What kind of person jumps off a cliff with two children? **MNHQ warning: upsetting content**

[Leafyhouse]

I've been really shaken by that story about the woman stabbed at home, and the father found at the bottom of the cliff with 2 dead children, 10 and 7.

Their home is about 400 yards away from me. I also have 2 DS's, aged 8 and 10. It's just made me sick to the core. Police and forensic officers all over this lovely house, in a really nice area - and for what? Why would someone do that? Have your own problems, but why take the children?

Just reeling at the moment, am going to hug my kids extra tight tonight. This one's just so very close to home.

And anyone who's defending this bloke's behaviour is despicable. I cannot imagine the horror of his children's last hours. It's the stuff of nightmares.

A man who thinks he can play god.

I too live close and this has left me very shocked and saddened.

He has snuffed their wee lives out. They were ammo used by him in his story, his revenge, his power play.

I think of their poor classmates, they've lost a friend and are likely to young to be able to make sense of it. They too will probably need professional help.

The evil that men do, eh?

It's very hard to know what drives someone to this.

Possibly severe mental health difficulties. If you have a psychosis you can believe what you are doing is right even when you are totally detached from reality.

Or it a case of DV. Killed his wife in a rage and wasn't going to accept his punishment for it or let anyone else have his kids.

Those poor poor children though. What a way to spend their last few hours and minutes on earth

To be able to repeatedly stab someone, close up, you must have to be in one hell of a rage. I can imagine cases where the husband kills the wife in fury, could have been for anything, then realising what he's done, his ego cannot take the thought of going to prison, people knowing what he's done so losing his standing, and most of all his kids hating him and him losing his 'hero' status with them. So he decides to kill them, then himself, in a misguided attempt at preventing them from knowing what he's done and so he doesn't have to face up to what he's done because it's all about him.

That's not mental illness, that's pure ego driven murder.

Not saying that happened in this case because we don't know.

Its natural when something like this happens, and is plastered all over the news, for people to be so affected they want to discuss it.

I don't get the 'thread police' idiots moaning about it, just bore off, if YOU don't want to discuss it, get off the thread! I should imagine its being discussed on many more forums than just this.

"I don't get the 'thread police' idiots moaning about it, just bore off, if YOU don't want to discuss it, get off the thread! I should imagine its being discussed on many more forums than just this."

This

Always men hardly ever women and it smacks and entitlement and patriarchy that they are his property.

We shouldn’t assume mental illness. That’s potentially pretty stigmatising.

Could just be a nasty, abusive, aggressive spouse with a history of violence, who finally did the unthinkable.

I actually think the title of this thread should be changed. From Person to Man. It's always men. Always, always men

Fucking evil bastard family annihilaters, that's who. A particularly nasty brand of abusive man and not that uncommon. I'll reserve my sympathy for the woman and children he murdered and their families.
Of course, it will be reported as a 'family tragedy' and he 'was driven to do it'.

Awful. Absolutely awful.

As soon as I read the story I guessed that the father killed the mother first.

This is why’we need decent support for women with children who need to escape DV. We need a proper safety net.

I think that people want to think people who commit these kind of hideous crimes are ill because it is hard to comprehend how someone could do such a thing. To do so would mean accepting that people are capable of unthinkable acts even in their 'right mind'. Unfortunately I think well people do have it in them to murder their families.

I also think that it can be unhelpful to people to mental illness to frame horrific violence as connected with it. Mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.

I also think the lack of/waiting lists for mental health services is a bit if a red herring in these cases.

Narcissistic men like this would not consider they had mental health issues.

Probably a fucking deranged and evil murderous abusive bastard like most of the men who murder their wives and children are.

Fuck him. I’ll save my sympathy for the wife and children.

I think that people want to think people who commit these kind of hideous crimes are ill because it is hard to comprehend how someone could do such a thing

I think it's more to do with people trying to convince themselves that it could never happen to them. If there's this "reason" for the men we hear about in the news killing their families then people can convince themselves that the nice "normal" people they know will never hurt them or their friends or family. The moment people accept that there really are people out there who kill their entire families because they WANT to is the moment they have to accept it could happen to anyone.

This.

'Dr Alex Yellowlees, consultant psychiatrist and medical director of the Priory Hospital in Glasgow, said there were distinct differences in the minds of men and women who harm their children. Women, he said, tended to be mentally ill, often suffering from postnatal depression. In contrast, men tended to be struggling to deal with feelings of rage, jealousy, revenge and hatred.'

