Inside the Davison household in the countryside of Dorset, there’s a prominent world map displayed on the wall. Professor Sean Davison, his wife Raine, and their three children, aged 15, 14, and 11, are well-traveled.

He seems puzzled when I suggest the possibility of an identical map, perhaps adorned with pins and notes on a cork board, lurking within a nearby police station, similar to scenes often depicted in TV dramas featuring detectives on the trail of a suspect.

This is a man, after- all, who could be implicated, to some degree or other, in the deaths of no fewer than 29 people, spanning the globe.

Davison considers the idea. It seems mad to him.

“The last time I spoke with the police was in June. They mentioned the prolonged nature of the investigation due to its international intricacies. Investigations into the deaths of those 29 individuals, originating from various parts of the globe, are underway. Just five were from the UK.”

He pauses, aware of how this sounds. ‘That makes it sound like an international manhunt, doesn’t it? It’s insane.’

Davison’s situation is notable in that he isn’t concealing anything from anyone. His activities, openly conducted at the Pegasos Clinic in Switzerland, involve aiding suicides. Regardless of where one stands in the assisted dying debate, this openness is remarkable.

It has been 14 months since Davison, now 63, faced arrest on charges of assisting suicides at the clinic. Allegedly helping 29 individuals to end their lives, which, while not illegal in Switzerland, is a criminal act in the UK.

Very few people are prosecuted (there have only been five successful prosecutions in the UK) and none of the cases were quite like this. If his case goes to court, it will make history.

The fact that it is playing out as the Assisted Dying Bill – which would change the law in UK, legalising assisted dying for terminally ill, mentally competent adults with a prognosis of six months or less – makes its way through Parliament, makes his story timely. Perhaps terrifying, too.

Davison’s modus operandi? For a man who knows that the maximum sentence for such a crime is 14 years in prison, he’s extraordinarily open.

Working for a campaigning organisation called Exit International, he acted as a sort of travel agent, arranging not holidays, but deaths, at Pegasos.

The clinic, which is based in Basel, differs from its more famous rival, Dignitas, in that it does not require a terminal diagnosis, or for applicants to be suffering extreme pain or living with an ‘unendurable disability’ to take them on.

The only requirement for ending your life at Pegasos is that you must be an adult, mentally capable of making that decision and not suffering from depression.

And Davison’s role? This bookish academic, with a gentle manner, would meet people – mostly terminally ill, with little time left, but, as we will discover, not always – and listen as they poured their hearts out to him, over tea and scones.

He’d then help them with the arrangements to Switzerland, meeting them at the airport, sometimes travelling on the plane with them (with their portion of the ticket only being one-way).

He would then sit with them in the clinic and hold their hand as they slipped away.

He makes his modern-day Ferryman role sound impossibly poignant, almost romantic. Also – somewhat surprisingly – often fun.

‘Oh, there was often champagne involved,’ he tells me, in an astonishingly candid interview.

‘The happiest ones were when the individual had family: children, grandchildren, all generations, and there would be a celebratory atmosphere.

‘The saddest ones were when they had no one there, because they were so afraid that a family member would be risking arrest.’

As indeed he was. His account of his arrest, in July 2024, also sounds like something from a TV drama.

Ten police officers arrived at this home at 7.30am and ‘ripped the place to pieces’, gathering evidence.

‘The children were getting ready for school,’ he remembers. ‘I was still in my pyjamas. An officer came with me while I got dressed, brushed my teeth. When they took me away, I gave my daughter a hug.

‘She was in tears. I said, “It’s nothing to worry about. I’ve done nothing wrong”.’

Davison was held in a cell overnight, before he was released on bail.

That was 15 months ago, and he’s still in limbo. No charges have been brought – yet – but he is fully aware they might be.

He’s been here before, you see. He’s worked as a euthanasia campaigner for nearly 20 years now, a ‘career’ that has seen him prosecuted and convicted (i)twice(i) for helping others to die.

