This month, Dr. Jack Kovorkian goes on trial charged with violating Michigan's law against
assisted suicide.
Until now, Kovorkian has successfully eluded prosecutors, but now he must face a jury which
will decide if he has the right to help people die.
And the reason we'll win is because it's right.
Most people, regardless of religion, race, creed, social standing, support this issue.
Tonight on Frontline, in the past four years, Dr. Kovorkian has helped 20 desperate people
end their lives.
I want to take my life.
I don't know that.
Not one of my patients feared death at all, not a touch of fear.
They welcomed it.
Frontline examines the evidence in Kovorkian's most controversial cases, was suicide the
only answer?
I think it's a dangerous thing when a doctor is willing to take your life for whatever
reason.
I think these 20 cases are as much an indictment of our current medical system as they are
of Dr. Kovorkian.
Where are these people's doctors?
Tonight, the Kovorkian File.
Funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by annual financial
support from viewers like you.
This is Frontline.
Suicide machine, you know, Paul, a Michigan doctor, yes, devised a machine by which people,
if they chose to, in dire circumstances, end their own life.
Here now, top 10 promotional slogans for the suicide machine.
If they were to market such a thing.
For nearly four years, the story of Dr. Jack Kovorkian has marched by as a loud and garish
circus.
Did Dr. Jack Kovorkian commit acts of mercy or murder?
Just try it once, that's all we ask, number nine.
An endless parade through county jails and courtrooms, trumpeted on morning talk, the
evening news, and the late show.
While I'm killing myself, I'm also cleaning my oven.
The public drama has been fueled by a ferocious legal battle over Kovorkian's right to assist
in suicides, and a macabre fascination with Dr. Death and his tools.
If you're not dead in 30 minutes, it's free.
And the number one promotional slogan for the suicide machine, we're not the heartbeat
of America.
But there is another Kovorkian story, hidden within the private struggles of the 20 men
and women he helped to die.
Their stories provoke the most profound moral questions about who should live, who should
die, and who should decide.
And they probe the most disturbing dilemma faced by doctors today.
What is the role of medicine at the end of life?
At the heart of each case, there is a remarkable videotape, Kovorkian's own recording of his
final consultation with the life he is about to end.
The first one was recorded nearly four years ago.
It is June 2, 1990, in a motel room just off Highway 696 near Detroit.
Jack Kovorkian's sister turns on a home video camera.
Kovorkian conversation, first I want to introduce Mr. Ron Atkins, who's the husband of the patient.
How do you do?
We are here today to make this video and discuss some very serious matters which have occurred
in our family and our life over the last year.
Could you introduce your wife?
Yeah, okay, and this is my wife Janet.
Janet Atkins is 54.
She has Alzheimer's, an incurable disease that is eroding her memory and will eventually
destroy her mind.
Where do you live?
In Portland, Oregon.
Where is that?
Where is Portland, Oregon?
Portland, Oregon is on the West Coast.
West Coast.
Of what country?
No.
All right.
Okay, you know it's on the West Coast, right?
Yes.
Okay.
What other state is on the West Coast, you know?
California also.
Can you name one more?
No.
Washington.
There you are.
Okay.
By all accounts, Janet had led a wonderful life in Portland.
A classically trained musician, she taught at a community college.
She had raised three sons and was now a grandmother.
When her doctor diagnosed Alzheimer's a year earlier, he told Janet she might have only
a year left before her life disintegrated.
He went on to say, that will mean that eventually Ron will have to pick your clothes out and
Ron will eventually have to dress you and eventually, you know, you'll have to be taken
care of.
Maybe have diapers and all these things were just devastating to her.
Now this is a woman that was vivacious.
She loved life.
She loved ideas.
She loved philosophy and then to have that.
How has the process been going recently?
Is it stabilized?
Is it the same?
Getting worse or what?
How would you say?
No, I think it's progressing.
It's getting worse.
Since January, how would you say it?
There are, for instance, I have to, when she goes to play tennis, I have to call her up.
In the morning, I have to tell her when she has to leave the house to go play tennis.
She plays at 10.15.
She has to leave at 10.
Then I have to call her or she'll call me.
Is it getting near that time to go?
Despite the frightening loss of memory, there was much that Janet Atkins could still do.
Just days before she went to see Dr. Kevorkian, Janet played tennis with her son and won.
