Murder–suicide
act in which an individual kills one or more other persons as well as oneself
A murder–suicide is an act where an individual intentionally kills one or more people, before or while also killing themselves. The suicide may be in response to the guilt one feels for the murder, or to avoid potential punishments, such as imprisonment. Some forms of murder also inherently entail suicide; such as suicide attacks, or when the operator of an aircraft with passengers deliberately crashes it.
Many perpetrators of spree killings, such as mass shootings, either end their own lives afterwards, or intend to be killed by police. Some cases of religiously motivated mass suicides have also involved murder. All categorization amounts to forming somewhat arbitrary distinctions where relating to intention in the case of psychosis, where the intention(s) is/are more likely than not to be irrational. Ascertaining the legal intention (mens rea) is inapplicable to cases properly categorized as insanity.
The term sometimes includes more general cases of homicide rather than strictly murder ('homicide–suicide'), meaning that cases of manslaughter are included.
According to an analysis of The Times of London's reports of murder (1887–1990) by Danson and Soothill (1996), there is a much higher proportion of British male murder–suicides, in general, than female. Overwhelmingly the women committing murder–suicide tend to kill their children and then themselves.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Murder–suicide” as act in which an individual kills one or more other persons as well as oneself. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as act in which an individual kills one or more other persons as well as oneself. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3307578. The Library of Congress control number is sh2021003785. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1887, 1990 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Murder–suicide” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.