Another selfish bastard kills himself - and his two dcs as well, to spite his wife

[Moomin]

How utterly utterly heartrending.

NAB - I understand your point (I think). It's about fundamentally believing that a father has as much right to raise his children as a mother. Of course, when you look at individual cases, there are some dreadful fathers around who should have controlled access for the safety of the children. And ditto for mothers.
But the starting point needs to be that no parent has any more 'right' to a child than the other.

If I had known he had been violent I would have felt differently.

I am off to do something else now.

It's irrelevant - it's not as if she could have made him kill them by refusing access, if he were not a violent man. In fact especially unlikely to have had any impact on this happening if he were not already subject to violent tendencies.

I think I will go and do something else as well. Cannot find a meeting point here, sorry Nab.

interesting thought, policywonk. they probably are, at least by some definition. it's how far that relates to actual culpability that is more relevant, i'd have thought.

that debate aside, 90% of this thread is supposition and speculation, which imo is pretty distasteful when two kids have just been killed.

This happened in my local community recently. A man murdered his child in his bed, went downstairs, set alight to the house, and hung himself in the garage.

I was shocked, but not remotely surprised. He was a truly horrible man, inherantly capable of committing such an act.

These things don't come out of the blue. They're bred in the bone.

What about the children's rights to be loved and protected by their Dad? Someone they should be able to trust with their life?

I wonder if they were looking forward to a nice trip out with their dad, maybe a bit excited, perhaps thinking they would tell their mum about it afterwards.

Of course, now they can't, can they?

Beacuse Dad killed them.

of course it doesn't 'make' someone else kill the children by denying them access. But to say it is 'irrelevant' is equally incorrect. I would see it as highly relevant if my husband controlled my access to my children.

I meant it was irrelevant whether he was violent in the past, in terms of what Nab was saying.

She said she hadn't realised he had a history of violence - I pointed out that whether he had or not did not make the woman responsible for his actions.

So would many people findtheriver.

And they've said so.

I will say it too.

I would be devastated. I can't imagine the pain.

Never, ever would I hurt my son. Every fibre of my being revolts against it.

I'd hope that's how every parent feels.

Obviously not.

Yes, you're bang on about culpability being the real question aitch.

You're right about being distasteful - I guess this is one of those issues that we all find so sickening/frightening/maddening that it's hard not to worry away at it. It's almost not enough to just think 'Well, some men are mentally ill and they kill their kids and it's sad but no one is really culpable' - there is a need to achieve catharsis by blaming someone, I suppose.

of course it's not how every parent feels, what a nothing statement.

i thin NAB's comment was supremey off-colour but seeing as she's apologised for it and explained that she'd rather got the wrong end of the stick, it might be time to stop pummelling her.

Most mentally ill people hurt themselves though, not others. That's a common misperception.

Killing a child does not make you mentally ill. That idea is the result of faulty logic. It is insulting to people who are genuinely ill and allows guilty people to evade responsibility for their actions.

It's a fallacy. "He killed a child, therefore he must have been mentally ill". Wrong. That is working backwards. Someone may be mentally ill and someone who is mentally ill may, sadly, kill a child. But it does not follow that everyone who kills a child is ill. It's like seeing a brown dog and saying that therefore all dogs must be brown.

There is a difference between bad and mad. Otherwise we could solve all serious crime by merely locking up every person suffering from mental illness. Which would clearly be a bizarre, and wrong, course of action.

The knee-jerk 'he must have been mentally ill' line is tempting - because we find it hard to understand anyone who does such a terrible thing, they must be mad, right? But it is not, in fact, true. Sometimes people who know exactly what they are doing commit terrible crimes. I suspect Robert Mugabe is sane - just very angry and vengeful.

This is my last post on the subject as I am getting my DH to block me coming on here. Lots of reasons, not about this.

If I had known he was violent then I probably wouldn't had the initial thought that it was about access. I would have had a different slant on it totally.

Clearly you lot are all much nicer people than me. I posted what I thought, I have apologised for the upset but what I will say is access is an emotive subject and no one can ever know what goes on in someone's mind.

I don't think I am digging a hole. I am trying to explain myself and doing so badly.

Goodbye.

i have a friend whose dh is a vile, vile abuser... he probably has mental health problems but tbh i couldn't give a fuck, i'd see him hang high, no problem. but i know him... all this stuff is based on his crime and their divorce, afaia there haven't been other details released. disgusting, terrible shame, though.

lots of fairly substantiated rumour that Mugabe is losing his mind from syphilis, i think.

