NZ professor accused in fourth death
Sean Davison’s wife reveals her husband is expected to face another murder charge in South Africa. In an exclusive interview, she tells Jacques Steenkamp he was compelled to break the law out of compassion.
Standing in the busy parking lot of a petrol station close to the Cape Town International Airport, a gaunt Sean Davison waits to be reunited with his family. With the smell of exhaust fumes and sea salt hanging in the air, and the iconic Table Mountain towering over the city in the distance, Davison paces excitedly.
It’s been three months since he saw his 45-yearold wife Raine Pan and their three children, Flynn, 9, Finnian, 8, and Fia, 4. They are flying into Cape Town this week from Australia, via Singapore and Johannesburg.
But he is not allowed within 500 metres of the airport: he is constrained by strict bail conditions linked to his two murder charges. So a friend is meeting his family at the airport, and bringing them to the service station. Davison would prefer to be picking them up himself – but it just isn’t worth the risk of getting caught.
Davison is also constrained from speaking to media, as he awaits trial. But in an exclusive interview with the Sunday Star-Times, Pan reveals her husband is expected to face a third murder charge in South Africa, which will link him to a total of four deaths.
In September, Auckland-born Davison was charged with the premeditated 2014 murder of 53-year-old doctor Anrich Burger, who was a quadriplegic. Davison acknowledges he was with his friend in his Waterfront hotel room as he died, but remains adamant it was not a crime. ‘‘Dr Burger committed suicide. He wrote his own prescription; he collected it, he arranged for the hotel. I was at the end with him, but he clearly expressed his wish to die.’’
Then two weeks ago, he was charged with the July 2015 murder of Justin Varian, who had motor neuron disease. He is accused of ‘‘placing a bag over the deceased’s head and administering helium with the intent of helium deoxygenation and/or asphyxiation’’.
Now South African police are gathering evidence for a third murder charge, according to Pan, which she expects he’ll be charged with when he returns to the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court on January 29.
Back at the petrol station, the family’s reunion is bittersweet. The children are over the moon at being reunited with their father. ‘‘The kids really missed papa so much,’’ Pan says.
What they are too young to be told is that their papa faces between 15 and 25 years in a South African prison, for premeditated murder.
Pan says the children have been through enough. All that matters now is to remain positive for her husband’s physical and mental wellbeing.
She says they met at ballroom and Latin dance classes in Cape Town in 1999. She, a student; he a scientist, working for the University of Western Cape.
They married in 2012. But escalating levels of violent crime in an already volatile country made the couple look elsewhere to raise their children. They settled on Australia and moved to the coastal city of Wollongong, south of Sydney, a year ago.
Pan says their decision to emigrate came shortly after armed thugs held knives to Flynn and Finnian’s throats while tramping with their dad on Signal Hill. ‘‘Our children have been exposed to a lot of violent crime. Sean was very scared and just dropped everything. The men took his bags and camera and ran away. Our kids were very traumatised.’’
The moment they touched down in Australia felt like they had won their freedom back. But the family’s happiness was shortlived.
Davison, who founded the Dignity South Africa lobby group to support euthanasia after his mother’s death in 2006, travelled back to Cape Town in September to attend the World Federation of right-to-die societies’ biennial conference. He was arrested as he was about to return to his family in Australia.
Pan says news of the arrest came out of the blue when she received a text message from Davison. ‘‘I was stunned and in shock. I couldn’t believe it.’’
She started crying the next day and couldn’t stop for two weeks.
In the end, it was books on Buddhism that got her through one of the darkest periods of her life.
Davison was released on bail, but the South African police confiscated both his South Africa and New Zealand passports, and he isn’t allowed to leave the Western Cape province, meaning he couldn’t return to Pan and his three children.
It also meant Pan had to make the tough decision between returning to South Africa immediately or hanging on until the end of the school year. She chose the latter so the children would have a 2018 school report and be eligible to advance to the next school grade in South Africa.
This wasn’t the first time that the family had been separated. When Davison was sentenced in the High Court at Dunedin to five months’ home detention for counselling and procuring attempted suicide for his mother, Patricia Davison, he was stuck in New Zealand and she in South Africa.
Pan says this ordeal has made them both realise how grateful they should be as a family. She says they won’t ever be separated again.
She and her husband have shared a few laughs since her return to their home in the suburb of Pinelands, but it’s clear that he is under a lot of stress.
‘‘Sean’s state of mind is worse than mine,’’ she says. ‘‘He is very sad and fearful of being separated from his children. We talk and laugh, but the feeling of fear never goes away.’’
Her biggest fear is Davison going to jail. She doesn’t know how they’ll cope because she says she relies on him mentally and financially.
Davison’s sister, Jo Bennett, has offered to take care of Pan and the children, all of whom are New Zealand citizens, if he goes to prison.
But Pan wants none of that. She says if their nightmare comes true they will remain in Cape Town so they can visit Davison.
The mother-of-three remains adamant her husband did not commit the crime of murder. Davison helped the four die, she says, but ‘‘if what he did is considered a crime it was a crime of compassion’’.
‘‘I think any humane person would have done what my husband did, in the same situation, if they had the courage. He was compelled to break the law to help ease the suffering of others and was driven by compassion.’’
Pan is also very worried about the lack of jury trials in South Africa. It’s just one judge who determines the outcome of a court case and she fears that if this judge has deep religious convictions against euthanasia, he will be prejudiced.
After her mother was paralysed following a stroke last year in China, Pan says she understands even more what Davison has done to help others.
Meanwhile, Davison’s legal team, who are working pro bono, will try to postpone his case until the outcome of another euthanasia case is known. That case seeks to challenge the laws that criminalises assisted deaths in the South African courts.
When all is said and done, Pan admits her husband regrets his decisions. She says he won’t ever try to help anyone ever again – not like this.
‘‘He had nothing to gain from doing this, but a lot to lose,’’ she says.
‘‘He is now very sad he put the suffering of strangers ahead of the suffering he has brought the family. I now see compassion can be a dangerous thing.’’
He was compelled to break the law to help ease the suffering of others and was driven by compassion. Raine Pan
* The Davison family intends to return to live in New Zealand as soon as Sean Davison is allowed to leave.