Detectives investigate 'I killed mum' claim

Sean Davison. Photo / Greg Bowker

Police are investigating an admission by an Auckland-born scientist that he gave his cancer-riddled mother a lethal dose of morphine.

Sean Davison admitted giving the overdose and said he did not fear being charged with a crime. "I have no regrets about what I did. I did the right thing, the compassionate thing," he told the Herald on Sunday.

Davison had been scheduled to return later this week to South Africa, where he is a professor of biotechnology at the University of the Western Cape, but he has now brought forward his flights.

The married, father-of-one, published a diary last month, which detailed the time he spent with his 85-year-old his mother in the last months of her life.

The memoir, called Before We Say Goodbye, omitted details of exactly how his mother Patricia Davison, a former GP and psychiatrist who worked under the name Fergusson, died.

At the time Davison told NZPA the book was deliberately ambiguous about his mother's final moments.

"The book doesn't make it particularly clear deliberately because that's not the message of the book. I didn't want to detract from the desire to stimulate debate (about voluntary euthanasia). So it's not clear and there's no need for it to be clear."

Davison returned to New Zealand when his mother was diagnosed with the terminal disease, and over the following months she repeatedly asked him to help her die.

She unsuccessfully attempted suicide by starving herself, but after 33 days, her son said, in a leaked copy of the original manuscript of the diary, she died hours after he gave her "a lethal drink of crushed morphine tablets" dissolved in a glass of water.

"I held it in front of her and said, 'If you drink this you will die'. I really wanted to be so absolutely sure that there was no hesitation. "She answered, 'You're a wonderful son'."

Davison verified the manuscript's authenticity to the newspaper. The passage was left out of the published book.

Dunedin Senior Sergeant Mel Aitken said police would look into the matter.

- NZPA