Police to Probe Man's Claim He Assisted Friend's Death : Suicide: He says he helped cancer-stricken dentist kill himself on advice of former Michigan pathologist, Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

By DEAN E. MURPHY

Feb. 13, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Los Angeles police said Wednesday they will investigate a claim by a Westside man that he helped a cancer-stricken friend commit suicide last year after the friend sought advice from Jack Kevorkian, the former Michigan pathologist charged with murder for helping two women kill themselves with suicide devices.

“If there is any indication of foul play, obviously we would be remiss if we didn’t look into it,” said Lt. John Dunkin.

Free-lance journalist Don Rubin told the Detroit Free Press Tuesday that he helped deliver a lethal dose of drugs to a longtime friend, Dr. Gary Sloan, 44, in their Studio City home last March 5. Rubin, who has since moved to the Westside, repeated his story to The Times Wednesday and said the two men used a suicide device modeled in part after one designed by Kevorkian.

“Clearly the humane thing to do was to help him,” said Rubin, who said he watched for 20 minutes as his friend slipped into unconsciousness and died. “I liken it to a battlefield. I am sure people in Vietnam helped their mortally wounded buddies die with some dignity. This was like a long war for Gary.”

Sloan’s death certificate, on file at the Los Angeles County Hall of Records, lists the cause of death as “disseminated colon cancer” and makes no mention of suicide. Rubin said an autopsy was not conducted because no one suspected suicide since Sloan was “just days” from death anyway.

Dr. Lawrence Leichman, Sloan’s physician who signed the death certificate, did not return phone calls Wednesday.

It is illegal to assist suicide in California, but a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office said it is often difficult to prosecute such cases because authorities must prove the basic elements of a crime independent of any confession. The felony crime carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison.

“The problem is that it isn’t enough for somebody to just say they did something,” spokeswoman Sandi Gibbons said.

Rubin, who said he fears the consequences of going public with his role in his friend’s death, said he contacted the Detroit paper nonetheless because media attention on Kevorkian and his suicide device had missed the “human side” of the tragedy. Rubin criticized Kevorkian for pursuing his “own agenda” that did not focus enough on the stories of his patients.

“There was never any follow-up, and he never even saw (Sloan),” Rubin said. “He never even verified who (Sloan) was, that this guy was really terminally ill. It could have been handled better.”

Kevorkian, 63, was arrested last week on murder charges stemming from the assisted suicides of two chronically ill Michigan women. Kevorkian, who has admitted to helping the women kill themselves, provided the assistance despite being under a permanent injunction banning him from ever again helping anyone commit suicide.

Oakland County (Mich.) prosecutors unsuccessfully prosecuted Kevorkian in a previous assisted suicide case in 1990. Prosecutor Richard Thompson said last week he hopes to show that Kevorkian caused the deaths of the other two women by attaching them to death-dealing devices.

A lawyer for Kevorkian confirmed Wednesday that his client, nicknamed “Dr. Death” for his advocacy of physician-assisted suicide, had spoken with Sloan on the telephone numerous times and had sent the Studio City dentist clippings from Detroit newspapers that explained how to build his suicide machine.

Attorney Geoffrey Fieger, however, said Sloan admired Kevorkian and had even agreed to testify in a court last January when a Michigan judge issued an injunction prohibiting Kevorkian from using the suicide machine he developed. Fieger said Sloan never mentioned Rubin, and the attorney questioned whether Rubin was exaggerating his story to draw attention to a book the free-lance journalist is writing about Sloan’s death.

“He could be totally making this up,” Fieger said. “The body has been (cremated) so there is no way of knowing. He could have found a letter from Dr. Kevorkian to Gary Sloan talking about the machine and then made up the rest.”

Rubin, 46, said Wednesday he and Sloan told no one about the suicide plan, including Sloan’s mother, Roslyn, who lives in North Hollywood. Only after Roslyn Sloan repeatedly challenged Rubin’s claim that her son died in his sleep, did Rubin break down and tell her the truth, he said.

In a brief telephone interview, Roslyn Sloan confirmed that Rubin and her son were good friends and lived together off and on during their 20-year friendship. She said Rubin told her about his role in the suicide, but she did not know whether to believe him.

“I don’t know if he is making it all up,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about any of this. All I know, it is causing me a lot of heartache. I have to get on with my life.”

Rubin acknowledged that he was seeking publicity in contacting the Detroit newspaper, but not for his book. He said he wanted to draw attention to the story of his friend of 20 years, which he feared was being forgotten by people concerned only about the “religious, moral, medical and bioethical” implications of Kevorkian’s activities.

Rubin said he approached The Times last fall about buying his own first-person account of his friendship with Sloan, including a discussion of Sloan’s five-year struggle with cancer and his ultimate decision to commit suicide with Rubin’s assistance. Rubin met with several Times editors and a reporter from the View section and even wrote a portion of his story. Rubin was paid a fee by The Times, but the article never was published.

“Times editors reviewed his material, talked with him and paid him $500 for a partial story draft,” a spokeswoman for The Times said. “They declined to pursue a story at that time in the absence of independent verification of Rubin’s claims and because of Rubin’s insistence on writing the story himself.”

In the interview Wednesday, Rubin recounted the final hours of his friend’s life and spoke openly about his role in preparing the suicide device and releasing the valves that allowed the sodium pentothal, which put Sloan to sleep, and potassium chloride, which killed him, to flow into Sloan’s veins.

Rubin said the two men, who met as neighbors in a Boston apartment building in 1969, had rehearsed the final act several times. They moved to Los Angeles from Boston in September, 1990, to be closer to Sloan’s mother, after Sloan left his dental practice in Cambridge, Mass., Rubin said.

“Toward the end, the only mistake was waiting so long,” Rubin said. “He felt he should have done it before.”

The night of March 4, Rubin said, Sloan became jaundiced and collapsed after his kidneys failed. Rubin lifted Sloan into bed, and then left their Studio City home to buy a bed pan. Rubin said Sloan was a “control freak” and did not want to defecate in bed. When Rubin returned home, Sloan told him the time had come.

“He had decided,” Rubin recalled. “He said, ‘What is the sense?’ ”

Rubin spent the next 40 minutes preparing the drugs in the kitchen. Sloan already had a catheter in his chest for the painkiller morphine, and the two men had saved intravenous bags, valves, and tubing provided by a hospice for Sloan’s other medical needs, Rubin said. Rubin unraveled two coat hangers and hung them from picture hooks on either side of Sloan’s bed to administer the drugs.

Rubin said he released a small amount of sodium pentothal to give Sloan “one last high.” The two men talked for several minutes, before they agreed the final dosage should be released.

“His dog was beside him in bed, and then I opened the flow of the pentothal,” Rubin said. “When I was certain he was fully unconscious, I opened the potassium chloride.”

Based on the newspaper clippings sent to Sloan by Kevorkian and phone conversations between the two men that Rubin said he overheard, Rubin expected Sloan to die within six minutes. But his friend hung on, he said, eventually dying in 20 minutes.

“He is perfectly still. I thought he had died. There there was a deep breath,” he said. “Then he resumed comfortable breathing again. Then he died. I said, ‘He is gone,’ as much as to myself as to Gary.”