Sanitary pad 'silenced patient'

Jasmin Lill

AN anaesthetist helped lace an abortion doctor's coffee with sedatives because she wanted to keep his temper tantrums under control.

Anaesthetist Dawn Cullen confirmed that in one of his temper tantrums, Dr Peter Bayliss had left a patient tied to a bed with a sanitary pad stuffed in her mouth.

Cullen, Bayliss's former colleague at the Greenslopes Fertility Clinic in Brisbane, was giving evidence at an inquest into the doctor's death.

The inquest reopened this week after Bayliss's housekeeper told the Brisbane coroner's office that the doctor's de facto wife, Claudia McEwan, was rumoured to have spiked his coffee with drugs.

Cullen told the court yesterday that she provided valium to McEwan in a bid to calm the doctor's temper tantrums. "The patients were terrified of him when he got into that state," Cullen said.

Under cross-examination by McEwan's lawyer, Cullen was asked if Bayliss had ever tied patients to beds and put sanitary pads in their mouths to "shut them up".

"I think that happened once," she said.

Cullen said she knew McEwan was putting Prozac in Bayliss's coffee, and remembered giving McEwan an ampoule of valium to use.

"I only agreed when she suggested that he should have it," she said.

Cullen admitted she was concerned about the practise, but said it was necessary to stop Bayliss acting "like a pork chop in a synagogue".

"It was a matter of running the clinic . . . .it would run properly providing he was reasonably calm," she said.

Retired doctor John Ogden said he had known Bayliss for 20 years and occasionally filled in for him at the fertility clinic.

He agreed Bayliss and McEwan slept in separate bedrooms, had separate bathrooms, and led separate lives while sharing a home at New Farm. "In a way, it was an apartheid life to the observer," he said.

Ogden said he had seen Bayliss inject McEwan with pethidine, but had refused to give her injections at Bayliss's request.

"I thought maybe it was becoming a habit," he said.

Ogden said he was "amazed" at the levels of drugs that had been found in Bayliss's body.

"All these are sedatives of considerable magnitude and I can't imagine Peter functioning on this level of drug," he said. "This is a cocktail."

Ogden said Bayliss often walked around the house with a cat draped around his shoulders like a stole, and laced his coffee with HP sauce.

Mary Williams-Howard, who cleaned the couple's house for 10 years, told the inquest how she contacted the coroner's office after an inquest in 1999 found Bayliss's death was accidental.

That inquest found the death was due to a heart condition as a consequence of sleeping pill toxicity, but Williams-Howard said she didn't even know about the inquest until it was over.

"The morning after his death, there wasn't one of us who didn't think something was amiss," she said.

The inquest, before Coroner Michael Halliday, continues today.