Anorexia's Fallen Angel: The Untold Story of Peggy Claude-Pierre and the Controversial Montreux Clinic

By Barbara McClintock

Anorexia's Fallen Angel contains all the ingredients of an irresistible read: a baffling disease that overwhelmingly afflicts the young and gifted, promises of a miracle cure, whistle-blowing insiders, and the personality cult surrounding a charismatic leader. Journalist Barbara McLintock tells the tale of Peggy Claude-Pierre, a mother with no professional training who claimed to cure eating disorders with unconditional love at the Montreux Clinic in Victoria, B.C. Breathless media coverage earned Claude-Pierre's clinic a worldwide reputation before allegations of force-feeding and patients being held against their will ultimately led to the clinic losing its license.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781443400145

Barbara McClintock

Barbara McClintock has written and illustrated many acclaimed books for young readers, including Adèle & Simon, an ALA Notable Book, a Children's Book Sense Pick, and a New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year, and Dahlia, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor Book. She lives in Windham, Connecticut.

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1

The Stuff of Legends

Chloe* was desperate. She was caught in a Kafkaesque maze, a prisoner in her own home, watched every minute of the day, searching frantically for an avenue of escape. She was no criminal. She was an ordinary suburban housewife, mother, and nurse’s aide who happened to suffer from acute anorexia and bulimia. Discharged from hospital, she had been struggling to cope at home with her husband and three small children. No one had been more surprised than she when she’d answered the door of their home to find lay counsellor Peggy Claude-Pierre, Claude-Pierre’s husband David Harris, and two other women whom she didn’t know on the doorstep. Chloe had met Claude-Pierre only once, at the urging of her husband. He had read an article in a local women’s magazine which had touted her as someone who worked miracles helping sufferers recover from their eating disorders. After that first meeting, neither Chloe nor Claude-Pierre had talked of any further counselling.

The visitors came into her living room. Claude-Pierre said she had been talking to Chloe’s husband. They had decided that Chloe was so ill that the only way she could be saved was to receive round-the-clock care from Claude-Pierre’s hand-picked staff. They had come to provide that 24-hour care in Chloe’s own home, beginning immediately. She would not be allowed to leave the house. She would not be allowed to use the phone. She would not even be allowed to go to the washroom unobserved. Claude-Pierre herself would come to the house half a dozen times a day to feed her nutritional drinks from a sports bottle.

Chloe was flabbergasted. She was 24 years old. She had not been legally declared so mentally ill as to be unable to care for herself. She knew full well she should have the right to decide on her own course of treatment—and that course wouldn’t include Claude-Pierre or her staff. But the workers were there, keeping her away from the phone, putting themselves between her and the door. When her husband was home, he gave them his full support.

She spent two weeks under house arrest, as she thought of it. Although Claude-Pierre was supposed to come to feed her six to eight times a day, on many days she only managed to come once or twice. She often didn’t allow the other workers to try to feed Chloe. Chloe began losing the weight she’d struggled so hard to put on while in the hospital. When she protested against the feeding, the bottle would be jammed into her mouth, once with such force her lip was cut and bleeding.

Every day she became more desperate to escape. Once, while her careworker for the day was distracted for a few minutes, she saw her opportunity. Who to call? She picked up the phone and called her regular family doctor whom she trusted implicitly. In a few seconds, she managed to whisper to him that she was being held against her will and needed help. Her last sentences were overheard by the returning careworker, who took the phone out of her hands.

The doctor was so shocked by what Chloe had told him that he immediately phoned the police department in the Victoria suburb of Saanich, where the family lived. They sent an officer over to check on her welfare. But the officer arrived too late. Chloe had already gone. The careworker had phoned Claude-Pierre and Harris, and they’d arrived several minutes before the police cruiser. Chloe remembers physically clinging to the banisters, winding her skinny arms and legs around them. But she was a small woman, and weak from her eating disorder. Claude-Pierre and Harris bundled her quickly into their own car and took her to a careworker’s home, over the municipal boundary into the city of Victoria proper. After dark, they moved her again, this time to Claude-Pierre and Harris’s own home. The police department were convinced it had been a domestic dispute and elected not to pursue the issue.

