Adele was still half asleep when she spotted her parents’ car careering across the campsite in the New Forest at 8am.
On a camping trip with her boyfriend, her initial thought was that her mum and dad had come over for an impromptu visit.
‘I was confused, still groggy, then I saw my mum’s face, distraught,’ says Adele Zeynep Walton, ‘and immediately, in my gut, I knew it was Aimee.’
Adele’s younger sister Aimee had – their shattered mother revealed – died aged 21 in a hotel room in Berkshire in an apparent suicide. ‘I felt numb with disbelief, devastated,’ recalls Adele, 26. ‘We sat, crying and hugging.’ Suicide is always devastating for those left behind, but in the days and weeks after Aimee’s death, in October 2022, the family’s grief was compounded by anger.
The police discovered that, unbeknown to her loved ones, Aimee had visited a pro-suicide website, where members encourage each other to kill themselves. It was also through this website that police suspect Aimee sourced the poisonous substance she ingested to end her life. They believe she got it from a man called Kenneth Law – who is linked to 88 deaths in the UK and is awaiting trial in his native Canada, accused of murder and aiding and counselling suicide there.
It also emerged that Aimee had not been alone when she died, but with a man whom she had met through the suicide site.
While the man, whose name the police shockingly have still not disclosed to Aimee’s family, was initially arrested on suspicion of assisting suicide, police have since dropped their investigation into him.
Appalled by what happened to her sister, Adele is now calling for a public inquiry into the website and wants the inquest into Aimee’s death – postponed until after Law’s trial next year – to recognise the pivotal role online harm played.
Molly Russell took her own life when she was just 14 after viewing images of self-harm online
‘I felt sick at what Aimee had been looking at,’ says her sister Adele Zeynep Walton, right
‘I felt sick at what Aimee had been looking at – that there’s somewhere people are egging each other on to take their life and speaking about it as if it’s buying a new coat or taking a holiday,’ says Adele.
‘There are forums where people are analysing their mental health, and others where it’s like, “What’s the best method, guys? Where can I buy it?” They’d ask each other, “Who’s going to catch the bus today?” – slang for “who is going to kill themselves?” ’
For Adele, Aimee’s death raises the question of whether a death can even be described as suicide if it comes as a result of coercion.
‘At the very least, if it is suicide, it’s assisted suicide, which is illegal,’ says Adele, who has written a book, Logging Off: The Human Cost Of Our Digital World, about Aimee and the wider ramifications of online harm. ‘My feeling is that Aimee was groomed into making the decision.’
Tragically, Aimee is far from the first to be influenced by this pro-suicide website, which the Daily Mail is not naming. A BBC investigation linked it to at least 50 deaths, and it is under investigation by the National Crime Agency. Last year, a 17-year-old from Southampton took his life with poison, believed to be the same substance Aimee took, after visiting the site.
The toxin Aimee used is, according to the Molly Rose Foundation – set up after Molly Russell took her life aged 14 after viewing images of self-harm online – associated with at least 133 deaths in the UK since 2019. The foundation adds that the site Aimee visited ‘promotes, glorifies and instructs [the toxin] for use as a suicide method’.
In April, the site became the first to be investigated by Ofcom under the Government’s Online Safety Act, which requires platforms to protect people in the UK from illegal content and activity, including encouraging or assisting suicide.
Access is now supposed to be restricted for internet users based in the UK, but last week Ofcom admitted that the Samaritans charity had provided evidence that the website was still available in the UK, under a different domain name. Access was blocked again, but Ofcom admitted it was concerned ‘similar issues may arise in the future’.
A lack of enforcement is leaving loopholes to access it, says Adele.
While the website Aimee visited is the most prolific, it’s not the only online suicide forum in existence.
The Molly Rose Foundation revealed that coroners have raised concerns regarding online suicide forums at least 65 times to three government departments since 2019.
Adele’s grief is still raw three years after the loss of her sister.