Clinically, she certainly had the disease, but it was in its early stages and the disease
had a long way to go in terms of years before she developed the type of disability that
the public associates with Alzheimer's disease.
Dr. Murray Raskind, an Alzheimer's specialist, told Janet she had several good years left,
but Janet did not trust his more optimistic prognosis and told Raskind she was determined
to end her own life.
She was afraid that if the disease progressed further, aside from the disability, that she
would be considered at some point not to be competent to make her own decisions and the
option would be taken away.
Janet and Ron, already members of the Hemlock Society, asked several doctors to prescribe
pills she could use to kill herself.
They all refused.
And then Janet read an article about Dr. Kevorkian.
For three years, Kevorkian had been advertising his services to help dying patients end their
lives.
He had even invented a suicide machine.
It carried a saline solution, a narcotic to put the patient out, and a lethal dose of
potassium chloride.
That puts you to sleep, then.
Yeah, the audience feels a lot better now, doctor, thank you.
Kevorkian's sister, Margo Janis.
He said, this is something I must do.
It is my destiny.
Of course you realize she is not terminal.
Not in a physical sense.
Okay.
Not mentally.
Well.
Months earlier, Ron and Janet began asking Kevorkian to help them.
At first, he had put them off, recommending that Janet try a new drug therapy.
But it didn't help.
Do you want to go on?
No, I don't want to go on.
You don't want to go on living?
I don't.
Do you know what that means?
Yes, I do.
What does that mean?
That's the end of my life.
What's the word for that?
What's the word for that?
Oh, euthanasia?
No.
What is the word for the end of life?
What happens when you stop living?
What's it called?
You're dead.
All right.
Is that what you wish?
Yes.
That's the word I want.
Do you understand the implications of what that means?
Yes.
Okay.
I think he wanted me to say, yes, I agree and will offer my support to your plan.
Dr. Raskin says he told Kevorkian he was adamantly opposed to ending Janet's life.
Because that's when I was stunned and somewhat angry, actually, that he'd taken this, what
I considered and still consider, given the stage of her illness and the quality of her
life at the time, to have been an inappropriate person for suicide in any way.
And why do you want to do that?
Why do you want your life to end?
In other words, you feel it's better than going on the way you are now?
Yes.
Right.
Because what's coming, you think, is, now I don't want to put words in your mouth,
because what's facing you is worse than death, you think?
I've had enough.
Enough?
I've had enough.
What does that mean, for example?
Did you live well?
Yes, I did.
You lived a full life?
Very.
Very.
Well, Janet, in the name of rationality, human rationality, which you're beginning
to lose, I have decided to help you on, two days since, on June 4, the morning of June
4.
This is the last picture taken of Janet and Ron Adkins.
No one wanted to see Janet die.
When she separated from her husband to go with Jack, her husband's cries are still
ringing in my ears.
Janet, Janet, it was the cry of great, great desperation.
He needed her and didn't want to lose her.
Later that day, Janet Adkins lay down in the back of Jack Kevorkin's 1968 Volkswagen van.
She tripped the switch on his suicide machine and whispered her final words, thank you.
She was unconscious in 25 seconds.
Kevorkin says he was stunned by the reaction to Janet Adkins' death.
He had expected just to write a scholarly medical article about the case.
What he got instead was a murder indictment.
Criminal charges against Dr. Kevorkin are being considered.
The suicide machine has been confiscated by the police.
The Oakland County prosecutor charged him with murder.
Kevorkin unsupervised in his rotting van, deciding who should live and who should die.
Prosecutors offered their evidence.
A scene on a videotape made too nice.
Kevorkin hired Jeffrey Feiger, a tough and flamboyant Detroit medical malpractice attorney.
Feiger counterattacked.
Don't get nervous.
I'm going to kick their ass.
I promise.
The murder charges were dropped.
The doctor broke no law.
There's no state law which says he committed a crime.
He was ordered to stop using his suicide machine.
He will not be allowed to use his machine again.
Don't use the so-called death machine.
As Kevorkin and Feiger fought off the prosecutors, another physician announced that he too had
helped a patient commit suicide.
Dr. Timothy Quill, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, said he had prescribed
barbiturates for a patient he called Diane, suffering from terminal leukemia.
Diane lived for about three months after I gave her the prescription by which she could
take her life and she lived that time free of a fear that she would have the kind of
death that she was afraid of, the lingering dependent death.
