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home / centre for automotive safety research / Publications / List / Details Publication Details| Title | Familial Vehicular Murder-Suicide | | Authors | Byard RW, O'Donovan S, van den Heuvel C, Baldock MRJ | | Year | 2017 | | Type | Journal Article | | Abstract | A certain number of single vehicle crashes into stationary roadside objects such as trees, are thought to be occult suicides. However is it possible that some cases of multiple deaths within a family in similar crashes are due to unrecognized familial murder-suicides? A 39-year-old women and her 11-year-old daughter are reported who died of injuries following a vehicle impact with a tree. Unusual behaviour of the mother leading up to the crash, and assessment at the scene, raised the possibility of this being a non-accidental event. However, difficulties in retrospectively determining the intent of a driver in a vehicle crash, and the non-recording of, or lack of separate coding for murder-suicides on registers, make determination of the incidence of these types of events extremely difficult. It may be that this is a subcategory of murder-suicide that is under-diagnosed and so is not being registered on central motor vehicle crash databases. | | Journal Title | Journal of Forensic Sciences | | Journal Volume (Issue) | online, doi: 10.1111/1556-4029.13667 |
| Reference | | Byard RW, O'Donovan S, van den Heuvel C, Baldock MRJ (2017). Familial Vehicular Murder-Suicide. Journal of Forensic Sciences, online, doi: 10.1111/1556-4029.13667. |
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