Deliver Them From AIDS : To Marty James, They Were ‘Good Deaths.’ : After All, the Men Had Been Agonizing for Weeks and Wanted to End Their Lives. : He Was More Than Willing to Help.
The plan for Ron Weigart’s death was the essence of simplicity. A mouthful or two of pills would do the trick. Then, numbing sleep. It would all be over by the new year.
There were only three who knew as midnight approached on Dec. 31, 1983.
Weigart had begged for the end. After fighting AIDS for two years, the pain had become unbearable. At 31, his taut surfer’s torso had deteriorated into the limp body of a rag doll. His breath came in rasps. His few waking hours were made barely tolerable with morphine.
The notion of assisted suicide horrified Joe Perez. For weeks, Weigart had asked his lover for help, but Perez cut him off. Not until the final weeks of December, when the disease took a savage new path, fogging Weigart’s memory, did Perez relent. Yes, he would help Weigart die.
The third man, Marty James, needed little persuasion. He had entered their lives four months earlier as Weigart’s AIDS counselor. Now, he aimed to be Weigart’s deliverer. Every day, James sat at Weigart’s bedside, listening to him pour out his heart. In his job, James had been witness to the grim testimony of dozens of AIDS patients. Listening was no longer enough. This time, he would act.
As night fell, Perez and James sipped champagne while Weigart slept. Then, at James’ direction, they emptied capsules of a hypnotic medication into a pharmacist’s mortar, mixing the contents with fruit juice. Close to midnight, they woke Weigart and said what was left to say. Weigart grasped a cup, drinking half the mixture before becoming groggy. Perez spoon-fed him the rest. It was nearly finished.
Perez awoke New Year’s Day morning and checked on his lover. He was unconscious but still breathing. Perez screamed: “He’s not dead! He’s not dead!”
Panicked, Perez and James considered their options. They could let the pills take their course. But if the dosage was not lethal, Weigart would still live. They could call paramedics. But Weigart might spend weeks rotting away in a hospital ward. Or they could finish the job.
The two reached a decision. James went to the kitchen and returned with a white plastic trash bag. Trembling, he approached the bed, slipped the bag over Weigart’s head and secured it with a belt. The bag ruffled slightly with each failing breath, then fell still. This time, it was truly finished.
For Marty James, though, it had just begun. Emboldened by Ron Weigart’s death--listed in Los Angeles County death records as an AIDS fatality--the counselor claims to have assisted over the next four years in at least seven other suicides of AIDS patients. It was a clandestine career, revealed only to an anonymous few who aided him. James’ activities remained a secret until March, when the 34-year-old counselor appeared on national television to tell how he aided in a second “self-delivery” of a friend he identified only as Keith.
Keith was Keith Lower, who died from what had appeared to be an unassisted overdose of barbiturates the previous November. James’ televised revelations about Lower’s death sparked a criminal investigation. The result, announced 10 days ago by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office, was that no charges would be filed against James because the county sheriff’s homicide investigators had not been able to prove beyond James’ own statements that a crime had been committed.
But the 1983 death of Ron Weigart--described by James and Perez in more than 10 hours of interviews--raises new and equally fundamental concerns about an intimate and private crime that some insist is becoming as common among AIDS patients as it has been among cancer victims and the elderly.
Like Weigart, Keith Lower was infected with the AIDS virus. Like Weigart, Lower allowed James to play a crucial role in the most important decision of his life. But unlike Weigart, Lower--though suffering from AIDS-related complex--was nowhere near death, according to his doctor.
Convinced of the morality of his actions, James, who himself suffers from AIDS-related complex, describes his handiwork as “good deaths,” justified by society’s need for a decent end to the ravages of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. His aim in going public about the deaths of Weigart and Lower, James says, was to put a human face on euthanasia.
Taken together, the accounts of the two suicide deaths detail the troubling nature of what was done in the name of mercy: about how forceful a role James played in Ron Weigart’s death; about the lack of contact with physicians or family before the deaths occurred; about the influence of narcotics on James and the men he helped to die, and about James’ apparent failure to determine whether Keith Lower was terminally ill.
