final exit
▲ An “exit bag”
like the one John
Celmer used to
kill himself.
8 4 | at l a n ta | s e p t e m b e r 2 0 0 7
Two surgeries took away
the cancer that was killing
John Celmer, but they left
him with chronic pain and
a disfiguring hole in his
jaw. He secretly reached
out to a controversial
group that advises
the sick and suffering on
how to end their own lives.
Members of the Final Exit
Network say they provide a
compassionate service, but
if they’re breaking the law,
is it man’s law or God’s?
by Charles Bethea
photograph by Andrea Fremiotti
God has the power over
life and death. God gives
life. We can’t create life
from nothing and we do
not have the power to
take it. That’s not what we
have. We were given the
job to help. We weren’t
given the power to decide
who’s going to live and
who’s going to die.
▲
From left, Sue and John at their
wedding in 1984; in North Georgia in
2001; at the wedding of Sue’s son in
1993; and in the Thousand Islands.
—Sue Celmer
the last time Sue Celmer saw her husband alive, he
8 6 | at l a n ta | m a r c h 2 0 1 0
j o h n c e l m e r p h oto g ra p h s co u rt esy o f s u e c e l m e r ;
t e d g o o d w i n : J u l i a H a n w ay
he’d be fine, whether he was or not. Lately he’d been in a bad
state of mind, staying at home alone. Sue called him again that
evening, while she was out, to see if he wanted her to stop by.
“Just go home,” he told her. A while later, he called to make sure
she was there. Then he hung up the phone and turned to the
two strangers who were sitting on his couch, across an Oriental
rug, in his living room. Their names were Ted Goodwin and
Claire Blehr and they were there, as they would later acknowledge, so fifty-eight-year-old John Celmer could kill himself.
Goodwin and Blehr are members of the Final Exit Network,
a national group then based in Marietta that John had contacted
in the final months of his life. FEN advises the terminally ill—as
well as those who are not dying but who suffer unrelenting
physical pain—on how to commit suicide. According to Goodwin, the group’s president at the time of John’s death, FEN
members have attended the deaths of almost 200 people since
its founding in 2004, instructing them in the mechanism of
their demise and often witnessing their last moments on earth.
Not surprisingly, the group is a flash point for controversy. Its
work exposes America’s own unresolved attitude toward sui-
strong shoulders. He was also stubborn: about the quality of his
stereo speakers, the crispiness of his oven-broiled pasta, and
the soundness of his conservative politics. One of his favorite
expressions was “Quitters never win and winners never quit.”
John never quit pursuing Sue, and they married in August
of 1984. Her children became his to help raise. The youngest,
Tammy, understood him best. She called him a “chocolate
Continued on page 123
▲
was hungry. John was always hungry. It was June 18, 2008, and
they’d just been to the drugstore to get more pain medicine.
He was still recovering from a twelve-hour surgery a month
before—the latest in a series of operations that had removed all
of the cancer from his mouth but left a half-dollar-sized hole in
his jaw. Although doctors had patched the hole with skin from
his chest, his face was still severely swollen. On the way home
from the drugstore, John asked Sue to stop by McDonald’s for
a cheeseburger. Because of the swelling and the difficulty of
chewing, all his food had to be blended like a milkshake. At
home, she put the cheeseburgers in the blender, without the
buns, and John drank the liquefied meat. A hungry man, she
thought, is a man who wants to live.
The next day Sue called John. She was going out with friends
from church that night and wanted to be sure he’d be okay
alone. The couple had separate residences in the same Cumming townhome community, but they were still close. They
shared a car, the affection of her three children and eight grandkids from a previous marriage, and twenty-four years—some
more difficult than others—spent as husband and wife. It had
been a long, hard road, but her husband had miraculously
walked out of the hospital with his life. Things would soon get
better. She was sure of it. The federal government had recently
begun to process John’s request for disability money. Sue
believes in signs; this was a good one.
During the phone call, John said he’d be fine. He always said
cide. In 2005, a Pew Research Center poll found that almost half
of Americans approve of laws permitting doctors to help terminally ill patients end their lives. But only three states make such
allowances, and Georgia is not one of them. Indeed, in 1994 the
state enacted a law forbidding the “direct and physical involvement, intervention, or participation” in a suicide. Celmer’s
death, and the circumstances surrounding it, ultimately led to
the arrests of Goodwin and Blehr for allegedly violating that law.
