Family's murder-suicide deaths baffle friends

updated 8:49 p.m. ET April 21, 2009

TOWSON, Md. - They seemed like an ideal Long Island family: William Parente was a lawyer, his wife Betty a stay-at-home mom active in the community. Their daughters were well-liked by teachers and classmates.

Friends and neighbors said they never suspected anything was amiss and were dumbfounded to learn the Parentes had died Monday in an apparent murder-suicide in a suburban Baltimore hotel room.

Experts say that's typical of family killings. Several similar high-profile cases in recent months have been tied to families' economic woes, though there's no indication that was the case with the Parentes.

They lived in a neighborhood of million-dollar homes in Garden City, N.Y., next to a golf course. William, 59, was a tax and estate planning attorney who commuted to his Manhattan office. Betty, 58, volunteered.

They were in Maryland to visit older daughter Stephanie, 19, a sophomore at Loyola College in Baltimore. With them was her sister, Catherine, 11, a sixth-grader at Garden City Middle School.

Housekeeper found bodies
"I can't tell you how heartsick I am," next-door neighbor Mary Opulente Krener said. "This is the most wonderful family, the most kind and loving family. I'm astounded."

The Parentes ate breakfast together Sunday morning and an employee of the Sheraton Baltimore North Hotel in Towson saw them together Sunday afternoon.

On Monday, after they failed to check out of their room on time, a housekeeper found their bodies.

Baltimore County police said they were investigating the deaths as a murder-suicide, but did not indicate who was the killer. They declined to release the results of autopsies conducted Tuesday.

Cpl. Michael Hill, a police spokesman, said only that the Parentes were not shot or stabbed.

Maryland was already reeling from a similar tragedy when word of the Parentes' deaths began to spread. Sometime late Thursday night or Friday morning, a father in a small northwest Maryland town fatally shot his wife and their three young children, police said.

The father, Christopher A. Wood, 34, then shot himself. Police revealed Tuesday that the family was having extreme financial problems.

Familicides are considered rare
An analysis by the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., found an average of nine or 10 murder-suicides a week. But familicides — in which both parents and all their children are killed — generally happen only happen two or three times every six months, said Kristen Rand, legislative director for the center, a nonprofit gun-control advocacy group.

"They were so rare that we didn't really bother to count them as a separate category," Rand said. But in the last few months, she said, "there's a clear rash" of such killings.

They can be tied to the nation's economic woes, said Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.

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