‘My son took his own life after a website showed him how'

Telegraph

08-07-2025

David Parfett's son Tom was dying while a group of people from around the world not only did nothing to help him, they egged him on. He was live-blogging his own death on a suicide forum after ingesting a poison fellow users had recommended that he order online.
Forty-four people reacted with 'hugs' and 'sad face' emojis to his post saying he had taken the lethal substance. Messages said 'RIP' and 'all the best'. As his profile goes silent, one member concludes: 'I think they are gone'. The 22-year-old, studying philosophy at St Andrews University in Scotland, died alone at a Premier Inn in Surrey in 2021 in, David is sure, 'excruciating pain'.
It would be a year before his father saw a photo of the packet that contained the poison – which we are not naming – sold for just $59 (£47). Written on it was the website from which it was purchased. David would later learn the site was run by Kenneth Law, a Canadian chef who is now facing 14 counts of first-degree murder and another 14 of counselling and aiding suicide, in Ontario. He denies the charges. He is also accused of sending more than 1,200 packages of poison to young people across the globe.
In the UK, the National Crime Agency is investigating potential offences linked to the deaths of 98 individuals who purchased items online to assist with suicide, including several deaths linked to Law, but no charges have yet been brought.
Poisoned, a new two-part Channel 4 documentary, tells how Tom's death sparked an international hunt to unmask Law after David turned to James Beal, an investigative reporter at The Times. He had been despairing at the failure of the police to join the dots between various cases. 'It's very, very limited information available to families,' he says. 'You kind of get patted on the head, and then you're into a very blinkered process. At the end of the day, it's the journalists who stopped it, rather than police.'
Neha Raju, 23, another Law customer, died in Guildford six months after Tom but Surrey Police did not appear to link the deaths. The first episode also features heartbreaking testimony from families across the world. Louise Nunn talks about her daughter, Immy, who took her own life in her flat in Brighton aged 25. She had more than 780,000 followers on her TikTok account, Deaf Immy, with humorous videos raising awareness of deafness and mental health.
In Arizona, while police thought a young man named Miles had taken an accidental overdose, his sister Malyn, who worked for the cyber unit of the FBI, put her skills to use. She began tracing the links between the suicide forum used by her brother – 'an echo chamber of despair' – and Law's website, which looked like it purveyed specialist foods, selling the poison (though Miles did not buy his substance from Law's sites). The second episode is a powerful call to arms by David as he and other families, along with Beal, piece together the global fallout from the forums and Law's poison-shipping enterprise.
David is seen listening to the recording of the phone conversation that an undercover Beal had with Law. The Canadian revealed that Britons were some of his most 'frequent buyers', numbering 'literally in the hundreds', and admitted 'many, many, many, many' had died. So sure was he that he would get away with it, he added with a chuckle: 'They're not going to bring me over to the UK for this. It's too small.'
'That was really hard, to hear the voice of the person that I believe murdered my son,' says David on a video call from his home in Twickenham. 'But also oddly satisfying, having spent so long shouting in the dark about this, trying to get somebody to pay attention. That was the moment that I knew we could at least take one supplier off the streets.'
For David, his son will always be the little Manchester United fan who ran around in his David Beckham shirt until he was too big to fit into it; whose perennial honesty saw one teacher praise his 'excellent moral compass'. Tom was open with his father about his suicidal thoughts, triggered by a school friend who had taken his own life at university. But David believes he was 'more vulnerable to being influenced online', as someone who had been diagnosed with autism at 12 and was struggling with extreme anxiety 'around academic achievement, friends, relationships'.
Tom had dropped out of university during his Covid-disrupted second year. He restarted the course, but was sectioned for 24 hours after talking about suicide. His father, a 57-year-old data director, had previously appreciated the benefits that an online world brought to Tom, including allowing him to make short films, as he grew up in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, with his two siblings.
'It really helped him bring out that creative side. He had access to just the wider internet from probably the age of 13, 14. One of the reasons I am delighted that Poisoned has been made is that I don't want other parents in a situation like me, where they know somebody who potentially is considering suicide and are naive enough to not consider the internet to be a danger.'
The scales fell from his eyes as he tried to track his son's 'digital footprints to understand what had happened'. Within minutes, David found himself on a suicide forum, not knowing at the time that it was the same one that led to Tom's death. David set up a profile 'pretending to be depressed' and ordered poison from Law. It arrived within 'a few days' – but he only found out a year later that Tom's purchase had come from the same man.
