Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  “Maybe so,” snaps George.

  That evening I get to talking with Dr. Admiraal about George’s idealism.

  “He’s too good for this world,” Admiraal says. Then he adds, “I’ve been observing him for a long time, and I’ve asked our psychiatrists to observe him. He is, in my opinion, enjoying the death of another person. And that’s dangerous. I have the strong impression that he wants to be there and see something dying. Well, he cannot help that. It’s his character. It’s a kind of phobia to enjoy death. And that’s why he says, ‘I will commit suicide.’ Because he will want to die at that moment.”

  (Later, Admiraal clarifies this. He says he doesn’t mean George derives psychopathic pleasure from being around death. Instead he thinks George is too in love with the afterlife. He believes in it too much and the pleasure he gets is from clapping and cheering his clients to a better place.)

  I’m beginning to feel the same way about George. I’ve noticed that very few of his clients are terminally ill. Most are depressed or suffering from psychosomatic diseases. When I ask him about his client list, he says, “Many of my colleagues will avoid such persons like the plague, but I feel a very strong identity with the story of the Good Samaritan. I stop while others walk by and ignore their pleas.”

  How, I wonder, do George and his clients find each other?

  After the conference I visit Derek Humphry, author of Jean’s Way and the father of the modern right-to-die movement. He’s from Wiltshire but now lives in Oregon, where we sit in his cabin in the forest.

  “Once or twice a week,” he tells me, “I get very strange people on the telephone who are anxious to commit suicide because of their depression or sad lives. When they get your number they want to talk and talk. And they call again and again. And they also call all the other right-to-die groups, who say, ‘We can’t help you. It’s not within our parameters because you aren’t terminally ill.’ But they pursue you. They call and call. And eventually someone will say, ‘George Exoo will probably help you.’ And that gets them off the phone and on to George.”

  “Isn’t that terrible?” I ask.

  “Oh, yes,” he says.

  So George is like the backstreet abortionist of the assisted suicide world, getting under-the-counter referrals from the more respectable mainstream.

  Three years pass. Even though the Irish government has been pressing the FBI to arrest George, they don’t. Meanwhile he’s traveling around America, helping nonterminally ill people die.

  In the spring of 2007 a package arrives at my house. Inside is a videocassette. The postmark on the envelope is Beckley, West Virginia. I close my office door. I put it into the VCR and I press Play.

  • • •

  IT IS AN EMPTY ROOM. It’s a mess. It’s overflowing with detritus—paperweights, books, novelty ornaments, papers, coffee cups. Then George appears in the shot from behind the camera. He looks like he’s been awake for days.

  He says to the camera, to me, “Now. What I’m going to do is call my friend Shirley, who is out in a western state in a motel.”

  He picks up the phone and dials. He says, “Hey, Shirley. This is George. The hour has come that we’ve been planning.” He hasn’t bugged the phone, so I can only hear his end of the conversation. “I know you’re nervous,” George says. “You’ve never done this before. But that’s all right. We’re going to get through this. It’s time for you to”—he sighs—“drink the potion that’s in front of you. It’s bitter and horrible-tasting, so it’s important that you chugalug it right down. I ask you to raise that glass and I want you to know how honored I am to be with you at this moment. ”

  There’s a silence of perhaps ten seconds. Then George’s voice hardens impatiently: “I know it’s bitter. Just keep drinking. Put your finger over your nose and chugalug it all down.”

  He’s talking to Shirley like someone would talk to a child who had disobeyed them. Then he chants a Buddhist chant: “Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate . . .”

  (Gone. Gone. Gone completely beyond.)

  Then: “Shirley? Can you hear me?”

  He looks into the camera. “I think I heard the phone drop. Which would mean she is probably now gone.”

  He shrugs slightly. “And that’s it. That’s the way it’s done.”

  He turns off the camera.