Almost a year after their arrests, Goodwin and Blehr still
have not been indicted, although Forsyth County prosecutors
say they expect to bring the case to a grand
Former Final
jury this month. Emboldened by the delay,
Exit Network
Final Exit Network members, after tempopresident
rarily suspending their operations followTed Goodwin,
foreground,
ing the arrests, have resumed advising the
with Robert
afflicted on how to kill themselves.
Rivas, FEN’s
It is still unclear whether a Georgia court
attorney.
will determine if advising someone and perhaps even holding his hand as he intentionally inhales a lethal
quantity of helium is a criminal act. No court in Georgia has
ever addressed this specific question, or the more philosophical one: What, exactly, does it mean to help someone die? And
what, for that matter, does it mean to help someone live, to give
them everything you have, and fail?
Sue Celmer sees no ambiguity. “In God’s eyes,” she claims,
“John was murdered.”
sue was thirty-two and a shy, cautious mother of
three when she met John at the Red Carpet Restaurant in Buffalo, New York, where she was a waitress in the spring of 1981.
He was a hungry, outgoing loan officer with a broad chest and
m a r c h 2 0 1 0 | at l a n ta | 8 7
Final Exit
Continued from page 87
volcano.” His outside was hard—his stubbornness could turn antagonistic—because
the inside was so soft and sweet. It needed
protection.
In July of 2004, John moved into a small,
gray brick townhome in Wyngate, a new
subdivision in Cumming. Business had
brought him here from Buffalo, as it had
Sue, a customer advocate for a medical software company. His place was a little dark
and bare, but he had a good sound system.
He also had 400 alphabetized CDs, six
acoustic guitars, and a pewter hockey figurine commemorating his goalie days. Sue
was around the corner, just a three-minute
walk away. They didn’t live with each other
anymore: John drank, Sue didn’t. But they
talked almost every day—about the kids, the
weather, God—and they attended a small
Methodist church in Cumming together.
By his mid-fifties, with Sue’s support, he’d
become a believer.
John soon became friends with Wyn-
gate’s president, Thomas Baumgartner, a
sixty-six-year-old pest control specialist
from Atlanta. Both men loved God and
beer, which they drank on John’s stoop.
When it was warm enough, they played
guitar and sang together by the community
pool—church songs when they were feeling
holy, Buddy Holly and the Eagles when they
just wanted to rock.
I was still legally his wife, and I stood by
him. A lot of people who have problems
in their marriages just give up, get divorced,
don’t do anything for each other. But I lived
around the corner from John. I brought him
protein shakes every morning when he was sick.
I took him to his doctor’s appointments when
he couldn’t drive. There was nothing for me to
gain—he left me with debt when he died. I paid
for his medical insurance. I paid for almost
everything that was in his house, too—not
because I have anything, but because I was
dedicated.
So what bearing does it have that we didn’t
live together? That doesn’t speak to what our
relationship was. There wasn’t a day that went
by that if I was late coming home from work,
he didn’t at least call to check: “Just wanted to
make sure you got home okay.” When I went out
of town, he drove me to the airport and picked
me up. Once he moved down here, I really feel
like things were changing and I think that more
changes would have come. I think we would
have been married forever.
john went through some hard
times in his forties and fifties. He lost a highend audio business, a setback that almost
broke him. Then he bought a taxi franchise
and sold that. And so it was that the man
who’d been a loan officer when he first met
Sue went into dry cleaning, delivering the
clothes himself. People loved him, though.
He always had Tootsie Rolls in his pockets.
He’d give one to each customer or staple it
to the tag. “Ten years ago,” he told his wife
one day, “I would have been ashamed to tell
anybody that I was in dry cleaning. But I
don’t really care. It’s an honest living. I love
being outside. I love being with people.”
Then one August day in 2006, when the
world had finally started feeling okay again,
John opened his mouth and found something inside.
m a r c h 2 0 1 0 | at l a n ta | 1 2 3
He was sitting on the porch, and he said,
“I’ve got something to show you.” And
he lifted up his tongue and showed me the spot
underneath it. He said, “What does it look like
to you?” I said, “It looks like you need to get to a
doctor as fast as you can.”
