The Suicide Chef

Kenneth Law sold a mail-order poison to suicidal people in forty countries. Most were young. Most, in the end, wanted to live.

A note to readers: this story discusses suicide. A crisis line is listed at the end.

Sara Ramirez had been told she would probably never carry a child to term. An old car-crash injury, the doctors said. So when she got pregnant in 2001, she and David treated the news as exactly what it was: a reprieve they hadn’t expected. Noelle was born the following spring.

Two decades later, the Ramirezes nearly lost her. Noelle had become suicidal, and her parents did everything they were supposed to do. They brought her home and cleared the house of knives, ropes, pills, anything she might use to hurt herself. Her siblings moved in close around her. And it worked. Within a couple of weeks, her mood began to lift. When David went back to work, his boss asked how she was doing. “I think we’re headed in the right direction,” he said.

He was right that she was climbing back. He was wrong about where the danger was.

Most of a continent away, in the basement apartment of a split-level house in Mississauga, Ontario, a fifty-seven-year-old man named Kenneth Law sat posting about Star Trek on Facebook. He had an engineering degree, an MBA, and a mail-order business. What he sold, to suicidal people who found him online, was sodium nitrite, a meat-curing salt that turns lethal in concentrated doses. He had shipped it to more than forty countries. One packet was already in the mail, addressed to David and Sara’s daughter, with a tracking number attached.

The Ramirezes had cleared their house of every danger they could name. They could not clear the mailbox.

Most People Who Try to Die Are Also Trying to Live

In a recording later played in a Newmarket courtroom, Kenneth Law can be heard telling a man who phoned him posing as a customer: They have their intentions. I cannot stop them.

He said it without weight, the way you’d quote a delivery date: a fact about the transaction, not about the people it killed. It was his defense, and, as far as anyone can tell, it was also his sincere belief: that the people who bought from him had made up their minds, and that he was only a supplier standing at the far end of a decision someone else had already reached.

The record says otherwise. The record is full of people changing their minds.

Robert Hu was twenty-nine, in Toronto. After he swallowed what he had bought from Law, he picked up the phone and called 911 himself. The prosecutor read his last words into the court: he said please, he said he was going to die soon, and then he began to cry. By the time paramedics reached him he was unresponsive, fighting to breathe.

Anthony Jones was seventeen, in the Detroit area. After he swallowed what he had bought, he ran to his mother, screaming I want to live, I want to live, and collapsed. He was rushed to the hospital, but it was too late. A torn-up invoice showing his address and the name of one of Law’s companies was found nearby.

This is not what a fixed intention looks like. Clinicians call it ambivalence, the most ordinary feature of a suicidal crisis: the wish to die and the will to live running at the same time, in the same person, often within the same hour. The crisis narrows the field of view until death looks like the only door in the room, and then, for most people, the field widens again. The window closes. People who are stopped, or who stop themselves, overwhelmingly go on to live.

Law’s customers were not exempt from that ambivalence. They were inside it. He sold a way to make a passing state permanent before it could pass. What he told himself, and the court, and the stranger on the phone, was that their intentions were none of his business. I cannot stop them. Robert Hu spent his last conscious minutes trying to stop himself.

The Long Fall of Kenneth Law

The man on the other end of that transaction had, by the time Robert Hu dialed 911, spent most of a decade on his way down.

Kenneth Law was not a failure on paper. He held an industrial engineering degree from the University of Toronto and an MBA from York’s Schulich School of Business. He had worked in tech, then for the federal government’s export-development agency, then, by his own account, for the British firm that made the brakes for a Boeing jet. The résumé climbed. Then it stopped. He told people he had founded his own start-up and run it as CEO; few who knew him believed it. By his early fifties, the man who could recite his own rise was applying for work as a line cook.