But at the very end, she was having high fevers, was having a lot of pain, was requiring more
and more medicine to control her symptoms.
So she met with me and said that this was where she was and it was where she was and
then she said she was going to take the overdose in the next several days, which in fact she
did.
Despite his own actions, Dr. Quill criticized Kevorkin's handling of the Janet Atkins case.
It's one of the most troubling kinds of cases.
This is not a black and white case.
She's not terminally ill in the sense that most people think of that word, even though
she has something very real to fear in her future.
So it's something that is on the very gray end of the spectrum and therefore warrants
the most caution, getting to know her as well as you possibly could.
Would you ever act with somebody, meeting them once or twice over the phone or for an
hour?
Absolutely not.
My view is that this ought to be an agonizing decision for a physician.
This is only the last resort after you've really thought about and explored every other
avenue and it takes time and it takes expertise.
In spite of the controversy, Janet Atkins' suicide changed everything for Jack Kevorkin.
He received dozens of requests from people who wanted his help.
Two women were at the top of his list, but Kevorkin waited.
He wrote a book and appeared on more talk shows and then he made another videotape.
This is a videotape recording on Tuesday, October 22, 1991 at around 8 p.m.
It has been 16 months since Janet Atkins' death.
And we're here to discuss actually what's called physician-assisted suicide and we're
here to discuss the wishes of Sherry Miller.
Forty-three-year-old Sherry Miller has multiple sclerosis.
And Mrs. Marjorie Wants...
Fifty-eight-year-old Marjorie Wants has suffered with acute pelvic pain for years.
Sherry, have you thought this over well?
Yeah, I have.
I thought about it a long time, a long time.
Yeah, I have.
And I have no qualms about my decision.
I could do it tonight.
You realize, of course, the implications of your decision.
Yeah, I do.
What is the implication of your decision?
There's no turning back.
In the corner of the room is Sharon Welsh, Sherry Miller's best friend since childhood.
She's a tiny, real short and tiny, but bubbly, and she was a nice person to know.
She wasn't a cheerleader, she wasn't a class officer, but I'll bet 90% of the people,
if you'd go back and ask, did they know who she was, they knew who Sherry Miller was.
As adults, Sharon and Sherry remained friends, sharing the good times.
And then about 12 years ago, the worst news of all.
And my mom called me one day and said, Sherry's ill, and she has MS.
And we just cried, we just cried.
As the disease worsened, Sherry's husband divorced her and took custody of their house
and their children.
Finally, with nowhere else to go, Sherry moved back into her parents' house.
The doctors couldn't help her, the doctors couldn't stop the progression, they couldn't
make the MS go away.
And she started telling me about a letter that she had written to this doctor that helped
people commit suicide.
When you first contacted me, Sherry, did you write that letter by yourself?
Yes, I did, yeah.
Now you can't write at all, you can barely make an X, is that right?
You can't even direct your hand to the paper, can you?
Sherry Miller had approached Kevorkian about the same time as Janet Adkins.
But he was concerned Sherry's family did not yet support her wish to die, and so he put
her off too, and asked that she see a psychiatrist.
But Sherry kept pursuing Kevorkian, telling her story repeatedly on television.
She even testified for Kevorkian in the Janet Adkins case.
I should have done something sooner when I was capable of doing something on my own.
That poor girl was in misery every day, and I really made her go on over a year with more
misery.
But the family, the folks came around then.
That's happened to several patients of mine.
And I've been told they can't do anything, every surgery has made me worse, especially
the last one.
How many have you had?
Ten.
Ten surgeries.
In the one spot?
In the one spot?
This time you left a needle up there, you won't take it out, no doctor will take it out.
Marjorie Watts had also pursued Dr. Kevorkian for years, asking for relief from the excruciating
pain she had suffered following surgery to remove some benign vaginal tumors.
I've known her going on two and a half years now, and I haven't, you notice I haven't
done anything with her, because I knew there was more to be done.
Her doctors had to do more surgery, they had to have more pain medication.
When we were on television recently in the Dana show, how has your situation been since
then?
Has there been any improvement at all?
No.
Has it gotten worse or not the same?
It's gotten worse.
Not even the same?
Not even the same.
I get a half hour and hour sleep at night with all the pills and sleeping pills I take.
I go to bed all day long, most of the time, with sleeping pills, just to get out of the
pain.
That's the only time I get out of the pain is when I sleep.
