Late last month, Canadian right-to-die activist John Hofsess passed away at age 78 by subjecting himself to euthanasia. Before he died, Hofsess made a startling confession: He took part in illegally helping eight people die.
"I went from advocating for assisted suicides to facilitating them. Let's not mince words: I killed people who wanted to die," Hofsess, a onetime Victoria-based writer, wrote in an article published by Toronto Life after his death.
He also admitted that what he did was a crime, particularly first-degree murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence, or assisted suicide, which carries a maximum 14-year sentence.
"Under current Canadian law, there's no apparent difference between me and killers such as Robert Pickton, Paul Bernardo and Clifford Olson," the right-to-die advocate confessed, as quoted by LifeSite News.
In the article, Hofsess further identified well-known Canadian free verse poet Alfred Wellington Purdy as among the individuals to whom he illegally administered euthanasia. This incident happened on April 21, 2000.
The euthanasia activist said he considered turning himself in and subjecting himself to trial after Purdy's death, but the poet's own wife prevented him from doing so as to avoid the "media frenzy" that will definitely ensue should the police investigate the incident.
Hofsess, the founder of the Right to Die Society of Canada, then just thought of administering euthanasia as an "essential service" for some people.
He only stopped doing his illegal assisted killings when one of his accomplices Evelyn Martens was arrested in 2002 and charged with two counts of assisted suicide. Martens was eventually acquitted two years after her arrest.
"The authorities' awareness made it impossible to revive our assisted death service," Hofsess wrote in his confession. "Since then, many Canadians have suffered greatly, trying to have a meaningful choice in dying."
Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, condemned Hofsess for his posthumous admission, calling the right-to-die advocate "a mass killer."
"This is a man who should have been charged and obviously wasn't charged because no one knew about it," Schadenberg told LifeSite News.