In the end, their story illuminates the heart-breaking frustration of men who wanted to recapture the last shreds of dignity from a disease that allowed none and their reliance on a helper who tried to navigate the fine line between suicide and murder while blinded by compassion.
Four months before his death, Ron Weigart left San Francisco on a sweltering August morning. He was coming home to Los Angeles to die.
While Joe Perez drove the balky, cramped rental truck, Weigart slumped on the passenger’s side, feverish in the 110-degree heat. Most of their possessions had been sold to pay for Weigart’s AIDS treatments. Their penthouse apartment, with its spectacular view of downtown San Francisco, was gone. Their sleek Plymouth Sapporo was gone. What was left was thrown into the back of the truck.
The engine whined as they drove past the drab humps of the Diablo Range. Just south of Bakersfield, the radiator boiled over, overheating frequently the rest of the way. The two men were exhausted when they arrived at their bare apartment near Hancock Park.
Weigart had wanted to be close to his family in his final days. His mother still lives in the one-story frame dwelling in Whittier where he was raised. His father, a quiet Oklahoman who died in May, was a distant figure who often made ironic references to his son’s inability to stay put for long.
Genevieve Weigart remembers a pliant child who kept his room “clean, clean, clean.” Her husband, a roofer, wanted his son to learn his trade. But Ron Weigart rebelled, taking college courses to become a physical therapist.
A bout of hepatitis interrupted his plans. Weigart recovered, but lost purpose, frequenting the sands at Laguna Beach. A surf bum, he looked the part--a tanned, muscular bleached blond whose round face was halved by a dark mustache.
He was also homosexual, and the late 1970s were heady years for the gay movement. Disco music, which first found its audience in gay nightclubs, had seized America’s airwaves. On weekends, Weigart sampled Los Angeles’ club circuit. He danced long into the night, according to friends, sharing cocaine and whatever else was available.
“He was electric,” said a club-hopping friend, Everett Alexander. “When he smiled, the room lit up.”
Tiring of the party scene, Weigart moved in 1981 to San Francisco. He found work as a bank secretary. Tank tops gave way to double-breasted suits. Drugs were passe. “He was very career-minded,” Joe Perez recalled.
The olive-skinned New York-born hairdresser and the beach boy, who was four years younger, quickly became friends, then lovers. They moved into an upscale Noe Valley neighborhood, stocked it with expensive furniture and traded in Weigart’s battered Volkswagen.
Life was serene until late 1982 when Weigart suddenly grew easily fatigued. He would wake up in the middle of the night, dripping with sweat. Perez badgered him to go to the doctor. One day, Weigart came home quaking. It was AIDS.
“I was devastated,” Perez recalled, “because I knew it was a death warrant. You know you don’t survive. Nobody has survived.”
Weigart sobbed for hours on end. He ordered Perez to abandon him, despairing that “he was going to die and I shouldn’t be hanging around him.” Perez persuaded him to sign up for hospital experiments of untested AIDS treatments. Side effects wore him down further. Headaches struck, so strong that Weigart complained that he felt like “somebody took a baseball bat and hit you in the back of the head.”
His weight plunged. Suits sagged over Weigart’s shrunken frame. At work, pregnant secretaries complained that he might infect their unborn children. He was fired and had to sue to win continued compensation.
Sporadic hospital stays brought mounting bills. By the summer of 1983, Perez said, they were $150,000 in debt. They declared bankruptcy, sold off what they owned and fled south. In Los Angeles, they lived frugally. With death an everyday presence, why acquire things?
While Perez worked at a new hair salon, Weigart needed sitters. A few of his old nightclub friends agreed to keep watch. One suggested that a counselor might help Weigart vent his pent-up emotions.
The friend suggested Marty James.
Fledgling Community of AIDS Volunteers
The lean, sad-eyed man who became a regular visitor to Ron Weigart’s apartment in the fall of 1983 was a prominent member of Los Angeles’ fledgling community of AIDS workers and volunteers.
James was then executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Shanti Foundation (shanti is “inner peace,” in Sanskrit), a San Francisco-based organization of volunteer counselors trained to sit with terminal patients and listen without judgment to their fury and sorrow.
Working 70-hour weeks, he managed a changing roster of volunteers from his file-strewn office on Santa Monica Boulevard. For James, once a drifter and a former heroin addict, it was a $12,000-a-year job with impact and importance. There was a sense of the familiar, too--his life was already steeped in mortality.
