A chapter ends for the woman who played God

Lesley Martin is forthright and determined. As JAMES GARDINER reports, these qualities helped to put her in the dock.

Loose lips sink ships, Lesley Martin said. She was right. When the jury came to decide whether Martin was guilty of trying to bring an early end to her dying mother's life, the weight of evidence was formidable.

And it all came from Martin herself: two confessions to police, statements to a hospice nurse, one of her mother's friends and her own sister.

With Martin there are no half measures.

As a teenager she dreamed of travelling the world and wanted to become an air hostess. She ended up working as a commercial pilot.

By the age of 20 she met a young man she loved, married and had a baby. The marriage lasted barely a year.

When her dying mother begged her to end her suffering, she not only reversed her personal opposition to euthanasia, she did what she said she had been asked to do, then wrote a book about it.

A criminal conviction was not in the script, but Martin, 40, now faces the possibility of going to jail - but only because she could not keep quiet.

Found guilty this week of attempting to murder her mother Joy, 69, five years ago, Martin cried out for justice.

She was, she claimed, trapped between legislation and love, like many thousands of others; the dying who want a quick and painless end, and the friends and families desperate to help them.

Previous attempts to change the law to allow people to elect to have their lives ended early have been rejected by Parliament, most recently by just two votes. The issue is so divisive, even Martin's supporters don't necessarily back her views.

Her best friend from childhood, Prue McAvoy, who sat in the front row of the public gallery throughout the 2 1/2-week trial, describes herself as a born-again Christian personally opposed to euthanasia.

IT certainly divided the Martin family. Martin's younger sister, Louise Britton, also watched most of the trial and, like older brother Michael Martin, was a prosecution witness.

Unlike her brother, Britton felt no sympathy towards her sister.

"I want her to be found guilty and go to jail for what she did," she said before the verdict.

For her, the guilty verdict on count one of attempted murder was correct, and her only disappointment was that Martin was granted bail. She says people don't know the real Lesley Martin. "She is not a nice person, my sister. If you cross her she will make your life a living hell."

The sisters actually came to blows after Martin published her book To Die Like A Dog. Louise, 36, a Bulls housewife with three children, said the pair had "a massive fist-fight" after Martin objected to her siding with police against her.

"She came into my house and told me I didn't have a story," Louise said.

"She was eying up my broom and I thought, you're not going to hit me with my broom. We've just never liked each other."

Martin, interviewed during her trial, told the Weekend Herald she came off worst.

"She actually beat me up over the book, but she used the book as a tool to vent her frustrations."

She did not complain to the police.

"I recognised it as 20 years of her sibling issues against me. She kind of holds me responsible for having done more or whatever than she has.

"I've worked really hard. I've sacrificed a lot of other things to study and pay for education and pay for travel.

"It's opportunities that you take. It's directions that you move in. If you make no choices in life, then you do stuff-all."

Britton said her sister was selfish because she told no one what she intended to do, and then chose to end her mother's life on the birthday of her mother's only sister, Ena Cole.

"I've got a 13-year-old boy who hates Lesley Martin because he didn't have a chance to say goodbye to his Nana. We all feel the same.

"Aunt Ena sent her £10,000 [$28,000] to move back to New Zealand [from Australia] and care for Mum, and that's how she repays her."

Ena Cole, 75, told the Weekend Herald from her home in England yesterday that she was devastated by her sister's death, the court case and the way it had split the family.

"I do accept that it [euthanasia] is against the law but I don't want Lesley to go to prison."

She said she would probably have done the same thing, put in Martin's position.

"I couldn't have borne to see my sister in agony."

Britton said she too might have agreed, had she been consulted and if her mother wanted to end her suffering by increasing pain relief until it killed her - but only if the law allowed it, which it did not.

So who is the self-proclaimed "personal face of the euthanasia debate" as Martin describes herself on the back cover of the book which became the most important exhibit in her trial?

BORN in Luton, England, on August 14, 1963, to Edward Charles and Joy Patricia Martin, she grew up from the age of 3 in Wanganui.

The family, along with Joy's parents, emigrated in 1966 with Michael, now 42, the oldest by 18 months and and Louise, 36, born six months after they arrived in New Zealand.

Charles Martin was a tobacconist-shopkeeper who had travelled the world with the Royal Navy before marrying Joy, who had a face reminiscent of film star Audrey Hepburn. As he had in Luton, Charles Martin ran a store, the Fitzherbert Dairy in Springvale, Wanganui. The family lived in working-class Aramoho, the city's northernmost suburb, on the Whanganui River.

