It has hardly been the most auspicious of starts for Dr Philip Nitschke, the controversial Australian on a mission to revolutionise the way we die.
His unique suicide capsule, named the Sarco (derived from sarcophagus) and likened to ‘the Tesla of euthanasia’, was recently seized by law enforcement authorities. Furthermore, an individual closely linked to the project is currently in police custody as investigations into the circumstances surrounding the demise of their inaugural ‘client’ are ongoing.
Yet the man known as ‘Dr Death’ for his chilling invention is far from deterred by these setbacks.
In an exclusive interview following the debut deployment of the Sarco, Dr. Nitschke not only discloses the development of a third iteration of the pod but also highlights that insights gained from the demise of a 64-year-old American woman in Switzerland have contributed to enhancing the device’s design.
Moreover, with the recent passage of the Assisted Dying Bill in Parliament (pending several additional legislative stages before enactment), Dr. Nitschke envisions a future where he will introduce his contentious suicide pod to the UK, suggesting the Lake District as a potential serene setting for individuals seeking to peacefully conclude their lives.
‘I’m very pleased that it’s gone in favour,’ Dr Nitschke told the Mail yesterday. ‘It’s a very good development.
‘What has to happen now is hopefully a workable piece of legislation emerges.
‘In terms of the actual legalities under the new law, if you decide to go and die in the Lake District, I suppose I don’t know what the law would say,’ he told the Mail this week. ‘I suppose it’s entirely up to you if you want to sit looking at the lake or whether you want to be in your own little bedsit in South London. The device is certainly portable. You can take it to where you can put it and climb in.’
The Sarco pod used by the unnamed American woman (pictured with her back to the camera)
Dr Philip Nitschke, 77, who designed the futuristic suicide pod Sarco (short for sarcophagus)
This is the first time Dr Nitschke, 77, has spoken at length to a British newspaper since his colleague and head of The Last Resort, Florian Willet, was arrested and taken into custody in the wake of Sarco’s debut two months ago.
Willet remains in prison in Schaffhausen near the Swiss border with Germany, where inmates spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement.
What Dr Nitschke has to say about this is striking, not least because he insists the Swiss authorities have not asked for – nor, as far as he knows, seen – video footage recorded of the Sarco in use.
If true, this is perplexing given a recording should provide a visual and audio record of what happened.
Also curious is Dr Nitschke’s assertion about the ‘strangulation’ marks reportedly found on the neck of the woman who died inside the capsule; he says if such marks existed then the most likely explanation is that they were caused when the woman was removed from the Sarco by Swiss authorities, after her death was reported by Florian Willet.
The forthright Australian is, he says, ‘extremely annoyed’, at what he terms ‘an extreme over-reaction by the Swiss authorities to a person who has behaved in every way in accordance with Swiss law’. ‘There’s still no autopsy report,’ he says. ‘And we’re just stuck in some hopeless kind of limbo.
‘In terms of the actions of the prosecutor, there seems to be almost nothing happening. They don’t seem to have responded to our offer to go to Switzerland to be questioned. So they don’t seem to want to talk to me, and I can’t seem to do anything to get them to release Florian.’
The events that put the 47-year-old lawyer, economist and assisted dying campaigner Willet behind bars unfolded in September when the unnamed mother-of-two from the American midwest travelled to Switzerland to die. Her reason for choosing this path? She is said to have been suffering from a severe immune disorder that left her in great pain.
In a final brief interview, having flown first to Germany, she said of her impending death: ‘I think it is going to be amazing.’
Her dealings with The Last Resort leading up to her demise, she said, had been ‘wonderful’, ‘easy’.
The aftermath, of course, has been anything but. Switzerland was the obvious choice of departure point as one of the few countries where assisted dying is legal, provided there is no ‘external assistance’ and those who help them to die do not do so for any ‘self-serving motive’.
Dr Nitschke’s colleague and head of The Last Resort, Florian Willet, was arrested after Sarco’s debut two months ago
Dr Nitschke lives in the Netherlands with his wife Fiona Stewart (pictured), a director of The Last Resort
Thus, the pod was transported from Dr Nitschke’s workshop in the Netherlands to remote woodland near the village of Merishausen, in the northern canton of Schaffhausen.
It was here, on September 23, that the woman opened the pod using an access code and climbed in, settling herself down on a thin mat with a cushion at her head.
Next came a series of questions to confirm she knew what she was doing. There was reportedly no hesitation in pressing the activation button that flooded the sealed chamber with nitrogen, starving her of oxygen.
‘She was very committed,’ says Dr Nitschke. ‘This was a person who, after climbing in, straight away pressed the button. She could have sat there for three hours thinking about it, but she immediately pressed the button.’
Dr Nitschke notably wasn’t present when the death took place. Instead, he ‘observed’ remotely.
What happened is still being probed. According to Willet, who was present, her death was ‘peaceful, fast and dignified’ and everything went ‘according to plan’.
But footage seen by Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, taken by cameras both inside and outside the capsule, would seem to tell a different story.
A graphic description of what took place has emerged: the moment she climbed inside at 3.50pm; the piercing alarm at 4.01pm, thought to have been caused by the heart rate monitor; the moment Willet told Nitschke (who was watching on video link from Germany): ‘She’s still alive Philip.’ It was only after 30 tense minutes that Florian said: ‘She really looks dead,’ at which point he called the police.