Someone mentally ill who doesnt deserve my sympathy!
His wife and children do.

Having an opinion about a thread isn't being boring. It's as valid as any other. The subject is worth discussing. I don't think the individual should be commented on when everything is so new and we have no real information and there is no objective source. It's being judge and jury. Not on, imo. But I don't make the rules.

I have posted this story before, I am not giving more of myself than I can give. This story is something that is part of me, my life and it no longer affects me much day to day.

However, I share it often in the case of women living with DV, in the hope that it will shake them into moving away from the risk of death at the hands of their partner.

When I was 6 years old and my little sister was nearly 2, I woke one morning, 3 weeks before Christmas and went downstairs. On the wall at the bottom of the stairs was a note. It read 'Daddy loves you very much, please go to Aunty x's house'. So I stuck a pair of shoes on, went out in the freezing cold and slammed the door shut behind me. I went to my aunts house arriving just after 6.30am. She went to our house and found that I had locked us out. She rang the police and they came and broke in. Inside they found the body of my mum in the kitchen and my little sister upstairs in her cot crying. My dad's body was found several hours later in his car.

My mum and dad had a volatile relationship. My dad had MH issues but that was no excuse, it was just the reason he wasn't a good person to live with. My mum repeatedly tried to leave. She also had affairs and they fought over us kids.

It's thought that on that night, she had finally had enough and decided she wanted to split from him and take us with her. He strangled her.

I don't want sympathy but I do want people to know that I am grateful he didn't end the lives of me and my sister. That would not be any kind of fucking 'mercy'. My sister and I have grown up, have children of our own and are still as close as ever.

You cannot blame MH for killing children. I agree that severe MH conditions can cause people to snap in an instant but in this case he killed his wife and then deliberately drove his children to their deaths. That's premeditated. He did not love his children enough to let them live.

I often wonder how life would have been without the trauma from my early years but it is what it is and I cherish my life, my family, my kids and the fact that I can speak up, speak out and hopefully give at least one woman the impetus to leave a bad relationship before it's too late.

I don't want sympathy or flowers but I do want you to read this and understand that men killing women who want to leave is no new thing.

**I don't think desperately unwell at all.
Murderous cunt. The worst kind of man (it's 99.5% men)

Soon it'll come out what a nice man he was to his neighbours but that privately he was violent and she was trying to get away.**

^This.

Evil man. I just can't imagine how those poor children must have felt. It's pure evil.

As for the "all murders and mentally ill" argument ... I disagree.

I have a family member who is a majorly high up psychiatrist, he obviously can't give Personal information or details away, but he has been reasonable for assessing mental competencies of people who have done evil acts. Some clearly have issues, some done.

There are reasons of course, but insanity isn't always the reason.

As far as I can understand there are three kinds of people who do these things:

1. a relatively small number who are mentally ill and under a delusion (either thinking they are saving their children from some horrendous danger or thinking the children themselves are demons/monsters/enemies)- afaik there is no particular gender division here

2. an even smaller number who actually do do it as a mercy killing because child is severely ill/disabled and suffering, and they are unable to access support- probably more likely to be mothers as they tend to bear the heaviest burden in these cases

3. a far, far higher number who do it as part of their own suicide in order to punish the other parent- statistics show that they tend to be male

In the third scenario, women are more likely to only harm themselves, while a higher proportion of men than women involve their children and/or spouses.

I know nothing about this case, but this is good on the reportage and initial reaction to Alan Hawe’s murder of his wife Clodagh and their three sons in Cavan in 2016:

granta.com/he-had-his-reasons/

He makes the point that the immediate assumption that such family annihilators must be mentally ill, often on no evidence, sidesteps the
reality that in most cases of family annihilation, it is the terminal act in a long pattern of domestic abuse.

And that the term ‘murder-suicide’ suggests that both acts have equal weight, and are as tragic as one another, AND hence manages to make the perpetrator of multiple murders appear to be as much of a victim as the people he murdered. It reads differently if we see what Alan Hawe did as committing multiple murder, after which he also killed himself.

The Hawes’ case was particularly horrifying because the murderer was initially buried in the same grave as the wife and children he killed (later exhumed at the request of Clodagh’s family) after a collective funeral, at he was portrayed as just as much of a victim as Clodagh and the boys — and he got far more media attention than his victims, until the #hernamewasclodagh campaign got going —but bar the burial, that is exactly what happens all too often in such cases.

We don’t assume perpetrators of DV are mentally ill, so why assume it of family annihilators?