A mother who died in a Swiss euthanasia clinic without telling her family spent her final hours confiding in a TikTok friend she had never met about the suffering she had kept hidden from her own children.
Maureen Slough, 58, of County Cavan, Ireland, sent a series of haunting messages from inside the controversial Pegasos facility in Basel, where she had quietly paid £13,000 to end her life.
In them, she spoke of ‘living in hell’ for the past year, waking up each day ‘crying, shaking’, and insisting she would not ‘allow a dog to suffer’ the way she had.
Her daughter Megan said she was devastated to learn the news by text – and horrified when her mother’s remains arrived in a plain brown pot with a scuffed gold label.
When Ms Slough flew to Switzerland on July 8, her family believed she was travelling to Lithuania with a friend. Two days later she died at Pegasos, listening to Elvis Presley’s gospel music.
On the morning of her death she told her online confidant: ‘I’m not myself. I feel like I’ve been living in hell for the last year and it’s not good. I wake up crying, shaking, everything, because I’m in fear all the time, and that’s not the way I want to live.’
‘God wouldn’t want me dying alone,’ she added. ‘But I don’t think God wants people to be suffering until the end like f**king dogs. I wouldn’t even allow my dog to suffer, the way I’ve been allowed to.’
Days earlier, she had admitted to the same friend that she was in ‘two minds’ about going through with the procedure and feared going to ‘hell’.
Maureen Slough, a 58-year-old mother from Cavan who took her own life at the Pegasos clinic, with her daughter Megan
Ms Slough travelled alone to Switzerland and paid 15,000 euros (£13,000) to the Pegasos Swiss Association to facilitate her death two days later
When Ms Slough flew to Switzerland on July 8, her family believed she was travelling to Lithuania with a friend
‘I know I’m loved by a lot of people. I’m not going to say I agree with suicide – but assisted suicide maybe, when people are really suffering.
‘I’m in two minds at the moment, I’m going to hurt a lot of people and I don’t like doing that. But I can’t see a way out.’
Megan, who gave birth to her second child just weeks before her mother’s death, said the family had no prior warning from Pegasos, which she claims relied on forged paperwork to verify relatives were aware of the procedure.
The clinic said it received a letter from Megan confirming she knew of her mother’s decision, along with a follow-up email, but the family believe Ms Slough forged both.
Her online confidant questioned whether she had the mental capacity to make such a decision, telling the Daily Mail: ‘I don’t think Maureen was sound enough of mind to make the decision she did and I don’t think the corporation she paid a large sum of money to kill her [checked] the authenticity of her daughter’s letter and email [thoroughly enough].’
Ms Slough’s family were also horrified by the way her ashes were returned by post. ‘She was just in the back of a van somewhere, and I was following a tracking number like she was a parcel,’ a grief-stricken Megan told the Irish Independent.
Swiss law requires anyone seeking assisted death to be of sound mind, though they do not need to be terminally ill or have a medical condition. Pegasos says it tests decision-making capacity with extensive psychiatric assessments before approving any procedure.
But the non-profit, run by activist Ruedi Habegger, has come under fire for its practices. In 2023 the family of teacher Alastair Hamilton, 47, condemned the clinic after he died there without their knowledge, despite having no diagnosed illness.
Chemistry teacher Alastair Hamilton told his parents he was visiting a friend in Paris when instead he was flying to Basel, Switzerland to end his life by lethal injection
Alastair’s distraught mother Judith Hamilton warned that other families should be aware of the ‘cowboy clinic’ called Pegasos
Anne Canning, 51, from Wales, travelled to the Pegasos clinic in the Swiss city of Basel in January to end her life without informing her family
Pegasos vowed to begin contacting relatives before future procedures, but in January this year 51-year-old British mother Anne Canning – who was not terminally ill and was said to be grieving her son – also died there without her family being told.
As Pegasos faced mounting scrutiny, Ms Slough was retreating into an online world she increasingly saw as her safe space. On TikTok she struck up a friendship with a 43-year-old delivery driver from Devon after bonding over their shared Catholic faith.
Though they never met in person, they exchanged religious gifts, prayed together on livestreams and spoke long into the night. Over time she confided in him about the abuse and losses that had scarred her life – memories she found too painful to share in her everyday life.
She said she was abducted by her mother aged three and taken from England to Ireland without her father knowing – something she only discovered much later. In her final months she remained tormented by having blamed him for abandoning her and bitterly regretted not being at his bedside when he died.
As a child in Dublin, she claimed she ran away after being sexually abused by a friend of her mother. When the authorities found her, she said she was given a choice: either return home or be placed in one of the country’s notorious Magdalene Laundries where women worked without pay and suffered mistreatment from the governing nuns.
About her five years spent in Dublin’s An Grianán Training Centre, Ms Slough said: ‘Do you think it was proper of a girl, my age, to be walking down the laundry, scrubbing f**king clothes and floors?
‘No freedom, bars on the windows, being forced to pray [and] bring slop buckets down to the f**king basement yard, that all went to the f**king pigs.’
Describing the nuns who ran the place, she said: ‘We were just scum to them.’
Some of the final messages Ms Slough’s friend sent her before her death at Pegasos clinic in Switzerland
Ms Slough told her friend about her experience at Dublin’s An Grianán Training Centre, a Catholic-run institution which had once been part of one of Ireland’s notorious Magdalene Laundries
Messages sent by Ms Slough on July 5, just a few days before she travelled to Basel to die
This is not the first time the non-profit assisted dying clinic Pegasos in Switzerland has attracted controversy
The home attended by Ms Slough had been part of High Park Magdalene Laundry, where for more than a century young women had lived and worked without pay. The building is now the home of a housing association’s offices
As she grew older, her life was marked by further tragedy, including the loss of her three siblings – Hazel, Wendy and Fred – for whom she kept an altar at home. She also struggled with depression, anxiety and allegedly fibromyalgia – a chronic condition that left her in constant pain and exhaustion.
In her final year she became convinced she had developed septic shock, but said she was ‘fobbed off’ by doctors and suffered ‘medical negligence’ from professionals who refused to take her symptoms seriously or provide proper pain relief.
A year ago, she attempted suicide by overdosing after what she described as the ‘worst pain’ in her back.
Following Ms Slough’s death, the clinic said it has tightened its rules once again. It will no longer accept unaccompanied applicants with living relatives unless their next of kin provide passport copies and take part in a video call with staff.
A Pegasos spokesperson told the Daily Mail: ‘We take great issue with any allegations that we are acting without regulation or unethically. Pegasos has always complied and will continue to comply with Swiss law without exception.
‘We ask for medical or psychiatric reports from independent specialists and applicants are required to speak to a doctor or psychiatrist during the process. These confidential conversations determine whether voluntary assisted death is the only and last option – and some people reconsider.
‘It is standard procedure for applicants to be interviewed again by a doctor the day before the death. Only if the doctor confirms they are capable of judgement can the procedure take place.’
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