O’Rorke ‘convinced’ she would be found guilty

Gail O’Rorke, who was recently found not guilty of helping her friend to end her life, has said that she had been convinced she was going to jail.

The Dublin woman is the first person to be tried for attempting to assist another person’s suicide.

Her employer and close friend, Bernadette Forde, 51, who suffered with a severe form of multiple sclerosis, died on June 5, 2011, after taking a lethal dose of barbiturates ordered from Mexico.

It took two days before the jury returned with a not guilty verdict and, throughout the eight-day trial, Ms O’Rorke feared she would end up in prison. Speaking on RTÉ radio yesterday, Ms O’Rorke, 43, said she had been warned by her legal team that the case was without precedent and there was a “good chance” she could go to prison.

When the jury came back into the court room, she panicked. Her husband, Barry, used his body to shield her from them.

“He just put his back to the court and just stood in front of me,” she recalled.

Ms O’Rourke strained to make out what the the court clerk was going to say when the jury handed her a piece of paper.

“I was absolutely convinced that the word ‘guilty’ was going to come out from her mouth,” she recalled.

On the night Ms Forde took the drugs that ended her life, she had arranged for Ms O’Rorke and her husband to stay in a hotel in Kilkenny.

Ms O’Rorke said she and her husband went out of their way to be seen on as many CCTV cameras as possible in Kilkenny and had rented a video in the hotel so there was record of their presence.

“I did not want people thinking that I had gone to Kilkenny and then driven back to Dublin in the middle to the night to help her,” she said.

“So we went to Kilkenny and sat like two zombies in the hotel. We never got to see the video. We could hardly speak to each other, never mind watch a video. We were protecting Bernie and she was protecting us.”

Ms O’Rorke said a friend of Ms Forde had arranged to sit with her as she took the overdose and then left the apartment as she was close to death.

The next day Ms O’Rorke called a neighbour who had a key to Ms Ford’s apartment and she found that she had died.

Ms O’Rorke cried when she spoke about the unfairness of having to be away from Ms Forde on the night she died. “The one person she wanted to be there with her was me and that could not happen,” she said.