He had watched his mother endure a protracted death. Bonnie Jean Cardoza suffered from Hodgkin’s disease. The illness attacked her lymph nodes, swelling her legs and opening ghastly tumors. She underwent torturous chemotherapy and applications of nitrogen mustard, similar to poison gas.
Growing up in San Bernardino, James was her constant companion. When his mother was hospitalized, he shuttled between relatives. When she was in remission, she boarded him in shabby border motels while she went on futile journeys to Mexican Laetrile clinics.
She spent her final days bordering on delirium. James is still obsessed by the memory: “I walked in one day and it was a haunting image, like something out of a concentration camp. When she smiled, it was almost exaggerated, from ear to ear.”
After her death, he felt no ties to anyone. He was graduated from high school, then drifted to Hollywood and its gay scene. He experimented with heroin, an addict at 19. “My pain over my mother’s death was so great,” he said. “It seemed no one was there for me.”
A year blurred by before James checked into a psychiatric hospital for a week. He recovered with methadone treatments, then dabbled in a succession of enthusiasms. He worked as a hypnotherapist, flirted with Scientology, sold thrift clothing.
Then, in 1982, James discovered AIDS. Few social service organizations had come forward to help the disease’s early victims. James volunteered with a Hollywood phone bank, taking calls from anxious patients. He read about the Shanti Foundation and moved to San Francisco briefly to learn its training methods. Within a year, he helped found a Los Angeles chapter.
AIDS workers were impressed by his ability to project calm to even the most hysterical and beaten clients. He reassured them in a dreamy baritone voice that was an odd match for his frail frame. He spoke, in earnest New Age vernacular, of “completeness” and “sharing” and “being.”
“Compassion was his main strength,” therapist Jaak Hamilton said. “He was one of the first voices to deal with how to live and die with AIDS.”
James’ main client in the fall of 1983 was Ron Weigart. By then, Weigart was bone-thin, close to 100 pounds. James became a familiar figure at his bedside. “When questions came up, Marty seemed able to answer them,” said Everett Alexander, a regular visitor.
In September, Weigart rallied and visited a friend in England who was succumbing to AIDS. When he returned, he began to talk of a new interest: euthanasia. Perez now suspects that Weigart’s English friend had committed suicide in his presence.
Weigart broached the forbidden subject awkwardly. “Suddenly, he was saying that he was ready,” Perez said. “He wanted to end it all.”
Perez refused to help. “I didn’t want him to die,” he said.
Weigart sounded out other friends, among them a decorator named Michael Burgholdt.
“I’m trying to find a way to commit suicide without it looking like suicide,” Weigart told Burgholdt. “If it gets worse, I don’t know if I can stand it.” Burgholdt begged off. Everett Alexander told Weigart he could not “even consider the possibility.”
So Weigart turned to his counselor. Like the others, James was at first reluctant.
“I had strong reservations,” he recalled. They had long talks. Once, Weigart angrily lifted up the sheets from his bed and showed James his bony torso, crisscrossed with surgical scars. Empathy gave way to sympathy. James began gathering literature on suicide. He explained his decision as making “another option available to Ronnie.”
Weigart’s lungs collapsed during a November operation. When Perez brought him home, he weighed 90 pounds. Kaposi’s sarcoma, an opportunistic cancer, had spread over his kidney and liver. Blotches appeared on his face.
Weigart’s friends threw a Christmas party, buying a towering spruce and decked it with lights. Weigart’s mother and sister came up from Whittier. “We all knew it was his last Christmas,” Genevieve Weigart said. They knew nothing of his plans.
Weak as he was, Weigart kept pressing Perez to help him die. Finally, the week before New Year’s Day, Perez wavered. One afternoon, Weigart lay swaddled in blankets, talking to his lover and his counselor. As Perez recounts the conversation, Weigart wearily told him: “If you won’t do it, I’ll have Marty do it for me.”
By then, Weigart was narcoleptic, sleeping most of the day. He was fed by spoon and frequently forgot what he had been doing moments earlier.
Perez looked at James. “Marty, help me,” he said with a sigh. “I want to do it.”