Despite her pain, Marjorie Watts was not terminally ill.
Authorities had tried to institutionalize her for mental problems.
Psychiatrists said she was depressed and suicidal.
Some felt her pain was psychosomatic.
And later when the medical examiner, Dr. L.J. Dragovich, conducted Marjorie's autopsy,
he could find no physical cause for her pain.
The pelvic pain would have been some type of phantom pain coming from her head, not
from the lower part of her body, because she simply didn't have anything there and there
was no disease process.
But Marjorie Watts was the only one who was not terminal, but probably the most justified
of all.
And for this reason, she was in the worst pain.
She had the prospect of going through another 10, 20 years of pain that was unimaginable.
I see you're in pain every day.
Marjorie's husband tells Gaborkin his wife often screams through the night in pain and
that she has tried to kill herself several times.
I have tried loading a gun, but I don't know how to load one.
If I did, as Bill says, I probably wouldn't have succeeded and I would have been in worse
shape than I am right now.
As the consultation tape rolls on, Gaborkin seems relaxed, very relaxed for a man about
to enter another firestorm.
But then Jack Gaborkin had been preparing for the role of Dr. Death for most of his
life.
In the 1950s, as a young pathology resident, Gaborkin asked to work the hospital's night
shift because more people died at night.
He wanted to do some research to photograph the eyes of patients at the exact moment
of death.
They say, why are you looking at the eyes?
It's before transplantation, see.
I said, well, someday it'll be useful to know when the body had died, so how many minutes
you got left to do something.
Transplantation did it.
The brain-dead people, you can tell by looking in the eyeball, if there's circulation to
the brain, you don't need this $50,000 machine.
He wrote papers arguing that men on death row, if they consented, could be put to sleep
before execution.
Experiments could then be performed on them or their organs removed for transplant and
other lives could be saved.
During the Vietnam War, Gaborkin experimented with another idea, transfusing blood directly
from the dead to the living.
Here's something, there were a wounded soldier and a dead soldier, and you look at their
dog tags, and if they got the same blood type, pump the blood from the heart of the dead
man into the living man.
So we wanted to test it in Vietnam, under battle conditions, turned down.
Gaborkin always seemed willing, even eager, to take a provocative stand.
In the 1960s and 70s, his one-man show of surreal paintings featured titles like Fever,
Suicide, and Death.
Gaborkin's death research effectively destroyed his medical career.
By the time he invented his suicide machine in the late 1980s, no hospital would hire
him.
He's worked very hard all his life, and much of it without success, because the ideas were
so controversial.
Ironically, a patient's right to die was not the big idea that animated Gaborkin's
unorthodox career.
It was his search for anything useful, blood, organs, knowledge, that could be salvaged
from death.
And on the last night of their lives, Gaborkin tries to sell Sherry Miller and Marjorie Wants
on donating their organs.
But the cuckoo clock cuts him off.
Both women decline his suggestion and begin to question Gaborkin about his suicide machine.
Gaborkin has set up this double suicide because
he is not sure what police and prosecutors will do to him afterward.
He has told the two women if he helps only one of them, he might not be around to help
the other.
Early the next morning, they all gathered at a rustic cabin in Bald Mountain State Park
near Detroit.
Marjorie Wants went first.
When she was gone, by use of the device, within 10 seconds, it was a remarkable thing to see.
She didn't move.
It was so peaceful that I have said to my brother, that's the way I want to go if need
be, if I am suffering.
But Gaborkin was unable to insert the IV in Sherry Miller's veins and had to improvise
with an alternate method, carbon monoxide gas.
In the case of Sherry Miller, so Jack said, okay Sherry, you saw what happened.
You can change your mind.
We don't need to go on.
We can come back another day.
And Sherry just looked at him and raised her arm, the only one she could raise, and said,
next.
It was almost like, come on you guys, I've waited long enough.
Let's do this.
And I held her head up and Dr. Gaborkin put the mask on her face.
And she had already practiced pulling, the screwdriver was taped to a nozzle.
Sherry wasn't able to turn the nozzle herself, but she could pull the screwdriver toward
her that would start the gas.
And you know, I don't know whether Dr. Gaborkin said to her, whenever you're ready or exactly
what, but she never hesitated.
She just reached over and pulled it.
And I remember going over to her and holding her hand, and I can still feel that warm hand.
And I said to her, it's okay.
And she was okay.
She was finally at peace.
