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Science 25 August 1978:
Vol. 201. no. 4357, pp. 748 - 750
DOI: 10.1126/science.201.4357.748
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Articles

Airplane Accident Fatalities Increase Just After Newspaper Stories About Murder and Suicide

DAVID P. PHILLIPS 1

1 Department of Sociology, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla 92093

Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-executive airplanes have increased after publicized murder-suicides. The more publicity given to a murder-suicide, the more crashes occurred. The increase in plane crashes occurred primarily in states where the murder-suicides were publicized. These findings suggest that murder-suicide stories trigger subsequent murder-suicides, some of which are disguised as airplane accidents.

Submitted on December 16, 1977
Revised on April 28, 1978


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