Four people found dead in a Towson hotel room were identified as William Parente, 59; his wife, Betty Parente, 58; and their daughters, Stephanie Parente, 19; and Catherine Parente, 11, all of Garden City, N.Y. Click here for complete coverage of this story
To mourners at the funeral Mass Tuesday in Garden City, the Parente family was a unit: Betty was a paragon of giving, donating her time and energy to her family, the church and charitable causes. Her pastor recalled the graceful phrase she often employed as a goodbye: "All good things to you."
"Blest are you that weep and mourn,
The man who answered the phone in room 1029 at the Sheraton Baltimore North didn't sound like William Parente.
Friends and relatives bid a final farewell to a mother and her two daughters who were brutally slain in a Maryland hotel by the girls' father.
Mourners shared tearful hugs outside a Long Island funeral home Monday where flowers blanketed the closed caskets of a mother and her two daughters brutally slain last week by the family patriarch, a shocking crime that has friends and relatives grasping for an explanation.
Portrait photographer Joanne Schulter hasn't been able to control her tears since she found out her longtime subjects had died.
Some time after checking into the Sheraton hotel in Towson last week, William M. Parente went across the street to the Towson Town Center and bought the knife he used to kill himself.
They call themselves "The Mates." Danni and Lauren, Jules and Heather, Big Steph and Little Steph, or just "the little one."
The headlines have had a similar ring: A Frederick County man underwater on his mortgage kills himself and his family. A man accused of financial improprieties does the same while staying at a Towson hotel. A top official with Freddie Mac, a company with major money woes, is found dead in an apparent suicide.
The phone in the Parentes' 10th-floor hotel room rang just before midnight. By then, a mother and two daughters staying there had been beaten and asphyxiated by the man who answered the phone. Not long after taking that call - from a college roommate of his older daughter - the man used a knife to commit suicide.
One hint that something might have been amiss in William Parente's professional life came from a nondescript law office in a shopping center in Queens. Attorney Bruce Montague, uneasy about an investment he had made through Parente, asked for his money back - but got, he claims, nearly a half-million dollars in bounced checks.
It is human - or perhaps just journalistic - nature to think we can explain the inexplicable. We take all the horrifying details that tumble from first one murder-suicide that wipes out an entire family and then unbelievably a second one - the sunny yellow house, the 10th-floor hotel room, the three little tykes, the two sisters, the mom who blogged and the one who volunteered - and we grasp for a universal string theory that will tie the who-what-where-when-and-how to a why.
Stephanie Parente wasn't the kind of student who would blow off a college chemistry exam. The 19-year-old Loyola sophomore and speech pathology major was far too studious for that, her friends said.
A wreath of bright flowers decorates the front door of the tidy white-brick house on First Street, across from the fairways of the Cherry Valley Club.
The ritual of the Roman Catholic Mass provided a salve to the wound felt by more than 1,000 Loyola College students who gathered Tuesday night to remember their friend and classmate, Stephanie Parente.
The father was a successful breadwinner with a Manhattan law practice that paid for a Hamptons condo; his wife a devoted stay-at-home mom and breast cancer survivor who baked cakes for her Garden City neighbors and spent free time on charity work. Their two daughters were cheerful, talented, friendly, athletic and poised for achievements.
New York State attorney general's office investigators are probing a complaint from a Queens lawyer who says he invested hundreds of thousands of dollars with William M. Parente and then tried to get his money back in recent weeks, only to have the checks bounce.
Vengeful ex-employees, abusive husbands or boyfriends angry over a separation, financially strapped and overwhelmed providers, depressed fathers, psychotic mothers: When do they cross a line, as only a very few do, and kill their families and themselves?
The bodies of four relatives were found Monday behind the locked door of a Towson hotel room in what Baltimore County police are investigating as a possible murder-suicide.
Baltimore County police are now calling the deaths of four people found in a room at the Sheraton Baltimore North Hotel in Towson a murder-suicide. Authorities released the names of the victims but have not yet said how they died.
In the prayer garden next to the Loyola College Chapel, a dozen students who were friends with Stephanie Parente gathered Tuesday to cry, hug and lean on each other as they remembered their classmate who was found dead with her family in a Towson hotel Monday.
Loyola College President Rev. Brian F. Linnane issued the following statement Tuesday:
