"Today I Killed Best Friend"

About 5 p.m. one day last week, Dorothy Butts, 50, pulled a .22-cal. pistol from her purse and with two shots killed Mary Happer, 61, a patient at the High Oaks Home for Christian Scientists in Philadelphia. As a nurse rushed into the room, Miss Butts fled and drove away in her car. Six hours later, the car was found parked outside the police station in Bethesda, Md., a Washington suburb. Miss Butts was crumpled over the wheel, dead of a bullet through her head. Beside her body was a note: "Today I killed my best friend, Mary Happer. I had to let her find relief from the cancer pain that was killing her so cruelly."

Cure by Prayer. Texas-born Mary Happer, sister-in-law of General Maxwell D. Taylor, was the sprightly, popular treasurer of the Holton-Arms School for girls in Bethesda, where she started as a dancing teacher in 1927. Among her close friends was unpredictable, withdrawn Dorothy Butts, a Methodist and a former teacher at Holton-Arms. Early this year, Miss Happer, a Christian Scientist, began to complain of stomach pains; by March she had lost 37 Ibs. Finally, despite the tenets of her faith, she was persuaded to see a doctor, who insisted that she enter a hospital for further tests of an abdominal tumor.

Instead, Mary Happer entered High Oaks, which takes only "dedicated, mature, seasoned Christian Scientists." She was treated by a Christian Science practitioner, who relied on prayer to work a cure. At least twice Miss Butts drove up from Bethesda to visit her friend. Each time, apparently, she became more concerned over Mary Happer's condition. Two days before Miss Butts's final visit, she had bought a gun. When they returned to Mary Happer's room at High Oaks after a drive in the country, Dorothy Butts stayed for nearly an hour and then shot her.

Distorted & Mistaken. Was the "mercy killing" justified? In the case of Mary Happer, clergymen think, the answer was clearly no. "It seems that Miss Happer still possessed a good deal of vitality," says Dr. Charles Philip Price, Episcopal preacher at Harvard. "The act of taking her life could be at best a distorted and mistaken decision." One of High Oaks's directors, in fact, insists that Mary was responding well to the spiritual treatment. Even if she was certain to die, argue pastors, no one has the right to take into his own hands the decision to shorten another person's life.

Even so, says Dean Jerald Brauer of the University of Chicago Divinity School, "the incident dramatizes the situation in which we find ourselves in regard to mercy killing. The religious community will quite soon have to rethink its whole stand on this." It is already doing so. Some Protestant theologians believe that euthanasia is morally justified to spare the suffering of the hopelessly ill. Says Unitarian Jack Mendelsohn, minister of Boston's Arlington Street Church: "There are occasions when mercy killing is justified because it is desired by the person who is ill." More cautiously, the Roman Catholic Church follows the principle, poetically and archaically articulated by the Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough, that "Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive officiously to keep alive."

In 1957, Pope Pius XII said that doctors should not use extraordinary means to keep fatally ill patients on the brink of life if the measures meant hardship for the living. Last month a study group of the Church of England declared that it was morally right for doctors to withhold medication that would prolong a travesty of life or the process of dying"--a baby born without a brain, for example, or an aged man in a perpetual coma.

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