What really happened in Sarco suicide pod? Chilling claims after woman’s post-mortem, the mysterious alarm and questions over why it took her 30 minutes to die as chief is arrested: PAUL BRACCHI investigates

From the outside the prison in Schaffhausen, near the Swiss border with Germany, looks more like an Alpine hotel. But no one should be under any illusion: the regime here is far from soft.

The 40 or so inmates, being held mainly on remand, spend 23 hours a day in solitary confinement in a cell with just a bed, basin and toilet. One of them is the unlikely figure of Florian Willet, who has just begun his sixth week in custody.

His backstory, which was controversial even before he was incarcerated, is rapidly developing, metaphorically speaking, into something resembling a Netflix series, given the developments of the past week.

The 47-year-old is co-president of The Last Resort, the operators of the futuristic ‘suicide capsule’ known as the Sarco (short for sarcophagus).

It was on September 23, in woods about five miles from the prison, that a woman – a 64-year-old mother of two from the American midwest – became the first person to end her life in the sealed chamber by pressing a button inside which flooded the pod with nitrogen, thus starving her of oxygen. Her death, Willet declared to the world, was ‘peaceful, fast and dignified’ and everything went ‘according to plan’.

Despite this Willet – a lawyer, economist and member of high-IQ society Mensa, as well as an assisted dying campaigner – is now behind bars.

A disturbing question now hangs over his arrest: were strangulation marks found on the woman’s neck when forensic officers removed her body from the capsule?

The allegation, which was reported to have been made by the public prosecutor in court and made headlines in the Swiss Press this week, was made after marks were allegedly discovered during a post-mortem examination.

The public prosecutor, who is said to have raised the suspicion of ‘intentional homicide’ to get a judge to extend custody, refused to confirm or deny the reports, which The Last Resort called ‘ridiculous and absurd’.

Nevertheless, the imbroglio, together with further details that have emerged about the woman’s haunting last moments, has added to the growing controversy surrounding the Sarco capsule which has been dubbed the Tesla Of Euthanasia.

But why should any of this concern us?

Firstly, there are 120 applicants waiting to use the Sarco – according to The Last Resort – and a quarter of them are said to come from the UK, including ex-RAF engineer Peter Scott and his wife Christine, both in their 80s, who have signed up to be the first couple to use a double suicide pod after Christine was diagnosed with vascular dementia.

The events in Switzerland must have filled them with trepidation. Secondly, the Sarco debacle offers a sobering glimpse of what can go wrong, whatever the truth of the ‘strangulation’ marks, in the emotionally charged issue of assisted dying at a time when a bill to give terminally-ill people in England and Wales the right to choose to end their life is about to be debated and voted on for the first time in Parliament on November 29.

Dame Esther Rantzen, who has terminal cancer, and Blur drummer Dave Rowntree, whose ex-wife Paola Marra died aged 53 at the Dignitas clinic in Zurich in March after being told she had untreatable bowel cancer, are among those who have added their voices to the campaign for the law to be changed.

Switzerland is one of the few countries where assisted dying is legal provided there is no ‘external assistance’ and those who help them to die do not do so for ‘any self-serving motive’.

Officially Florian Willet, who was the only person present when the American woman died, is being held on suspicion of breaking this law, Article 115 of the Swiss Criminal Code.

The irony in all this is that the man who invented the Sarco, Australian-born Dr Philip Nitschke – nicknamed Dr Death for obvious reasons – left the scene just hours before police arrived in the forest near the village of Merishausen in the northern canton of Schaffhausen.

Nitschke, 77 – who monitored the drama unfolding in the Sarco remotely from Germany – is now back in Holland, where the suicide machine was created using a 3D printer and where he is pictured on his houseboat with his wife Fiona Stewart, a director of The Last Resort, on the organisation’s website.

The Dutch connection is the reason Amsterdam-based daily De Volkskrant was given exclusive access to the American’s final journey. The paper’s latest dispatch a few days ago, picked up by the Swiss media, claimed the scope of the investigation into her death had been extended to include suspicion of vorsatzliche totung or intentional homicide.

This line of inquiry, the article alleged, came to light at a court hearing when chief prosecutor Peter Sticher is said to have suggested the woman may have been strangled. The claim was based on a phone call from a forensic scientist to investigators a few hours after she had died that she had suffered injuries to her neck.

It has not been possible to verify this because documents apparently containing the information, among them the full autopsy report, have not been made public.

A source close to The Last Resort, however, told Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung (NZZ) that there was a more innocent explanation: the woman had skull base osteomyelitis, a painful bone infection which could have been responsible for the marks.

Due to an immune disorder, she could not be treated for the disease which had left her in chronic discomfort.

