Husband Testifies to Placing Bag Over Ill Wife’s Head as She Slept

DETROIT — In tearful testimony, Bertram R. Harper said Wednesday that he had no choice but to place a plastic bag over his wife’s head after she had fallen asleep in a motel room last August because for her to awake would have been “the most devastating thing in the world to her.”

Sobbing, he said, “It was the only thing I could do to carry out her trust in me.”

Harper, 73, is standing trial on murder charges because he assisted his terminally ill wife in committing suicide.

Taking the stand Wednesday in his own defense on the second day of the trial, Harper told how his wife, Virginia, 69, had tried but failed to kill herself in 1989. Subsequently, he said, the couple agreed that she would only attempt it again in the presence of her husband and daughter, Shanda McGrew.

The retired chemical engineer said they went to Michigan from their home in Loomis, Calif., near Sacramento, because they thought that assisting suicide was legal in Michigan.

McGrew was not charged with a crime. Harper was charged with murder after admitting to police that he slipped the plastic bag over his wife’s head when she fell asleep after taking sleeping pills. His wife had initially pulled on the bag, but he had to raise it above her face several times because she became hot and uncomfortable, he said.

After she finally fell into a deep sleep, Harper said he slipped the bag into place himself and secured it with rubber bands she had brought. “I realized that if I didn’t do something to aid her, to assist her, she was going to end up exactly the same way she did a year before,” he said.

In her previous suicide attempt, Virginia Harper fell asleep before she could put the bag on her head, he said. Because of the overdose of sleeping pills she took then, she was unable to walk by herself for three days and could not speak normally for a week, he testified.

Harper’s attorney, Hugh M. Davis, asked Harper if he would help her again, knowing the legal ordeal he would go through. “I had no choice,” Harper said, his voice cracking.

Harper disavowed taped statements he gave to the police immediately after his wife’s death that indicated he played a more direct role in initially placing the bag over his wife’s head.

Wayne County assistant prosecutor Timothy Kenny played the tape for the jury Wednesday. On the tape, Harper said that after Virginia became drowsy, “I got the plastic bag and she, Shanda or I--I . . . can’t tell you really which one of us--one of us lifted her head up so that the plastic bag could be slid under it and Ginger reached up to help . . . us get the bag down over her head.”

In testimony Wednesday he said Virginia initially put the bag on herself, then when she got warm he and Shanda lifted it up from her face.

“When I made that tape I was extremely exhausted,” he said.

Prosecutors contend that had Harper not put the bag in place his wife would not have died that night.

Harper and a family friend, Patricia Young, both testified that Virginia had been deeply affected by the suffering a friend with terminal cancer had gone through. He said she told him she would rather commit suicide than suffer and lose dignity.

After having cancerous lumps removed from her breasts twice, Virginia Harper was told in early August that the cancer had spread to her liver and that she had two months to two years to live, he said. When she awoke on Aug. 17 in excruciating pain, she announced that it was time.