John Bement held a spoonful of vanilla pudding to his wife's lips. It was laced with the drugs she had been hoarding for her suicide.

He sat on a bedside stool, she on a bedside commode, as daughter, Cynthia Hull, looked on.

It had been seven years since the doctors told Judith
that she had Lou Gehrig's disease (MND). For the past two years, the once vigorous, hard-working woman of 57 had been paralyzed.

"We've managed before," John Bement would tell his wife of 33 years. "We'll manage again."

Cynthia Hull says her mother eventually gave up. She opened her mouth and swallowed the spoonful. And with that, the transformation of John Bement began: from husband to widower to convicted killer, found guilty of manslaughter on Feb 20th 1998.

It was then, too, that a gulf began to open between Cynthia Hull and her sister, Susan Randall, who was so
distraught that she helped police gather evidence by secretly taping her conversations with Bement and Mrs.
Hull.

Mrs. Hull, a 39-year-old mother of two teen-agers, says her stepfather was fulfilling a promise he had made out of love when he fed his wife the pudding that would help end her life. Mixed in were crushed sedative and
antidepressant pills that her mother had saved for months, even years.

"My dad really didn't want my mother to die. He really didn't," said Mrs. Hull, "and neither did I."

But her sister is not convinced. Susan Randall was not with her mother in her last hours on June 28, 1996. She had left Mrs. Bement's home in Springville, 25 miles south of Buffalo, shortly after her sister arrived for a visit. Her mother had been having a good day, Mrs. Randall said. Moreover, she did not say a final goodbye or