Either way, it would be difficult to imagine more damaging headlines for a right to die organisation. A photographer from the Dutch daily and two lawyers acting for The Last Resort – who alerted the authorities of the death knowing there would need to be an investigation as there always is in such cases – were also arrested in the vicinity and detained for 48 hours on suspicion of aiding and abetting suicide.

But, nearly six weeks on, Florian Willet is still in solitary confinement in Schaffhausen prison.

Nor did a statement from the prosecutor offer any hope that he would be released any time soon.

‘I can confirm that one person is still in custody pending trial,’ Peter Sticher said ominously.

Such a lengthy period in custody, according to Swiss legal experts, is unusual if the only offence being investigated is for ‘inducing or assisting someone to commit suicide for selfish reasons’, which would be hard to prove in the circumstances.

The Last Resort – funded by donations, bequests and an annual voluntary membership fee – does not receive any payment for the use of the Sarco.

The American woman – the first person to use the machine, remember – stayed in a hotel in Germany where she gave a final brief interview before making the short trip across the border into Switzerland. The interview was featured in De Volkskrant.

She told how she suffered such ‘crippling headaches’ that on some days she could barely move or go to the bathroom. Her sons, she said, who did not accompany her to Switzerland, were behind her decision ‘one hundred per cent’. 

She had previously tried to arrange her death with Pegasos, another Swiss right to die group, but found preparing all the documents they needed ‘extremely time consuming’ and the ‘long waiting periods very frustrating’.

Of her impending death, she predicted: ‘I think it’s going to be amazing’, pointing out that, this way, no doctor needed to be involved. She added: ‘I cannot see why this wouldn’t work.

‘Scientifically, it makes sense… the experience has been wonderful and easy and less traumatic than I expected. It’s been a great experience.’

Hard to believe she was describing the countdown to her last moments just a few hours later that same day.

At the outset the plan was for the Sarco to be placed in a grove which would offer a final ‘beautiful view’ of green meadows and mountains, but hikers arrived en masse and the capsule had to be hidden under trees in the forest.

The unfolding events were captured on a video – seen by De Volkskrant – taken by cameras inside and outside the Sarco.

The woman is said to have entered the capsule at 3.50pm. Willet asked her: ‘Do you want to talk to Philip?’ [Dr Nitschke] who was following proceedings remotely from Germany.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I’m okay.’

‘Keep on breathing,’ Willet told her from outside the Sarco after she had pressed the activation button. After one minute and 57 seconds the internal camera, which reacts to movement, turned on twice in quick succession.

A dark spot appeared in the fogged-up window – which De Volkskrant suggests is most probably her knees being raised.

Willet thought this was the result of her body ‘strongly cramping’, he would later tell police. The same thing occurred again after two and a half minutes.

At 4.01pm, Willet’s iPad suddenly emitted a piercing alarm, thought to have been caused by the woman’s heart rate monitor sounding, even though it was now six and half minutes into the process. 

This was explained in the article by the fact that, after losing consciousness, it takes some time before the heart eventually stops. But Willet, the paper reported, seemed confused by the sound, nonetheless.

‘She’s still alive, Philip,’ he told Dr Nitschke, while leaning over to look inside the Sarco. At this stage, Nitschke could only partially follow events from his base in Germany because of technical problems.

Finally, after 30 tense minutes, Willet believed the woman was dead. ‘She had her eyes closed,’ he informed Nitschke.

‘And she was breathing very deeply. Then the breathing slowed down. And then it stopped… she really looks dead.’

Is there anyone, apart from members of The Last Resort, who think her death sounds ‘peaceful, fast and dignified?’

In a joint operation with Dutch police, Nitschke’s office in Haarlem outside Amsterdam, where his own euthanasia group Exit International is based, was raided.

Nitschke, a GP in Australia nearly two decades ago, has a long and controversial track record.

One of his many previous ‘inventions’ was the Exit Bag, a specially designed plastic bag which created an airtight seal around the neck to suffocate users.

‘I hate the plastic bag,’ he admitted at the time. ‘And that’s why I thought: how can we make a plastic bag look more beautiful? How can I make it a bit more glamorous and stylish?’

The result was the Sarco. The suicide capsule was confiscated by the Swiss authorities, but Nitschke is now creating another one, again using a 3D printer, he revealed in a YouTube video this week.

Back in Switzerland, his associate Willet speculated what he thought the police would do following the death of the woman, the paper reported.

‘I think the chance that they will seize the body will be 99 per cent,’ he said.

‘And I estimate the chance they will take the Sarco at 80 per cent. The chance they will detain me, I estimate at 10 per cent.’

But did he calculate his own odds of still being in a prison cell nearly six weeks later?

• Additional reporting: Rob Hyde & Tim Stewart