Unitarian Minister: 'I make it look like they died in their sleep'
Pastor Dale Morgan
Unitarian Minister: 'I make it look like they died in their sleep'*
Reverend George Exoo is a leading figure in the right-to-die movement.
He says he has helped 102 people to commit suicide. But, reports Jon
Ronson, most of his clients were not terminally ill, just depressed and
in need of psychiatric help
* Jon Ronson
* The Guardian,
* Monday May 12 2008
In January 2002 it was reported on the Irish news that a woman's body
had been found in a rented house in Donnybrook, Dublin. Her name was
Rosemary Toole and, police said, she had been suffering from depression.
Her suicide would probably have gone unreported were it not for the fact
that she'd been spotted at Dublin airport a day earlier, picking up two
jolly-seeming Americans at arrivals. The three of them were then seen
drinking Jack Daniels and coke at the Atlantic Coast Hotel in County
Mayo. At one point - other drinkers later testified to the police -
Toole stood up to go to the toilet and did a jig at the table. The next
day she was dead and that night the two mysterious Americans, one
wearing a dog collar, left Dublin.
The Irish police released the names of their suspects. They were seeking
the arrest and extradition of the Reverend George Exoo and his partner
Thomas McGurrin, of Beckley, West Virginia, for the crime of assisting a
suicide, which, under Irish law, carries a maximum prison sentence of 14
years.
I telephoned Exoo to ask if I could follow him around. I imagined myself
as being pro-assisted suicide, although I didn't know much about the ins
and outs. But it seemed only fair to let someone kill themselves and
have a reverend at their side if that is what they wanted. The Irish
prosecutors struck me as draconian and anachronistic. I wasn't alone in
believing this: radio phone-in shows across Ireland were ablaze with
callers supporting Toole's right to kill herself with a reverend at her
side.
And so, at dawn on a Monday in 2003, Exoo and I set off in his
clapped-out old Mercedes towards Baltimore (a five-hour drive) to visit
a new prospective client, Pam Acre, who said she had been suffering from
chronic fatigue syndrome since the 70s and was considering killing
herself later in the year. Exoo was paying for the petrol even though he
was broke. He said he asked for donations from his clients but often
didn't get them, but he didn't care because this was his calling.
"I've never done anything as important as this in my ministry," he told
me en route. "I think it's the reason I was placed on this planet. I'm a
midwife to the dying, for those who want to hasten their deaths."
Exoo was cheerful, quite giggly, a gay, liberal, libertarian Unitarian
preacher, cultured, funny, charming. He said he often carried around a
large, gas-filled inflatable alligator to his "exits" in case the police
stopped him on the way. He often used gas as a suicide method. With the
alligator, he could pretend he was a children's party entertainer. But
lately he had begun phasing the alligator out.
"It made me feel conspicuous," he said. "Part of the thing is that I
want to not be noticed. I'm always careful and I always work quietly,
like the Lone Ranger. I do so generally at night and for the most part I
make it look like they just died in their sleep. I'll prop a book up on
their lap so it looks like they just expired. But if I'm carrying a big
alligator people are going to notice me."
"Plus," I said, "surely the last thing your clients would want to see in
the minutes before death is a large inflatable alligator coming through
the door."
"Exactly," said Exoo.
So that was why he no longer kept an alligator in the boot of his car.
There was something Laurel and Hardy-ish about Exoo. Earlier he had
demonstrated the gas method for me by attaching a hose to the end of a
gas tank, but he did something wrong in the preparation and the gas tank
practically exploded, shooting the hose across the room and whiplashing
his stomach. We all shrieked.
"Does this happen when you're helping people?" I asked, aghast.
"This has never happened before," Exoo replied, a bit sheepishly.
Acre lived in a decrepit old country cottage in the outskirts of
Baltimore. She looked as crumbling as her house. She was 59 but she
acted 30 years older. She let us in. We all sat on her sofa.
