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"A murder-suicide is all about trust."

Suicide pacts are when two or more people all decide to kill themselves at the same time, based upon a pre-determined plan that determines how, where, and when. They're different from mass suicides (such as when 960 Jews killed themselves rather than submit to being captured by the Romans at Masada back in 73 AD) because generally only a handful of people are involved; similarly, they differ from cult suicides because there's no dogmatic reason for the suicide itselfnote . Suicide pacts, rather, usually involve small groups of people (such as married or romantic partners, family members, or friends) whose motivations are intensely personal and individual.

At least one episode of every forensic investigation drama series ever has revolves around the plot of a suicide pact gone wrong.

Compare Driven to Suicide. This is sadly Truth in Television.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • The plot of Black Paradox is kicked off when the four protagonists meets on an online chat room - the titular Black Paradox - and decide to meet up in the city's outskirts, and kill themselves over various reasons. However their suicide attempts (both of them) are interrupted by their doppelgangers.
  • A Running Gag in Bungou Stray Dogs is Dazai constantly wanting to do this with a beautiful lady.
  • Rei and Fukiko from Dear Brother create one as children to end their lives before the world can corrupt them, which fails and creates the rift between them through the rest of the series. At some point, Rei is very feverish and overloaded with drugs... and tries to kill herself and Nanako, the girl who's in love with her, under the belief that Nanako is Fukiko; Nanako manages to stop her, and Rei collapses in tears.
  • The second episode of Durarara!! features one of these made over the internet, though unbeknownst to poor Rio Kamichika, it's really Izaya setting her up for his own amusement. Yeah, Izaya is an asshole. In the manga, he does the same, except he meets two girls at a karaoke bar — and then drugs their drinks and insinuates that he's going to murder them and stuff their corpses into suitcases as they're succumbing to the effects of the drug. He wasn't actually planning to kill them (he had Celty deliver the unconscious girls to their homes afterwards), but it was an incredibly dick move nonetheless.
  • In Future Diary Yuno and Yuki, being the last two contestants left in the game, decide on a suicide pact as neither wants to become God and live in a world without the other, although this will mean the destruction of the universe. However, before they can go through with it, Yuki discovers that Yuno is actually Yuno from a parallel universe; as in this universe, she and her world's Yuki were the last two left in the game and decided on a suicide pact. Things went wrong and Yuno survived, leaving her as winner of the game and the new God of Time and Space; since she couldn't resurrect her world's Yuki, she instead used her powers to create this universe, killed this world's version of herself and took her place in the game, in order to be with Yuki once again. She then plans to murder Yuki and do the whole thing all over again just to be with him some more.
  • Ghost In The Shell SA C2nd Gig. The Individual Eleven decapitate each other with swords in front of media cameras as a political protest, though Hideo Kuze, realising the others have been influenced into this act by a virus, changes his mind at the last moment and survives.
  • A variation occurs in Gunslinger Girl when the fratello of Jose and Henrietta vow to, instead of killing themselves to keep from falling into enemy hands, to kill each other. They eventually do, after a berserk Henrietta accidentally shoots Jose.
  • Akira Otobe of Yoigoshi-hen of Higurashi: When They Cry made one of these. He chickened out. The other members of the group didn't.
  • The first chapter of The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service has the main characters find the corpse of a man who killed himself as part of one of these. His wish is to be reunited with his lover, the other member of the pact. Turns out she was an Idol Singer who killed herself along with him when her father forced them to break up, and daddy's pulling a Mummies at the Dinner Table.
  • A few different variations pop up in Lone Wolf and Cub, most especially with members of the Kurokuwa ninja clan. After Ogami manages to kill his way through the entire active duty list of the Kurokuwa, Retsudo bullies a group of retired Kurokuwa into going after him. They each individually assess him in disguise, sizing him up more accurately than any assassin before them had bothered to do. They discuss it, and conclude that they had a chance at succeeding despite Ogami's prowess and multitude of hidden weapons. But they can't shake one nagging thought: that Ogami and Daigoro are around the age of the children and grandchildren that the ninja life had denied them. In the end they link hands and walk into the sea as a group, never to be seen again.
  • Between Amamiya Yuuhi and Asahina Samidare at the end of The Lucifer and Biscuit Hammer. It's a suicide pact, but made to save each other's lives - Yuuhi promises his beloved Sami that she will never be alone, even in death, because he "lives for" her - as in, he will kill himself if she dies before him. This draws Samidare back from the brink.
  • Used in MPD Psycho, with the mass suicide of Lucy Monostone and his fanatical followers in a church.
  • Paranoia Agent: "Happy Family Planning."
  • The second episode of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei.
  • The whole point of Suicide Club, which is based on the movie of the same name.
  • Welcome to the NHK featured a group that went to a remote island to throw themselves off a cliff to their death, but eventually one of them hesitated at last second, resulting everyone reconsidering their reasons, and finally giving up on the thought, after their loved ones also show up.
    • There's also an interesting variation at the end where Satou and Misaki make each other promise they will not commit suicide without each other, so that neither will end up doing so. It Makes Sense in Context.

