The Decibel - The man accused of selling toxic substances used for suicide

Episode Date: December 15, 2023

Earlier this week, a man from Mississauga, Kenneth Law, was charged with 14 counts of second-degree murder. Police allege he helped people end their lives by selling them sodium nitrite online.Today, Globe reporters Mike Hager and Colin Freeze explain what we know about Kenneth Law, the charges against him, and how he defended himself in an interview earlier this year.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call Crisis Service Canada at 1-833-456-4566 or visit crisisservicescanada.ca. Young people can also call Kids Help Phone at 1-800-668-6868, text 686868, or visit kidshelpphone.ca. If it is an emergency, call 911.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Before we start, a warning that today's episode talks about suicide, so please take care. A man from Mississauga, Kenneth Law, was selling a substance online, and police say people used that substance to end their lives. Now, he's been charged with 14 counts of second-degree murder in Ontario, and he's facing investigations around the world. Today, we're telling you about this case with Globe reporters Mike Hager and Colin Freese. We'll talk about the charges against Kenneth Law and how he defended himself in an interview with Mike earlier this year. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Mike, thank you for being here. No problem, Mainika. Always a pleasure.

Let's just start by talking about Kenneth Law, the man who's really at the center of all of this. What do we know about him and his life? Yeah, he's, you know, lived a normal life by all accounts. He's 57 from Mississauga. It looks like he was a professional engineer for a number of years. But, you know, when the pandemic hit, he was working as a chef at the Fairmont Royal York. In downtown Toronto. Downtown. Yeah, the iconic Royal York.

And then hit, like many people, a very rough patch with the pandemic and ended up filing for bankruptcy in April of that year. He, you know, was $134,000 in debt. And, you know, around that time, August in 2020, so four months after he'd filed for bankruptcy, he registered a website called I'm Time Cuisine and began selling sodium nitrite around the world for 59 bucks for a 50 gram package. He sold other things, but the core of the venture was selling sodium nitrite. And what exactly is sodium nitrite? It's a food preservative. It's a salt used to cure meats. And we consume it in small doses usually then, is that right?

Yes. Yeah. It can be fatal in larger doses. 50 grams is enough to kill someone. And it's totally legal to sell and buy. There's no kind of regulatory oversight of its sale. Okay, so what is Kenneth Law accused of doing? Like, what are police alleging here? that he was operating five websites and selling people products and counseling them on how to use those products to kill themselves. They alleged that he was quite active in forums online for people seeking help on how to kill themselves. And they alleged that he was selling sodium nitrate around the world. He also had another website where he sold nitrogen gas masks, apparently, allegedly,

to help people end their lives that way. You know, masks with hoods and gauges and other apparatuses. So Mike, you actually saw some of the chats in these forums, right? Like, what did they say? Yes, we immediately started digging into the forums when the first news of his alleged activities broke, and they started disappearing equally quickly. So we were able to archive some and discover folks talking about his businesses by name. And these are forums where people are talking about suicide, essentially. Yeah, they're asking for help on how to basically go through with it. And, you know, his name frequently came up, his companies, and many commenters mentioned how helpful he had been in allegedly counseling them how to go about it.

And so what evidence do police have that connects Kenneth Law to people's deaths? So we have some information nitrate from Mr. Law's business. And he was able to provide me with a copy of a police suicide investigator in the UK who found the packaging that had the name I'm Time Cuisine on it. So that named Mr. Law's company. And then as well, the Peel Regional Police said that they had found his Peel box he was running out of his local shopper's drug mart, and they had tracked some 1200 products being shipped to 40 different countries wow so that's kind of the extent of the evidence that that has been um disclosed or or dug up um we're talking with with victims' families right now. And, you know, a lot of them are livid

that this was sold online like this. So, Mike, how did the police find out about this in the first place? So it actually came about after an investigation was published by the Times of London. They published a big article on Tuesday, April 25th, with Ken Law as the subject of undercover reporting that interviewed him saying allegedly that he had helped hundreds of people in the UK use his product. And they quoted him as saying during those undercover

interviews where a reporter posed as a suicidal buyer that he told them he was told by his customers he was doing God's work. And so this really shocked us. We immediately, when this was published, started digging and finding out as much as we could about Mr. Law. And one of the lines of reporting was what are local law enforcement doing? And when we contacted his local police service, the Peel Regional Police Service, they confirmed that they had opened an investigation. So Mike, after the Times of London had their investigation published, you actually spoke with Kenneth Law. So this was back in the spring. Can you just tell me, what was that conversation like?

