Mercy or murder:
Barbara Eckersley was so distressed by her mother Mary’s suffering that she sought to relieve it with sedatives. Last month, the court collectively held its breath when she stood trial for murder.
A daughter’s devotion and the death of her brilliant mother
Scientist and grandmother Mary White was 92 years old when she died in her nursing home bed one cold winter’s night in 2018. From the outside, the talented palaeobotanist’s death appeared to be a natural end to a full and productive life. The curls of her youth had long been white, and her final moments were watched over by her loving daughter, Barbara Eckersley. But when her doctor was asked to sign the death certificate, he refused. Something wasn’t right.
Mary had lived actively on her Falls Forest eco-property on the mid-north coast of NSW until she was well into her 80s, when a heart attack and then a series of small, destructive strokes blunted her brilliant mind and left her paralysed down one side of her body. She was a charming, charismatic scientist and the author of intricate botanical books before vascular dementia robbed her of the power to communicate. By the end, her son-inlaw Richard Eckersley says, she could no longer make herself understood. And she needed to be spoon fed, which Barbara did. As hard as it was to see the mother she loved and admired incapacitated, Barbara came to the Warrigal nursing home in the Southern Highlands almost every day to sit by Mary’s side.
Yet, when Mary White’s heart stopped, her doctor was alarmed. Mary was not an end of life patient. As Mary’s family made preparations for her funeral, Dr Indran Rajendra called the coroner and ordered an autopsy. His instincts were correct. “Toxic to fatal” levels of the barbiturate pentobarbitone, known as ‘green dream’, were detected in Mary’s blood.
Mother-daughter bond
“A tide of green that creeps and spreads” is how Mary White described the advancing ancestral floras that covered Australia’s prehistoric landmass in her first book, The Greening of Gondwana. The book’s publication in 1986, when Mary was 60, marked the start of the Second Act of her life. Mary had a superb scientific mind and a Master’s degree in botany from the University of Cape Town, but for many decades, she had devoted herself to caring for her five children, Peter, David, Zoe, Barbara and Derek.
“I knew, from the age of three, I was going to be a botanist, just like my mum, and I was going to get married and have lots of kids because I saw those as the two roles in life, and I’ve always said if you’ve got such easy ambitions they’re very easily achieved,” Mary said in an ABC interview in 2013.
She was born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1926 to progressive parents who encouraged her scientific curiosity. Mary said fondly of her father: “If you asked him a question, he would stop what he was doing and answer it as if you were a scientist.” When a geologist named Bill White came to Rhodesia to do his air force training, Mary fell in love. The seeds of her later work were planted in 1955 when she and her young family arrived in Fremantle and she was struck by how similar the local wildflowers were to those of her homeland. After Bill died in 1981, she threw herself into educating the world about its natural history, publishing eight books for which she was awarded four honorary doctorates and made a Member of the Order of Australia.
As Mary followed her botanist mother, her own daughter, Barbara, followed in her footsteps. Barbara was an honours student and in 1979 she was awarded a PhD in reproductive physiology. She married a tall, kind man named Richard, and like her mother, Barbara stepped back from her career to raise her kids. Her husband said that although she was highly qualified, “I think she was happiest when she was a stay-athome mum”.
Also like Mary, Barbara involved herself in caring for the environment, and from the late 1980s to the late 1990s, she volunteered with the ACT Wildlife foundation, where she rescued and rehabilitated orphaned and injured animals.
“We would easily have two, three, four baby joeys living with us in artificial pouches,” Richard told the NSW Supreme Court. “Sometimes we would get animals that were badly injured … beyond recovery or healing. The accepted practice was to put them down.” Barbara kept a quantity of pentobarbitone, or ‘green dream’, for the humane destruction of animals.
Mary and Barbara were always close. When Mary embarked on her career as a scientific author, Barbara produced the maps and diagrams for many of
her books. “We worked very well together and enjoyed each other’s company,” Barbara told the court.
“They loved each other. They really cared about each other, those two,” Barbara’s brother Peter said. “They were the closest of us all.”
Barbara said Mary was “a very loving mother”, and as a woman she was charming, charismatic and determined. “Sometimes they irritated each other a bit because Mary could be very judgemental and that upset Barb, but by and large it was a good relationship,” Richard said.