"Tell me about your illness," Exoo asked her.
"This is a difficult disease to cope with," Acre replied, "because they
run all the tests and they come back negative. Then they decide that ..."
"It's all in your head," said George.
"Right," said Pam.
They smiled at each other.
"They start wanting you to go to psychiatrists," said Acre. "But of
course that's totally useless."
"Sure," said Exoo, softly. "Sure."
Exoo wasn't, I noticed to my surprise, saying anything to Acre that
might possibly dissuade her from committing suicide. Instead they talked
about the "mechanics of the dying" (what pills and gas and apparatus
Acre would need) and she seemed delighted to have someone there who
didn't question her symptoms or intentions at all. Then she turned to me.
"I've learned what I can from this," she said, indicating her skinny,
frail body. "I don't judge much of anybody for anything. Because until
you walk in somebody else's shoes you do not know."
Exoo told me he drifted into assisting suicides in the early 90s when he
was a Unitarian minister in Pittsburgh. Unitarianism is a middle-class,
liberal religion and Pittsburgh is a tough, working-class town, so he
didn't have many parishioners. He would look at his tiny congregation
and wonder if he was wasting his life.
One day a parishioner approached him and said, "My husband has got ALS
[amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neurone disease] and
your name has been given to me as someone who might help."
"It was that vague," Exoo said. "But I knew what she meant. Two weeks
later he said to his wife, 'It's time. Call George Exoo.'"
That's how Exoo found his calling. He says he has gone on to assist 102
people, including Acre, who killed herself, with Exoo at her side, a few
months after our visit.
In early 2004, Irish police formally instigated extradition proceedings
against Exoo. They asked the FBI to arrest him. Exoo telephoned me.
Could I come to Seattle? He had something he wanted to tell me. It was
all quite cloak and dagger. I met him in the lobby of a Seattle airport
hotel. There was a slightly weird smile on his face.
"What is it?" I asked him.
"I've ordered a magic potion because I certainly don't intend to travel
to Dublin," he replied. "So I may be the first right-to-die martyr."
There was a silence. Exoo gave me a big, profound look. I didn't know
what to say. It was a bit of an awkward moment.
"Other than that," I said, "how are you?"
"Fine," he said. "So, anyway, maybe I should call you over to Beckley
for the big event."
I narrowed my eyes. He wanted to kill himself and he wanted me on hand
to chronicle it.
"I don't want to," I said.
He looked a bit disappointed.
Exoo was in Seattle for a private meeting of international right-to-die
activists. The biggest names in the movement were here, such as Derek
Humphry, a former British Sunday Times journalist who wrote a
bestselling memoir, Jean's Way, about helping his terminally ill wife
commit suicide in 1975. Jean's Way pretty much began the movement: a
network of right-to-die groups inspired by it sprang up across the world
in the late 70s. These activists meet once a year in an anonymous hotel
somewhere to discuss advances in suicide technologies.
"It's very hush-hush," Exoo said. "I'm surprised they're letting you in."
The delegates sat around a table in a conference room. Exoo began by
announcing his intention to martyr himself rather than face extradition.
Then he scanned the room. I think he was expecting an outpouring of
shock and sympathy but in fact people seemed much more interested in
what method he was intending to use.
"My curiosity is why would you go with a drug approach?" one delegate
asked him, and then the others leaned forward, paying attention.
Exoo's reply was that, when one uses gas, the person killing themselves
often tries to involuntarily remove the apparatus once they're
unconscious, and he has to hold their hands down, and he "didn't want to
involve anyone else in my passing".
He then changed the subject, saying that Toole in Dublin had promised to
send him a message from beyond the grave. The message would somehow take
the form of roses. And she fulfilled the promise the day after she died.
"What happened was Thomas [Exoo's partner] and I flew out the next
morning to Amsterdam," he said, "and a man brushed by us on the street.
