Kenneth Law, an Ontario man who was arrested for selling over 1,200 suicide kits online, has now been implicated in at least four New Zealand deaths, further widening the global scale of his crimes.
Last year, the Times of London revealed the findings of an investigation they had been conducting into Law, and found that he was linked to seven deaths. At the time of their investigation, which took place in April, he spoke openly to an undercover investigator about the number of people he sold suicide kits to, saying, “It will be literally in the hundreds. And they’ve all received it. We have had many, many customers in the UK who have purchased it.”
A New Zealand coroner has now linked four more deaths to Law, confirming his earlier statements that he had victims all over the world. He was also found to have sold nine kits to people in Italy, causing at least one death. Of the four deaths in New Zealand, three were between the ages of 18 and 21, along with a 40-year-old personal trainer. Yet authorities in New Zealand have still not ensured that Law’s websites are blocked — a process which they say is ongoing.
One of Law’s prior victims from the United Kingdom was a TikTok creator with over 700,000 followers. Imogen, known as “Deaf Immy” to her followers, shared about her experiences with mental health and hearing issues. “She loved helping people. That’s what she wanted to do. She wanted to share her experiences and struggles and try and help other people and realize it’s ok not to be ok,” her mother, Louise Nunn, said. Imogen died suddenly, and months later, the coroner reported finding sodium nitrate in her system.
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“We’d never heard of it before. I didn’t have a clue what it was,” Nunn said, adding that the police contacted her in June to say the substance had come from Canada. “That’s where they mentioned she was on a list they’d found on a computer belonging to Kenneth Law. It’s shocking. Just devastating. You think you’re the only person going through something and you think no one can understand. But to know there are that many other people going through that amount of pain — it’s not something you want, not something you would wish on your worst enemy.”
Other people had died years before Imogen’s suicide, and those family members had gone to police — leading Nunn to question why nothing was done to stop Law until the media got involved. “I can’t even say how angry it makes me feel,” she said. “It’s sickening. Why did they let it go on for so long? They could have stopped this a long time ago.”
Law, who claimed he was doing “God’s work,” said he had contributed to the deaths of people around the world, including at least one teenager. He was soon arrested, with 40 countries and 11 Ontario police forces investigating him. Law operated multiple websites, which all have been taken down, where he sold poisons like sodium nitrate, as well as flow regulators and gas masks, and he would instruct the buyer how best to use them in order to ensure death.
Several weeks after his initial arrest in Ontario, National Crime Agency (NCA) Deputy Director Craig Turner told EuroNews that over 200 people were believed to have purchased Law’s suicide kits, and 88 people were believed to have died because of them. Just one week before his arrest, he defended his crimes, saying, “I’m selling a legal product, OK. And what the person does with it? I have no control.”
