They were three fathers with a lot in common -- including the pall of death.

They had suffered through business failures.

They were shunned by people close to them.

And, prosecutors and police say, all three killed the wives and children who, by most accounts, were at the center of their universe.

Robert Bryant and -- provided they're found guilty -- Edward Morris and Christian Longo resemble what criminologists call family annihilators, a class of mass murderers who kill spouses and children.

Their form of annihilation, called familicide, is rare -- an average of about 50 cases a year nationwide during the past decade. Yet the three Oregon cases have clustered together within the past year, providing eerie parallels among the three men's lives. Their pasts raise many of the red flags that experts say mark family annihilators: distressed lives and families for whom they feel intensely responsible.

The rate of slayings of multiple family members in Oregon is 2.5 per 100,000 households, which far exceeds the national average of 1.4, according to The Oregonian's analysis of FBI crime reports from 1990 to 1999. During that time, Oregon recorded 11 crimes in which someone killed a family member under the age of 18 and another child or intimate partner, The Oregonian found.

Experts have laid out the common threads of familicide: It's a crime committed mostly by white men in their 30s and 40s who then usually take their own lives.

Psychologists and criminologists also have built a psychological profile of those men, based on studies of dozens of cases nationwide: They are usually depressed and, sometimes, paranoid men with overcontrolling personalities who see themselves as the only ones capable of providing much of their families' needs. They are under stress -- financial, marital or social -- and fear they are losing control over their lives, including their families. They are afraid of failing. They see killing family members as their only option.

"If anything, the guys who commit these kinds of acts are overly invested in their families," said Charles Patrick Ewing, a forensic psychologist in Buffalo, N.Y., and author of "Fatal Families: the Dynamics of Intrafamilial Homicide." "They've been overly responsible."

Shortly before Christmas last year, prosecutors allege, Longo killed his wife and three children, dumping their bodies in coastal inlets off Newport and Waldport. He fled to Mexico, where police arrested him in January. He awaits trial in March on seven counts of aggravated murder.

In February, Bryant shot his wife and four children to death in their Yamhill County home, before fatally shooting himself with a shotgun.

And this Christmas season, police allege, Morris killed his pregnant wife and three children, dumping their bodies in the Tillamook State Forest before fleeing in the family minivan. His family insists he's innocent. He has yet to be found, dead or alive.

Morris' life centered on his children, his cousin and father said; the couple envisioned raising 12 kids on a Tillamook farm and establishing their own church. Bryant was said to be extremely close to his wife and children. Longo told investigators that his family was everything to him.

"They had the biggest bearing on anything that I ever did, every action I ever took, whether honest or dishonest," Longo told detectives after his capture.

The reason most family annihilators kill their families, experts say, is because they feel they can no longer take care of them.

"The killing of the family is almost altruistic: saving the family from all this suffering," said Gregg McCrary, a criminal profiling consultant in Fredericksburg, Va.

Bryant under heavy stress That may have been the case with 37-year-old Robert Arlie Bryant. In June 2001, Bryant moved his family from Northern California to the McMinnville area. He was looking for a fresh start, intent on keeping his troubles in the rearview mirror.

The stresses in Bryant's life were considerable. A few years earlier, elders in the family's Jehovah's Witnesses congregation in California expelled Bryant, a process known as disfellowship. He was shunned by other congregants, including family and many clients of his landscaping business. Bryant was forced to declare bankruptcy in early 2000.

In addition, his parents reportedly had initiated a custody battle to keep his children in their congregation.

Although Bryant had begun to rebuild his life slowly, all was not well.

On the evening of the Bryants' 17th wedding anniversary, for reasons that remain unknown, Bryant shot his four children in their beds, said Yamhill County Sheriff Jack Crabtree. Janet Bryant, his wife, had climbed to her feet in the master bedroom, where Robert Bryant killed her with one shot. Then he knelt on the living room floor and shot himself in the head. The corpses were not discovered for 19 days.

