- 3 months ago
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00New Year's Eve, 2022.
00:10Emmy was going to a party.
00:13She had plans for next year.
00:15It was lovely.
00:17She was really excited.
00:20About 20 past 5 in the morning, my phone was ringing.
00:24Straight away, I knew it was bad.
00:26It was her friend's mum who just realised Emmy's left the party.
00:35She hasn't got her shoes on.
00:37We're going to go out and look for her.
00:40For Emmy to go missing, something's happened.
00:47Her dad said, Lou, I'm just going to go straight to her flat.
00:50See if I can find her.
00:54He got there within 20 minutes.
00:56He rang me going to the police here.
01:02She's in the flat, but she's not breathing.
01:09And I just remember thinking, please, God.
01:13You know, please let them get her breathing again.
01:17When I started looking into this story, I had no idea it was going to become as prolific as it's become.
01:27I had no sense that it was going to involve the deaths of hundreds of people.
01:34A deadly poison being sold all over the world, intentionally.
01:39Who was behind this?
01:40I decided to track this person down, hold him accountable.
01:45What do you think the chances are that it will kill me?
01:48There's a very, very high probability.
01:50People who you can die, people in the US have died, people in Canada have died.
01:54This is the equivalent of posting a loaded gun to somebody with instructions to say, pull here on the trigger.
02:09This person could be one of the worst mask murderers ever.
02:16Nobody was doing anything.
02:17Nobody.
02:18It was a consistent shutdown.
02:21The FBI, the Food and Drug Administration.
02:23It's a systematic failure of everything.
02:28The number of dead continues to climb.
02:31Police said he sent more than 1,200 packages to 40 countries,
02:36earning him the nickname in British media of the Poison King.
02:41Every single victim needs justice.
02:53The number of dead continues to be killed.
03:23Hey, I'm here with Tim, and we're walking home.
03:31Tom was extremely gifted academically, some wonderful friends.
03:39He started university recently, he had a lot to look forward to.
03:50He was absolutely passionate about everything from Manchester United through to philosophy.
04:00Wicked sense of humor, quite a dry sense of humor.
04:05His laugh, yeah, he had very distinctive laugh that also actually made me laugh as well.
04:15He was just such a lovely man.
04:19Probably not even an hour I go through without thinking about him.
04:26I'm in service, is the patient breathing?
04:33No, the patient is there.
04:35We check his pulse, there's no pulse, his wife and the goat.
04:41Do you know his name?
04:42His name is Mr Tom Parfit.
04:49Tom was found in a hotel room in West London.
04:57He was found in a prison, a poison next to his body, having taken his own life.
05:04It's just a different world after that, after that moment.
05:09Not going to see him grow up and have his own family.
05:14That's all, that's all gone.
05:15When I found out about this poison, I was just ever so angry.
05:30It's not something I knew about, not something I'd heard of.
05:35How on earth can somebody like my son get hold of something like this to kill himself?
05:40How did he find out about this substance?
05:43I started searching on Google.
05:47I very quickly came across a forum discussing suicide.
06:00I was shocked, for sure.
06:02I didn't know such places existed.
06:04They talk about methods, success rates.
06:09If you're going to jump off a building, how high do you need to jump?
06:17It wasn't hidden away in a dark corner of the internet.
06:20It wasn't something that maybe just a few people were using.
06:24There were lots of people all over the world interacting with this platform.
06:30The scale of this was just so difficult to comprehend.
06:35This forum gets millions of hits every month.
06:41A lot of people in the States, Canada, UK, Europe, Scandinavia.
06:52To think about each individual person who's taking this decision,
06:56it's just so, so tragic.
06:59The lives that have been lost.
07:01It's just astonishing.
07:04I didn't know anything about suicide forums until this, all of this.
07:22Like, just didn't even know that existed.
07:25And it's, yeah, it's terrifying.
07:29And she didn't stand a chance.
07:31The minute I got that phone call, I just remember thinking, oh, my God.