“Are you sure?” James asked.
“Yes, I’m sure now,” Perez said. “Now I’m sure.”
Family Members Say It Was Murder
Genevieve Weigart thought her son died of AIDS.
New Year’s Day morning, the telephone rang. “Joe called and said that he’d passed away,” she recalled. “That was that.”
Four years passed before she learned from a reporter about the account of the suicide given by James and Perez.
Weigart’s death certificate listed three causes of death. The first two were “cytomegalovirus infection” and “Kaposi’s sarcoma,” conditions associated by AIDS. The third was AIDS itself. There was no reference to an overdose, no reference to asphyxiation. No autopsy was performed.
The certificate bore the signature of Dr. Ronald Mitsuyasu, a UCLA blood and cancer specialist. Mitsuyasu declined to discuss the case except to say that he had examined Weigart less than a month before his death, diagnosing him as terminally ill. Mitsuyasu explained that under state law an autopsy is not required if a patient has been examined within a month of his death and diagnosed as terminal.
“If there was any suspicion on my part that a patient died from anything other than his condition, then it would be my responsibility to call for an autopsy,” he said. “In this situation, there was no indication at all.”
James said he told no one, neither Mitsuyasu nor Weigart’s family, of the real cause.
To Weigart’s parents, “he died of AIDS,” James said later. “That was bad enough for them. . . . Why make it any more complex? There was no need to say, ‘Your son suicided.’ ”
But Genevieve Weigart and her daughter, who had stayed in close touch with Weigart in his last months, bitterly accuse James of murder. Astonished that they were not told, they insisted that they should have been informed as soon as he mentioned suicide.
Both mother and daughter said they would have tried to prevent him from taking his life. “I think we were obligated to know . . . ,” Janice Weigart said. “I would’ve told him he was crazy.”
When James talks to AIDS patients who bring up suicide, he said that he urges them to discuss their intentions with their families. But in this case, he said, the role of family was taken by his lover.
“You have to realize that we are a gay people and society tries to tell us we’re wrong all the time,” James said.
Derek Humphry, director of the Hemlock Society, a national pro-euthanasia group based in Oregon, defended the decision to aid in Weigart’s death and keep it from becoming known to others. “Given the position that they were in, they had to do what they did,” Humphry said. “That’s why we need proper physician-assisted suicide.”
It was Humphry who indirectly provided the crucial information that allowed James and Perez to complete their botched attempt to help Weigart commit suicide. On the morning that the two men discovered that Weigart’s lethal cocktail had not worked, James thumbed through “Let Me Die Before I Wake,” Humphry’s manual on mercy killings.
The counselor found his answer in a passage describing the use of plastic bags as a suicide method. The passage recounted the 1980 suicide of Lady June Spencer-Churchill. Dying of cancer, the daughter-in-law of the British statesman suffocated herself with a bag.
Told that his book had been used as a reference in Weigart’s suicide, Humphry noted that it includes a specific warning: “I would be careful that no one assisted me in putting it on,” it reads, “for such action could make them criminally liable . . . .”
But many medical ethicists insist that there is no moral justification for such an act. Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center, a New York research institute for biomedical ethical issues, described the two men’s assistance in Weigart’s suicide as “abhorrent.”
Callahan debated James when the counselor broke his silence about assisted suicides on ABC’s “Nightline.” “What you have here,” Callahan said, “is someone doing something illegally, without any training, without any counsel from anyone, making a decision of life and death.”
James and Perez say they feel no guilt over their actions. But for months, Perez--now himself stricken with AIDS--had nightmares about waking up next to Weigart’s body. “Everybody thought that he had died (of AIDS), and I had this dark secret,” he said.
The memory preyed on James as well, particularly when he passed supermarket shelves piled high with cartons of plastic bags: “I had difficulty walking down that aisle . . . for a long time after that.”
After four years, the two men have differing memories of who bears responsibility for slipping the trash bag over Weigart’s head and tightening the belt around his neck. Both men agree that James took the lead, but Perez says that he helped.
“We both did it,” Perez said. “To tell you the truth, we both did everything. It was something mutual. . . .”
