There was a true crime documentary I saw, about a mother and son who murdered the son's wife by following behind her car one night (with the couple's children in the car with their grandmother and father, wearing something like hallowe'en masks so that they wouldn't witness what happened) and the mother shooting her daughter-in-law dead out the car window as they overtook. I may be getting mixed up with another case but I think it was this one - the mother couldn't help herself from bragging to someone in jail awaiting trial, about where she had buried the gun.
That was not a case of family annihilation but still the daughter-in-law was put at risk by the husband's unhealthy relationship with his mother. She ran his adult life.
I would add it to the list of red flags, not necessarily a strained relationship between mother and daughter-in-law, because that is all too common, but seen in conjunction with the traits of a son still enmeshed with his mother and clearly a personality disorder on some level. How those traits can be defined is still yet another challenge. I think there would have been signs, and I think friends would not have seen the real Chris. His greatest fear was being unmasked so of course he would make sure that their friends never saw any imperfections. But I don't think the same applies to behind closed doors, when the camera's not running. Sometimes we think we are being silly and dismiss our own brain telling us that it registered a flicker of something unsettling. We don't want to believe it so we don't take action and we don't tell anyone else. We are being silly. We are not being positive, we are indulging our own fears based on our own past. We can fix it with love. We maybe caused it or contributed to it. etc. I have to think that this was a fatal mix of ingredients and it did not come from nowhere at all. It didn't just happen. He brewed this. He cheated. He became distant. He deleted his social media. He was acting like he had secrets. He was no longer present in his marriage. He had moved on. He felt no attachment to any of them. They were an inconvenience and an impediment to his new life.
That was not a case of family annihilation but still the daughter-in-law was put at risk by the husband's unhealthy relationship with his mother. She ran his adult life.
I would add it to the list of red flags, not necessarily a strained relationship between mother and daughter-in-law, because that is all too common, but seen in conjunction with the traits of a son still enmeshed with his mother and clearly a personality disorder on some level. How those traits can be defined is still yet another challenge. I think there would have been signs, and I think friends would not have seen the real Chris. His greatest fear was being unmasked so of course he would make sure that their friends never saw any imperfections. But I don't think the same applies to behind closed doors, when the camera's not running. Sometimes we think we are being silly and dismiss our own brain telling us that it registered a flicker of something unsettling. We don't want to believe it so we don't take action and we don't tell anyone else. We are being silly. We are not being positive, we are indulging our own fears based on our own past. We can fix it with love. We maybe caused it or contributed to it. etc. I have to think that this was a fatal mix of ingredients and it did not come from nowhere at all. It didn't just happen. He brewed this. He cheated. He became distant. He deleted his social media. He was acting like he had secrets. He was no longer present in his marriage. He had moved on. He felt no attachment to any of them. They were an inconvenience and an impediment to his new life.
