Murderous Self-Destruction: Revenge, Bitterness, and Suicidal Murder in Early Modern Finland

This paper examines suicidal murders in early modern Finland, murders in which the perpetrators’ goal was to bring about their death through legal punishment. While previous research on suicidal murders often emphasizes their ritualistic nature and religious connections in the early modern context, this paper challenges such generalizations. It discusses the explanations that the perpetrators gave for their actions in court and reconstructs the emotional circumstances that led these people to become suicidal. This will reveal that in early modern Finland, suicidal murders were framed by revengefulness and bitterness rather than religious or ritualistic conceptions.

In Finland, a substantial number of suicidal murders involved perpetrators suffering from mistreatment, as well as emotional and financial distress. Labelled as “weary of life” by contemporaries and lacking a social safety net, these individuals often contemplated suicide. Yet, they chose to commit murder, driven by bitterness and a desire for revenge. Some individuals sought justice for the wrongs they had suffered through a public trial and execution, while others aimed to harm their victims or their victims’ families, using the legal system to engineer their own self-destruction.

This paper argues that bitterness and vindictiveness played a more significant role in cases of suicidal murders than previously acknowledged. Consequently, these crimes exhibit characteristics similar to modern homicides, such as familicide and mass shootings, wherein self-destruction extends to others. This perspective reinforces the notion that preventing violence by self-destructive people against others begins with addressing self-destructiveness in the first place.

The paper is based on the presenter’s dissertation project: Suicidal Murder as a Criminal, Social, and Cultural Phenomenon in Early Modern Finland. The dissertation adopts a historical criminology viewpoint, analyzing deeply detailed and comprehensive sources from the early modern Swedish judiciary.