Coroner Finds No Cancer After Kevorkian Aids Suicide

Jack Kevorkian took part Wednesday in the suicide of a 58-year-old cancer patient who the medical examiner later determined had no lingering trace of the disease.

“There was no cancer,” Dr. Kanu Virani, deputy chief medical examiner for Oakland County, said Wednesday night after an autopsy on Patricia Cashman of San Marcos, Calif.

Her body was found wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of a gray mid-’80s Renault Alliance outside the morgue. The car is registered to Kevorkian, said sources speaking on condition of anonymity.

Cashman, who ran a travel agency, had feared ending up a “vegetable” unable to care for herself, Kevorkian lawyer Geoffrey Fieger said. She was the 26th person whose suicide was attended by Kevorkian.

Fieger said the woman had suffered for three years from breast cancer that had spread throughout her body and had recently lost her ability to walk.

However, Virani said he would have expected to find cancer in her lymph nodes, liver or other internal organs but found none.

The medical examiner’s office listed the cause of death as carbon monoxide poisoning and said Cashman’s right breast had been surgically removed.

Fieger challenged Virani’s assertion. He said the breast cancer had spread to all of Cashman’s bones, her bones were crumbling and she was on morphine.

In a July 6 letter, Cashman told Kevorkian that she “would go to almost any length to avoid ever being on pain pills again because of the terrible side effects.”

Sheriff’s Lt. William Kucyk said his agency was investigating. Detectives were trying to contact Kevorkian, but Kucyk said: “We’re certainly not optimistic he will submit to an interview.”

Kevorkian, 67, already faces assisted-suicide charges in four deaths in Oakland County--two in 1993 and two in 1991. He could get five years in prison in each case. Prosecutors failed last month to have him placed under house arrest while he awaits trial next year in the earlier deaths.

“It is time for this charade to end and for him to go to trial,” said prosecutor Larry Bunting.