One of our librarians, Stephanie Chambers, just amazing colleague. We were digging life furiously when this Times investigation was published and she uncovered a phone number for him tied to one of his websites. And so before any charges had been laid, I called him up. And, you know, he was, all things considered, quite understanding and quite talkative. He was livid about the Times of London's reporting. He said that they basically tricked him and took his words out of context. And I just kept asking him, you know, were they fabricating these quotes that they have of you saying you counseled hundreds on how to kill themselves with your

products? And, you know, he maintained that it was a lie and that they took it out of context. You know, we got into the products he was selling. He didn't deny that he was selling sodium nitrate. But he kept just going back to the fact that he was not counseling folks. He was only selling a product. I'm selling a legal product, okay? And what the person does with it, have no control at one point he said you know soy sauce is fatal at a certain dose uh what do you do to someone who sells a knife

to someone you can't you know you can't control what that person does with the knife they buy so uh pretty circular convo after a while and he was very um reticent to to speak about the details of his business um he it seemed like he wanted to talk and at the same time was uh very aware that he was in this quite tense time where this massive story had just broke and police had opened an investigation. And yet he said, you know, he's going to wait for more reporting and await any sort of contact from police. He was also confident he would get a lawyer and, you know, pursue sort of remedy for the alleged libel and defamation, he said he suffered from the Times reporting. Mike, did he say anything about why he started doing this?

Yeah, he was kind of upfront about how tough the pandemic was. If it was because of the pandemic, I mean, I hope you can understand that. And that part of his profession involved, you know, using these preservatives. And so it seemed like a natural fit for him, is what he told me. So Mike, I mean, looking back now, this is, you know,

this is months after that conversation. But I guess I wonder, do you remember how you were thinking about this at the time? Did you have any idea that what he was doing was potentially so widespread? I mean, we had some idea the forums of people in Germany saying the police had raided their house. what to do if, you know, you were approached by law enforcement about purchasing this legal substance yet for a purpose that was, you know, quite dark and had potential legal ramifications given the source of it. So we knew that, you know, this would likely grow to other jurisdictions, especially given the number of shipments coming from his PO box. But I don't know if we had any sort of idea of the scope and scale of

what we're now hearing and expecting with more police departments potentially coming forward with the results of their investigations. Mike, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Thanks a lot. After the break, we'll talk to Colin Freese about the investigation and the charges against Kenneth Law. Colin, thanks for joining me. Good to be here.

So we just talked to Mike about Kenneth Law's backstory and how he explained himself. But Colin, we're talking to you because you cover crime and justice for The Globe. And I want to get into the charges really against Kenneth Law. So what do we know about these charges? Kenneth Law was first arrested in May of this year. At that time, he was charged with only two criminal charges that was aiding suicide of two people who happened to live in Mississauga. Police said at a very early point that this investigation is going to be built in stages because there were some 1,200 packages shipped globally to more than 40

countries by Kenneth Law. That's a key allegation. 160 of them approximately were shipped to Canadian addresses. But then in August, Law was charged with 14 counts of aiding suicide. And this followed an investigation by, I think, more than 10 police agencies across the province teaming up. But all of these deaths were of people in Ontario, all under 40 years old, in the last three years or so. This week, something very surprising happened. Kenneth Law was charged with 14 counts of second degree murder, which is

a much more serious charge, where you get an automatic life sentence for a single count, and this is 14 counts. So it was a charge that greatly increased the stakes of the case. So the new allegation establishes that Kenneth Law wasn't merely a passive actor or cheerleading somebody else's suicide. The new charges allege that Kenneth Law is directly and materially responsible for these deaths in a very active way. That's the essence of murder, too. It's saying you're directly responsible in some way for these deaths. Okay, so the first charges that the police had were aiding suicide and that.

So now it's kind of been upped to second degree murder, as you say. So this is basically saying he had a bigger hand in it then. Right, right. So, you know, when I asked the inspector from York Region, Simon James, what evidence he has to support that, he wouldn't say. And when I asked the defense lawyer, what he knows he when he said nobody's told me so it's a the prosecution theory uh the narrative has changed dramatically since police first arrested mr law um what some legal observers are inferring is that police in their searches have some evidence, some communications involving Mr. Law that would, you know, greatly elevate him as a suspect. But of course, we're far off from trial and we don't know what that

is at this point. But the idea is the police would have some evidence here to lead them to charge him with second degree murder. Right. And I think given that Mr. it's been established that Mr. Law ran businesses, online businesses, shipping certain substances to addresses around the world, that the electronic communications that may have been seized under a search warrant would be very interesting for police and prosecutors to go over. And also people whose phones and own computers records were looked at after they had died would also be very interesting for police to look at. So any records of communications between Mr. Law and the people who are dead. Can you help me understand this, Colin? Like if we just stick on the charges for another minute here, what would make this murder? Like how would shipping someone a substance, how would that constitute murder? So when you parse the second degree murder charge, it's a form of culpable homicide where you are either intended to kill somebody

or you were acted in a manner that was sufficiently reckless that their death was foreseeable, right? So we're more familiar with second degree murder in the context of a bar fight that goes wrong, right? It's between manslaughter and first degree murder. It's not somebody who plans a murder for days or weeks on end. It's a murder that happens in the prove or seek to prove that the actions cause death or could reasonably have been foreseen to cause death, in which case it may not be incompatible with the counseling suicide charge. But so I guess how would selling someone a substance like this, how would that be different from like, you know, selling someone a knife or something like that? Where's the line?

