Natasha Lechner had applied the toxins of an Amazonian tree frog to burns on her skin on several previous occasions before the ritual which led to her death on March 8, 2019. But according to court testimony given by the last person to see her alive, Lechner’s reaction to the “medicine” in her final ceremony was alarming.
“She felt faint quite quickly and she lay herself down in a kind of semi-recovery position,” Victoria Sinclair, a self-described spiritual teacher, told an inquest into Lechner’s death on Tuesday morning. “Then she sat up and grabbed my arm and just looked at me and said: ‘It’s not good.’”
Lechner, 39, died during a shamanic “Kambo” ritual in Sinclair’s apartment in the town of Mullumbimby in the Australian state of New South Wales. Sinclair said Lechner was conducting the ceremony, which involves making small burns in the skin and applying poison to them to induce severe vomiting or “purging.”
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One of the substances Lechner used was the mucus secreted from the giant monkey frog—a species of leaf frog native to the Amazon basin in South America. The mucus was banned in Australia in 2021 after the country’s Therapeutic Goods Administration found Kambo had no medicinal benefit and could be deadly, but it was still easy to obtain online at the time of Lechner’s death.
Sinclair joined the inquest in Lismore into Lechner’s death by video link from Bali. She said she’d known Lechner for around five years before the 2019 ritual and that Lechner had been her client for earlier ceremonies in which Kambo was used.
Sinclair explained that Lechner had just finished a course in administering Kambo herself and that it was Lecnher who led the proceedings before her death. “I wasn’t being brought in [in] my capacity as her practitioner that day,” Sinclair told the inquest, according to the Guardian. “It was more of a colleague actually.” Australia’s ABC quoted Sinclair as saying that Lechner “had done her training, she was really in a way showing what she had learned,” adding that Lechner “had quite a high threshold for the medicine.”
Sinclair said Lechner first used an incense candle to make three small burns on Sinclair’s left calf and one on her left ear. She then applied the Kambo which provoked a strong reaction, with Sinclair describing womb cramping that was “not necessarily normal.” Sinclair said she then began purging within 15 minutes.
Sinclair explained that she then made five burns on Lechner and applied the Kambo. That’s when Lechner became unwell, said “It’s not good,” and fainted as she tried to sit up. Lechner also started murmuring and her lips turned blue. Sinclair also said her friend’s hands began twitching and her breathing became labored.
As the situation deteriorated, Sinclair said she performed CPR on Lechner and told the court that she didn’t know Australia’s 000 emergency phone number, nor did she have a phone on her person at the time. An ambulance was only called when Sinclair’s roommate came home later. Although paramedics arrived within five minutes of the call, Lechner couldn’t be saved.
Medical Director at the NSW Poisons Information Centre Darren Roberts said Lechner’s death was most likely caused by an acute cardiac event, and that Kambo probably played a role. He added that Lechner had a “perfect heart” and showed no evidence of heart disease, and that he believed she “saw Kambo as complementary to mainstream medicine.”
