid for doing such as Charon (the ferry man in legend).
Amen! So that I may live a better life in my future I ask that the recipient also agrees to follow this payment for birth, etc, as my future mother.
Romey Beliles
Apparently believing that the end of his life was near with the FBI arresting him and a court date approaching, Romey prepared for this Scientology lifetime to end, and his next Scientology lifetime to begin.
He was still friends with Sandra, the woman he knew at the Orlando Org years before. And one of Sandra’s daughters Romey had babysat in the past, Ana, was now a 25-year-old adult, and a mother herself to a three-year-old boy.
Ana, however, was not pregnant with another child (and in fact today still has only the one son.)
But Romey, as a Scientologist, apparently believed, as all Scientologists do, that after his current lifetime ended, he, as a disembodied thetan, would find a newborn to jump into at a maternity ward to begin his next life. And he also believed that he would somehow become Ana’s son.
Sandra recently passed away, and Ana let us know that she was never aware of the will, and had no idea that Romey had such a plan. She hadn’t heard from him since around that time.
Romey’s criminal case bounced from state to federal court, and he was represented by a federal public defender. Scientology sent an attorney even though it was the Department of Justice that was prosecuting the case.
It was none other than Kendrick Moxon, Scientology’s in-house attorney and an unindicted coconspirator in Scientology’s notorious Snow White Program of the 1970s.
“I represent the Churches of Scientology. As you can see from my appearance here from California, this matter was taken very seriously. The threats are considered serious. People were frightened, frightened very much so,” he told the court.
On December 2, 2009, Romey was sentenced to five years federal probation during which he was barred from going within 1,000 yards of any Scientology facility. He ended up becoming close to his probation officer.
He was never again in trouble with the law.
7. Bowling Green
Over the next nine years, Romey’s life took two simultaneous tracks.
On the one hand, he prospered as a productive member of Bowling Green, Kentucky.
By 2013, he had completed his probation and received a proclamation from Kentucky Governor Steven Beshear restoring his rights.
He continued to develop his artistic skills, going back to school again, and also in 2013 obtained an associates degree in welding at Bowling Green Technical College, and fabricating a sculpture with his instructor, which remains at the campus today.
He followed that up by completing a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Western Kentucky University in 2017.
And he finally did follow his father’s footsteps and went into barbering, running his own place, Cowles Barber Shop, on West 12th Street.
And of course, he still worked additional jobs and tucked away considerable money, as he always had.
On the other hand, and invisible to his many friends who knew him as a successful business owner, he began a systematic and obsessive campaign to convince Scientology to let him back in.
And the person he needed to convince, the person who, according to Scientology’s ethics rules is the “terminal” for people who have been expelled from the church, is known as the International Justice Chief.
Only the IJC can communicate with people who have been kicked out of Scientology, and only the IJC can determine if and how a person can get themselves back in the good graces of the church.
And in those days — and today as well — the person who was the International Justice Chief of the Church of Scientology was a man in Los Angeles named Mike Ellis.
Yes, the same Mike Ellis who, in 1993, was Barbara’s “personal communicator” at the CLO EUS in New York City, and who had told Romey that they had enough to declare him suppressive then, but simply wanted him to go.
As Romey served his probation and then completed it, he began writing regularly to Ellis, constantly going over the same themes and puzzles that had plagued him from the start of his Scientology journey.
His problems with the shabbiness of the Orlando Org. The pressure on him to quit the Navy just as he was about to become a nuclear engineer. His issues with the CLO in New York, and how Barbara had handled the “Admiral” quote and then told him to leave after he had made out with Sylvia, and then had turned out years later to be an “anon” and antagonistic to Scientology. His bewilderment at how he was treated at the Hollywood Celebrity Centre and so much of his money was wasted on the PDH Sec Check. How he was sent into a tailspin by Katie Autry’s horrific death, and how the Cincinnati Org had given him a bizarre diagnosis and then had kicked him out.