James, however, said the crucial move was his. When Perez reached forward to help him slip the bag over Weigart’s head, James says he grabbed his hand and pulled him back. “I told him, ‘This isn’t about murder. This is about carrying out Ronnie’s wishes,’ ” James recalls. “I grabbed his hand. I didn’t want him to carry that burden the rest of his life.”
There was no time to mull over their actions. Weigart had left instructions for a final viewing. Friends and family had to be called. Perez and James dressed Weigart in a jogging suit, laying him on his bed. A single candle flickered on the dresser. Briefly, eight mourners knelt on the floor in silent prayer.
Authorities were not notified for eight hours. When James finally called, a suspicious fire captain questioned why they had waited so long. James replied that “we prepared the body at home.”
Shortly, two men from the coroner’s office arrived, clad in protective masks and gloves. After looking over the death certificate to make sure Weigart had not died improperly, they left with his body.
Quitting Shanti for Private Therapy
Marty James kept his secret to himself.
He told no one at Shanti. His assistance in Ron Weigart’s suicide was a breach of the organization’s by-laws.
Counselors had been told that if AIDS-afflicted clients bring up the idea of suicide, the counselor was obliged to refer them to a licensed therapist. If a client refused to seek help, it was the counselor’s responsibility to sever all ties.
“We do not condone or cooperate in the act of suicide,” said Paul Zak, the current Shanti director. The policy exists, Zak said, for legal protection and because “there are certain issues we are not prepared to handle.”
In the summer of 1985, James resigned as Shanti’s director. The strain of juggling counseling and fund-raising duties had overwhelmed him. Edward Slough, a fund-raiser who secured emergency grants for Shanti that year, remembers that toward the end, James often burst into tears and was absent for days at a time.
Slough said several of the group’s board of directors feared he was on “the edge of a nervous breakdown.” James counters that he was suffering mere “administrative burnout.”
Freed of his daily pressures, James became a private therapist, staging “healing” seminars for AIDS patients. His secret work of “self-delivery” continued--done, James said, without compensation.
Over four years, James said, he had a “direct role” in assisting at least eight AIDS patients to die. But he refuses to discuss the other cases in great detail.
“Some people that I have worked with have asked that I not even mention it, not even by name, not by incident, not even as a statistic,” he said. “It was very difficult for me to come forward and talk about Keith. It was also difficult to talk about Ronnie. I broke that silence because I think it’s important to put a face on euthanasia and to make it real, not something abstract.”
When first contacted, James was ambivalent about discussing his involvement in the suicides. He talked about Weigart’s death, but only gave the dead man’s first name. The Times learned Weigart’s identity through a search of death records.
James insists that he is one of a silent but growing community of friends and lovers who have helped dying AIDS patients commit suicide. “There are hundreds of us across America,” he said.
In recent years, there has been a flurry of high-profile mercy-killing trials involving the elderly and the terminally ill. But medical authorities suspect that most AIDS mercy killings are erroneously reported--as in Ron Weigart’s case--as AIDS deaths.
A study by Dr. Peter Marzuk of the Cornell University Medical College found 42 suicides by AIDS patients among 11,000 New York city residents known to have the disease between 1985 and 1987. Using coroner’s records, Marzuk determined that two-thirds of that group killed themselves within six months of being told they had AIDS.
Many of the rest committed suicide in the final stages of their disease--a point at which, Marzuk said, “they would need some kind of assistance” to die. Marzuk suggests that as many as 1,000 people with AIDS will kill themselves by 1991.
“There always was the issue of euthanasia for those who were terminal and old,” Marzuk said. “Now the AIDS question has really forced the issue on younger people.”
As James reconciled himself to euthanasia, his greatest risk was in obtaining the drugs. Early on, clients stockpiled their own painkillers or turned to the streets. By the fall of 1987, James found a steadier supply.
For awhile, a friend took overweight women to diet clinics “under the ploy that (they) were there to get diet pills,” James said. “. . . The friend would then go pick these women up at the doctor’s and pay them for their end of it.” In another “self-delivery,” James said he hid a lethal dosage of barbiturates in a box of breakfast cereal.
By the time James met Keith Lower, the logistics of euthanasia were no longer a problem.
He Was a Blond Blur of Energy
Keith Lower liked to dive through clouds.