He had roses flung over his shoulder. I've never seen anybody with so
many roses. There must have been 10 dozen roses! And Thomas said, 'There
she is! There she is!'"
There was a silence. Then Dr Pieter Admiraal, a pioneering Dutch
advocate of euthanasia, coughed grumpily and said, "Oh, dear George. To
meet somebody with roses in the Netherlands is not so extreme because we
are growing them to export to the whole world."
There was laughter from the others.
"And now you are in trouble," Admiraal added. "Maybe God can help you."
"Maybe so," snapped Exoo.
That evening I approached Admiraal for an interview. We talked for a
while about Exoo's idealism.
"He's too good for this world," Admiraal said. Then he added, "I've been
observing him for a long time, and I've asked our psychiatrists to
observe him ..."
He paused. He was obviously weighing up whether to tell me whatever was
on his mind.
"He is," he finally said, "in my opinion, enjoying the death of another
person. And that's dangerous. I have the strong impression that he wants
to be there and see something dying. Well, he cannot help that. It's his
character. It's a kind of phobia to enjoy death. And that's why he says,
'I will commit suicide.' Because he will want to die at that moment."
(Later, Admiraal clarified this. He said he didn't mean Exoo derived
psychopathic pleasure from being around death. Instead, he thought Exoo
was too in love with the afterlife. He believed in it too much and the
pleasure he got was from clapping and cheering his clients to this
better place.)
I didn't know what to think. I hoped Admiraal was being overdramatic
because I had considered myself pro-assisted suicide, and once your mind
is set on something it can be hard to do a 180-degree turn. Still, my
own doubts had been creeping in. For instance, I'd noticed that very few
of Exoo's clients were terminally ill. Most were depressed or suffering
from psychosomatic diseases. When I asked him about his client list he
said, "Many of my colleagues will avoid such persons like the plague but
I feel a very strong identity with the story of the good samaritan. I
stop while others walk by and ignore their pleas."
How, I wondered, did Exoo and his clients find each other?
After the conference, I visited Humphry, father of the modern
right-to-die movement. He is from Wiltshire but now lives in Oregon.
"Once or twice a week," Humphry explained, "I get very strange people on
the telephone who are anxious to commit suicide because of their
depression or sad lives. When they get your number they want to talk and
talk. And they call again and again. And they also call all the other
right-to-die groups."
Humphry said that the mainstream right-to-die groups will tell them,
"'We can't help you. It's not within our parameters because you aren't
terminally ill.' But they pursue you. They call and call. And eventually
someone will say, 'George Exoo will probably help you.' And that gets
them off the phone and on to George."
"Isn't that terrible?" I asked.
"Oh, yes," said Humphry.
Three years passed. Even though the Irish government was pressing the
FBI to arrest Exoo, they didn't. Meanwhile he was travelling around
America helping non-terminally ill people die.
In the spring of 2007 a package arrived. It was a video. I went into my
office, closed the door, put it into the VCR and pressed play. Exoo's
messy office blurred fuzzily on to the screen. Then he skulked into shot
from behind the camera, looking as if he had been awake for days.
He said, "Now, what I'm going to do is call my friend Shirley who is out
in a western state in a motel."
And he picked up the phone and dialled and it became obvious what was
going to happen. A woman called Shirley was sitting in a motel room in
Arizona waiting for his call. She had a bottle of poison in front of her
and he was going to guide her through her suicide.
He said, "Hey, Shirley. This is George. The hour has come that we've
been planning."
He hadn't bugged the phone so I could only hear his end of the conversation.
"I know you're nervous," Exoo said. "You've never done this before. But
that's all right. We're going to get through this. It's time for you to"
- he sighed - "drink the potion that's in front of you. It's bitter and
horrible tasting so it's important that you chugalug it right down. I
ask you to raise that glass and I want you to know how honoured I am to
be with you at this moment."