Over and over again, how unfair it all was, how badly it was all handled, and all Romey had ever wanted was the auditing and the state of Clear that he had read about in Dianetics while he was still in high school.
Letter after letter, email after email, to the IJC and the IJC’s subordinates and to the Flag Land Base and others. Romey wrote and wrote and wrote. And it was happening while, at the same time, he was flourishing in Bowling Green and saving up money, and hoping to find a 2D, a wife, who shared his interest in auditing and Scientology.
(In fact, it was in 2014 while trying to find a mate through a Scientology dating service that he was told that he could not participate because he was on a list of people declared suppressive by the church. It was his first official word that this was the case.)
That the IJC almost never responded didn’t stop Romey. He kept writing, hoping that some day he could go back into an org some day.
And then, finally, in October 2018, the impossible happened.
The Orlando Org called, asking him to come back, and even offering to pay to fly him out and put him up in a hotel.
He was stunned and elated, and got there as soon as he could.
By now, however, he was arriving at a very different place. While Orlando was still a backwater as far as Scientology was concerned, its drab strip mall location had been replaced earlier that year with a gleaming new cathedral, known in Scientology as an “Ideal Org.”
Since 2003, church leader David Miscavige has pursued a program of raising huge amounts of money from Scientologists, about $25 million per facility according to one former executive, in order to replace mundane orgs with Ideal Orgs.
And the new Ideal Org in Orlando would have been under huge pressure to ramp up every one of its activities in that first year, including going through lists of inactive members, hoping to bring them back. In that fervor, they had found Romey’s name.
When he got there, Romey was “regged” hard by the Orlando Org — asked by registrars to put huge amounts of money on account — but it thrilled him to be treated like a Scientologist again, and he was more than happy to oblige, bringing a large amount of cash with him. (He even took a photo of what looks like $25,000 as he was counting it.)
But the org wanted more.
They not only wanted Romey to bank large amounts for his “Bridge,” but also to help out a local Scientology family that needed a loan.
The parents of a 12-year-old were very concerned about their daughter running into trouble at school, and the school recommending that she get a psychiatric evaluation.
Romey actually knew the mother from many years before, and he wanted to help out if he could. They asked him for a $25,000 loan, and then another one, in order for the girl to go to a Scientology school and to get Scientology care so that she could avoid the evil psychs.
Romey had already turned over all of the cash he had brought with him, so they put him through something that we have reported previously was very popular in Scientology around this time.
Romey called it a “credit card blitz cycle,” but from others we have heard it called the “Chase Wave.”
According to multiple people who experienced it, the Chase Wave involved making a quick succession of applications to open new credit card accounts with zero percent interest rates, and then rolling up huge balances.
When Romey went through it that day at the Orlando Org, they opened 16 new card accounts for him in rapid succession, and put a total of $160,000 on the cards.
Romey was overwhelmed. And soon, he realized that much more had been given to the family of the 12-year-old girl than he had agreed to.
Over the next few months, he made numerous complaints to the org about what had happened, but then, the executives at the org realized they had made a huge error.
As a declared suppressive, Romey Beliles wasn’t eligible for courses or auditing, and they had charged him for things he could never spend.
It was just another flub by the hapless Orlando Org. In the end, they had to return nearly all the money he had turned over.
He was back where he was before, still trying to get back into Scientology, writing to the IJC, while running his business in Bowling Green.
And then, disaster.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, some of the businesses hardest hit by lockdowns were hair salons.
Overnight, Romey Beliles lost his business.
But, being Romey, he fought back with ingenuity and hard work. He took on a job that didn’t require interacting with other people: he drove a pilot car, providing warnings to other drivers as a large load was being brought down the highway.
“He really liked it. It allowed him to see parts of the country he’d never been to before,” his cousin Shane says.
And he took up another pursuit that allowed him to work alone during the lockdowns: He learned day trading from his home computer.
