Some are asking what 'drove' Rowan Baxter to murder his family. As if he was only a passenger.

What he did to those poor little souls and their beautiful mother is absolutely haunting. You would have to be evil to the very core to kill your children, in particular, burning them to death. To die in such a horrendously painful way, well, you wouldn't even wish that on your worst enemy.

And he was a coward right to the very end. Running from the car, stabbing himself so he wouldn't have to face any accountability for his awful crimes. What a POS.

It was probably for the best that Hannah didn't survive. Nothing she ever did would have brought her any joy after what happened to her children. Now at least she gets to be with her baby angels in heaven. May they all rest in peace.

Nothing will change and heinous acts like this
will continue so long as the media and talking heads (like a psychologist
talking about this case on Radio National) keep talking about this in terms of
logic and reason. Steve Chase, the ABC presenter was asking said psychologist
things like, "Oh but was his situation enough to make him do this" -
all as if there were a rational point in a person's life whereby they can
consider it justified to burn his whole family to death. This cool weighing up
of the perceived 'sufficiency' of the triggering event is just adding fuel to
the fire - because any potentially murderous fathers listening to this can
consider that justification exists for these homicidal acts. The main problem
with respect to commentary on these issues is an evident lack of understanding
of the sort of mental states that precipitate these events. Necessarily -
independent of how much of an arsehole the perpetrator is - a complete
breakdown of the mind has to occur for someone to even consider such barbarity.
Given that significant barriers exist to prevent perpetrators from talking
about their ideas of doing immoral and illegal acts (society at large will
censure such talk) and given that male ego is undoubtedly at work in the form
of “I can’t be wrong” ‘Male Pattern Recalcitrance,’ there are few impeding
factors that can be brought to bear on such situations. It seems everyone is
‘talking past’ the most salient issues. The main barrier to the propagation of
more useful commentary is the continuation of framing life-destroying phenomena
in terms of ‘weighing’ the apparent sufficiency of the ‘triggering’ events as
experienced by the man – as if all this can be explained by logic, and as if
such savagery can EVER be justified under any circumstances. It cannot. The
only messages that may help prevent these tragedies in the future are messages
directed at men, so as firstly to get their attention and then to tell them
that THEIR THINKING IS WRONG. In the same way that a depressed person
contemplating suicide has lost rational perspective, and feels they must die in
order to feel relief (when you’re dead you can’t feel anything, and certainly
not relief) … well the reality of this situation is typically that the person
does not really want to die. Suicidal ideation itself is a trauma that
accelerates and ‘snowballs’ irrationality, often leading to tragedy. The same
sort of erroneous thinking applies to murder/suicides. Rational thinking has
broken down, and society at large is not conversant with the counter-intuitive
nature of homicidal/suicidal thinking. The person does not want to die, or to
kill his family, yet is under the delusion that this is 'the only way out.'
Really, as I say the thinking is wrong, on every level. Nothing can ever be
solved by entering into such madness. But men especially need to know to be
aware of the very first inklings of such poisonous thinking, again in the same
way that a suicidal person needs to recognise when thought patterns are veering
into dangerous territory. Given that it’s currently not societally acceptable
to talk about having family-murdering urges; such thoughts will remain
underground. The opportunity, then is surely for the mass media to talk
directly to men, in the form of “If you have had, have now, or may in the
future have homi/suicidal urges; know that these are not only bad and wrong
thoughts, but they are a sign of a broken mind. A mind that has gone beyond
rationality, and in its despair has submitted to base urges and deterministic
end-of-the-world conclusions. In the same way that so many emotionally-charged
media stories carry a prefacing ‘trigger warning’, and at the end of the story
a suggestion to call Lifeline, Beyond Blue etc. if the story raises any issues
– we must have some sort of a ‘blow-off valve’ setup for men to access. For
without any such intervention, there is little hope of preventing the
deterioration of relationships into spite, hatred and ultimately a total
breakdown of rational thought, reason, humanity. In summary, I believe what is
needed is the widespread dissemination of messages to men directly; urging them
to examine their thinking, and to consider this is not just about them, and
that they are – surprise surprise – not always right because they are male and
strong. The absence of such messaging leaves wide open the path for men to
think that their situation is that they ‘have been pushed too far’ when in fact
resorting to murderous urges is not at all based on reason or a measuring of
the sufficiency of the perceived provocation. The message needs to be broadcast
that such thinking is always wrong. It is wrong and morally corrupting for the
man – and potentially catastrophic to the other family members who, after all,
were forged in love and tenderness. There needs to be a teasing apart of the
beauty of romantic and familial attachment, and notions of possession of same.
There needs to be an awareness that sometimes love ends in painful and
unthinkable loss – but that such agony is not at all commensurate with visiting
greater pain and suffering on those you are supposed to love. All of this can
only begin when men get the message that they can STOP further destructive
thinking, and to realise that their thinking has gone haywire, and they can
challenge distortions of thinking that lead them to believe the only way out is
Armageddon. These messages, communicated directly to men via radio, TV,
Internet, can sow enough of a seed of reflection to at least make the
perpetrators reconsider; to realise that the murderous and suicidal thoughts
they have are not even of their own authorship. They are the result of an
unstable mind; a mind that has lost perspective. These are ‘Trojan Horse’
thoughts that compete for headspace with valid, rational thoughts. After a
time, the warped thoughts – because they come from the same mind, after all –
are given equal weight, leaving the way open for the thoughts to be acted on.
There must be a widespread realisation of this mechanism whereby thinking can
go wrong. It goes way beyond ‘normal’ murderous urges (say, in the case of a
hot-blooded fight) and perverts the mind to thoughts of destroying loved ones.
Everybody abhors massacres like this one. Such acts are unthinkable. But, if we
cordon off such acts as unthinkable and thereby fail to think about the
circumstances that lead to these tragedies, we deprive ourselves of the
possibility of preventing them.