Familicide

A type of murder or murder-suicide in which a person kills multiple of their own close family members, such as a spouse, children, siblings or parents, in quick succession, with the perpetrator dying by suicide afterward in roughly half of documented cases. Researchers Yardley, Wilson and Lynes have proposed a four-part typology of familicide offenders: the anomic offender, who views the family as a status symbol and destroys it when facing economic collapse; the disappointed offender, who punishes the family for failing to live up to an ideal of family life; the self-righteous offender, who targets the family to exact revenge on the mother; and the paranoid offender, who kills believing, however wrongly, that they are protecting the family from an external threat. Most perpetrators are male, and a 2018 literature review found that seventy four to eighty five percent of familicide cases involved relationship problems or separation, with financial difficulty and the availability of a firearm identified as common contributing factors.