Wife, Doctor Won’t Be Charged in Death

Prosecutors have decided not to file murder charges against a Redondo Beach woman and doctor they had suspected of mercy killing in the death of the woman’s 79-year-old husband last year.

Mary Seifert and Dr. Richard Schaeffer have maintained that they were only trying to ease the pain of Seifert’s husband, Melvin, when Schaeffer administered an injection of a sedative on Oct. 27, 1990.

Although a live-in caretaker told police he saw Schaeffer deliberately give a lethal injection to retired high school coach Melvin Seifert, Deputy Dist. Atty. Brian Kelberg said Tuesday that he does not believe he could convince a jury of that. The case was complicated because Seifert had suffered a heart attack eight to 12 hours before he died.

“It’s not a question of what I personally believe (happened),” Kelberg said. “To put it succinctly, it would be a waste of everybody’s time and resources to file charges because I just do not believe it’s reasonably probable that 12 jurors will agree as to what happened.”

The decision came on the day Washington voters cast ballots on whether to approve the nation’s first law allowing doctor-assisted suicides.

An attorney for Seifert’s widow, Mary, 76, insisted the case had nothing to do with the right-to-die issue.

“This is not a case where the doctor and Mrs. Seifert are saying they felt justified in putting Mr. Seifert’s life out because he was suffering,” Joel Levine said. “Everything Mrs. Seifert did and everything Dr. Schaeffer did was intended purely to make him comfortable, not to speed his death.”

Mary Seifert and Schaeffer, 70, were arrested and jailed in the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 28, 1990, less than 24 hours after Melvin Siefert--an invalid suffering from a number of serious illnesses--died at his Redondo Beach home.

Seifert’s live-in caretaker, Louis Walters Jr., went to police shortly after the man’s death to report that Schaeffer injected Siefert with amytal sodium, a sedative, “to put him to sleep” and then told Mary Seifert her husband would die shortly. Seifert died about 15 minutes later, Walters reported.

According to court documents, Walters, 20, told investigators that Schaeffer contacted a mortuary and told them “to cremate the body right away, without preparation.” Police investigators confiscated Seifert’s body before the cremation could take place.

Time-consuming toxicological tests, as well as lengthy interviews with family members and medical experts, extended the investigation to more than a year.

Medical examiners discovered that Seifert had suffered a heart attack within eight to 12 hours of his death, leaving him “no more than a few hours to a few days to live,” Kelberg noted in his memo recommending against prosecution. Because of that, pathologists stopped short of saying the sedative injection was the primary cause of Seifert’s death, but said it clearly was a contributing factor.

In his memo, Kelberg criticized Schaeffer’s decision to give Seifert amytal sodium, a once-popular, powerful barbiturate that doctors use less frequently than they did 20 or 30 years ago.

Kelberg said he was particularly concerned because the dose Schaeffer administered had been manufactured more than 30 years ago. Investigators also found many other decades-old drugs in Schaeffer’s medical bag.

Because of the old medication and what Kelberg called Schaeffer’s medically questionable decision to give a sedative to a man suffering respiratory problems, Kelberg said he has asked the doctor to relinquish his medical license. If Schaeffer does not, Kelberg plans to forward his file to the state medical board for action.

Schaeffer’s attorney said his client was “a physician who is dearly loved in the community” and did nothing wrong.

“He was dying, Dr. Schaeffer knew it, so what he tried to do was just make him more comfortable in those final moments,” attorney Michael Magasin said.