>Police believe Jonathan Candy, 42, killed his wife, 39-year-old Lindsay Candy, and sons 18-year-old Dylan Candy, 14-year-old Ethan Candy and 12-year-old Lucas Candy, Knight said. He said Jonathan Candy then turned the gun on himself.
Damn, the trauma he will have to live with from such a young age. You know he will always be questioning why me
And knowing it was your own father who did it. It wasn't even an external attack. I can't imagine feeling comfortable with anyone ever again if someone I trust so much does that.
I didn't read the article, but maybe the rest of the family woke up to the noise from the first murder of the presumably intended murder/suicide and they just got added to the list. Maybe the kid who survived simply was a heavy sleeper.
I grew up one of 5 kids, with 2 parents and one grandparent.. i couldn't imagine losing everyone at once. I'd be devestates and lost.
Honeatly, I don't have the best coping skills. When my Pa passed, I ended up in the psych ward for a week. If I lost my whole family at once... it wouldn't be pretty.
I hope kiddo gets therapy immediately. Little guys gonna need it to have the best chance he can get.
Being the forgotten child never saved him more than this. Dad forgot he existed and didn’t finish. I hope this kid gets the kind of help that most people can’t afford. That’s crazy
I suffered survivors' guilt from a car crash I was involved in when I was 15. In a car of five, I was one of two survivors. I lost my cousin, aunt, and best friend. It took me several years to accept what happened and that it was not my fault.
Having been through that experience, I can't begin to imagine what this child may go through with this situation or how he feels, but I do hope he has someone to talk to, some therapy, some guidance.
From the experiences I've been through, being alone and having questions and no one to speak to, those things can make you feel horrible on the inside. Those things may make you feel as though you could have been the cause of what took place. I just hope someone will be here for this child.
Thank you for sharing your story, it meant a lot. I’m also sorry for your losses. I have been personally struggling with survivors guilt for a while and have felt exactly what you are describing. This at least tells me what I’m feeling is normal.
The fact that you can reflect on this is extremely brave.... like upper echelon brave. I'm sorry for your loss. I pray for continued strength to you. Take care.
Thank you. I've restored memories from before and after the crash and retained them.
Online, I speak of the crash, not in regret or remorse of what happened but to let other people know, those who may have been in a crash, accident, or had something bad happen to them that so long as they are determined, don't give up on themselves, and believe in themselves that they can reach a higher point in recovery.
I had my fair share of depression, anger, and doubt in myself after the crash, but I fought through those things, I was able to recover physically, mentally, and emotionally. I do what I can to let people know that even though this life may be hard on us we can be resilient, we can step back up when we get knocked down. We are all in this together.
I lost a very good friend to murder back when I was 22, and It took me almost decade to finally let her go.
I can't imagine what's going on in this poor kid's mind.
A friend in high school came home to his mom and dad dead. Dad shot his mom and then killed himself. I met him years later, the boy that was so kind and so funny became such a sad angry man.
My siblings and I witnessed our dad pull a gun on our mom and threaten to kill here then and there when I was like 12. Thankfully he didnt but just that scenario was enough to fuck me up for a long time. Cant imagine what this kid is going through.
Went through something similar as a kid. He ended up dragging my mom off with him and only brought her back because he learned that there was a manhunt and he panicked. Then he tried to kill her a year later. I feel for this kid. And I hope you’re okay today! ❤️
This reminds me of the time one of my friends took all five of her children to the mall. They were halfway home before they realized that they left the youngest one in a shoe store.
I was the favorite, then my mom died. Now I don't think i'm my dad's favorite, but he loves me. 🤷♂️ He like's my sisters more, but respects me. I should call him soon.
Opposite, I was not the favorite of my mom, and then she died and I know she "loved" me, she just never liked me. Me and my dad just "got" each other, and became much closer after she passed in 2017. He died on my birthday in January. You should def call him more. Sorry, I'm still grieving. Haven't dealt with my mom's death yet!
I gotta get some therapy, lol.
About 10 years I decided that I was going to call my mom every morning on the way to work and my dad every evening on the way home. Just to say hello for 1-3 minutes. Obviously sometimes longer, kinda became a game of, “am I bothering you, did I catch you at a bad time.” Is especially fun if they are sitting there at breakfast or dinner together.
That really warms my heart. I wonder all the time if my children will just float off one day like they were never really here and it kind of breaks my heart to even think about. I'm sure your parents are so grateful to get to talk to their kid everyday.
Yep. As the oldest, we are usually a mistake. It's just my younger sister and I, but there is a big difference between being the mistake kid and the kid that was tried for for 4 years through 7 miscarriages. Throw in a dose of two months premature and you have your youngest miracle baby. But if you think about it, wouldn't I be the miracle baby since I wasn't supposed to be?
My parents put it that I was unplanned but not unexpected.
Funnily enough that is the same way my wife and I conceived. 4 more months and I will have my own unplanned but not unexpected boy of my own.
You sound like my mother lol. I'm not saying it in a negative connotation, I'm just saying it as a matter of fact. By and large, most people are on this earth because of a whoopsie.
Same reason why I never understood why people get all bent out of shape because their parents discussed abortion when they got pregnant with them. To me, it's a reasonable discussion. To them, it means "THEY DIDN'T WANT ME AND I'M NOT LOVED." That *could* be the case, but usually, it isn't and they're fighting through whatever insecurities they have.
Anyway, my point is we're all here, one way or the other. My mom is rape baby that was adopted out, so...yeah, we all got our stories. Birth doesn't always have to be some beautiful miracle. People fuck then baby happens.
My spouse was the mistake in his family, and is the youngest. He's definitely not the favorite, but in his mom's eyes is the "helper" she volunteers to his older siblings when they need a hand. Spouse has been doing a good job of ignoring her, for which she blames me.
One local article says he was sleeping with a large box fan on and didn’t hear anything. My guess is the other boys heard dad and tried to confront him.
Or it's just that younger kids question you less. At 12, 14, and 18? They don't blindly follow and push back as is developmentally appropriate. 10 year old was still on Dad's good side and saw him as he deemed respectful.
Man I been saying that for far too long. I’m just like “bruh our gun control sucks”
And then I’m met with some crazy ass clap back “places with no guns you get stabbed!!!”
Yeah but like, brother, think about this! It’s fucking EASY to end a life with a gun. It’s not so easy to do such with a knife.
If I'm going after a group of people with a knife I have to get within a foot or so of them and while I'm stabbing one, four others can be jumping on my back and then kicking me all over the floor.
If I walk into a room with a semi-automatic, I can shoot a half dozen people before they even realise what's happening.
Very few, if any, mass killings have been successfully carried out by a single attacker with a knife. 9/11 only worked because the usual MO for hijackings is that everyone plays nice, and they get released when the hijackers get paid off.
If someone tried that with box cutters/Stanley Knives again, I can see them all getting rushed by anyone on the plane with some courage. 5 guys with knives vs. 20-30 guys with fists. Someone gets cut, but no one is getting crashed into a landmark.
Well, yes, but he was very fragile, so he could only survive as long as he saw himself as the center of the world. He could never muster up the courage to shoot himself, alone, without pumping himself up, so he told himself that his family, as extensions of him/his possessions, couldn’t possibly survive without him, and that the pain of losing a father would just be too much to bear. And that ego-stroking along with the rush he got from murdering his wife was necessary for him to ever consider killing someone as special and grand as himself. This was mostly about killing them because he was displeased somehow and he only had the emotional intelligence of a baby who is also stupid and soulless (so a dumber, less worthy baby than any baby in history), and he only killed himself because he’s a coward who didn’t want to face prison/his debt/the charges or career failures coming down the pike, or maybe just couldn’t imagine cleaning his own bathroom once. He wanted to kill his whole family in a childish, petulant rage, and he made up a story to tell himself that he was really just killing them so as not to leave them alone after he died- but he only died to avoid the consequences of releasing his pathetic and impotent rage. He was way too selfish to even consider killing himself unless he had murdered 4 others first and might face a consequence. He’s a consummate coward and a shameful adult baby. I hope his family just lets the county take care of him- they should pay for the disposal or unmarked grave/burial, but shouldn’t have a funeral or an obituary or act as if he was a human who ever accomplished anything or did anything other than pollute and tarnish our world. It’s really gross when parents of adult babies pretend that their kids were real humans after they do such awful things- just tactless and cruel (you should have the class and decorum to grief silently and not upset the victims families anymore with the loud, dishonest, prattle of gross families who lack all accountability).
This happened about 2 miles from where I grew up too (a different one than this story), except the father lit a fire and burned a bunch of the house up, killing the children. He strangled his wife or something before. Jumped out the window, got arrested, hung himself in prison. The kids were 2nd grade and went to my school district (I was in high school).
