The European Homicide-Suicide Study

The Swiss database is drawn from a larger national database which encloses all homicide and 10% of the suicide cases in Switzerland over the last twenty years. Data were collected from forensic medicine, police and court files. The research design includes detailed questions about offender and victim characteristics as well as the circumstances of the homicide/suicide, with a special emphasis made on homicides followed by a consecutive suicide of the offender. The homicide database contains 1311 homicide cases with 1462 victims and 1404 perpetrators. 132 cases have been identified as homicide-suicide cases. For this special category, official data will be compared to the digital archive of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) to complete missing cases.