Maureen Messent says she has never regretted it

The Birmingham Mail newspaper columnist said she administered a lethal dose of morphine to Eileen O'Sullivan who was dying of lung cancer 30 years ago.

I will go to my death knowing it was the right thing to do. Never for one minute have I regretted it.

She didn't look like Eileen any more.

I just helped her out of life Police probe 'mercy killing'

She looked like a little shrivelled nut and that was the time I knew she had to go.

There wasn't a hope in hell of her getting better. If I hadn't done that, she'd have only lived perhaps a month or six weeks or maybe days. I don't know.

She hardly looked human. I just helped her out of life.

I had thought about it for a long time because I knew that the family around her wouldn't help her. They would be dead against this.

'Only sober relative'

They were very devout Roman Catholics. As much as they loved her, they would believe in God taking her in her own time.

She was an old lady whom I loved dearly. She brought up my brothers and myself. She brought up my mother and various other odd relatives because my whole family have been afflicted by alcohol.

Eileen was probably the only sober one among them.

Occasionally she would open her eyes and murmur 'I love you'

I did the last thing I could for a woman who was more than parents (and) who was absolutely everything to me.

I looked at this woman whom I loved and I knew I just had to help her.

When she got to be very old in her 80s, she'd been in perfect health until that time. She became incurably ill with lung cancer. She was a 40-a-day woman but it was a terribly long and lingering death.

Occasionally she would open her eyes and murmur 'I love you'. She wasn't really with it at all towards the end. She was talking about people long dead. Perhaps she didn't know who I was any more.

Eileen O'Sullivan had a "long and lingering death"

She took the place of my father and mother. I'm pretty sure that had the circumstances been different, had I been the one so mortally ill, she would have done the same thing.

She was a very compassionate woman. She loved animals and she always helped them. She'd have her pets put down when they became too old.

I knew she had a horror of seeing old people suffering. She used to say 'poor old beggar - what a mercy it will be when it comes to the end'. So I knew how she felt.

I would be very, very much against doctors and nurses bumping off people in hospital because they think their time is coming to an end.

Terrible mistakes can be made and also those people have no emotional ties.

If I was very old and very feeble, I wouldn't want my fate decided by young people no matter how skilled doctors they were. You've got to have lived a bit.