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.

@MichaelBendfaster

In that case all murderers are presumably mentally unwell?

In which case legally we may as well scrap murder as they would all be reduced to manslaughter on the basis of diminshed responsibility.

FYI: Your view is out of step with the actual law and the view of psychologists.

The Nordic countries don't do so well when it comes to domestic violence

www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/06/10/the-best-countries-for-gender-equality-may-also-have-a-domestic-violence-problem/?utm_term=.e4eed5f39313

Thing is, we're still just thinking of the man as the central person in this, the real person in this story, the one whose life and motivations matter. The murdered wife and kids are just the objects of his destructive actions. Was he mad or was he bad? Who can say?

But none of that matters much to the victims. My dad was a wife-beater and a child-beater. He was also an alcoholic. He was also aneurotypical. Did his alcoholism (an illness) and his aneurotypicality contribute to the reasons for him beating his wife and kids? I am fairly certain they did. But it's my mum who was sitting there with a black eye and broken glasses and cigarette burns on her legs where they wouldn't show, and cigarette ash tapped into her hair. She was a real person too. I don;t care, in the end, what factors made him do the things he did. I just wish he hadn't, or that he was stopped.

An utter fucking deplorable despicable creature.

We have to see him as a whole person if we want to solve the problem, though. That doesn’t mean excusing him or blaming it on MH issues. What is does mean is acknowledging that men are less likely to access support. That society has fostered a culture where being a man means being in control, taking control, being ‘in charge’ of women. I think you have to feel inadequate as fuck to abuse your partner or children, or to only be able to communicate with violence. Which is why we have to start giving men better tools to express and deal with their emotions.

It's just interesting his mental illness didn't cause him to murder random people.

That’s actually more common than killing random people. The two most recent cases I can think of is the girl that killed Katy Rough and also the girl in Bexley who stabbed her mother. Both of them had delusional mental illnesses. I can only think of the Zito killing immediately where it was a stranger. Delusional killings are different from killings with depression. They genuinely don’t know what reality is.

Obviously we don’t know yet.

I always wonder whether the wife in these stories was a Mumsnetter.

So horrible to think there could be threads about DV or leaving that just stop and none of us realise why

I think most monsters and controlling abusers kill the children and not the mother to let the mother suffer. They then sometimes kill themselves but not always.

I think this case suggests madness rather then badness but god knows

If this man had gone on a killing spree involving victims who weren't his wife and kids nobody would be saying poor man, or we musn't rush to judge. The sympathy afforded exclusively to family annihilators is bizarre and a complete insult to the terror his victims went through.

lougle
This thread is so distasteful. A family is dead. But their relatives live on.

The thread may not be to your liking, but it is certainly very relevant. I admit it's got a bit abusive (for understandable reasons), but the original question was 'What kind of person would do this?'. Because this isn't the first time it's happened, and it won't be the last.

How do we identify DV? What drives people to do this? (Men and women - I remember a woman in Surbiton killing her special needs children not long ago, that was only just down the road). Is there anything we can do to spot this before it happens?

I'm sure you have great faith in the authorities to have an 18 month inquiry followed by a coroner's inquest that says 'lessons will be learned', but I'm not so sure myself - because it keeps happening.

Just angry I suppose...

I remember Clodagh and her children being murdered by her husband. I think of her often. She died the same week I left my ex for good that’s probably why.

All I heard read was “he was a kind man, a pillar of the community, a devoted husband and father, couldn’t do enough for anyone” Clodagh was barely remembered it seemed. “Seemed like a nice woman” was about all that was said. Her sons got even less of a look in.

I think I read recently that the family were originally all buried together but the killer’s body has now been exhumed and moved elsewhere. Or is going to be. I am glad of that and I imagine the family are too.

I keep thinking about the poor children! Did they know what their dad was about to do? Did they know that their mother had been murdered?

If there is a god, then I hope to god that those poor innocent children didn't know what had happened to their mum and what was about to happen to them.

I have absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the father.

He's a family annihilator. A gross, narcissistic shithead who wants to destroy his family because he's a violent man.

Evil fucker

Highly possible she was an MNer

Just doesn't bear thinking about. I only hope those kids were at school and didn't witness this attack on their mother

"Lessons learned"

What a fucking joke. And every week more women's shelters are closed.

Those children did not deserve to die. What the fuck am I reading ?

'If this man had gone on a killing spree involving victims who weren't his wife and kids nobody would be saying poor man, or we musn't rush to judge.'

Exactly this ^

Putting violence against a partner into a separate category, calling it 'domestic violence', has people viewing it differently.

Helmetbymidnight Did you read the rest of my comment?

Flirtygirl your comment is deplorable.
This threads need pulling imo. I would hate for their family to see it.

Alan hawe's children fought for their lives while he stabbed them to death.

He killed his victims in order of strength: first his wife, then his oldest, then the middle child and finally the six year old.

All of them fought him, knew what was happening, wanted desperately to live.

In the aftermath, people said he must have been so ill, poor man,
Nobody in their right mind could do that. His wife Clodagh's family listened and buried him with them, but as time passed they realised that no, what he didn't wasn't madness, but premeditated, and they have had his body exhumed and are promoting a women's shelter be founded in memory.

It is much more likely in cases like this that the backstory is one of DV, and control, and evil, rather than mental illness. The lies about mental illness cause so many women to stay with abusive men it is unreal.

The details in this case haven't come out yet, but everybody who assumes there was mental illness at play here needs to do some reading. Family annihilation is a phenomenon, usually perpetrated by abusive men, and making excuses for it is the worst thing you can do.

A family annihilator, aka a murderer.

That poor mother and children. he can rot in hell the murderous coward