The California Coven Project

by Bob Stickgold

  “That’s right. Jaime. What makes the case all the more confusing is the fact that McPhee is also the head of the Natural Midwives Association of California, a group of midwives who broke from the main California Midwives Association over the use of fetal monitors during routine deliveries. The monitor, which has become more and more popular over the last dozen years, gives the midwife or doctor important information that could help them spot danger signs during labor, and, in extreme cases, could lead to the saving of either the mother’s or child’s life. The Natural Midwives Association, or N.M.A., which McPhee heads, opposes the use of the monitors, apparently because it is an ‘unnatural process.’ It is this refusal which has prompted the A.M.A. to demand that their licenses to practice midwifery be revoked, and has led to the legislative hearings on the N.M.A.”

  Carol was on her feet. “It’s lies, all of it. They’re just lying about the whole thing!” She turned to Maggie, her face red with fury. “How can they do that? ‘An unnatural process’! It blinds kids, why don’t they talk about that? Why don’t they talk about the five- to ten-fold increase in Caesarians when the monitor is used?”

  Maggie reached out and pulled Carol over to her side. “You’re going to have to get used to it, darling. The world isn’t always fair.” She turned to Judy. “Maybe I wasn’t so paranoid after all.”

  The rest of the story wasn’t any better. Photos of Maggie and Carol were displayed, and viewers were requested to forward any information that would help police locate the suspects. “We have to figure out what to do about Beckie,” Maggie said. “We can’t just leave her at their mercy.”

  “Well,” Judy said, “she’s not exactly without support. She does have legal help, and I suspect the N.M.A. is going to be working tooth and nail to get her out and acquitted. Besides, there isn’t much you could do to help.”

  “I could offer to trade myself for her.”

  “Maggie, she’d kill you if you did that, and you know it. She knew what she was doing when she sent you out the back. You told me how much you miss Beckie’s advice. Well, now you’ve got it. You’ve got to go out there and cure cancer patients.”

  * * *

  Amy pulled into the Herberts’ driveway with trembling bands. After the news coverage last night, she wasn’t the least bit confident that they hadn’t turned her in. She took a deep breath, opened the car door, and got out. It was a pleasant suburban home, set in a peaceful section of Santa Clara, the last place one would imagine a police stakeout, but she still couldn’t shake the fear from her mind.

  Suddenly the front door of the house flew open and a burly man of forty charged out. “Thank God!” he exclaimed. “We were afraid that you wouldn’t come back!” Jerry Herbert was Fran’s husband and, at this point, nurse, for Fran was dying of cancer.

  Amy tried to smile, the adrenaline still shaking her body. “You’re not the only one who was scared, let me tell you. Trying to get into the driveway, I was shaking so hard, I almost hit that tree of yours.” They looked at each other a moment.

  “Thank you,” Herbert muttered.

  “No,” Amy said, “thank you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Liz Jason sat behind her table in the hearing room and listened as the testimony droned on. She could hardly keep her mind on what was being said as her thoughts continually returned to Beckie McPhee. They actually were treating cancer patients, and Beckie insisted they were curing the female patients with a hundred-percent success rate! She jerked her attention back to the hearings again. Good old Senator McCardle was still trying to drag an official apology out of Pat White.

  “Senator White, you don’t feel you implied in your statement last week, that I was making this whole thing up?”

  White, looking peeved or bored by turns, seemed unable to decide which emotion should have control. “Senator, if that’s how you took my statement, I’m sorry that you did so. Because it means that you failed to understand what I was in fact trying to say, which is that no one should be allowed to allege wrongdoing from his or her position in the legislature without turning all of the evidence as to his wrongdoing over to the Attorney General’s office. It would seem that if an apology is owed it’s you who owes to this entire state, for having refused to turn the information over—”

  “I Did Not Refuse To Turn It Over, I Merely Had Not Yet—”

  “Then for not yet turning this information over—”

  “Senators, please!” The chairperson was pounding his gavel. “I will not tolerate such behavior in these chambers!” White and McCardle fell silent, and then McCardle made as if to reply. “Not a word!” The gavel descended again. The chair looked from one to the other, “This discussion is out of order! We shall now return to discussion of the issue before us, to wit, the status of the licenses of members of the Natural Midwives Association.”

  “Mr. Chairman,” McCardle suggested politely, “certainly the arrest of Miss McPhee and the flight of Mrs. Stone are relevant to this deliberation. Miss McPhee is—”

  “Senator,” the chair insisted, “it is your demands for an apology that I am ruling out of order. You may talk all you want about the arrest and alleged flight of members of the Natural Midwives Association.”

  An aide brought a note to McCardle and shoved it in front of him. McCardle read it quickly and rose to his feet. “Mr. Chairman!” There was something in his tone that held everyone’s attention. “Mr. Chairman, I have just received a note informing me that a fourth victim of these—these witches has been found. He was treated by them just two weeks ago, and now is dead!”

  The hall broke into an uproar, and reporters ran for telephones while the chair pounded for order. Getting nowhere, he finally recessed the hearings until alter lunch.