  In May 2007 George begins teaching a friend, Cassandra Mae, the ropes. He says he needs an assistant in case he’s arrested or kills himself. I arrange to meet him at Cassandra’s house in North Carolina. I arrive before George. Cassandra lives alone. Her house is filled with plastic lizards. She’s in her forties. While we wait, I ask her how they met.

  “I was bitten by a brown recluse spider in 1993,” she says. “It was so painful I wanted to die.”

  She says she called the official right-to-die groups, “but they wouldn’t help me.”

  “Because you weren’t terminally ill?”

  “Yeah, they rejected me. But then somebody said, ‘You might want to call George.’ Kind of like under the counter.”

  Cassandra says she would have killed herself with George’s help—he was perfectly willing—but she couldn’t find anyone to look after her pet snake. Eventually, they got to talking. If she wasn’t going to be his client, perhaps she should be his assistant.

  • • •

  GEORGE ARRIVES. He has a second job now, buying up houses that have been seized by the banks, and then selling them on for a quick profit, although he hasn’t managed to sell any yet.

  “You could provide the full service,” I say. “You could sell them a house, and when the banks foreclose, you could help them kill themselves.”

  We laugh. I say to him, “In the Arizona tape, Shirley said, ‘It’s bitter,’ and you snapped, ‘Drink it!’”

  “Absolutely,” he replies. “Because I’d been through that argument with her before.”

  “She’d tasted it before?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says. He’s getting annoyed with me. “I’d been with her twice before in person. What kind of bull twaddle is that? If you’re serious, you’re going to drink it and not whine about it!”

  “But this is somebody who doesn’t know whether to kill themselves,” I say.

  “Just drink it,” he says, exasperated. “Three or four swallows and you’re going to go to sleep. Permanently. In ten minutes you’ll be off this planet. Yes, I was probably pressing her to some extent. But I was pressing her to make up her mind one way or another because I can’t go flying across the country week after week and have nothing come of it. I want her to either go on and live her life, or check out. But it’s her choice. It’s not mine.”

  We go for lunch. Cassandra has told me that her multiple chemical sensitivities (triggered by the 1993 spider bite) were so severe, there is only one local restaurant she can eat in where the atmosphere does not set off her symptoms. But we eat in another restaurant—an all-you-can-eat buffet—and she is fine. She eats all she can. I begin to see Cassandra as living proof that George really shouldn’t help people like Cassandra kill themselves.

  After lunch I tell him some people think he’s on a slippery slope.

  “What slippery slope?” he asks sharply.

  “Not being able to stop helping people because you see it as your calling and you like to be there at the moment of death because you get something out of it. And you may consequently be encouraging them toward suicide.”

  “Bullshit,” he says. “It just hasn’t happened. Otherwise these people wouldn’t be hanging on for years and years and years.”

  And that part seems to be true: He’s always said he has clients who have been vacillating for years.

  George drives off to do some real estate business and I’m left alone with Cassandra. We sit on her porch. “I see this as a business,” she says. “George sees it as a calling. There’s a big difference there. For me it’s ‘No cash, no help.’”

  “What’s your price?” I ask.

  “Seven thou
sand dollars,” she says.

  “You’re bound to get it wrong, aren’t you?” I say. “And help someone who shouldn’t be helped?”

  Cassandra shrugs. “Probably, at some point, yes,” she says.

  She says George’s worst crime is his financial imprudence: that he’ll help people who can’t afford to pay.

  “George will get to a point where he’ll run out of money,” she says. “He won’t scale down the expensive cuts of meats. He would rather kill himself than economize.”

  “He seems quite keen on killing himself,” I say.

  “I think he’ll do it soon,” says Cassandra. “And that’s why I’ve been pressing him to give me a list of his current clients.”

  A few weeks pass. Then I get an early-morning call from Cassandra. She says the FBI has just arrested George. His partner, Thomas, woke up to find George and two men standing there. They said, ‘We’re putting George in prison until we can take him to Ireland.’” George didn’t have the opportunity to run into the kitchen and drink his poison.

