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Amnon COHEN
Classification: Murderer
Characteristics:
Parricide
- Suspected his wife was having a
"virtual affair" with someone over the Internet - Set the flat on
fire
Number of victims: 3
Date of murders:
July 23,
1999
Date of arrest:
Same day (suicide attempt)
Date of birth: 1956
Victims profile: His wife Suzanne Leah,
39, and
their children, Yair, 4, and Yael, 2
Method of murder: Stabbing
with knife
- Strangulation
Location: Tel-Aviv, Israel
Status:
Sentenced to
three life
sentences in July 2000
On July 23, 1999, a 43-year-old taxi driver burned his
wife and two children, ages 4 and 2, to death in their Tel Aviv
apartment. The suspect, Amnon Cohen who is in police custody, was
lightly injured in the fire.
In a letter he sent to newspaper offices which
arrived a half hour after the incident, Cohen wrote he intended to kill
his family and commit suicide.
Neighbors said that Cohen and his wife argued
frequently, and that he suspected his wife was having a "virtual affair"
with someone over the Internet.
Cohen stabbed and strangled his family as they were
sleeping and then doused their bodies with turpentine and set them on
fire.
Amnon Cohen, taxi driver, murdered his wife Suzanne Leah and
their children, Yair, four, and Yael, two, in July 2000. A computer
technician, hired by Cohen to access his wife's e-mail correspondence
because he had suspected her of having an affair, was abble to confirm
Cohen's suspicions.
His rage was so great that he smothered his children in their sleep and
murdered his wife in cold blood. He then doused their bodies and their
apartment with turpentine and set it on fire. Cohen received three life
sentences.
"Surviving Infidelity", Rona Subotnik and Gloria G. Harris
Family killed over wife's virtual affair
By Eric Silver - The Independent
Tuesday, 27 July 1999
An israeli man murdered his wife and children and
tried to kill himself because she was conducting a "virtual" romance
on the Internet with a man she may never have met, a court heard
yesterday.
Amnon Cohen, a 43-year-old Tel-Aviv taxi driver,
confessed and re-enacted the crime for police on Sunday, the morning
after he stabbed and strangled his wife, Suzie, 39, strangled their son
Yair, four, and daughter Yael, two, in their sleep and set the flat on
fire. The victims were buried yesterday and a magistrate remanded Mr
Cohen in custody.
Police had been called around midnight after Mr Cohen
phoned another cabby and sent a suicide note to two newspapers. When
firemen burst into the blazing flat, they found the three bodies in
flames. They said the children's bodies were burning like torches and it
was difficult to tell whether there were two of them or one.
Mr Cohen was in the bathroom with a rope around his
neck after taking 90 blood pressure pills. He wrote a suicide note
attached to a computer printout of his wife's on-line conversations with
her virtual lover and photographs of his children.
"My wife has been behaving strangely for months," he
wrote. "It turns out she found a lover on the computer. I read what she
wrote to him... Virtual infidelity is still infidelity. Explaining why
he killed his children, he went on: "I did not want to leave my children
in your cruel world. I grew up an orphan and I suffered indescribably. I
know ... what it is like to grow up without parents or family."
In court, the defence lawyer, Moshe Meroz, suggested
that the shock of his wife's betrayal had triggered memories of two
traumatic experiences from Mr Cohen's own childhood. When he was six
months old, his father accused his mother of infidelity. She responded
by burning down their home and killing herself.