He first ‘stepped on this path’, as he puts it, in 2006 when he was working in South Africa, and returned to his native New Zealand to look after his 85-year-old mother, Pat, a retired GP, who was terminally ill with cancer.

As her condition deteriorated, she’d begged him to smother her with a pillow, and was trying to starve herself to death.

So her son crushed up her morphine tablets, dissolved them in water and held the glass to her mouth.

Any loving son would have done the same, he says. He has absolutely no regrets.

Not everyone saw it that way, however. Sean’s own sister shopped him to the police, creating an enormous rift in the family. He is at peace with that, too.

‘In every family there is one person who opposes it, but the important thing is the wishes of the person who wants to die,’ is all he wants to say on the matter.

His conviction for assisting a suicide in 2011 made headlines in both New Zealand and South Africa. After serving his sentence of five months’ home detention he returned to Cape Town, where others who were desperate to die began to contact him for advice and help.

And so, in 2019, Davison stood trial in South Africa, accused of helping three men to die – again administering the required medication himself. Davison stood trial in South Africa, accused of helping three men to die – once more, administering the morphine himself.

Fate (and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a fellow assisted dying supporter) kept him out of prison. After a plea-bargain, he swerved a life-sentence, being punished only with house arrest.

Most would have attempted to rebuild their bonafide careers after this, keeping out of controversy, but when Davison returned to New Zealand he was struck off the Medical Science Council.

In 2022, he came to the UK (both his parents were British) where he was thrown a career lifeline in the form of a salaried contract from Exit International.

It was not, he stresses, a job that paid on a commission basis, but involved campaigning and also very personal contact with clients.

It was this side he says, that became more and more important to him.

Although he clearly knew he was tiptoeing in difficult areas of the law, Davison insists he always thought he was operating ‘on the right side of it’. His work in Britain, he says, was also ‘quite different’ to the previous cases.

‘I wasn’t actively involved in helping someone to die,’ he says. ‘I was assisting them to get to Switzerland. I didn’t think for a moment I was breaking the law.

What did he actually do? He says his contact with each family was different, but there were clearly individuals who stand out.

He talks movingly about one man with a fast-progressing degenerative disease.

‘I had a Zoom call with him and his wife. They sat on the sofa holding hands. They’d been married for 50 years.

‘He wanted me to go with him. I begged his wife to go too, but he was a lawyer, and said he couldn’t take the risk that she’d be arrested.’

She didn’t go and that man died holding Sean’s hand.

‘I took him to Pegasos, a place in the hills with a view of the valleys. It’s a beautiful place to die.

‘It was so so sad. He was holding my hand, but it wasn’t the same as holding the hand of your wife of 50 years.’

He says he was due to fly to Switzerland with another British woman immediately after his arrest. This woman was 95, but not terminally ill.

She fell into the category of ‘old age rational suicides’. He talks about this as if it’s perfectly common, and perfectly normal, describing how the old lady threw a ‘wonderful farewell party with all her family’.

‘But as soon as I was arrested, the police went to her house saying, “We are going to stop this. We’re sending social welfare people to help you to live.”’

In the end, she sneaked off to Heathrow and died at Pegasos anyway – but alone.

Here, he says, the law is ‘simply wrong’: ‘It doesn’t make sense. It’s cruel. It’s inhumane.’

Davison’s fate won’t come down to what he thinks is morally right, however. It will come down to the law.

Still he insists: ‘I did nothing wrong. I did nothing morally wrong. I am not a murderer. I am not a criminal.’

The unspoken word ‘yet’ hangs heavily in the air.

In the past, when he was facing prison abroad, Davison’s wife said that her children ‘don’t need a martyr, they need a father’. She isn’t at home today (she’s in her native China, visiting her own parents), but he says the whole family are ‘fully supportive’.

The charges he is being investigated over date from 2023 until his arrest last year, and are believed to include both the lawyer and the elderly lady who managed to get herself to Switzerland.

