When Ingrid Poulson ended her marriage to her abusive husband, Phitak Kongsom, in 2003, he left a menacing note on her car threatening to kill himself and take her with him. When it became clear she would not be returning to their home in Sydney, he sent her a letter warning he was going to cause her “big hurt”.
In the end, he inflicted a punishment more shocking than her murder or his own death. He killed their two children instead.
“Nothing tops the crime of retaliatory filicide,” says Melbourne criminologist Judy Wright. “For the surviving parent, living with the guilt that her children were killed to pay her back for ending a relationship … is the most agonising punishment a man can possibly inflict on a woman.”
Tragically, while overall homicides in Australia appear to be on the decline, filicides are not. In 2019, a study of 238 child murders in Australia from 2000–2012 showed that when children died in domestic murders, 18 per cent were killed by a biological parent or step-parent – and the perpetrators were generally men. Less than a third of revenge killers were the children’s biological mothers.
According to the study by the Monash-Deakin Universities’ Filicide Research Hub, while domestic murders had declined