He got the job at the Fairmont Royal York, the downtown landmark grand enough that the Queen stayed there when she came to Toronto. It went badly from the first week. He couldn’t make a tomato sauce. He plated undercooked chicken after he’d been trained not to. When colleagues corrected him, he repeated it back in a mocking singsong. The kitchen meant to let him go at the end of his probation, and his supervisor, trying to be gentle, asked whether he really wanted to begin a cooking career at his age. Law scoffed. At his age? He filed a complaint with HR alleging discrimination. The union stepped in. The hotel kept him.

Three years of managed irrelevance followed. He was slow on the line, and the other cooks said so, often, until management began moving him from station to station to limit the damage. They tried him on staff meals; the staff stopped eating them. Eventually, they invented a job for him: assembling small room-service cheese plates, a task with almost nothing at stake. The rest of the kitchen was glad to have him out of the way. He ate alone. When the kitchen workers tried to switch unions, Law quietly leaked their meeting notes to the union they were trying to leave: the one that had saved his job. It was the only leverage he had, and he spent it on the people standing next to him.

Then the pandemic closed the kitchen, and the quiet sidelining became plain unemployment. By then Law owed more than C$134,000. His assets were a few pieces of furniture and a twenty-year-old Lincoln Town Car. He filed for bankruptcy. That winter, he was fifty-seven, alone in the Mississauga basement, posting about Star Trek.

He had run out of jobs, out of money, and out of anyone who believed the story he told about himself. In the summer of 2020, in that basement, Kenneth Law found a business. It was legal. It was cheap to run. And it would tie a bankrupt former cheese-plate cook to the deaths of more than a hundred people around the world.

How a Curing Salt Became a Mail-Order Poison

The business was built on salt. Not a lab poison but a curing salt from the kitchen, the kind that makes bacon and corned beef.

Sodium nitrite is a fine white powder used to cure charcuterie and, in hospitals, as an antidote to cyanide. Until about 2018, almost no one outside a kitchen or a morgue had reason to think about it. Then an Australian named Philip Nitschke began telling people what else it could do.

Nitschke runs Exit International, a right-to-die group more militant than most: he has built a suicide machine, he sells a how-to handbook, and he has argued for decades that any adult of sound mind should be able to die on demand. He began promoting it as a means to that end, calling it cheap, reliable, and relatively painless. The painless part was a sales pitch. People who have survived the salt describe nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, and a hammering heart; in concentrated form, it kills by stopping the blood from carrying oxygen, so the body suffocates from the inside while the lungs keep drawing breath. Within a couple of years, the words sodium nitrite were surfacing in the corners of the internet where suicidal people gather.

Kenneth Law learned about it from Nitschke himself. He attended one of his Toronto seminars, and Nitschke has since admitted he taught Law the method and then steered customers toward him. Testimonials on one of Law’s own sites thanked him for offering an alternative to what they called “Dr. Nitschke’s sprawling death empire.” Law had found more than a product. Law had found more than a product. He had found the words to sell it: the right-to-die movement's language of autonomy, dignity, and rational choice, which dressed a mail-order poison as a free person's considered decision. Asked afterward about the people who were dying, Nitschke called it “a fundamental human right” and said of Law, “He’s helped them achieve their goals.”

Law turned the vocabulary into a catalog. The storefronts were dressed as specialty food shops. One, called Imtime Cuisine, sold the salt beside bottles of hot sauce for cover, the substance’s initials tucked into the logo as a wink to the customers who knew what they’d come for. Other sites sold the paraphernalia that goes with it: masks, gas regulators, the hardware of a do-it-yourself death. One offered paid consultation calls with Law himself, at $150 per session. The reviews praised his “mission.” The powder he bought cheap and sold dear, by the packet, to anyone who clicked.

He told reporters that his mother had suffered a stroke and spent years bedridden and tube-fed while his religious father kept her alive, and that he sold his kits to spare others that kind of suffering. It is a tidy story, and it has a hole in it. By 2020, Canada already had a legal assisted-dying program, one built on exactly the safeguards his business lacked: proof of a grievous and irremediable medical condition, assessed independently by two clinicians, the whole system designed so that no one dies on the strength of a bad week. Law asked for none of it. He sold to whoever paid. He told one reporter he was “a little more enlightened” than a society that won’t talk openly about death. He told another, more plainly, what the business was for: “I need a source of income. I hope you can understand that. I need to feed myself.”