Two women were found dead in a cabin.
The double suicides outraged the prosecutors, and Gaborkin was again arrested on murder
charges.
Two women dead inside the cabin.
Okay, he killed one person, well now he killed two, and so I thought, what's gonna be the
next one?
You know, and what I was worried about was that each time he had to make it bigger and
better.
If Gaborkin is convicted...
But Michigan still had no law against assisted suicide, and again, all charges were thrown
out.
...with murder.
Listoring verbal attack against the prosecutor.
Since the death of Janet Atkins, the religious right had been pushing the Michigan legislature
to pass a bill to stop Gaborkin, but the legislators were deadlocked.
Meanwhile, the Michigan State Board of Medicine revoked Gaborkin's medical license, and the
American Medical Association, which opposes physician-assisted suicide, condemned him.
We have to question how much of this is being done for Dr. Gaborkin, for the opportunity
to make his mark, or at least have his name known.
Dr. Gaborkin has been with people that he knew only briefly, whose physicians who knew
them for longer periods made far different recommendations, and he's used those patients
recurrently, because long after people will not remember who Janet Atkins was, or who
Mrs. Watts was, they remember who Gaborkin is.
Doctors were particularly critical of how Gaborkin handled the Marjorie Wants case.
This is one of the most troubling cases from my point of view, just because it's so complicated
that I have no doubt that Dr. Gaborkin doesn't have the skill to assess this kind of a patient.
You would need a lot of real experts to get involved and provide some input, and there's
a lot of work to be done.
Is her pain relieved as much as it possibly could be?
Is depression or other psychiatric disorder ruled out in every way that's possible?
And I think there's a tremendous room for wondering about that, certainly not something
you could assess based on one or two visits.
But Gaborkin continued to act.
He assisted another woman suffering with multiple sclerosis, then two more women with cancer,
a retiree with Lou Gehrig's disease, and a nurse with emphysema.
When the Michigan legislature finally passed a ban on assisted suicide designed to take
effect on March 30, 1993, Gaborkin's pace quickened.
A 53-year-old lumberjack with cancer became his ninth patient.
Two weeks later, two more cancer patients died together.
Then another woman with MS, and then patient number 13.
We'll introduce ourselves.
On my right is the patient, Mr. Hugh Gale.
And I'm Dr. Gaborkin, and on my left is his wife, Cheryl Gale.
It is January 26, 1993.
The new law will go into effect in two months, and dozens of desperate people are clamoring
for Gaborkin's help.
Now, Mr. Gale, what is it that you wish?
Put it in plain English.
What do you mean by breathe?
Well, I can't breathe, of course.
And every day it gets worse, you know.
Hugh Gale, a former merchant marine and a lifelong smoker, has suffered from emphysema
for almost 20 years.
Boy, you see me.
This is my life right here.
Right there in that chair, huh?
Yeah.
And I've been in this chair for three weeks.
Three years.
I've been in that chair for five years.
He hasn't slept in a bed for five years.
Really?
You sleep in that chair?
Sometimes he would pray.
He would pray not to wake up.
The wakeups were very hard for him because while he slept, the mucus would accumulate,
and he would end up drowning in his own mucus when he woke up.
And he believed that man had kept him alive with the pulmonary machine, the oxygen, the
medications, and that if God had taken him at his time, he would have died long ago.
Family practitioner Carl Emmerich was Hugh's doctor.
He was despondent.
He was very outspoken of the fact that he was tired of living.
He told me on numerous occasions that he was tired of all this.
He was ready to die, that that was basically what he wanted.
For how long had he been saying that?
At least two, three years.
I don't think his doctor knew how to respond.
I don't think he was prepared for the statement, and I don't think he knew what to say.
Hugh was a painter, and for years and years he promised to paint me a painting.
And I remember telling him that you can't stop living yet, and you've promised me a
painting for years, and you have to come through.
And you use those types of things to try to give people a little bit of a boost, and just
try to bring them up a little bit.
No, I just, it just isn't there anymore.
I can't paint anymore.
Yeah, that's right.
I saw your painting right here.
Let's show his painting here.
You've got some talent there.
You don't enjoy that at all anymore.
I can't.
You can't paint at all.
No, I put everything away.
I see.
And I couldn't, I couldn't, I can't get out of my garage and work with wood or anything.
I can't even get to the garage.
He was hoping to get some type of medication, pills.
He had talked about pills.
