Moments after Robert Hollie shot his wife to death in February, he grabbed her body and dragged it down the path of her Three Mile Creek home in Mobile, along the sidewalk before placing it in the gutter. As her blood began to pool in the darkness, Hollie got in his car and went home.

Not long after Fonda Poellnitz, 58, was found by neighbors, police pieced together what had happened. SWAT teams began to descend on Hollie's home near Prichard.

After watching officers setting up a cordon on the edge of his property, Hollie, 72, opened his front door and began shooting. Mobile police officer Justin Billa was shot and later died in hospital. Hollie then shot himself with the same gun that he had used to kill his wife and Billa.

A double murder-suicide.

A man with psychotic mental health issues that finally snapped and killed his wife before turning the weapon on himself, or the ultimate culmination of domestic abuse? As is often the case with murder-suicides, also known as domestic homicides by advocates, there are no court proceedings to determine the facts. All involved are dead. There will be no grand jury, no trial, no sentencing.

The inquest in the aftermath of such tragedies is often carried out by friends, family and strangers in towns and cities around the state where dozens of these incidents have taken place thus far in 2018.

Many incorrectly attribute the violent acts to the tragic deterioration of mental health, according to experts, and seldom consider guns and the years of abuse that led up to the deadly moment.

"Mental Health is often the scapegoat," said Tonie-Ann Torrans, executive director of Penelope House, a Mobile-based organization that helps woman who are involved in intimate partner violence. "While it does have the ability to raise the risk factor, most mentally ill people are not dangerous. Jealousy, power, control, and guns are much more dangerous in these scenarios than people with mental illness."

So far in Alabama in 2018, there have been 18 murder-suicides resulting in the deaths of nearly 40 people. State-collected data on the phenomenon are non-existent, while incomplete national stats loosely suggest that there has been an increase.

Information and even opinion on murder-suicides is difficult to come by in Alabama.

In 2017, the state department of health launched a pilot program in 10 counties aimed at recording instances of murder-suicides, but that data, according to a department of health spokesperson may not be released until next year. Complete data for 2018 will be collected from a range of sources, including law enforcement, coroners and other statewide agencies, but will not readily be available until well into 2019.

The Violence Policy Center, a Washington DC-based non-profit gun control advocacy group, keeps limited records on murder-suicides for the first six months of each year it samples. The records generally come from media reports.

In the first six months of 2005, there were two murder suicides in Alabama resulting in the death of four people. In 2007, those figures doubled. By 2011, the figure had increased to 11 and 22, respectively, a possible by-product of Alabama's 10 percent unemployment average throughout that year.



Unemployment is listed in reports as a high-risk factor when coupled with a history of domestic abuse, according to a National Institute of Justice report from May 2010.



In 2014, the figures dropped to four murder-suicides and a total of eight deaths, and 2017 saw the figures increase to nine and 18.

In the first six months of this year, there have been nine murder-suicides resulting in the death of 24 people, according to AL.com and other media reports. There was also the Florida murder-suicide of recently divorced Alabama couple from Enterprise. Since then, there has been a further seven murder-suicides that have seen 16 more people killed up to the beginning of August.

Of six states that have a similar size population to Alabama, only Kentucky saw more murder-suicides in the first half of 2017 with 11, resulting in the death of 24 people. While Oklahoma had fewer murder-suicide with 7, it resulted in the death of 19 people, according to date from the Violence Policy Center.

The report noted that nine out of 10 of the 296 murder suicides in the country in the first half of 2017 were committed by a person using a gun, resulting in the death of around 660 people. Approximately 65 percent involved an intimate partner. Of that figure, 96 percent were women killed by men. More than 40 of the victims included children, according to the study.

The United States is the only country in the world where the primary means of suicide is guns.

In 2015, 22,018 Americans killed themselves with guns, according to a recent Center for Disease and Control study. That's nearly 10,000 more than homicides by guns, noted the same study. Historically, the states with the weakest gun-control laws have had substantially higher suicide rates than those with the strongest laws, according to a 20 year government study released in 2002.



"If you have immediate access to a gun you are more likely to use it on a partner or yourself," said David Adams, executive director of Emerge, a nationwide group that works with abusers to end violence in intimate relationships. "Whereas if you have limited access to a gun you have time to think and the thought may pass."



The Signs

"Possessive jealousy, threats to end the relationship, and dependency are some of the reasons as to why men kill their partners and then themselves," said Adams. "And while alcohol can drive their jealous ruminations it's not as big as factor as believed by many."

But Adams did agree with Torrens in that he felt the mental illness card was largely overplayed when investigating murder suicides.

"I don't think depression is rare in these cases but agree that it's not necessarily the driving force either. Sometimes the killer isn't depressed but decides to kill himself after he's already killed his partner and realizes that his life isn't very viable after that due to the criminal consequences. In these cases, suicide is an afterthought."

Some additional factors, said Adams, were the presence of a stepchild in the home, an age difference between the man and the woman, a history of domestic violence, and guns in the house.

In the case of Robert Hollie, he fit the mold almost perfectly. In March 2015, his wife obtained a protection order against him after he threw a can at her face and threatened to shoot her, according to Mobile court records. Along with physical violence, Hollie had expressed anger that his wife's grown son was still living at home. His wife, Fonda Poellnitz was 14 years younger than him. And lastly, he always had a gun on him, according to Poellnitz's daughter, Octavia Poellnitz.

"He was violent for as long as I knew him, and my mother tried to keep him away from all of us," said Octavia. "He was scary and always popped up back in our lives even though he was supposed to stay away."

The murder-suicide of Gary Sullivan and his wife Mel Ann was another example that rings true. After being forced in to early retirement as a school teacher, Sullivan's wife allegedly wanted to leave him, according to friends of hers that spoke with AL.com. He shot her in the back of the head while she sat on the porch preparing for church Sunday July 22. He then killed himself.

Washington County Sheriff Richard Stringer believed that Sullivan had had a psychotic episode that led to the murder-suicide. But Torrens believes that he was exhibiting classic abusive behavior based on the deterioration of the relationship.

"These things often happen just when the person is trying to leave the abusive relationship," said Torrens. "The man thinks he's losing his power and wants it back - and that includes killing his intimate partner."

"That's the ultimate control. I can take your life."