The State - News from Jan. 27, 1988

A Burlingame physician who advocated a patient’s right to die apparently committed suicide, along with his ailing wife, authorities said. Dr. Louis Shattuck Baer and his wife, Evelyn, were found dead in a San Mateo apartment. They had rented the apartment several days earlier for one month only, apparently for the purpose of ending their lives, San Mateo County coroner’s spokesman Dave Fortman said. The couple were found locked in each other’s arms on a couch, he said, and left behind notes saying they wanted “to continue their journey together.” Evelyn Baer, 69, was reportedly suffering from terminal cancer, and Baer, 73, who had in the mid-1970s written a book, “Let the Patient Decide,” about helping patients avoid lingering deaths in nursing homes, had recently suffered a stroke. They had been married 51 years.