Lost At Sea Part 47

He posted me a video message. It was him, sitting on a sofa, speaking directly into the camera.

"It's one thirty in the morning here in Australia," he said, "and I've just received an urgent telephone call from the UK. It seems that Christine in Scotland has had a turn for the worse and I have to make a decision immediately if we're going to help her at all. At the moment the only person in the community available to help Christine is Reinhart, and he's booked to fly to India tomorrow morning. The problem with Reinhart is that although he's willing to donate, he's not very keen. I could push him into it. I have to make a decision, and there's a life dependent on it."

Dave paused. The bags under his eyes practically reached down to the end of his nose. His beard looked stragglier than ever.

"The decision I make," he said, "is going to have to take into consideration repercussions from the media-people like yourself. As you know, we stopped the filming after your article appeared in the Guardian. Among other things, I was upset about the fact that you portrayed me as a manipulator, forcing or coercing Casey into doing something he might later regret. I think that was terribly unfair both to Casey and myself. No way did I push him into doing it. I didn't even approach him. It was his idea and he ran with it. And that's why we decided not to cooperate with you. But after this phone call tonight I've had a rethink. I'm prepared to go ahead with the doc.u.mentary, but on one condition: You use this video. You see, I'm not going to say anything to Reinhart. I'll let him fly out tomorrow. And I'll let Christine's blood be on your head, Jon, and on the heads of the authorities there in England, those people who felt that because a group of Christians wanted to donate their kidneys to strangers, there was something wrong with us. So go ahead. Make your doc.u.mentary. But don't forget to tell them about the recipients. That's the big picture, Jon, and that's been overlooked. These recipients are real people. People like Christine."

Dave bowed his head and said: "Thank you."

"You stupid f.u.c.king idiot," I thought.

I'd entered Dave's world convinced that the cult-busters were the crazy ones, comparing Dave to Invasion of the Body s.n.a.t.c.hers, etc. But now I thought of him that way. Why? Because I really didn't like him. I began to dislike Dave hugely, in the way that former members of sects hate their former leaders after they rejoin the real world.

Dave had especially hated the implication in my article that he was personally hoping to get out of donating a kidney. And, as it transpired, Dave did indeed donate one, in January 2003, to a man from California.

Susan donated a kidney to Larry from Aspen. I don't know what happened to Christine from Scotland. Three years later, on April 26, 2006, the Department of Health announced plans to legalize altruistic kidney donations-donations from a stranger to a stranger-as long as they were a.s.sured no money was changing hands, and no coercion was taking place.

"I Make It Look Like They Died in Their Sleep"

In January 2002 the Irish television news reports that a woman's body has been found in a rented house in Donnybrook, Dublin. Her name is Rosemary Toole Gilhooly. The police say it was suicide. She'd been suffering from depression. The story 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 Daniel's and c.o.ke at the Atlantic Coast Hotel in Westport, County Mayo. At one point, other drinkers later testified to the police, Rosemary Toole Gilhooly 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 dressed as a reverend, left Dublin.

The Irish police release the names of their suspects. They're seeking the arrest and extradition of the Reverend George Exoo and his partner, Thomas McGurrin, of Beckley, West Virginia, for the crime of a.s.sisting a suicide, which, under Irish law, carries a maximum prison sentence of fourteen years.

Radio phone-in shows across Ireland are ablaze with callers supporting Rosemary Toole Gilhooly's right to kill herself with a reverend at her side if that was what she wanted. I feel the same way. I contact George Exoo to ask if I can follow him around. He agrees.

And so, at dawn on a Monday in 2003, he and I set off in his old Mercedes on a five-hour drive to Baltimore to visit a new prospective client, Pam Acre, who has told him she's been suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome since the 1970s and is considering killing herself. George is paying for the petrol himself even though he's broke. He says he asks for donations from his clients but often doesn't get them, but he doesn't care because this is his calling.

"I've never done anything as important as this in my ministry," he tells me during the drive. "I think it's the reason I'm placed on this planet. I'm a midwife to the dying-for those who want to hasten their deaths."

George is cheerful, giggly, a gay, liberal, libertarian Unitarian preacher. He says he often carries around a large inflatable alligator to his suicides in case the police stop him en route. Should this happen he'll pretend he's a children's entertainer. The alligator will explain the canister of helium in the trunk. Helium is one of his methods.