He had the product, the vocabulary, and the storefront. He needed customers, and he already knew exactly where they were waiting.

The Pro-Suicide Forum Where Law Found His Customers

They were waiting on a website called Sanctioned Suicide.

Founded in 2018, it draws tens of thousands of users and can pull close to ten million page views a month. People go there to say what they can’t say anywhere else (that they have lost hope, that they want to die) and to find others who won’t flinch. Some of them are teenagers. They compare methods, post “goodbye threads” narrating their own deaths in real time, and, in every third or fourth post, someone asks where to get sodium nitrite.

Law did not have to find his customers one at a time. He went where they had already gathered. On the forum, he wore a name that wasn’t his, Greenberg, and a costume to match: he presented himself as a doctor in New York. Under that name, he kept a pro-suicide blog and talked with users about the salt, and when the conversation turned to where a person might buy it, he steered them to his sites. The forum forbade posting sources, so its users built a code: KL for Kenneth Law, IC for Imtime Cuisine, traded in private messages. Before long, the initials were everywhere. What’s IC? I keep seeing it everywhere, one user wrote. Does he deliver in India? asked another. For nearly three years, Law sold several kits a day.

Emma Morrison was twenty-three, living in Dundee, in the middle of a mental-health crisis, when Greenberg found her. She hadn’t gone looking for him. She was on the forum, and the message arrived unprompted: a stranger telling her about sodium nitrite, cheap and easy, and handing her a link. The site looked like a supplier for the cooking and catering trade, stocked with products that were always, conveniently, out of stock. The only thing ever available was the salt. “It was like shopping on Amazon,” she said. “I had a tracking number and everything.”

Her parents found out what she was doing and grew frightened. And at some point, Morrison tried to pull herself out: she deleted her account. Then she made another. Greenberg messaged her again. She made a third. He found her on that one, too. “I created three accounts in total,” she said, “and on every single one, Greenberg messaged me.” Three times she stepped back from the edge. Three times the same persona reached across the distance and set the salt back down in front of her.

She ordered twice. The second time, in December 2022, an email arrived. It read: Your purchase has already been mailed. Kindest regards, Kenneth.

She took the salt and nearly died. She was fighting to breathe when her partner found her and called an ambulance. They gave her the antidote at the hospital, and she lived.

She was young. Three separate times she had tried to pull herself out. None of that made her unusual among the people who bought from Law. It made her typical.

Why the Dead Were So Young

Law’s customers came from forty countries and every kind of life, but a great many of them shared a history of struggle. Like Noelle, some had been diagnosed with autism, OCD, depression, anxiety, conditions that raise the risk. Many had attempted suicide before. And most of them were doing, at the very moment they found Law, the opposite of giving up. They were in therapy. They were taking their medication. They were exercising, journaling, volunteering, applying to school. They swung, hour by hour, between the wish to die and the will to live, and in the hours the wish was winning, they reached a man who would sell them a way to make the hour final.

They were also overwhelmingly young. The dead clustered in their teens, twenties, and thirties; the Ontario victims ran from sixteen to thirty-six. That wasn’t an accident of who was online. It is the shape of suicide risk itself, sharpened by the channel. A suicidal crisis in a young person tends to move differently than in an older one: faster, more impulsive, more completely fused to a single unbearable thing, a breakup, a failure, a shame that feels like it will never lift. The crisis arrives certain it is permanent. It rarely is. Carrying a young person through the hours or days a crisis lasts is often what saves a life, and the decades that follow.

Law supplied the means. The forum supplied something he couldn’t: permission. A frightened, wavering person alone with a packet might wait, might flinch, might tell someone. That same person inside a thread of strangers who call the act brave, who wish them peace, who treat the decision as already made, is being walked to the edge by a crowd. The means came from Mississauga. The nerve came from the screen.