A friend tells us that she was concerned about Romey because the best thing about him had been his sociability, his friendliness, how he made the others around him feel, and working as a popular local barber had really suited him.
But now, he was locked up at home all the time, working away at his computer playing the stock market, and never seeing anyone. She worried what it was doing to his mental health.
And still, Romey kept writing to the IJC. He kept trying to get back in with Scientology, even as it was more than obvious that Scientology was never going to let him back in. In 2022, he was also writing to the Religious Technology Center, Scientology’s nominally controlling entity with David Miscavige as its chairman of the board.
Dear Sir, Ok, I got it. The door is closed. (Period) There is no making up the damages by the S.O., CC Int, for what it did in 2001. There is no, ‘Make up the damage one has done by personal contribution far beyond the ordinary demands of a group member,’ for CLO EUS ([Barbara] the former CO there) and the actions of CC Int against me in what I can only call a series of mock auditing sessions out there in 2001. Ethics is long term survival so this has to happen. You are being bypassed. This is a Danger Condition! Get you hat back or I will wear it for time immemorial.
He was angry, but those who knew him, who had no idea about the battle he was waging with Scientology, say he was his usual friendly self when they spoke with him.
But more and more, he had retreated to his private world, day trading and obsessing about Scientology, and saw less of friends and family.
“I think he was spending two to three hours a day going through his L. Ron Hubbard library in his home, and the rest of the day he was day trading, and then he would walk,” Shane says. “That was his whole life. Scientology, trading, walking.”
Shane remembers a particular conversation they had around this time, after the lockdowns. “He asked me, what do you feel about me being a Scientologist? I gave him a truthful, but not full answer — I could have said a lot of things I was thinking. But I told him, Romey, this is America and people can believe whatever they want to here. If you’re getting something from it, then good for you. It’s not for me.”
Romey seemed satisfied with that response, and in their subsequent conversations never brought Scientology up again.
Shane can’t help wishing that he’d asked more about it. He wished he’d asked Romey what was in his mind at the end of 2024, for example, as his cousin made another of his trips to Scientology’s spiritual mecca.
8. Clearwater
Scientology leader David Miscavige has put more emphasis than ever on Clearwater, Florida, the church’s spiritual home. Miscavige moved there himself more than a decade ago, after abandoning the previously all-important “Int Base,” a secretive compound about 90 miles east of Los Angeles.
As Int’s importance has waned, the Flag Land Base in Clearwater has taken center stage as Miscavige has called to longtime members and celebrities to move there.
In 2013, he opened the massive “Flag Building” across the street from the Fort Harrison Hotel downtown with its space age “Super Power” floor, and Tom Cruise has had a two-story penthouse condo built just a few minutes walk away.
Miscavige is now trying to add to Scientology’s Vatican City with a giant new performance space, L. Ron Hubbard Hall and Park, that will complete the complex with the Hotel and the Flag Building.
Meanwhile, Flag is still the only place in the world where upper-level Scientologists can receive some of the most expensive, most arcane auditing and other processes. A steady stream of wealthy church members is flying in for these experiences, which can take months at a time and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
While there’s ample evidence that Scientology is struggling around the world compared to its height in 1990, if there was anywhere in the world that is a magnet for Scientologists today, it’s the Flag Land Base.
According to Shane, Romey arrived in Clearwater a few days after Christmas 2024, and in time to bring in the new year in the gulf coast city.
Romey told Shane, and he told another close friend, that he had come to Clearwater and was staying in a series of AirBnB rentals because he planned to move there permanently, to make it his home.
Shane says that in a two-hour phone call on March 23, Romey said he was going to sell his Bowling Green house, and he asked Shane what he could get for that amount of money in Florida.
And he told the friend that there was a specific reason why he was back in Clearwater, and why he intended to live there.
Because of the Scientologists.
Romey said that he believed about 10 percent of Clearwater’s residents were Scientologists, and there were similar numbers in Largo, Dunedin, and Safety Harbor.