Seeing a photo of an identical packet during the inquest process 'was a very hard moment', he tells me, 'understanding how easy it had been to find this poison and how cheap it had been to buy it'. Neither of the Parfetts had to turn to the 'dark web', but simply went through Google. As David says in the film: 'There were no checks. It was like buying a book online, all too easy... like posting a loaded gun to somebody and saying, 'Pull the trigger'.'
Just a few weeks after discovering them, David is shown in the film scrolling through the stream of posts his son made as his life was coming to an end. As the real responses pop up menacingly on the screen, he says in the documentary: 'I know Tom would have died in agony. Yet nobody called an ambulance. Nobody tries to find him.'
There were more horrors still to uncover. On the forum, David stumbled upon Tom's profile name listed and crossed out by one of the moderators, 'as someone who's been 'successful',' he says. 'It's absolutely callous.' He believes many of those involved in running such sites actually think they are 'doing a service. They seem to passionately believe that it's every individual's right to kill themselves whenever they want to, and they want to support people doing so.' He adds that he suspects, for some, 'there's a dark side, I guess maybe a sexual side to this as well – effectively some kind of kick from knowing that you've influenced someone to die.'
Assisting suicide is a crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison in both the UK and Canada. The substance that killed Tom is reportable under the 53-year-old Poisons Act, compelling UK companies to alert the Home Office to buyers they believe are seeking to cause harm to themselves or others. But these rules do not apply to companies abroad. In April, regulator Ofcom opened an investigation into the forum used by Tom over whether it 'has failed/is failing to comply with its duties under the Online Safety Act 2023'.
The evening before I speak to David, the Technology Secretary Peter Kyle told the audience of BBC Question Time: 'Suicide platforms, which have led to the death of children, are now no longer available in this country.' It is a bold claim refuted by David, but days later, the same forum announced that it has voluntarily decided to bar access to UK users from July.
At the same time, it is publicising a method to get around the block. The trustees of the Thomas William Parfett Foundation, a charity set up in Tom's memory to campaign for suicide prevention, issued a statement to The Telegraph saying: 'We've seen this and other platforms use the tactic of a voluntary block in the UK and in other countries. They are likely to remove the voluntary block in the near future. We call for this site to be blocked in the UK through application of the Online Safety Act to stop the harms that this platform facilitates.'
A government spokesperson responded: 'Under the Online Safety Act, services must take action to prevent users from accessing illegal suicide and self-harm content, and ensure children are protected from content that promotes or instructs on these behaviours – otherwise they could face tough enforcement action, including substantial fines. We're already seeing this in practice – Ofcom has launched enforcement action against companies failing to meet their online safety duties, including a suicide forum. Other harmful forums have also since withdrawn access for UK users.'
David says he is calling for a 'single minister who's accountable for this and that there's proper training and resources. I guess the analogy would be, for fraud cases you get specialist police officers, specialist processes. People understand fraud.' He says 'the Home Office look at import of poison into the UK through the lens of counter-terrorism. The Department of Health own a suicide prevention policy, but none of these people are joined up at all. And then you've got Peter Kyle's department who look at it from a tech and regulation point of view.'
However, even if one set of poisons is rigorously regulated, David fears that another will soon be put on the market, while suicide discussions are taking place 'on most of the major [social media] platforms. It's an ever-moving target and needs constant policing.' He is not seeking damages from anyone, insisting: 'I'm focused on looking forward – on other people avoiding the hell that we've been through as a family.'
Having taken time off after Tom's death, and now redundancy, it has become 'a full-time job'. 'I truly believe that Tom would still be here if he hadn't been able to find an internet site that gave him very specific instructions about options on how to kill himself,' he says, advising concerned parents: 'Please don't be naive like I was. Please don't be embarrassed to ask the direct question, 'Are you thinking of self-harming? Are you thinking of taking your own life?''
Law may be behind bars and awaiting trial, but David knows there is so much still to do – and is convinced that purchasing poison online today is 'no harder at all' than when his desperate son turned to the internet four years ago. 'There are other Kenneth Laws out there doing exactly the same thing.'
Poisoned: Killer in the Post airs on Channel 4 on Wednesday 9 July and Thursday 10 July. For further information on online safety go to the Thomas William Parfett Foundation and the Molly Rose Foundation; Samaritans operates a 24/7 helpline, which you can call free on 116 123, or email [e-mail]