07:46Oh, my God.
07:47It just went on and on and...
07:51It must have been about, I don't know how long it felt, like, forever.
07:56Waiting for them to ring.
07:58You know, to say, yeah, she's fine, she's breathing again.
08:03And I just ran.
08:06So, she's gone.
08:13No, guys, this is my deaf friend.
08:16She's deaf.
08:17I haven't, that is...
08:19Immy.
08:22Immy loved her social media.
08:24Yeah.
08:25That's when she found Immy.
08:27Did you follow her?
08:28Yeah, I followed her straight away.
08:30It just used to make me giggle.
08:32Hello, Sialangas, too.
08:34Bullshit!
08:37Immy wanted to, um, use her TikTok to help people understand
08:42that having a disability was okay.
08:47Having mental health problems was okay, you know.
08:50It's so, so important to talk to people how you are feeling.
08:55To let people know if you are struggling.
08:57Just know that you are not online.
09:00Stay safe.
09:06Immy was probably about 13 when she
09:10seemed a little bit quieter.
09:14And I think at that age
09:16it suddenly hit that being deaf
09:19was actually affecting her at school.
09:23Her mood just continued to drop.
09:28She was in and out of hospitals from 15 to 24.
09:33The nine years were a constant battle.
09:36Desperate, desperate battle
09:39to find someone that could help her.
09:42I'm so sorry you're dead.
09:45Oh, JP.
09:47Have a drink on me.
09:49Oh.
09:51Thanks.
09:57Was Immy on the forum, do you know?
09:59Yeah, Immy was on the forum.
10:01I've been shown a comment that was on there.
10:06As soon as I saw it, I knew it was in me.
10:09I could just tell by the way she said my parents love me.
10:14And they're going to be the straw.
10:17Why do you think she bought the poison?
10:22Maybe people have told her that it's definitely going to work.
10:27I quickly found discussions about how to source the poison.
10:31How much you need to measure?
10:33How much do you dilute it by?
10:35There was a huge volume of these discussions.
10:37How many do you think?
10:39Hundreds, hundreds of posts about this.
10:40It's just horrendous.
10:41Like many forums, there's a code.
10:42One of the codes was the abbreviation IC.
10:43It's just horrendous.
10:45It's just horrendous.
10:46It seemed to be referring to the poison.
10:47It seems to be referring to the poison.
10:48It's just how much of this is that.
10:49How much do you know how much you need to measure?
10:50How much do you dilute it by?
10:52There was a huge volume of these discussions.
10:53How many do you think?
10:54Hundreds, hundreds of posts about this.
10:56It's just horrendous.
11:00Like many forums, there's a code.
11:04like many forums there's a code one of the codes was the abbreviation ic
11:14seemed to be referring to a place which would sell that poison that tom used to end his own life
11:22but nobody in the open forum actually explained what it stood for and what it what it meant
11:27i adopted a persona of somebody who knew into the forum was contemplating suicide and i started
11:39posting asking them what ic stood for
11:52after i'd been on the forum for a few weeks somebody finally explained what that meant
11:58it was in time cuisine
12:08it behaved like any other website where you might go and buy goods
12:14i did some digging around the site and i found the poison
12:21you'd go to the page you'd add it to your basket you don't even have to register
12:26there were no checks it was like buying a book online they didn't ask my age it was all too easy
12:35so i order the poison
12:48it wasn't long probably a few days after
13:05i bought the poison online i get it in the post
13:11a relatively small package has been through customs just seemed to indicate that this was um a well
13:18oiled machine this was something that was being done at a considerable scale
13:29it still astonishes me that it's that easy to get hold of this poison
13:35one of the challenges with our poisons law is that it doesn't really cater for international trade
13:48there's no effective regulation if you buy something that is a portable substance in the uk from abroad you effectively bypass those those laws
13:58i wanted to shout it from the rooftops that there's a problem here that needs to be stopped
14:06i could not persuade the police force investigating tom's death that it
14:10looked to me like a bigger problem they weren't interested and seeing this as more than just
14:16an individual taking his own life
14:20i had ran out of options i had nowhere left to turn
14:28my last chance was to go to the newspapers
14:36thanks for calling me david i'd definitely be interested in taking a look at this
14:41would you mind talking through what's what's happened i'm just i'm just really let's call it
14:47surprised that you know the police need known since they found tom's body where he bought this from