It was a spot under the tongue, a growth
with some gray areas. He’d already done all the
investigation online, of course, and he handed
me all the pictures—that’s how he was. He studied things.
It was devastating, but we moved forward.
What else could we do?
it was oral cancer, on the floor
of his mouth and under his tongue, likely
caused by years of smoking. In September
of 2006 John had his first surgery. They cut
the skin along his throat from ear to ear and
pulled his face up. They removed the spot
from under his tongue and much of the floor
of his mouth. Then he was released. For
most of that fall, John underwent radiation
treatment five days a week, which damaged
his jawbone severely. By early 2007, a hole
had appeared in his lower jaw, below his
chin. He cut his mouth on exposed jawbone.
He lost teeth. Traces of cancer remained.
He still had Sue and the kids, and for as
long as he could work, he had his laundry
job and the customers and neighbors he
made smile. He had faith, too, which is no
small thing. But he didn’t have the same
body he had before he went into the operating room. Instead, he had a body he barely
recognized, with a whole new set of seemingly intractable problems. He took the
morphine and codeine he was prescribed.
He self-medicated with nicotine and beer.
In October of 2007, John found the website
of the Final Exit Network, an end-of-life
advocacy group that believes it is fighting
the last great civil rights battle: the human
right to a death with dignity. He clicked the
site’s icon that read “Exit Guide Services”
and, from that moment on, began actively
pursuing his own death. This, FEN officials
say, is what he wanted. He never mentioned
it to his wife.
The surgery was his hope. And he
thought, “I had the surgery, and now I
have all these other problems.” He didn’t realize that when you wake up from surgery, you
don’t feel better; you feel worse. Patients are
discharged from hospitals with assumptions
that they understand the expectation for recov1 2 4 | at l a n ta | m a r c h 2 0 1 0
ery and how to take care of themselves. He was
having trouble. He had a hole in his jaw, and a
suction machine that was breaking down, and
an arthritic hip. I was paying all the bills instead
of staying with him. He wasn’t in a very good
frame. He didn’t think it had turned out right.
Maybe he was depressed. He couldn’t see the
light of day, and it was right around the corner.
So here’s a guy drowning, and they push his
head underwater.
a former executive recruiter
from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Ted Goodwin sits in the office of his lawyer, Bruce
Harvey, in Downtown Atlanta. Goodwin,
sixty-five, is talking about dying, as he does
almost every day. He tells Harvey, a criminal
defense attorney who parks his Harley at
the foot of a spiral staircase and has a tattoo snaking out from his cuff, that, looking
at him, he sees “only a man who will die.”
This may or may not be a joke, as that may
or may not be a smirk on Goodwin’s face.
Harvey laughs uncomfortably.
Goodwin grew up in a middle-class
home, son of the county’s director of child
welfare. Both parents were civil rights advocates. He earned a scholarship to West Virginia University and became a public school
teacher. He couldn’t support his family on a
teacher’s $5,200 salary in 1967, though, and
he landed in Atlanta, running an executive
recruitment firm. Ten years later he invested in a company in the medical screening
field and ran the company until 2008. His
unpaid advocacy work, however, is what
has consumed him.
In 2001, Goodwin moved in with his
father, who was dying of emphysema. The
disease takes you down in stages, as your
lungs turn into something like cardboard.
They can’t absorb oxygen, and you’re left
gasping like a fish out of water. After one
terrible episode, Goodwin called the doctor
four times to get morphine for his father,
but the doctor didn’t respond. Ten days
later, his father was dead. At that moment,
Goodwin—who hopes to die “with my shoes
off, my family there beside me”—made a
vow to himself that no one else would suffer
so at the end, “if I could help it.”
The right-to-die community is the product of boldly negative thinkers who prepare,
at all times, for the worst possible outcomes.
In 2004, a few members of the now-defunct
Hemlock Society—America’s first physicianassisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia
advocacy group—were frustrated by its
legislative agenda that, they felt, left current sufferers helpless. Seeking a bolder,
more immediate approach, the breakaway
members created the Final Exit Network,
which would actively counsel people with
diseases such as Alzheimer’s and muscular
dystrophy. Indeed, FEN is the only rightto-die organization in the U.S. that will
advise people with intractable pain—but
who aren’t necessarily dying—on precisely
how to end their lives, while also being
present at their deaths. The founding board
wanted to avoid the way Jack Kevorkian had
operated: as judge, jury, and, at least once,
executioner. “We’re governed by a board of
directors,” says Goodwin, one of the founders. “We have a medical review committee.