For the next few weeks, Chloe felt as if she had no control over her own life. Each morning, she was taken to a day program Claude-Pierre was running for a group of eating-disorder sufferers; each night she had to go back to Claude-Pierre and Harris’s house. She had to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor of the guest room with a careworker watching her to ensure she didn’t escape. At one point, when Claude-Pierre’s daughter, Nicole, and Nicole’s new husband moved back into the family home, Chloe and the careworkers were required to share a room with Harris’s young son.

While in Claude-Pierre’s presence, she sometimes doubted herself, thinking maybe she really did need this kind of treatment and they were all doing what was best for her. She wrote Claude-Pierre long, apologetic letters, promising to co-operate. Sometimes she told herself that if she wrote enough letters, Claude-Pierre would relax her guard and she’d be allowed to escape. As soon as she was left alone long enough to think things out for herself, she realized that she wasn’t getting any better, and that nobody had the right to hold her against her will. She again started making plans to escape.

Twice she managed to get away. Once Montreux staff members quickly found her. The other time she hid for hours, watching the searchlights of the police cars go by. She’d heard often enough from Claude-Pierre that the police were Claude-Pierre’s friends, and she believed she couldn’t trust them. Two police officers had even been part of the group when Claude-Pierre had taken her on an outing to watch a fireworks display. But soon Chloe realized she had nowhere else to go. Claude-Pierre and Harris would be waiting for her at her own home. Chloe’s own husband had been convinced by Claude-Pierre that she needed such drastic treatment to keep her from dying. So had members of her own family, who were paying thousands of dollars for her treatment. Unaware of her own doctor’s previous efforts to rescue her, she didn’t see calling him as a fruitful possibility this time. Reluctant and defeated, she returned to Claude-Pierre’s home. It was several weeks later that she managed to stay logical and calm and talk her way to freedom. She was able to convince Claude-Pierre that she was safe now to return to her own home and be treated as an outpatient. She heard later that her parents had sought help from the Victoria police, but had been told that if their daughter was suffering from anorexia, she couldn’t be in a better place.

Chloe’s treatment was to prove a prototype for the treatment Claude-Pierre would soon provide through Montreux Counselling, a residential program that attracted dozens of wealthy clients from around the world—although most patients accepted the restrictions on their freedom with far less rebellion than Chloe. Claude-Pierre called it one-on-one care and insisted it would save the lives of eating-disorder sufferers that no other program had been able to help. Health authorities would later call it imposed therapy, unlawful in British Columbia unless a patient has been legally committed as mentally incompetent by two physicians—not family members, police officers, or lay counsellors. Eating-disorder experts would explain there was no evidence to back up claims of any out-of-the-ordinary success rate.

Claude-Pierre had no medical training and had not even completed her bachelor’s degree in psychology. Her theories about anorexia came entirely from her own experience, the experience of a mother whose two daughters both developed eating disorders. The residential Montreux program was the culmination of events that started for Claude-Pierre in the mid-1980s, as she worked with first one daughter and then the other.

At that time, eating disorders were just beginning to come to the forefront of public attention. It was only in the few months before Peggy’s daughters became ill that magazines, radio and television began to feature eating disorders as an issue of interest. Bookstores stocked only a few volumes on how to overcome an eating disorder or help your child to do so. Stories of a girl deliberately starving herself, sometimes to the point of death, were considered so rare as to be a freakish event. The idea of a girl making herself throw up everything she’d eaten was barely talked about in the popular press.