I think he was afraid of ending his own life by himself, because if he survived, it would
be worse than death.
If Hugh Gale would have said to you, could you give me some pills for my pain, and could
you give me a month's supply and tell me how many I need and how many would be a dangerous
dosage, would you have ever done anything like that?
That is not something that I would do.
It's not something that the medical community is allowed to do, and I would have denied
such a request.
Has anybody ever asked you for that?
There have been hints at times of people that wanted to use medication such as that for
purposes that they really not intended that might end their life.
You wouldn't do it?
Wouldn't do it.
No.
Wouldn't do it and can't do it.
It was very difficult for me at Christmas time, because I didn't know what to get him.
He couldn't go out.
I asked my husband what he wanted for Christmas, and he said to me, an appointment with Dr.
Kevorkian is what I want.
I know I'm going to die, but what I'm hoping for is I'll take my own way of going, and
the easiest way out, I guess.
You want help in ending your life, is that what you want?
Yes.
He started getting nervous before you arrived, and I said, you don't have to make a decision.
No.
No.
No.
No.
I said, and if you do make a decision, you can change your mind.
Right at the last moment.
Listen, Mr. Gale, you've got to understand.
You won't offend us at all.
You can change your mind right at the last minute, and it won't bother us at all.
We'll be delighted, because we're here to help you, and we're not here for any other
reason.
And if you change your mind, we're content.
That's great.
We're happy with it.
Kevorkian's assurances are practiced and polished, but his words would come back to haunt him.
Hugh Gale was going to be Kevorkian's most difficult death.
A very loving relationship.
Okay, then.
Understand now.
You enjoy yourself now, and you two talk it over, and you decide, both of you decide,
when you think it's time, we'll come and we'll have another quick session and sign the thing.
All right.
Let's hope it's weeks.
Let's hope it's a couple months.
Let's hope it's here.
Three weeks later, on Valentine's Day, Hugh Gale told Kevorkian he was ready.
He slept the entire night.
I was awake, so I know he slept the entire night.
I could not sleep, but he did, and he became very peaceful.
Kevorkian arrived the next morning at 815.
I felt like I was someone else watching what was going on, but I don't think I was there
emotionally.
If I didn't distance myself emotionally, I wouldn't have been able to be there, and he
wanted me there, and I wanted to be there for him.
When he first put the mask on, Dr. Kevorkian had a clear plastic tent that went over his
head, and when Hugh put the mask on, he had taken his oxygen off, and he put the mask on,
and then the tent was put over.
But the carbon monoxide gas was causing problems with Hugh's emphysema.
He should have left the oxygen on, because he started into what seemed like one of these
seizures that he had.
It pushed himself back into the chair, and his head started to gasp and tremble.
He said, take it off, take it off, meaning the tent.
I took the thing off right away.
I said, Hugh, let's do this another day.
Let's come back another day.
Let's stop.
He got his composure back and said, no, no, today.
I went in the kitchen, and Cheryl came, and I said, Cheryl, I don't want to do it again.
And Cheryl says, well, he wants it.
We waited and talked about half an hour in the kitchen, then went back out and said,
Hugh, we can come back, and he said, no, today, now.
And we sat there 15 or 20 minutes, and then Hugh said, I'll leave the oxygen on this time.
He said, let's get on with it.
I'm ready.
So that's what he did, is he left the oxygen and then put the mask on over it, and then
he became unconscious.
Are you unhappy that he did it?
It was Hugh's choice, and I can respect the man for making his decision and following
through on it.
Again, I think the political arena has made it very difficult for patients to make that
choice, and I respect the man for making his decision.
But as a doctor?
As a doctor, I feel very strongly in patients' rights and in this country as being able to
make one's choice, and I think if that's his choice and that's the one he made, I would
respect that.
As a physician, could you ever assist in a suicide?
I hope I'm not asked.
70-year-old Hugh Gale died in his home.
Hugh Gale's death erupted into controversy when right-to-life activists discovered a copy
of a document signed by Kevorkian, which they said showed Gale again told Kevorkian to stop
the procedure just before he lapsed into unconsciousness.
As prosecutors launched a murder investigation, Kevorkian's attorney argued that the doctor
had simply made a mistake when he wrote the document and that Cheryl Gale confirmed that
her husband did want to die.
Are you listening to the Christian Defense Fund or are you listening to the people who
are there who have no reason to lie?