  A few weeks after that (I later learn) Cassandra flew to New Zealand to help a depressed, nonterminally ill woman she had met on the Internet commit suicide. The woman had previously asked a mainstream right-to-die group called Dignity NZ to help her, but they refused. “I was of the impression that she needed assistance in living rather than advice on how to end her life,” Dignity NZ’s founder, Lesley Martin, later e-mails me. “I imagine you are developing a good understanding of what an absolute mess the euthanasia underground is. Unfortunately, there are ‘gung-ho’ individuals involved who, in my opinion, treat the matter of assisting someone to die as an exciting relief from the boredom of their own lives and do so completely ill-equipped and dismissive of the responsibility we have of ensuring that people who need mental-health assistance receive it, while still working toward humane legislation that addresses the real issues.”

  I visit Cassandra and ask her what was wrong with the New Zealand woman. “She had some sort of breathing disorder,” she says, “and the doctors there wouldn’t give her the medication that she needed. I happened to take the same medication. I gave her a little bit of mine and she was fine.”

  “But you helped her commit suicide, even though you helped her breathe better?” I say.

  “Yeah,” says Cassandra. “Isn’t that ironic?”

  “You shouldn’t do it,” I say.

  “Somebody’s got to pay the bills so you can have some water in that glass you’re drinking,” she says.

  On October 25, 2007, a federal judge in Charleston, West Virginia, decrees that because assisted suicide is not a crime in twenty-five of the fifty states, he can’t allow the Irish prosecutor to try George in Dublin. The extradition has failed. George is free.

  I visit George one last time. I thought there wouldn’t be any more twists and turns in this story. But there’s a final one. “You know I provided you with a tape?” he says. He means the Shirley/Arizona telephone tape. “That was not a real deathing. I was talking to a dial tone.”

  “You’re a very good actor,” I say.

  “I wanted to give you an example of how I would work with somebody,” he says, shrugging. “And she was the only possibility.”

  He explains that Shirley was a real person, and he really had visited her on many occasions, and that she really had vacillated. All that was true.

  “And guess what?” he adds. “She’s killed herself now. While I was in jail.” He pauses and says, sounding quite triumphant: “She really is dead now.”

  Is She for Real?

  DAY 1: AT SEA

  It is Tuesday evening and I am on a luxury Mediterranean cruise ship called the Westerdam. I’m in the audience in the Vista lounge. A grouchy woman is sitting on a beige and golden throne on the stage. She’s complaining about builders and dispensing dietary advice. Her name is Sylvia Browne and for years I’ve wanted to interview her. She’s America’s most divisive psychic. She’s become famous for telling the parents of missing children what happened to their kids. Distraught parents go to her during her weekly appearance on The Montel Williams Show on CBS television. Montel is like Oprah. Sylvia tells them, “Your child is dead,” or “Your child was sold into slavery in Japan.”

  She really did once say that, in 1999. A six-year-old, Opal Jo Jennings, had a month earlier been snatched from her grandparents’ front yard in Texas while playing with her cousin. A man pulled up, grabbed her, threw her into his truck, hit her when she screamed, and drove off. Her grandmother went on Montel’s show and said, “This is too much for my family and me to handle. We want her back. I need to know where Opal is. I can’t stand this. . . . I need your help, Sylvia. Where is Opal? Where is she?”

  Sylvia said, “She’s not dead. But what bothers me—now I’ve never heard of this before—but for some reason she was taken and put into some kind of a slavery thing and taken into Japan. The place is Kukouro.”

  “Kukouro?” Montel Williams asked, after a moment’s stunned silence.

  “So she was taken and put on some kind of a boat or a plane and taken into white slavery,” Sylvia said.

  Opal’s grandmother looked drained and confused. Opal’s body was eventually found buried in Fort Worth, Texas. She had, the pathologist concluded, been murdered the night she went missing. A local man, Richard Lee Franks, was convicted.