    Comic Books 
  • In the Chick Tract "No Fear?", Lance and Dolly forge a suicide pact where Lance will kill himself first, then Dolly will kill herself during Lance's funeral. Lance kills himself and ends up in hell. However, Dolly's suicide is interrupted by a Badass Preacher kicking her door in, and she is talked into accepting Jesus.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): A flight attendant heard her pilot and co-pilot talking about a suicide pact before takeoff but thought they were joking, when it turns out they were both serious and successful she grabs quietly grabs the famous pilot they just happen to have as a passenger, Steve Trevor, in order to try to prevent panic. Luckily by this point Steve had plenty of experience flying commercial planes as he'd left the air force over a decade prior.
  • The first issue of The Wicked + The Divine opens with the final four members of the 1923 Pantheon blowing themselves up on the last day of their two years of godhood. Issue #35 reveals that at the last second Minerva backed out of killing Susanoo and blocked Amaterasu's attempt to kill her. This was all a ploy so she could take Susanoo's head for her renewal ritual.
  • Chris and Julie in The Walking Dead try to pull this off, intending to shoot each other simultaneously after they have sex for the first time as as to be Together in Death. Unfortunately, Chris shoots a second earlier than Julie, leaving her dead and himself alive. Tyreese response by strangling Chris to death, then letting him come back as a zombie in order to kill him again.

    Fan Fiction 
  • Checkmate (Anla'Shok): Mags' second year as a mentor is the first year with the landmines and countdowns. Her male tribute (who was forced to volunteer by the peacekeepers in lieu of being executed for trying to destroy her career academy) makes a speech about the injustice of the Games and then he and his three allies all use the mines to blow themselves up. After a brief stunned paused, one of the other tributes follows their example.
  • Paragon ends with Ron killing himself because he can't stand living a lie in Josh Mankey's body. Kim kills herself alongside him.
  • In South Park Monogatari, Stan and Kyle try to abide by this by jumping off of the bridge where Kenny drowned in the episode "The Tooth Fairy's Tats 2000" when Stan's parents argued too often and when Kyle's pushed him too hard to study. It's thwarted because A. new student Hiromi (known from then on as Nekagi) saves Kyle, and B. the water was too shallow when Stan fell in.
  • After Mikuo tries unsuccessfully to commit suicide alone in this Vocaloid fanfic, he and Akaito form one. They never go through with it though, as it's implied by the end that they no longer want to die.