In the end, prosecutors believed Cheryl and no charges were brought against Kevorkian.
...continues to insist there's no evidence to support the charges.
...beyond a reasonable doubt.
For nearly three years, Jeff Feiger had been able to keep his client out of jail.
...work on assisted suicide is far from over.
Prosecutors say Feiger is just blowing smoke.
But Kevorkian's crusade was about to enter a whole new phase.
Each death now would directly challenge Michigan's new law prohibiting assisted suicide.
The state cannot blanketly prohibit suffering, dying, mentally competent adults from making
decisions because then you're saying that the state has a right to require suffering
because they own your life.
Over the next six months, Kevorkian would assist in five more suicides to test that law.
Michigan judges would throw out the charges in most of them, declaring the new law unconstitutional.
In the end, Kevorkian would face trial on only one case for assisting in the death of
his youngest patient.
This is July 1st, 1993 and we're in Novi, Michigan at the home of Thomas Hyde and his
wife Heidi.
30-year-old Thomas Hyde has ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig's disease.
And he was diagnosed when he was 29.
He was diagnosed when he was 29 years old and now he's 30 and the disease has progressed
rapidly in less than a year.
Oh yes, quite rapidly.
It'll be a year in August.
It's progressed rapidly in the last three weeks.
It'll be a year next month.
Yes.
It seems the more we get, the farther or the longer he has the disease, the faster the
progression is.
I see.
Hyde had first noticed something was wrong 14 months earlier, about the same time their
daughter Carmen was born.
Like a couple little symptoms would happen.
He would fall over on his motorcycle.
He just couldn't keep it up.
He couldn't hold his hammer at work.
It was getting more difficult for him to even grasp something.
Obviously you try to give as optimistic a picture as you can.
Dr. Louis Rents was Tom's doctor.
Short periods of time, you know, he went from walking, a little slurred speech, some clumsiness,
to a wheelchair without the ability to move his arms or legs in less than a year.
Can you stretch your fingers out?
Okay, can you make a fist now?
The right arm is definitely weaker.
Yes.
Okay, don't strain too much now.
Don't strain.
Just conserve your energy.
Yes.
Now he's getting cramps, right?
Okay, we're not going to go any further with the physical thing now.
He had come down to, in his last visit, he was having to face the concept of a feeding
tube, because he couldn't swallow as well, and where he had to start dealing with the
concepts of whether or not he would have a respirator or something to breathe for him.
So it was getting bad.
Yes.
But he never talked suicide.
Not to anyone that I know of.
But at home, Tom began to talk to Heidi about ending his life with a drug overdose.
But he didn't think he could swallow pills any longer.
His doctors were offering hospice care, but Tom decided to write to Dr. Kevorkian.
I said, honey, don't get your hopes up.
It's against the law now here.
You know, you know that.
And I was really afraid that Tom was going to be disappointed.
And this really was his last attempt at helping himself.
But Kevorkian answered Tom's letter.
Well, Tom, what is it you wish?
Tell me your wish in plain English.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
One.
Take your time.
Take your time.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
I guess I have a basic prejudice that a physician should not be involved in taking life.
We can allow it to happen, but the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.
I think it's a dangerous thing when a doctor is willing to take your life for whatever reason.
Could Tom Hyde have killed himself all by himself?
I guess Tom would have had to have some way to kill himself.
He didn't have the physical resources, I don't think, to pull a trigger.
I don't think he could have, I suppose he could have figured out some way to do it if he'd have wanted to without some help.
But it would have been difficult, I think, for Tom other than if he had waited and he had not eaten and he had not had any fluids
and he were in pain and we sedated him or gave him medications to relieve that discomfort.
Tom would have died in a very short period of time.
So he could have stopped eating and refused hydration.
The pain would have ensued, you could have prescribed something that would have made that more comfortable, and then he would have died.
Yes.
Is that assisted suicide?
No, it's not.
Is there anything else that you want to add to this or have Heidi tell us or Heidi, is there anything you want to add before we conclude this discussion?
I want Tom to be free.
Okay.
I've watched him suffer too long.
On August 4th, Heidi and Tom spent their last morning together.
I got him up and that's when we, when I got, helped him up and I got his clothes on for him and then he went over.
And I walked out here and he was over by the crib and he was crying and crying very hard with Carmen.
And I went in there and it was pretty sad.
So we cried a lot.
That morning.