“I would guess 15 to 20,000 Scientologists in this region, and one or two more being born every day,” he wrote.
One or two more being born every day.
In the light of the will that Romey wrote in 2009, spelling out his intention of jumping into a newborn Scientologist after his death, that phrase sticks out.
Romey, apparently, had a plan.
At about 6 am on the morning of April 5, 2025, a Saturday, Romey Beliles left the house on N. Glenwood Avenue in Clearwater that he had been renting through AirBnB.
He was seven days into the twelve days that he had paid for. As he left the house, he stacked up his possessions in a neat pile inside the front door.
He got into a rented white 2024 Hyundai Sonata, and drove away.
A few minutes later, he parked the car about a mile to the west, on Madison Avenue, just north of Drew Street, a major east-west artery.
Then he walked two blocks back east, along the north side of Drew Street, until he reached the corner with Jefferson Avenue.
A security camera at the house there picked up Romey walking on the sidewalk located near the intersection at 6:21 am.
A few minutes later, a woman driving east on Drew Street noticed the figure of a man lying face down on the sidewalk near the corner. She thought he was in an odd position, and didn’t appear to be a street person. She called 911 and reported it.
At 6:55 am, police arrived and found Romey Beliles lying on the sidewalk, a gunshot wound through his right temple, and his Springfield Armory 1911-01 .45-caliber pistol lying under him.
He was pronounced dead at the scene. The medical examiner later determined it to be a suicide.
Romey was 53 years old.
As Romey intended, his cousin Shane helped take care of his affairs after his death. And what Shane found at Romey’s Bowling Green house helped convince him that Romey went to Clearwater with a plan.
What he found were four cardboard boxes, neatly stacked, and each labeled with the names of Romey’s four closest friends in the world, including Shane himself.
“He had left each of us different things that he knew would mean something to us,” Shane says.
Romey also left behind reams of paperwork, including a 451-page collection of his many letters to Scientology officials, receipts, photographs, and messages to friends and family spelling out his entire, frustrating Scientology career.
Those documents show that Romey was aware of criticisms of the church. Leah Remini’s television series, for example, which he apparently avoided. And at least one citation of a story here at the Underground Bunker. On the other hand, he noted how impressed he was when Scientology leader David Miscavige launched Scientology TV in 2018, and in numerous letters to the IJC he referred to things he saw in its programming.
He wanted desperately to be a full member of the Church of Scientology, at the same time that he felt abused by it, and he struggled with the notion of going public with his concerns.
Shane says that at one point, Romey mailed a packet of information to the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office, but that it had later been returned to him. Seeing what his complaints were, it’s not hard to understand why the DA would see little that it could prosecute.
Shane also found half a dozen unsent envelopes with similar packets that Romey had prepared, but never mailed, to news organizations, including the New York Times.
In Clearwater, police investigating Romey’s death soon located his mother in Kentucky, who said she hadn’t seen or spoken to her son for about four years. Asked about his mental health, she said she didn’t know him to have any mental health diagnoses, and that he didn’t use drugs or alcohol.
“When asked why Romey would be in Clearwater, she advised Romey had been a member of Scientology since he was twenty. [She] advised Romey was arrested in Kentucky on a harassment charge relating to the Church of Scientology,” and the next sentence in the police report is redacted.
The police then spoke to Norman Shape at the Flag Land Base. He told them that “Romey Beliles has never been a practicing member of the Church of Scientology in Clearwater. Norman Shape advised Romey Beliles was expelled from the entire Church of Scientology in October of 2016.”
When Shane spoke to the Clearwater detective on the case, he said that at first Scientology had denied that Romey made any contact with the Flag Land Base while he was in Clearwater this time. But when the detective told them he knew that wasn’t true, the Scientology representative admitted that Romey had come to the base twice, for “interviews.”
“Interview, in Scientology language, generally means an ethics interview,” Claire Headley says, referring to Scientology’s internal standards and obedience rules. “My feeling is that, knowing how hard Romey was trying to get back in, he was probably going there demanding consideration of his petitions. And he would be considered to be ‘in ethics’.”