    Film 
  • Aliens. Ripley and Corporal Hicks agree to kill each other rather than be used for hosts by the aliens. Which doesn't happen, though two other soldiers blow themselves up rather than be taken.
  • In All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Mandy and Emmet enter one of these, killing a number of their classmates and intending to kill each other in order to get themselves immortalized in pop culture. However, Mandy backs out at the last minute.
  • Rejected in Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Leigh notes that she has two bullets left in her revolver and suggests she use them to kill herself and Wilson. Wilson is determined to go down fighting, so tells her to shoot the first two gang members who break in "and after that get inventive." When the police turn up to rescue the survivors (who have also run out of bullets) they're all holding makeshift clubs while Leigh is holding her revolver by the barrel.
  • The Korean horror movie A Blood Pledge revolves around a four-person suicide pact in which two people are still alive.
  • Circle:
    • Since there's no way of stopping the elimination process, it's suggested that people volunteer to sacrifice themselves. At least one person suggests that they all do it simultaneously, but since most of them do want to survive, this never transpires.
    • The black man and woman who had an affair decide to step off the platform at the same time.
  • In Ginger Snaps, sisters Ginger and Bridgette made one when they were eight years old; "Out by sixteen or dead in this scene, but together forever." They're ultimately unable to keep this promise after Ginger becomes a werewolf, and Bridgette, having finally found the strength to stand on her own, is forced to kill her older sister in self defense.
    Bridgette: I'm not dying in this room with you! I'M NOT DYING!
  • Invoked in Heathers. What looks like a suicide pact between two gay lovers who were also the stars of the high school's football team is actually a case of murder. Later, J.D. tries to blow up the whole school and frame it as a mass suicide pact.
  • On the Count of Three: The suicidal Val breaks his best friend Kevin, who attempted suicide days prior, out of the psych ward for this reason. Initially, Val is convinced and Kevin is skeptical, but Val changes his mind when he learns about Natasha's pregnancy and Kevin becomes more convinced when he relives his trauma of being sexually abused.
  • Operation Daybreak (1975). The last two remaining members of the SOE group that assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, pinned down in a church basement that's being flooded with water, shoot each other rather than face capture and torture by the Nazi occupation forces.
  • Profumo di donna: Fausto is an army officer who was blinded in a training accident. He goes on a train journey to visit his army buddy Vincenzo, who was also blinded in the same accident (a bomb went off by mistake). What Fausto's caretaker Giovanni does not know, is that Fausto and Vincenzo have decided to kill themselves rather than live the rest of their lives as blind men.
  • In The Seventh Continent, both parents decide to end their lives. Their little girl consents to the triple suicide, not realizing what she got herself into.
  • In Sightseers, Outlaw Couple Chris and Tina decide to go out on a high by jumping from a scenic railway bridge. However, Tina backs out at the last second.
  • In the film Suicide Club, 54 schoolgirls leap in front of a subway train all at once. The rest of the film is figuring out why.
  • The main characters of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil come to believe that the college kids that keep dying around them must have some sort of murder-suicide pact going on. In actuality, it's simply stupidity and bad luck on the part of the college kids.
  • Near the ending of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, when Captain Nemo was fatally shot and his island base of Volcanus was about to explode, he declared that the Nautilus would go down for the last time. Nemo's crew, loyal to the end, vowed to go down with him. Ned and his friends, who had been captured by Nemo by force, were nearly forced into this as well, requiring them to fight their way off the sub before it was too late.
  • This is how the murder in White Sands is done. The killer convinces the victim that the authorities are onto them, so they should kill themselves. One man shoots himself and the other just walks away.