14:53yeah but nobody's anything about as a journalist you cover so many different stories politics one
15:00minute crime the next you can definitely make a difference shining light on things that are not widely known about
15:10this is one of the frustrations with the uk police they just weren't
15:18interested in following up on this you know they weren't interested in highlighting this as
15:23any chance of a criminal case where as you know it's an offense to assist them with suicide
15:29mental health is a real pressing subject for a lot of people so i think it's hugely relevant
15:34to talk about suicide when i was speaking to david i couldn't understand why the police
15:42weren't investigating it was his belief that the website selling a poison knew it was selling to
15:47a person that was suicidal and it is illegal to assist suicide
15:55i felt that there was the chance to expose something going on here that hadn't been noticed before
16:04there was a pressure to cut to the heart the whole story and find out what was going on
16:14after the call with david i went straight on to i'm time cuisine.com
16:21the first thing you see is a plate of cold meats
16:25and if you scroll down on the website it appeared to be selling products that you might use around the home
16:31liquid food flavoring salts and then nestled among them was the poison
16:41the website had painted a picture a facade if you like of respectability it looked like someone's
16:48trying to perhaps cover up its true purpose so i wanted to find out who was behind it who ran it and
16:56what exactly was going on
17:20the police thought miles had taken an accidental overdose
17:23you know that didn't quite sit right with us and so we were just trying to get an idea of what his
17:30final days and final weeks had looked like and we'd started looking through his computer and his phone
17:37and we had discovered that he was very very active on a suicide forum
17:42we started to do searches just everything that we could find out at the time about this forum
17:55there's a lot of talk about people becoming addicted to that site and he was very welcomed in that forum
18:03miles was my first born son
18:15we had malin about 18 months later and just had a great childhood growing up happy and fun
18:23i always looked up to my my older brother because he was
18:26he was just so good at everything you know he was brilliant and uh talented and um
18:36yeah
18:44excuse me
18:46as a mother you don't want to see your kids hurt
18:48and so
18:53you want to try to do everything you can to help them and i wasn't able to do that
18:59when i began to realize people in a mental health crisis like miles had access to that forum
19:19you feel so bad for them you're trying to figure out a way to stop it
19:25my mother was quite adamant to help people that were on that site
19:31i was in the military for about 12 years became a counterintelligence agent
19:37i have a bachelor's degree in intelligence and security studies and then i took a few courses
19:43in digital forensics and so my mother had reached out to me one day and asked me
19:49to look into where to find the poison basically and so i posted on the site
19:58i remember it was a saturday morning and i had received a message back
20:04from a user called greenberg he had a picture of a white dog and a short bio
20:12that kind of explained how he was a retired pathologist based in new york
20:17i had seen the name on the site often kind of one of those users that you would see posting very
20:26regularly
20:29and he merely messaged me the name imetimecuisine.com
20:34it just appeared to be a site that sold food service products salts and things like that
20:46like a restaurant supply company yes
20:51my brother he didn't get it from icy but i decided maybe i should look at this a little bit further
20:57and i scrolled down to see their products and lo and behold they had products being displayed but
21:08they were either salt that was ten thousand dollars salt that i had in my pantry that was ten thousand
21:15dollars or other products that were sold out the only thing available for sale for 59 plus shipping
21:25was the poison and i thought that is strange and further to that there's no other use for that
21:34chemical at that potency and i said you know i think there's something more here that needs to be looked at
21:41i remember messaging back and forth with my mom saying this is definitely a front site
21:46this person's providing suicide methods that are favored by the forum and then greenberg is
21:55advertising the site and shuttling people over to this storefront it just opens up this whole world of
22:05what seems to be black market selling for methods to commit suicide
