‘By the Time Your Read This, I'll Be Dead’ by John Hofsess

In this piece, which won a Canadian Magazine Award in 2017, filmmaker, journalist, and activist John Hofsess reveals that he illegally assisted in the suicides of eight people between 1999 and 2001. He describes founding the Right to Die Society of Canada in 1992 and becoming involved that same year in helping Sue Rodriguez challenge Section 241(b) of the Criminal Code, which prohibited assisted suicide—Rodriguez was dying of ALS and wanted the right to end her life legally. Hofsess frames the death of his friend the Québécois filmmaker Claude Jutra as his motivation for actively helping people have assisted deaths in Canada. Jutra took his own life after being diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Hofsess describes feeling immensely guilty because Jutra had asked for his help to end his life, and he had been unable to offer it. In 1999, he writes “following Jack Kevorkian’s example” he established “an underground assisted death service” with the help of Evelyn Martens. The centre of the piece is Hofsess’ description of how he helped Al Purdy, a renowned Canadian poet who at 81 was dying of lung cancer, end his life in 2000. Through this story, Hofsess paints assisted dying in an extremely positive light, as a way of offering the terminally ill control over their final moments. Hofsess affirms in his piece that he “was willing to stand trial for [Purdy’s] death if such a trial might lead to law reform.” In Hofsess’ telling, however, they decided to make Purdy’s death look like a natural one because Hofsess would be unable to “help anyone else,” if he were jailed. Hofsess helped Purdy die using a combination of Rohypnol and helium. This was a method he had developed with Gordon Smith. “No questions were raised,” Hofsess reports, by all accounts Purdy had “died in his sleep.” In 2002, however, Hofsess was forced to shut down his assisted suicide operation when Martens was arrested in connection with the deaths of two women. Hofsess claims that these were assisted suicides of which he was unaware. In closing, Hofsess explains that he felt it was finally time to reveal the truth about Purdy’s death despite the risk of being “arrested and charged with crimes ranging from assisted suicide to first-degree murder” for his revelations. He furthermore states that he has decided to end his own life in Switzerland due to his failing health. Finally, he says he is working “every day that [he] is able to write” on a forthcoming e-book to be published by Canadian Humanist Publications.

‘By the Time you Read this I’ll be Dead’ was published in 2016 by the magazine ‘Toronto Life’ as the Canadian government was preparing to legalize assisted dying, and after Hofsess’ death by assisted suicide in Switzerland through the organization Eternal Spirit. In this tell-all piece, Hofsess casts himself as both saviour and martyr—a portrayal which is reinforced by the documentary about his final days which was made by the ‘Humanist Perspectives’ film crew he invited to accompany him to Switzerland. In a 2022 article for the Literary Review of Canada, however, journalist Sandra Martin paints a less flattering portrait of Hofsess, who attempted to foil the publication of her own book on assisted dying in Canada for which she had hoped to interview Hofsess. Hofsess claimed that Martin was pressuring him to kill himself so that she could profit off his story. Martin defends herself in her article, insisting Hofsess’ claims were false, and describing what she observed of his need for attention and his tendency to turn on others for self-serving reasons in their email exchanges. She highlights how Hofsess omitted that although he was instrumental in Rodriguez’s campaign, she would cut ties with him in 1993 after he twice issued statements on her behalf to the press without her consent. Martin portrays Hofsess as manipulative and untrustworthy. She posits that his participation in the assisted dying movement was motived by a desire for fame more than benevolence. She highlights his tendencies to exaggerate and to break promises, and his proclivity for spectacle, depicting him as eager to broadcast his death—by Martin’s account, Hofsess promised the film rights to his story to more than one production company. Hofsess is a curious figure in the history of Canada’s right to die movement, whose full account of his life is not available because his book was never published. He may have helped eight people to painlessly end their lives on their own terms, albeit illegally, but his motivations for doing so can’t be known.