Martin recalls "a pretty average Kiwi kid upbringing", which for her meant swimming club, gymnastics, netball and 12 years of ballet.

As a teenager she developed a passion for acting and for horses - a hobby her parents were not able to support financially, she says.

Undeterred, Martin displayed early signs of what she calls her stubborn character.

"I was just determined to have one, so I went round the local farmers and scrounged a bit of grazing off each of them, rode my bike to the side of town where the local racing stables were and scrounged a horse off them."

She borrowed as many as five horses for a period, then returned them to the stables, riding bareback until she could afford a second-hand saddle with part-time jobs at her father's shop and as an usherette at the picture theatre where Joy worked.

"I try to encourage that in my sons - that if they're really interested in something, they've just got to get out there and make it happen."

Michael Martin says his sister always had a compulsive streak and changed direction relatively easily, but achieved, academically and otherwise, because of her determination to get what she wanted. "She was a pain in the arse," he says, but they were close, whereas Lesley and Louise "never ever got on".

Britton says her sister used to "prance around" with an "I'm it and what I say goes" attitude, which she resented. "She loves to be in the limelight. It's a private matter the way my mum died. She's not the only daughter here."

Martin says the pair were "fine" until she hit puberty, then they just grew apart.

"We grew to quite different personalities and made different choices for ourselves and I think that's probably the kindest way of putting it."

Apart from the sibling rivalry, the children remember a happy family environment with loving parents whom they never saw fight, or even argue.

Martin says she was very close to her father. "I knew that I could just go and kneel down literally at his feet and talk to him and that's the kind of relationship that he and I had."

She went to the local school, Aramoho Primary School, then Wanganui Intermediate and Wanganui Girls' College, passing six School Certificate subjects and being accredited University Entrance.

Her desire to be an air hostess was thwarted by the age restriction. You had to be 21, she says, preferably with a first-aid qualification. So in 1981, she went to Palmerston North to begin training as a nurse, one of the last intakes of hospital-trained nurses.

Halfway through the three-year training, aged 19, she met Douglas Sciascia, who was not much older than her, and ran a bricklaying and paving business. They became engaged, Martin got pregnant, they married and Matthew was born in October 1983.

"I took six months' maternity leave and finished the training with the class that followed."

But the marriage lasted just 14 months. "We were far too young."

She returned home to Wanganui with her baby and worked at Wanganui Hospital in obstetrics and gynaecology.

In 1986, she decided to go to England and train as a midwife, taking her son with her.

"I went to England with a one-way ticket and a child and a stroller and a backpack."

She boarded with people prepared to provide childcare, worked in intensive-care units in London, then began travelling.

Matthew had his third birthday in Cyprus and his fourth in the south of France, where Martin worked for six months as a child-minder at a holiday camp, providing her son with a constant supply of playmates.

By the end of 1987, they were back in Wanganui and Martin was back at the hospital but also taking flying lessons, qualifying as a commercial pilot.

Itchy feet took her back overseas in 1991 to a nursing contract in Saudi Arabia, and this time her son stayed with her parents.

"I came back with some gold and carpets, some American dollars and a harsh experience in culture-shock."

She and Matthew moved to Queensland's Gold Coast, where she worked for a time as a pilot, flying a seaplane during the week and working night shifts as a hospital nurse, then became pregnant from a fleeting relationship. Sean was born in April 1994.

Despite knowing the hardship of raising one son on her own, she never contemplated terminating the pregnancy, which also halted her flying career.

"I'm actually anti-abortion and pro-voluntary euthanasia because my personal belief is that once life is conceived, it belongs unto that life. I had a responsibility to do the best by the baby."

While she was pregnant her father died suddenly, aged 67, after two heart attacks. He was kept alive long enough for Martin to fly home and see him.

After the funeral she returned to Australia and Joy flew out to be with her when Sean was born.

In her book, Martin describes the death as a blow. "I wrote little-girl-lost poems for my father and was cruel to my mother in my grief."

She told her mother she hoped she, when her time was up, would be considerate enough to give plenty of warning.

Despite being "financially stricken" from her decision to have Sean, she stuck it out on the Gold Coast, starting several small businesses,

but it was nursing that provided reliable income.

Then in August 1997, while working in the operating theatre of a private hospital, Martin damaged her back. A wheel came off a trolley and the unconscious patient rolled off into Martin's arms, rupturing a disc in her spine.

