Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the notorious advocate of
physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients who became a
household name in the 1990s by practicing what he preached and in so
doing inflamed the nationwide debate over a patient’s right to die, died
early Friday. He was 83.
Kevorkian, a former Michigan pathologist who served
eight years in prison for second-degree murder for a case in which he
personally administered the lethal injection rather than helping the
patient do it himself, died at William Beaumont Hospital near Detroit,
according to Mayer Morganroth, a lawyer and close friend.
He was being treated for pneumonia and kidney problems, Morganroth told the Associated Press.
Dubbed “Dr. Death,” Kevorkian claimed to have assisted in the suicides of more than 130 people between 1990 and 1998.
Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Portland, Ore., mother of
three adult sons in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease and
unwilling to let it progress further, was the first.
When Adkins and her husband, Ron, first met with
Kevorkian in Michigan, he already had begun receiving media attention
for his untested “suicide machine,” a homemade device he called the
“mercitron.”
On June 4, 1990, as Ron Adkins waited in a motel
room, Kevorkian’s sisters, Flora Holzheimer and Margo Janus, drove Janet
Adkins to Groveland Oaks County Park, where Kevorkian was waiting for
her in his rusty white 1968 Volkswagen van.
He had tried to find a more suitable setting, he told
People magazine later that month, “and every place turned me down. But
Janet didn’t care what the environment was.”
With Adkins lying in a bed in the back of the van,
Kevorkian hooked her up to a heart monitor and inserted a needle into
her arm to start the flow of a harmless saline solution.
As chronicled in People, Adkins asked Holzheimer to
read passages Adkins had brought with her, including the 23rd Psalm and a
message from her closest friend.
Then Adkins pressed the button on Kevorkian’s
machine, which intravenously began sending the anesthetic thiopental
sodium through her veins to put her to sleep and then deadly potassium
chloride to stop her heart.
“Thank you, thank you so much,” Adkins reportedly told Kevorkian as the anesthetic began taking effect.
“Have a nice trip,” he said.
After the line on the heart monitor went flat less
than six minutes later, Kevorkian called the authorities and told them
what he had done.
His actions thrust the right-to-die issue into the
national spotlight, with Kevorkian at the center of what Time magazine
called “a media barrage that ricocheted from ‘Crossfire’ to ‘Nightline,’
‘Good Morning America’ to ‘Geraldo.'”
“I’m trying to knock the medical profession into
accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include
assisting their patients with death,” Kevorkian told reporters at the
time.
Derek Humphry, executive director of the Hemlock
Society, a right-to-die group that supports the concept of
doctor-assisted suicide, told the Los Angeles Times in June 1990: “If we
are free people at all, then we must be free to choose the manner of
our death.”
Critics, challenging Kevorkian on both moral and procedural grounds, were equally vocal.
“What he did is like veterinary medicine,” Dr. John
Finn, medical director of the Hospice of Southeastern Michigan in
suburban Detroit, told the Times that June. “When you take your pet to
the vet, he puts the pet to sleep. I think human beings are more
complicated than that. I think he should have his license revoked.”
Dr. Melvin Kirschner, co-chairman of the joint
committee on medical ethics of the Los Angeles County Medical
Association and the Los Angeles County Bar Association, complained in a
Times interview at the time: “Kevorkian did this without any guidelines
whatsoever. Physicians cannot just, willy-nilly, assist someone in
killing themselves.”
A few days after his wife’s death, Ronald Adkins said he believed assisted suicide was a more dignified way to die.
“It’s not a matter of how long you live, but the
quality of life you live, and it was her life and her decision, and she
chose this way to go,” he was quoted telling his local TV station.
In December 1990 a Michigan judge dismissed a
first-degree murder charge against Kevorkian, noting that Michigan law
did not forbid suicide or assisting in it.
Unable to legally obtain drugs for his suicide
machine after losing his Michigan medical license, Kevorkian turned to
rigging canisters of carbon monoxide to face masks and had his patients
release a clamp to start the deadly flow of gas.