  At the beginning of the afternoon session, Pat White called for a ten-day recess, “to allow the hysteria surrounding this issue to subside.” Over McCardle’s vehement objections, the committee voted in favor of the recess, and the chair scheduled the next thy of hearings for a week from that coming Thursday.

  * * *

  The isolation was more than Maggie had planned on. She sat in Judy’s spare bedroom, the shades pulled down, reading the Chronicle. Carol had been in the shower more than a half-hour, and showed no signs of surfacing.

  Scattered throughout the first section of the paper were articles about the Coven, about the N.M.A., sidebars with biographies of Beckie and herself. There were articles on the state of the art in treating cancer, and histories of the Laetrile fiasco.

  The paper’s position was negative. It rejected the Coven’s claim to a cancer cure, pointing to hundreds of other alleged cures that had popped up in the preceding decade. In contrast, the editors seemed eager to accept McCardle’s charges, and reported his statements as if they were fact. All in all, the situation wasn’t very encouraging. In the whole paper only Cranes column seemed sympathetic. Suddenly, the shower turned off in the bathroom.

  Maggie felt useless. There didn’t seem to be anything she could do from seclusion, and there wasn’t really anyone she could talk to. Admittedly, there was Carol, who knew as much as she did, and there was Judy, who was wonderfully supportive, but neither were people that Maggie could lean on for help in deciding what to do.

  She got off the bed and began to pace the small room. What was she going to do? She hadn’t gone into hiding just to hide. Clearly, her task was to do whatever she could to help Beckie in her trial. But what did she need? Maggie found herself wishing that Beckie would somehow get word to her, impossible as she knew that was.

  “Hi, Mom.” Carol walked into the room, toweling her hair dry, water dripping all over the floor.

  Maggie stopped her pacing. “Well, how are you today?”

  Carol grinned at her. “Ready to get back to work. We’ve been sitting around here for five days now, and it’s about time.”

  Maggie frowned. “Any suggestions?”

  “Well. I thought we were supposed to treat more women, and maybe
try to figure out why the potion doesn’t work on men.”

  Maggie nodded. “That certainly was the idea.”

  “Well, what’s the matter with it?” Carol demanded.

  Maggie put an arm around her. “Nothing, darling, except that at the moment we don’t have any patients to treat, we don’t have any potion to treat them with, and I don’t have the foggiest notion of what to do about the men. So we seem to be at a standstill.”

  “You mean you don’t think there’s anything we can do?” Carol asked.

  Maggie tried to smile. “No. I just mean that we’re going to have to think about it awhile, until we figure out just what we should be doing.”

  “Well, then we have to start thinking right now!” So saying, Carol picked up a sheet of paper and a pen and sat down at the little desk by the shaded window. “We can start by making a list.”

  * * *

  The afternoon paper contained a statement from the Coven. Maggie and Carol read it the instant Judy brought them the paper.

  “It’s a pretty good statement,” Judy told them as they started to read it.

  “Shh!” Carol whispered. “Let us read it.”

  It read as follows:

  The California Coven expresses its unreserved support for Rebecca McPhee and Margaret Stone in their struggle against the oppression of the medical establishment. Once again this country finds itself in the midst of a witch-hunt, where facts and reason are replaced with fantasies and fear. These fantasies and fears are being perpetrated on the people of California by the medical establishment, which is showing its true colors by fighting against good medical care in order to increase its own power and wealth.

  The California Coven states categorically that it has in its possession a treatment for cancer that can cure over fifty percent of all cases of cancer, and can cure cancer completely within ten days of the start of treatment. Since the start of this project three months ago, we have cured over forty-five cases of cancer, with only ten failures. Although we acknowledge the fact that four of the individuals among our ten failures have subsequently died, we deny categorically that the treatment which we gave these individuals in any way caused or hastened their death. All fifty-five of our patients were terminal cancer patients. Those whom we fall to cure will die. That is the nature of their disease.

  We believe at this time that we can distinguish between those cases which we are capable of curing, and those which we cannot. Therefore, we are prepared to make the following challenge to those who would have us arrested, and our cure discredited: If a list of one hundred cancer patients who are believed to have terminal cancer, but are expected to live for at least six additional weeks, is presented to us, the California Coven is prepared to (1) suspend its secret treatment of cancer patients, (2) select thirty to fifty individuals from the list of one hundred, and (3) treat that subgroup within the following four weeks, We insist that if permitted to treat these individuals as we deem appropriate, by the end of the four-week period at least ninety percent of those we have treated Will have undergone so-called spontaneous remissions and will show no residual signs of their cancer. If we fail in this test, we will acknowledge the failure of our treatment, and cease and desist from all further testing.

  We know as a fact, however, that we can and will succeed. But we will participate in this test only if we are assured that all charges against Beckie McPhee will be dropped, and that no further charges will be brought against her or any other person in any way connected with the California Coven if we succeed in proving the efficacy of our cancer cure. We would, of course, also demand immunity for those members of the organization who participate in the test.