‘We should be going on holiday and to concerts together,’ says Adele. ‘It’s heartbreaking I don’t have her with me, to witness the woman she would have become.’
Growing up in Southampton, where she still lives with her mum Ozlem, 53, a social worker, and dad Martin, 70, a retired environmental manager, Adele says she and Aimee were ‘super close’. ‘Mum dressed us in the same clothes. We went everywhere together.’
Aimee, two years Adele’s junior, loved dancing and skateboarding and was obsessed with computer games. But, although fiercely independent, Aimee floundered socially and struggled to make friends.
The noisy school environment led to meltdowns at home, she was fussy about food and obsessively hoarded merchandise from singers she idolised, such as Pharrell Williams. Aged 14, she was diagnosed with OCD, for which she was offered therapy but either didn’t turn up or refused to engage.
‘My feeling is that Aimee was groomed into making the decision,’ says Adele
Adele is now calling for a public inquiry into the website and wants the inquest into her little sister’s death
‘We feel she may have been autistic, but she was never diagnosed,’ adds Adele.
Because Aimee had few friends of her own, Ozlem suggested she hang out with her older sister and her friends, ‘but Aimee hated that,’ says Adele. ‘She didn’t want to be seen as a victim. If anything, I think trying to take care of her pushed her away from me, so we grew apart a bit.’
The more isolated she grew, the more Aimee connected with people she met online, especially during the Covid lockdowns.
Adele, who was by then an undergraduate at Brighton University, says her sister’s mental health deteriorated during this time. Yet Aimee still put pressure on herself to succeed. In September 2021 she started a music technology degree at university in Bristol. But she quit two weeks later, and around the same time she ended her relationship with her boyfriend of 18 months.
‘He was her safe haven,’ says Adele, who adds that from this point on her sister ‘was in self-destruct mode’. Aimee started running away from home for weeks at a time, not answering her phone or leaving it behind altogether.
‘We didn’t know how she was earning money, or where she was staying,’ says Adele. ‘It was awful.’
Her parents did everything they could to get their daughter the right support. Yet Aimee considered any help offered by Southern Health, their local authority, ‘a betrayal of trust,’ says Adele. ‘They [the professionals she saw] kept saying she’s an adult, she’s made her decision, she doesn’t want to engage.’
Ultimately, Adele says: ‘She didn’t get the support she needed.’
Whether Southern Health played any part in her death will be heard at the inquest.
A spokesman for Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, which now encompasses Southern Health, says: ‘We were deeply saddened by Aimee’s death and our thoughts are with her loved ones.
‘We will participate fully in the coroner’s inquest in due course, to understand the circumstances surrounding Aimee’s death and any further learning for the trust about the care we provided.’
The last time the family saw Aimee was in July 2022. ‘From then on, we didn’t know where she was,’ says Adele. ‘Every day we worried the worst was going to happen.’
Two days before Aimee died, Adele says she emailed her sister asking to meet up. Aimee never replied. The following day Martin dropped Adele and her boyfriend in the New Forest for their camping trip.
When she saw their car approach the following morning, Adele thought her parents might have arrived for an impromptu dog walk. Then the bleak horror on her mother’s face registered.
‘Mum was in bits,’ says Adele, who describes much of the aftermath as a ‘blur’. At Aimee’s funeral, Adele spoke of the fun they’d had together as girls, swimming in the sea on holiday and posing for photos together.
As for the circumstances of Aimee’s death, at first all Thames Valley Police told the family was that she had been found in a hotel room in Slough, Berkshire, with a man. He told police he had been in the UK for 11 days and was working in the hotel room. He had called an ambulance but paramedics had been unable to resuscitate her.
We didn’t know where she was. Every day we worried the worst was going to happen
‘Aimee was so obviously unwell,’ says Adele, ‘I immediately felt suspicious of what that man’s motives were for being with her and not alerting support services or calling a family member.’