    Literature 
  • Atar Gull: The pirate captain Brulart was once a young aristocrat who'd spent most of his young life as The Hedonist, until he finally met the girl of his dreams. They decided to commit a Seen-It-All Suicide rather than wait for old age and Brulart's debts to catch up to them... except Brulart's dose wasn't strong enough and he survived, learning the girl had run off to marry a rich banker's son, having never intended to die with him. Brulart kills her lover and flees the country, committing Crime After Crime until he becomes a feared slaver.
  • "The Very Gentle Murders" by Ray Bradbury plays with this for Black Comedy. An elderly, wealthy pair hate each other's guts, so they try to kill each other by arranging "unfortunate accidents", much to the misfortune of the various people who keep triggering every one of their traps by accident. At the end they both invoke Poisoned Chalice Switcheroo, only to realize they're both going to die. Their mutual murders end up being mistaken for this trope.
  • In a novelization of the original Doom series two people became fused together at the skull deep in enemy territory, apparently the result of some gruesome experiment. Left to suffer, the two carried out a suicide pact.
  • At the end of Double Indemnity, the main couple apparently does this after they are found out.
  • In House of Sand and Fog, Behrani and his wife agree to commit suicide together.
  • In Arto Paasilinna's book Hurmaava joukkoitsemurha ("A Charming Mass Suicide") two men who by coincidence run into each other when both are about to commit suicide instead organize a mass suicide for people who don't want to live longer - they will drive a bus off North Cape. They reason a carefully organized and planned suicide will make everyone involved look better in retrospect. The authorities disagree, and the people gathered take a long way to North Cape. Hilarity Ensues - really, but with Paasilinna's usual macabre wit.
  • The Jodi Picoult novel The Pact (and the Lifetime Movie of the Week adaptation) is built around a suicide pact that apparently goes wrong. The girl ends up dead. The guy survives, only to be put on trial for contributing to the girl's death. The guy is actually put on trial for murder because he doesn't remember what happened right before her death and is suspected to be the one who killed her, especially when it's discovered that she was pregnant.
  • In The Shattered Kingdoms, the Shadari priesthood all commit suicide by jumping of the roof of their temple as the Norlanders invade. People tend to assume that the suicide had something to do with the invasion, but it was actually a response to a vision of the future — the priests were trying to remove their knowledge from the world to avert a future in which someone using their powers would cause massive harm.
  • The Survivalist series by Jerry Ahern is set in a post-World War III United States. In "The Web", the title character John Rourke comes across a peaceful town in the mountains where no-one even mentions the war. It turns out that everyone made an agreement to use up all available resources to keep things going as before, but when the supplies run out they plan to commit mass suicide by blowing up the town. Unfortunately by the time Rourke finds out the truth, the lonely woman he's staying with has drugged and tied him up so she won't die alone.
  • In the back of each book of the Tough Magic trilogy there are outtakes, with two of them playing the concept of a suicide pact for laughs, having the main characters killing each other for spurious reasons.
  • The Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Battlestar Galactica (2003): In "Lay Down Your Burdens", when the Cylons have them pinned down, Kara and Anders agree to kill each other rather than be captured and be sent to the Cylon breeding farms (which Kara had already experienced). Athena unfortunately doesn't have this option as she'd simply be resurrected as a Cylon. Fortunately, the Cylon forces withdraw instead.
  • Blake's 7: In "Volcano", a race of Actual Pacifists have set up a Doomsday Device which they threaten to use to destroy their planet if any hostile force attempts a landing. Unfortunately, Servalan decides to call their bluff and launches an attack. It's not a bluff.
  • One episode of Cold Case had two high school students decide to do murder-suicide. One of the guys backs out, as his life starts to get better, while the other gets upset and ends up accidentally pushing his friend off of a bridge and gets charged with manslaughter.
  • CSI: In "Forever", a pair of formally dressed teens are found dead in the middle of the desert. This turns out to have been a suicide pact, although a third party was involved with strong motivation to see both of them dead.
  • CSI: NY:
    • An episode has a group of terminally ill patients all giving each other their ideal deaths. One of them doesn't go through with it.
    • There's an episode where two teenage circus performers who were Star-Crossed Lovers make one. The boy, who was a contortionist, stuffed himself in a box just like in his act, but in a way that made him suffocate. The girl, who was a trapeze artist, was about to jump off a swinging bar and not let her dad catch her...but she changed her mind, realizing that she had a lot more to live for. The whole case was investigated after the girl discovers her boyfriend's body and buries the box at the beach.
  • In an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a man is lured into a car that he thinks will take him to some party when all the others know they are going to park on railroad tracks and go together.
  • On one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, it turns out that a victim wasn't a victim at all; she was attempting suicide when the maids came in early. She later manages to kill herself for real, and the team seems desperate to arrest someone for it. It turns out she frequented a site that encouraged suicidal people to take the plunge, run by a true believer played by Marlee Matlin. Matlin's character got the woman to commit suicide by telling her they'd do it together, which she had no intention of fulfilling, leading the team to prosecute her under "Murder by fake suicide pact."
  • Midsomer Murders: "Dance with the Dead" begins with what appears to be a suicide pact gone wrong. Of course, being Midsomer, it is Never Suicide.
  • Murdoch Mysteries:
    • The solution to "Love and Human Remains" ultimately hinges on a decades old suicide pact.
    • "Master Lovecraft": The discovery of a young girl's body and a sketchbook full of grotesque drawings lead Murdoch to a gang of death-obsessed teenagers, young H.P. Lovecraft among them. The solution is a murder-suicide pact, but the guy was rescued by another friend and then backed out.
  • The Stargate Atlantis episode "Childhood's End" has the team find a village of kids and young adults who have agreed to kill themselves upon hitting age 25 in a perceived effort to keep The Wraith from "harvesting" the community. The team learns this is needless as the Wraith were kept because of a powering dampening field which was running out of power soon and the sacrifices were thought necessary in the beginning to accommodate the field's limits and they eventually convince the villagers to stop this practice.
  • In the Supernatural episode "Croatoan", Dean enters this with Sam when he refuses to kill or abandon his brother despite the fact that Sam has been exposed to the Croatoan virus. Defused by the fact that Sam turns out to be immune to the demonic virus.
  • A suicide pact (rather, a murder/suicide pact) is what drives the season 6 Christmas episode of The X-Files, "How the Ghosts Stole Christmas". Two ghosts who were victims of a murder/suicide pact try to get Mulder and Scully to re-enact it in a Haunted House on Christmas Eve. It almost works.

    Manhua 
  • Old Master Q have a Black Comedy version Played for Laughs in one strip; Master Q, Big Potato and Chin are all jobless and tries seeking help for Chiu, but Chiu has been laid off as well. So they got to a lake, with Master Q, Potato and Chin tying rocks on themselves, and prepares to jump with Chiu putting a revolver to his temple. The next strip ignores the events of this one given the Negative Continuity nature.