Dr Nitschke, who lives in the Netherlands with his wife Fiona Stewart, a director of The Last Resort, insists this was as ‘peaceful’ as it was intended to be.
But as Sarco’s most prominent champion, questions have been raised as to why he wasn’t present at the time the pod was deployed. He denies that his departure had anything to do with legal risk. ‘I had a conference that I was supposed to be speaking to, quite a big conference in Budapest,’ he says.
‘I had spent two days installing the device and then I had very little time to get back to Amsterdam to get the stuff I needed to get to Budapest, so I set off straight after it was installed and I was in Germany on my way to Amsterdam [when the Sarco pod was used].
‘As it was, I still didn’t have enough time and damn nearly missed my presentation.
‘The idea was that I would make the device workable and available to the Last Resort and they would make all the decisions, and they did.’
His office in Haarlem outside Amsterdam, where his right-to-die advocacy group Exit International is based, was raided by Dutch police, at the request of the Swiss authorities. But no further action has been taken.
‘It’s ludicrous and absolute rubbish,’ he declares to suggest any foul play.
He elaborated further on a podcast with his wife this week, when he said: ‘We’ve got documentary evidence for everything. We’ve got film showing that she walked in, climbed into the Sarco unassisted. We saw video film of her pressing the button.
‘We’ve got the trace of the oxygen level inside the capsule, so we know exactly when it reached 0.5 per cent. We also know when she lost consciousness and we have a good estimate because of a cardiac alarm when she died.
Dr Nitschke now foresees the day when he will bring his controversial capsule to the UK, with the Lake District mooted as the perfect location for people to end their lives
‘So we have all that material. The outside of the capsule was being recorded, the inside of the capsule was being video recorded. She was not interfered with, touched or, in other words, had anything other than the fact that she herself was in an environment that was incompatible with life and she died peacefully.’
He bristles at what’s happened to his colleague. ‘The fact that the authorities were prepared to arrest him and keep him in prison for nine weeks, but also to arrest our lawyers and a photographer, smacks of a hysterical over-reaction on the part of the authorities,’ he says.
‘We still don’t know what’s driven that extreme reaction. Obviously there are some powerful people who don’t like the idea of the Sarco. We’re offering a free service and democratising the process and I guess that may have upset some people.’
Despite all this, work on a new Sarco continues apace.
‘It’s being printed right now,’ says Dr Nitschke. ‘We’ve made a number of improvements – it’s a much better version.’
In a chilling admission, he reveals he has modified the design due to the lessons learnt in Switzerland, which takes us back to those curious marks spotted on the American woman’s neck.
‘She climbed in unassisted and the capsule was not opened [after she died] and the police rung. So if there was any external injury it must have been done after the police turned up and opened the capsule,’ he asserts.
The new design, he says, will take this into account.
‘It’s going to have a much bigger opening canopy,’ he explains. ‘One of the possible suggestions is that to try to get a dead person out of the existing one is quite difficult and that may have caused some sort of injury. It’s easy enough if you’re alive, but if you’re dead it’s not that easy for someone else to drag you out.
‘The new one will have much more of a total opening, so it will be much easier to get into and out of.’ The ongoing investigation and furore surrounding events in September have also not diminished interest in the capsule.
Dr Nitschke says that although applications have been paused for the time being, there has been a flood of emails to The Last Resort.
Of the 380 applications he had already received from around the globe, 23 are from Britons. Among them is ex-RAF engineer Peter Scott and his wife Christine, both in their 80s, who signed up to be the first couple to use a double suicide pod after Christine was diagnosed with vascular dementia.
‘I don’t know if we’ll be able to use it in Switzerland depending on how the Swiss move, but one of the Dutch assisted dying organisations here have made an arrangement to see if they can make use of the device where they have a joint purchase,’ he adds. ‘They are currently exploring their position in Dutch law.’
As for the UK, Dr Nitschke welcomed yesterday’s historic vote, which saw MPs decide in favour of the Assisted Dying Bill.
What does this mean for the use of the Sarco over here?
‘That remains unresolved. We need to commission some legal opinion about that,’ he says.
‘But my understanding at this stage on a superficial level – it looks like there’s no problem.
‘So now it’s a matter of trying to make sure that is the case and then, if that is the situation, it’s a matter of finding someone who wants to use the Sarco and then meet the other requirements to put it in place.
Dr Nitschke says if the Bill did eventually pass into British law, ‘we would certainly make the device available for use in the UK’.
Should the Sarco get the green light, he believes there will be no shortage in demand.
‘We’ve got lots of applications. We’ve contacted them all, and these are people who were originally planning to come to Switzerland to use it.
‘But a number of people from the UK now, if of course it were able to be used in the UK, they would certainly not wish to be making a trip to Switzerland.’
Where exactly would the Sarco be deployed? Somewhere ‘beautiful’ like the Lake District, he says.
‘For people who have got that choice of picking the day and the time… it is the most important day of your life, presumably – the day you die.
‘If you want to be overlooking the lakes or the mountains or looking at whatever, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be accommodated. Certainly, the Sarco can do that.’
But doesn’t this all sound a little too public? ‘You certainly don’t want passing bushwalkers or strollers,’ he admits.
A private forest, now that’s a good place, Dr Nitschke says, insisting that he, too, would ‘enthusiastically’ use the machine.
‘The idea is that people should pick their own place. We find that people really do want to have a choice.’
And if this chilling new reality does indeed come to pass, Dr Nitschke will be only to happy to provide the means.