In footage of Mary at Falls Forest, in her 80s, she appears energetic and cheerful. Her words are emphatic and her blue eyes have the twinkle of a woman animated by purpose. She had purchased The Falls Forest Retreat, near Port Macquarie, in 2003 and spent 10 years covenanting it as a biodiversity and rainforest sanctuary. She always wanted to be useful, and was terrified by signs she suspected were mental decline. As her son Peter suggested in court: “Mum probably said something like, ‘Don’t resuscitate me. I don’t want to end up like that’. It was the sort of thing she said regularly. She was pretty forthright. ‘I’m going to live until 100 then I’m going to slip away quietly in my sleep’.”
Tragic decline
In 2009, Mary suffered a heart attack. Barbara helped her through her recovery but said Mary “seemed confused” and her “memory wasn’t great”. By 2014 Mary could no longer live independently, so Richard and Barbara built a granny flat on their property and Mary moved in with them. By this stage, vascular dementia was taking hold, and after Mary suffered a major stroke in early 2016, she had to move into the nearby Warrigal nursing home. Mary’s intellect was such a big part of who she was and her decline “distressed her enormously”, Barbara said.
The NSW Supreme Court heard that in the months that followed, the care of Mary White became a point of bitter contention between the Warrigal staff and her daughter. In the two-and-a-half years Mary was a resident at the care facility, Barbara and Richard Eckersley attended 12 case conferences with the staff, asking — pleading — that they do more to ease Mary’s discomfort.
“We thought too often that she was distressed,” Richard told the NSW Supreme Court in April this year. “We were told, when Mary was admitted, that they would be able to stop her suffering.” But time and time again, she seemed agitated.
Nurses had to put side rails on her bed and crash mats on the floor because Mary would “throw herself off the bed”. Her son Derek recalled that, on one visit, “she looked very uncomfortable to me. Constantly pulling at her blankets and pulling at her skin. It seemed very obvious she was agitated.”
Barbara recorded footage showing her mother in bed, unable to speak and barely able to move except to lift a hand to wipe tears from her eyes. Aside from close family, “visitors just dwindled away. She wasn’t responsive at all,” Richard said. “Sometimes she looked like she wanted to cry out. She had tears in her eyes. I don’t see how you could look at Mary when she was doing this and not see that she was in pain, suffering, in distress of some sort. She was stuck in this awful limbo for two-and-a-half years. It just seemed to drag on. There was no end in sight.”
The stress of seeing her mother suffer was taking a toll on 69-year-old Barbara. She had a history of depression, and her mental health declined “as she observed Warrigal failing to care properly for
“They loved each other. They really cared about each other, those two. They were the closest of us all.”
her mother,” according to her defence barrister, Kieran Ginges. She advocated loudly on behalf of her mother, but when it came to her own mental health, Barbara was silent. She was not the sort of person to talk openly about her struggles. “Several times over the past couple of years I told her I thought she was depressed and [should] get some counselling,” Richard said, but that wasn’t Barbara’s way.
In an email to her siblings on July 26, 2018, she wrote: “I look in the mirror and see her” and “emotionally it’s like watching myself dying slowly”. She was taking antidepressants to treat insomnia. When she called her brother to discuss their mother’s care after the final case conference with the nursing home, she was extremely distressed.
“I found it confronting and quite disturbing,” David said. “Barbara was crying. I can’t remember the exact words but she said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this anymore’.” Barbara became “quite desperate” to move her vulnerable mother to a different facility, but the prospect also awoke fear and guilt. “She was afraid she would die in transit. She felt guilty for moving her in such a state,” Richard said.
The Court heard that in July 2018 Barbara and Richard attended what would be the final case conference at the nursing home, during which they were told that “there wasn’t much we could do for Mary White” in terms of her comfort, and that if Barbara and Richard weren’t satisfied, they could move her to another facility. Feeling “let down, belittled and dismissed”, Barbara contacted her brothers and sister and confessed that she was struggling to cope with managing her mother’s care, and that she thought it would be best if they moved her. The siblings agreed and arrangements were made for her transfer to a new nursing home in Coffs Harbour.
Mary’s last days
On Saturday August 4, 2018, the afternoon before Mary died, Barbara crushed some temazepam tablets and put the powder in a vial. She was detached and felt as if she was watching someone else’s hands turn the sleeping pills into a fine white powder. When she went to see her mother, Mary was crying. Barbara took the stopper from the vial and poured the crushed pills into her mother’s dessert. She had only intended to give Mary some of the sedative — just enough to calm her down – but when she held the vial over her mother’s food and gave it a tap, the whole of its contents “shot out”. She didn’t tell anyone she had given her mother the unauthorised drug.