It was only in the year before Peggy Claude-Pierre’s elder daughter, Kirsten, developed her eating disorder, that the first high-profile celebrity death from anorexia moved the issue to the front pages. Karen Carpenter, the pop singing sensation of the 1970s, was 32 when she died on February 4, 1983, of heart failure as the result of years of severe anorexia. She’d been battling the condition on and off for more than 15 years. It had been a relentless force in her life for the previous eight years. She had restricted her eating to almost nothing, and had been taking large numbers of laxatives and thyroid pills and forcing herself to regurgitate the little she did eat. Her death spawned an upsurge in interest in eating disorders. The public became aware that those with anorexia were suffering from a potentially fatal condition.

Those first articles gave readers the basic definitions of eating disorders. They explained that those with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa suffer from an extreme and unrealistic fear of gaining weight or becoming fat. Their sense of their own body image is so distorted that they’re convinced they’re fat even when they’ve lost so much weight that others see them as gaunt and skeletal. Many become so underweight that their physical health is severely compromised. Girls and women (who make up about 90 per cent of those who suffer from eating disorders) stop menstruating. In the restricting type of anorexia, sufferers often begin by cutting out unhealthy food from their diets, then gradually restrict more and more until they’re eating almost nothing at all. Many also exercise to extremes for hours a day to work off any calories they may have allowed themselves to take in. In bulimia and the purging type of anorexia, sufferers eat, sometimes even excessive amounts of food, but then go to any lengths to remove it from their body. Most common is forcing oneself to vomit, but other sufferers take huge amounts of laxatives or diuretics or force themselves to drink syrup of ipecac—a substance normally used to treat poisoning cases because it’s almost certain to induce vomiting.

The increased interest of the early 1980s, however, had not yet spawned any large number of treatment options for those who developed anorexia or bulimia. Although numerous studies were underway to try to discover the cause of eating disorders, no conclusion had been reached. Even today, 20 years later, experts believe there is no single cause. Most experts believe the development of an eating disorder is the result of a complex interplay of biological or genetic factors and environmental factors, ranging from family dysfunction to a history of sexual abuse to the intense social and cultural pressures on women in our society.

In the 1980s, specialized eating-disorder programs were few and far between. Most whose illness was so advanced that they required residential treatment were hospitalized either on general medical wards or in psychiatric hospitals alongside patients suffering from schizophrenia, hallucinations, and psychoses. The most common method of treatment involved a strict behaviourist approach: patients were punished for refusing to eat by the withdrawal of privileges, including family visits or phone calls; they regained the privileges only by eating normal meals, often of high caloric value to increase their weight rapidly.

Not every patient was subject to such an approach. In 1979, pediatrician and researcher Dr. Hilde Bruch wrote The Golden Cage, in which she characterized anorexia as a disease suffered by those with extreme deficits in their self-esteem and sense of self. She argued that simply refeeding the patient, or insisting that she eat, would not prove successful until those deficits were addressed.

At the time Dr. Bruch was winning acclaim for her thoughts about anorexia, Peggy Claude-Pierre was a college psychology student in Kamloops, a small city surrounded by desert hills in the interior of British Columbia. She was raising two daughters and struggling with a failing marriage. Only the broadest outlines of Claude-Pierre’s early life are known. She has always been reluctant to answer questions about her childhood or her life before she separated from her husband, moved to Victoria on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, and became involved with eating disorders.

She was born in 1949 in Kamloops, one of three children in the Cordinier family. Her father, John, was involved in the retail and hotel business. She married young, to a successful builder and contractor named Jurgen. They had two girls in quick succession, Kirsten in 1968 and Nicole two years later. The family remained in Kamloops, and the girls remember a household where their friends were always welcome and where they were always surrounded by pets. As the girls grew older, Claude-Pierre started attending the community college in Kamloops. As part of her courses, she began studying programs to help young offenders and, she says, undertook volunteer work with related organizations like the Elizabeth Fry Society.

However, she and Jurgen were becoming increasingly estranged, and in 1982 they agreed to separate. Claude-Pierre decided to move to Victoria and continue her studies in psychology at the University of Victoria. Nicole, then 13, came with her. Kirsten wanted to stay and finish the school term in Kamloops, and she moved in with Claude-Pierre’s parents.