Long after he stopped parachuting, Lower often reminisced about his hobby with Trip Harting, his close friend and Hollywood house mate. High above the earth, Lower could see how fast he was falling, something he could never do in open air.
He liked the element of danger. “You could lose your point (landing zone),” said Harting, a horseback riding teacher who often watched Lower sky dive. “A gust of wind could blow you way off course.”
It was a little like the way Lower lived--an incredible burst of motion, but off kilter. Raised in Glendora, Lower was a star high school swimmer. As a waiter at the Seafood Broiler restaurant in Beverly Hills, he was a blond blur of energy.
“When we were busy, he’d be flying around the restaurant,” co-worker Peter Chaconas said. “Adios, he’s a ghost.”
Chaconas and others suspected that Lower’s hyperactivity was bolstered by drugs. Trip Harting described Lower as a weekly user of cocaine. High, Lower was moody. Sober, he was a delight, Harting said--impish, considerate, “always popping around and doing things.”
“Keith never had any material goods to give to people so he would give of himself,” Harting said. “If he was a guest in your house, you’d find your bathroom clean, all the towels neatly folded.”
It was that peppy eagerness that attracted Marty James when he met Lower at a party in December, 1986. They had a one-month affair, though Lower warned James that he had AIDS-related complex. Over the next year, the counselor kept in close touch.
Occasionally, Harting said, the three of them shared cocaine. Harting said that on his birthday, James mentioned that he “had some coke, and I offered to buy it. He offered it to me as my birthday present.”
James denies that he used narcotics with either man, insisting that “there was never a point in my life when I was using drugs and . . . counseling the terminally ill or working with someone who was making a decision about euthanasia.”
On Jan. 2 of this year, James was arrested outside the Bel Age Hotel in West Hollywood and charged with possessing several small pieces of rock cocaine, a bag of marijuana and nine Valium pills. In their report, two sheriff’s deputies described James’ condition as “very paranoid. He continuously walked around in a circle, shouting, ‘They’re after me. Don’t let them get me.’ ”
Pleading innocent to the felony charges, James has attended a court-ordered drug diversion program.
According to James, Lower did not propose suicide until Nov. 17, 1987. James said that Lower telephoned the day before, showing up the next afternoon at his apartment on San Vicente Boulevard. Three hours of chatter passed before Lower came to the point. Lower broke the ice by discussing his own medical situation.
“Keith said to me, ‘I’ve been to the doctor, and it doesn’t look real good,’ ” James recalled. He said Lower told him that his doctor had found cancer cells in his blood and dark spots on his lungs.
James recounted their talk: “He said, ‘The doctor told me that it was as though I had just stepped off a cliff, and it won’t be long before I hit bottom.’ ”
And then, according to James, Lower said: “I want to take my life.” He told James he had tried to discuss it with his doctor, but the physician would not listen. James said he first told Lower to “wait a few days,” but when Lower insisted, he agreed to help.
But while Lower suffered from AIDS-related complex, he did not have one of the opportunist infections that typifies full-blown AIDS and was not facing imminent death, said his physician, Dr. Robert Davis. “He did not have AIDS, and I certainly didn’t tell him he was facing a terminal prognosis,” Davis said.
Lower had enlarged lymph nodes, but his immune system appeared to be functioning well. And Davis’ records indicated that Lower had never been hospitalized for any AIDS-related problem.
“It meant he wasn’t about to have an opportunistic illness any time soon,” Davis said. The doctor added that his notes show no evidence of any discussion of suicide. “I’d have made notes if he had brought it up,” he said.
Trip Harting said he doubted that Lower had gone to another physician after Davis. The only medical bills that came to the house after Lower’s death were from Davis’ office.
In the weeks before Lower’s death, Harting recalled, his house mate rarely discussed AIDS. “I think the ARC was just one other factor,” Harting said. He also noted that “there were other factors that were depressing him: He was down about never having enough money; he was down about his coke use.”
James explains his swift decision to assist Lower--despite the fact that Lower was not close to death and may have had other reasons to kill himself--by saying that “Keith made it clear to me that he was no longer feeling vital. It was increasingly difficult for him (Lower) to participate fully in life. Being active was important to him.”