    Music 
  • BIGMAMA's "Swan Song" is about one; though it skirts around saying so outright, the Romeo and Juliet reference gives it away (translated from partial Japanese below):
    Romeo and Juliet, take or leave
    If even being alive is too painful
    Then instead, with our hands joined for eternity...
    Fly high and fall into a sleep
    Falling down too deep
  • Parenthetical Girls has "The Four Platitudes"
    "resigned to take our lives by the age of twenty-five"
  • The song "Here in Heaven" by Sparks features a suicide pact:
    Juliet, you broke our little pact
    Juliet, I'm never coming back
    Up here in Heaven without you
    It is Hell knowing that your health
    Will keep you out of here for many, many years
  • Though the deeper meaning is anyone's guess, the lyrics of the song "Lie, Lie, Lie" by System of a Down's Serj Tankian paint a picture of the narrator feigning a suicide pact with his girlfriend but then letting go of her at the last second and happily watching her plummet off the cliff on her own.
  • The Therapy? song Little Tongues First plays with this (as well as naming the album) with the line "Suicide pact - you first".
  • A popular live version of The Tragically Hip's song "Highway Girl" includes Gord Downie telling a (presumably fictional) account of how he and his girlfriend Colleen decided kill themselves, using a shotgun aimed at both of their heads, to be triggered by the next person to enter their apartment. Eventually, after waiting a while, they decide the idea was silly, only for a passing train to rattle the door open, killing her. The monologue ends with Downie declaring "That's my story, and I'm sticking to it."

    Newspaper Comics 
  • This is the shtick of the lemmings from Pearls Before Swine, who gather at the edge of a cliff so they can all jump to their deaths. Whether or not they actually go through with it, on the other hand... (After Stephan Pastis started doing the lemming strips, he started receiving mail saying that the whole "suicidal lemmings" idea is a myth perpetuated by Disney. He then acknowledged this in one strip in which one of the lemmings pointed out that they didn't have to commit suicide. It didn't really change anything.)

    Theatre 
  • The two lovers in Sutton Vane's Outward Bound turn out to be this ... at about the same time the audience (and the passengers) realize that everyone else on the ship is dead too.
  • The Cantonese opera Princess Chang-Ping (Dai Nui Fa). Chang-Ping, the exiled daughter of the last Ming-dynasty Emperor, drinks poison with her new husband after settling the political negotiation with the new Munchauian Emperor.
  • The two lovers in the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet by Frederick Delius sink themselves in a boat.
  • Rosmersholm: The romantic couple decide to throw themselves in the waterfalls together. Although there is a clear subtext here, it seems they did it on very short notice.

    Video Games 

    Visual Novels 
  • While it's not outright stated by the parties involved, this is heavily implied (and theorized by at least two of the other characters) to be the truth behind the fourth case in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. With the students being trapped in a funhouse and being deprived of food until someone commits murder, Gundham Tanaka comes to the realization that everyone seems to be willing to die rather than kill another student. In order to save their lives, he engineers circumstances that allow him and Nekomaru Nidai to meet in private while the other students are (supposed to be) sleeping, where the two engage in a Duel to the Death. This is where things are left open to interpretation, but it's implied that, despite Gundham never dropping his Evil Overlord persona during their encounter and insisting that he simply wanted to kill out of malice, Nekomaru realized what his true intentions were and agreed with them, which is supposedly the reason that he stayed and fought despite being given the opportunity to run away. Since they both knew that the winner of the duel (which turned out to be Gundham) would be executed if found guilty, the case then becomes a murder-suicide that both the killer and victim consented to. Gundham does try to avoid being caught, coming up with a complex murder plot that only ended up being solvable due to a Spanner in the Works, but that is because of his own personal philosophy that one should never give up on life. The moment he falls under suspicion he stops trying to defend himself and Sonia defends him for the remainder of the trial.
  • In the Fan Game Danganronpa Another, this occurs three times in the game's fourth chapter alone with the final instance being reminiscent of the DR2 example above. Monokuma trapped the survivors in a ballroom and deprived them of food until someone commits murder and even gives them free access to firearms with a soundproof armory before explicitly telling them that suicide won't count towards saving the others. First Teruya suggests that they publicly draw lots to decide who kills the other, which would free them and bypass the trial entirely. The others attempt to go along with it but Kinjo, having gone mad from both starvation and his Black-and-White Insanity, refuses to go along with a plan that involves murder and instead tries to force everyone into shooting themselves. This results in the others snapping out of it and ganging up on him to tie him up. After (almost) everyone went to bed after this, the lovers Haruhiko and Satsuki felt guilty about eating most of the rations and decided to make up for it with a Heroic Sacrifice. In order to get around the "no suicide" rule and resolve their argument over who should kill who, they settle on a Ten Paces and Turn duel. Unbeknownst to Satsuki, Haruhiko rigged his gun to explode in his hand so that she could live and used the last of his strength to create a Locked Room Mystery to help her chances. However, Satsuki confesses her crime at the beginning of the trial to make sure the others live to defeat the mastermind, but because of extenuating circumstances she was unaware of, nobody believes her at first.
  • This was abused by Dahlia Hawthorne in the third Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney game, by tricking Terry Fawles into many things... one of them being committing suicide if he doubted her. And he did, unaware that she wouldn't "follow" him in death.
  • Abused before the game's events by Uzune Hitori in Hatoful Boyfriend, who had told the real Nanaki Kazuaki that they would commit suicide together. However, Hitori didn't kill himself like he promised- instead, he watched as Kazuaki died, then took Kazuaki's identity.

