Alice Zoghbie

Alice Zoghbie is the president of the Socrates Club, a right-to-die organization whose public commitment to personal autonomy is complicated by her advocacy of euthanasia for people unable to make decisions for themselves. A former hospital personnel director and admirer of Eldon Mate, she helps him obtain rental vans when companies will not rent to him directly. Her influence over the club and her guarded connection to Mate make her an important figure in the investigation; the story ultimately brings her political arguments into disturbing proximity with the violence surrounding his murder.

Identity and Public Role

Zoghbie holds a succession of positions in organized humanism: she was treasurer of the Secular Humanist Infantry and later became president of the Socrates Club, headquartered in Glendale. The club presents itself as an advocate for the right to die and for the legalization of assisted suicide. Its website gives that cause a polished public face: a logo featuring the sculpted head of the Greek philosopher, a statement defending individual ownership of life against religious convention, and membership benefits available for a hundred-dollar fee. The organizational language makes Zoghbie not merely a private supporter of Mate but a public representative of a movement seeking changes in law and social attitudes.

A newspaper profile describes Zoghbie as a tall, very thin woman in her fifties and identifies her former occupation as hospital personnel director. She had worked at a hospital for twenty years before devoting herself full-time to the Socrates Club. In conversation with investigators, she explains that she had followed Mate's career, wrote to him to express admiration, and sought meaning through humanist work after leaving her job. She says she had, in effect, been pushed out of that employment; the supplied account does not establish the circumstances beyond her own characterization.

The Club’s Controversial Campaign

The Socrates Club had largely kept a low profile, filing friend-of-the-court briefs in right-to-die cases. That restrained public posture changed after Zoghbie spoke at a brunch at the Western Sun Inn in San Jose. Before an audience estimated at about fifty, she called for the humane dispatch not only of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of thought impairment, but also of disabled children and others considered legally incapable of making the decisions they would supposedly choose if mentally competent.

The proposal marks a consequential distinction between supporting a person’s own request for assistance in dying and claiming authority to decide what another person would have wanted. Zoghbie grounds her position in her experience of hospital care, arguing that treatment can preserve biological life while leaving patients profoundly diminished. Her stated solution is not confined to defending an individual right against religious or legal restrictions: it would also require a way to measure when someone’s life or capacity has crossed a threshold. In the available account, that proposal is reported as a source of controversy, not as an adopted policy or a measure already put into practice.

Alliance with Eldon Mate

Zoghbie describes Mate as the figure who made his approach to death seem newly possible to her. After learning about his work, she wrote him a letter of admiration and became an ally. Their connection also has a practical dimension. Mate used vans in connection with his work, and Zoghbie says she had rented them for him before because rental companies sometimes gave him trouble. She confirms renting the van associated with the weekend he was murdered; she explains that she did so because companies did not want to rent to him.

The arrangement helps account for why Zoghbie’s name appears in the van paperwork. She rented the vehicle and left for Amsterdam the following day, traveling to a humanist convention. Investigators initially learn that she is out of the country and expected back a week later. Her absence is therefore both a straightforward circumstance of the inquiry and a source of uncertainty: the person who can explain the rental is temporarily beyond their reach.

When Milo Sturgis asks how she came to know Mate, Zoghbie says she had been following his career and regarded his work as a courageous intervention into a neglected problem. Asked about the weekend of the murder, she acknowledges the van rental without evasion. The account supplied here does not establish that she participated in Mate’s killing. Later, however, Alex Delaware recalls that when investigators asked about confederates, she nearly conceded that other people were involved but refused to elaborate. She also dismissed the possibility that anyone close to Mate could have savaged him. Her silence leaves the extent of the network around Mate unresolved while making her a significant, guarded witness.

Investigation, Disappearance, and Death

Zoghbie remains difficult to reach after the investigation turns to the people and records surrounding Mate. On a Thursday morning, Alex calls her and receives the same recorded message. Later, considering Mate’s files, he wonders whether they may never have been in Roy Haiselden’s possession and might instead have been kept at the small house on Glenmont Circle that also served as the Socrates Club’s office. He considers calling Zoghbie again, but doubts she will be more forthcoming. These are investigative suspicions, not confirmed findings about the files’ location or her knowledge of them.

Alex also considers using discrepancies between Joanne Doss’s assisted death and Mate’s other cases to draw Zoghbie out. He imagines suggesting that Mate did not help Joanne and that Richard Doss killed Mate for nothing, turning him into the sacrificial victim of an accusation. The proposed approach shows how Zoghbie’s loyalty and access to Mate’s circle have become investigative questions; it does not establish that Alex’s theory is true or that she accepts it.

The narrative’s later discovery scene presents two bodies bound to a tree with thick rope at chest and waist level. The woman’s clothing has been pulled aside, and her body bears extensive wounds. The sequence belongs to the investigation associated with Zoghbie and Haiselden, and converts the earlier problem of her unavailability into a grim final revelation: the person whose testimony might have clarified Mate’s network can no longer be questioned. The display of the bodies also echoes the case’s broader concern with violence made into a message, without resolving, in the evidence presented here, every question about who carried it out or why.

Narrative Significance

Zoghbie embodies a tension at the center of the right-to-die debate in the novel. Her public cause speaks in the language of autonomy and freedom from imposed religious rules, yet her proposal for people who cannot consent shifts decision-making authority toward those who claim to know what such people would choose. Her hospital experience gives that position a stated basis in opposition to harmful treatment, but the breadth of the proposal unsettles the boundary between compassion and power over another person’s life.

Her role in Mate’s practical arrangements links that ethical controversy to the mechanics of the murder investigation: a van is rented through a humanist leader who is also Mate’s admirer, and her travel abroad delays direct questioning. Later, her guardedness about possible confederates leaves an important gap where an explanation might have been. Her death intensifies that gap rather than filling it. Zoghbie thus functions both as a witness to Mate’s work and as a figure through whom the story tests the distance between a movement’s principles, its claims to compassionate authority, and the violence that gathers around its members.