There was a silence of perhaps 10 seconds. Then Exoo's voice hardened:
"I know it's bitter. Just keep drinking. Put your finger over your nose
and get it all down."
He was talking to Shirley like someone would talk to a child who had
disobeyed him. Then he began to chant a Buddhist chant: "Gate, Gate,
Parasamgate ... "
(Gone. Gone. Gone completely beyond.)
After five minutes he said, "Shirley? Can you hear me?"
Then he looked into his camera. He said, "I think I heard the phone
drop. Which would mean she is probably now gone."
He shrugged slightly. "And that's it. That's the way it's done."
He leaned over and turned off the camera.
Exoo's irritable attitude towards Shirley was startling but it wasn't
totally unexpected. He had, he told me, behaved in a similar manner
towards Acre. She too had prevaricated, and he told her he wasn't
leaving town until he had "finished" guiding her through her suicide.
I'm sure Exoo wasn't encouraging reluctant clients to kill themselves -
I'm sure the choice was always theirs - but he did seem to speak
impatiently at them during apparent moments of hesitation.
In May 2007 Exoo began teaching a friend, Susan (not her real name), the
ropes. He said he needed an assistant in case he was arrested or killed
himself. We arranged to meet at Susan's house in North Carolina. I
arrived before Exoo. Susan lived alone, a middle-aged lady with a
collection of plastic lizards. While we waited I asked her how they met.
"I was bitten by a brown recluse spider in 1993," she replied. "It was
so painful I wanted to die."
She said she called the official right-to-die groups, "but they wouldn't
help me."
"Because you weren't terminally ill?"
"Yeah, they rejected me," she said. "But then somebody said, 'You might
want to call George.' Kind of like under the counter."
Susan said she would have killed herself with Exoo's help - he was
perfectly willing - but she couldn't find anyone to look after her pet
snake. Eventually, they got talking. If she wasn't going to be his
client, perhaps she should be his assistant.
Then Exoo arrived. He had a second job now, buying up houses that had
been seized by the banks, and then selling them on for a quick profit,
although he hadn't managed to sell any yet. It was oddly nice to see
him. We joked about how he could provide his clients with the full
service: he could sell them a house and when the banks foreclosed he
could help them kill themselves. For all the ambiguities, he was fun to
be around. And he was a strange mix, often going to the ends of the
Earth to help people in distress, but also getting cross with them if
they seemed hesitant about killing themselves.
I said to him, "In the Arizona tape, Shirley said, 'It's bitter,' and
you snapped, 'Drink it!'
"Absolutely," he replied. "Because I'd been through that argument with
her before."
"She'd tasted it before?" I asked.
"Yeah," he said. He was getting annoyed with me. "I'd been with her
twice before in person. What kind of bull twaddle is that? If you're
serious you're going to drink it and not whine about it!"
"But this was somebody who didn't know whether to kill themselves," I said.
"Just drink it," he said. "Three or four swallows and you're going to go
to sleep. Permanently. In 10 minutes you'll be off this planet. Yes, I
was probably pressing her to some extent. But I was pressing her to make
up her mind one way or another because I can't go flying across the
country week after week and have nothing come of it. I want her to
either go on and live her life, or check out. But it's her choice. It's
not mine."
We went for lunch. Susan had told me that morning that her multiple
chemical sensitivities (triggered by the 1993 spider bite) were so
severe there was only one local restaurant she could eat in where the
atmosphere did not set off her symptoms. But we ate in another
restaurant - an all-you-can-eat buffet - and she was fine. She ate all
she could. I began to see Susan as living proof that Exoo really
shouldn't help people like Susan kill themselves.
After lunch I told him about the view - held by some psychologists who
had observed him - that he was out of his depth and it was a slippery
slope and he should stop.
"And what's the slippery slope I'm on?" he asked sharply.
"Not being able to stop helping people because you see it as your
calling and you like to be there at the moment of death because you get
something out of it. And you may consequently be encouraging them
towards suicide."
