Candid Camera

A bizarre "suicide"story

It begins as a typical, if pathetic, Mother's Day visit. Carrying a bunch of daffodils, a woman enters an old folks' home to visit her aged mum. After some small talk, their conversation abruptly shifts to suicide. "How many have you brought?" asks the mother. "Fifteen."

"But does it take fifteen?"

"For most [people] ten are fatal, but if you take them with whisky, five are enough."

"It is a mortal sin."

"People are doing it left, right and center. It's not a sin any more--it's nothing nowadays. But it's up to you."

"But is it cowardly to do it?"

"No, it isn't cowardly. If you had a dog in this state, you would take it to the vet, wouldn't you?"

"A dog hasn't got a soul."

This chilling scene, filmed by a concealed police camera in a nursing home in East Sussex, is the dramatic heart of The Case of Yolande McShane, a powerful documentary shown last week on British television. The "case" began in March 1976 when Sussex police learned that Yolande McShane, 60, the wife of an artist, was urging her 87-year-old mother, Mrs. Edith Mott, to commit suicide. The daughter was deeply in debt and stood to inherit $70,000 upon her mother's death.

Having obtained permission from the nuns who cared for Mrs. Mott, police filmed the 3 1/2-hour visit. As she left the home, McShane was arrested. The nuns searched Mrs. Mott's clothing and found 18 Nembutal tablets--more than enough to kill a healthy adult. Still on film, the mother explained that she wished to die. "It's because my daughter loves me so much that she wants to help me," she said.

The jury disagreed. After a 14-day trial early this year, McShane was convicted on charges of attempting to "aid, abet, counsel or procure" her mother's suicide and passing dangerous drugs. She was sentenced to two years in prison.

Enter Yorkshire TV, which decided that the case perfectly suited the network's goal of creating "socially committed documentaries that illuminate dark areas of our society." The producers persuaded McShane to tell her side of the story on camera. "My mother's been threatening to commit suicide for about 40 years," she explained. "It's a fantasy of hers." The lethal pills, she said, were a sort of "security" for her mother. As it happened, Mrs. Mott died of natural causes two weeks ago, ten days before the TV documentary went on the air.

Viewers' reactions were mixed, perhaps because of the sort of reasoning used by the Times's Michael Ratcliffe: "Suicide, euthanasia, privacy and surveillance: rarely can there have been a broadcast in which so many time bombs of universal interest were ticking away The Independent Broadcasting Authority [Britain's commercial TV watchdog] would have been irresponsible if it had prevented The Case of Yolande McShane from being shown. In the public interest? You bet it was."

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