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Hunting the Suicide Salesman

49:42 recording · EN · 4 speakers

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Brief overview

An online forum and an easily bought preservative turned private suicidal crises into more than a hundred deaths.

  1. The forum supplied a method, not only companyJoe posted about hanging until another user told him to try the sodium nitrite method because it was easier to get hold of.
  2. Most suicidal crises are acute and temporaryJoe's crisis ran roughly three months after grief, a stabbing and a breakup, and Catherine insists Tina's was a temporary crisis too.
  3. Intervention worked where regulation did notThe substance is not illegal and Royal Mail would not stop the parcel, but a police visit to Tina's door confiscated it.
Executive Summary AI
  • Damon Fairless introduces Hunting the Suicide Salesman, a CBC investigation into an online world helping people take their own lives, tied to a Canadian man named Kenneth Law whom police suspect is connected to more than a hundred suicides around the world.0:57
  • Catherine describes the morning of April 4th, 2020, when she came downstairs to music looping on his phone and found her 23-year-old son Joe dead on the sofa, beside a block-lettered warning telling the family not to touch the glass or him and to call the police.6:35
  • A mobile lab tested the two glasses and told the family it was sodium nitrite, a meat-curing preservative that was being sold online at over 99.9% purity.10:17
  • Melanie found Joe's posts under the username YoYoJoJo, made in the six days before he died, in which other users steered him from hanging to the sodium nitrite method, sent a 3,300 word instruction manual, and pointed him to a supplier selling it for about eight pounds.19:47
  • When Tina, a woman in her early 50s who was messaged by a site expert called Greenberg and bought the powder from ImTime Cuisine near Toronto for just under 60 bucks Canadian, told Catherine her parcel had arrived, Royal Mail refused to intercept it but Catherine kept her talking while Melanie called police, who took the substance away.38:18
Key Quote
“But when he came back from her, I never saw my Joe again, how he was.”
— Catherine16:09
Key Quote
“That was the time Catherine said to me, I'm grieving for a son that I've not lost yet.”
— Melanie18:39
Key Quote
“He said to me, if you loved me, you'd help me die.”
— Catherine19:05