UK poison survivor confronts Canadian seller at sentencing hearing

Elisabeth Belien sat in an Ontario courtroom on Wednesday and looked at the man who had sold her poison when she was twenty-three years old and at the bottom of her life. She had survived. Nearly eighty people in Britain had not.

Belien had been struggling with her mental health for years when she found Kenneth Law in an online suicide forum. He was a former chef from Canada who had turned the internet into a marketplace for death. She bought toxic chemicals from him in January 2023. Medics gave her an antidote, and her body recovered. But the rest of her—the part that lives in the world, that thinks about tomorrow—remained broken in ways she is still learning to name.

At the sentencing hearing, which would stretch across four days, Belien told the court what it felt like to be alive when others were not. She described intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, the weight of survivor's guilt. She said Law had made it easier for her to act on her despair. She said she felt shame. She said she felt guilty for surviving, and guilty too for having enabled him to continue his business, to reach other vulnerable people like herself. "I felt like my vulnerability was exploited," she said. Being in court reminded her how easily it could have been her own parents sitting there, speaking about her death instead of her life.

Law had admitted to fourteen counts of aiding suicides in Canada. But the scope of what he had done was far larger. Authorities say he sold approximately twelve hundred packages of toxic substances to people he met in suicide forums across forty countries. About a quarter of those packages went to Britain. He was arrested in May 2023 after a complex investigation involving at least eleven law-enforcement agencies from around a dozen countries. As part of a plea deal with Canadian authorities, he would not face charges in the UK or over any British deaths, despite the nearly eighty deaths there linked to him.

During the hearing, families read impact statements. David Parfett, whose son Tom died in October 2021, said he had spent five years unable to fully process his son's death. He had been an outgoing man before Tom took his own life. Now he struggled to enjoy anything. Kate and Henry Tucker, parents of a fourteen-year-old boy named Henry who died in October 2021, said their son had been diagnosed with autism but actually had a treatable neurological condition. "The realisation that his suffering and his death could have been prevented is a weight that is impossible to bear," they said.

Norson Harris, father of Ashleigh Harris, read his statement in person. He said the circumstances of her death had been incredibly tough to bear. He said they all felt they should have been able to prevent it. Instead of help, Law had sold her a chemical. Harris told Law directly: "Rather than offer the help needed that individual Kenneth Law sold her a chemical that Ashleigh took to end her life."

Stephen Mitchell Sr., whose son Stephen Jr. died on March 25, 2023, addressed Law in the courtroom. He said his son had been ill and needed help, and he had tried his best to provide it. "Mr Law robbed my son of that chance to be well," he said. Then Mitchell Sr. did something else. He imagined Law's own despair, his own moments of hopelessness in prison. He said that if his son had been well, Stephen Jr. would have helped Law work through those thoughts, because Stephen Jr. believed in the value of people.

Sandra Scott, whose daughter Amara died on February 9, 2022, aged twenty-five, said the family had been trying to help her through a mental health crisis when she made contact with Law. "The day I and her friends found Amara, and the way that she died – it broke my heart," Scott said. "It was a blessing and an honour to be Amara's mother."

The hearing continued. Belien, who until Wednesday had not been publicly known as one of Law's customers, had said something else before she left the stand: "I'm learning that things can get better. I'm learning to be excited to see what the future holds for me. But the gratitude I'm feeling for being alive today doesn't take away from the trauma of the experience."