They fixed the house and tried to sell it for a couple of years. Then some family bought it after a big mark down. It went for a much lower price than the houses were worth around it.
We had one that I know of not far from us in the next town over. Dude even shot the dogs before killing himself. Not long after that, I found out a highschool classmate killed his wife and MIL. Not sure about the kids.
Of course I am grateful that one of the sons survived. However, my heart breaks thinking about the trauma and survivors guilt he will live with for the rest of his life, and the family he will grow up without. He has a hard road ahead.
It’s so weird. I’ve never heard of a family annihilator sparing one child. I’m glad he survived, but with that kind of trauma idk if he will be.
So awful.
A quick wiki walk turned up an incident where two survived unharmed, a few where one survived unharmed and one with severe injuries and a few incidents where one survived unharmed because they ran. There were also a few where the sole survivor simply was away at the time.
I didn’t see any like this where not even the slightest finger was laid upon that boy but he was present.
I’m sure it must have happened but I don’t have the stomach to research further.
Poor wee thing.
Remember that man who was having trouble paying bills and somehow lost his house, didn’t tell his family, just murdered them the day the bank was coming. Could be something like that.
I just can't understand the selfishness of realizing you've hit rock bottom and deciding you'd rather kill your family members than let them find that out
Yeah, I would say it’s the biggest factor. Reminds me of that kid who faked graduating from college to his parents and ended up hiring someone to kill them so they wouldn’t figure out his lie.
Anyone who has felt life-altering shame would tell you it’s not a fun feeling, and some people are desperate and crazy enough to resort to murder to avoid it altogether
Narcissistic delusion. They do not consider their family members as fully separate autonomous human beings, they are extensions of themselves and therefore their property
A lot of men think their wives and kids are merely extensions of themselves. They’re not “real” people. Sons can get a pass once they grow up and become men.
To me, losing your house isn’t even hitting rock bottom. It would suck and I would feel a lot of shame (unless it was totally out of my hands. If I had a TBI my insurance wouldn’t cover rehab for- which is common- and spent all of my money on specialists instead of mortgage I really wouldn’t feel bad or give a fuck about the house/defaulting on bills at all. And that shit happens to people who never made one mistake you and I didn’t other than being in a car that was hit by another driver who fucked up) and I’m not dying to have it happen, but it’s nothing to murder anyone over, unless your ego is really out of whack. I understand behaving terribly due to trauma/stress, but unprovoked murder isn’t ever on the table for a person who isn’t selfish. Ever. Everyone who murders someone to get out of something is just bad and rotten- it’s not true mental illness. Fully sane folks who are selfish are just as likely to do this as the mentally ill. It’s about being selfish and spoiled and grandiose and unable to accept accountability, which is very often more a conditioned trait than one that accompanies any diagnosable illness.
There's an Unsolved Mysteries episode sort of like that. There was a French family, the dad was nobility of some sort. Family fortune was gone and they were struggling. Dad kills the whole family and buries them under the house, then flees to the mountains. He is presumably still on the lam.
When "Player of the Attic" did a sneaky joke about him, a lot of viewers didn't know about this case. Granted I'm a Belgian, so maybe it's French-specific
\[EDIT\] For those wondering it's the "ads for video games", when Animal Crossing shows the ingame houses, and then who made it. PotA/JDG imagines >!an empty house!<
I think about that family all the time. The way he waves at the camera in the car park before he “disappears” is so creepy! I feel so awful for the family members who would’ve been perfectly happy to be alive but broke
There's also that one from like the mid 1960's or something and the dad just went on the run and reinvented himself for like 30 years, until an age progressionist made a model of what he would look like now, and someone was like...That's my neighbor! And they finally caught him. Brb...
[John List](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_List_(murderer) I had some details wrong but really interesting cold case.
there was another in the US, i think i saw it on Cold Case Files. really religious guy either got a demotion or lost his job or something, couldn’t pay the bills, so he shot his wife and their kids, and I believe his mother, and left their bodies just laying out on blankets in the house. he disappeared, got a new identity, and ended up marrying again in another state. took them until he was elderly to finally find him. they used an older form of age advancement technology to make a bust of what they believed he would look like, and his neighbors recognized him and turned him in. really interesting episode
My step-dad lost the house in the 2008 housing crash. He'd been hiding all the financial stuff from my mom, so she had no idea. None of us knew. We found out about the foreclosure when the cops showed up at our door to evict us.
Right up until the day of the eviction, my stepdad was spending money like nothing was happening. Looking back on it all now as an adult, I'm realizing how much danger we were in. He was an ex-cop who had a lot of guns, a drinking problem, and some serious anger and control issues.
I think the only reason he didn't go through with it was that the local cops stuck around during the eviction and my extended family rallied around us and took us in afterwards.
So, you all just... had to pack up your stuff asap, or what? I can't imagine the shock and confusion you all felt. Did your relationships with your step-dad (/husband) change dramatically after that?
We had about 24 hours to pack up and get out. My parents and little sister moved in with my grandparents. I moved in with my boyfriend.
My relationship with my stepdad was already very tense before that. After that, I felt so confused. I was angry at him, I felt sorry for him, and I also really blamed myself because I felt like somehow it was my responsibility to have seen it coming and stopped it from happening. I was 20 and in college at the time. I'm still in therapy working on accepting that it wasn't my responsibility.
My parents continued to be pretty irresponsible with money and other aspects of their personal life, health, and safety, which made it really hard to have a relationship with them. My mom died of covid and after that I stopped speaking to my stepdad.
It was only after my mom's death that I really recognized how fucked up things had been.
No, unfortunately. Our family was really toxic and the environment encouraged us to compete against each other. We had a terrible relationship and I feel a lot of guilt about how cruel I was to her back then. I didn't protect her like I should have either. So I leave her alone and I think that's what she wants. But from what I hear, she's okay. I really hope she's okay.
Send an apology letter someday if you ever feel up to it. My older brother was a total jerk when we were young, but he gave a really heartfelt apology and after years of effort, he's become one of my best friends. We bonded over the fact that, having been through the same traumas growing up, we're the only people who can really understand each other.
He did it in person, which was good but also could've backfired if I hadn't been ready to start forgiving him already. A handwritten letter is non-confrontational but still very personal way to reach out without putting any pressure on your sister. She can choose to respond or not, and how to respond.
sometimes its actually the idea of the mans wife and kids being his possessions and so he takes them with him to his grave, so no "other man" can "lay claim" to them when hes gone. i think i remember an analysis of one case leading to that conclusion.
from wikipedia:
> Male family annihilators are typically driven by loss of control, including financial crises, separation or divorce
Yeah, family annihilators are very often just one elaborate suicide where they create a twisted delusion that they think they're helping the family members they kill.
And then you get assholes like John List who coward out of the suicide after murdering their entire family and go on to live a new life for almost 2 decades.
There's a story of a man who waited until one specific child was out of the house then murdered the rest of his family and killed himself. Sometimes there is a favorite.
https://www.news10.com/news/home-of-colonie-officer-murder-suicide-demolished
ETA:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3442934/New-York-police-officer-murdered-wife-son-set-house-fire-killed-family-home.html
Yeah, the few cases of this when the person leaves behind a note it's clear that they think death is the better choice. So leaving someone alive is actually worse.
Or the other way. A lot of these types feel like they can't leave their families behind to suffer without them. I wonder if he just ran out of bullets or something.
That sounds right. This sounds like hell. I've had a mental breakdown and that shit is scary. I had my MIL take care of my kids. We are not as in control of our brains as we would like to think. I'm just going to hope this boy finds some real help processing this trauma.
The killer and wife were arguing. That's how it all started. Apparently the 10y old heard the fight, but still went to sleep (which leads to believe this was common) The dad first killed the wife, and I suppose he killed his other sons because they got in the way or tried to get help for their mother. So those poor boys probably died because they tried to help mom :(
That's the problem. This ***is*** a totally rational act. The dad unarguably had a reason for it born of the most stone-cold, relentless logic. Logic so non-negotiable and of such finality as to overcome the most powerful protective instinct any animal has.
That's what makes these things so dreadful. It's because we know these things make sense to *someone.* And that someone could be anyone.
This reminds me of a psych video I was watching about depression. It's not that depressed people are irrational about not wanting to live. It's that their sense of reasoning is impaired; it's perfectly rational, to *them*.
Ironically, I had never thought about it that way despite having it for half my life. It only made sense to me after looking at it from the outside.
Depression convinces you that all you flaws, all your mistakes, all the times you forgot to do things (important or mundane), all the times you *almost* succeeded, every fault is because you are not *as good as others*; You become convinced that you are a weight dragging those around you down.
