NZZ (translated into English)
Dying assistant Florian Willet helped a woman to take her own life with a suicide capsule, came under the scrutiny of the Schaffhausen criminal justice system – and then chose suicide himself. Now documents raise new questions about his pre-trial detention.
It is a gloomy autumn afternoon, that 23 September 2024 in Merishausen, which will ultimately cost the lives of two people. One life will come to a planned end, that of a 64-year-old seriously ill American woman who, on that day in a wooded area in the now famous Sarco, deliberately presses a button to flood the suicide capsule with nitrogen and die from lack of oxygen.
It is a gloomy autumn afternoon, that 23 September 2024 in Merishausen, which will ultimately cost the lives of two people. One life will come to a planned end, that of a 64-year-old seriously ill American woman who, on that day in a wooded area in the now famous Sarco, deliberately presses a button to flood the suicide capsule with nitrogen and die from lack of oxygen.
Standing next to her in a yellow windbreaker is Florian Willet, an assisted suicide volunteer, recording the woman’s death with his mobile phone, cameras and iPad. He too will die, the victim of an escalation that no one could have foreseen. Willet was arrested on the spot, spent 70 days in custody, was released without regaining his footing and, as the German authorities announced last week, died voluntarily in Cologne on 5 May.
The 47-year-old was president of the euthanasia organisation The Last Resort, which wanted to pave the way for self-determined dying without medical assistance by using the futuristic capsule in the Schaffhausen forest for the first time. The organisation has no hesitation in apportioning blame: Willet is a victim of the law, says Philipp Nitschke, the inventor of the Sarco, and quotes from a psychiatric report that diagnosed Willet with an ‘acute polymorphic psychotic disorder’ as a result of the stress of being in custody.
Even if it is too early to apportion blame and a suicide can rarely be explained monocausally, everyone who knew Willet says that after his release in December, a highly intelligent, reserved and objective person became a driven, paranoid person, always in fear of being bugged and sent back to prison.
How did it get this far? After all, Willet and his organisation’s lawyers had called the police themselves on that gloomy 23 September. They had documented in detail what had happened and also that the suicide in the Sarco was in accordance with the seriously ill woman’s wishes. While the lawyers and a photographer from the Dutch newspaper ‘Volkskrant’ who was present were released after 48 hours, Willet remained in custody – for 10 weeks.
Documents now indicate that the public prosecutor’s office relied on an analysis of the cause of death, which subsequently proved to be incorrect. Only now is it known what the final version of the American woman’s autopsy report says.
A memo dated 24 September from the public prosecutor in charge played a decisive role in the order for pre-trial detention. In it, she summarised what the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Zurich had told her on the phone about the results of the investigation into the death the previous day. It lists in detail everything that speaks in favour of ‘compressive blunt force to the neck (strangulation)’. There is talk of ‘pinpoint haemorrhages in the conjunctiva’, signs of blunt force such as bruising at larynx level or a broken left hyoid bone. It was ‘by no means a quiet, peaceful death in which the deceased simply fell asleep’.
This file note was the basis for the subsequent request for imprisonment from the Schaffhausen public prosecutor’s office, which, to the astonishment of the lawyers, brought deliberate homicide into play in addition to assisted suicide. The shocking suspicion: the Sarco had not worked properly when it was first used and Willet had helped it along.
You need to know this: The public prosecutor’s office had warned Willet and his fellow campaigners in advance that it would open a criminal investigation if they set up the Sarco in Schaffhausen. However, euthanasia is only a criminal offence in Switzerland if it is carried out for selfish motives. Willet and the lawyers therefore assumed that even in the worst-case scenario, the arrest would only be brief. Only the strong suspicion of intentional homicide in combination with the risk of absconding allowed the public prosecutor’s office to remand the German, who had only lived in Switzerland for a few years, in custody for 10 whole weeks.
It remained strange, however, that even in the weeks and months that followed, no actual post-mortem report was available in addition to this file note. At a hearing on his release from custody at the beginning of November, Willet only learnt that his DNA had not been found on the body of the deceased, yet he had to remain in custody.
Officially, the report has only been available since 27 March this year, a full six months after the death in Sarco, as the public prosecutor’s office recently confirmed to the NZZ. However, other parties only saw what the nine-page report allegedly says this week, as rumoured by lawyers. The autopsy does not confirm the suspicion of violent external influence, even if it cannot be ruled out 100 per cent. Rather, the marks on the neck that were originally considered suspicious could be explained by natural causes.
The new development does not cast a favourable light on the investigation. How is such a discrepancy between the telephone note immediately after the autopsy and the autopsy report possible? Why did it take so long for the expert report to arrive? Why were the accused and their lawyers denied access for so long? And: Was the long pre-trial detention, which ultimately caused Willet so much distress, ordered on the basis of incorrect assessments?
The public prosecutor’s office in Schaffhausen does not comment on these questions ‘due to official and investigative secrecy’. The First Public Prosecutor, Peter Sticher, merely points out that the decisions of the compulsory measures court, which rules on pre-trial detention, and the High Court protect the actions of the public prosecutor’s office. The latter had to rule on an appeal against the refusal of release, albeit at a time when Willet was already at large again, so that the main issue was the costs of the proceedings. The High Court sided with the investigators.
The problem: in all of these decisions, it was primarily the early telephone memo on the post-mortem examination that played a key role and not a finalised expert opinion, the results of which apparently contradicted the memo and were not officially available until later.
Willet and the lawyers involved were also surprised at the whereabouts of the post-mortem report, which is normally produced after a few days. They demanded further access to the files – which the Schaffhausen authorities refused to grant them – and wondered angrily how long the individual stages of the proceedings took and whether the public prosecutors had ignored the recordings from the cameras and the oxygen measurements in the capsule that had documented the events in the forest.
During all this time, Florian Willet spent time in the old, gloomy cantonal prison in Schaffhausen, without being questioned even once after the start of his pre-trial detention, without contact with the outside world, except through his two lawyers. And while he had survived the initial period well according to their statements, his mental state deteriorated towards the end. On the Saturday before his release, his Schaffhausen-based lawyer Urs Späti had to make an emergency visit to calm him down. ‘He lost the ground under his feet and thought his things were being searched,’ says Spaeti.
‘Pre-trial detention is always bad. You’re still innocent by definition, but you experience the harshest of all prison regimes when you’re isolated from one day to the next. Being in pre-trial detention for so long was traumatising,’ says Andrea Taormina, a lawyer from Zurich who is representing the Dutch photographer in this case.
Willet was finally released from custody on 2 December – apparently because, after two and a half months, the public prosecutor had finally found the oxygen levels measured in the Sarco to be correct, showing that the capsule had not been opened during the euthanasia. But by then, disaster had already taken its course. According to companions and psychiatric diagnoses, Florian Willet slipped deeper and deeper into a psychotic episode – a diagnosis that describes a sudden mental crisis with severe mood swings and delusions. In February, he fell from the third floor of his apartment building, a first suicide attempt for some, which he denied; he was seriously injured, underwent surgery and had to undergo rehabilitation. He then disappeared without informing his loved ones. He travelled to Germany to die.
