I’m hoping somebody can point to some good resources here.
We’re all familiar with the plot outline of a murder suicide: a confused person kills someone, typically friend(s) ,lover(s), or family member(s), followed by killing themselves.
It’s important that they do it in the correct order; if they get that backwards it’s just not the same plot.
My serious question is about whether the assailant is motivated mostly to commit suicide and throws murder(s) in there on more or less a whim, or are they more typically preplanned murder(s) where the assailant then gets second thoughts about what they’ve just done or the likely aftermath, e.g. cops, trial, prison, etc. And then commits what’s essentially an unplanned suicide as the situation spirals ever farther out of their control.
My utterly uninformed intuition is that one or the other of those two patterns is the overwhelmingly common one. I just have no clue which, or why.
Anyone have any good info to share?
And no, this question isn’t occasioned by any real world events, past, present or future that I’m aware of. It’s just one of those “Hmmm, I’ve never thought about that detail before…” things that pops into one’s head from time to time.
I don’t know if there is a definitive answer, but I know someone who wanted to kill herself and thought that her children would be better off dead. I’ve heard that isn’t uncommon to think that way.
I suspect that the person is well aware the grief that waits for them after they go - for example, in a spousal (or girlfriend, or more likely, ex). In this case, their motivation is to “get even” and then spare themselves a life in prison. In the case of children, it may be a custody dispute - “if I can’t have them with me, you’re not going to walk away and have them.” It’s an extension of the stick-it-to-the-spouse mentality found so very often in custody disputes.
Very rarely, there’s an example - thinking of one in the news a few years ago in Canada- a woman with ongoing post-partum depression kills here two children first, probably in the despair that “they are better off dead” before she kills herself.
This is also what I have heard. The person knows in advance that they are going to commit suicide. They then proceed to murder their families in the belief that they are sparing them the pain and hardship of whatever misfortune they are suffering (poverty, divorce, child services, etc).
Other mass killers are revenge-driven. They are full of anger and resentment over whatever misfortune they have suffered (real or imagined) and intend to kill themselves. Murdering whoever they blame for their misfortune is just icing on the cake.
I’m pretty sure there is no conclusive answer here and each situation will have different dynamics.
ETA: for those parents that want to end it and take their kids with them, I wish they would leave instructions for their kids to read, and then take themselves out first.