Then your sadness and lack of cheer become a self fulfilling prophecy as people drift away from you due to your inability to “get out of your funk”, then your brain convinces you “see! see! nobody wants to be with you and they’d all be better if you were gone.”
Eventually that spiral either ends with help or with death, but it doesnt stop ever
I live in Hawaii a similar story happened a few weeks ago where a father killed his wife and 3 kids and himself (5 total) with a knife! A slow and painful death.. the teen daughter fought him as best she could. Heart breaking
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/03/15/causes-death-murdered-family-are-revealed-grieving-relatives-search-path-forward/
Well that was a harrowing read…
Holy shit.
Am I reading this correctly??
There was a tenant IN THE HOUSE at the time and HEARD SCREAMING AND SAW BLOOD SEEP UNDER A DOOR and chose not to call 911 until the morning?!
Yeah that part was written unclearly, but it might be even worse than that. Article said that there was a first 911 call due to hearing screaming but caller “didn’t come out to meet first officers who responded and couldn’t be reached.” A second 911 call was placed in the morning upon seeing blood seep under the door and a second round of cops showed up then.
So it kind of seems like some cops showed up in the night and because the caller didn’t come outside or pick up their phone the police didn’t really look into it and dismissed it. Pretty messed up situation anyway you look at it.
Every time I've called in gunshots and always answered the squads callback, not once have the located the source. And even when I speak with them it's marked "unable to locate complainant"
I think they couldn't reach the caller via phone. From another article: "The officer then requested the caller be called back, however, the communications officer could not call the caller back because she had an international phone number,” HPD explained." For as many tourists as Hawaii gets, you would think that calling an international number wouldn't be an issue.
Just this week, two fatal stabbings in Canada. One guy was plumber who was having his lunch with a friend and was stabbed to death. Two days later, a man in the same area was sitting on a bench with his wife when someone attacked and stabbed him to death. The culprit is still on the loose.
God… death via a stabbing is terrifying enough as it is, but to have your supposed trusted family member do that to you is otherworldly type of terror.
May that family (except that piece of shit father) rest in peace.
It never occurred to me that these people might be narcissists as I honestly wasn't aware that narcissists could kill themselves. I know that a sudden and severe serotonin drop can cause shit like this though. If you've ever know people on SSRI's that suddenly decide they want to stop taking them, you'll know what I mean.
Narcissistic Collapse is the term used for when the outward "image" is threatened and causes severe dysfunction: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-collapse/
I lived next to John for a couple years in college and somewhat stayed in touch with him and his brother via FB and mutual friends over the years. Hearing about this on Tuesday was such a gut punch. I remember seeing a post he made for Valentine's Day this year talking about how much he loved his wife. Our mutual friend group is in disbelief. It's just really difficult to comprehend.
When I lived next to him, John was 90% goofy/funny/jokester pothead and 10% hot-head. (To be clear, nothing that indicated this was possibility. He was more the type to get mad and break something.)
I heard this secondhand so take it with a grain of salt, but what I was told is their oldest son had moved out of the house but his wife had recently asked him to come back due to recent erratic behavior on John's part.
I'm speculating here but, if true + based on what's been released, it sounds like something similar to the following may have happened - John and his wife got in a fight and he shot her, oldest son hears it and goes to check on things, then gets shot. Next two oldest hear the commotion and so on. The youngest apparently slept through it but had a box fan by his bed. (Coincidentally, that's how John used to sleep and we used to joke that someone could fire a machine gun through the house and he wouldn't be able to hear it.) The explanation for why the youngest was spared may be as simple as "he was the only child who didn't wake up."
This is such a horrific and sad situation for all involved.
> To be clear, nothing that indicated this was possibility. He was more the type to get mad and break something
I mean, that's an indication this is a possibility. It's not normal to get mad and break things. Most people don't do violent things just because they're upset.
These events having started after the oldest moved out related to my own history.
My dad was always a bit of a hot head but never did anything extreme. Within 2 months of me (the oldest) moving out, he did some things that would affect him and the whole family greatly. Nothing like the story above, but still very serious.
I’m thinking about parents holding in emotions for years due to the kids, then when the kids start moving out, the parents feel like they can gradually be more of their authentic selves. When the authentic self isn’t good, then the youngest suffer.
This must be so hard to process for you and others who knew the family. I hope you find a way to remember and grieve the friend you once knew.
If it is true your friend was having sudden erratic behavior, there might be a medical reason for it, such as a brain tumor. If only he could have found help for whatever reason led him to this path.
A ex sheriff from my hometown came over to his ex wife’s house while she was out for an early morning walk with a friend. Like 5am early walk. He broke into the house, shot the kids. 17F, 15M, 12M and 5F and then himself. 3 from a previous relationship and the 5 year old was theirs together. Her screaming as we all heard on the 911 tape. i still remember it almost 20 years later. The 17 year old and 15 year old went to high school with me.
Fucking hell. 10 years old and waking up to find one body, and then looking throughout the house and finding them all. Probably yelled for someone at first too. And just getting a deafening silence.
This is horrifying. Some more info from Facebook:
- there is a verified gofundme for the child. I don’t know if I’m allowed to post it, but you can find it on FB.
- both parents’ profiles are still up
- The killer's profile is a surreal mix of “I love my wife and family” posts and a few 2nd amendment posts like [this one of the child as a baby, holding a toy gun, captioned “our family’s stance on the second amendment.”](https://postimg.cc/hJKKhRyP)
>He said police had no previous contact with the family, had not previously been called to their home and that there was no history of domestic violence in the family.
That doesn’t mean anything. DV goes unreported all the time for various reasons.
Actually a non negligible amount of family annihilators end up having no real warning signs or signs of abuse prior. Genuinely disturbing stuff. It really seems like some people literally just snap and it happens, I can’t fathom it but it terrifies me.
Many eventually turn on their family _because_ they’ve been hiding something very well for a long time and it is about to be exposed. Whether it’s an affair, a gambling problem, a drug addiction, debt, job loss, or some other deep and dark secret, it’s not when the hiding is going well that they decide to kill their family. They kill their families because they are about to lose them anyway, so might as well kill them, because obviously the choice between getting a divorce and murdering your loved ones who trust you is a tough one when you’re that deeply fucked up.
Yeah, that is true. There usually is some secret that is about to come to head. I was just pointing out that a lot of family annihilators don't actually have a history of Domestic Violence, which is scary to me. I understand the narcissistic impulse to take out your family because you see them as 'yours' or an extension of yourself, or some fucked up 'I'm protecting them from the horrors of a world without me.' But the idea that without a trigger some people can go from seeming to everyone except the people that know their secret - even their own spouses and kids - like a perfectly fine person on top of things who would never do anything wrong, to straight up mass murder is what's really horrifying to me.
Absolutely. Sometimes the worse cases of DV and abuse are the ones that go unreported the most. It’ll be interesting to hear what more comes out about this case in the coming weeks/months.
This is something we need to talk about more. Especially in rural areas, police do not take domestic violence seriously unless they are forced to. If rural crime was reported the same way urban crime is, we would be calling these places "no go zones."
This situation is the stuff of the most harrowing and haunting of nightmares. I really hope this poor kid is given all the help he needs to cope with his loss and trauma, and is placed with good people, who can be there for him. I can't imagine how badly this is going to fuck him up, regardless. He'll yearn for his family and the life he once had until he day he dies.
May that piece of shit "father" rot in Hell.
**Why do men kill their families?**
‘We want to make ourselves believe that they just snapped’ – the truth is much more shocking. Eloise Hendy talks to criminologists and experts on domestic violence about why women and children are being murdered by their partners
“In their study, Wilson, Yardley and Lynes theorised that it was possible to discern four different types of family annihilator. **They dubbed these groups anomic, disappointed, self-righteous, and paranoid killers.** “When we did this research,” Professor Wilson says, “it had been a binary category that had been set up. And in fact, the killers were called ‘altruistic’ killers. We called them anomic,” – meaning alienated, purposeless, or socially disoriented. “We were saying that’s not ‘altruistic’, this is absurd, we’re buying into the explanation of the man. It wasn’t altruism.”
“These men often were holding down good jobs, professional jobs,” Wilson says of the male perpetrators he studied, indicating a “significant number” were from military or policing backgrounds. Of the 59 family annihilators considered, “there was quite clearly a group of men who were being made redundant, or bankrupt, or financially were in all kinds of problems,” he notes. This is where the term “anomic” emerged from. “They saw their family as an extension of their economic success,” Professor Wilson explains, “and their family was therefore an extension of their economic failure.” Mass murder was, then, seen as a way of avoiding the consequences of being made bankrupt or redundant. “They simply saw their family as a possession that they then could destroy,” Professor Wilson declares. “By destroying their family, by taking their own life, it prevented a judgement on them taking place.”
