Sometime during late afternoon on Monday, a 64-year-old woman climbed into a futuristic capsule in remote woodland in Switzerland. What happened next could have come from the set of a dystopian sc-fi movie.
Once inside, after being given an access code (valid for 24 hours), the lid silently closed above her and, as she lay on a thin mat similar to a camping mattress, with her head resting on a purple neck cushion, an automated voice proceeded to ask her three questions: ‘Who are you?’, ‘Where are you?’ and ‘Do you know what happens if you press the button?’
Three times the woman – a mother of two from the American midwest – answered correctly. She was then given a final chilling reminder about what would happen if she did press it and that there would be no turning back. ‘If you want to die,’ the voice informed her, ‘press this button.’
The woman did so without hesitation. Moments later the sealed chamber was flooded with nitrogen, starving her of oxygen.
Within two minutes she had lost consciousness and within five – at 4.01pm – she was pronounced dead, a process which was apparently ‘peaceful and painless’.
The woman, who suffered from a severe immune disorder that left her in great pain, was the first person to use the ‘suicide capsule’ known as the Sarco (short for sarcophagus). She has not been identified but shortly before she died, she was pictured with her back to the camera outside the pod, about three miles from the village of Merishausen in the northern canton of Schaffhausen.
The haunting image of the blonde-haired figure wearing a fleecy cream jumper, black trousers and open-toed sandals, was published in a Dutch newspaper.
The inventor of the Sarco, n-born Philip Nitschke – nicknamed Dr Death by his many detractors – now lives in the Netherlands where the device was created using a 3D printer for Swiss assisted dying organisation The Last Resort.
The design is intended to resemble that of a spacecraft in order to give those inside the feeling they are travelling to the ‘great beyond’. The hatch, in fact, is like the door of the DeLorean from the Back To The Future film franchise.
But critics have condemned the capsule’s futuristic design and glitzy marketing for ‘glamorising suicide’. The fact a purple (non-functioning) showroom model was displayed, amidst prosecco and pasta, at a design festival in Venice a few years ago and that visitors who attended a funeral fair in Amsterdam were invited to put on virtual reality glasses to experience what the Sarco might be like to use, has done little to counter this narrative.
Even in Switzerland, where assisted dying is legal in certain circumstances, the events which took place in a forest in Schaffhausen this week have provoked controversy.
Four people, including co-president of The Last Resort, Dr Florian Willet, were believed to have been arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting suicide. The public prosecutor’s office could give no further details other than to say ‘criminal prodeedings’ had started.
Switzerland is one of the few counties where someone can legally end their life provided there is no ‘external assistance’ and those who help them to die do not do so for ‘any self-serving motive’.
The Last Resort has previously insisted no laws were broken.
The moral and legal status of the Sarco has been keenly debated here in Britain where the ‘right to die’ is back on the political agenda.
MPs could be given a free vote to legalise assisted dying in England – an issue highlighted in a high-profile campaign by Dame Esther Rantzen who has terminal cancer – before the end of the year. More than a quarter of the 120 applicants waiting to use the Sarco, according to The Last Resort, come from the UK.
Among them are ex-RAF engineer Peter Scott and his wife Christine, both in their 80s, who have signed up to be the first couple to use a double suicide pod after Christine was diagnosed with vascular dementia.
The death of the American woman, who was examined in advance by a psychiatrist and deemed mentally competent, provides a graphic illustration of what lies ahead for them and others who decide to make the journey to the ‘great beyond’ in the Sarco.
A forensic account of her final moments are contained in Dutch daily De Volkskrant.
The pod itself was transported on a trailer to a remote wooded area close to the German border where it was set up outside a hut.
The only person who was present at the scene was Dr Willet.
The unfolding drama inside the capsule, however, was followed remotely from Germany by its inventor Dr Nitschke, whose lawyer wife Fiona Stewart is director of The Last Resort.
The American woman had to give an oral statement about her momentous course of action before entering the chamber. In the recording, lasting over four minutes, she said that she’d had a desire to die since being diagnosed with her illness, which had left her in chronic discomfort for ‘at least two years’. She revealed that her two sons, who were not with her in Switzerland, ‘completely agree’ that this was her decision. ‘They support me 100 per cent,’ she said, something they confirmed in written statements.
Their mother, who was then fitted to an oxygen and heart rate monitor, was given the choice of a dark or transparent view from the Sarco. She chose the latter.
The last thing she saw as she drew her final breath was the canopy of trees above her.
Dr Nitschke, who witnessed her death from a camera inside the Sarco, said she ‘almost immediately pressed the button’ after answering the three questions. ‘She didn’t say anything any more,’ he is quoted as saying in De Volkskrant. ‘She really wanted to die.