When they came, I got Tom into his wheelchair and wheeled him out to the car.
And it was almost euphoric, not happy. It was dreamlike.
By then, it was clear to Dr. Kevorkian that anyone besides himself who was in attendance at the very last was subject to prosecution.
So he recommended to Heidi that she not be present.
They said their goodbyes outside of their apartment.
And then Jack, then Jack went to another location in his van.
And that's where the event took place.
Kevorkian drove Hyde 45 minutes to Belle Isle, a park near downtown Detroit.
I went to pick up the phone like a normal, everyday phone call. And he says, Hi Heidi, this is Jack.
And I just want to let you know everything went well.
And I said, OK. And he said he wanted to talk to Margo. So I said, OK. And I handed the baby to Margo.
And I thought, how well can something like that go?
And I went into the bathroom. And it was a rush of emotion that I have never experienced in my life.
I assisted Thomas Hyde in a merciful suicide. There's no doubt about that. I stated emphatically.
Can you understand why some people would go to Dr. Kevorkian, why they would be drawn to him?
It's a puzzle to me. I must admit it's a puzzle to me.
Because frankly, the whole process that he goes through seems a little sensational and a little tawdry.
I think if I wanted to die, you'd sort of fantasize some very great last experience and then slip away comfortably,
not being parked in the back of a rusted Volkswagen van doing some relatively unpleasant, unesthetic thing to die.
But for Dr. Timothy Quill, there is no mystery about Kevorkian's appeal.
I say that's probably a pretty sad indictment of the doctors that they have seen before.
I mean, I think people are genuinely scared about what might happen to them.
Not everybody, but many people have, particularly people who have witnessed hard deaths or who are in the throes of this kind of an illness.
And it must be a relief to come in and have somebody who will talk to you about that,
who will acknowledge that it exists, that there's a real problem here.
I think these 20 cases are as much an indictment of our current medical system as they are of Dr. Kevorkian.
Where are these people's doctors?
These conversations, the conversation that each of these individuals had with Dr. Kevorkian,
should have been happening with their doctor.
The doctor is going to work with them throughout the end of their life, no matter what path they choose.
All the survivors that I've met, I've become very close with.
We can put our arms around each other and we can feel what each other feels because we've been through the same thing.
On Super Bowl Sunday, the families of Kevorkian's patients gathered to remember their loved ones
and to celebrate the man who gave them death.
Dr. Kevorkian isn't mainline and Janet wasn't mainline.
And major changes in society never occur by mainline people.
It's the people that are different, the people that are willing to risk all for an idea and for a principle.
Kevorkian still faces charges in the Thomas Hyde case,
and he has promised not to assist in any more suicides until the higher courts rule on the constitutionality of the Michigan law.
These are the tyrants, the medical tyrants, the religious tyrants and the legislative tyrants.
The tyrants are the ones that cause all the problems in the world.
Anybody wish to sign?
Kevorkian is now leading a political campaign to change the Michigan law.
He will be successful and someday the world will still remember a little Armenian doctor by the name of Jack Kevorkian,
who was brave and who changed the world in this little way for the better.
I think he's raised consciousness, but he's also scared the heck out of people.
Twenty patients, a lot of patients.
We have a tendency in our culture to seek a quick fix for things that are very complicated,
and if you want a quick fix, Jack Kevorkian is the man.
And this is not the kind of decision you want a quick fix for.
If the lives and indeed the death and the suffering of Janet Adkins, of Marjorie Watts, of Sherry Miller...
When you've witnessed a hard death, it changes you in a fundamental way.
You no longer see this as a simple issue.
You can't say it's simple, doctors should never get involved in this, because it's so compelling and terrifying.
Of Marty Ruart, of Ron Mansour, of Thomas Hyde...
After Tom died, I realized what a gift Jack had actually given to him.
At that point, it's all Tom wanted, and I couldn't deliver it, but somebody else could.
And I began to love this person because they helped Tom.
Of Jack Miller, of Elaine Goldbaum, of Hugh Gale...
I think he has tapped a nerve in the public.
Now people are having a chance to reflect a little bit on, gee, we probably don't want what Dr. Kevorkian is doing,
but we also don't want an environment where doctors are afraid to assist at all.
So what do we want? That's the real question.
Of Jonathan Brands, of Marty Ruart, of Ron Mansour, of Thomas Hyde, of Donald O'Keefe.
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