Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Making sense of the county’s tragic month of murder-suicides

Data on phenomenon is thin, but factors are well-known

Investigation

Sam Morris

Metro Police investigate the scene of an apparent murder-suicide at 1292 Sun Village Ave. on Monday, September 14, 2009.

Murder-Suicide Investigation

Metro Police investigate at the scene of an apparent murder-suicide at 1292 Sun Village Ave. Monday, September 14, 2009. Launch slideshow »

The strangest case

Of September’s murder-suicides, the case of Mark Helwig and his frozen wife is the most mysterious.

Helwig sent police a letter confessing to killing his wife, Veronica, and claiming he would kill himself. Police discovered Helwig had made good on this vow when they visited the couple’s Las Vegas home Sept. 17. He was dead of a self-inflicted shot in the head; she was folded into a freezer.

Police believe Veronica’s body may have spent the past 18-24 months in that freezer.

Nobody reported her missing during that time. Neighbors barely knew the couple. His relatives did not reply to the Sun’s requests for comment.

The couple lived, it seems, as unnoticed as they died.

But the Helwigs had problems in their past.

The couple were married in 1997, in Hawaii. Eight years later, Mark Helwig filed for divorce in Clark County. The couple spent the next six months in court, fighting over the terms of their split before deciding, in August of that year, to dismiss the case entirely — to stay together, after all.

From those court filings, a slightly sharper picture of the couple emerges, though their past still raises more questions than it does provide answers.

For starters, two months into the divorce case, Mark called 911 to file a complaint against his wife, whom it appears he was still living with. According to police reports, the couple were fighting when Veronica, in an effort to prevent Mark from leaving the house, rendered his car immobile with an anti-theft device, like The Club, and hid the keys. Mark locked himself in a bedroom and called police, who determined nobody had been injured. Shortly thereafter, it appears Mark filed a temporary protective order against his wife.

The couple had no children together. They did, however, have assets: Two homes in Colorado, a time share somewhere and considerable money in the bank.

That money presented a problem during the divorce. Court records indicate that Veronica transferred approximately $428,000 out of a bank account the couple shared and into her own private accounts. Judge Cheryl Moss ordered these assets frozen pending the divorce negotiations — allowing Veronica to withdraw only $20,000 for her attorney’s fees and living expenses.

Veronica was 48 at the time of the divorce filing, which listed her occupation as “housewife.” (She also went by the name Phuoc and used her maiden name, Tran.) Financial records indicate she had more than $1 million in her name in 2005.

Mark was 56 at the time of the divorce filing, and an employee at Bechtel Corp., an international engineering and construction company. The couple, it appears, met in Hong Kong and then lived for short periods all over the globe — China, Malaysia, England and throughout the United States — before settling in Las Vegas.

Sources who know the couple indicate she has adult children abroad who are estranged. The Clark County coroner’s office has yet to notify her next of kin.

What court records do not indicate, however, is why the couple suddenly decided to dismiss the divorce case and continue their relationship. Attorneys representing the couple did not return calls, or didn’t want to speak to the Sun because of client privilege matters.

So, for whatever reason, the divorce case was officially dropped in September 2005. Mark took his own life in September of this year. And somewhere in between, Veronica Helwig vanished into a freezer.

September has seen three murder-suicides in Clark County, and two homicides with failed suicides — a rash almost anybody would agree is unusual.

What will be harder for people to agree on, however, is why.

In a town that has averaged about six murder-suicides a year since 2003, according to Metro Police, there is no definitive answer to why detectives would suddenly find themselves investigating five such cases in the space of 19 days.

“You’re dealing with irrationality, with crimes of anger, passion, emotion,” Metro Capt. Vincent Cannito said. “What drives a person to do something you or I would never do in a million years? No one is going to know.”

What we do know, however, is that like the vast majority of murder-suicides across the country, these most recent Clark County cases involve people who are, or were, intimate partners. Many of the couples, according to police and friends of the victims, had histories of abuse or death threats — another common factor in murder-suicides everywhere.

Gayle Jensen-Allen said her close friend, Denise Ebarb, had become “immune” to death threats from her onetime boyfriend, Kelly Dicaro, “because he hadn’t killed her yet.”

On Sept. 7, however, Dicaro called police and reported he shot Ebarb, who was found dead at the scene. Dicaro had also shot himself in the neck, according to police reports, but survived the injuries. He now faces murder charges.

Jensen-Allen had told Ebarb she feared for her because the couple’s fights had grown so intense. Still, Ebarb became a September crime statistic.

“You never know when you prevent a tragedy,” Jensen-Allen said. “Only when you don’t.”

•••

There’s no central clearing house tracking murder-suicide rates in the country, but data gathered by the Violence Policy Center in 2007 indicates that there are roughly 10 such events every week in the United States. Other research has indicated the number is much higher — from 1,000 to 1,500 annually.

