Time 10.31am
The last day of 2010.
Mary Sue Hubbard (born Mary Sue Whipp on June 17, 1931 at Rockdale, Texas; died November 25, 2002 at Los Angeles, California[1]) was the third wife of L. Ron Hubbard, from 1952 to his death in 1986, and was a leading figure in Scientology for much of her life. She had four children by Hubbard – Diana (born 1952), Quentin (born 1954), Suzette (born 1955), and Arthur (born 1958).
She became involved in Hubbard's Dianetics in 1952 while still a student at the University of Texas, becoming a Dianetics auditor. She soon became involved in a relationship with Hubbard and married him in March 1952. She accompanied her husband to Phoenix, Arizona where they established the Hubbard Association of Scientologists – the forerunner of the Church of Scientology, which was itself founded in 1953. She was credited with helping to coin the word "Scientology".
Mary Sue Hubbard played a leading role in the management of the Church of Scientology, rising to become the head of the Church's Guardian's Office. In August 1978 she was indicted by the United States Government on charges of conspiracy relating to illegal covert operations mounted by the Guardian's Office against government agencies. She was convicted in December 1979 and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment and the payment of a $10,000 fine. She was forced to resign her post in July 1981 and served a year in prison from January 1983, after exhausting her appeals against her conviction. In the late 1990s she fell ill with breast cancer and died in 2002.
Early life and involvement in Dianetics
Mary Sue Whipp was born in Rockdale, Texas to Harry Whipp and Mary Catherine Hill.[2] She grew up in Houston, where she attended Rice University for a year before moving on to the University of Texas, from which she graduated as a Bachelor of Arts.[3] She originally intended to work in petroleum research, but a friend persuaded her to travel with him to Wichita, Kansas in mid-1951 to take a Dianetics course at the Hubbard Dianetic Foundation. She soon began an affair with Hubbard, who had just been divorced from his second wife Sara, and moved in with him within only a few weeks of arriving in Wichita. She obtained a Hubbard Dianetic Auditor's Certificate and joined the Foundation's staff, abandoning her previous career plans.[4]
She became pregnant in February 1952 and married Hubbard in March. By this time the Foundation had filed for bankruptcy, and Hubbard's erstwhile backer, Don Purcell, was left to deal with its substantial debts. A bitter dispute broke out between the men over the ownership of the Foundation's remaining assets, with Hubbard resigning to start a rival "Hubbard College" on the other side of Wichita. Mary Sue was given partial responsibility for running the new Dianetics establishment. It remained in business for only six weeks[5] before being replaced in April 1952 by the Hubbard Association of Scientologists, established in Phoenix, Arizona to promote Hubbard's newly announced "science of certainty" – Scientology.