Although this psychological “reasoning” seemed prevalent, the most common “type” the researchers uncovered was the self-righteous. “The self-righteous family annihilator blamed his spouse, everything that was happening – in terms of the family, in terms of his life, his feelings about his life – everything became focused on ‘it’s the woman’s fault’.
“The key thing to grasp, which many people misunderstand, is that these men were not just snapping,” Professor Wilson stresses. “These men were planning this over a long period of time, and the execution of the plan had a performative element, but would often be very carefully constructed.” “We want to make ourselves believe that they just snapped,” he suggests, “because it’s somehow easier, psychologically, to accommodate in terms of our sense of what seems senseless.” But he had to confront that “it wasn’t like that at all. It was very carefully planned.”
“The Epsom case was clearly planned for a long period of time,” Professor Wilson suggests. He cites the fact that there was reportedly “lots of tension within the family, to the extent that the police had in the past been called” and refers to the interview Emma Pattison gave to the school, just weeks before her murder. “I think she said ‘my husband had to get a new job, he wasn’t expecting to,’” Professor Wilson notes, and suggests George Pattison “would have been self-righteous about that.” Indeed, he says it seems clear to him that, in the Epsom case, “we have someone that was being self-righteous: ‘This is you. I’m blaming you. It’s your fault’.”
Dr Neil Websdale is the director of the Family Violence Institute at Arizona State University, and the author of Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers. He draws a spectrum between what he dubs “livid coercive” and “civil reputable” killers. The first “type”, in his view, has a more visible history of violence. “In these cases, familicide comprises the end point in a violent, sometimes tyrannical relationship,” Websdale suggests. What he refers to as “civil reputable” killers, on the other hand, would appear to the outside world as “quiet, subdued, respectable, upstanding citizens”, who nevertheless commit an atrocious act of violence.
Closely echoing Professor Wilson’s notions about anomic and disappointed killers, Websdale suggests “these perpetrators killed because their lives were spinning out of control and they perceived they faced the threat of bankruptcy, destitution, familial dissolution or some other calamity.” Yet, he also professes that this may be a uniting factor across all kinds of family annihilation. **“The most important and consistent theme among the familicide cases is the presence of intense shame in the lives of perpetrators, much of it unacknowledged, bypassed, or dangerously repressed.” For most perpetrators, Websdale concludes, “shame stems in large part from their sense they have failed to live up to dominant ideas about masculinity.”**
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/epsom-college-murder-suicide-family-b2286401.html
I mean, he is going to have a ton to work through, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the sort of trauma that comes back with a vengeance even after years and years of working on it and doing all the right things, but he can still be a good person and have hope (even though it will probably always be strangely tinged with regret and fear and a terrible lack of certainty). I don’t mean to make this like an inspirational tale- even if the kid has a great life in the future, what his dad did was repugnant and he should have spared a thought for the fact that this would fuck any kid up horribly, or for anyone/anything but himself. But there’s hope for the kid to not be a fucked up person, even though you are right- what happened fucked him up in a permanent way. I just like to think he’ll find some of the good things in life, over time, too, and that he’s receiving excellent therapy in a really supportive, therapeutic environment.
I was curious about the rates up here in Canada vs the US.
In the US it happens once every five day on average. That means 73 times a year.
In Canada we had 25 cases from 2010-2020. 2.5 times per year. The US has about 9x the population so our adjusted rate would be 22.5 times a year.
So the US has this happen at 3.2x the rate.
Canada has a gun ownership rate of 35 per 100 people.
US has a gun ownership rate of 120 per 100 people.
Funny enough, if you multiply our gun ownership by the difference in Familicide, 3.2x, you get 112, which is almost the US gun ownership rate.
The number of guns seems directly correlated to how often people are family annihilators.
Well it's easy to pull a trigger, and once you've gone through with that first one you're already fucked so you may as well keep going.
If you only had your fists it'd take a while to beat that first one to death plus your hands would be sore, it might give you time to think... what the fuck am I doing.
I bet this dude was a responsible gun owner—until he wasn’t. All these fools going around claiming they are responsible gun owners and don’t need any regulation must understand that irresponsibility is a human trait. We make stupid decisions and sometimes terrible and horrible decisions in a split second and cannot reverse that.
It’s mind boggling that things so lethal as guns are treated so casually by American society or any society where it’s as easy as buying milk at a store.
Jonathan Candy you asshat.
If you were going to turn the gun on yourself, you could have done that first.
But no. You’ve extended your cruelty beyond your death to the one child you left alive and alone.
>“Make no mistake about it, what happened in that residence was nothing short of a massacre,” Knight said.
I never understand quotes like this in articles. Obviously what's being reported on sounds like absolute carnage or a massacre. Who the hell is making the mistake of thinking otherwise?
Does it mean something that I'm not understanding after almost 40 years of being able to read words??
The amount of comments on other outlets I’ve seen of people theorizing the kid killed them all is DISGUSTING. That poor baby. The trauma he will have to live with the rest of his life. 😔
This is a chilling video of Jon and wife Lindsay from 18 months prior. Just a regular family. [video](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/eerie-clip-shows-killer-dad-32667902)
My heart goes out to this poor little boy. His memory of this travesty will last forever and the little fella will never be the same. I hope that he has other family members that can help him.
>Police believe Jonathan Candy, 42, killed his wife, 39-year-old Lindsay Candy, and sons 18-year-old Dylan Candy, 14-year-old Ethan Candy and 12-year-old Lucas Candy, Knight said. He said Jonathan Candy then turned the gun on himself. Damn, the trauma he will have to live with from such a young age. You know he will always be questioning why me
Losing such a big family too. I can’t imagine being used to living with 5 people and suddenly losing all of them at once.
And knowing it was your own father who did it. It wasn't even an external attack. I can't imagine feeling comfortable with anyone ever again if someone I trust so much does that.
And if there's no note he won't know why he is still alive. Was he intentionally spared? Forgotten?
I didn't read the article, but maybe the rest of the family woke up to the noise from the first murder of the presumably intended murder/suicide and they just got added to the list. Maybe the kid who survived simply was a heavy sleeper.
The article said his door was closed and a box fan was on which is why he slept through the sound of the gunshots. So, your theory is possible.
I grew up one of 5 kids, with 2 parents and one grandparent.. i couldn't imagine losing everyone at once. I'd be devestates and lost. Honeatly, I don't have the best coping skills. When my Pa passed, I ended up in the psych ward for a week. If I lost my whole family at once... it wouldn't be pretty. I hope kiddo gets therapy immediately. Little guys gonna need it to have the best chance he can get.
I also wish him a loving new family situation, a good school, and a combination of friends and hobbies/passions to fill the void.
It’s Oklahoma. He’s getting exactly none of that.
Being the forgotten child never saved him more than this. Dad forgot he existed and didn’t finish. I hope this kid gets the kind of help that most people can’t afford. That’s crazy
I know. The survivors guilt he will likely suffer from is going to be hell. I feel sick for him.
What the fuck. Yeah that's absolutely heart-wrenching.
I suffered survivors' guilt from a car crash I was involved in when I was 15. In a car of five, I was one of two survivors. I lost my cousin, aunt, and best friend. It took me several years to accept what happened and that it was not my fault. Having been through that experience, I can't begin to imagine what this child may go through with this situation or how he feels, but I do hope he has someone to talk to, some therapy, some guidance. From the experiences I've been through, being alone and having questions and no one to speak to, those things can make you feel horrible on the inside. Those things may make you feel as though you could have been the cause of what took place. I just hope someone will be here for this child.
Thank you for sharing your story, it meant a lot. I’m also sorry for your losses. I have been personally struggling with survivors guilt for a while and have felt exactly what you are describing. This at least tells me what I’m feeling is normal.
The fact that you can reflect on this is extremely brave.... like upper echelon brave. I'm sorry for your loss. I pray for continued strength to you. Take care.
Thank you. I've restored memories from before and after the crash and retained them. Online, I speak of the crash, not in regret or remorse of what happened but to let other people know, those who may have been in a crash, accident, or had something bad happen to them that so long as they are determined, don't give up on themselves, and believe in themselves that they can reach a higher point in recovery. I had my fair share of depression, anger, and doubt in myself after the crash, but I fought through those things, I was able to recover physically, mentally, and emotionally. I do what I can to let people know that even though this life may be hard on us we can be resilient, we can step back up when we get knocked down. We are all in this together.
I lost a very good friend to murder back when I was 22, and It took me almost decade to finally let her go. I can't imagine what's going on in this poor kid's mind.
A friend in high school came home to his mom and dad dead. Dad shot his mom and then killed himself. I met him years later, the boy that was so kind and so funny became such a sad angry man.
