When a murder ends in suicide, investigators lose one of the most important pieces of the puzzle—the person who could explain why. In this episode, I take you inside several recent murder-suicide cases from across the United States, including tragedies involving entire families, intimate partners, and parents and children. From Michigan to Oklahoma, Delaware, and Florida, these heartbreaking cases remind us that every scene tells a story, but it’s the evidence that reveals what truly happened. As a forensic death investigator, I explain how investigators reconstruct these complex scenes by examining body position, injuries, blood evidence, trajectories, fire damage, digital evidence, timelines, and countless other details. When there is no suspect to interview, no trial, and often no suicide note, the investigation must rely on science, careful documentation, and the facts left behind. We’ll also discuss why protective orders don’t always prevent violence, why investigators avoid speculation during active cases, and why it’s important to distinguish between homicide and suicide when understanding these tragedies. Throughout the episode, I share the questions investigators ask, the evidence they search for, and why the answers aren’t always immediately clear. These cases are difficult to hear, but they also highlight the dedication of investigators, first responders, and forensic professionals who work tirelessly to uncover the truth for victims and their families. Join me as we explore the investigative process behind one of the most challenging types of death investigations, and the questions that often remain when murder ends in suicide. *  Listener discretion is advised. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: 00:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies. I’m your host, Julie Mattson. 00:10 Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine-tingling, unusual, and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner. 00:24 Do I have some stories for you? Are you ready? Hey, guys. Welcome back to another episode of Pushing Up Lilies. We are home this week and back from North Dakota. We had a great trip. Travel’s exhausting. 00:42 I don’t know if y’all feel the same way about it that I do. I’m always so excited to get there, but I’m also equally excited to get home. 00:50 Of course, I recorded the podcast from there and did homework from there, and so life didn’t really stop. 00:59 I’m really looking forward to three days from now when this semester’s over, and I can actually relax for about seven weeks before my next semester starts. 01:11 That gives me a little bit to look forward to. Maybe I can take a little trip to Fredericksburg or something to wine country during that time. That’d be kinda relaxing. I would love that. 01:22 Now, this week I planned on having Kelsey on from last week’s episode, and that is not happening just because our schedules are hard to coincide right now. 01:37 Working on having her within the next couple of weeks, but while I was gone, we had this wave of murder-suicides, and so I kinda wanted to talk a little bit about that this week instead of having Kelsey on and give her some time to get her bearings. 01:57 I know that case is relatively new, having just happened in June. 02:01 I don’t want to overwhelm her and bother her too much, so I did reach out to her, and we’ll try to get together in the next couple of weeks. 02:09 I’ve also been scheduling myself as guest host on a lot of other podcasts. 02:16 That has resulted in me hiring an executive assistant to actually help me set up all of my guest appearances and travel and that kind of stuff ’cause it gets hectic, and I don’t wanna forget something, and I always wanna be able to reach out to people, and that just keeps me on my toes a little bit more so that I can respond a little bit quicker. 02:39 Anyway, we’re gonna talk again about this recent wave of murder-suicides, and the truth is it happens every day, and not a lot of people know that. 02:51 I know that because I worked as a death investigator, but even in the small county that I worked in, there were a lot of them, and when I worked in Harris County, there were even more. 03:02 In Dallas County, there were even more. 03:05 So of course, the larger the area, the more frequently this happens, and because there’s been a wave recently, we’re hearing about it a lot in the news, but then also the recent case of the family and then also the influencers, those cases tend to make the news because family of eight and two TikTok influencers. 03:31 As social media has grown, so do the instances where we’re hearing of these more frequently. But I know we’ve all been following the news lately. 03:41 It’s very disturbing, and in a matter of weeks, we’ve seen families, husbands, wives, parents, children, and former partners become victims in cases that are described as murder-suicides. 03:55 It’s happened in Michigan, Oklahoma, Delaware, Florida, and other communities all across the country. 04:03 They’re all different people and different circumstances and different relationships, but they have the same basic ending, and that is someone decides another human being is gonna die, and then after committing the homicide, the person responsible dies by suicide. 04:22 And so tonight I wanna kinda talk you through these recent cases, but I wanna approach the episode a little bit differently because I’ve spent years investigating death, and I’ve walked into homes where someone dies unexpectedly and, of course, examined the bodies and talked to families during the worst moments of their lives. 04:45 One thing you learn quickly in death investigation is that the scene does not arrive with an explanation, so you basically have to build it. 04:54 You look at the body, you look at the environment, you look at the evidence, and of