‘Better-Off Dead’

It seems unfathomable that an ostensibly stable and loving man could kill the people he loves most; but unfortunately, it is more common than we may like to consider. Last month, Mark Meeks, 51 from Whitehall, Ohio killed his wife and two children after he lost his job. That case came just one week after Ervin and Ana Elizabeth Lupoe of Los Angeles committed suicide after killing their five children. The Lupoes wrote in their suicide note; "after a horrendous ordeal, my wife felt it better to end our lives; and why leave our children in someone else's hands ... we have no job and five children under eight years with no place to go. So here we are." These cases shocked a nation still absorbing the news of Bruce Pardo, 45, who dressed as Santa Claus, attacked a Christmas Eve party hosted by his ex-wife's parents and killed his former spouse and 8 of her relatives before setting the house on fire. Pardo later killed himself.

Known as "family annihilators", these people, most always men, have a profound need for control that drives them to destroy their family when they can no longer provide for them financially or when the family has been divided by divorce. (With men who commit murder-suicides there tends to be a catalyst such as a financial or personal defeat that they view as catastrophic, while women who kill loved ones are more likely to have a history of mental-health conditions like postpartum psychosis, as in the case of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five young children in 2001.)

The Violence Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research group, estimates that there were 1,108 murder-suicides in the United States in 2007, the overwhelming majority of them carried out by men. And though these most recent available statistics do not indicate a rise in such crimes from 2006 to 2007, with an economy shedding thousands of jobs a month, some experts believe that we may be facing a set of stressful economic circumstances where more men or even women could find themselves considering the unthinkable.

NEWSWEEK's Raina Kelley spoke to Jack Levin, professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University and author of "Serial Killers and Sadistic Murderers: Up Close and Personal" (Prometheus Books), about how seemingly ordinary men wind up committing terrible acts and why we may need to brace ourselves for more of these crimes as the recession tightens its grip. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What is a family annihilator?
LEVIN: A family annihilator is usually the husband/father (certainly one of the family members) who kills the family unit, not just his wife or one of his children, but every member of the family. The motive for the crime may be clear or not; but the annihilation indicates that the family [as a whole] is the victim.

What could the motive for such a crime possibly be?
Typically the motive is either revenge or altruism. We like to think that we're safe with our loved ones but the largest number of mass killings in the U.S. occurs in the family. [Second is the workplace, third is at schools] About 30 percent of mass killings are within the family.

Can you explain how seemingly average people wind up committing such an extreme crime?
There are certain factors that we find in almost every annihilation, especially the ones where the motive is revenge: There's a catalyst that is seen as catastrophic in the mind of the killer. The percipient is usually a nasty divorce or child-custody battle. There's a loss of a relationship. There's an externalization of blame. The killer believes that the spouse is responsible for the destruction of the family unit. The children are killed because the husband blames the wife and kills everything associated with her … first the children go and then the wife—everything associated with the person is considered evil.

When the motive is altruism, the catalyst is usually financial disaster. The killer is convinced that he no longer has the ability to take primary responsibility of his wife and his children. He may have lost his job in an economy that's going south. He may have lost almost every penny in the stock market like many other people today. The husband/father feels that he will never again be able to find another comparable job and thus won't ever be able to take care of his family. He feels a responsibility for the well being of his family and their current existence is so miserable that they would be happier in the hereafter where they can reunite after death.