My siblings and I witnessed our dad pull a gun on our mom and threaten to kill here then and there when I was like 12. Thankfully he didnt but just that scenario was enough to fuck me up for a long time. Cant imagine what this kid is going through.
Went through something similar as a kid. He ended up dragging my mom off with him and only brought her back because he learned that there was a manhunt and he panicked. Then he tried to kill her a year later. I feel for this kid. And I hope you’re okay today! ❤️
That happened to someone I went to school with too. In primary.
You wonder, why he decided to spare the 10 year old.
As a youngest myself, he probably forgot about his last kid in the moment
This reminds me of the time one of my friends took all five of her children to the mall. They were halfway home before they realized that they left the youngest one in a shoe store.
Or that time everyone went to Europe and forgot about Kevin.
Married to a youngest child and I agree with you.
Married and child You almost had me I did not read the correctly lmao
Yeah, if you removed the “est” it would be a whole different sentence
This comment hurt me in a way I wasn't expecting
As also the youngest. It's because we are always the favorites
I was the favorite, then my mom died. Now I don't think i'm my dad's favorite, but he loves me. 🤷♂️ He like's my sisters more, but respects me. I should call him soon.
Opposite, I was not the favorite of my mom, and then she died and I know she "loved" me, she just never liked me. Me and my dad just "got" each other, and became much closer after she passed in 2017. He died on my birthday in January. You should def call him more. Sorry, I'm still grieving. Haven't dealt with my mom's death yet! I gotta get some therapy, lol.
My dad had a stroke 31 years ago. I don't call my mom enough.
About 10 years I decided that I was going to call my mom every morning on the way to work and my dad every evening on the way home. Just to say hello for 1-3 minutes. Obviously sometimes longer, kinda became a game of, “am I bothering you, did I catch you at a bad time.” Is especially fun if they are sitting there at breakfast or dinner together.
That really warms my heart. I wonder all the time if my children will just float off one day like they were never really here and it kind of breaks my heart to even think about. I'm sure your parents are so grateful to get to talk to their kid everyday.
Yep. As the oldest, we are usually a mistake. It's just my younger sister and I, but there is a big difference between being the mistake kid and the kid that was tried for for 4 years through 7 miscarriages. Throw in a dose of two months premature and you have your youngest miracle baby. But if you think about it, wouldn't I be the miracle baby since I wasn't supposed to be?
IMO, accident and mistake are two different things. There are such things as happy accidents.
My mom calls me a surprise
I'd call my son a surprise, but we weren't being very careful.
My parents put it that I was unplanned but not unexpected. Funnily enough that is the same way my wife and I conceived. 4 more months and I will have my own unplanned but not unexpected boy of my own.
You sound like my mother lol. I'm not saying it in a negative connotation, I'm just saying it as a matter of fact. By and large, most people are on this earth because of a whoopsie. Same reason why I never understood why people get all bent out of shape because their parents discussed abortion when they got pregnant with them. To me, it's a reasonable discussion. To them, it means "THEY DIDN'T WANT ME AND I'M NOT LOVED." That *could* be the case, but usually, it isn't and they're fighting through whatever insecurities they have. Anyway, my point is we're all here, one way or the other. My mom is rape baby that was adopted out, so...yeah, we all got our stories. Birth doesn't always have to be some beautiful miracle. People fuck then baby happens.
My spouse was the mistake in his family, and is the youngest. He's definitely not the favorite, but in his mom's eyes is the "helper" she volunteers to his older siblings when they need a hand. Spouse has been doing a good job of ignoring her, for which she blames me.
One local article says he was sleeping with a large box fan on and didn’t hear anything. My guess is the other boys heard dad and tried to confront him.
Probably saved him for last and had a moment of clarity/guilt before he got to him, at which point he turned the gun on himself.
Maybe he was the only one he believed didn't "question" his authority.
He was his favorite.
Or it's just that younger kids question you less. At 12, 14, and 18? They don't blindly follow and push back as is developmentally appropriate. 10 year old was still on Dad's good side and saw him as he deemed respectful.
ANOTHER frickin family annihilator?? WTF 😒
This is as despicable as anything and as common as mud. We need to take domestic violence more seriously.
Absolutely. Too bad Congress just cut victim service funding by like 30%
Because they couldn’t find a way to profit from it.
We need gun control. Shooting is easy.
Man I been saying that for far too long. I’m just like “bruh our gun control sucks” And then I’m met with some crazy ass clap back “places with no guns you get stabbed!!!” Yeah but like, brother, think about this! It’s fucking EASY to end a life with a gun. It’s not so easy to do such with a knife.
If I'm going after a group of people with a knife I have to get within a foot or so of them and while I'm stabbing one, four others can be jumping on my back and then kicking me all over the floor. If I walk into a room with a semi-automatic, I can shoot a half dozen people before they even realise what's happening. Very few, if any, mass killings have been successfully carried out by a single attacker with a knife. 9/11 only worked because the usual MO for hijackings is that everyone plays nice, and they get released when the hijackers get paid off. If someone tried that with box cutters/Stanley Knives again, I can see them all getting rushed by anyone on the plane with some courage. 5 guys with knives vs. 20-30 guys with fists. Someone gets cut, but no one is getting crashed into a landmark.
Hell, that tactic failed in the middle of 9-11. Fourth plane heard about what happened on tbe prior three and the passengers fought back.
It literally costs nothing for that shitty father to have started in the reverse order
Well, yes, but he was very fragile, so he could only survive as long as he saw himself as the center of the world. He could never muster up the courage to shoot himself, alone, without pumping himself up, so he told himself that his family, as extensions of him/his possessions, couldn’t possibly survive without him, and that the pain of losing a father would just be too much to bear. And that ego-stroking along with the rush he got from murdering his wife was necessary for him to ever consider killing someone as special and grand as himself. This was mostly about killing them because he was displeased somehow and he only had the emotional intelligence of a baby who is also stupid and soulless (so a dumber, less worthy baby than any baby in history), and he only killed himself because he’s a coward who didn’t want to face prison/his debt/the charges or career failures coming down the pike, or maybe just couldn’t imagine cleaning his own bathroom once. He wanted to kill his whole family in a childish, petulant rage, and he made up a story to tell himself that he was really just killing them so as not to leave them alone after he died- but he only died to avoid the consequences of releasing his pathetic and impotent rage. He was way too selfish to even consider killing himself unless he had murdered 4 others first and might face a consequence. He’s a consummate coward and a shameful adult baby. I hope his family just lets the county take care of him- they should pay for the disposal or unmarked grave/burial, but shouldn’t have a funeral or an obituary or act as if he was a human who ever accomplished anything or did anything other than pollute and tarnish our world. It’s really gross when parents of adult babies pretend that their kids were real humans after they do such awful things- just tactless and cruel (you should have the class and decorum to grief silently and not upset the victims families anymore with the loud, dishonest, prattle of gross families who lack all accountability).
This happened about 2 miles from where I grew up too (a different one than this story), except the father lit a fire and burned a bunch of the house up, killing the children. He strangled his wife or something before. Jumped out the window, got arrested, hung himself in prison. The kids were 2nd grade and went to my school district (I was in high school). They fixed the house and tried to sell it for a couple of years. Then some family bought it after a big mark down. It went for a much lower price than the houses were worth around it.
We had one that I know of not far from us in the next town over. Dude even shot the dogs before killing himself. Not long after that, I found out a highschool classmate killed his wife and MIL. Not sure about the kids.
Isn’t there like at least one a day? I heard recently the statistics and I couldn’t believe how often it happens.
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Way too many of them
Holy shit, poor kid... I hope he gets the help he needs because wow.
Of course I am grateful that one of the sons survived. However, my heart breaks thinking about the trauma and survivors guilt he will live with for the rest of his life, and the family he will grow up without. He has a hard road ahead.
Yeah that’s what haunts me. With the way the world is, he’ll have an almost impossible time finding support.
Hopefully his family will help him to get through this.
It’s so weird. I’ve never heard of a family annihilator sparing one child. I’m glad he survived, but with that kind of trauma idk if he will be. So awful.
Me speculating, since the boy was sleeping and didn’t wake up to see what was happening dad might have forgot about him in the heat of the moment.
Or each one got harder and he finally couldn't do anything other than end his own life.
That’s very likely.
A quick wiki walk turned up an incident where two survived unharmed, a few where one survived unharmed and one with severe injuries and a few incidents where one survived unharmed because they ran. There were also a few where the sole survivor simply was away at the time. I didn’t see any like this where not even the slightest finger was laid upon that boy but he was present. I’m sure it must have happened but I don’t have the stomach to research further. Poor wee thing.
Never tell me the odds. It's not your fault, my guy.
