Widow who took her husband to Dignitas CAN have his £1.8m

A WIDOW who accompanied her husband to the Dignitas suicide clinic should be allowed to inherit his £1.8million fortune, a judge ruled yesterday.

Sarah Ninian, 63, could have been barred from the money because she had assisted in her partner’s death.

But a judge ruled she was ‘wholly motivated by compassion’ for 84-year-old Alex Ninian. Once a ‘ fiercely independentminded’ travel writer, he was diagnosed with an incurable disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, in 2013. He had difficulty swallowing, could not move his eyes, had poor mobility and rarely spoke.

Following a High Court hearing earlier this month the judge, Chief Master Matthew Marsh, ruled yesterday that Mrs Ninian, her husband’s sole beneficiary, should not be prevented from inheriting. The court was told that she had tried to dissuade her husband from taking his own life and had contacted police about the case.

It also heard that Mr Ninian contacted Dignitas without his wife’s knowledge – but she guessed the truth when she spotted that he had visited its website.

He had instructed lawyers to prepare a statement in which he said his wife had been opposed to his decision, had not pressured him to take his life and had accompanied him to Switzerland in November 2017 because he could not travel by himself.

The couple, who lived in London, married in 1983 and had no children.

Mrs Ninian told the judge: ‘A few months before his death, I asked him if he got any enjoyment out of life at all and he gave me the thumbs down.

‘I spent a year trying to get Alex to change his mind but he was solid in his decision that he wanted to be dignified to the end.

‘Alex was my soulmate for 40 years and it is very hard to cope with losing him. Everything that I did for him I did because he asked me to, and

‘I cared too much to refuse’

because I loved and cared for him too much to refuse.’

An inheritance can be blocked where a beneficiary has been involved in an ‘unlawful killing’. But Mrs Ninian applied to the court for this law to be waived.

The judge said Mr Ninian ‘had been assessed by an eminent consultant as having capacity to fulfil his wish to undertake a lawful act’. He said Mrs Ninian ‘ did what many would do for a loved one’.

Mrs Ninian voluntarily contacted police. The Crown Prosecution Service decided it ‘would not be in the public interest’ to bring charges.