The preliminary report on homicides committed by mentally ill people was published on Wednesday, 17 August 1994. The decision to present some of our findings ahead of the more comprehensive report to be published in 1995 was made by the Steering Committee after it became clear that some information coming from our collection of data might usefully be made more widely known. The media reaction which had followed individual cases over the previous months made it important to provide some perspective into the frequency of homicides by psychiatric patients, to indicate that the respondents to our questionnaire often saw these tragic episodes as unexpected and unconnected with shortage of services and to point to the finding that several of the cases showed that the individual patient had somehow removed himself or herself from supervision or from regular medication in the weeks or months before the homicide.