We wanted many heads to make decisions.”
The group now has 3,000 members, and in
the spring of 2005, Goodwin became their
national president.
Oregon, Washington, and Montana are
the only states that currently allow assisted
suicide, and then only by a physician. In
Oregon, a lethal cocktail may be prescribed
to mentally competent adults who are terminally ill. FEN supports this method,
but until it’s available nationally, the group
endorses what they call “self-deliverance.”
Opponents call it assisted suicide.
if the right-to-die movement
has a bible, it would be a 220-page book
first published in 1991 and now in its third
edition. Final Exit: The Practicalities of SelfDeliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying
was written by Derek Humphry, a Britishborn journalist who founded the Hemlock
Society in 1980. Humphry’s book contains
twenty-seven chapters that are by turns
funny (“How Do You Get the Magic Pills”),
cryptic (“The Cyanide Enigma”), deadly
serious (“Self-Starvation”), and unnervingly matter-of-fact (“Self-Deliverance Using
a Plastic Bag”). Final Exit was the twentyninth-most-banned book of the 1990s
in America.
Humphry, who now lives in Oregon, currently advises FEN, and his book is required
reading for Final Exit Network members. In
the twenty-third chapter, “A Speedier Way:
Inert Gases,” Humphry explains that helium, argon, neon, and nitrogen can be used
quickly and painlessly to cause one’s death.
The balloon gas, he concludes, is best.
Inhaling helium expels oxygen from the
body, which initiates brain death—without
pain, it is said—in minutes. Bodily death
occurs some ten minutes later. While it’s
not the foolproof “magic death pill” wished
for in the right-to-die community, helium
is close to perfect. It isn’t explosive or flammable. It’s odorless, easy to breathe, and
tough to trace. (In December of 2007, The
American Journal of Forensic Medicine and
Patholog y wrote: “It leaves only seldom
externally visible marks . . . on the body.
If the . . . auxiliary means are removed by
another person, the forensic death investigation of cause and manner of death may
be very difficult.”) Best of all, it’s available
in lightweight compressed-gas cylinders
included in party balloon kits that go for
about $25 at Party City. Buy two, one for
backup, advises Humphry. Pay cash so you
won’t leave a trail.
Then there’s the “exit bag.” It’s clear plastic, approximately twenty-two by thirty-six
inches, with a four-foot piece of thin plastic
tubing that connects to the helium tank. An
elastic headband secures it. “Ugh! The plastic bag! Agreed. Not very aesthetic,” writes
Humphry, “but not so bad with a little prior
practice to become accustomed to it.” One
size fits all, ordered by mail from a California company.
While Humphry’s tone is at times glib, the
reader learns that the seventy-nine-year-old
has helped three family members die: his
wife, brother, and father-in-law, who suffered from cancer, brain damage, and heart
failure, respectively. “The right to choose to
die in a manner and at a time of one’s own
choosing,” he says, “is the ultimate personal
and civil liberty. In fifty years, assisted suicide will be a forgotten subject, confined to
the books on social history.”
after joining fen, John Celmer privately mulled his options, which were, simply, to live or die. In a typed letter dated May
1, 2008, addressed to his “case coordinator”
at FEN, John revealed his conclusion. John
wrote that he wished to use a “heliuminduced methodology . . . for the purposes of
coordinating my demise.” He continued, “If,
however, for some imaginable reason(s), you
do not feel comfortable in the continuance of
your involvement . . . rest assured that I will
have no other choice than to pursue any and
all alternative sources of available means of
helium inducement including pathetically
taking measures into my own hands.”
He continued to walk around bandaged
up, and everything he ate continued to fall
through the hole in his jaw. He brushed his
teeth and looked in the mirror and could see
the sink through the hole. Working was too
difficult, and embarrassing, to continue. He
wouldn’t let it get any worse.
