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 some new twists: Miller was the first male to die and the first outside Kevorkian's former home territory of Oakland County. The message, said his attorney, was that Kevorkian would not only defy the impending Michigan ban but continue to expand his practice throughout the state to include anyone, anywhere, anytime.