Family faces jail for watching cancer victim kill herself

After three years of enduring the agony of bowel cancer, Nancy Crick decided enough was enough. She swallowed an overdose of drugs, took a swig of Baileys and lit a final cigarette.

Yesterday, her home on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, was declared a crime scene and 21 friends and relatives who watched her commit suicide faced the possibility of life imprisonment.

Mrs Crick, a 69-year-old former barmaid, had made no secret of her desire to end her life, chronicling her physical deterioration in graphic detail in an internet diary. She did not want to die alone, but she knew that assisting a suicide was illegal, so on the eve of her death she recorded a video statement aimed at protecting her loved ones.

"It's my death, I'm doing it and no one else," she declared in the video. Mrs Crick, who campaigned vociferously for the reform of euthanasia laws, said: "I can't take any more pain and suffering. I just can't."

Her life had become an endless round of pain, medication, vomiting and diarrhoea, she explained. "I can't even hold my great-grandson. I can't do a darned thing."

Australia's Northern Territory became the first place in the world to legalise voluntary euthanasia in 1996, but the law was overturned by the federal government nine months later, after four terminally ill patients had taken their lives. The Netherlands legalised euthanasia last month, and Belgium is preparing to follow suit.

In Australia, people merely present during a suicide can be prosecuted for assisting. Forensic police in blue overalls sealed off Mrs Crick's home in the small town of Burleigh Heads early yesterday, shortly after her body was carried out to a waiting ambulance.

Officers will decide whether to bring charges after questioning everyone who was with her on Wednesday night, including a witness aged 94. It was at 8.30pm that evening that Mrs Crick carried out a promise she had made two months previously to kill herself before the onset of winter. She had obtained the relevant drugs after an appeal on the internet. Dr Philip Nitschke, Australia's foremost euthanasia advocate and an adviser to Mrs Crick, said her death was dignified and peaceful.

Dr Nitschke, who assisted the four deaths in the Northern Territory, said: "She drank her drugs and decided to have a glass of Baileys to follow. She only had a sip of the Baileys. She said 'I feel like a cigarette' and while she was lighting up that cigarette, she slipped into unconsciousness and died 20 minutes later."

Her death has reignited the euthanasia debate and presented the authorities with a quandary. How can they prosecute people for helping to bring about a death that was so ardently desired? Yet how can they ignore such a flagrant flouting of the law? Terry O'Gorman, a lawyer for the witnesses, said that to bring a prosecution would be "a total travesty".

The state premier, Peter Beattie, offered his condolences to Mrs Crick's family but reiterated his opposition to changing the law. "I've given a lot of thought to it and I want to protect people. I want to protect life," he said.

Dr Nitschke had urged Mrs Crick to take up an offer of palliative care at Gold Coast Hospital in April, but she left after a few days, saying it had not helped her significantly.

As well as recording the video before she died, she gave two television interviews, which were broadcast last night. Asked in one whether she was afraid of dying, she replied: "I'm afraid of living, of what's going to happen every day I get up, what pain I'm going through." In the video, she said: "The thing that upsets me most is that the law says I can kill myself any time I want to, but no one can be with me because they might have helped me. That's just rubbish and I don't see why I should die alone. I don't want to die alone."