Murder-Suicide Cases Especially Terrifying in ‘Normal’...

To his neighbors, John Cotter Jr. was a wealthy real estate developer who had it all, the son of a retired state Supreme Court chief justice, himself the patriarch of an elegant family, a loving father who took his son hunting.

But inside, Cotter was tortured by “monsters,” tormented by his business failures, shattered by the recent discovery that his son had epilepsy.

Hopelessness overtook him and in the end he shot himself--but not before taking the lives of his wife, son and daughter.

The tragedy recalls other cases in which people bent on killing themselves have taken innocents, even bystanders, with them--people like Joseph Wesbecker, the former mental patient who in September killed nine, including himself, in a Louisville, Ky., printing-plant rampage.

Psychologists and physiologists are only beginning to isolate possible reasons for such perplexing behavior. Besides personal pressures that seem unbearable, they cite perverse love-hate relationships between some killers and victims, and in many cases a deficiency in a message-carrying chemical in the brain.

The details of Cotter’s final act provide a dim light down the foreboding tunnels of the mind.

“There was nothing strange about them,” said Jane Longley-Cook, a neighbor who was in a car pool with Cotter’s wife, Anne.

Anne Cotter, 44, was a patron of the arts and a caring mother so thoughtful she’d hand out trick-or-treat candy in advance of Halloween if she was going to be away. The daughter, Julia, 21, graduated from college last spring with a degree in French and planned to spend some time in England. The son, John III, 17, was enrolled in a private school.

“It probably was the biggest shock of my life,” Jane Longley-Cook said of the July killings in the three-story brick house across the street. “I don’t think we’ll ever know what causes people to do things like that.”

Cotter, a shy, private man of 47, had started seeing a psychiatrist about a month before. According to police reports, he indicated to the therapist that he was depressed because of, among other things, financial problems and the illness of his son, a loner who had few close friends.

About a year earlier, the son suffered a seizure while driving, which led to the discovery that he had epilepsy.

The psychiatrist, who prescribed antidepressant drugs for Cotter, would not comment on the case, but police said he indicated Cotter never talked about taking his own life, let alone killing his family. Just a week or two before the shootings, he told the therapist his difficulties seemed to be straightening out, according to investigators.

But apparently pressure began to build in a mind psychiatrists say might have crossed the line from reality to exaggeration. His last thoughts were scribbled on a single page of paper in disjointed and unpunctuated notes:

“Depression

“Shaking uncontrollably inside

“Destitute

“No hope

“No hope for family

“No good insurance

“Epilepsy

“John III is depressed from Tegretol (medication to control seizures) and . . . walks the house at night as I do He worries about another seizure and accident, becoming a closeted person

“Death, nervous breakdown depression is everywhere

“The monster shakes my body each night and I wake trembling.”

The page ended with a reference to his wife, who was mourning the recent loss of her mother:

“No future, no hope, suffering for all of us--she suffered in the past and can’t suffer again.”

Cotter also left an eight-page letter alleging payoffs and the mishandling of funds and grants in the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority, which makes loans for projects, including low-income housing. Although Cotter did not implicate himself, he alleged that the purported scheme to defraud the authority involved real estate he had owned. The state is investigating.

Cotter himself was facing a half-dozen civil suits filed by tenants of one of his developments seeking more than $2 million in damages from a fire. At a probate hearing, a judge said Cotter’s estate might not be enough to cover his debts.

Dr. Alan L. Berman, a professor of psychology at the American University in Washington, said Cotter’s notes are an expression of tremendous anxiety, fear or threat he felt and an inability to separate himself from his family.

Some suicidal people in a twisted state of mind may see those they murder as themselves. “They are so fused, so incapable of distinguishing that this other person is a separate human being, the suicidal motive extends to having to kill this other person as well,” said Berman.

The most typical murder-suicide is one in which two partners depend on and abuse each other for affection in a love-hate relationship marked by separations, threats and accusations of infidelity, he said.

“They cannot exist separate from each other and they really can’t live with each other without being abusive. So it’s sort of a final act that communicates just that and that is: ‘I am so despairing because you’re threatening to leave me. I hate you so much and I love you so much, I have to take you with me and I have to go.’ ”

Berman told of a Baltimore man who shot his lover three times in the head, then bent over and kissed her before killing himself.

Nancy Allen, a Los Angeles counselor, found in a study of 104 murder-suicides that 71% of the murderers were husbands or boyfriends of the victims. In half of the cases, the couple had been drinking.

Studies since 1976 link such violent and impulsive behavior to a decrease in the chemical called serotonin, which carries messages between brain cells.

“Serotonin has been found to be the lowest in murder-suicides,” said Dr. Susan J. Blumenthal, a psychiatrist and chief of the Behavioral Medicine Program at the National Institute of Mental Health in Rockville, Md. “It’s also very low in arsonists who then kill themselves or attempt suicide.”

Some who commit murder-suicide fall victim to depression or psychosis, unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, hearing voices telling them to hurt themselves and others. They blame others, including family members or their work supervisors, for their failures and their hurt, often exaggerated in the exhaustion of the mind.

“These are people . . . who feel helpless in the face of being victimized by someone else,” said Dr. Ronald S. Ebert, senior forensic psychologist at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass.

Such was the case with Wesbecker, a 47-year-old pressman who was put on disability leave last year. A manic depressive, he had attempted suicide three times. Co-workers said he carried a grudge because he was laid off and feared his disability benefits were going to be stopped.

“You’re dealing with a man who perceives a miscarriage of justice and he’s going to correct it,” said Dr. Martin Symonds, chairman of the American Psychiatric Assn.’s Task Force on Victimization.

Many murderers then take their own lives because they despise what they did and cannot to live with themselves after killing someone, particularly someone close.

The National Institute of Mental Health’s Blumenthal said that in more than 90% of suicides there is some humiliating life event in the recent past. “There’s a breakup in a relationship. They’ve lost a job. They’ve lost some financial status. They’re about to be confronted by the law.”

No one knows for sure what was going through John Cotter’s mind that fatal summer day on Woodside Circle.

“I think everybody wishes they knew because you could say, ‘Well, it happened because of this and we can put it behind us,’ ” said Longley-Cook, a mother of three.

“I think that’s what’s very frightening to children. They see this happy family across the street and then suddenly they hear the father murdered everyone and killed himself. That’s pretty devastating for children. Every time I see the house, I just can’t believe that’s happened there.”