Mangling Meaning, # 28

The odd phrasing here leads to an unlikely, unpleasant and erroneous premise:

Link: The Telegraph, ‘Husband and wife found dead in suspected murder-suicide’

The combination of ‘is accused’ and ‘before’ suggests a cause and effect scenario which is not — this being journalism — negated by the shift of tense from the headline to the subhead. Someone who is dead cannot be ‘accused’ in the sense of being charged with an offence; but the only other meaning of the word (see Oxford Dictionaries), to claim someone has done something wrong, is also illogical: as the circumstances are as yet uncertain, it cannot be firmly asserted that events transpired as stated here. Perhaps the writer should have changed the verb and used one of those spare allegedlys from last week.

A […] man is accused of killing his 73-year-old wife in the bedroom before taking his own life