2 in Assisted-Suicide Case Tell of Pain on Videotape

Two disabled women wept and laughed on the eve of their assisted suicides as they explained the suffering that brought them to Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a videotape released Monday showed.

“I thought about it for a long time, a long time. I have no qualms about my decision,” Sherry Miller, 43, told Kevorkian in a tape released by Kevorkian’s lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger.

“I want to die, and I know there’s no turning back,” she said, her voice faltering.

The videotape was recorded last Tuesday, the day before Miller, who had multiple sclerosis, and Marjorie Wantz joined Kevorkian in a secluded Oakland County cabin and killed themselves with devices he invented.

Kevorkian had been expected to make his first public appearance here since the suicides. He did not show at Fieger’s office, but the attorney read a statement from Kevorkian in which the retired pathologist called for a national panel to explore doctor-assisted suicide and set guidelines.

Kevorkian, 63, would issue no other statements until the Oakland County prosecutor’s office decides whether to charge him with a crime, Fieger said.

No charges have been brought against Kevorkian despite his apparent violation of a court order barring him from assisting suicide.

The injunction was issued in January after the Dec. 13 dismissal of a first-degree murder charge against Kevorkian for helping an Oregon woman commit suicide in June, 1990. That woman, Janet Adkins, had Alzheimer’s disease.

Michigan has no laws against assisted suicide.

In the hourlong videotape released Monday, Wantz told of previous unsuccessful attempts to commit suicide and escape the pain of 10 pelvic operations. She was diagnosed as having papilloma virus, a nonfatal disease.

Wantz, who lived in Sodus, Mich., said she tried but failed to commit suicide three times by inhaling carbon monoxide from a hose connected to a car exhaust pipe. She said she twice tried to take an overdose of the sleeping medication Halcion.

“I tried loading a gun, but I didn’t know how,” she told Kevorkian. “If you do it yourself, you don’t know what you’re doing. I wish I could have done it a year ago or two years ago.”

The videotape, shot at the Roseville, Mich., home of Miller’s parents, showed both women chatting amiably with Kevorkian about details of their planned suicides. On several occasions, Kevorkian asked the women and their relatives whether they had second thoughts.

“I hate to see my sister kill herself,” Gary Miller said. “But I think she has the right to say that she’s had enough. I couldn’t put the needle in her hand. I couldn’t hold a pillow over her head. But I’m not going to step in and stop her.”