She needed surgery and, with no ACC system, sued the hospital.

Out of work, she started a two-year telephone counselling course and by Christmas 1998 had done a year of that when her home phone rang.

It was Joy, calling to say she had been diagnosed with rectal cancer.

MARTIN returned home immediately to begin the chapter of her life that has played out in the High Court at Wanganui.

Many, including Martin, might have thought 14 years of nursing experience in four countries should have prepared her for the role of caring for her mother during the medical mayhem that followed over the next five months.

Martin says she dreaded the worst when her mother revealed she had been bleeding from the bowel for seven months, but put off seeing a doctor because she did not want to miss a planned five-month trip to England to see her older sister, Ena Cole.

The three children were all with her when Joy went into hospital for her operation on January 21, 1999. A photograph in the book of the four of them, taken by a nurse, testified to that, but it is the only one to feature Britton.

The operation removed the tumour but there were immediate complications and Joy spent a lengthy period in intensive care on life support. She had to return twice to the operating theatre, had nausea and vomiting throughout her admission and was in a coma for nearly a fortnight.

Even after being discharged, Joy's nausea continued. Despite being readmitted twice, the cause was never identified and eventually she was told she had secondary cancer on the liver.

At that point, Joy declined further surgery and asked to go home to die.

What happened next was the subject, nearly four years later, of an interview in the Wanganui police station between Martin and Detective Sergeant Ross Grantham.

Grantham had first spoken to Martin the day Joy died.

In a conversation that he says was "off the record", she told him about injecting her mother with a 60mg dose of morphine two nights earlier and about holding a pillow over her mother's head until she stopped breathing.

By "off" the record, Grantham meant he would not record the conversation, but later, on advice from his police boss, he did just that, sealing what he wrote in an envelope.

It was 10 months before Grantham was able to advise Martin that no charges would be laid against her at that time. The post-mortem examination on Joy had been inconclusive.

It showed she died of respiratory failure, a common side-effect of morphine, but it could have been caused by either the morphine or bronchopneumonia. More significantly, there was no evidence of suffocation.

Until that time, Martin thought she had killed her mother with the pillow, and feared she would be charged with murder.

What reopened the case for Grantham was Martin herself.

She finally published To Die Like A Dog herself in 2002 using a "six-figure" out-of-court settlement she had received from the hospital where she injured her back.

In it, Martin not only revealed that her mother had asked her to end her life - "don't let me lie there, not alive and not dead" - but that she promised to do so and, later, how she did it.

After reading the book, Grantham went to Martin's home with a warrant to seize the transcript. In an interview at the police station, he asked her why she told no one else about her mother's request and the promise she made.

"Loose lips sink ships," was Martin's reply.

In fact Martin had told people. Wanganui hospice nurse Wiki Alward, whose concerns first alerted police to the possibility Joy Martin's death was suspicious, said Martin explained to her she had given the 60mg dose of morphine not for increased pain, but because she wanted to end her mother's suffering. They had discussed euthanasia, she said.

Britton wanted to know why police were investigating, and Martin told her she and Joy had discussed euthanasia and that when her mother asked, "Would you do it?" she said, "Yes, I would."

Highly contentious evidence came from Joy's friend Pam Ward, who said she spoke to Martin on the telephone on the morning of May 27 and asked if Joy still there. That was the morning after the 60mg was allegedly administered.

Martin's reply, Ward said in court, was: "Yes, I couldn't have given her enough."

The evidence was contentious because Ward did not tell police about the comment until the trial started five years after her statement.

While the evidence of the failures in the medical system's care of her mother may have garnered sympathy for Martin, the defence could not pursue an argument that Martin had no control over her actions. As prosecutor Andrew Cameron and Justice John Wild said at the end, a stressed intent to kill was still an intent. There was no defence of diminished responsibility.

The morning after the verdict saw Martin, her husband, Warren Fulljames, and her son, Sean, who turns 10 this month, laying flowers at her parents' grave.

The ever-present camera crew making a documentary for TVNZ about her was asked not to film this private moment.

Now the family has a month's wait to find out Martin's sentence and she is on bail on condition she lives at her home in New Plymouth.

Half an hour south, at her home on the main highway through the town of Bulls, Britton is chain smoking, and happy to tell anyone who cares to listen what she thinks of her sister dragging what she regards as a private tragedy into the public spotlight.

"My mum never would have wanted this."