Because indictments against Goodwin
and three other FEN members are still a
possibility, they won’t talk specifically about
much of what John Celmer told them. But if
FEN followed its protocol with John, as in
the other reported exits in which the group
has been involved, the end of his life would
have been set into motion this way: A case
coordinator would have contacted him to
discuss why he wanted to end his life. This
is what Goodwin refers to as “the whiff
test.” John then would have been handed
off to the “first responder,” who gathers
a detailed personal and medical history,
including facts of diagnosis, prognosis, and
treatment. This individual’s completed form
is sent to the case coordinator.
m a r c h 2 0 1 0 | at l a n ta | 1 2 5
Next, John’s medical records would have
been reviewed to confirm what Goodwin
calls “a real, physical medical condition.”
These, along with the two sets of notes
already taken, would have been sent to
FEN’s medical director at the time, Dr.
Lawrence Egbert, an eighty-two-year-old
physician who teaches part time at the
Johns Hopkins medical school in Baltimore
and who says that he’s “never felt more like
a doctor” than while advising FEN. By the
time medical records of applicants arrive
on his desk, around a quarter of cases are
already screened out.
“Generally, Dr. Egbert didn’t talk to
them unless he had a specific question
that couldn’t be answered by the medical
records,” says Goodwin. “But he would look
at the medical records, the evidence, the
opinions of two different people and make
a determination as to whether or not they
would be provisionally approved.” John
would have then been assigned an “exit
guide,” who would be in touch regularly
by telephone and, at least once, in person.
John’s guide was a woman named Claire
Blehr, with whom he likely would have
discussed, among other things, his family:
whether they should be involved, how they
might react. Family members are involved
only if the exiting individual wishes them
to be. They are not contacted otherwise.
(Goodwin estimates that family members
are present at the point of exit slightly more
than half the time.)
Blehr, according to a police affidavit filed
so investigators could search her house,
judged that it was “a secure situation” where
the possibility of arousing suspicion or outside interference was minimal, and that
John wasn’t what Goodwin casually calls a
“loony tune.” The case wasn’t declined for
medical reasons, which happens perhaps
one in fifty times—as when Egbert thinks
an individual hasn’t exhausted his pain
management options—and John was not
referred to one of FEN’s three affiliated
psychologists. John signed a sheet of paper
more than once saying he’d exhausted his
medical options, didn’t want further treatment, and was choosing this end himself.
If the guide agrees with the others, as
Blehr allegedly did, the group offers provisional acceptance into the exit program.
John would choose when to die, coordinating with his exit guide and a senior exit
guide—in his case Ted Goodwin—who
1 2 6 | at l a n ta | m a r c h 2 0 1 0
would also be present. He would buy the
exit bag and helium tank, which he would
activate himself as the guides watched and,
if he desired, held his hands. They would
throw the tanks and bag away after he was
gone. They would leave, if possible, no trace
of their presence. It would appear to be a
natural death.
“i never did know quite what to
call them,” says Blehr. “Clients? Patients?
Friends?” Her lawyer, Robert Rubin, makes
a joke: “Consumers.” She quietly admonishes him and continues, “Depending on how
close I got to the person, after it was over
there was a mingled sense of sadness and
relief. In one case, I didn’t know her long,
and I wished I had known her forever. I
send blessings. I send prayers for them. I’m
not religious, but I am a spiritual person.”
After a pause: “We did what John wanted.”
Blehr, seventy-seven, is a former contractor for Georgia Quick Start, a state agency
that provides free training to qualified businesses. She volunteers to teach the elderly
how to navigate health benefits, disaster
preparedness, and consumer fraud. She
has a master’s degree in counseling psychology. Despite all this, she says she’s easily intimidated. When other FEN members
learned that she attended the Unity Church
of “practical Christianity”—she has also
tried out the Episcopalian, Presbyterian,
and Jewish faiths—their skepticism was
intimidating. So was being in the presence
of her senior exit guide, Ted Goodwin,
whose “bearing and experience” awed her.
A trial, too, would be intimidating. Blehr
never saw her arrest coming. On her computer she has a note that says, “Charges are
dropped.” Her church, she says, teaches the
importance of positive thinking. She is one
of the dozens of foot soldiers who have done
FEN’s work.
on may 6, 2008, according to the affidavit, John Celmer sent a letter and a $60
check to a company called the Gladd Group,
which sells exit hoods. The following day,
he purchased two helium tanks. During
the previous six months, despite the pain,
he’d been helping a man around the corner
learn to read and had been fixing up a 1969
Honda Classic motorcycle. He was browsing the Internet one day and saw it: the same
motorcycle he’d owned when he was young.
