Familicide

The word familicide refers to various forms of mass killing within familial or kinship networks or among those connected through bonds of sexual intimacy. The term is usually reserved for those killings that occur in a relatively short time period, often within 24 hours. However, it is conceivable that someone could kill a significant number of family members over a period of years and that such acts might be construed as a form of familicide. Compared with other forms of homicide, including those involving family members, familicides are relatively rare events. In part because of their rarity and in part because they offend common understandings of what families are supposed to be like, familicides attract considerable media attention. However, there is relatively little substantive research on this phenomenon.

Researchers recognize that perpetrators of familicide may or may not subsequently commit suicide. There is no agreed upon number of victims that a perpetrator must kill for the act to constitute a familicide. Indeed there is a great deal of variation in those forms of familial or kinship mass killings that potentially qualify as familicides. A few examples help illustrate this point.

One form involves a parent, nearly always the father, killing the entire family and then killing himself. For example, on January 12, 1999, Terry M. Jones of Anderson, Indiana, killed his wife and two children then committed suicide. He allegedly did so because he thought his wife was having an affair on the Internet. In this case the perpetrator had a previous conviction for domestic violence against his wife.

The historical record contains very few cases of women killing their families and then killing themselves. One such example is a familicide in Cadillac, Michigan, perpetrated by Mrs. Daniel Cooper who shot and killed her husband and six of her seven children before taking her own life. According to newspaper accounts, Mrs. Cooper had been “mentally unsound” for more than a year prior to the killings.

The concepts of familicide and homicide-suicide are sometimes used interchangeably. Some writers use the term familicide to describe, for example, a case where a parent kills his or her children and then commits suicide. Others might use the term homicide-suicide to describe the same killings. Some criminol-ogists reserve the word familicide for only those mass killings in which all the children are killed. Others still use the term if only a proportion of the children are murdered. These inconsistencies speak to the range and complexity of some of the various forms of mass killing that occur within familial or kinship networks. At this point it is safe to say that the word familicide is usually used to describe mass killings where perpetrators kill a significant proportion of family members, to the extent that the family, as a unit or network, is no longer recognizable.

There is also some overlap between familicides and other forms of mass killing. Clearly, the term familicide includes cases where a perpetrator kills his current or ex-wife or partner, most or all of their children, and other relatives. However, it sometimes happens that the killing of kin accompanies the murder of community members, bystanders, or other persons significant to the perpetrator. The following examples illustrate this overlap.

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