The Night Noelle Ramirez Died

Noelle Ramirez was all of it at once. Young. Recovering. Surrounded by people who loved her. And, behind a closed bedroom door, still reachable by strangers who believed death was a kindness.

When the package arrived, she pulled it from the mailbox herself and told her parents it was a copy of her birth certificate and that she needed it to travel. David and Sara were glad. It sounded like a girl making plans.

The evening of March 3 began like any other. Around nine, David sat down to work an overnight IT shift from home. Sara put three-year-old Elijah to bed. Fourteen-year-old Matthew got ready to turn in. Noelle said good night and shut her door.

She did not go to sleep. She logged on to the forum, opened a goodbye thread, and posted as she went. A chorus of strangers gathered beneath it to urge her on, wishing her peace, wishing her relief. When she had written her last message, she climbed out through her bedroom window, walked a few blocks to a public park, and called the police, so that when she was found, it would not be her family who found her.

By the time the ambulance reached her, she was unconscious. Paramedics drove her to the hospital while officers drove to the house, knocked, and told David and Sara that their daughter was not asleep down the hall but unresponsive and on her way to the ER. David stayed with the boys. Sara drove to the hospital crying, telling herself what she had told herself so many times before, that Noelle always pulled through. A doctor met her there and said they had tried. The child they had been told they would never have was gone.

Kenneth Law was not there for any of it. He had never been there. Weeks earlier, he had driven to a Shoppers Drug Mart on Erin Mills Parkway, carried the packet to the Canada Post desk, and mailed it to a town he had never heard of, for a person he would never meet. By then, he had done it hundreds of times. To the man who set her death in motion, Noelle was an address, a payment, a parcel out the door. He would learn her name, if he ever learned it at all, the same way the rest of us did. From the news.

Why “Vulnerable” Is the Wrong Word for His Victims

His records held a name, an address, and a payment. They held nothing of who these people were.

Tom Parfett was twenty-two, a bright British philosophy student who cheered for Manchester United and worked shifts at the Lego Store in London for pocket money. He died in a London hotel room in October 2021. His father, David, has said he is “99 percent certain” that if his son had not been able to find the drug, he would be alive today.

Jeshennia Bedoya-Lopez was eighteen, the only child of Maria Lopez and Leonardo Bedoya, three months out of high school. Her mother remembers a big smile, a jokester, a good student, a good daughter, and a friend people came to for advice. She wanted to be a police officer. She had just reached the part of life where you start finding out who you’re going to be.

Ashtyn Prosser-Blake was nineteen, a month short of twenty. He built his own computers, made art, gamed for hours, and graduated from middle school as valedictorian even though standing in front of a crowd frightened him. The next year, he watched a man assault a woman on a public bus and reported him, knowing the boys who jumped him afterward would make him pay for it. When the pandemic shut him in, he kept reaching for help: the ER, a family doctor, medication, a move across the province to live with relatives, and support groups that responded with waitlists. He had changed medications and, his mother says, seemed to be getting better. His grandmother found him after she came across the goodbyes he’d written while checking that the house was locked for the night.

Stephen Mitchell Jr. was twenty-one, from Toronto, a quiet, thoughtful kid with a startling memory who could call up stories and facts in exact detail. He played basketball and volunteered with a Christian youth program, teaching the game to younger kids. At his funeral, he was remembered as caring and giving.

These were not weak people. They were strong people caught in a narrow place: recovering, ambitious, devoted, in the middle of growing. Jeshennia had just stepped toward her future. Ashtyn was three institutions deep into trying to get well. Stephen was teaching kids to shoot a layup.

Even the most determined person, in a suicidal crisis, has hours when the wish to die outruns the will to live. In those hours, Law's poison was a click away. He did not sell to people who had given up. He sold to people at a bad hour and made the hour final.

Almost all of them were found by someone who loved them, with one of Law’s packets somewhere nearby. And it was those same people, parents and grandparents and partners sorting through what was left, who began doing the work the authorities had not. One of them was Tom Parfett’s father.

