Bill Pavelic - William Bill Pavelic

City News Service

May 15, 1996, Wednesday

Assisted Suicide

BYLINE: DAVID HOUSTON, City News Service

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES

The lawyer for a man being prosecuted for helping his AIDS-ravaged lover com-mit suicide last year vowed today to make his client’s trial O.J. all over again.'’
We’ve uncovered a great deal of evidence of police misconduct in this case,'’ said John Duran, and the ironic thing about it is that some of the major players in the Simpson case are involved.'’
Deputy District Attorney Lydia Bodin worked on the Simpson double murder trial. She is prosecuting Keith Green, but refused to comment on Duran’s remarks.

I think it is highly unethical to talk to the press,'’ she said.
Duran said a key investigator in the Simpson case, Los Angeles police Detec-tive Ron Phillips, and Brad Roberts, who was former Detective Mark Fuhrman’s partner, investigated James Northcutt’s suicide.
The 54-year-old interior designer killed himself, with the help of his lover of eight years, at the couple’s Laurel Canyon home.
Green, 36, reportedly confessed his role to police and said later he did not realize that what he did was illegal. His preliminary hearing is set for June 10.
Bruce Roberts, who also represents Green, said one informant told the attor-neys a total of 20 Los Angeles police officers and detectives investigated the suicide, far more than usually show up at these kind of things.'’
We’ve found that there was a lot of AIDS phobia and homophobia (by the po-lice),'’ he said. Roberts said police referred to Green as the faggot who killed his husband.'’
This is a clear case of gay bashing,'’ he said. There is also evidence that the coroner did not perform all the usual tests in the autopsy, like examining (Northcutt’s) brain and testing his blood for drugs. We believe that is because they were scared of AIDS.'’
In another parallel to the Simpson case, Roberts claims the coroner discarded the contents of Northcutt’s stomach without testing them. The coroner’s office came under fire in the Simpson trial for throwing out Nicole Brown’s stomach contents without examining them.
This is extremely important,'’ Roberts said, because we believe Northcutt may have died from the overdose, and not from carbon monoxide poisoning as the coroner’s report says.'’
Green’s attorneys have hired forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who was highly critical of the coroner’s actions during the Simpson case, as an expert in their case.
Investigator Bill Pavelic, a former detective who uncovered alleged police misconduct in Simpson’s case, also has been tapped to look at officers’ behavior while investigating Northcutt’s suicide.
Duran said when detectives arrived at Northcutt’s house Dec. 4, they ini-tially were sympathetic to Green, hugging him and talking of the awful toll of the AIDS epidemic.
This was entirely directed at having him give up his rights as a citizen and speak to them,'’ Roberts claims.
When Green told detectives he helped Northcutt kill himself, they arrested him on suspicion of murder. Prosecutors later dropped the murder charge, but are pursuing the case under a 100-year-old state statute that bans assisted suicides. The obscure law reportedly has never been invoked by police before.
Last month, defense attorneys failed to get West Los Angeles Municipal Court Judge Linda Lefkowitz to dismiss the case. The lawyers had cited two recent federal appeals court decisions that called bans on assisted suicide unconstitutional.
Green has refused to talk about his case publicly. But his attorneys say that after watching his lover make unsuccessful attempts to kill himself earlier in 1995, Green agreed to help Northcutt.
According to his lawyers:
Green watched as Northcutt took scores of barbiturates and sedatives, then helped him tape a swimming pool hose from the exhaust pipe of his BMW to the car’s rear window, and later reinserted the hose after it fell out of the window.
Northcutt’s doctors had told him he had about five months to live, but had refused the designer’s request to help him end his life, according to Green’s lawyers.
The prosecution contends Green has not worked for years and stands to inherit most of Northcutt’s $2 million estate, which raises suspicion about his role in the suicide.

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