Since his arrest, however, another case has come to light which has shifted the narrative alarmingly.

In the summer of 2023, British chemistry teacher Alastair Hamilton, who was just 47, flew to Pegasos to die.

Davison was not with him, did not hold his hand, but he had been in touch with him for some weeks beforehand, and acted ‘as a friend’.

Yet after his death, Alastair’s shocked and grieving family went public, saying they didn’t know about his plans. Although aware he had been ill, his family said they weren’t aware of any specific diagnosis. Nor did they know he was in Switzerland; he’d told them he was going to Paris on holiday.

They only discovered the terrible truth when the police and Interpol investigated him as a missing person.

And only found out about his trip to Pegasus, when an analysis of his bank transactions revealed four payments to the company, totalling £10,310.

Branding the clinic bosses ‘cowboys’, the Hamilton family asked the UK police to include their son’s death in any investigation of Davison.

Again he feels that he did nothing wrong in his dealings with Hamilton, who got in touch with him several months before his death and only after he’d had the official ‘green light’ from Pegasos.

They’d chatted regularly on the phone.

‘We both had science backgrounds. We both loved cricket. He was great company.’

He was also, insists Davison, a man determined to die.

He ‘categorically’ rejects the idea that he ‘encouraged his suicide’ in any way.

‘I encouraged him to live, to pause and reflect – but it wasn’t for me to keep discouraging him, particularly towards the end. He wanted a friend he could confide in. It seemed I was the only person he could do that with.’

He also insists that he had no idea Hamilton had lied to his family about going to Paris.

‘I was shocked. He gave the impression that his family knew. Pegasos documented the fact that he had told his family.’

What if he’d discovered earlier that he hadn’t?

‘I would have intervened, yes, in that I would have tried to convince him to tell his family. I would probably have reached out to them myself.’

Alastair’s family have described how he’d had been battling with low moods since 2022, when he began losing weight and feeling increasingly tired. Despite numerous tests, doctors could not establish what was wrong with him.

‘The bottom line is that he had decided to take his life,’ says Davison. ‘The existence of Pegasos, or even of Switzerland, isn’t the issue here. If he wasn’t going to Switzerland he was going to end his life by his own means. He had every intention of ending his life, regardless of Pegasos, regardless of my friendship.’

But this was a young man, who was nowhere near the end of his life. This scenario is a million miles from hastening your mother’s inevitable end. Did Davison not feel out of his depth, unqualified to be involved here, even in an advisory capacity?

‘What qualification do you need to be a friend?’ he replies, quietly.

At the same time there is an acknowledgement from him that that Hamilton’s death crossed a line, morally, if not legally.

‘I have learned so much from Alastair’s case. When I saw the grieving of the family…

‘If my son had done the same thing, it would have destroyed me for life, absolutely, and I understand how they felt. Equally, it would destroy me if I found him hanging in his bedroom, having done it himself. At least going to Pegasos, I would be assured he had had a peaceful death, and I would have heard he was happy and smiling at the end.’

Since the furore over Hamilton’s death, Pegasos have changed their rules and insist that families are told, and a video provided as proof.

The decision of whether to charge Davison is likely to involve issues such as whether he advertised his services (no, he says) and whether money changed hands: yes. He was paid.

The families involved paid for his flights too. And expenses? ‘No. Things like food I would have had to pay for anyway. It would never have occurred to me to expect families to pay.’

He is heading off to do the school run when we finish talking. I ask if he thinks his mother would be proud of him.

‘She’d be horrified that I was arrested but proud of me for standing up for the right of people to have the dignified death they want, which is what she wanted.’

What a terrible burden she placed on him, though. His relationship with his sister never recovered, and they remain estranged.

There is something rather sad about his admission that he would probably ‘never have even a moment’s thought to euthanasia if his mother had died in her sleep’.

‘I’m sure I would be living a carefree existence with the kids, rather than going down this route. This is not something you ever think about until it is in your face – and in your life.’