The Father Who Did the Police’s Job

David Parfett did not wait for the system. After Tom died in that London hotel room, the Surrey police had not connected the death to anyone; the packaging beside him meant nothing to them. So his father spent the next year teaching himself to do what they hadn’t. He retraced his son’s steps online until the trail ended at Kenneth Law. He took what he found to his Member of Parliament, Theresa May, a former prime minister of the United Kingdom. Nothing happened. So he went to the press.

He brought it to James Beal, an editor at The Times of London, who phoned Law posing as a customer weighing a purchase. Within minutes, Law was coaching him through how to use the salt and urging him to keep some on hand. Should the day come … at least you would have something readily available, he said.

In the same call, he acknowledged that “many, many, many people” had died using his kits. When Beal mentioned that police in Surrey had already written asking him to shut down, Law was unbothered. He’d stop, he said, once he’d sold through what he had. “I have inventory to sell.”

None of it should have been possible, and not because Law was hiding. He was the opposite of hidden: his name, phone number, and email sat on his own sites, alongside the address of the PO box where he collected his mail. The store ran on Shopify, the same checkout software behind countless ordinary online shops, which court records show paid him about C$149,000 over three years. The dead were discovered with their packaging beside them. Grieving families had been reporting him to police since February 2021: to the RCMP, to the OPP, to forces in several countries. Some opened files. None laid a charge.

The reason was a gap in the law that you could ship a parcel through. It is a crime in Canada to counsel or aid a suicide. But Law, on paper, ran a registered business that sold a product you could legally buy. Investigators looked at him and saw a merchant, not someone counseling suicide. There was no proof in what they had that he was pushing anyone toward death. He had built the operation precisely in that blind spot: legal product, legal storefront, lethal use, no fingerprints on the decision. He was visible and untouchable at the same time.

A Barrier Only Has to Outlast the Crisis

We know what would have helped: put distance between a person in crisis and the means to die. Toronto has a monument to the idea. For years, the Bloor Viaduct was the second-deadliest bridge for suicide in North America, after the Golden Gate; nine people a year went off it. In 2003, the city strung a curtain of steel rods across it, the Luminous Veil. The jumping stopped. For a few years, some would-be jumpers shifted to other bridges, but the displacement proved temporary, and most of those who would have gone off the viaduct did not, in the end, find another way. They lived. A barrier only has to outlast the crisis, not the person.

The trouble is that you cannot string steel rods across a meat-curing salt that anyone can buy online for less than a hundred dollars. And Law’s business was the opposite of a barrier. He had engineered away every obstacle a person in crisis might once have hit: a pharmacist’s question, a locked cabinet, a clerk, a wait, a human face. Underneath the salt, he sold the removal of every pause that might have let a bad night end in a morning.

Beal took what he had to Peel Regional Police before he published. By then, Peel had opened its own file on a local death. On May 2, 2023, about a week after The Times ran the story, a line of cruisers turned onto Law’s street and took him away in handcuffs, nearly three years after the first package went out. Stopping him had taken a grieving father, a newspaper, and the better part of a decade. Convicting him would prove harder still, because the law was about to find that it had no clean word for what he had done.

Why Law Will Never Be Tried for Murder

On May 29, 2026, in a courtroom in Newmarket, Ontario, Kenneth Law pleaded guilty to fourteen counts of counseling or aiding suicide. Prosecutors would withdraw the fourteen first-degree murder charges they had filed for the same fourteen deaths. He would not be tried for murder, because the Crown had concluded it could not win.

The problem was not the evidence. It was the definition. Homicide law is built around the idea that a killer causes a death; it gets complicated when the person who dies performs the final act themselves, willingly. A separate Ontario case had already forced the question. There, the Court of Appeal had drawn the line this way: someone who provides the means commits murder, rather than the lesser crime of aiding suicide, only if he also “overbore the victim’s free will in choosing suicide.”