This is where Claude-Pierre’s public history begins. According to the stories she tells about her life after that, her mother phoned several months later and said she was worried about the amount of weight Kirsten had lost. When Kirsten arrived in Victoria, she was, according to Claude-Pierre, dangerously thin, carrying less than 100 pounds on her five-foot nine-inch frame. Although little independent evidence exists to corroborate the family history, Claude-Pierre says the doctors were gloomy about Kirsten’s prognosis. She checked out what specialized eating-disorder clinics she could find, but even when Kirsten was down to 84 pounds, she rejected them all because, she says, they all proposed a behaviourist approach. She was convinced such treatment wouldn’t help Kirsten because, she contends, Kirsten was already obviously punishing herself so much that a reward-and-punishment scheme would only make her feel worse about herself.

Instead, she became her daughter’s own therapist, talking constantly to her about her thoughts and feelings, and trying to persuade her to substitute logic for her irrational fear of eating. In all her reported conversations with Kirsten, she never mentions Kirsten talking about being afraid of gaining weight or becoming fat. Instead, Kirsten talked to her mother about feeling that she didn’t deserve food, and said that strong internal voices were always telling her not to eat. It was the first time Peggy began a virtual 24-hour-a-day watch on a patient, because she was afraid to leave her daughter alone. She later wrote in her own book, It was a successful day if I just kept her alive.¹ She talked her through every meal, she says, and within a few months Kirsten began to improve. Kirsten’s comments had given her mother the first inklings of what were to become her theories about the cause of, and cure for, anorexia.

Nicole was highly supportive of her sister during Kirsten’s bout with anorexia, but only three months after Kirsten showed signs of recovery, Nicole started showing symptoms of an eating disorder herself. According to Peggy, Nicole’s anorexia was much worse than Kirsten’s. She describes her younger daughter as becoming intensely suicidal and depressed, outwardly defiant of Peggy’s efforts to help her, and manipulative and evasive about what she was or wasn’t eating. Her behaviour grew increasingly bizarre and sometimes violent. One of the most often repeated stories has Nicole sneaking downstairs to eat dog food out of a dog dish—although the family had no dog, and her mother watched her 24 hours a day.

According to Peggy, Nicole’s weight dropped significantly below Kirsten’s lowest, at one point falling as low as 68 pounds.² Nicole, however, remembers her lowest weight ever as being 80 or 81 pounds.³

Peggy tells of finding notes all over the house, notes that Nicole had written in the third person, talking about how she was a fat pig and a bad person. Again, however, the notes apparently turned up weeks after Peggy says she put Nicole under 24-hour observation. She says she allowed herself only 90 minutes sleep a night for fear something would happen to her daughter otherwise, although doctors say so little sleep would soon seriously jeopardize a person’s own health.

She tells of two occasions when Nicole collapsed on the street and she carried her home, not sure whether her daughter would actually be dead by the time they got there. Never has there been any discussion as to whether she called an ambulance or had Nicole treated for the obviously severe physical problems the anorexia was causing. No matter how exasperated they might be with the psychiatric interpretation of anorexia, most parents could be expected to call 911 in a panic if they thought their child was potentially within minutes of death.

Peggy Claude-Pierre tells of taking Nicole to several doctors but finding all of them unsatisfactory. She has never specified publicly who these doctors were, or whether any of them were eating-disorder specialists. One said Nicole was beginning to develop schizophrenia. One insisted that family dysfunction was at least part of the problem and warned Peggy that if he undertook individual psychotherapy with Nicole, he wouldn’t be able to tell her about what went on in sessions. One wanted to prescribe psychiatric medications, but Nicole resisted and Peggy backed up her refusal. Ever since, although Peggy has always said publicly that it’s important to have a doctor as part of an anorexic’s treatment team, she has most often portrayed the medical profession as insensitive, unsympathetic, and unwilling to understand. The stories she tells of medical and hospital treatments, both of her daughters and of her later patients, would be enough to keep any sufferer and her family from seeking out conventional therapy.

