Husband Fled After ‘Machine’ Suicide

Ronald Adkins, husband of the Portland, Ore., woman who committed suicide with the assistance of a doctor near here last week, tried to leave the area quickly on the afternoon of his wife’s death and initially tried to evade police questioning, state police and local prosecutors said.

Not until he was in the doorway of an airplane at Detroit’s Metropolitan Airport and being questioned by a Michigan State Police detective for a second time did Adkins acknowledge that he was the husband of the dead woman, Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Alzheimer’s disease patient, officials here said.

“He wanted to get out of our jurisdiction as quickly as possible,” said one prosecutor involved in the case, who asked not to be identified. “He wanted to disappear.”

“It seemed unusual to me that, if a man knew his wife was going to die, that he wouldn’t stick around and at least take care of the arrangements,” added Sgt. Terry Saunders, the detective who first questioned Adkins.

Saunders went to the airport simply to notify Adkins that his wife had died. Saunders canvassed everyone waiting to board the aircraft on which Adkins was to be a passenger. Although Adkins was among them, he did not step forward until the airline gate attendant saw his ticket and pointed him out to Saunders.

Saunders then asked Adkins to accompany him while he telephoned the state police post in suburban Pontiac, which was handling the case. Adkins refused to do so and boarded the plane, according to Saunders.

His suspicions aroused, the detective then called for more information and learned, for the first time, that a “medically supervised” suicide had taken place. Saunders was asked to confirm Ronald Adkins’ identity, so he then acted to detain the flight. Adkins came off the plane and acknowledged that he knew about the suicide. He told Saunders he would be willing to cooperate in any investigation.

Saunders had not been asked to detain Adkins, however, so the husband then left for Portland, leaving behind his wife’s body and many of her personal effects, local officials said. He had left cremation instructions with a Detroit area funeral home, prosecutors said, but the body was held for an autopsy by the Oakland County, Mich., medical examiner. The body has since been released.

State police and prosecutors said that, if not for poor communications between officials at the scene of Janet Adkins’ death and Saunders at the airport, the husband probably would have been held for further questioning.

Prosecutors are now awaiting an autopsy report and the completion of a state police report to determine whether criminal charges should be brought against anyone involved in the death, most notably Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the retired pathologist from the Detroit suburb of Royal Oak, Mich., who helped Janet Adkins kill herself.

Ronald Adkins, an investment broker in Portland, did not return telephone calls to his home and office Wednesday.

The June 4 death of Janet Adkins, who killed herself in the back of a rusting 1968 Volkswagen van with the aid of a drug-dispensing “suicide machine” devised by Kevorkian, has caused a nationwide sensation and sparked emotional debate over the “right to die.”

Since his return to Portland, Adkins has publicly supported his wife’s decision to end her life. He has appeared on television talk shows and given a wide range of interviews.

Last Friday, Oakland County Circuit Judge Alice Gilbert issued a preliminary injunction barring Kevorkian from assisting any further suicides in the state. Kevorkian later said that he would not violate that order.

In a hearing before the ruling, Kevorkian told the court he first spoke with Janet Adkins the weekend before her death, when she and her husband flew to Michigan to meet him. Before that, he said, he had spoken only with Ronald Adkins. He said the husband first contacted him last October, after Janet Adkins had read about his “suicide machine.”

Ronald Adkins contacted Kevorkian again in May, the doctor said, after some special treatments had failed to slow Janet Adkins’ decline. Ronald Adkins told Kevorkian by phone that his wife was more eager than ever to end her suffering.