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

Sam Morris

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

By Abigail Goldman

Wednesday, Sept. 30, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Murder-Suicide Investigation

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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

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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.