22:16the crucial element in this story was who exactly was the person behind this website
22:23under the contact information there was a p.o box address in canada located in a city called
22:30mississauga about 45 minutes west of toronto there was also that phone number and an email address
22:42klaw at outlook.com i googled that and then i clicked on two further websites that came up there was nambuca.com
22:51eskimo.com and eskimo.com these two websites were definitely more explicit in their content and
23:02quite clearly selling goods for purposes of suicide
23:06there were testimonials on eskimos saying that the products were expensive but it was probably the
23:15last a thousand dollars they would ever spend it was shocking to see that a website that this could
23:22operate under the radar on both websites the p.o box address and the contact details were the same
23:31klaw at outlet.com and on eskimo was the name kenneth m law
23:45i googled his name and immediately popped a cv of a kenneth m law dated from 2005
23:53and then at the bottom of the website there was a picture of kenneth law himself
24:01dressed up in a tuxedo smiling at the camera
24:06doing this job for a number of years you become quite skeptical about things
24:11quite cynical i had no doubts that there was somebody called kenneth law living in ontario
24:20but would somebody really be as brazen or foolish to use their real name on a website that
24:27may well be conducting griminality
24:33to really discover what's going on i needed to track down kenneth law
24:41i've kind of gone down the rabbit hole at this point i knew that david's son tom purchased
25:00a poison from a seller in canada calling himself kenneth law
25:16i was looking for any information about him
25:19where he might live
25:26what he might be up to other than these websites
25:31who was kenneth law
25:34i discovered quite an old tv it was dated from 2005.
25:39he was pretty well qualified in the engineering field
25:42he had had several stints of employment at big companies including an aerospace company called
25:49dunlop in the midlands in the uk
25:55when i did social media searches i found the same picture as on the cv on a facebook profile for
26:04kenneth law in canada he didn't have many public posts there was one strange post about erotic art
26:17and there were other posts about the tv show star trek
26:21a large percentage of his facebook friends appeared to work at the fairmont royal york hotel
26:27a five-star hotel in downtown toronto i guessed that he either worked there or had worked there at some stage
26:42i was beginning to piece together who this person was
26:45i needed to find out what was the scale of his business
26:50how many people have they sold this stuff to
26:52there was enough information in front of me to try and conduct a full investigation
27:01around this website and this substance
27:05but we needed to be extremely careful because we knew it was so sensitive
27:15can you click on one of those
27:16yes here's a post from someone who's asking whether or not they should use the poison
27:25to commit suicide after miles had died we were on the forum often day after day hour after hour you
27:33would see goodbye posts of people who just they aren't getting the help that they need
27:46i do believe that people should have the right to talk about suicide i believe that people should
28:01have the right to choose as well i i am wholly behind the right to die movement for those who you know are
28:09suffering from a terminal illness that they can't come back from and all that all that's at the end of
28:15that is more suffering but this is something different
28:28this is a community that comes together for one single purpose
28:33they become an echo chamber of despair
28:46and heartbreak
28:50but the thing is if you say have you tried to reach out to a suicide hotline you'll be banned from the
28:56site if you try to suggest reach out for help do you have family do you have somebody anybody you'll be banned from the site
29:08day after day after day you see them say goodbye ctb i'm going to catch the bus
29:15you don't know if these people are minors if they're going through an acute mental episode
29:28you don't know if these people want to take back what they started and they can't and there's nothing you can do
29:37about it absolutely nothing
29:47it was only a few weeks ago that i found that tom started a forum post when he took the substance
29:57he says i took the poison my heart is beating fast it feels like i've been on a run
30:04i feel like i need to breathe really hard
30:08and then somebody else on the forum says see you on the other side
30:14tom then posts i feel sweaty
30:18my head is making a slightly screeching noise