When she had rejected all the doctors, Claude-Pierre took the entire burden of curing Nicole onto herself. She continued, she says, her round-the-clock supervision, while trying to give Nicole the illusion she wasn’t being monitored. She tricked her into eating small amounts of her favourite foods. She worked to overcome the enormous self-hatred Nicole was feeling, trying to replace every negative thought in her mind with a positive one. Eventually Nicole, too, started to improve.

The seeds of Montreux Counselling came from Peggy Claude-Pierre’s experiences with her two daughters, especially Nicole. As she struggled to come to terms with Nicole’s disease, she developed the theory of what she would later call Confirmed Negativity Condition (CNC). She had always had a good relationship with both daughters, she has said, and she couldn’t believe anything in her relationship with them had caused either of them to develop anorexia. There was no history of abuse that she was aware of, nor did they see her separation and divorce from their father as a particularly traumatic event. She concluded instead that the roots of the disorder came from something deep within both her daughters’ personalities, something that engendered in them the deep self-loathing she had seen, almost a complete lack of an independent self. She remembered Nicole telling her one time when she looked in a mirror that this had nothing to do with efforts to be thin in order to be beautiful. I’m not vain, she quotes her daughter as saying. I’m looking for me. I can’t find me. Since she had always previously found both Kirsten and Nicole to be unusually kind, sensitive, and helpful children, Claude-Pierre began to conclude that those personality characteristics were intertwined with the characteristics of negativity she’d seen in her daughters. She developed a theory in which the anorexia could be cured if and only if the negativity and self-blame could be removed from the patient.

According to Claude-Pierre’s own book, the seeds of Montreux as a clinic for eating-disordered patients were planted during the worst of Nicole’s illness. Peggy remembers one day, during one of Nicole’s worst periods, when she asked Nicole what her happiest memory was. Nicole remembered a holiday trip back to the family’s roots in Switzerland, especially walking on the boardwalk at Montreux, a flower-filled promenade along the shore of Lake Geneva. It was a time, she told her mother, when she’d felt filled with peace and contentment.

When Nicole remembered that, her mother told her that she would ensure Nicole recovered. After that, she told Nicole, she would develop a practice in which other children suffering eating disorders and their families could also be helped. The idea of opening a clinic, she said, gave Nicole concrete hope and something to live for.⁴ Eventually, she promised, she would open clinics all over the world so neither children nor their parents would be blamed for eating disorders. Everyone would understand the true causes of eating disorders then, she said. She predicted it would take about 10 years.

In the meantime, as part of Nicole’s recovery, Claude-Pierre started working with other troubled young people, in part, she said, to show Nicole that she was not alone in her struggles. Some of the others had eating problems; others had difficulties with substance abuse or more general troubles at home or at school. Some of her clients were adults, including a handful of local police officers who were struggling with the stress of their jobs. One detective, at that point working in a specialized unit to combat organized crime, wrote her a general reference letter in which he talked of consulting her about the psychological aspects of certain criminal activities he was investigating.

Claude-Pierre had given up her university courses when Nicole became her 24-hour-a-day job. Kirsten had been willing to come along and listen to university lectures while her mother was supervising her, but Nicole never was. At various points during Peggy’s media appearances, there was talk that she was working on her doctorate at that time. Talk-show host Maury Povich at one point even addressed her as Dr. Claude-Pierre. In fact, however, she was then—and still is—a number of credits short of a bachelor’s degree. After Nicole began to recover, Peggy did, for a brief period, enroll in a post-graduate program at the Adler School of Professional Psychology in Vancouver, a program that does not always insist on completion of a bachelor’s degree before starting post-graduate work. Claude-Pierre says that in the psychology courses she did take, she was always particularly impressed with the work of Alfred Adler, with its emphasis on the unity between mind and body, the interconnectedness of people and their need to belong to a group. However, she never came close to completing her courses at the Adler Institute either. Long before she could do so, she says, word of her work with her own daughters got around, and she was approached by the parents of other children and teens who were suffering from anorexia and not doing well with conventional treatment.

