Murders-suicide defy explanation

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 two daughters were well-liked by teachers and classmates.

Friends and neighbors were dumbfounded to learn that all four Parentes had died Monday in an apparent murder-suicide in a suburban Baltimore hotel room.

They lived in a neighborhood of million-dollar homes in Garden City, N.Y., next to a golf course. William, 59, was an 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.

Stephanie, who rowed for Loyola, volunteered with Habitat for Humanity and had been accepted to study abroad next year in Newcastle, England.

"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, 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 yesterday, and would say only that the Parentes were not shot or stabbed.

Maryland was already reeling from a similar tragedy. Last Thursday night or Friday morning, a father in Middletown, a town in northwest Maryland, fatally shot his wife and their three young children, police said.

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

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 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.

He describes familicides as "canaries in a mineshaft" - sensational cases that herald an uptick in more common forms of domestic violence.

"You can only speculate over whether the economy is going to affect the broad swath of abuse of children and abuse of women," he said. "But the warning sign is when these familicide cases begin to cluster. In the past few months, they have begun to pop off across the country." *