He bought it, but it hurt too much to ride.
Still, he cleaned it constantly, telling Sue that
once he was better—this little word, once,
giving her hope—he’d show her how to ride.
They bought brand-new helmets.
He even consented to another surgery.
Given John’s condition—he’d lost more than
fifty pounds since the first operation—and
the complexity of the procedure they had
in mind, doctors said he had a roughly 30
percent chance of emerging cancer-free
this time. Over the course of twelve hours
on May 23, doctors removed his partly
disintegrated jawbone and reconstructed it
using bone and tissue from his leg and skin
grafts from his thighs. In June he returned
to have skin grafted from his chest over the
hole in his jaw. The patches left by the harvested chest skin were, in turn, covered by
thigh skin. A man only has so much skin,
or patience, for cutting. But it was a success:
John’s doctors declared him cancer-free.
Still, he walked with a crutch. He
couldn’t eat or speak normally. The pain
was unrelenting. In weak moments, Sue
later thought, when you look into your circumstances and you take your eyes off the
Lord, that’s when you become vulnerable.
At times, John seemed to be losing hope.
on june 18 , John smoked a few cigarettes and drank some beers, against his
doctor’s orders, in the chair outside his door.
Baumgartner drove by around 2 p.m. and
said hello. “He seemed okay,” Baumgartner
says. “Just sitting there, same as always.”
The next day, four days before he was
scheduled to see a psychiatrist, John wrote
an e-mail to Blehr saying that he was
unhappy with his surgeries and was seriously considering “my plan (you know what
I mean by that).” According to the affidavit,
he thanked Blehr for “reinforcing that I can
count on all of you to cooperate in assisting
me with it should it come to fruition.” She
was ready if he was.
According to Blehr, as outlined in the
affidavit, John wanted to die at 11 p.m. that
day. And he did not want Sue to know about
his plan. “He didn’t use the term ‘meddlesome,’” says Goodwin, “but that was the gist
of it. She was over there every day checking
up on him. He didn’t want her involved
because she did not agree with this. He said,
‘She’ll cause problems.’ Boy, was he right.”
It was a hot day, even for June in Georgia.
Goodwin and Blehr arrived at John’s residence around 10 in the evening. The three
talked for about an hour. John, who had
trouble speaking—Dr. Egbert, who never
met him, later described him around this
time as “walking the streets with his head
half gone”—told them about his love of the
guitar and his belief in God. “If I’d have
known then what I know now,” Goodwin
recalls John saying, “I would never have
let them operate on me. I would have gone
into hospice and allowed nature to take
its course.”
Much of the rest of their conversation,
to Goodwin, is a blur. “It’s embarrassing,
but if I were to store every nuance of all of
this stuff in my head, it would make me
crazy,” he says. “What still sticks in my
mind was the fact that John—a very sweet
man—looked at me and said, ‘Thank God
you’re here. Without you, I would have to
shoot myself.’”
According to Goodwin, shortly after 11
the three of them went upstairs to John’s
bedroom, where he lay on his bed and put
his head in a plastic bag filled with helium.
Goodwin says he and Blehr held John’s
hands until they went limp. As he asphyxiated, there was no involuntary reflex of
the hands or body, a phenomenon that
occurred with maybe half of those Goodwin
has watched die by helium inhalation. In
other words, he did not struggle. “He just
lay there and very peacefully, you know . . .
he knew that we were there for him and he
was happy. I could see his face through the
bag, and I know that he was very content.”
Though he died thirty minutes before midnight, the official date of John’s death is June
20, 2008, when his wife found his body.
Goodwin, who’d not met John until that
day, says the man was unconscious within
twenty seconds and dead in twelve minutes,
according to the affidavit. He and Blehr
stayed with John for fifteen or twenty minutes afterward to make sure he didn’t wake
up, as Goodwin says, “brain-dead like Terri
Schiavo.” Then, following standard FEN
protocol designed to protect the deceased
and the guides, they removed all visible FEN
paperwork—which, according to the affidavit, included a suicide note written by John.