On Saturday night, Barbara had a nightmare. She fretted about her mother all Sunday, thinking, “What do I do if she’s miserable tonight?” That evening, she and Richard walked the gentle distance from their house to sit with her mother and feed her dinner. Barbara carried a travel bag containing some nighties and a few wall hangings for Mary to take on her journey north. Moving Mary could be risky and Barbara was feeling apprehensive, though on the surface she appeared stoic and calm.
“I would sit on one side of the bed. Barbara was on the other side and she would feed Mary,” Richard said. On that final night, the meal Barbara gave her mother was soup. “Quite quickly Mary started coughing,” Richard recalled. Her breath began “gurgling” and she became floppy and was unresponsive. “Barb rushed off to get the on-call nurse.”
One of the nurses gave Mary a tranquilliser, clonazepam, which seemed to settle her, so Richard and Barbara went home to eat their own dinner. They returned around 9pm to check on Mary, who appeared to be comfortable but, according to a nurse, had “rattly” and “noisy” breathing, which was a sign she was nearing the end of her life. Around 9.30 that evening, Mary White left this world. “Barbara was very upset,”
Richard recalled. The following day, when Richard and Barbara spoke to the funeral parlour about making burial arrangements, they were told that the authorities had taken Mary’s body, and that “the police wanted to speak with us,” Richard said.
Back at home, sitting quietly on their bed, Barbara confessed to her husband that she had poured ‘green dream’ into her elderly mother’s soup. “I thought, oh my God, what have I done?” she said.
“It was the shock of my life,”
Richard said. “She was very distressed. It was an awful time.” Richard wanted her to speak with a lawyer but Barbara was determined to tell the truth to the police as soon as she could.
That Wednesday, Barbara walked into the Southern Highlands Police Station and revealed that she had put the drug in her mother’s food.
“I helped my mother die,” she said.
She later told the court, “I wasn’t thinking of ending her life … I just, while she was in my care I just wanted to relieve her suffering.”
Barbara was taken into custody and charged with the murder of Mary White.
Crime and punishment
Barbara spent two nights behind bars before she was bailed and allowed to go home, but the threat of a lengthy prison sentence hung over her head. Through her lawyers, Barbara wrote to the prosecutors offering to plead
guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter. When the offer was rejected she wrote again, twice. Though she never denied giving her mother the drug, she said it hadn’t been her intention to kill her.
She was ordered to stand trial. Prosecutors accepted that Barbara was a loving, caring and compassionate daughter who could not bear to see her mother continue in pain and suffering. But, the Crown said: “No matter the reason, the intentional and unlawful taking of a life is murder.”
Two psychologists found that she was suffering from a major depressive disorder and ultimately the jury refused to attach the label “murderer” to Barbara Eckersley, instead finding her guilty of manslaughter, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 25 years. There was a chance that Barbara could be ordered to serve a community corrections order — a non-custodial sentence that would include community service and could be applied in exceptional circumstances.
Finally, on a crisp Thursday morning in May, almost three years after her mother’s traumatic death, it fell to Justice Robert Beech-Jones to decide if Barbara would be jailed for taking Mary’s life. None of her brothers, nor her sister, Zoe, seemed angered by Barbara’s actions. In fact, the judge mused, they appeared grateful for everything Barbara had done for
Mary during her life. When given the opportunity to tell the court how they had suffered as a result of their mother’s death, the White siblings all refrained from making a statement that could negatively impact Barbara’s sentencing. Witnesses spoke of Barbara’s good character and integrity.
When Barbara returned to court with her husband to be sentenced for the crime, Justice Beech-Jones emphasised that the issue at hand had nothing to do with the right to die debate.
“Mrs White’s life was ended involuntarily in circumstances where it appears that she was not able to determine whether that is what she wanted. It was the ultimate violation of her human rights for someone else to determine that her life should end,” he said. He spoke of Barbara’s unwavering devotion to her mother but also made clear his judgement should not be taken as a criticism of the care provided by Warrigal.
It took an hour for Justice BeechJones to read his reasons before handing down his decision. Barbara sat in the large wooden dock, surrounded by tall bars. The judge reflected on Barbara’s explanation for what she had done. It was “an act of despair and desperation,” he said.
The members of the White and Eckersley families held their breath in the old Goulburn courtroom. Many had tears in their eyes as the judge said that Barbara had long accepted the criminality of her actions. “Mrs Eckersley had punished and continues to punish herself,” he said.
In the end, the hearing closed as it opened, with an acknowledgement of how distressing it is to watch someone dear to us languish in pain.
“To compound the sad end to Mary White’s remarkable life by imprisoning a daughter who cared for her and loved her would simply not be just,” the judge concluded. The non-custodial sentence was imposed. And on May 20 this year, Barbara Eckersley walked free.