"Familicide is a form of suicide," said author Ewing. "Obviously, to kill your entire family takes a disturbed mind -- the disturbance is usually one of depression."

It is not known whether Bryant -- or Morris or Longo -- was depressed, although most people who've killed their families suffer some form of depression.

"The widely held misunderstanding of these cases is that normal individuals just snap," said J. Reid Meloy, a nationally known forensic psychologist based in San Diego. "Most men who do this have a drug or alcohol problem, a personality disorder and clinical depression."

Ewing, in his book "Fatal Families," found that family killers not only suffered from depression, but also had overcontrolling personalities, viewed their families as extensions of themselves and strove to make their families fit a romanticized ideal.

A 1992 study of murder-suicides, conducted by researchers at Cornell University and New York University and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, also found the family annihilator typically is depressed, paranoid or intoxicated. Triggering factors include financial, marital or other social stresses on the family. Suicide notes suggest that the murderers often see themselves as delivering the family from hardship.

Strife plagues Morris Edward Paul Morris certainly had his share of hardships.

The 37-year-old North Portland resident and his wife, Renee, filed for bankruptcy in 1993 and never fully recovered. Before the bankruptcy, a roofing business Morris started had failed in 16 months. The couple and their baby had survived on the $230 a week Edward brought home from his job as a milker at Simon Roth Dairy. They had once sold their 13-year-old Datsun for food.

Morris spent the last several years working a slew of jobs -- welder, landscaper, janitor -- but couldn't seem to settle on one.

He also had social stresses in his life. The Morrises were not close to several members of Edward Morris' extended family, apparently the result of a family squabble over his inheritance of his grandmother's home.

Despite stresses, Morris was by most accounts a devoted father and husband and a regular member of St. Johns Wesleyan Church. In contrast to the family annihilator profile, Morris didn't appear to have an overcontrolling personality. In fact, his wife was the family disciplinarian, home-schooled the children and was the more active church member.

Like Morris, Christian Michael Longo had been through a succession of jobs. He considered himself a failure.

His family, Longo told detectives, had lived too long as impoverished nomads. "They deserved much better," Longo said. "I didn't know if I could give it to them."

Unlike Bryant, Longo didn't try to kill himself -- a key difference.

Longo's life in tatters Longo's behavior resembled a less common type of family annihilator, psychologists told The Oregonian earlier this year -- that of a psychopath, a person who operates without a conscience and who sees murder as a way to eliminate a family that has become an intractable problem.

In the summer of 2001, Longo's life was in shambles. The construction cleanup business he had begun in Michigan had tanked. On probation for forging checks, Longo moved his family into a run-down warehouse in Ohio, where he was accused of stealing construction equipment and passing bad checks. He was deeply in debt, owing creditors and the courts more than $30,000.

His spiritual life also was in ruins. Like Bryant, Longo and his family had worshipped at a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses, but Longo's problems with the law caused elders in Michigan to order his disfellowship.

Family members packed up their most valuable possessions and drove until they reached the Oregon coast in September 2001. Two months later, Longo flimflammed his way into renting a pricey Newport condominium without a down payment.

Late one night in December, Longo stood on the balcony of the condominium, contemplating how he had failed his family. They were out of groceries, virtually out of money. They soon would be homeless again, when the condominium's managers found out he couldn't pay them.

Longo hinted at his mental state that day in a police interview two days after his Jan. 13 capture at a rustic beach camp in Tulum, Mexico, where he was sharing a bed with a young German woman.

"You've told us that you reached the end of your rope," said Sgt. Ralph Turre, a detective with the Lincoln County sheriff's office. "Inside yourself you felt that you had failed them. And that you didn't feel that you were able to bring the family back out of this situation. Okay. You had pretty much resigned yourself that night that you needed to do something. That you had to make a decision."

Longo gave detectives a motive for the killings but didn't give them the confession they sought.

"I wanted the best life for them," Longo told them. "And I didn't want them to miss anything."

Staff writers Steve Suo and Maxine Bernstein, correspondent Matt Sabo and news researcher Lynne Palombo contributed to this report.