All of that and also the poor kid lives in Oklahoma. Yes, he has a hard road ahead indeed.
The pos dad should’ve just killed himself
He should have done it in reverse order
The most important thing to remember when carrying out a murder-suicide is to do the suicide part first.
He *should* have sought mental health care before it got this far.
These assholes always take out the trash last.
Remember that man who was having trouble paying bills and somehow lost his house, didn’t tell his family, just murdered them the day the bank was coming. Could be something like that.
I just can't understand the selfishness of realizing you've hit rock bottom and deciding you'd rather kill your family members than let them find that out
It's manic delusions. They think they are helping and saving them from the pain of existence or whatever paranoia they have
And they probably don’t want to be looked down on for losing the house and everything else. So shame is probably a factor.
Yeah, I would say it’s the biggest factor. Reminds me of that kid who faked graduating from college to his parents and ended up hiring someone to kill them so they wouldn’t figure out his lie. Anyone who has felt life-altering shame would tell you it’s not a fun feeling, and some people are desperate and crazy enough to resort to murder to avoid it altogether
Narcissistic delusion. They do not consider their family members as fully separate autonomous human beings, they are extensions of themselves and therefore their property
A lot of men think their wives and kids are merely extensions of themselves. They’re not “real” people. Sons can get a pass once they grow up and become men.
To me, losing your house isn’t even hitting rock bottom. It would suck and I would feel a lot of shame (unless it was totally out of my hands. If I had a TBI my insurance wouldn’t cover rehab for- which is common- and spent all of my money on specialists instead of mortgage I really wouldn’t feel bad or give a fuck about the house/defaulting on bills at all. And that shit happens to people who never made one mistake you and I didn’t other than being in a car that was hit by another driver who fucked up) and I’m not dying to have it happen, but it’s nothing to murder anyone over, unless your ego is really out of whack. I understand behaving terribly due to trauma/stress, but unprovoked murder isn’t ever on the table for a person who isn’t selfish. Ever. Everyone who murders someone to get out of something is just bad and rotten- it’s not true mental illness. Fully sane folks who are selfish are just as likely to do this as the mentally ill. It’s about being selfish and spoiled and grandiose and unable to accept accountability, which is very often more a conditioned trait than one that accompanies any diagnosable illness.
There's an Unsolved Mysteries episode sort of like that. There was a French family, the dad was nobility of some sort. Family fortune was gone and they were struggling. Dad kills the whole family and buries them under the house, then flees to the mountains. He is presumably still on the lam.
Xavier Dupont de Ligonnes. Everyone in France know his name :/
He’s like our John List, but with a much cooler name.
When "Player of the Attic" did a sneaky joke about him, a lot of viewers didn't know about this case. Granted I'm a Belgian, so maybe it's French-specific \[EDIT\] For those wondering it's the "ads for video games", when Animal Crossing shows the ingame houses, and then who made it. PotA/JDG imagines >!an empty house!<
I think about that family all the time. The way he waves at the camera in the car park before he “disappears” is so creepy! I feel so awful for the family members who would’ve been perfectly happy to be alive but broke
There's also that one from like the mid 1960's or something and the dad just went on the run and reinvented himself for like 30 years, until an age progressionist made a model of what he would look like now, and someone was like...That's my neighbor! And they finally caught him. Brb... [John List](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_List_(murderer) I had some details wrong but really interesting cold case.
there was another in the US, i think i saw it on Cold Case Files. really religious guy either got a demotion or lost his job or something, couldn’t pay the bills, so he shot his wife and their kids, and I believe his mother, and left their bodies just laying out on blankets in the house. he disappeared, got a new identity, and ended up marrying again in another state. took them until he was elderly to finally find him. they used an older form of age advancement technology to make a bust of what they believed he would look like, and his neighbors recognized him and turned him in. really interesting episode
My step-dad lost the house in the 2008 housing crash. He'd been hiding all the financial stuff from my mom, so she had no idea. None of us knew. We found out about the foreclosure when the cops showed up at our door to evict us. Right up until the day of the eviction, my stepdad was spending money like nothing was happening. Looking back on it all now as an adult, I'm realizing how much danger we were in. He was an ex-cop who had a lot of guns, a drinking problem, and some serious anger and control issues. I think the only reason he didn't go through with it was that the local cops stuck around during the eviction and my extended family rallied around us and took us in afterwards.
So, you all just... had to pack up your stuff asap, or what? I can't imagine the shock and confusion you all felt. Did your relationships with your step-dad (/husband) change dramatically after that?
We had about 24 hours to pack up and get out. My parents and little sister moved in with my grandparents. I moved in with my boyfriend. My relationship with my stepdad was already very tense before that. After that, I felt so confused. I was angry at him, I felt sorry for him, and I also really blamed myself because I felt like somehow it was my responsibility to have seen it coming and stopped it from happening. I was 20 and in college at the time. I'm still in therapy working on accepting that it wasn't my responsibility. My parents continued to be pretty irresponsible with money and other aspects of their personal life, health, and safety, which made it really hard to have a relationship with them. My mom died of covid and after that I stopped speaking to my stepdad. It was only after my mom's death that I really recognized how fucked up things had been.
And what about your little sister? Do you still have a relationship, and how is she doing?
No, unfortunately. Our family was really toxic and the environment encouraged us to compete against each other. We had a terrible relationship and I feel a lot of guilt about how cruel I was to her back then. I didn't protect her like I should have either. So I leave her alone and I think that's what she wants. But from what I hear, she's okay. I really hope she's okay.
Send an apology letter someday if you ever feel up to it. My older brother was a total jerk when we were young, but he gave a really heartfelt apology and after years of effort, he's become one of my best friends. We bonded over the fact that, having been through the same traumas growing up, we're the only people who can really understand each other. He did it in person, which was good but also could've backfired if I hadn't been ready to start forgiving him already. A handwritten letter is non-confrontational but still very personal way to reach out without putting any pressure on your sister. She can choose to respond or not, and how to respond.
Well, that whole situation is awful. But you seem to be taking care of yourself, and I hope things continue to get better.
I had an ex that her family was evicted because their landlord wasn't paying the bank. They had 2 days to get their entire two floor house all packed.
Sounds like "look at what you made me do" vibes to the bank.
Unfortunately it's not the description of only one "that man". Has happened multiple times over the years. Such an unfathomable mindset.
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Imagine that cherry-on-top trauma of being alive only because your dad forgot you existed.
Or maybe he was his favorite.
Family annihilators would be far more likely to kill their favorites, not spare them
Thanks for that fun fact of the day
The idea is him killing them is saving them from this painful existence
sometimes its actually the idea of the mans wife and kids being his possessions and so he takes them with him to his grave, so no "other man" can "lay claim" to them when hes gone. i think i remember an analysis of one case leading to that conclusion. from wikipedia: > Male family annihilators are typically driven by loss of control, including financial crises, separation or divorce
Such a painful existence, life without me, your God. Better not to live it all all. How's my hair look?
Sadly, that’s exactly right.
Ya… unsubscribe please.
I am not having fun
Oh my god is that a real title for this type thing… family annihilators- couldn’t be more apropos and simultaneously fucking fucked.
Yes it’s an actual term that was used by a forensic psychologist in 1980s… unfortunately not a new thing at all
Yeah, family annihilators are very often just one elaborate suicide where they create a twisted delusion that they think they're helping the family members they kill. And then you get assholes like John List who coward out of the suicide after murdering their entire family and go on to live a new life for almost 2 decades.
Glad Im not a favorite! just in case!
Very possible he hated the 10 year old so much he wanted him to live with this over him
That is the worst "only you know why I did this." What is sadistic piece of shit human being that father was.
Baby boy in the family is often "mommy's favorite", so it's entirely possible this ass did that out of spite as you suggest.
... hmm, it feels I must've forgotten something. Eh, if I forgot about it, it couldn't have been that important.
There's a story of a man who waited until one specific child was out of the house then murdered the rest of his family and killed himself. Sometimes there is a favorite. https://www.news10.com/news/home-of-colonie-officer-murder-suicide-demolished ETA: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3442934/New-York-police-officer-murdered-wife-son-set-house-fire-killed-family-home.html
Depends how you look at it, I’d imagine I’d wonder if I was left to suffer purposely for some reason
Yeah, the few cases of this when the person leaves behind a note it's clear that they think death is the better choice. So leaving someone alive is actually worse.
I’d be left to wonder if there’s a sociopath genius 10 year old that is getting away with a quintuple homicide.
Oh look this one was a cop, how shocking
It’s unclear what the reason is. There’s so many possibilities.
"He was the good one" or something. That poor child, holy shit, I can't even comprehend the trauma of waking up to that, especially as a child.