However, Goodwin and Blehr deny he left
a note. Says Goodwin: “It was important to
him to have his death look ‘natural,’ so as to
not upset his family and friends.” According
to the affidavit, Goodwin and Blehr collected
the helium tanks and exit bag, turned off the
lights, and closed the garage, where Goodwin’s car had been covertly parked. They
threw the tanks and bag into a Dumpster in
Acworth. This was the third exit Goodwin
and Blehr had guided together, and they
didn’t spend much time talking about how
it felt, as they had after the first time in early
2007. “Afterward we just try to decompress,”
Goodwin says. “There was this allegation
that we go out and celebrate after the event.
That’s just malarkey. There’s no high-fiving.
It’s a traumatic thing for us, frankly.”
Sue lay awake down the street, not knowing. Nine days later, according to the affidavit, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation
would know what she found in his townhome: the copies of Final Exit, the e-mails to
members of FEN on his computer and notes
about meeting them on his calendar. And
a sample suicide letter, allegedly written by
Blehr, dated almost five months earlier.
I don’t hate those people. They’re not
responsible to me for what they did. But
they are responsible to God. Life here is a blink.
m a r c h 2 0 1 0 | at l a n ta | 1 2 7
Eternity is a long time. He was on the road to
recovery. He just couldn’t see it. He wasn’t a
dark, depressed person. He was full of life, just
momentarily not dealing. Given what he’d lived
through the previous year and a half, that was
understandable. What he needed was somebody
to help him. Somebody other than just me. If you
buy [FEN’s] premise, then why, as a culture, do
we bother educating psychiatrists? Why don’t
we just let all the depressed people in the world
kill themselves? Why help them?
three months after John’s death,
a man named Richard Sartain joined the
Final Exit Network. Blehr met him in his
Dawson County home on January 8, 2009,
to rehearse his planned exit. Blehr, the
affidavit states, explained that once Sartain put the exit hood on his head, she and
Goodwin would let the helium tanks run
for twenty minutes after his pulse stopped.
One of the guides would stand beside him
and the other would be on the bed, holding
his hands down to ensure that he didn’t pull
the bag off, which could result in him being
“in worse condition than he was before he
started,” according to the affidavit. Sartain’s
1 2 8 | at l a n ta | m a r c h 2 0 1 0
exit would have been Goodwin’s fortieth
and Blehr’s fourth, had Sartain truly been
terminally ill, or, for that matter, a man of
that name. In fact, Sartain was the alias of
an undercover agent working for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Goodwin and Blehr were arrested on
February 25, 2009—Ash Wednesday, as
Blehr recalls—for their alleged assistance
in John’s suicide. Along with codefendants and fellow FEN members Nicholas
Sheridan (allegedly Celmer’s “case coordinator”) and Dr. Lawrence Egbert, they are
“The Georgia Four.” They contend—citing
the First Amendment—that they merely
passed along information to John, which
he used to deliver himself as Goodwin
and Blehr watched quietly and, as they
acknowledge, held his hands. They are
also charged with violating Georgia’s RICO
Act and tampering with evidence, crimes
that together could fetch up to twenty-eight
years in prison.
Defense attorneys believe that prosecutors won’t be able to prove that Goodwin
and Blehr did more than hold John’s hands
as he died using a method that FEN recom-
mended. Prosecutors, however, may argue
that this was criminal assistance enough.
Penny Penn, the Forsyth County district
attorney, told Atlanta magazine she expects
indictments this month.
Thomas Baumgartner, whose Wyngate
community was the focus of headlines and
police attention and gossip in the days and
weeks after John’s death, is still in a state of
disbelief. “We’ll never know what possessed
him to do that,” he says. “What possesses
anyone to do that?”
How do you think it felt to find him like
that? Every day I went to work, came
home, checked his mail, went through that dark
house. I was the only one here to take care of it.
They think they’ve got a case about compassion,
but they weren’t harmed. John’s life was ended
and mine was devastated.
I can tell you that he loved the Lord. That’s
contrary to what occurred, but it doesn’t wipe the
other out. John was more than the circumstances
of his death. So I said, I’m not going out like a
ragpicker. I’m putting on a dress and I’m going
to bury him with honor because he is a child of
God. I will not dishonor him in his death. n