Two brilliant university students were found dead together in a hotel room after apparently rigging up a laptop to deliver lethal injections in what is thought to have been a suicide pact.
Friends Robert Miller, 20, and 19-year-old James Robertson – both described as highly intelligent – were found slumped in chairs.
Their bodies were discovered facing each other at the £65-a-night Ramada Jarvis Hotel in Ayr – 80 miles from where they were both studying for joint maths and physics degrees at Edinburgh University.
Staff entered the room after becoming concerned that the young men hadn’t checked out.
The tragedy has raised fears the pair were influenced by Australian doctor Philip Nitschke, dubbed Dr Death, inventor of the so-called ‘Deliverance Machine’.
Pro-euthanasia campaigner Dr Nitschke’s device involved a computer connected to a syringe driver which could deliver a lethal dose of medication at the touch of a button. It killed four terminally ill Australians before being outlawed in 1997.
8 comments:
I am from Edinburgh and many of my friends go to the university, im really upset to hear this story.
Suicide like this is a tragedy, there's no doubt about it. But what are these "fears" about the possible connection to this Deliverance Machine? Surely people don't actually think these young men would still be alive if they only had had the old fashioned methods to choose from.
I agree.
The more important issue here seems to be where they got the lethal substance.
As for as the suicide by laptop concerns- If you have a full technical Leco-set at your disposal, you can make an even far more lethal machine without the need for a laptop.
If you have some rope and a high strong place to hang it, you don't even need any machine.
If you have a highway or a railway or a high cliff near you, you don't even need all the technical stuff...
They were bright young men with an internet access. I doubt it's that hard to make a lethal poison from common ingredients, the challenge is probably more whether you die slowly and horribly or not. There are probably many substances in regular households that are quite deadly taken intravenously.
Banning things with which you could possibly kill yourself is truly a useless way of preventing suicide.
Were they terminally ill? Doesn't sound like it.
They would've found a way, with or without their laptop.
If tehy were running Windows XP they might still be alive today!
If they were connected to the Internet, it may not have been suicide.
Now that's a disturbing thought.
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