    Webcomics 
  • Sonichu does this in issue 10. When the Author Avatar pulls a The Power of Rock to destroy a building, two trolls left behind (due to making fun of said person and being homosexual) decide leaping down an elevator shaft is a whole lot better than letting him kill them and hold hands on the way down.
  • Drop-Out is about the two main characters, Lola and Sugar, taking a suicide pact to jump at the Grand Canyon. Sugar is depressed after her cousin's suicide and knows Lola is also suicidal, and knows they both have struggles, and thinks the two of them committing suicide together will be "so romantic." What Sugar doesn't realize is that she's unintentionally giving Lola a Suicidal Sadistic Choice, seeing as, if Sugar is gone, Lola won't be able to support herself, and might even be blamed for Sugar's death.

    Web Videos 

    Western Animation 
  • The two men investigating Murphy and Sparks's deaths at the end of the Sealab 2021 episode "The Policy" believe they had come across one of these after finding out about Murphy's massive credit card debt. In reality, Sparks had tried to kill Murphy to commit Insurance Fraud, and Murphy pulled a Taking You with Me.
    Frank: From all the champagne bottles, I'm thinking they were getting their courage up. A final embrace, then they chuck in the battery.

    Real Life 
  • Happened quite often in the last days of Nazi Germany during World War II:
    • Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun made a pact to take cyanide together in a locked room as the Allies were marching into Berlin. Supposedly as a final act of cowardice, Hitler shot himself in the temple after taking the cyanide in order to spare himself the rather painful and grotesque death cyanide poisoning brings. With the only bullet on hand. Sorry Eva.
    • Joseph Goebbels had a dentist inject his six children with cyanide, and then he and his wife went to the garden and killed themselves.
    • German Generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Hans Krebs committed suicide together.
  • Inseparable East Village artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake killed themselves because they believed they were being persecuted.
  • House star Hugh Laurie has admitted that he and a friend made a suicide pact when they were 18 to kill themselves shortly before their 40th birthdays. Neither went through with it.
  • Subversion: Japanese serial killer Hiroshi Maeue lured victims by forging bogus suicide pacts with them, suggesting burning charcoal in a sealed car as a method of exit, only to suffocate his victims with his hands instead.
  • When Australia was a penal colony, conditions were so poor that some prisoners would enter a variation on the pact: One prisoner would kill the other, and then allow himself to be executed for the murder.
  • Fairly early during the Jewish Revolts, the Jewish commander Josephus and forty men escaped the siege of Jotapata and hid in a cave. Once discovered, they formed a suicide pact, drawing (presumably numbered) lots and having each man kill the third one down the list from himself. According to his own account of the incident, Josephus survived by luck, talking the second to last man out of killing him and then defecting to the Romans. The Josephus Problem in mathematics is derived from the cynical presumption that he rigged the contest.
  • One of the theories about the Mayerling Incident, with Imperial Crown Prince Rudolf of Habsburg and his mistress Mary Vetsera. Historians and descendants of the Prince haven't reached a consensus, but in 2015 letters from Mary declaring their intention to commit suicide ("For love," wrote she) have been found. For his part, Rudolf wrote farewell letters to his entire family except his father.


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