Alleged poison seller Kenneth Law will stand trial on charges of murder and abetting suicide in the fall of 2025, families of alleged victims have been told.
CBC News has learned the families were notified by Ontario court officials last week to expect an eight-week trial next year, beginning Sept. 2 and running until late October.
Law, 58, is charged with 14 counts of first-degree murder and 14 counts of counselling or aiding suicide in connection with 14 deaths across the province, including at least four teenagers. His products are suspected of being connected to more than 100 additional deaths elsewhere in Canada and abroad.
The announcement of expected trial dates provides families with a clearer timeline amid an unusual case that one legal expert said is especially complex.
“What may well be unprecedented — and what the Crown may well have difficulty proving — is that this qualifies as murder,” said Ingrid Grant, a Toronto-based criminal defence lawyer not involved in the case.
Police allege that Law ran websites marketing a legal but potentially lethal salt and other suicide paraphernalia to at-risk clients from late 2020 until the spring of 2023. Investigators previously said Law mailed some 1,200 packages to more than 40 countries. About 160 were delivered to Canadian addresses, according to York Regional Police.
Law, a former engineer and hotel cook, has denied wrongdoing. The charges against him have not been proven in court.
His lawyer, Matthew Gourlay, said the trial dates have not yet been confirmed. He said to expect an update at Law’s next judicial pre-trial hearing this coming September.
Gourlay previously told CBC that his client would be pleading not guilty. The murder charges amount to “a novel proposition for somebody who’s alleged to have sold products to people over the internet,” Gourlay said earlier this year outside the courthouse in Newmarket, Ont.
The families of the alleged victims of accused poison seller Kenneth Law have told CBC News they’ve been alerted that a murder trial will begin in September 2025. Law is accused of marketing to vulnerable clients, selling a legal but potentially lethal substance and other suicide paraphernalia.
The families of Jeshennia Bedoya-Lopez, 18, from Aurora, Ont., 19-year-old Ashtyn Prosser from Windsor and Toronto’s Stephen Mitchell Jr., 21, have all identified their loved ones as being among the deceased. Their names are listed as alleged victims in an indictment filed in Ontario Superior Court.
Deaths probed in multiple countries
Interviews with families, statements from authorities and public records have linked Law’s products to at least 127 deaths worldwide — from the U.S. to Germany and New Zealand — according to a year-long CBC investigation.
Law’s arrest by Peel Regional Police in May 2023 came a week after Britain’s Times of London first reported Law had been “sending the substance to vulnerable people around the world.”
“I know he’s being tried in Canada … and we’d really like him to be tried over here [in the U.K.] as well,” said Sarah Dornford-May, who lost her stepson Adam Birch, 28, in March 2023.
Five months later, Dornford-May said police called to tell the family Birch’s name had appeared on a list of Law’s customers. She said she would want to see stricter regulation surrounding the chemical that Law sold.
“The most immediate thing I would like is for anyone who wishes to purchase that [chemical] needs a licence,” Dornford-May told CBC on a video call from her home in Cheshire, England.
Law’s products were frequently promoted on a notorious pro-suicide forum. Users said a shadowy figure known as “Greenberg” directed them to Law’s online storefront, unprompted.
B.C. RCMP, Calgary police and Quebec’s Longueuil police have all confirmed they’re probing deaths for links to Law.
Law declined to request a bail hearing and has remained in custody for more than a year.