The options in Victoria for treatment were not plentiful at that time. No doctors in the city were specialists in eating disorders. One general practitioner had developed an interest in the area and was trying to provide help for those referred to him. Children or adolescents whose disorders became so severe as to require hospitalization were usually sent to the pediatric unit at Victoria General Hospital or to B.C. Children’s Hospital, and adults to the psychiatric wards at the Eric Martin Pavilion.

One of the early patients referred to Claude-Pierre turned out to be a family member of a local GP, Dr. David Clinton-Baker, a fairly recent arrival from New Zealand. The girl was only nine years old and was described as being seriously anorexic. Claude-Pierre decided to give up her studies yet again, so she could work intensively with the child. Her intervention was apparently successful, and Dr. Clinton-Baker was so impressed with her work that he became involved in providing medical backup for her patients, despite his own previous lack of expertise in eating disorders. He has been one of the regular doctors for patients at Montreux ever since.

Patient followed upon patient in quick order. Some had relatively severe eating disorders and had previously spent time in hospital. Others were adolescents struggling with a variety of issues, ranging from bulimia to alcohol abuse. Claude-Pierre did not think it much mattered what their symptoms were. Although she concentrated on eating-disorder victims, she believed that Confirmed Negativity Condition could show itself in all sorts of other behaviours as well. The same treatment would be effective for them, she believed.

Some of the patients came for a while and moved on. Others came, became enchanted by Claude-Pierre and her methods, and stayed. One of these was Tessa,* a bank teller deep in the throes of bulimia. On bad days, she would binge on virtually any item of food she could find, and then regurgitate it all. As Claude-Pierre helped Tessa overcome her problem behaviours, Tessa also became a sounding board for Claude-Pierre’s theories. On many days, they would sit for hours, developing the theory of Confirmed Negativity Condition. Claude-Pierre concluded that CNC was a condition children were born with, one that would often manifest itself initially in extreme emotional sensitivity and an unusual concern for the welfare of others. Such children, she argued, developed eating disorders when they found it wasn’t possible for them to make everyone around them, or indeed the whole world, happy, and then became convinced they had already failed at life.

Claude-Pierre soon saw in Tessa someone whom she wanted to join the practice, and she began teaching Tessa to be a counsellor as well, usually by having her sit in on sessions. Tessa never took any formal training, but would later move on to head the outpatient counselling program after Claude-Pierre herself chose to spend her time developing a residential clinic. In 1988, with as many patients as she could handle, Claude-Pierre, as she had promised Nicole, officially opened Montreux Counselling, at that point solely an outpatient counselling practice with an office in downtown Victoria. As she worked with her eating-disorder clients, however, she decided that some needed more intensive help than she could provide in an hour or two a day in an office setting. Some needed help eating virtually every meal. Some were too physically weak to make the trek downtown for office appointments. She began making house calls, going into the patients’ own homes to feed them and talk to them. Some patients, she found, required four or five visits a day. When the home setting wasn’t as supportive as she’d like, she began to bring patients into her own home, requiring them to live there for weeks or months while she tried to provide the counselling they needed.

Some parents also contacted her when their children had become so ill with eating disorders that they’d been admitted to the pediatric ward of the general hospital. She’d often be found on the ward, sitting with the most recalcitrant anorexics, persuading them to eat. Some of the nurses approved of her presence, if for no other reason than that she seemed able to afford the time needed to cajole the patients into eating, time that was always in short supply for the nurses on the floor. But other staff, including senior hospital administrators, worried when they heard she was also using her time on the wards to recruit patients and families into her practice and away from other available treatment options.

