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Murder-Suicide (651A/20)


I would like to request the following information on murder-suicide. For the purposes of this request, I am defining murder-suicide as ‘murder followed by the suicide of the perpetrator(s) within one week’.

I would like to request the following information for the years 1st January 2015 to 31st December 2018 inclusive:

  1. In total (for all ages), how many murder-suicide incidents were recorded in your force between 1st January 2015 and 31st December 2018? Please provide a breakdown by year (e.g. 10 in 2015, 20 in 2016, 30 in 2015, total = 60)
  2. How many of these murder-suicides (number not percentage please) involved a victim who was aged 60 or over? Please provide a breakdown by year (e.g. 10 in 2015, 20 in 2016, 30 in 2015, total = 60)
  3. How many murders involving a victim aged 60 or over were recorded during the same period (number not % please) Please provide a breakdown by year (e.g. 10 in 2015, 20 in 2016, 30 in 2015, total = 60). Please note – this question is designed to allow me to ascertain how many murders of older people are murder-suicide cases.
  4. For each of the recorded murder-suicide cases involving an older victim (60 or over) (as per question 2, above), please provide the victim, offender and crime details on an individual case basis as per the attached table – if possible please complete a table for each recorded offence or provide the same information in a different format if preferred but please provide this on an individual basis – please do not aggregate the information).

This request has been carefully designed to ensure the data requested is anonymous (e.g. using age categories rather than asking for specific ages, not requesting any personal data on victims or suspects such as names, addresses, date of birth and so on). I am seeking information on closed cases only.

Please note, I have previously made requests for details on other offences, including sexual offences and, relatedly, murder/manslaughter asking for almost identical information and the Information Commissioner upheld my appeal for this information on the basis that this did not engage section 30, section 38 or section 40. For further detail please see here:


Further to this request I am emailing to provide clarification on the terminology used. The term perpetrator has been used to describe suspects – I would be grateful if you could proceed with this request for data on murder followed by suicides within a week and provide the requested victim and suspect characteristics.


Please find attached our response.



