This is not an outraged “OMG Die in hell” thread that often pops up in the pit when someone does particularly heinous, especially to children, but I do find these kind of stories disturbing. Here in Maryland we’ve had two of these in the past week. In Frederick, a man hanged himself after killing his 4 kids (They haven’t actually said this per se, but his death has been determined to be suicide by hanging and his 4 kids were suffocated and killed with blunt force trauma, so it’s likely. His wife is missing and I think by now presumed dead, so I suppose she could have killed the kids and taken off and he hung himself when he discovered them, but that’s not the general pattern in these things, is it?), and today a man in Montgomery County killed his one and three year olds after taunting his wife on the phone before then killing himself. These incidents sicken and disgust me, but I realize they are as old as mankind itself, and if we can’t prevent them, then I’d like to help these poor bastards out. I always think the same thing when I hear a someone has killed their kids and then themselves, so I’m debating publishing a “how to” guide for people who are considering doing this to share my wisdom. So:
Think I can get some of these assholes to follow my guide instead of what they’ve been doing?
Dan Savage proposed a similar idea after a spate of murder/suicides out here a few years back. Something about it still seems counter-intuitive to me, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what…
Unfortunately, for many of the bastards in question, the idea of tormenting their partner/spouse/ex/whatever seems to be one of the main points to the whole thing (frinstance, your second example
Still, if you could get JUST ONE of them to follow your prescription…
Can anyone take a stab at explaining the psychology of the murder-suicide to me, particularly involving kids?
I mean, I can kind of understand it with the wife. Perhaps you really want to kill your wife but don’t want to go to jail for it, but the murder-suicide involving children is just beyond me. Anyone care to explain?
In some cases, it stems from depresion so extreme that they actually think the kids will be better off dead. This seems to be particularly common for single parents, or for parents in an extremely abusive relationship (“I’m so bad off I’ll be better off dead, but how can I leave the kids with that monster? I know, I’ll kill them too”)
Babies start out as an extension of ourselves. They’re like those “black boxes” we were given in freshman science class, where you have to try to figure out what’s going on without destroying the thing. They don’t know to put on a coat - if YOU’RE cold, they need more covering. If YOU have the sniffles, then their runny nose means they probably have your virus.
Another pathology is quite simply that some people are evil - for a variety of possible reasons, the child ceases to be an individual in their own right, but becomes simply a bone of contention in a failed/failing relationship. That seems to have been what happened here, with this case, where the father kidnapped his daughter, got into a small plane with his daughter, and flew into his former mother-in-law’s house.
After leaving a taunting voicemail for his ex, that includes his daughter crying in the background, begging for mommy to come get her.
There’s no way I can see this as anything but a desire on the asshat’s part to inflict the most pain on his ex as possible. With no real sense of his daughter as a person in her own right.
This can have part of it’s genesis in fessie’s point. A lot of people view custody arrangements as some kind of property issue, rather than trying to figure out how to balance the rights of the people involved, and the good of the child. They talk about how “that asshole isn’t going to touch my kid” with the implication that the kid is simply another part of them.
My brother’s niece and nephew were killed by their father in a murder-suicide. He had them for the weekend and was supposed to take them fishing. Instead, he turned on the gas in his apartment and asphixiated them all. The kids may have been asleep. Fortunately the older daughter decided to skip the trip and survived.
He deliberately set things up so his ex-wife, my brother’s wife’s sister, would be the one to find them all the next morning. He told her he was leaving an envelope with some money for her on the kitchen table so she would come in and make the discovery.
It was obviously an attempt to inflict the maximum suffering possible on the spouse.
On a practical note: these things run in spats. For years there are no family killings-suicides, and then there are seven in one year.
Dutch psychologists say it is reading about such cases in the paper that pushes people at risk over the edge. They go from: “Life is hell, but what else can I do but bear it” to “Well, if they snapped, why shouldn’t I?”
For that reason, Dutch press has been very reticient in reporting such cases in mass media in the past years.
That’s very interesting. My brother’s brother-in-law was in fact an Afrikaner; the event happened in South Africa. His wife and sister-in-law are South Africans of mostly English/Norwegian ancestry.
If I were so miserable that I wanted to kill myself, I would definitely want to take my kids out so that they would be spared the misery, too. It seems pretty straightforward to me.
Fortunately, I don’t feel that way and I don’t have kids. But I don’t see what’s hard to understand about it.
I mean really, isn’t that more logical than: “I can’t go on another minute in this horrible world of hardship and woe. So long, kids! You’ll probably suffer less than I did.” It doesn’t make sense.
That’s just murder. Regardless of your opinion on the matter, their lives aren’t yours to take. If they want to kill themselves then that’s their deal, but you’ve no more right to decide that their life isn’t worth living than you can decide it for any other person who isn’t you. (Excluding fetuses and whatnot, who aren’t self-aware.)
Well, not a single fetus has ever written or said anything to lead anyone to believe they’ve got the least bit of self-awareness. But if you’ve got a cite that they are self-aware, I’ll listen.
Anyway, I’m going to start using these news stories as examples for my kids when they won’t clean their rooms. Taking away the TV doesn’t seem to be cutting it.
i.e. The world is a horrible place. Its full of misery and suffering. There is no joy. I cannot leave the children I love to suffer in such a world. I want to spare them this endless pain of a joyless world. Death is the best option for all of us.
I don’t see what’s hard to understand either. Many parents would do anything to protect their kids from unbearable pain and suffering. And suicidal depression is a psychosis where its common to believe the world only offers unbearable pain and suffering.
Sure, it can be, if you don’t believe you will be caught.
Since many people regard having and raising children and perpetuating your family line one of the most important things in life, killing one’s own children is just about the most horrific and illogical thing possible - probably even worse than killing yourself.