How they caught the Poison King
Glen Keogh explains how a journalist unmasked an ex-chef linked to hundreds of suicides. His mail order scheme is being investigated by police around the world.
Kenneth Law’s marketplace website appeared innocent enough. Set against an image of an extravagant cold meats and cheese board, the homepage of the site, which purported to sell food ingredients, promised to offer “the art and craft of the cold kitchen”.
Indeed, Law, a hotel chef, even gave shoppers a delicious recipe. “Ken’s fried chicken (KFC)”, as the Canadian called it in his blog, was so good he claimed fans had bribed him for the secret.
But Law’s website also had a more sinister purpose. The comestibles on offer were being used as a lethal poison by desperate individuals around the world to take their own lives.
In the UK alone, Law has been linked to 88 deaths after sending almost 300 of his poison packages to Britain, with the National Crime Agency launching an investigation earlier this year. Agencies
in Australia, the US, New Zealand, France, Ireland, Italy, Germany and Switzerland are also investigating packages shipped to their countries. (In NZ the coroner is investigating deaths of people who’re believed to have bought lethal substances from Law).
The true scale of his global poison network, inflicting tragedy on hundreds of families around the world who lost loved ones, including teenagers, to suicide, began to unravel only after Law was unmasked in April in an undercover investigation by The Times.
Since Law set up his business just two years ago, it has emerged that his poison may have been used to facilitate hundreds of deaths. The extraordinary case highlights the critical distinction between assisted dying, for those with terminal illness, and assisted suicide.
Last week, Law, 58, was charged with 14 counts of second-degree murder in connection with numerous deaths across the province of Ontario, Canada. He had already been charged with 14 counts of aiding suicide.
In a press conference, Inspector Simon James, of York regional police, a force on the outskirts of Toronto, revealed that the youngest of the victims was 16 and the eldest was just 36.
Law, who was first arrested in May, is currently in custody, with a bail hearing expected later this month. So how did a supposedly highly qualified aerospace
engineer turned chef find himself at the centre of a criminal investigation that has destroyed the lives of hundreds of families around the globe?
A post-bankruptcy ploy
Law, who claims to have briefly worked in Coventry on the Boeing 787 programme team for Dunlop Standard Aerospace, appears to have begun selling poison online in 2021. He had filed for bankruptcy earlier that year with debts of almost NZD$163,000, having lost his job as a chef at the five-star Fairmont Royal York hotel in Toronto when the pandemic hit.
The substance, which we are choosing not to identify, is legal to sell for its normal uses, and Law, spotting a business opportunity, set up websites so it would look as if he were selling the poison for legitimate purposes. But the true purpose of his alleged mission was only vaguely hidden.
One website, which appeared to sell equipment linked to gas, featured glowing testimonials. “To be able to move from confusion to confidence with... the premium solutions offered compassionately is a... life-saver... well, you get my drift,” one customer wrote.
Another said: “Thank you Kenneth, for all that you do for our civilisation.” Another testimonial referred to Dr Philip Nitschke, an Australian euthanasia advocate dubbed “Dr Death”.
On the same website – perhaps oddly for one purporting to sell hardware – Law also offered a “phone call consultation” for $150. “Clean packaging”, which would show no trace of what was inside each box, cost an extra $10. One of his store’s “core values” was to “responsibly honour the wishes of our customers, independent of social stigma and without judgment”.
On internet messaging forums where desperate people discussed ending their own lives, users were quick to direct one another to Law's sites.
The trail finds Law
The exposure of Law’s activities began in October 2021, when Tom Parfett, a former philosophy student at St Andrews University, was found dead in a Premier Inn in Sunbury-on-Thames, Surrey. The 22-year-old, from High Wycombe, had taken a substance bought from Law.
A packet with the name of Law’s company was found in his hotel room. A year later, an officer from Surrey police emailed Law but received no response.
Six months after Parfett’s death, Neha Raju, a 23-year-old biomedical scientist from Guildford, Surrey, was found dead. She bought from Law's site. Surrey police again contacted Law, who is said to have told them he was sad to hear of Raju’s death and would stop selling – but only once his “stock was depleted”. The force said: “As he was not known to be doing anything illegal, we had no powers to compel him to immediately cease sales.”
