Wanting To Die Just Because

I mentioned Kathleen Dobson last week, who died at the infamous Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland, and whose death has resulted in a furor among her children. What’s painfully obvious is that Dobson lied to Dignitas, saying that she was bedridden, etc., etc., when in fact she wasn’t, as the photos in the piece show. One of her sons who unsuccessfully tried to stop her believes she was depressed. And what about all the money to be inherited? Could that have played a part? Stay tuned.

In-Dignitas: Son tells how his mother took her life at notorious Swiss clinic - and how they kept it secret from skeptical brother

Sitting in a favorite Lloyd Loom chair in a sun-dappled greenhouse, Kathleen Dobson waters her cherished tomatoes and looks a contented, wealthy woman enjoying a well-earned retirement.

But this poignant photo, on a balmy day in August, 2008, is the last taken of the 74-year-old multi-millionairess, who lived in Guernsey.

A week later, Kathleen flew to Zurich, where she ended her life by swallowing sodium pentobarbital at Dignitas, the Swiss assisted-suicide clinic.

Last photo: Kathleen Dobson a week before her suicide, watched by her distraught son Graham

In a letter to the doctor who prescribed the drug, she claimed she was immobilised by rheumatoid arthritis, ‘afraid to go outside, move around, garden . . . I exist between a chair and the bed’.

But her youngest son Graham Carlton, 47, insisted last night that, far from being bedridden, the widowed mother-of-three still lived a full, active life. Having inherited a fortune from her second husband, whose father was chairman of the Hawker Siddeley aviation empire, she had no financial worries. more