In almost every instance of a husband killing his wife, there has been a long history of control and abuse in the marriage. “It could come out of the blue, but that is very, very rare. The relationship has had to be very, very acrimonious. There has to be a pattern of abuse,” said Susan J. Elliott, 51, certified grief counselor and founder and CEO of Getting Past Your Past Productions, LLC, based in New York.   

“People just get very emotionally distraught and feel if ‘I can’t have you no one can have you.’ They just get so angry, they kill the person,” she said. “I think most of the time it is not calculated. They get really wrapped up in the emotion. In all divorces, emotions run high. If one person is unstable, you don’t know what could happen.”   

“Divorce even pushes the truly sane to the edge,” added Elinor Robin, divorce mediator based in Boca Raton, Fla., who runs www.AFriendlyDivorce.com. “If someone is already in a fragile state, divorce can easily trigger the end. Divorce affects us on every level–physical, financial, emotional, logistical, social, and legal. Feelings of abandonment, rejection, and being de-valued are underneath the rage that is necessary for murder, in domestic, workplace and school settings.”   

And no one can deny that incidents of husbands killing their wives has been gaining media attention with high profile cases in the news such as Scott Peterson, now serving time for the murder of his pregnant wife, and Drew Peterson (not related) a suspect in the death of his third wife and subsequent disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy. “These incidents, despite the media attention, tend to be fairly rare. They are not that common especially compared to the number of divorces which is number about 1.5 million a year,” said Elliott.    

But common or not, they still happen. And for Katherine van Wormer, the similarities between all murdering husbands is striking. The professor of social work at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls has co-authored a book about this topic called "Death by Domestic Violence (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008)."

In researching the book, she gathered multiple statistics about men who kill their wives and read through hundreds of domestic abuse cases that ended in murder. The profile of the common killer husband is remarkably similar.   

“These types of people are extremely possessive and obsessive about the woman. They are jealous of family so they isolate them and they also imagine that there are other men in their lives,” said Van Wormer, 63. And the main motive behind the murder, she added, was also jealousy. “In these cases, according to research, it was jealousy. These jealous types, they are extremely obsessed with their wives.”   

And it gets more complicated in murder-suicides. “What we find here with the suicide cases, is that she is a part of him, and he owns her. He says things like, ‘I can’t live with out you’ and he means it. He thinks if she leaves him, it’s like his own death.”   

Others believe that the tipping point for some of these men is not jealousy, but money and a sense of losing power and control. “When you go from being husband of the year to being a potential deadbeat in a matter of seconds, and your entire self image is destroyed and, thanks to no fault divorce, you haven’t done anything wrong, I think it makes you feel powerless,” said Adryenn Ashley, 39, a Petaluma, Calif.-based divorce financial analyst.    

“I have sat in over 1000 court cases, and there is no guarantee that the settlement is going to be reasonable, financially. I think they [men who murder their wives] felt they were being shoved into a corner,” she said. “In the case of Scott Peterson, he felt like he had no option for getting a divorce. He felt he would have been a slave for the rest of his life. In his mind, there was no way out. He felt he couldn’t just get a divorce because he would be strapped financially with no end in sight. Yes, he should have done the standup thing and said, ‘I am an asshole and I am cheating on my pregnant wife.’ But I think it’s all about the money or more so about the powerlessness of the whole process.”   

Ashley is not alone in that thinking. “We have had several clients killed by their spouses, always female,” said Thomas Martin, 63, a private investigator and former FBI agent from Newport Beach, Calif.“Trying to analyze their minds is always tricky, but it seems the motive is centered on money, such as paying big alimony and child support.”