But lately he's begun phasing the alligator out.

"It's been making me feel conspicuous," he says. "I want to not be noticed. If I'm carrying a big alligator, people are going to notice me."

"Plus," I say, "surely the last thing your clients would want to see in the minutes before their death is a large inflatable alligator coming through the door."

"Exactly," says George. "Anyway, 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."

There's something Laurel and Hardyish about George. Earlier he had demonstrated the helium method for me by attaching a hose to the end of a tank, but he did something wrong and the gas tank practically exploded, shooting the hose across the room and whiplas.h.i.+ng his stomach. He shrieked.

"Does this kind of thing happen when you're helping people kill themselves?" I asked.

"This has never happened before," George replied, looking sheepish.

Pam lives in a decrepit old country cottage on the outskirts of Baltimore. She looks as crumbling as her house. She's fifty-nine but looks far older. We sit on her sofa.

"Tell me about your illness," George asks her.

"This is a difficult disease to cope with," Pam replies, "because they run all the tests and they come back negative. Then they decide that ..."

"It's all in your head," says George.

"Right," says Pam.

They smile at each other.

"They start wanting you to go to psychiatrists," says Pam. "But of course that's totally useless."

"Sure," says George softly. "Sure."

George says nothing to Pam that might make her reconsider suicide. Instead they talk about the "mechanics of the dying" (what pills and gas and apparatus Pam will need) and she seems delighted to have someone there who isn't questioning her symptoms or intentions at all. Then she turns to me.

"I've learned what I can from this," she says. "I don't judge much of anybody for anything. Because until you walk in somebody else's shoes, you do not know."

George says he drifted into a.s.sisting suicides in the early nineties when he was a Unitarian minister in Pittsburgh. Unitarianism is a middle-cla.s.s, liberal religion and Pittsburgh is a tough, working-cla.s.s town, so he had barely any paris.h.i.+oners. He'd look at his tiny congregation and wonder if he was wasting his life.

One day a paris.h.i.+oner approached him and said, "My husband has got ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neuron disease] and your name has been given to me as someone who might help."

"It was that vague," George says. "But I knew what she meant. Two weeks later he said to his wife, 'It's time. Call George Exoo.'"

That's how George found his calling. He says he's a.s.sisted 102 people, including Pam, who killed herself, with George at her side, a few months after our visit.

It didn't go smoothly. "We [George and his partner, Thomas] began chanting the Heart Sutra," George tells me later, "which we did for half an hour. Then she got up and said she wanted to have a bagel. So she proceeded to get up and toast a bagel. And put cream cheese on it. And sat there munching very slowly on the bagel and proceeded to tell us that this woman who lives in the same house as her was expected to return about eleven-thirty p.m. Well, by then it was eleven-fifteen p.m. Shees.h.!.+ And she's still munching on the bagel. I said, 'I can't stay here! I will not leave until I'm finished here but I simply can't stay here and run the risk of all this audience coming in.'"

"It sounds like she'd changed her mind," I said.

"No, she was very much decided," said George. "Very much decided. I was thinking, there was one other time this happened. I was in Pittsburgh. And the woman didn't follow my instructions. She was sitting around eating stuff in some kind of crazy way, too, I remember. At one point somebody came into the house and I had to hide in the bas.e.m.e.nt. It was horrible. I was scared to death. So I didn't want to repeat that circ.u.mstance. So that's what happened." So George left without helping her to die. "She had enough pills to sleep soundly but not enough pills to zap her," he said.

And then he returned to her house a few nights later, and was more successful.

In early 2004, the Irish police formally instigate extradition proceedings against George. They ask the FBI to arrest him. George telephones me. Can I come to Seattle? He has something he wants to tell me, he says. Something very important.

I meet him in the lobby of a Seattle airport hotel.

"So?" I say. "What's the news?"

There's a strange, almost coy smile on his face.

"I've ordered a magic potion because I certainly don't intend to travel to Dublin," he replies. "So I may be the first right-to-die martyr. Maybe I should call you over to Beckley for the big event."

"I don't want to sit there watching you die," I say.

He looks disappointed.