Perhaps I didn't make that point too well Aitch.

Clearly the man who killed his children didn't feel that way, because he took their lives.

His instinct wasn't to protect was it?

The man beat up her 19 year old son and was violent. I think she had EVERY right to deny him access. I think it is absolutely despicable that some people on here can suggest that the mother should be partly to blame. How on earth can she be in any way shape or form to blame for this. By trying to protect her kids against a violent unhinged man? I can't even imagine what pain she must be going through without judgmental people such as NAB saying that she is also to blame for this. Anyone who has ever been in a violent abusive situation would understand.

And anyway, he was seeing the kids as part of normal access arrangements and failed to bring them back when he was supposed to. Hardly sounds like someone who is denying access.

I think anyone who tries to control the other parent's right to raise their child, unless it is clearly a situation where there has been neglect/violence etc and the courts have specified controls, is behaving in a fucking shameful way.
Of course it doesnt 'justify' what has happened. There can be no justification for killing two innocent children.
I just detest the way this kind of thread can turn into a man-bashing or woman-bashing thread.
There have been numerous horrendous cases in the news recently - this guy killing his two children, a young mother leaving her toddler in a filthy house while she went out all weekend, that little girl starved to death the other week (where by the sound of it, both parents were living in the home). Some parents do horrible, vile things. Murder is the most extreme. Abuse, neglect, or emotional cruelty by denying the other parent the right to raise their children are all other forms of vile behaviour.
Try turning it around.... any parent who denies the other parent access out of spite, is actually denying their children the right to be raised by a parent. It's not all about the rights of the parents after all, is it? I intend never to split up with my husband, but if, god forbid, we did, I hope I would never inflict the emotional abuse on my children of trying to control their father's relationship with them.

I think NAB was merely putting across her own feelings. It is true that there are many men who are denied access to their children, and who are blackmailed by their wives, who are taken for every penny, whose children are told that they are "bad daddys" and so on. When it comes to emotional abuse, us women score very highly.

But that does not excuse the taking of innocent lives. I do not believe in revenge. As it happens in this case, the man was clearly a monster.

However NAB did withdraw her statement once she learned this fact. It is interesting to hear different opinions and I think NAB should be allowed hers, even if you disagree with it.

I dunno edam. What's the definition of 'mentally ill'? It's a pretty broad concept, isn't it? Couldn't it encompass those who don't form proper loving relationships with their kin, or those whose need for power/control overrides their other impulses? (This is a devil's advocate question by the way, I don't really know what I think about this issue.)

This is from teh Times report (and all others)

Brian Philcox, a supporter of the pressure group Fathers4Justice, telephoned the children?s mother beforehand to leave a message saying: ?I have left you a present ? I?ll make the papers, just you wait?.

And there's more. Violence to his stepson and to the mother, threats to her, he send a dummy bomb in the post to her, oh and guess what the sick bastard had REGULAR ACCESS every other weekend.

From the report:
?I would rather burn the house down than give it to that f bitch.

One said: ?I saw him take the kids away last week. He had a filthy look on his face. It was very tense between them?.

Another neighbour said that Mrs Philcox had complained that she was frightened of her former husband and what he was capable of. ?He would come around to where she was staying, banging on the back windows and giving her hassle,? said the neighbour.

?She is a beautiful girl. You never saw her alone. She was always with her chldren. She is one of the most beautiful women you could ever wish to meet."
Others suggested that she had complained to police of his violence, and that he used to beat her son Ryan McAuliffe, 19.
One said: ?He was brutal towards Ryan. Lyn could not handle him beating up her own son. She would say, ?You are not treating my kids like that?. She told me he had punched her son Ryan and hurt him?.
This evening police sealed off a park in Runcorn to inspect a suspect package that it is believed Mr McAuliffe had received in the post overnight.
Mr Philcox had picked up his two children from his estranged wife?s home at 7pm on Friday as part of normal access arrangements and was due to return them on Saturday afternoon.
Mrs Philcox alerted police when he failed to return and a full-scale search was mounted after he phoned her. Bomb-disposal experts who went to his home found that Mr Philcox had left a realistic-looking hoax device, which was found not to be viable. More than a 100 residents were temporarily from removed their homes.

North Wales police revealed that Mr Philcox had taken his daughter and son to Llangollen, which they had said they wanted to visit. The three were found 30 miles away.

He picked them up on a scheduled visit.
Please the mother's responsibility out of this, it is very distasteful.
I agree with Desi and Edam