In the immediate aftermath of Aimee’s death, police offered to give her family the man’s name. ‘We said it was too soon and would be playing on our minds in the depth of our grief,’ says Adele.
Yet two months later, when they asked for the name, she says police refused to reveal it. Even though police dropped their investigation into the man, Adele remains doubtful; police told the family Aimee met him on the pro-suicide forum.
Adele – who had never heard of the website before her sister’s death – says she was shocked by the fact that the site existed, let alone how easy it was to find. ‘I thought these sorts of sites were on a separate dark web – that you had to go through layers of encryption to get to them,’ she says.
Founded in 2018, the website Aimee visited is believed to be run by a Uruguayan and an American, both men in their 30s, who have also run online forums for incels – involuntary celibate men. According to a New York Times investigation, in 2021 the site was getting an average of six million hits a month, with most users under 30. Police told the family they believe Aimee contacted Kenneth Law via the website.
Law, 58, is awaiting trial for 14 counts of aiding and counselling suicide and 14 murder charges in Canada, where he is in custody.
Arrested in May 2023 for operating websites that allegedly sold substances used for suicide, he is said to have sent at least 1,200 packages containing lethal substances worldwide, and is linked to 88 deaths in the UK.
Police believe that Aimee was given the poison by Kenneth Law, who is linked to 88 deaths in the UK and is awaiting trial in his native Canada, accused of murder and aiding and counselling suicide
When asked by the Daily Mail whether he supplied poison to Aimee, Law’s legal representative declined to comment.
Yet since speaking out about what happened to her sister, Adele says she has been contacted by those affected by both Law and the website, including Canadian parents whose 14-year-old daughter allegedly died after taking poison provided by Law.
‘I feel disgusted,’ says Adele, who wants tighter regulations surrounding the purchase of the poison. An antidote exists that is effective if administered quickly enough, and Adele wants paramedics to be equipped with it.
Yet it is the influence of pernicious online forces that she is most passionate about combating. ‘They [those who run the website] have peddled the myth they host a safe community for people to be open about their mental health,’ says Adele.
‘They’re on a power trip, in my opinion. They’re enjoying this. They feel they can get away with it and so far, they’ve been able to. It’s appalling.’
It’s for this reason that she and her parents were happy when the inquest into Aimee’s death was postponed just a week before it was due to start in September. It will now take place after Law’s trial is over in Canada.
‘We were relieved,’ says Adele, explaining that initially the coroner hadn’t wanted to include any online elements in the scope of the inquest, limiting the hearing to the involvement of Southern Health. She believes the online harm her sister faced is of greater concern and, unless coroners cite the role this plays in suicides, ‘the Government is not going to act’.
Adele refers to the case of 17-year-old Vlad Nikolin-Caisley, also from Southampton, who died in May 2024 after visiting the same website as Aimee and taking poison.
‘If the Government had acted when we had come to them with our concerns, and made sure Ofcom blocked the website and put stricter regulation on the sale of the poison, Vlad might still be here.’
An Ofcom spokesman told the Daily Mail that Ofcom didn’t have the power to ‘shut down’ a site, adding: ‘This forum remains on Ofcom’s watchlist and our investigation remains open while we check that the block [on UK IP addresses] is maintained and that the forum does not encourage or direct UK users to get around it.’
Clearly still impacted by her sister’s death, Adele says: ‘I don’t sleep well. I wake up with my teeth gritted. I get migraines.’
Although it’s starting to sink in that she will never see her sister again, Adele likes to think ‘she’s somewhere out there. It’s a coping mechanism’. But for now, she’s focusing on her fight.
‘Aimee was failed by the fact we’ve allowed this toxic space. I can’t have any more people die from this platform. I have channelled my grief into trying to fight for Aimee and others like her.’
Logging Off: The Human Cost Of Our Digital World by Adele Zeynep Walton (Trapeze, £20) is out now.
For confidential support, call the Samaritans on 116 123 or visit samaritans.org
