William Parente
Anomic Familicide / Murder-Suicide
Family Murder – Suicide
Crime Spree: April 20, 2009
William Parente
Did William Parente decide death for his whole family was the only option to his criminal mishandling of money?
The Final Call
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.
On Wednesday, Baltimore County police sketched a timeline for the murder-suicide of a Long Island family in a room at the Sheraton hotel in Towson. Officials described the methodical killings over a period of hours Sunday, but a crime with no clearly defined motive since the killer left no suicide note.
The New York Lawyer
William Parente, 59, a New York lawyer, asphyxiated his family members one by one, likely beginning with his wife, Betty, 58, a homemaker and charity fundraiser. Catherine, 11, was probably killed soon afterward. Then came Stephanie, a 19-year-old sophomore who abandoned her studies at the Loyola College campus late Sunday afternoon to make the five-mile trip north to the hotel, police believe.
Their bodies were laid out together on a king-size bed. William Parente’s body was found in the bathroom. He killed himself hours after his family, sometime early Monday morning. Police said there were no obvious signs of a struggle or that anyone had been drugged or restrained.
Taking notice of Stephanie Parente’s absence from classes Monday, Loyola officials alerted the Sheraton Baltimore North hotel. Employees entered the locked room about 3 p.m. that day and found the bodies.
Police said it was not unusual for the Parentes, a Roman Catholic family with Italian roots in Brooklyn, to make the 215-mile drive from Garden City to Loyola, where Stephanie was a speech pathology major. She was studious, friends said, and wanted to be a dentist.
The family checked into the hotel, near Towson Town Center mall on April 15. They were due to check out Monday morning.
An Unscheduled Visit
Stephanie was surprised by her family’s visit, said friend and fellow sophomore Gabrielle Paige, 19. Loyola had just resumed classes a day earlier, after a brief Easter break. Stephanie was preparing for final exams, Paige said. And the Parentes were scheduled to visit this Friday for an on-campus meeting about a study-abroad program in England, for which Stephanie and Paige had signed up, Paige said.
“None of it made sense,” Paige said. “They just called her and said they were here in Baltimore. It seemed like they decided on a whim to come out here.”
But once they were here, Stephanie’s friends said, the family’s visit was ordinary. “Nothing was amiss as far as her roommates could tell,” said the Rev. Brian Linnane, Loyola’s president. The family had breakfast together Sunday near the campus, a Loyola spokeswoman said, and Stephanie came back to her dorm room afterward. Stephanie had a chemistry exam Monday and was planning to study Sunday, friends said.
But she was nowhere to be found that night, though her chemistry book lay open on her dorm-room desk. Friends were concerned enough to call the hotel, Paige said.
One of Stephanie’s roommates got through to the room about midnight, and William Parente told her that Stephanie would be staying the night with them.
The Manner of Death
The medical examiner listed the manner of death of the wife and daughters as homicide, police said, and the cause for all three as asphyxiation and blunt force trauma. Asphyxiation is the obstruction of normal breathing, but police did not say whether the three were strangled or smothered.
There were several objects in the room that could have been used to inflict the trauma, said Johnson, the county police chief, but investigators have not concluded what exactly William Parente used.
The mother and youngest daughter were killed “relatively close in time,” said police spokesman Bill Toohey, though Johnson said evidence showed the mother died first. It is unclear whether the 11-year-old was in the room at the time.
Stephanie Parente was apparently killed later Sunday, police said.
“We might never know the exact sequence of events went on in that room,” Toohey said.
William Parente’s death was determined by the medical examiner to be a suicide caused by cutting with a knife. Police would not say where on his body he was cut.
The Motive of William Parente
The motive was believed to be Parente’s financial difficulties and a pending FBI investigation against him. It was learned, by Baltimore County Police, while they were investigating the crime that Parente was also being investigated for a Ponzi scheme in which investors were potentially defrauded out of $20 million. In particular, a complaint had been made against Parente for the alleged loss of $450,000.
According to the information learned in the financial investigation, $245,000 in checks Parente had written to investors had bounced. This immediately led to complaints to the New York attorney general’s office. Some investors reported following William Parente’s death that they had “lost millions.”
source: murderpedia | Julie Bykowicz | wikipedia
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