  Montel Williams was once asked in a radio interview why he has Sylvia Browne on his show. He said, “She’s great! She’s a funny character! She’s hysterical!” Thanks to Montel her books, such as Adventures of a Psychic, are frequently on the best-seller lists. She is the queen of psychics, but there are many others working in her field. “It happens every time a child goes missing,” Marc Klaas told me in a telephone conversation shortly before the cruise began. “I call them the second wave of predators. First you lose your child and then these people descend. Every time.” It happened to Marc. In October 1993 his twelve-year-old daughter, Polly, had two friends round for a sleepover at their California home. At 10:30 p.m. she opened her bedroom door to find a man standing there with a knife. He tied up the girls, told them to count to a thousand, and took Polly away. For the next two months, before Polly’s body was eventually found (she’d been raped and strangled), Marc was inundated with offers from psychics. “I was insulated from most of them by family and police,” he said, “but there had to be at least a dozen I personally dealt with. They hope you’ll pay them and they hope they’ll get really, really lucky and make a guess so close to the truth, they can say they solved it.”

  Marc did consult a psychic. He says she got it wrong but nonetheless later took credit (on a tabloid TV show) for psychically locating Polly’s body. “You become increasingly desperate and afraid,” he said. “Every day the police don’t find your child, you think they’re not doing their job. So you go elsewhere, and psychics put themselves out there as a very viable solution.”

  This is why, Marc said, he’s not surprised by reports that Madeleine McCann’s parents are considering consulting a psychic called Gordon Smith. Friends of the family have already contacted Smith, a host on Living TV’s Most Haunted. According to a Daily Mail article on October 2, the McCanns have received a thousand psychic tip-offs since May.

  Sylvia Browne doesn’t solicit. Such is her fame, distraught parents go to her. Most famously, Shawn Hornbeck’s parents went to her. On October 6, 2002, eleven-year-old Shawn disappeared while riding his bike to a friend’s house in Missouri. Four months of frantic searching later, his parents went on Montel.

  “Is he still with us?” asked Pam, Shawn’s mother.

  “No,” said Sylvia.

  Pam broke down. Sylvia said Shawn was buried beneath two jagged boulders.

  Four years later, in January of this year, Shawn was found alive and well and living with his alleged abductor, Michael Devlin, in Kirkwood, Missouri. This miraculous happy ending became headline news across the U.S. Shawn’s parents told journalists that one of their lowest p
oints was when Sylvia Browne told them their boy was dead. “Hearing that,” his father, Craig Akers, told CNN, “was one of the hardest things we ever had to hear.”

  Sylvia Browne doesn’t give interviews, especially not since the Shawn Hornbeck incident. She’s turned down CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Larry King, ABC, and so on. A few months ago I logged on to her website and watched some of her videos. She looks and sounds like a worldly dame you’d meet in a bar in a Dashiell Hammett novel. Then I noticed an announcement on her news page: Sylvia was to be a guest lecturer on a cruise around the Mediterranean in late September. Fans could sign up for four lectures and a cocktail party.

  “She can’t avoid talking to me if we’re trapped on a ship together,” I thought. And so, impulsively, I booked myself on to the cruise.

  • • •

  IT’S OUR FIRST EVENING aboard and there she is. She’s sitting on the throne on the stage, unexpectedly giving a rambling, grumpy lecture. “I don’t like tofu,” she growls. “I’d sooner eat a sponge.” And: “Try to get a workman! I’ve always wanted to put a little solarium on the back of my house. You know. Glass. They put it on backward. People don’t care anymore.”

  The audience listens politely. For all the times Sylvia gets things psychically wrong (which she does a lot: I sometimes think if she tells you your kid is dead, you should probably presume the child’s alive, and vice versa), she still has an enormous following. Hundreds of people have paid thousands of dollars each to be cruising with her this week. This is in part because if you want to pay $750 to have a thirty-minute telephone reading with her, there’s a waiting list of four years. Her critics believe her career can’t possibly survive the Shawn Hornbeck debacle, but there’s no sign of it diminishing on this cruise.