In other words, a problem case. And it’s likely that he would have been interrogated extensively during both interviews and notified, once again, that he was ineligible to get back on the “Bridge.”
“This was a situation created by Scientology,” Claire says, reflecting on Romey’s frustrating 35-year Scientology path. “They make promises and never deliver, because it’s all a lot of nonsense — head-spinning, confusing nonsense, particularly for someone who needs mental health care. This is the quackery of Scientology.
“From everything I read, Romey was in a complete tailspin, repeating the same things over and over, and he just wanted what he’d wanted from day one, the false promises made by Dianetics, and he never got that. It’s absolutely a tragedy of Scientology, no question about it. He needed actual professional help, but because of Scientology that was not an option for him.”
Chris Shelton came to a similar conclusion. “Romey was fixated on Clear in a way I did see other Scientologists become. It was always a weird kind of energy around such people. I don't have a better way to describe it. The guy was just in way over his head and never saw it. He kept trying to escape the prison of his own belief without realizing that he was the one holding the key to the door the entire time. That's what makes his story so tragic.”
Romey’s cousin Shane is more blunt.
“The church was the gun that killed him, and that stole any future from him,” Shane says.
After the police investigation, Romey’s personal effects were turned over to the family, including his iPhone. Shane showed us that the lock screen image was a woman’s hand holding a locket, inside of which were images of a fetus in a sonogram. We checked, and Ana confirmed that the photo was hers, showing her holding images of her son. She said she didn’t know how Romey had it, but she suspects her mother Sandra had given it to him.
Some 17 years after Romey had hastily handwritten his 2009 will, bequeathing to Ana his worldly goods as long as she was going to be his mother, he still had that image on his phone.
Shane agreed with us that it was a strong indication of how Romey still believed he was going to jump into a newborn in his new lifetime.
He notes that as Romey walked east two blocks on Drew Street that morning, to his right he could have seen a local business that catered to women who needed help during their pregnancies. He wonders if Romey thought he could have found a Scientologist newborn there. It’s impossible to say for certain: The facility is not a place where births take place, but Romey may not have known that. Otherwise, the corner where he chose to end his life appears to be completely random.
Shane and another close friend, two of the last people to communicate with Romey, tell us they are convinced that he was finally ready to accept that, in this lifetime he would never get the auditing he wanted and would never go Clear, that Scientology would never let him back in.
And so, he decided to end his life in Clearwater, on a relatively random street corner but surrounded by other Scientologists in the region, and where one or two new Scientologists were, he was convinced, being born every day.
After freeing himself from his body, Romey would then find a newborn to jump into, and would be raised not by Christian evangelical parents, but Scientologist parents who would have him auditing as soon as possible.
He would go Clear, but only after he had started that new life.
It made sense. To a Scientologist, at least.
It made no sense to his friends and family, who miss him very much, and wish that he had never run into a book with a lot of pernicious nonsense about the human mind that had been dreamed up by a self-obsessed science fiction hack, but that had somehow convinced a friendly, hardworking high school kid that it would unlock the secrets of the universe for him.
Instead, Romey Lance Beliles was brought back from Scientology’s Florida mecca to Kentucky and laid to rest in a family plot in Muhlenberg County, next to an aunt.
Help is available if you or someone you know is experiencing mental health issues or having suicidal thoughts. In the US: Call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Globally: The International Association for Suicide Prevention and Befrienders Worldwide have contact information for crisis centers around the world.
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This is one of the best pieces I've ever read at the Bunker, and that's saying a lot. Thanks, Tony.
I knew what was coming the whole time and yet it didn't make it any less heartbreaking. I know it will be easy for fully-in Scientologists to excuse away what happened and lay blame squarely on Romey. But, I hope some of you at least question how that was able to happen and why he could never just get the simple auditing and work to get to Clear from the CoS in the first place.