In closing arguments before a jury found Alex Murdaugh guilty of murdering his wife and son, prosecutor Creighton Waters referred to him as a “family annihilator.”
“The defendant is the person on which a storm was descending,” Waters said, referring to the imminent exposure of Murdaugh’s lies and financial crimes.
“Those pressures mount,” he said, “and someone becomes a family annihilator.”
It was the first time in the trial that prosecutors had used the term, and many observers and commentators were unfamiliar with it. Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz first used it in the 1980s, but these days, experts generally refer to “familicide” for family mass murder.
These killings generally fall into two categories, Louis Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told me. “One is the ‘despondent’ familicidal offender. This is somebody who’s very depressed, kills his family to save them from living in this horrible and cruel world. And he does this as sort of an act of mercy and very often kills himself or tries to kill themselves.”
A “paranoid” familicidal offender, in contrast, “sees his family in a proprietary way, an ownership way. And very often the murder itself is triggered by jealousy — perhaps the wife was with somebody else, that type of thing — and he just kills everybody as a form of punishment,” he added.
The he/his pronouns are intentional. “What you’re gonna find in general with respect to murder: This is a male thing,” regardless of whether it’s a single or mass murder, Schlesinger said. “Do women kill? Of course, but it’s predominantly by and large men.”
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/drumoorhouse/family-annihilators-murdaugh-haight-watts
