Planned complex suicide: report of three cases.

Three cases of planned complex suicide in a 3-year period are reported. A 40-year-old man was found dead, in his garage, hanging by his neck, with a gunshot in the head from a pen gun. A 50-year-old man was found dead in the sea with a gunshot to his head. A third man was found in a field hanging by a tree and burned. The investigation of the scenes and the methods used pointed toward a suicidal etiology. The main difference between planned complex suicide and those cases defined in medicolegal literature as combined suicides lies in the complex mechanism used by the victim as a protection against the failure of one of the mechanisms.