TOXIC RELATIONSHIP
Scientist suspected of using her own drugs to poison her partner Stephen Lewis trusted and cared about his partner, Dr Shelagh Dawson. It never occurred to him that she could be secretly trying to kill him. Martin van Beynen reports.
Builder Stephen Lewis rarely took a day off sick, but on July 14, 2017, he felt drunk, hazy and unsteady on his feet.
The next day the then 48-yearold couldn’t stand, falling over if he tried to. He lay in bed, increasingly worried as his ability to move seemed to be disappearing.
His partner, Shelagh Dawson, 59, a retired epidemiologist who had been a researcher at the Otago University School of Medicine in Christchurch, rang 111.
In Christchurch Hospital Lewis started having hallucinations and could not sit upright in bed. He was admitted about 7.30pm and treated as if he had a brainstem inflammation and given antibiotics. Tests showed he had a campylobacter infection, but that didn’t explain his symptoms.
He improved markedly over the next 48 hours and was discharged six days later.
On Saturday, July 22, he was at home resting. Then his memory went blank. The blank continued into Sunday and Monday. All he knows for sure is that he was brought to hospital by an ambulance after Dawson apparently found him naked on the floor of their bedroom.
Arriving unconscious, he was put in an induced coma and rushed to intensive care.
On Wednesday he was moved to a ward where he stayed for the next nine days until discharge. He wasn’t home long. After three days he sickened and was readmitted to Christchurch Hospital. He stayed another four days, with doctors still mystified about what exactly ailed him.
He didn’t return home. In a phone call, Dawson had told him she didn’t want him back and she would put his belongings and tools in a container on the property. With nowhere to go, Lewis went to a hotel.
Suspicions
Lewis first met Dawson in 2012 when he built some wardrobes in her house in Papanui. She had lost her husband, Graham, who died after a colonoscopy went wrong, in 2009.
They kept in touch and in 2015 began a relationship. Within a few months he moved into her Richmond home and the cohabitation was, as far as Lewis was concerned, reasonably happy.
Dawson, despite her qualifications, essentially kept house while Lewis went to work as a self-employed bathroom renovator. In the past he had managed his parents’ dairy farm in Golden Bay and worked on fishing boats in New Zealand and overseas. Trained in engineering, he had picked up a wide variety of skills over the years.
Dawson was born in Ayrshire, Scotland, trained as a nurse, and worked hard over many years to get her doctorate in medical science. She moved to New Zealand in 2003 with her husband, a firefighter, and their two youngest children.
By the time he was discharged from hospital for the last time, Lewis strongly suspected Dawson was responsible for his sorry state.
Although he had no proof and was still confused about what had happened, he was pretty sure Dawson had tried to kill him by poisoning him.
Dawson, something of a hypochondriac who was on about 18 different medications prescribed for chronic pain and depression, had access to a plethora of drugs.
Lewis’ suspicions arose when he first became ill. Dawson had taken away his phone and seemed in no hurry to call a doctor. She had a shower and did some
housework before calling 111.
‘‘I just had this gut feeling something wasn’t right and I told the ambulance crew to get me out of here. When the ambulance was backing up into the hospital they (the paramedics) asked me ‘what’s going on?’ I said I was just having a bad day. I was starting to dismiss my previous suspicions.
‘‘You don’t believe someone is trying to do you harm and you don’t understand what’s going on, but there was a gut feeling something wasn’t right.’’
A second go
The suspicions deepened after the second bout of illness.
TURN TO PAGE B3