Murder-suicides are not moments of madness... they are the last acts of controlling, coercive partners

[IwantToRetire]

The language we use about people guilty of family annihilation matters deeply

Murder-suicides are not a loss of control, a moment of madness. They are the last act of a controlling and coercive partner.

They are carried out by people — mainly men — who believe the people they are slaughtering are their possessions, and if they can’t have them, no one will.
They are perpetrated by cowards who want to make sure they will never have to answer questions or be held accountable for their actions.

And they are almost always carefully planned and involve extreme, gratuitous levels of violence.

Abusers often present as charming and accommodating outside the home. It is part of the reason why they get away with their behaviour. They create an environment in which their victim fears not being believed if they expose their true character.

Unless you have lived under the same roof as a person, you have no idea what they are like behind closed doors.

There are also those who come up with reasons for why a man would do such a thing — he must have been mad, depressed or was somehow driven to it, for example — preventing them from looking inward at themselves.

All three of the murder-suicides I’ve mentioned were committed in middle-class homes. Domestic abuse knows no barriers. It can happen in any social class. It could be your friend, relative or next-door neighbour.

Extracts only from longer article at https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/comment/murder-suicides-are-not-moments-of-madness...-they-are-the-last-acts-of-controlling-coercive-partners/a/158870893.html
And also at https://archive.is/KhH3W

(Although the article is about tragic cases in Northern Ireland, it happens across the UK, the US etc.)

Trigger alert.

Absolutely. It's never the other way round is it?

Trigger alert: My ex threatened to do this. He told me in detail how he was going to kill me then end his life. He was going to go out in a "blaze of glory" - he was going to take an overdose, slash his wrists in the bath and throw in a plugged in electrical appliance just to be sure.

Obviously he didn't and we are both here living our separate lives but I can't begin to understand why a man (because it usually is a man isn't it?) would chose to end their life instead of just walking away.

My daughter's teenage boyfriend ended up in court on a stalking charge against her. We had known him for 2 and a half years. We knew his family. He had come on holiday with us. We adored him. Everyone liked him in fact. And we had no idea how controlling he was being. We couldn't believe it when our daughter told us. She suddenly finished with him and a couple of days later was calling the police because of his threats. These men are so unbelievably good at hiding their behaviour, which only applies to their close female relationships (or male partners). I now believe he was horrible to his mother and sister too. I read somewhere that they act impeccably around men - in prison for example they are model prisoners. They are very tuned into male hierarchies and know their place - it's why they are usually so praised after the event by colleagues etc.

They called that recent case in NI a double murder and sudden death...

the language they used was queried a lot by locals as there’s a definite shift in reporting & SM comments had quite a few men giving off to other comments that assumed the man was the murderer, before it was confirmed it was the man. Very sad to the numbers rising for this sort of crime to be rising.

@Arran2024 my Dd had a similar boyfriend in her early 20s nice lad all the rest of it, is currently in prison for abusing his wife,

Op i agree with you these men know exactly what they are doing.

Absolutely agree, thank you for posting Retire. My ex was very violent and at points I feared this. Acutely attuned to male hierarchies describes him to a T.

There was an absolutely horrendous case of this in Australia in 2020, which seems to have brought coercive control much more to public awareness there, at least.

RIP Hannah Clarke and her three children.

this was near me, fucking scumbag, why couldn't he just go and off himself and leave his ex wife and her son alone

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-42341177

Sadly this has been none and reported on for some years.

What I dont understand is why this form of male violence isn't more robustly monitored and reported on.

I dont think that the annual femicide report includes, or at least has it as a group.

Not saying they are responsible as you would like to think the police, CPS etc., would want to be aware.

But maybe it is something they could include.

Family annihilation has at least four variants I have seen.

1. Man kills children to punish their mother
2. Man kills children and himself so he punishes the mother and she never gets justice
3. Man kills mother and children because no one else should “have them”
4. Man kills mother, children and himself because everyone would be better off dead than live separately, and if he has to die, so should they. This includes Kyle Clifford who killed Louise Hunt, his ex-girlfriend, her mother, Carol and her sister, Hannah, and then tried to kill himself, paralysing himself in the process.

This is why we need to take male violence against women and girls more seriously than we do.

There's the elderly men who kill their ailing wife then themselves. Often the female is a dementia sufferer and/or bedbound. There was a spate of these that had some people thinking it was actually the work of a serial killer. Which, I suppose, shows how closely this follows a pattern.

One that for some reason really upset me was the man who murdered his wife during lockdown. I think they were on the way out of the house and he just killed her. He talked about it like it was a trivial accident, like he'd broken a cup. He got four years. That poor woman.

There was a pivotal case in Ireland in 2016 - a man, Alan Hawe. killed his three sons and his wife, and then himself.

In 2013 a man, Martin McCarthy,' well respected in the community' as the cliché goes, drowned his 3-year-old daughter and then killed himself; it appeared that he did it so his separated wife wouldn't get custody of her. The child was initially buried with him.

The media reporting at the time was full of 'That poor man... what must he have been going through...what turmoil must have been going on in his mind...'
The child's mother was not just ignored, but there was some ill-will against her locally, and she had to fight to have her daughter exhumed from beside her murderer, and buried close to her mother's home.

The media coverage of the Hawe killings three years later started out along the same lines - 'what could have driven him...his three sons....a family tragedy... well respected in the community ...Vice Principal of the local school...those three lovely boys...' until her family stepped up with a campaign to shame the media into acknowledging the existence and humanity and value of the dead woman - 'Her Name Was Clodagh'.

It worked, and these days family annihilation by a man is seen firstly as murder rather than firstly as a 'private tragedy.'

I remember Luke and Ryan Hart fighting valiantly against the initial "tragic" narrative after their father killed their mother and sister. They spoke candidly about how their father's actions were just a continuation of his abusive behaviour in the house but IIRC, there were numerous quotes from neighbours initially saying how out of the blue it was as though they had any insight.

Media in the UK are supposed to report these cases sensitively too but they often seem to forget. The old "crime of passion" trope is alive and well.