Death Potion No. 9

THE FACE WAS FAMILIAR. VIRGINIA SKEENS, A resident of a rural section of Wayne County, Michigan, watched as a man she had seen on the evening news unloaded his paraphernalia at the home of her neighbor Jack Miller, 53, a tree trimmer who suffered from terminal bone cancer. "I knew," she later told reporters, "somebody was going to die."

And someone did. Facing a March 30 state deadline specifically enacted to end his practice of medically assisting suicides, Dr. Jack Kevorkian and two helpers assembled the machinery that allowed Miller to do himself in. But this ninth "medicide" since 1990 offered...