Shock testimony in death case

By JAMES GARDINER

Shock testimony rocked the Wanganui euthanasia trial late yesterday when Joy Martin's best friend revealed for the first time something she said Lesley Martin told her.

"I couldn't have given her enough," Pam Ward said Lesley Martin told her the day Lesley's mother lost consciousness after Lesley gave her a 60mg dose of morphine.

Mrs Ward was due to give evidence in Lesley Martin's attempted murder trial on Thursday.

But the trial had to be adjourned after Mrs Ward approached police with the new information about events five years ago.

When she took the witness stand yesterday Mrs Ward, a part-time TAB operator in Wanganui, said she regularly visited her friend in the last days of her life, including May 25 and 26, 1999. They had spoken virtually daily for more than 30 years.

When she spoke on the telephone to Lesley Martin on May 27 and asked if Joy was "still there" she got the response which, until this week, she never mentioned to anyone.

She said yesterday that she was so shocked she could not remember any other part of the conversation.

Later that day when she visited the house Joy Martin was in a coma.

"I assumed that Joy had an excess of morphine," she told the court." She later wrote in her diary: "overdose last night??"

In June 1999 when she made a statement to police conducting a homicide investigation she did not mention the comment because she did not think it was relevant and she was not asked. "It wasn't specifically put to us," she told Lesley Martin's lawyer, Dr Donald Stevens, QC.

Dr Stevens: "You knew the police were conducting a homicide investigation and if this comment had been made to you, you would have been volunteering it to the police without being asked.

"I put it to you it is completely implausible that you would not have told the police in June 1999."

Dr Stevens accused Mrs Ward of inventing the story to try to support Dr Bevan Chilcott, her husband's GP, whose care of Joy Martin was questioned earlier in the trial.

Earlier, another key prosecution witness recalled how Lesley Martin broke down and cried after being asked why she gave her dying mother a 60mg dose of morphine.

Retired hospice nurse Wiki Alward told the court that Martin said she administered the morphine not because her mother, Joy, was in pain but because her mother had told her she did not want a slow, painful death. Mrs Alward, assigned by Hospice Wanganui to set up an automatic syringe driver to dispense 10mg of morphine over 24 hours to Joy Martin, said she was "shattered" by what Lesley Martin told her.

She was aware Martin had morphine prescribed by Joy Martin's doctor but did not know how much or even what form it was in.

She rang Lesley Martin on the morning of May 27, 1999, to see how Joy was and was told her discomfort had increased to severe pain so Lesley had given her all the remaining morphine, 60mg, in addition to the 10mg loaded in the driver.

"I said to her that was an awful lot of morphine and I would need to notify the GP, Dr Chilcott."

Martin said her mother was now unconscious but comfortable, Mrs Alward said.

Asked why she did not go straight round to the house, Mrs Alward said at that stage she still accepted that Lesley knew what she was doing.

But later, on a visit, Lesley told her: "My mother did not have increased pain. I gave her the medication because my mum had indicated she didn't want a slow, painful death and I did not want that either.

"She continued to say that 'we had discussed euthanasia'."

Mrs Alward said Martin was upset and crying. "I told Lesley that what she had in fact done was a crime, that she had broken the law and she became more upset."

THE TRIAL

* The Crown alleges Lesley Martin twice attempted to murder her dying mother, Joy, in May 1999, firstly with an overdose of morphine and then by suffocation with a pillow.

* Euthanasia advocate Martin, a registered nurse, wrote about her mother's death in the book To Die Like A Dog, published in 2002.

* Police had discontinued investigations in 2000 but laid charges after the book was published. Copies of the book have been given to the jury.

* The trial in the High Court at Wanganui has attracted international attention from pro- and anti-euthanasia campaigners.

* Evidence was heard from about half the Crown witnesses this week, including Joy Martin's surgeon and GP. Lesley Martin's brother and sister are to be called next week.

* Defence counsel Dr Donald Stevens, QC, has got witnesses to agree that Martin was fatigued, stressed and upset in the final days of her mother's life, and he told the court that because of their close relationship, she should not have been left to care for her mother.