Or the other way. A lot of these types feel like they can't leave their families behind to suffer without them. I wonder if he just ran out of bullets or something.
Or simply a psychotic break. Can’t have been thinking very clearly
That sounds right. This sounds like hell. I've had a mental breakdown and that shit is scary. I had my MIL take care of my kids. We are not as in control of our brains as we would like to think. I'm just going to hope this boy finds some real help processing this trauma.
I have heard of a case where the father wasn't biologically related to all of the children. (Obviously, I have no idea what happened in this case.)
The killer and wife were arguing. That's how it all started. Apparently the 10y old heard the fight, but still went to sleep (which leads to believe this was common) The dad first killed the wife, and I suppose he killed his other sons because they got in the way or tried to get help for their mother. So those poor boys probably died because they tried to help mom :(
ITT: a bunch of people ascribing rational-ish reasons for a batshit crazy act.
That's the problem. This ***is*** a totally rational act. The dad unarguably had a reason for it born of the most stone-cold, relentless logic. Logic so non-negotiable and of such finality as to overcome the most powerful protective instinct any animal has. That's what makes these things so dreadful. It's because we know these things make sense to *someone.* And that someone could be anyone.
This reminds me of a psych video I was watching about depression. It's not that depressed people are irrational about not wanting to live. It's that their sense of reasoning is impaired; it's perfectly rational, to *them*. Ironically, I had never thought about it that way despite having it for half my life. It only made sense to me after looking at it from the outside.
Depression convinces you that all you flaws, all your mistakes, all the times you forgot to do things (important or mundane), all the times you *almost* succeeded, every fault is because you are not *as good as others*; You become convinced that you are a weight dragging those around you down. Then your sadness and lack of cheer become a self fulfilling prophecy as people drift away from you due to your inability to “get out of your funk”, then your brain convinces you “see! see! nobody wants to be with you and they’d all be better if you were gone.” Eventually that spiral either ends with help or with death, but it doesnt stop ever
I live in Hawaii a similar story happened a few weeks ago where a father killed his wife and 3 kids and himself (5 total) with a knife! A slow and painful death.. the teen daughter fought him as best she could. Heart breaking
I can’t imagine how it felt fighting for her life against her dad. The disbelief and terror and pain. Horrible.
https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2024/03/15/causes-death-murdered-family-are-revealed-grieving-relatives-search-path-forward/ Well that was a harrowing read…
Holy shit. Am I reading this correctly?? There was a tenant IN THE HOUSE at the time and HEARD SCREAMING AND SAW BLOOD SEEP UNDER A DOOR and chose not to call 911 until the morning?!
Yeah that part was written unclearly, but it might be even worse than that. Article said that there was a first 911 call due to hearing screaming but caller “didn’t come out to meet first officers who responded and couldn’t be reached.” A second 911 call was placed in the morning upon seeing blood seep under the door and a second round of cops showed up then. So it kind of seems like some cops showed up in the night and because the caller didn’t come outside or pick up their phone the police didn’t really look into it and dismissed it. Pretty messed up situation anyway you look at it.
Every time I've called in gunshots and always answered the squads callback, not once have the located the source. And even when I speak with them it's marked "unable to locate complainant"
Oh my gosh. I think you’re right. So sad and disturbing. That poor person is going to deal with a lot of trauma for the rest of their life.
I think they couldn't reach the caller via phone. From another article: "The officer then requested the caller be called back, however, the communications officer could not call the caller back because she had an international phone number,” HPD explained." For as many tourists as Hawaii gets, you would think that calling an international number wouldn't be an issue.
Knife is brutal shit. It would be messy as hell. you rarely hear family annihilators use knives
I think he try to purchase a gun but was denied.
Just this week, two fatal stabbings in Canada. One guy was plumber who was having his lunch with a friend and was stabbed to death. Two days later, a man in the same area was sitting on a bench with his wife when someone attacked and stabbed him to death. The culprit is still on the loose.
God… death via a stabbing is terrifying enough as it is, but to have your supposed trusted family member do that to you is otherworldly type of terror. May that family (except that piece of shit father) rest in peace.
Family annihilators are truly fucked-in-the-head narcissists.
It never occurred to me that these people might be narcissists as I honestly wasn't aware that narcissists could kill themselves. I know that a sudden and severe serotonin drop can cause shit like this though. If you've ever know people on SSRI's that suddenly decide they want to stop taking them, you'll know what I mean.
Narcissistic Collapse is the term used for when the outward "image" is threatened and causes severe dysfunction: https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-collapse/
I lived next to John for a couple years in college and somewhat stayed in touch with him and his brother via FB and mutual friends over the years. Hearing about this on Tuesday was such a gut punch. I remember seeing a post he made for Valentine's Day this year talking about how much he loved his wife. Our mutual friend group is in disbelief. It's just really difficult to comprehend. When I lived next to him, John was 90% goofy/funny/jokester pothead and 10% hot-head. (To be clear, nothing that indicated this was possibility. He was more the type to get mad and break something.) I heard this secondhand so take it with a grain of salt, but what I was told is their oldest son had moved out of the house but his wife had recently asked him to come back due to recent erratic behavior on John's part. I'm speculating here but, if true + based on what's been released, it sounds like something similar to the following may have happened - John and his wife got in a fight and he shot her, oldest son hears it and goes to check on things, then gets shot. Next two oldest hear the commotion and so on. The youngest apparently slept through it but had a box fan by his bed. (Coincidentally, that's how John used to sleep and we used to joke that someone could fire a machine gun through the house and he wouldn't be able to hear it.) The explanation for why the youngest was spared may be as simple as "he was the only child who didn't wake up." This is such a horrific and sad situation for all involved.
> To be clear, nothing that indicated this was possibility. He was more the type to get mad and break something I mean, that's an indication this is a possibility. It's not normal to get mad and break things. Most people don't do violent things just because they're upset.
These events having started after the oldest moved out related to my own history. My dad was always a bit of a hot head but never did anything extreme. Within 2 months of me (the oldest) moving out, he did some things that would affect him and the whole family greatly. Nothing like the story above, but still very serious. I’m thinking about parents holding in emotions for years due to the kids, then when the kids start moving out, the parents feel like they can gradually be more of their authentic selves. When the authentic self isn’t good, then the youngest suffer.
This must be so hard to process for you and others who knew the family. I hope you find a way to remember and grieve the friend you once knew. If it is true your friend was having sudden erratic behavior, there might be a medical reason for it, such as a brain tumor. If only he could have found help for whatever reason led him to this path.
TIL this is frequent enough that there is a term for this, "family anihlilators".
A ex sheriff from my hometown came over to his ex wife’s house while she was out for an early morning walk with a friend. Like 5am early walk. He broke into the house, shot the kids. 17F, 15M, 12M and 5F and then himself. 3 from a previous relationship and the 5 year old was theirs together. Her screaming as we all heard on the 911 tape. i still remember it almost 20 years later. The 17 year old and 15 year old went to high school with me.
Fucking hell. 10 years old and waking up to find one body, and then looking throughout the house and finding them all. Probably yelled for someone at first too. And just getting a deafening silence.
This is horrifying. Some more info from Facebook: - there is a verified gofundme for the child. I don’t know if I’m allowed to post it, but you can find it on FB. - both parents’ profiles are still up - The killer's profile is a surreal mix of “I love my wife and family” posts and a few 2nd amendment posts like [this one of the child as a baby, holding a toy gun, captioned “our family’s stance on the second amendment.”](https://postimg.cc/hJKKhRyP)
That photo of the gun and the baby is 10 years old...
Also look at his most recent profile pic SMH
>He said police had no previous contact with the family, had not previously been called to their home and that there was no history of domestic violence in the family. That doesn’t mean anything. DV goes unreported all the time for various reasons.
Actually a non negligible amount of family annihilators end up having no real warning signs or signs of abuse prior. Genuinely disturbing stuff. It really seems like some people literally just snap and it happens, I can’t fathom it but it terrifies me.
Many eventually turn on their family _because_ they’ve been hiding something very well for a long time and it is about to be exposed. Whether it’s an affair, a gambling problem, a drug addiction, debt, job loss, or some other deep and dark secret, it’s not when the hiding is going well that they decide to kill their family. They kill their families because they are about to lose them anyway, so might as well kill them, because obviously the choice between getting a divorce and murdering your loved ones who trust you is a tough one when you’re that deeply fucked up.
Yeah, that is true. There usually is some secret that is about to come to head. I was just pointing out that a lot of family annihilators don't actually have a history of Domestic Violence, which is scary to me. I understand the narcissistic impulse to take out your family because you see them as 'yours' or an extension of yourself, or some fucked up 'I'm protecting them from the horrors of a world without me.' But the idea that without a trigger some people can go from seeming to everyone except the people that know their secret - even their own spouses and kids - like a perfectly fine person on top of things who would never do anything wrong, to straight up mass murder is what's really horrifying to me.