Right. Well, I mean, exactly. Like what would help prosecutors would be, I would, I infer, would be any evidence of coaching, right? When you perused Mr. Law's websites, he was dealing in substances that could cause death. And if there were additionally directions on how to use these substances and paraphernalia advice, and if that advice and directions were logged and recorded and police had access to that, then that might get you

to where the charge is landing. But I've not seen the evidence in the law case. He is pleading his innocence before the courts. He plans to be anyway. And, you know, in interviews, as you've talked to with about Mike, Kenneth Law did not see himself doing anything illegal by trading in a substance that is not controlled. Yeah. What kind of precedent could this set call in? Like if we're talking about this kind of case where someone is charged with second degree murder for shipping someone, potentially the idea potentially of communicating with them, what kind of precedent could this case set?

Well, I think broadly it establishes that the crime, the criminal code offense of aiding suicide and also the criminal code offense of second-degree murder or culpable homicide don't exist in separate universes, that you can be simultaneously culpable for counseling a suicide and being responsible for that same death. Now, that has implications on other cases. I mean, we've already seen in some senses, you know, prosecutors alleging that drug dealers who sell people fentanyl might be guilty of manslaughter, I think, if it was foreseeable that somebody would die consuming a highly potent drug. And so any prosecution that's on the books that finds a vendor culpable for homicide, I would suggest is a very important case, not just necessarily within Canada, but potentially globally, right?

And I should say here something else. I mean, he's currently charged only in connection with 14 deaths, 14 counts of second-degree murder, which is a lot by Canadian standards. That's a very high number. But police have also stressed repeatedly that they are, you know, the investigators in Ontario are taking what they find. They're relaying it to their counterparts in the United States, in Britain, in many other countries where deaths have also happened. So this case is not over yet, not by a long shot.

So within Canada, I mean, how common are deaths from this substance in Canada? Like what have we been seeing? I'm seeing information indicating that coroners across the country saw deaths from these substances growing in the past five years or so. In fact, there was a group of Ontario pathologists who wrote in a journal article, very disturbing amount of deaths attributable to sodium nitrite. And these aren't necessarily ones that are tied back to law, but this is just the substance in general that we're talking about. Yeah. So the coroners in Ontario and elsewhere within Canada did notice this was a trend. Some coroners I'm seeing even wrote reports urging government crackdowns on the

trade in these sodium nitrite and other substances that seem to be being embraced by young people who are gravitating towards self-harm. So, I mean, all that being said, are there any plans to restrict this substance? I'm aware of no plans in Canada to restrict the substance. I am aware of an initiative in the United States, which I believe is called the Youth Poison Protection Act, specifically targeting sellers of sodium nitrate, people who would sell it at high concentrations to young people. We have not seen that in Canada yet, so far as I'm aware. So coming back to Kenneth Law's case, how are the families of the people who died feeling about

what's happened? Well, it's devastating. One of the parents told one of my colleagues this week that every day our life is hell. You know, we only had one daughter. And now imagine the magnitude of that story repeating itself 14 times, dozens of times, hundreds of times, you know, if you want to consider the scale of the substance as a whole being ingested. You know, these are parents that were not, you know, didn't necessarily see anything wrong. I was at the kitchen table of one family very early on.

They were blindsided by the death of their child, an adult child who was just sort of kept to himself. Yeah, these are hard conversations. Yeah. So Colin, so far we've seen charges just in Ontario, but going forward, could we actually see charges outside of this province as well? Yeah, I think that's likely, especially now that I think Ontario sort of blazed a trail with a crown theory that could be replicated elsewhere. You know, we also are aware of that, you know, in other countries, you know, with the packages being shipped to 40 other countries, it's possible prosecutors in those jurisdictions

will follow suit. You know, so I think the way I envision this investigation is a sort of, it's the dynamic of throwing a pebble into a lake. You have that focal point, which is Toronto, Ontario, Mississauga, York, which is where the investigation is central centered. But then the ripple starts spreading out everywhere.

Right. So we know that police in, in, in the prairies in Quebec are in investigating other deaths that could be attributable to the same suspect. And we know that, you know, countries, close allies like Britain and the United States and several European jurisdictions are also investigating this. You know, there was more than 200 packages shipped to Britain.

And I think a high number of suicides that could potentially be tied to Kenneth Law. And then you realize that there's, you know, when police say that 1,200 packages were shipped to more than 40 countries, you realize that there is this widening, ever-widening circle where it could involve any number of countries. So, you know, the investigation goes where the packages go. And we'll see, I think, in coming weeks, months, and years, just how far those packages went. Colin, thank you so much for being here today. Yeah, thank you.

That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wellens. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.