Before the counselling practice became a full-time business, Claude-Pierre had been making ends meet by working as a waitress in a restaurant. Pagliacci’s, located in the heart of Victoria’s downtown, was owned by a local character, Howie Siegel. Siegel had also owned a movie theatre, been a movie reviewer on TV, and even briefly had his own radio talk-show, until the station decided it was a little too provocative for the city. Pag’s, as the restaurant has always been known, was a popular venue for live music, and one of the most popular bands that played there was called Balkan Jam. The fiddle player for Balkan Jam was a violinist with a degree in music, David Harris. He and Claude-Pierre met, fell in love, and were married not long afterwards.

Many of Claude-Pierre’s clients from those first days remember their time with her fondly. They say she enhanced their self-esteem, gave them an ear to talk through the problems of adolescence, and helped them through a difficult time in their lives. Janet* still has the notebooks Claude-Pierre made her keep when she was 12: stenographers’ notebooks with all the negative, self-blaming thoughts on the left-hand side, each countered by a more logical statement on the right. She’s still pleased to show how, gradually, over the course of her treatment, the number of negative thoughts grew smaller and smaller, while the number of positive ones increased. The idea is very similar to what is known in many eating-disorder programs today as cognitive therapy, although Claude-Pierre never gave it that name or linked it to what other practitioners were doing. When Claude-Pierre needed to increase her staff after opening the residential clinic, Janet and several of her other early patients returned to become careworkers on a part-time basis while going to college.

But not everyone’s experience at Montreux was so positive. A case in point is the story of the Lawson* twins, Gemma* and Amanda.* They were identical twins who had both developed serious eating disorders during their high school years. Gemma, in particular, developed many emotional problems. She was severely depressed and had made several serious suicide attempts. Her family grew increasingly frustrated with the lack of results from her treatment in the mainstream medical system. The family put both girls into outpatient counselling with Claude-Pierre, and Gemma was one of the patients who stayed at Claude-Pierre’s own home for a time. However, their parents also recognized that Gemma’s physical and psychiatric problems probably needed more treatment than the supportive lay-counselling that Claude-Pierre could provide. They again sought conventional medical and psychiatric treatment for Gemma. Gemma seemed somewhat less depressed, and in early September 1992, the twins’ parents left them alone for a few days to help their elder daughter get settled into university out of town. During their absence, Gemma took a massive overdose of prescription drugs. This time her suicide attempt was successful.

The entire family was devastated, but especially Amanda. Overcome by both grief and guilt, her eating disorder soared out of control. The climax came at the end of March 1993. Amanda had been in hospital, but had begged to be taken home, and her mother, Bernice,* had agreed, hoping she might be more willing to eat in a setting where she was happier. She had home-care workers to help her look after Amanda, and she was trying Claude-Pierre’s technique of offering tiny bites and vast amounts of reassurance.

But on Monday evening, March 29, Bernice reported to police in their suburb of Oak Bay that Amanda, then 21, had run out of the home and that she feared for her daughter’s health and safety because she was so weakened by the anorexia. It had been, Bernice said, one of the few moments when she was not watching her daughter herself, and Amanda had apparently been able to slip by the home-care worker and out the front door, carrying a pillow and a dressing gown with her. The Lawsons lived less than a block from a large park which has been allowed to stay in its wild state, and the family suspected Amanda had headed there, where she’d often camped out before.

A search that night found no trace of her. For the next two days, trained search-and-rescue personnel, police, and firefighters combed the park as well as surrounding yards and a nearby golf course. Nothing. Helicopters and tracking dogs were brought in. Nothing. Fearfully, searchers checked the nearby bays and shoreline. Nothing.

Although no one could ever hold Claude-Pierre responsible for Amanda’s peculiar disappearance, it did allow her to make her first appearance in the mainstream media. On the Friday three days after Amanda disappeared, Victoria’s daily newspaper, the Times-Colonist, ran a lengthy interview with Bernice, detailing the horrors of living