‘My estimate is that she lost consciousness within two minutes and that she died after five minutes.
‘We saw jerky, small twitches of the muscles in her arms, but she was probably already unconscious by then. It looked exactly how we expected it to look.’
At 4.40pm, a law firm acting for The Last Resort informed the public prosecutor’s office that an assisted suicide had taken place that afternoon ‘near a forest hut in Merishausen’.
The Sarco, which is fitted with a detachable coffin, was seized by the police and the deceased was taken away for an autopsy.
Apart from Dr Willet, a photographer from De Volkskrant and two lawyers were also believed to have been held for questioning.
The Last Resort had been warned in writing by the public prosecutor that ‘if they came to Schaffhausen and used Sarco, they would face criminal consequences’.
Even without the arrests, the death in the forest would have created an international furore because of the involvement of Nitschke.
He pushed the boundaries of the hippocratic oath to the limit when he was a GP in nearly two decades ago.
He eventually burned his medical registration certificate in a legal dispute after he failed to refer to a psychiatrist a suicidal man who subsequently killed himself.
His book, The Peaceful Pill Handbook, describing dozens of suicide methods in detail, caused uproar in 2006 and he has been making headlines ever since.
One of his many creations was the Deliverance Machine, a laptop running a computer program connected to a syringe loaded with a lethal dose of barbiturates which could be injected into a person’s arm if they answered a series of questions to establish their mental capacity and confirm their intent to die.
Nitschke has held a number of euthanasia workshops in Britain down the years, raising concerns that elderly and vulnerable people could end up killing themselves in the belief that they had become a burden to their families.
His latest venture – the Sarco pod – was officially unveiled at a Press conference in Zurich.
One of the main ‘selling points’ is that it can be ‘towed anywhere for the death’ and ‘transported to an idyllic outdoor setting’ – such as a Swiss forest, for example.
Nitschke lobbied unsuccessfully for the Sarco to be used in Scotland in 2022. He wrote to Lib Dem MSP Liam McArthur, who is behind an assisted dying private member’s bill at Holyrood, urging him to support the introduction of the capsules in Scotland for those with a terminal illness because ‘they lead to a peaceful, even euphoric death’.
Not everyone, even inside the assisted dying movement, agrees.
Nitrogen was first used on death row prisoner Kenneth Smith in Alabama in January. Witnesses told how he shook and writhed, gasping for air, for up to ten minutes as his face mask filled with gas.
On its website, The Last Resort distances the Sarco from the Alabama execution, claiming Smith held his breath because he did not want to die. ‘Nitrogen hypoxia [asphyxiation caused by inhaling pure nitrogen] is only peaceful when the recipient is a willing participant and is willing to take deep, purposeful breaths,’ the statement said. ‘The Sarco is not a device that will ever be used in the context of a non-elective death and does not involve the use of a face mask.’
Nevertheless, the Swiss interior minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider said the use of nitrogen was not covered by the country’s laws and that, in her opinion, the machine would not meet product safety requirements.
To be eligible to use the capsule, potential applicants must be at least 50 years old and have a psychiatric report confirming their capacity to die. Eventually, Nitschke says he hopes to develop an artificial-intelligence screening system to establish mental capacity.
Unlike established assisted dying clinics in Switzerland, such as Dignitas, which typically charge around £10,000 to help people end their lives, the use of the Sarco is virtually free.
The Last Resort believes a ‘good death’ is a fundamental human right and the organisation is funded by donations, bequests and an annual voluntary membership fee. There is a £16 charge for the purchase of liquid nitrogen plus the bill for a funeral director to remove the body. One woman, however, Jennifer McLaughlin, also American, claimed she spent her life savings, totalling $40,000, (nearly £30,000) on travel expenses to fly to Switzerland in July and had been pushed to spend the money by The Last Resort who allegedly told her she ‘won’t need it after I die’. Her complaint was made in a letter to a Swiss newspaper in which she said her death had become a ‘media circus’.
Miss McLaughlin, a former insurance company worker from Columbus, Georgia, is understood to have turned to another Swiss assisted dying clinic.
The Last Resort flatly denied her version of events, insisting the use of the Sarco was withdrawn from her due to mental health concerns.
Either way, campaign groups in Switzerland and Britain have expressed serious concerns about the suicide capsule. ‘I wonder how humane it is to be enclosed in a device that closes you in and whether that can bring fear,’ said Alex Pandolfo, a member of The Right To Die With Dignity UK. ‘Most importantly, one of the great things about assisted death is that it can be holding hands with someone who loves you. But Sarco denies the person who dies and those that remain that last touch at the time of death.’
Isn’t there also something uniquely chilling about killing yourself in the middle of nowhere at the press of a button?