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Kenneth Law appears in court in Brampton, Ont., on May 3, 2023 in an artist’s sketch. Law has pleaded guilty to Canadian charges that he aided in the suicides of 14 people in Ontario, including two minors.Alexandra Newbould/The Canadian Press
Kenneth Law, the Canadian man who has admitted that he helped end the lives of at least 93 suicidal people by selling toxic salts and other deadly paraphernalia online, has told a psychiatrist that he considers himself a “pathfinder” and not a psychopath.
“I was just trying to serve a need that I thought was humane,” Mr. Law said during interviews with psychiatrist Jonathan Rootenberg conducted in a Lindsay, Ont., jail this July.
“I’m not a diabolical madman.”
Summations of Mr. Law’s post-conviction medical interviews have been filed in court ahead of sentencing hearings scheduled to start later this month. In these recent discussions, the 60-year-old describes his upbringing and his crimes in his own words, while arguing that much of what he did was morally defensible even if it violated the law.
“Now I can look back and say that what I was doing was legally wrong … that’s why I pled guilty. It’s about taking ownership and responsibility for your actions,” Mr. Law told the psychiatrist. “We all learn from our mistakes.”
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A booking photo of Kenneth Law from a court document filed by his attorneys in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.Supplied
The former engineer has been jailed for more than three years since his May, 2023, arrest on criminal charges of aiding suicide. This past May, Mr. Law admitted guilt in court, agreeing that his online businesses generated about $300,000 from a vulnerable and global clientele that included young teenagers.
In his psychiatric interviews, he said the businesses were not profitable. “I’m not a serial killer lurking around trying to kill people,” he said. “I made enough to sustain the business.”
Mr. Law’s wares were repurposed industrial goods – such as potent meat-preserving salts, as well as hoods, masks and lethal gas cylinders – that could be legally purchased but used to induce deaths.
He has pleaded guilty to Canadian charges that he aided in the suicides of 14 people in Ontario, including two minors. As part of his plea deal, he has also admitted that he aided in the suicides of another 79 people in Britain after police and prosecutors there sent evidence to Canada rather than start a separate prosecution.
Mr. Law is facing a substantial prison term in the range of 20 years, according to some experts. But the length of his incarceration and the conditions of his jailing have yet to be set.
Ontario Justice Michelle Fuerst will preside over several hearings this fall aimed at determining those details. It is anticipated that prosecutors – who withdrew premeditated murder charges against Mr. Law as part of this spring’s plea deal – will start the proceedings on Sept. 23 with victim impact statements.
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Last week, lawyers acting for Mr. Law submitted a 600-page sentencing evidence brief with findings that he is not dangerous, but rather redeemable, especially if programming is made available to him while he is in prison. The reports in the submission describe him as a man who “should be able to effectively participate in psychological treatments and programs aimed at rehabilitation.”
In an agreed statement filed in court, Mr. Law admitted to shipping more than 1,000 packages between 2021 and 2023 from a Canada Post office near his Mississauga home.
Who is Kenneth Law, the Ontario man accused of selling lethal substances to aid in suicides? A timeline of events
Prosecutors named dozens of countries that received these deadly shipments, but said most went to the United States (431 packages), Britain (330) and Canada (157). Half of the Canadian packages ended up in Ontario, where Mr. Law lived and operated. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has said his government will not convene an inquiry into the crimes.
There is no known tally of the overall number of victims killed by Mr. Law’s products, but the scale is staggering by his own account.
“The suicide rate is around 10 per cent and I sold around 1,200 products,” Mr. Law is quoted as telling a psychiatrist.
In the court-filed reports, he said suicide is not a crime and that he saw himself as someone who provided a legitimate service: “Maybe I’m a pathfinder to find the best medium for this type of behaviour.”
The psychiatric reports say Mr. Law described himself as an immigrant from Hong Kong who came to Canada as a six-year-old. Mr. Law’s mother worked with the elderly and his father was a bartender. While his 89-year-old father is still alive, Mr. Law said his mom died in 2010 after ”a series of strokes” that “left her weak and frail, and essentially bedridden.”
“My mother was experiencing a lot of pain and suffering, she had a seven-year period of pain,’” Mr. Law said during his interviews. Later, he told the psychiatrist “I was familiar with MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), but MAID wasn’t available when she died.”
He told the psychiatrist he had early academic and career success, earning an engineering degree and also an MBA, before working a variety of government, aerospace and research jobs. But a bad breakup in 2015 changed his life, he said, and he spent the seven years before his arrest working as a chef at Toronto’s Fairmont Royal York Hotel.
The psychiatric reports say it was during the COVID-19 pandemic that Mr. Law started his online businesses, and that he saw himself as a kind of entrepreneur who could cater to a clientele of anonymous people he met online in pro-suicide chat groups.
The reports say Mr. Law told the psychiatrist he viewed himself as blameless when he was arrested in 2023. “I wasn’t assisting people physically, i.e. I wasn’t there with them. I wasn’t turning a button – just selling a product.’”
An assessment by John Arrowood, a psychologist hired by Mr. Law’s legal team, was written on Aug. 23. He found no evidence of mental illness. “Mr. Law did not produce any elevations on scales related to clinical psychopathology,” this report said.
U.K. authorities, families of alleged victims following Kenneth Law trial
Following the interviews this summer in the Lindsay correctional facility, Dr. Rootenberg wrote a Sept. 8 report that says that, even while jailed, Mr. Law still sees himself as “detail-oriented and focused.”
“He is able to read 3-5 books a week including novels between 300-500 pages,” the court-filed documents say. “He is also quite goal-oriented, noting that when he wakes up every morning, he decides what to do that day, and tries to achieve that.”
The psychiatrist’s report says Mr. Law will not represent a danger to the public when he is released from prison years from now, but also urges immediate treatment to correct the warped world views that propelled his deadly crimes.
“In my clinical opinion, he was quite misguided in his thinking,” Dr. Rootenberg wrote. “He too easily dismissed the fact that some individuals were not able, nor perhaps were they ready, to make the very difficult choice to end their lives, either due to their personality make-up, underlying mental health difficulties, immaturity, or a combination of the above.”