Anne TootillMurder or Suicide?
May 12th 2008 23:21
Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? That is the question. This man Graeme Wylie left an estate worth 2.4m. In a nutshell you've got a long time lover of 18 years and an old and respected friend charged with murder and two daughters hell bent on getting a bigger cut of the will. You can understand they are not happy Jan, only being allocated $200,000 each while the long time lover gets the rest. Does it remind you a bit of Rose Handcock?
Graeme Wylie died at his Cammeray home, from an overdose of Nembutal - a drug recommended by Dr Nitzschke's organisation, Exit International - which was allegedly imported illegally from Mexico by Mr Wylie's "oldest and closest friend", Caren Jenning, a retired school teacher.
Jenning and Mr Wylie's de facto wife, Shirley Justins, his partner for 18 years, are alleged to have plotted his murder - or assisted his suicide. A Supreme Court jury must decide which, depending on its assessment of Mr Wylie's "mental capacity to exercise independent judgment to decide whether or not to commit suicide".
If he did not have this capacity, as the Crown argued, he had been murdered, said the Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi, QC. If he did, the women had illegally "aided and abetted" his suicide.
I came across this appeal for Caren Jenning.
Really Long Link
Mr Wylie's daughter Nicola Dumbrell yesterday told the jury her father's condition had deteriorated markedly by the end of 2005. He was unable to remember her name or converse, Ms Dumbrell said.
At a dinner after her father's diagnosis with Alzheimer's in March 2003, Justins had remarked that some people were so badly affected by the illness that they would answer the front door in the nude, Ms Dumbrell said. "Dad glared at her and said something like: 'If it ever came to that I would shoot myself'," she told the court.
However, she said, that was the only time Mr Wylie had talked to her about suicide.
She said Justins later asked her to write a letter in support of his Dignitas application.
But when, Ms Dumbrell said, on reading the paperwork she remarked Dignitas did not accept Alzheimer's sufferers, Jenning suggested she should not worry.
"(Jenning) just brushed her hands in the air and said: 'Oh it will be all right', and that (euthanasia advocate) Dr Phillip Nitschke would be coming to assess my father," she said.
While the family was waiting for a response from Dignitas, Ms Dumbrell said, she discussed her father's will with Justins. "She said ... that there was a will in an envelope (in the house) and that it was a third, a third, a third, to my sister, her and myself," she said.
"When I joked that my father, who loved wildlife, might have left his assets to "the possums or the cats", Ms Dumbrell said Justins gave her a "horrified" look.
"I said to her something like: 'I wouldn't like to see you thrown out of the house to the possums' and she replied: 'Nor to the greedy children'."
The jury last week was told that Justins arranged for Mr Wylie to draw up a new will just one week before he died, leaving her all but $200,000 of his $2.4 million estate.
Ms Dumbrell said that after Dignitas knocked her father back, Justins had said: "Oh, there are other ways".
Ms Dumbrell said Justins also had a "screaming match" with her sister Tania after the rejection, blaming her for "swaying" Dr Nitschke about their father's mental abilities.
Six weeks before his death, Ms Dumbrell said, Mr Wylie fell in his basement workshop and spent two weeks in hospital. After the fall, she asked Justins whether they should speak to a social worker about the accident and Mr Wylie's possibly "suicidal tendencies".
"She said: 'No, it wasn't suicide, it was a fall and everything would be all right when he got home'," Ms Dumbrell told the court.
She said her father had not spoken to her about suicide or anything to do with suicide after he was discharged from hospital.
Mr Wylie also never mentioned his will, she said.
"I had very low expectations of what he could do or say," Ms Dumbrell said.
The trial continues before Justice Roderick Howie.
The plot thickens.
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