In a particularly harrowing case, in February last year, 17-year-old Anthony Jones swallowed a substance he had bought online, before running into his mother’s bedroom shouting: “I want to live.” The teenager, from Westland, Michigan, in the US, died shortly afterwards.
By this point, however, Law was under the spotlight.
Parfett's father, David, 54, made contact with James Beal, social affairs editor of The Times, after the journalist had written an article about suicides at universities. David explained how his son had taken his own life, mentioning the name of the website that sold him the substance. Beal began to investigate.
“Almost immediately the website looked off,” Beal says. Owing to the evidence available that Law’s goods were being used, Beal arranged a phone “consultation” with Law, posing as a customer.
During the call, Law said he was doing “God’s work” and had sent his product to “hundreds” of people in the UK. Speaking candidly, he claimed to have set up the business after seeing his mother suffer following a stroke – a claim that has not been verified.
He claimed this is why he “created some avenue of escape, so that people, if they are in such a circumstance, can undertake it either by themselves or by somebody else”. He added: “People in the UK have died, people in the US have died, people in Canada have died, and other parts of the world.”
He continued: “People might not consider what I do as being very favourable or in fact even criminal.
But I think it is helpful for a small, very narrow group of people who really need an avenue like this, because simply the laws of our society don't permit it. We're not advanced enough as a civilisation to accept death openly. I hope I’m just being a little bit more enlightened.”
During his call with Beal, Law continued to urge the reporter. He said: “Should the day come for whatever reason – that could be a war in Europe or whatever it might be – at least you would have something readily available.”
He claimed that 95% of his buyers had some “serious, underlying issue... usually health or old-age related”. Yet in reality, many of those who have died were in their twenties, while Canada has confirmed victims aged under 18.
‘I didn't expect him to be particularly open, but in fact he was extremely open almost as soon as we started talking,“Beal recalls. ”Within 90 seconds he was telling us how to take this substance in order to die.“
Confronting Law
In Canada, like the UK, assisting suicide is illegal and punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Assisted dying, on the other hand, has been legal in Canada since 2016 for
adults with a terminal illness, and since 2021 for those with serious and chronic physical conditions.
After the call, Beal travelled to Canada to confront Law, eventually finding him with a bundle of packages outside a post office in Mississauga, a city in Ontario.
Beal says that when he approached him, this time as a journalist, Law’s demeanour was “completely different” to how he had been on the phone. After initially inviting Beal into his car to talk, Law quickly grew impatient and ordered him to leave, insisting he was not “assisting anything”, only “selling a product”.
In Britain, campaigners have long argued for an assisted dying law to be enacted, and in 2021, The Sunday Times launched a campaign to legalise assisted dying. This differs significantly from assisted suicide, as it would apply only to those who are terminally ill, mentally competent adults in their final six months of life, and each request would have to be approved by two independent doctors and a High Court judge.
Law did have his supporters, though. The controversial assisted-suicide movement claims people should have a choice over when and how to end their lives.
Exit International, founded by euthanasia advocate Nitschke in 1997, is one of the world’s largest such lobby
groups, with 30,000 supporters. Nitschke says “hundreds” of his members used the substance sold by Law, although he could not say for certain how many purchased directly from Law himself. “To many of our members he was something of a hero,” he says.
Nitschke says the average age of
Exit International members is 75, and acknowledges that Law performed no checks on the prospective buyers of his poison. “Our members obtained [it], the cost was reasonable, and many used it to end their lives and they are very grateful he existed.”
He said, however, that concerns grew when people began mentioning Law's websites on suicide forums. “It became clear Law had no concern about who he sold the substance to,” he adds. “There were no checks or balances at all.”
Today, Law is in custody. His websites, however innocuous he wished them to appear, have long since been removed from the internet.
Police estimate he may have sent 1200 packages of lethal substances to people in more than 40 countries. But the scale and cost of his legacy may never be fully known. –