James said he is “still very comfortable” with his actions: “I’m sorry I lost him. I’m not sorry I assisted him. If there was any other way, we would’ve tried it.”
The day before he died, Lower was a month behind in the rent and had started at a new restaurant job.
On the evening of Nov. 17, James said, he obtained barbiturates from a friend. He and Lower took a walk near his apartment, pointing up at the stars as they strolled through the darkened streets, then returning to write Lower’s suicide note.
They talked and watched television past midnight. Lower played a tape of “Over the Rainbow,” rewinding the cassette and playing it over and over. Then James went through his preparations. He served Lower tea and toast, then opened a number of barbiturate capsules and dropped the contents into a cup.
In the refrigerator, all James could find was grape drink. When he showed the bottle to Lower, the two men broke up laughing. “It was like: shades of Jonestown,” James recalled.
James mixed the concoction and handed the cup to Lower, who downed it in a single swallow. Dawn was about to break. As Lower grew woozy, he stretched out on a futon. James sat up a while longer, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood wakening, before he fell asleep.
When county coroner’s investigator Michael Joseph entered James’ apartment at 2:45 p.m. the next day, he found Lower still lying on the futon. In his report, Joseph noted that James “advised (that) the decedent had been very ill of late, running very high fevers.” James also told Joseph of Lower’s “history of AIDS.”
A county sheriff’s deputy also took notes, but James said nothing of his role to either investigator. “He made no representation of those facts to us,” Homicide Squad Capt. Bob Grimm said five months later.
The autopsy listed the cause of death as barbiturate intoxication.
Steven Lower said his family was devastated by his brother’s death. “I just have a hard time talking about it and would rather not,” he said. “It’s hit my parents very hard, and they would rather not talk about it either.”
About James, he said: “I wish I hadn’t ever heard of him.”
On March 31, five months after Lower’s death, James went public on “Nightline.” He wanted to arouse interest in a petition drive by the Hemlock Society for a California ballot initiative allowing physician-approved mercy killings. The drive later failed.
The society’s Humphry thought the “rather raw young man” acquitted himself admirably on the broadcast, debating two medical ethicists. He described James as “sane, balanced, compassionate and intelligent.”
Viewing the broadcast in Chicago, members of Americans United for Life, a right-to-life group, were outraged. They demanded that Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner investigate the incident.
“The audacity of this fellow getting on television and admitting it,” said Laurie Ramsey, the group’s education director. “It was almost as if he was daring someone to come after him.”
James’ Own Battle Against Disease
Most days, Marty James keeps to his West Hollywood apartment.
In recent weeks, he ran high fevers--a symptom of the progression of his AIDS-related complex. He padded about in his bathrobe, meditating before a small stone Buddha. “I treat myself like my only child,” he is fond of saying.
Showing the pressure of the investigation, James fled to Santa Barbara for a month. He stayed with friends, lounging on the beach and watching soap operas.
James says he felt relieved when the district attorney decided not to prosecute him. “I don’t think anyone looks forward to being on trial,” he said.
But he is adamant about continuing his role in helping AIDS patients die. “In the future, presented with similar circumstances, I would assist,” he said. And, in fact, James said that during the four months he was under investigation, he helped two more AIDS patients commit suicide. He elaborated little on the deaths, saying only that one died in the San Fernando Valley, the other in Silver Lake.
His attorney, Michael H. White, who was hired by the Hemlock Society, said that James is not trying to prompt another investigation. Rather, he said, James is “a concerned human being. Confronted with requests by people who are dying a hard death, he is willing to help when no one else is.”
As his own disease progresses, James tries not to dwell on the probability of his own death. But there have been times when he, too, has thought about the unthinkable.
In May, he gave a rambling speech on “AIDS Burnout” during a workshop in a nearly deserted cafeteria at Pasadena City College. As his small audience of AIDS patients and New Age adherents sat hushed, James spoke dreamily about the choices he has made, the friends he has seen die, the trouble he is in.
Sighing and speaking slowly, James said that if his health dramatically worsened, he, like Ron Weigart and Keith Lower before him, would consider suicide.
“It’s dealer’s choice,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen to the course of ARC in my body. But I think we do have the ultimate right, the manner of choosing our own death.”