Maria Herrera was fatally shot Sept. 5 by Buddy Kroll, a man police think traveled from Texas to North Las Vegas to ambush Herrera, with whom he had a child. Family members recently publicized voice-mail messages Kroll left on Herrera’s phone before her death, messages that included death threats and promises of funerals to come.

Kroll turned a gun on himself at the scene, but didn’t die from his injuries until Sept. 16. It’s unclear what Kroll was angry about.

Sarah Wayson was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds Sept. 14 in a south Las Vegas home. At the scene, police also found Eric Bray, a onetime boyfriend of Wayson’s, dead from a self-inflicted shot in the head. Wayson’s family members and police don’t want to comment on the case, though acquaintances who asked not to be identified told the Sun that the couple’s relationship had been tense, and that Bray may have felt inadequate compared with Wayson, whose career was taking off while his foundered.

Jealous men are one of the three principal perpetrators of murder-suicides, studies show. The other two common perpetrators: Depressed mothers (who kill their children, not their partners) and elderly men with sickly spouses — which may have been the motive behind the valley’s most recent alleged murder-suicide attempt.

Police responding to an early morning call on Sept. 24 found Kay Woods, 80, dead from a gunshot wound in the back and her husband, Joe Woods, 86, bleeding from what appeared to be a self-inflicted shot in the stomach. Metro Capt. Cannito says the couple were ill, and that the incident may have been planned because of their sickness.

Woods, now hospitalized, will face murder charges if he survives.

•••

The body of academic research on murder-suicides as a separate and unique crime is far outweighed by the endless studies on suicide rates and murder rates (perhaps in part because there is no good national tracking of murder-suicide incidents).

As such, people hoping to understand what could motivate murder-suicides often consider factors known to influence the separate crimes — murder, suicide and domestic violence.

On Tuesday, the Violence Policy Center released data indicating Nevada ranks fifth in the nation in the rate of women murdered by men, which at 2.23 murders per 100,000 is roughly 70 percent higher than the national average. Just more than half of the murder victims the center studied were wives or intimate partners of their killers.

So far, of the 90 homicides Metro detectives have investigated this year, eight involved intimate partners, Cannito said. This is an improvement over the past three years, which had an average of 15 intimate-partner murder cases annually.

When you expand the definition of domestic violence to its most technical meaning, however — violence between people who live together, including family members, roommates and romantic partners — it has historically been a factor in a quarter to a third of all homicides Metro investigates, Cannito said.

In August, the department launched a program designed to identify domestic violence victims in the greatest immediate danger, with the hope of intervening.

The problem, however, is that of the 626 people Metro Police determined met that danger standard, more than half have refused help, Cannito said. This, of course, is the nature of domestic violence and what makes these cases and many of the murder-suicide cases so frustrating.

“Look at the violent patterns, the historical patterns of abuse. These crimes can be prevented,” he said. “If the victim reaches out. And that is a point we cannot stress enough.”

•••

Researchers have found that violence is more likely to occur when couples experience financial strain, which creates a compounded problem: When money is tight, it’s often harder for victims without resources to leave. Other studies have indicated that abusive men without jobs were four times as likely to kill their partners.

Murder rates, meanwhile, were linked to unemployment in a July study published in the Lancet medical journal. Researchers studied mortality rates and economic changes over three decades in the European Union and determined that for every 1 percentage-point increase in unemployment, there was a 0.8 point rise in homicides (as well as a 0.8 point rise in suicides).

The Las Vegas Valley’s unemployment rate has risen to 13.4 percent.

As for suicide, just being in Clark County seems to put people at greater risk. Former UNLV researcher Matt Wray found that local residents were at least 54 percent more likely to commit suicide than people in other cities. Residents who leave Las Vegas, meanwhile, see their likelihood of committing suicide decrease by 13 percent to 40 percent. Wray’s study offers only possible causes of Clark County’s high suicide rate: gamblers’ despair, rapid growth that leads to social isolation, or some kind of “contagion” effect, by which one suicide inspires another.

Could the same be true of murder-suicides — could the rash of cases be explained by the rash of cases?

Some studies on the copycat effect have found correlations between highly publicized suicides and an increase in suicide rates. Still more studies have failed to find a link.

Murder-Suicide Investigation

A vehicle from the Clark County Coroner's Office is parked in the driveway Friday of a home at 1516 Willowbark Court, where authorities are investigating a murder-suicide that occurred a day earlier. Launch slideshow »

Conflicting results are probably par for the course when anybody — academics, police, friends and family of victims — attempts to make sense of something perhaps fundamentally senseless, like the most mysterious murder-suicide police investigated this month.

Mark Helwig mailed Metro Police a note claiming that he killed his wife, Veronica Tran, two years earlier, and was planning to kill himself. When police visited his home Sept. 17, they found Helwig dead of a shotgun wound in the head, and his wife’s body stored in a freezer, where detectives told reporters she had been stored for at least 18 months.

If homicide investigators have any idea what caused Helwig to kill his wife and then take his own life so long after the fact, they still haven’t let on. Neighbors, meanwhile, said they barely knew the couple.

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