"Bullshit," he said. "It just hasn't happened. Otherwise these people
wouldn't be hanging on for years and years and years."
And that part seemed to be true: he claimed to have clients who had been
prevaricating for years.
Exoo drove off to do some real estate business and I was left alone with
Susan. We sat on her porch. And she said something extraordinary. She
said that unbeknown to Exoo she had set up her own suicide business and
was willing to help practically anyone if the price was right.
"I see this as a business," she said. "George sees it as a calling.
There's a big difference there. For me it's no cash, no help." She said
her price was approximately $7,000.
"You're bound to get it wrong, aren't you?" I said. "And help someone
who shouldn't be helped."
Susan shrugged. "Probably, at some point, yes," she said.
She said Exoo's worst crime was his financial imprudence: that he'll
help people who can't afford to pay.
"George will get to a point where he'll run out of money," she said. "He
won't scale down the expensive cuts of meats every night. He would
rather kill himself than economise."
"He seems quite keen on killing himself," I said.
"I think he'll do it soon," said Susan. "And that's why I've been
pressing him to give me a list of his current clients."
A few weeks passed. Then I got an early morning call from Susan. She
said the FBI had just arrested Exoo. His partner McGurrin had woken up
to find Exoo and two men standing there. They said, "We're putting
George in prison until we can take him to Ireland."
A few weeks after that (I later learned) Susan flew to New Zealand to
help a depressed, non-terminally ill woman she had met on the internet
commit suicide. The woman had previously asked a mainstream right-to-die
group called Dignity NZ to help her, but they had refused.
"I was of the impression that she needed assistance in living rather
than advice on how to end her life," Dignity NZ's founder, Lesley
Martin, later explained to me in an email. She added, "I imagine you are
developing a good understanding of what an absolute mess the euthanasia
underground is. Unfortunately, there are 'gung-ho' individuals involved
[she meant Susan] who, in my opinion, treat the matter of assisting
someone to die as an exciting relief from the boredom of their own lives
and do so completely ill-equipped and dismissive of the responsibility
we have of ensuring that people who need mental health assistance
receive it, while still working towards humane legislation that
addresses the real issues."
I visited Susan and asked her what had been wrong with the New Zealand
woman. "She had some sort of breathing disorder," she said, "and the
doctors there wouldn't give her the medication that she needed. I
happened to take the same medication. I gave her a little bit of mine
and she was fine."
"But you helped her commit suicide, even though you helped her breathe
better?" I asked.
"Yeah," said Susan. "Isn't that ironic?"
"You shouldn't do it," I said.
"Somebody's got to pay the bills so you can have some water in that
glass you're drinking," she said.
I had agreed to protect Susan's identity before I knew she was going
around the world helping people die for money.
On October 25 2007 a federal judge in Charleston, West Virginia, freed
Exoo. He decreed that because assisted suicide is not a crime in 25 of
the 50 states, he couldn't allow the Irish prosecutor to try him in Dublin.
I visited Exoo one last time. I thought there wouldn't be any more
twists and turns in this story about the messy assisted suicide
underground, but he offered one.
"You know I provided you with a tape?" He meant the Shirley/Arizona
telephone tape. "That was not a real deathing. I was talking to a dial
tone."
I looked at him askance.
"You're a very good actor," I said.
"I wanted to give you an example of how I would work with somebody," he
shrugged. "And she was the only possibility."
He explained that Shirley was a real person, and he really had visited
her on many occasions, and that she really had prevaricated. All that
was true.
"She really is now dead," he added, sounding quite triumphant. He said
she killed herself in Kingman, Arizona, while he was in prison. (The
Kingman police later confirmed this.)
I think Exoo was stupid to fake that tape and that someone who helps
people decide whether or not to kill themselves shouldn't play weird
games like that. The things I liked most about Exoo when I first met him
six years ago - his libertarian, maverick qualities - are actually the
things that are most worrying about him.