30:22i don't feel as bad now i can hear a fuzzing noise weird
30:26and this is all within minutes of each other this is happening in real time
30:35my fingers feel numb like i can barely move it
30:41somebody else says not alone ever one here with you somebody else puts rest in peace r.i.p
30:49tom doesn't post anymore and then finally i think they are gone
31:00that's the the end of the thread so all of that's happened within a few minutes and that's my son dying
31:07what this substance actually does is horrific the poison suffocates the body from the inside
31:19i know tom would have died in agony and yet nobody calls an ambulance nobody tries to find him nobody
31:27nobody asks the question where are you what can we do it's all congratulatory messages it's all messages of sport
31:40so
31:54of all the forums that you looked at david did you get a feeling that this company is the biggest supplier
32:00or is it the most one that's signposted i would say it's the only supplier i've seen
32:06time posted but there's no doubt it's killing people i the thing i've been trying to find out
32:11and i can't is is how many 10 20 and 100 a thousand
32:22i'm spending increasing amounts of time on this investigation and trying to get things moving
32:27trying to find some answers for david
32:36this week we're tackling the difficult topic of suicide as numbers rise at startling rates
32:42especially among young people yes the suicide rates jumped 33 percent between 1999 and 2019
32:49then there was a small decrease in 2020.
32:55kenneth law's website started gaining traction in the summer of 2021 on the forum
33:01there were accounts about how kenneth law's product arrived quickly in the post without question from
33:11the authorities no one in the general public really knew what was going on no one in the general public
33:18really understood that people were so desperately ill that they would log on to a suicide forum be ushered
33:26towards a poison seller receive that poison through the mail take it and die
33:34and the sellers like kenneth law make a living out of it
33:37and the sellers like everything my brother's done in the past and what he could do in the future came down to 60
33:56dollars
34:19brings me back to happier days simpler days the good old days
34:26i'm going to go back to school
34:29benji tell me your full name honey
34:32benji benji he's running all right do you have any brothers and sisters
34:39how old is your brother
34:42what do you like about him
34:46nothing okay
34:49you're real mean to him are you no
34:51no do you tease him no am i teasing you yeah yeah
34:58do you look after your brother a lot
35:00most of the time yeah used to be a big job sometimes right
35:06you're a big job sometimes right there's a big job sometimes right there's a big job
35:15benji was my younger brother
35:19i was really the only one that knew about all his struggles
35:23i just didn't know how bad it was
35:30i could protect him from other people and you know stupid decisions but ultimately
35:37the one thing i couldn't do i couldn't protect him from himself
35:40that's the thing that will drive me crazy
36:02benji left a suicide note on the table saying make sure my brother gets my cell phone
36:08it was almost like a map for me he didn't log out of stuff he didn't delete his browser history
36:18reading my brother's questions and comments i'm seeing that he was guided to i'm time cuisine
36:25to purchase the poison let me grab this one
36:30a user says i'm time cuisine is where i get it from
36:35usually you need a license to obtain the poison but i'm time cuisine just hands it out
36:44i went through his emails and it's clear as day to see
36:48what benji bought when he bought it and who he brought it from
36:54i found he had made several purchases from kenneth law directly
36:59he uses his name in the email for different amounts of poison
37:08kenneth law was well aware what he was doing he knew why people were getting it and he did nothing
37:15to stop or try and get them to get help or talk them down or anything he just saw dollar signs
37:23it's customers were dollar signs to him
37:40so
37:46we started ringing the alarm bells about kenneth law in february of 2022
38:04at the time i worked in the cyber division for the fbi
38:17and so i went to my section chief and i brought the evidence that i had to him
38:24i showed him how the site was being used this person who's peddling the site to people who are
38:30trying to commit suicide in the united states and the answer i was given was he's not an american
38:39and this is a legal substance so there's nothing we can do about it and that i was kind of just
38:45shut down right there well and then that's when i picked it up and i contacted the police the fbi