In the immediate aftermath of Adkins’ death, the
Times reported that some supporters of physician-assisted suicide said
that Kevorkian’s interest in death and suicide was too obsessed and too
fanatical for him “to try to set compassionate and safe guidelines for
euthanasia in the future.”
Humphry, who had met Kevorkian in 1988 and rejected
his offer to set up an illegal “suicide clinic” for the terminally ill
in Los Angeles, described him to the Times in 1990 as “a zealot” and “a
strange bird.”
The maverick doctor, whom columnist Ellen Goodman
described in 1992 “an ethical outlaw, a freelance death dealer providing
paraphernalia and know-how to the users,” was no stranger to
controversy throughout a medical career in which he developed an early
fascination with death and dying.
The son of Armenian refugees, Kevorkian was born in Pontiac, Mich., on May 26, 1928.
While studying at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, where he excelled in languages — Japanese and German — he decided
on a career in medicine and chose to focus on pathology, the study of
disease.
A 1952 graduate of the University of Michigan Medical
School in 1952, Kevorkian volunteered for the Army and served as a
medical officer in Korea.
After his discharge in 1955, he began his first year
of residency in pathology at the University of Michigan Medical Center,
where he began conducting independent death-related research: He
received permission to set up an electrocardiogram and a small camera
next to patients so he could record changes in the retinas of their eyes
to pinpoint the exact time of death.
“His theory could assist pathologists, forensic
psychiatrists and police forces in solving homicides and convicting
perpetrators,” Neal Nicol and Harry Wylie wrote in their 2006 book
“Between the Dying and the Dead: Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s Life and the
Battle to Legalize Euthanasia.”
The nurses, finding Kevorkian’s research “creepy,”
Nicol and Wylie wrote, began referring to his research as “the doctor of
death’s death rounds.” Soon, they were simply referring to Kevorkian
with the nickname that would take on new meaning decades later: Dr.
Death.
Kevorkian wrote an article about his findings in the
American Journal of Pathology in 1956. “Unfortunately, the research was
never picked up or expanded upon,” the two authors wrote.
In 1958, he created a stir in medical circles — and
made news — when he presented a research proposal at a conference in
Washington for conducting medical experiments on consenting death row
inmates while under deep anesthesia just before the executioner
administering a final overdose of anesthesia.
In 1961, he published an article in the American
Journal of Clinical Pathology that detailed his experiments with direct
transfusions of cadaver blood into volunteers, which he viewed as having
potential benefits for battlefield casualties in Vietnam. The military
rejected his proposal.
Kevorkian moved from job to job over the years,
including serving as a staff pathologist at the Beverly Hills Medical
Center in Los Angeles in the early 1980s.
He returned to Michigan in 1982 after a stint as
assistant to the chief pathologist at Pacific Hospital in Long Beach,
Calif. That was the last hospital in which he was known to have been
employed, the Times reported in 1990, after Adkins’ death.
By then, as depicted in the Times story, Kevorkian
was a “lifelong bachelor living off his savings in a tiny,
ill-furnished, walk-up apartment in Royal Oak, Mich., not far from his
boyhood home in Pontiac” — a doctor who even had been turned down for a
paramedic job two years earlier and whose thoughts, the Times reported,
had become “increasingly dominated by the issue of suicide for the
terminally ill.”
Kevorkian made his suicide machine out of used scrap
parts. For his new business cards, he borrowed from the word obituary to
call himself an “obitiatrist”: a doctor of death. “The world’s first,”
he told the Times in 1990.
Kevorkian failed in his attempts to run
advertisements for his new service in Detroit-area newspapers and in
medical journals, but the Detroit Free Press and a few other
publications ran short stories on Kevorkian and his bizarre fledgling
enterprise.
A brief item about him in Newsweek magazine caught the attention of Ron and Janet Adkins.