  The people of the world have a right to see all alleged cures for cancer rigorously and scientifically tested. We demand that that right be extended to our cure, and we demand the right to prove to the world its effectiveness. We call on scientists, physicians, and lay people alike to join us in this demand.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  THE response of the A.M.A. was swift and brutal. Calling members of the “so-called California Coven” a group of “charlatans attempting to gain fame and fortune through the suffering of others,” it called for the swift roundup and prosecution of all members of the Coven. The A.M.A. took the occasion of its statement to announce the death of a fifth man treated by the Coven, and added, “if, as some have suggested, these deaths are other than natural, we might now be seeing just the beginning of one of the most massive instances of unnecessary deaths in American history.”

  Carol threw the newspaper article on the floor. “I don’t understand why they have to get so uptight about the whole thing! Why can’t they just let us test it in the open, and then they’ll be able to tell whether it works or not?” She was honestly confused.

  “Because they’ve gone to medical school, and they’ve been taught that anyone who hasn’t been is at best an idiot, and at worst a murderer. I think if there’s any profession that tries to convince its members that they are truly godlike, it is the medical profession.”

  “But you said Gramma’s doctor believed your cure, and offered to help.”

  Maggie shrugged. “So Bill Krueger isn’t like the others—and sure, lots of doctors aren’t. For all I know, a majority of them are decent although my instinct tells me that they’re not. Maybe it’s just that the A.M.A. elects the worst as their officers. All I know is that from my experience, everything the A.M.A. is doing fits right in place.”

  Carol changed the subject. “Have you decided what you think we should do now?”

  Maggie dropped into a chair. “No, I haven’t. It doesn’t make sense for me to line up patients and treat them from here. I’m not even letting myself be seen by Judy’s neighbors, let alone wandering around looking for cancer patients. Besides, if the other women in the Coven are still giving treatments, I wouldn’t be adding much, and if they’re not, it won’t be enough to make a difference. So I don’t know what I should be doing.”

  “So lets do something else,” Carol insisted. “There must be something we can do.”

  “I know. The question is what?”

  “Well, what about the men?” Carol asked. “Can’t we work on why it doesn’t work with men?”

  Maggie frowned. “I haven’t the foggiest notion of where to start on it, Carol. We know that it works differently on men or, rather, that it works on women and doesn’t work on men. So there must be a difference between men and women. But which of the thousands of differences is responsible? Carol, I really think it’s a hopeless problem given our resources.”

  “Mom, you’ve done this much. You can do the rest, too!”

  Maggie smiled and gave Carol a hug. “But it’s such a big problem, I really don’t see how—”

  “Just start!” Carol interrupted. “That’s what you always tell me when I’m stuck on my homework. Start anywhere.”

  “What do you recommend?”

  “Well,” Carol said unsurely, “we could start by talking about the sorts of things that could cause it not to work with men.”

  Maggie relented. “Look, we know two things about the potion that are strange: it only works on women; the women have to be in a particular psychological state or it doesn’t even work for them. What this means is that the potion, in and of itself, is not a cure for cancer. It only becomes a cure under certain circumstances.”

  “So?” Carol said. “We’ve known that for months.”

  “But what does it mean? It means that the potion has to be modified in some way before it becomes active, or it’s only effective if some second process, controlled by the patient’s psychological state, is also functioning. There are actually lots of examples of the first type. Vitamin D is a classic. What people have always taken as Vitamin D is, in fact, a very weak analog of the real, biologically active vitamin. What happens is that your body takes the form of Vitamin D that’s in the pills, and converts it to the active form. What’s unusual about our potion, if it works by this
model, is that not everyone’s blood contains the factors that are required to convert the inactive ingredient into the active, cancer-killing agent. What we could say is that neither men nor women normally have this converting ability, and we can get women so that they do have the converting ability, but we don’t know how to get men to do it.

  “Well, if that’s the case, then blood from the women we treat is able to convert an inactive ingredient in our potion into an active one. So we should be able to add the blood of women whom we’re treating to the potion, and get the conversion to occur in a test tube. If that happens, then we should be able to take the treated potion and give it to anyone and it should work.”

  “So we can try that on men!” Carol added. “And it should work, too.”

  “Maybe,” Maggie answered. “There are a lot of ifs in the project.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like we have to assume that the trick is a modification, and not a totally separate but important process which goes on in parallel. Like the modification has to be made by something that’s released into the blood, and not, say, in the cancer cells themselves. And the ingredient in the blood has to maintain its activity long enough for us to get the blood out of the treated women and use it to treat the potion. But since all we can add is maybe one part blood to one part potion, while in the body we combine one part potion with maybe fifty parts of blood, we have to hope that the converting agent in the blood is present in a huge excess. Finally, we have to hope that after it’s converted, it can still be taken up by the stomach, and not be degraded in the process. And I’m sure that there’re a dozen more that I just haven’t thought of—but that’s certainly enough for a start. No, we can try it, but we have to remember that it’s iffy. Real iffy.”