The Crown appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada, hoping for a lower bar. In December 2025, the Court refused to settle the larger question, calling it abstract and ruling on narrow grounds instead. The bar stayed where it was, and the Crown had no way to clear it: no way to show that Law, a vendor who never met his customers, had reached across an ocean and overpowered anyone's will. Murder, the prosecutor told the court, had become impossible.

So the families came to Newmarket to watch him plead guilty to the lesser charge. They filled the room. The Crown read the agreed facts aloud, naming the dead, including the British victims, folded into the Canadian case so they would count at sentencing.

Law sat almost motionless. Then the court played the recordings of his calls with the undercover reporter. It was then that the families heard, in his own voice, the defense Law had built his business on. I’m not assisting anything, he said. I’m selling a product. On another call, closing a conversation with a man he believed was about to buy: Take good care of yourself. When the judge asked whether the facts were true and accurate, Law said they were.

Outside, the families were grieving and furious. Leonardo Bedoya, Jeshennia’s father, said what stung was that Law never once looked at the families in the room. Kim Prosser, Ashtyn’s mother, said hearing her son’s name read aloud beside the word deceased was the hardest part of all. Some were furious that a man linked to so many deaths would never stand trial for murder.

In Britain, where seventy-three people died in England and Wales, five in Scotland, and one in Northern Ireland, prosecutors decided not to pursue charges at all: extradition was uncertain and could have been refused or blocked under double jeopardy law, and the surer path, the Crown Prosecution Service concluded, was to have the UK deaths written into the Canadian agreed facts and counted in his sentence. Some bereaved families pressed, separately, for a public inquiry into how it had been allowed to happen. His sentencing is set for September, when he faces up to fourteen years for each count, and when the people who loved the dead will finally get to speak.

Whose Choice Was It, Really?

Murder would have required the Crown to prove something it could not: that Law overrode his victims' will, that the choice to die was not really theirs. The law assumes it was. It treats such a choice as free, the person's alone to make. But almost nothing about a suicidal crisis is free. The mind narrows, the wish to die comes and goes, and the state itself is temporary. In that moment, the calm, deliberate will the law portrays is the shakiest part of a person.

Law had it both ways. Because the choice counted as free, his product was legal to sell. Because it counted as free, the deaths it caused were not murder. The same assumption built his business and shielded him from the charge.

How He Kept Selling After He Knew

It is fair, now, to say plainly what Kenneth Law was. No one has published a diagnosis of him, and he never sat for an evaluation, so this is not that. It is an account of what he did.

He was a man whose self-image had dwarfed his accomplishments for decades, and who found, at fifty-seven, in a basement, a way to feel competent and necessary again. That it was the sale of death that did it seems barely to have registered. He did not hate the people who bought from him. He did not think about them much at all. They were orders. He marked them shipped.

What kept him going after he knew people were dying has a name: moral disengagement, the mental moves that let a person keep doing damage without feeling like they're doing anything wrong. Law ran the whole set of rationalizations. It was legal. They had decided. He was enlightened. He couldn't stop them. He was only earning a living. Each one was a door from the deaths back to the business, and he walked through them more than a thousand times.

The creed he borrowed from the euthanasia movement gave the doors nobler names. Autonomy. Dignity. Choice. Those names did double work: they may have been something he believed, and they were certainly something he could hide behind.

The Ones Who Lived

Law does not get the last word. It belongs to the people he was surest would die: the ones he treated as already decided, as good as gone, as orders to fill. Some of them are alive right now.

Emma Morrison is one of them. The salt nearly killed her; her partner found her in time, and a hospital brought her back. She is now studying to work with animals. She has people who love her, a partner, and a life she did not expect to be living. She has said she’s glad to still be here, that her story is proof, as she put it, that it can get better. The person who messaged her was certain she had made up her mind. She hadn’t. She’d had a terrible few hours inside a life that turned out to be worth staying for.