In 1997, the Detroit Free Press reported the results
of its investigation into the lives and deaths of 47 people whose deaths
had been publicly linked to Kevorkian since 1990. The paper said
Kevorkian’s claims that he followed strict guidelines for
physician-assisted suicide, including consulting psychiatrists to
determine a patient’s mental state, “do not hold up.”
The investigation also showed that “at least 60
percent of Kevorkian’s suicide patients were not terminal. At least 17
could have lived indefinitely and, in 13 cases, the people had no
complaints of pain.”
In an effort to curtail Kevorkian’s assisted
suicides, the Michigan Legislature passed a bill in 1992 that
temporarily banned the practice.
Two years later, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled
that assisting in suicide was a crime, based on common law. And in 1998,
a new state law made assisting a suicide a felony punishable by up to
five years in prison or a $10,000 fine.
By then, Michigan prosecutors had charged Kevorkian
four times with assisting suicide. But the cases ended in three
acquittals and a mistrial.
But in 1998, Kevorkian was charged with first-degree
murder after he personally gave a fatal injection to Thomas Youk, a
52-year-old accountant from a Detroit suburb who suffered from
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Kevorkian videotaped injecting Youk, then he gave the tape to the CBS news program “60 Minutes,” which broadcast the footage.
In an accompanying interview with Mike Wallace,
Kevorkian said he made the tape to move the public debate from
physician-assisted suicide to euthanasia — death directly triggered by a
doctor — and dared prosecutors to charge him with a crime.
Prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder, which requires premeditation.
During the brief trial in Michigan in 1999, in which
Kevorkian defended himself, he appealed to the jury to send a message
that laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide were unjust.
In 1999, the white-haired, 70-year-old Kevorkian was
convicted of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in
prison.
“You had the audacity to go on national TV, show the
world what you did and dare the prosecution to stop you,” Oakland County
(Mich.) Circuit Judge Jessica Cooper told Kevorkian after sentencing
him. “Well, sir, consider yourself stopped.”
After serving eight years, Kevorkian was released
from prison in 2007, with one of the conditions of his two-year parole
being that he not conduct any more assisted suicides.
In an interview with the New York Times two days
after his release, Kevorkian proved to be as fiercely combative as ever,
complaining that during his time in prison no new laws had been passed
that would allow assisted suicide.
The government, Kevorkian said, was “the tyrant” and
the public were “sheep.” As for his severest critics, he said they were
“religious fanatics or nuts.”
During the peak of his notoriety in the 1990s, the eccentric, Bach-loving Kevorkian revealed other sides of himself.
He was a jazz musician and composer, who played flute
and organ on a limited-release CD performed with the Morpheus Quintet
and featuring his own compositions, “The Kevorkian Suite: A Very Still
Life.”
And, more in keeping with his Dr. Death image, he was
an oil painter of surrealistic, often gruesome, canvases depicting
medical conditions and social commentary — paintings of what Vanity Fair
writer Jack Lessenberry described as “such merry scenes as a child
eating the flesh off a decomposing corpse and Santa crushing a baby in a
manger.”
Kevorkian, who wrote a number of books, ran as an
independent candidate for Michigan’s 9th Congressional District in
Oakland County in 2008; he received less than 3% of the votes.
In 2010, Al Pacino delivered an Emmy Award-winning performance as Kevorkian in the HBO biopic “You Don’t Know Jack.”
“He turned away the vast majority of people who came
to him, he didn’t take money for what he did, and he did not see these
patients as people he was killing,” Pacino told the New York Times
before the film’s premiere. “He saw them as people whose pain he could
relieve.”
Asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper at the time if he
regretted taking up a cause that sent him to prison, Kevorkian replied:
“No, why would I?
“I wouldn’t have started if I thought I was going to
regret it. I knew what I was stepping into. I knew I was getting into
one of the most illegal things in the world. It was the right thing to
do. … That doesn’t mean I’m stronger than most people. It just means
I’m loonier.”
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