“I was bitten by a brown recluse spider in 1993,” she says. “It was so painful I wanted to die.”
She says she called the official right-to-die groups, “but they wouldn’t help me.”
“Because you weren’t terminally ill?”
“Yeah, they rejected me. But then somebody said, ‘You might want to call George.’ Kind of like under the counter.”
Cassandra says she would have killed herself with George’s help—he was perfectly willing—but she couldn’t find anyone to look after her pet snake. Eventually, they got to talking. If she wasn’t going to be his client, perhaps she should be his assistant.
• • •
GEORGE ARRIVES. He has a second job now, buying up houses that have been seized by the banks, and then selling them on for a quick profit, although he hasn’t managed to sell any yet.
“You could provide the full service,” I say. “You could sell them a house, and when the banks foreclose, you could help them kill themselves.”
We laugh. I say to him, “In the Arizona tape, Shirley said, ‘It’s bitter,’ and you snapped, ‘Drink it!’”
“Absolutely,” he replies. “Because I’d been through that argument with her before.”
“She’d tasted it before?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. He’s 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 is somebody who doesn’t know whether to kill themselves,” I say.
“Just drink it,” he says, exasperated. “Three or four swallows and you’re going to go to sleep. Permanently. In ten 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 go for lunch. Cassandra has told me that her multiple chemical sensitivities (triggered by the 1993 spider bite) were so severe, there is only one local restaurant she can eat in where the atmosphere does not set off her symptoms. But we eat in another restaurant—an all-you-can-eat buffet—and she is fine. She eats all she can. I begin to see Cassandra as living proof that George really shouldn’t help people like Cassandra kill themselves.
After lunch I tell him some people think he’s on a slippery slope.
“What slippery slope?” he asks 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 toward suicide.”
“Bullshit,” he says. “It just hasn’t happened. Otherwise these people wouldn’t be hanging on for years and years and years.”
And that part seems to be true: He’s always said he has clients who have been vacillating for years.
George drives off to do some real estate business and I’m left alone with Cassandra. We sit on her porch. “I see this as a business,” she says. “George sees it as a calling. There’s a big difference there. For me it’s ‘No cash, no help.’”
“What’s your price?” I ask.
“Seven thousand dollars,” she says.
“You’re bound to get it wrong, aren’t you?” I say. “And help someone who shouldn’t be helped?”
Cassandra shrugs. “Probably, at some point, yes,” she says.
She says George’s worst crime is 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 says. “He won’t scale down the expensive cuts of meats. He would rather kill himself than economize.”
“He seems quite keen on killing himself,” I say.
“I think he’ll do it soon,” says Cassandra. “And that’s why I’ve been pressing him to give me a list of his current clients.”
A few weeks pass. Then I get an early-morning call from Cassandra. She says the FBI has just arrested George. His partner, Thomas, woke up to find George and two men standing there. They said, ‘We’re putting George in prison until we can take him to Ireland.’” George didn’t have the opportunity to run into the kitchen and drink his poison.
A few weeks after that (I later learn) Cassandra flew to New Zealand to help a depressed, nonterminally 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 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 e-mails me. “I imagine you are developing a good understanding of what an absolute mess the euthanasia underground is. Unfortunately, there are ‘gung-ho’ individuals involved 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 toward humane legislation that addresses the real issues.”
I visit Cassandra and ask her what was wrong with the New Zealand woman. “She had some sort of breathing disorder,” she says, “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 say.
“Yeah,” says Cassandra. “Isn’t that ironic?”
“You shouldn’t do it,” I say.
“Somebody’s got to pay the bills so you can have some water in that glass you’re drinking,” she says.
On October 25, 2007, a federal judge in Charleston, West Virginia, decrees that because assisted suicide is not a crime in twenty-five of the fifty states, he can’t allow the Irish prosecutor to try George in Dublin. The extradition has failed. George is free.
I visit George one last time. I thought there wouldn’t be any more twists and turns in this story. But there’s a final one. “You know I provided you with a tape?” he says. He means the Shirley/Arizona telephone tape. “That was not a real deathing. I was talking to a dial tone.”
“You’re a very good actor,” I say.
“I wanted to give you an example of how I would work with somebody,” he says, shrugging. “And she was the only possibility.”
He explains that Shirley was a real person, and he really had visited her on many occasions, and that she really had vacillated. All that was true.
“And guess what?” he adds. “She’s killed herself now. While I was in jail.” He pauses and says, sounding quite triumphant: “She really is dead now.”
Is She for Real?
DAY 1: AT SEA
It is Tuesday evening and I am on a luxury Mediterranean cruise ship called the Westerdam. I’m in the audience in the Vista lounge. A grouchy woman is sitting on a beige and golden throne on the stage. She’s complaining about builders and dispensing dietary advice. Her name is Sylvia Browne and for years I’ve wanted to interview her. She’s America’s most divisive psychic. She’s become famous for telling the parents of missing children what happened to their kids. Distraught parents go to her during her weekly appearance on The Montel Williams Show on CBS television. Montel is like Oprah. Sylvia tells them, “Your child is dead,” or “Your child was sold into slavery in Japan.”