38:52the food and drug administration it was a consistent shutdown at every avenue because that poison is
39:04not regulated right now it's not marked as harmful
39:14nothing was being done and kenneth law was still operating
39:20and it was the most frustrating because at that point you're thinking where else can i go
39:29who can help us shut this down
39:38what you want to do on a story like this is to hold somebody accountable and make them answer questions
39:44and this is someone who's evaded scrutiny and accountability for almost two years
39:50at this point i had absolutely no idea whether there was one death or a hundred deaths
39:57i believed he knew his customers were purchasing his poison to take their own lives
40:02but i needed to get him on the phone admitting this
40:04on his esk mode website he offered a 40-minute consultation call with prospective buyer of one of his products
40:16so i purchased a consultation call
40:19and waited for him to reach out
40:32so i will begin to have the three wild'T darling
40:36my brother had another 180-minute controller
40:38he Wasser-hah
40:44this is very much a modern phenomenon
40:47the poison has legitimate uses
40:51and up until recently the legitimate uses
40:54were its own uses but for the last five or six years in particular this poison has been linked
41:03to a number of suicides this case gets complicated because this substance is reportable under the
41:10poisons act but all that means is that the seller has to report suspicious transactions to the
41:17authorities if you come across a seller that isn't reporting suspicious transactions the
41:25implication is that they would be knowingly selling that substance to people who might be
41:31using it to harm themselves and profiting from that i decided to speak to kenneth law under the
41:43guise of someone who needed help in order to get him to tell me things he wouldn't tell me if i was
41:48a journalist calling up i needed to get him to admit on the phone that he was selling intentionally to
41:56a person that was suicidal this would be the one and only chance to nail down who he was
42:04and find out the scale of his operation
42:13of course i couldn't use my real name hello ken here hi ken it's john
42:24hi john how are you doing today yeah i'm good how are you so um you're interested in some products
42:30i just wanted to be really sure about my my purchase basically what what do you think that the chances
42:37are that that it will kill me i mean it's a very very high probability is it legal well okay that
42:44that's a very much for a gray area as long as i don't say that the intent is to commit you know
42:49suicide then it's fine and you can assure me that you've done this before with people in the uk
42:55yes yes and and they've they've they've died because of this yeah absolutely
43:00do i cause any problems for you the only thing i ask is that any documentation communication that we
43:10exchange they destroy a dryer any type of labels that might be on the mailing box to destroy about
43:16a disposable dryer yeah other than that it's not really traceable so you just tell the police that
43:22you don't know why this person's bought it yeah yeah yeah it's even easier for me i'm sending
43:28international right so the uk government has no jurisdiction to the community government
43:35and they're not going to you know bring me over to the uk for this it's too small
43:42how many people have you sent it to in the uk it will be literally in the hundreds they've all received it
43:52if people in the uk have died yes people are you can't die
44:01people in the u.s have died
44:05people in canada have died in other parts of the world right
44:12how many countries do you send this to oh
44:15many countries probably at least a dozen now right
44:31sounds like a full-time job i've been kept busy yeah
44:34just evil okay take good care of yourself thank you bye
44:54hearing his voice
44:55uh that to me that's the man who murdered my my kid
45:04he knew exactly what he was doing
45:08kenneth law is a sure and present danger to the public
45:13he is connected to an enterprise of suicide methods
45:18hundreds of deaths dozens of countries and other people are still dying he has no intentions of
45:27stopping if somebody doesn't stop him
45:31i couldn't let him slip away
45:32i needed to go to canada to track him down
45:40and properly hold him accountable for these deaths
45:43oh yeah kenneth hi kenneth law uh james field oh what are you doing here
46:01so
46:10so
46:13so
46:15so
46:21so
46:25Transcription by CastingWords
46:55CastingWords
Recommended
2:00:00
|
Up next
1:37:59
45:48
1:45:09
1:18:48
1:55:11
1:23:52
41:46
36:39
1:09:33
1:01:20
44:44
1:56:25
40:46
1:47:17
50:19
1:32:37
53:04
1:01:36
1:43:42
Be the first to comment