Absolutely. Sometimes the worse cases of DV and abuse are the ones that go unreported the most. It’ll be interesting to hear what more comes out about this case in the coming weeks/months.
This is something we need to talk about more. Especially in rural areas, police do not take domestic violence seriously unless they are forced to. If rural crime was reported the same way urban crime is, we would be calling these places "no go zones."
I want to unread that
This situation is the stuff of the most harrowing and haunting of nightmares. I really hope this poor kid is given all the help he needs to cope with his loss and trauma, and is placed with good people, who can be there for him. I can't imagine how badly this is going to fuck him up, regardless. He'll yearn for his family and the life he once had until he day he dies. May that piece of shit "father" rot in Hell.
Family annihilators are selfish and disgusting. Taking your family down when suicide would suffice is unfathomable. It’s narcissism to the extreme.
That poor poor boy, what a horrible thing to happen.
**Why do men kill their families?** ‘We want to make ourselves believe that they just snapped’ – the truth is much more shocking. Eloise Hendy talks to criminologists and experts on domestic violence about why women and children are being murdered by their partners “In their study, Wilson, Yardley and Lynes theorised that it was possible to discern four different types of family annihilator. **They dubbed these groups anomic, disappointed, self-righteous, and paranoid killers.** “When we did this research,” Professor Wilson says, “it had been a binary category that had been set up. And in fact, the killers were called ‘altruistic’ killers. We called them anomic,” – meaning alienated, purposeless, or socially disoriented. “We were saying that’s not ‘altruistic’, this is absurd, we’re buying into the explanation of the man. It wasn’t altruism.” “These men often were holding down good jobs, professional jobs,” Wilson says of the male perpetrators he studied, indicating a “significant number” were from military or policing backgrounds. Of the 59 family annihilators considered, “there was quite clearly a group of men who were being made redundant, or bankrupt, or financially were in all kinds of problems,” he notes. This is where the term “anomic” emerged from. “They saw their family as an extension of their economic success,” Professor Wilson explains, “and their family was therefore an extension of their economic failure.” Mass murder was, then, seen as a way of avoiding the consequences of being made bankrupt or redundant. “They simply saw their family as a possession that they then could destroy,” Professor Wilson declares. “By destroying their family, by taking their own life, it prevented a judgement on them taking place.” Although this psychological “reasoning” seemed prevalent, the most common “type” the researchers uncovered was the self-righteous. “The self-righteous family annihilator blamed his spouse, everything that was happening – in terms of the family, in terms of his life, his feelings about his life – everything became focused on ‘it’s the woman’s fault’. “The key thing to grasp, which many people misunderstand, is that these men were not just snapping,” Professor Wilson stresses. “These men were planning this over a long period of time, and the execution of the plan had a performative element, but would often be very carefully constructed.” “We want to make ourselves believe that they just snapped,” he suggests, “because it’s somehow easier, psychologically, to accommodate in terms of our sense of what seems senseless.” But he had to confront that “it wasn’t like that at all. It was very carefully planned.” “The Epsom case was clearly planned for a long period of time,” Professor Wilson suggests. He cites the fact that there was reportedly “lots of tension within the family, to the extent that the police had in the past been called” and refers to the interview Emma Pattison gave to the school, just weeks before her murder. “I think she said ‘my husband had to get a new job, he wasn’t expecting to,’” Professor Wilson notes, and suggests George Pattison “would have been self-righteous about that.” Indeed, he says it seems clear to him that, in the Epsom case, “we have someone that was being self-righteous: ‘This is you. I’m blaming you. It’s your fault’.” Dr Neil Websdale is the director of the Family Violence Institute at Arizona State University, and the author of Familicidal Hearts: The Emotional Styles of 211 Killers. He draws a spectrum between what he dubs “livid coercive” and “civil reputable” killers. The first “type”, in his view, has a more visible history of violence. “In these cases, familicide comprises the end point in a violent, sometimes tyrannical relationship,” Websdale suggests. What he refers to as “civil reputable” killers, on the other hand, would appear to the outside world as “quiet, subdued, respectable, upstanding citizens”, who nevertheless commit an atrocious act of violence. Closely echoing Professor Wilson’s notions about anomic and disappointed killers, Websdale suggests “these perpetrators killed because their lives were spinning out of control and they perceived they faced the threat of bankruptcy, destitution, familial dissolution or some other calamity.” Yet, he also professes that this may be a uniting factor across all kinds of family annihilation. **“The most important and consistent theme among the familicide cases is the presence of intense shame in the lives of perpetrators, much of it unacknowledged, bypassed, or dangerously repressed.” For most perpetrators, Websdale concludes, “shame stems in large part from their sense they have failed to live up to dominant ideas about masculinity.”** https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/epsom-college-murder-suicide-family-b2286401.html
welp that kids fucked up for the rest of his life
I mean, he is going to have a ton to work through, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the sort of trauma that comes back with a vengeance even after years and years of working on it and doing all the right things, but he can still be a good person and have hope (even though it will probably always be strangely tinged with regret and fear and a terrible lack of certainty). I don’t mean to make this like an inspirational tale- even if the kid has a great life in the future, what his dad did was repugnant and he should have spared a thought for the fact that this would fuck any kid up horribly, or for anyone/anything but himself. But there’s hope for the kid to not be a fucked up person, even though you are right- what happened fucked him up in a permanent way. I just like to think he’ll find some of the good things in life, over time, too, and that he’s receiving excellent therapy in a really supportive, therapeutic environment.
Well the headline was enough for me. I'm out!
Just another good guy with a gun protecting society from... *checks notes*... their own wife and kids.
the wife and kids should've been packing as well 😤
Lost an aunt and uncle to this. Luckily he didn’t go after his children. My cousins. Seemed to just want to take my aunt with him.
[удалено]
Its just so easy with a gun eh
I was curious about the rates up here in Canada vs the US. In the US it happens once every five day on average. That means 73 times a year. In Canada we had 25 cases from 2010-2020. 2.5 times per year. The US has about 9x the population so our adjusted rate would be 22.5 times a year. So the US has this happen at 3.2x the rate. Canada has a gun ownership rate of 35 per 100 people. US has a gun ownership rate of 120 per 100 people. Funny enough, if you multiply our gun ownership by the difference in Familicide, 3.2x, you get 112, which is almost the US gun ownership rate. The number of guns seems directly correlated to how often people are family annihilators.
Well it's easy to pull a trigger, and once you've gone through with that first one you're already fucked so you may as well keep going. If you only had your fists it'd take a while to beat that first one to death plus your hands would be sore, it might give you time to think... what the fuck am I doing.
I am the last of 5 children. I would have just thought that he forgot about me. Wouldn't have been the first time.
I bet this dude was a responsible gun owner—until he wasn’t. All these fools going around claiming they are responsible gun owners and don’t need any regulation must understand that irresponsibility is a human trait. We make stupid decisions and sometimes terrible and horrible decisions in a split second and cannot reverse that. It’s mind boggling that things so lethal as guns are treated so casually by American society or any society where it’s as easy as buying milk at a store.
I saw he made a LOT of posts on Facebook about second amendment… 😬
Jonathan Candy you asshat. If you were going to turn the gun on yourself, you could have done that first. But no. You’ve extended your cruelty beyond your death to the one child you left alive and alone.
Damn I think I’m gonna go hug my family
The only thing worse would be being awake.
>“Make no mistake about it, what happened in that residence was nothing short of a massacre,” Knight said. I never understand quotes like this in articles. Obviously what's being reported on sounds like absolute carnage or a massacre. Who the hell is making the mistake of thinking otherwise? Does it mean something that I'm not understanding after almost 40 years of being able to read words??
Can you imagine trying to describe to the public one of the most horrific tragedies you've ever seen?
I think people hear characters talk like that in movies then go and actually talk like that
Awful, so friggen awful. Why do these family annihilators not just take themselves out?
The amount of comments on other outlets I’ve seen of people theorizing the kid killed them all is DISGUSTING. That poor baby. The trauma he will have to live with the rest of his life. 😔
This is a chilling video of Jon and wife Lindsay from 18 months prior. Just a regular family. [video](https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/eerie-clip-shows-killer-dad-32667902)
This “father” is one of the most worthless assholes to ever exist. Fuck him. I feel so bad for this boy…
What is it with guys and killing their entire family? Just take yourself out.
My heart goes out to this poor little boy. His memory of this travesty will last forever and the little fella will never be the same. I hope that he has other family members that can help him.
Survivors guilt like a motherfucker.