Tanveer Ahmed |The Monthly | June 2011
On a Saturday afternoon in November 2009, a sergeant at Kings Cross Police Station received a call from Helen Lonergan, the administrative head of Nepean Private Hospital. She was trying to discover the whereabouts of Suresh Nair, a neurosurgeon responsible for several in-patients who, three days after their operations, had still not been reviewed. Each had undergone a major procedure upon their spine; one required monitoring in intensive care.
Lonergan, who had appointed Nair three years earlier, had only a vague idea that he might suffer from a mental illness. Nair was also employed by the public hospital adjacent to the Nepean; the Medical Board had stipulated Nair must work under supervision and could operate just one day per week in the private sector. After his protracted absence, hospital staff had been trying to reach him by phone for days. Lonergan was worried about a possible decline in his condition, maybe even a suicide attempt.
When the local sergeant pulled up Nair’s name on the police database, he discovered the doctor was already under investigation and ordered an immediate search. Police arrived at Nair’s luxury pad in Elizabeth Bay to find it vacant. But they did discover the dead body of a beautiful young woman, Brazilian student Suellen Domingues Zaupa, on the floor.
The following Monday, not having heard anything further from police, Lonergan was preparing to shift Nair’s patients to other surgeons. But Nair had already been to work that morning and reviewed the patients who had been waiting to see him. Staff described him as calm and composed. He had apologised for his disappearance and lack of contact, citing a family crisis.
Later that day, police called the hospital and urged its administrators to suspend Nair from operating immediately, without revealing why. Lonergan waited anxiously after making special requests for confidential information to help determine whether the hospital would allow Nair to operate on a full list of patients the following day. The information arrived from police headquarters just in time.
Nair was found to have engaged the services of several high-end escorts over a long period of time. At his insistence he shared cocaine with them, sometimes inserting thumbnail-sized parcels of the drug into their vaginas and rectums, which increases the rate of absorption.
Nair’s activities may have resulted in Zaupa’s death. After she lost consciousness, Nair moved his Dionysian party of cocaine and prostitutes to a penthouse suite in a city hotel. Another woman, Victoria McIntyre, had been found dead in his apartment nine months earlier. He wasn’t yet charged for this earlier event, and neither the Medical Board nor Nair’s employers had been informed about it.
Nair was initially charged with murder over Zaupa’s death but the charge was downgraded and he ultimately pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He also pleaded guilty to the charge of supplying drugs to McIntyre. When released on bail in the middle of last year he was immediately discovered, thanks to police surveillance, to be hiring prostitutes and using cocaine. Further requests for bail were promptly refused. He was charged in January and will be handed a sentence at the end of this month.