Years ago, I produced and hosted a mental health program at UC San Diego. I had experienced suicide in both my personal and professional lives. I wanted to talk to people who had survived a serious attempt, people who had, in the most literal sense, lived despite themselves. I expected complicated feelings. What I found in every single person I spoke with was gratitude. Not one of them wished they had died. Not one of them had tried again. They had been certain, in the moment, that the pain would never lift. They had been wrong, and they knew it now, and they were grateful for the time they had almost thrown away.

They are not exceptions. They are the rule. Most people who have suicidal thoughts never attempt suicide; the most common outcome of suicidal ideation is not death but recovery. Of those who do attempt and survive, the great majority go on to die of something else, years or decades later. A past attempt raises the risk. But even so, most of those people are still alive. When a Berkeley researcher named Richard Seiden traced 515 people who had been physically stopped from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, he found that decades later, 94 percent of them were still alive or had died of something other than suicide. They had been pulled back from the worst moment of their lives, and for most of them, it stayed exactly that: the worst moment, behind them, survived.

This is the fact Kenneth Law sold against. They have their intentions, he said. I cannot stop them. He was wrong about what mattered most. The intention was rarely fixed. It was a crisis, and crises end. The cruelty of his business was that it reached people in the narrow window when the wish to die was loudest and made it permanent, before the rest of their lives could talk them out of it.

Noelle Ramirez pulled a package from the mailbox and told her parents it was a birth certificate, that she needed it to travel, and that she was planning for the future. Standing there, for a moment, maybe part of her was. Her family had cleared the house of every danger they could name. The one they couldn’t name had been mailed to them from a basement most of a continent away, by a man who would have called it a sale.

What is left to the rest of us is to keep the next package from ever reaching the door: every barrier, every law, every hard question at a pharmacy counter, every friend who asks and waits. Each of those buys a little time, and time is the one thing the crisis cannot outlast. Give the next person enough of it, and the future they were only half-planning becomes the one they live.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. In the U.S. and Canada, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In the U.K. and Ireland, call Samaritans at 116 123. You are not alone, and the crisis is almost always temporary, even when it does not feel that way.

Thank you for reading this issue of The Mind Detective. If you enjoy this article, please pass it along to one of your true crime-following friends. See you next week!

References

The narrative is drawn from primary court records, including the agreed statement of facts entered at Kenneth Law’s guilty plea, together with the appellate rulings cited below, coroners’ findings, and contemporaneous reporting by Toronto Life, The Times of London, The Canadian Press, CBC News, The Globe and Mail, and Global News. Details about the people who died follow statements their families made in court and to those outlets.

Legal authorities

R v BF, 2024 ONCA 511.

R v BF, 2025 SCC 41 (SCC Court File No 41420).

Criminal Code, RSC 1985, c C-46: ss 229, 231(5), 235 (murder and first-degree murder); s 239 (attempt to commit murder by administering a noxious substance); s 241(1) (counseling or aiding suicide); ss 241.1–241.4 (medical assistance in dying, as enacted by SC 2016, c 3).

R v Law (Ont Ct J), guilty plea entered 29 May 2026, Newmarket, Ontario; sentencing pending (unreported).

Peer-reviewed references (APA, 7th ed.)

Deisenhammer, E. A., Ing, C. M., Strauss, R., Kemmler, G., Hinterhuber, H., & Weiss, E. M. (2009). The duration of the suicidal process: How much time is left for intervention between consideration and accomplishment of a suicide attempt? Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 70(1), 19–24.

Owens, D., Horrocks, J., & House, A. (2002). Fatal and non-fatal repetition of self-harm: Systematic review. British Journal of Psychiatry, 181(3), 193–199. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.181.3.193

Seiden, R. H. (1978). Where are they now? A follow-up study of suicide attempters from the Golden Gate Bridge. Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, 8(4), 203–216.

Sinyor, M., Men, V. Y., Chan, P. P. M., Sanchez Morales, D., Levitt, A. J., & Schaffer, A. (2025). Long-term impact of the Bloor Viaduct suicide barrier on suicides in Toronto: A time-series analysis. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 70(4), 328–334. https://doi.org/10.1177/07067437241293978