Killer Dads (13 page)

On Sunday morning Stephanie accompanied her family to Shirley's Café near Loyola. A restaurant video shows the family walking in, sitting quietly at a table, and eating breakfast in the crowded restaurant. Steph returned to her suite later and began studying for her chemistry exam. She took off again after noon, leaving her chem book open on her desk. When she didn't return, Julieanne called her a short time later, but Stephanie's cell phone had been turned off. She told police later that Bill Parente must have picked up his daughter again that day to return to the Sheraton Hotel in nearby Towson, where they were staying. Stephanie had no car at Loyola, and there was no convenient public transit to the suburban Sheraton.

By late Sunday night, Stephanie still hadn't returned. Julieanne called the hotel to see if the Parentes had checked out, and was mortified when the desk rang her call through to their room. “I knew it was too late to call,” she told me. “It was close to midnight. If the family was still there, I was afraid I would wake them up.” Bill Parente picked up the phone and didn't sound like he had been asleep. He was uncharacteristically curt. Julieanne introduced herself and asked if Stephanie was with them, because she hadn't returned to her suite. “Stephanie is with her family. She's staying here,” he responded. “Good night.”

The next morning, Julieanne sent an e-mail to Stephanie's chem professor to make certain her roomie had turned up to take the test. She hadn't, which surprised the teacher, who knew Stephanie as the kind of student who would always send a note if she couldn't make an exam for
any reason. Julieanne then called the Parentes' home in Garden City to talk to Stephanie's parents, or at least confirm that Bill Parente's voice, or a voice on his answering machine was the same one she had heard the night before. The message machine was nearly full, packed with increasingly frantic, repeated calls from investors whose checks were bouncing, police would later discover. The initially polite messages soon became curt, demanding. “Bill, I waited to deposit the check the way you asked, and it bounced,” said one woman. “I'm not happy. Call me.” Finally a banker from Chase, where Parente's account was, called. “Mr. Parente, please call me,” he said. “It's actually rather urgent.”

Figure 5.5. Stephanie, Betty, and Catherine attend a Garden City event in Long Island. Betty was active in several charities and her local church.
Courtesy of Marianne E. Quinn.

After calling Steph's home, Julieanne then contacted student services, which contacted police, who called the hotel. A short time later, a hotel manager called 911. “We have a dead body in one of our rooms, ma'am,” said a calm male voice.

“Any idea how this might have happened?” asked the operator.

“I don't know. I'm not going further into the room after what I just saw on the floor in the entrance,” he responded.

When a school administrator called the hotel again to check on any news about Stephanie, she was told the hotel manager was “busy with the police.”

What hotel manager Robert Least saw in the entry hall into room 1029 was the body of Bill Parente. He lay dead on his back just beyond the bathroom door. His eyes were open, his right leg was up, bent at the knee. He was wearing green corduroy pants, a white t-shirt, socks on his small feet, and a gold and silver watch on his wrist. He had two white handkerchiefs in his right back pocket. The 911 dispatcher reported a possible cardiac arrest, but the responding officer immediately called detectives when he entered the darkened room where all the curtains had been drawn and all the lamps unplugged. The only light came from the bathroom. Baltimore County Investigator John Tollen entered a short time later. He stepped around Parente's body, opened a curtain of one of the windows along Dulhaney Road next to the king-sized bed. He pulled back a white duvet and sheet to “reveal the three Parente women, all obviously deceased,” the police report states.

The bodies of Betty Parente, Catherine, and Stephanie lay side by side on the bed. They appeared to have been posed. Betty was wearing black trousers, a pink shirt, and a light, zip-up black blazer. She wore only one silver hoop earring; the other was found on the floor. She lay on her back, her eyes closed, her right hand resting on her chest. Catherine, in orange shorts over gray sweatpants and a dark sweatshirt, lay next to her, also on her back. Her right hand rested beneath the pillow where Betty's head lay, and her other arm was bent, with her hand placed on her stomach. Stephanie, dressed in gray sweatpants and a blue hoodie, was lying on her side, facing her sister and her mother, her brown hair falling across her face.

The suspected murder weapons: “lamp and hands,” the Baltimore County Police report states. “There was blood observed in the bathroom, the bed, and on the rug. There was a small amount of blood spatter on the wall and headboard of the bed. There were several knives observed in the room, which were just purchased. The suspect appeared to have several self-inflicted cuts: one in
each wrist and one in the neck.” A pair of eyeglasses, apparently smeared with blood, were spotted on the floor next to the foot of the bed.

Betty suffered the worst violence. The top of her face and head were bashed and bloodied. She was apparently struck with a heavy hotel table lamp with such force that it cracked the base of the lamp, whose decorative pattern left an impression on Betty's skull. Catherine showed “mild petechia”—red marks on her face—from apparent asphyxiation, spotted by the detective. Investigators believe a scuff mark on the wall may have been made by the pink cast on Catherine's foot as she kicked out while she was smothered. She also had an abrasion on her chin and bruising on her chest and forearms. Stephanie apparently fought hard for her life. Her death was attributed to “multiple injuries,” like her mom. She had abrasions on both sides of her hips, the back of her left hand and forearm, abrasions and bruising on her left foot and left shin, lacerations on the top of her head, marks and scratches on her neck.

Amid the horror and destruction of the room were banal items that testified to the heartbreaking lost normalcy of their now-shattered lives. Betty had a safety pin attached to her bra with two charms: “One safety pin with two charms recovered from right bra strap of victim #1,” the police report states. A plastic shopping bag, apparently Catherine's, held a bobby pin, a plastic penny, and a plastic snowflake. “One (1) pair tennis shoes, Reebok brand, size 9, and two (2) brown shoes, American Eagle brand” were catalogued by forensics investigators. Stephanie wore a blue-and-yellow elastic ponytail band on her right wrist. More ominously, a strand of her hair was found caught in Bill Parente's watch wristband. Police also spotted the usual casual detritus of a family on vacation. Clothes were strewn in the room, some on the floor, others folded over chairs. Suitcases, including two Louis Vuitton bags, hotel-door card keys, the keys to Betty's car, three cell phones, and two wallets with cash and credit cards lay about the room.

No one will ever know exactly what happened in the room. The blood told a tale, a sequence of attacks and murder, indications of resistance or of sudden, fatal submission. Much was made of the fact in newspaper accounts at the time that no one was restrained. Betty and Catherine were dead by the time Stephanie walked into the room. Betty was likely killed, or at least
rendered unconscious, first, typical in such family annihilation cases so a mother can't help the children who are attacked next. Did Parente attack her as Catherine was in the shower? Did he cover Betty with the duvet to hide the fact from Catherine that her mother was dead before he smothered her? Did his daughter plead for her life? Did Parente respond? Did he try to make her understand whatever mangled logic he believed made sense of his mission? Did he attack Stephanie as she walked in the hotel door, or did she see her mother's and sister's bodies first? Was the idea that her father was a killer so unfathomable to her that she waited too many precious seconds to respond or run to save herself? And how could devoted family man Bill Parente continue to battle to kill a daughter fighting for her life?

Parente killed himself several hours later, likely shortly after midnight, investigators believe. He may have spent at least some of that time watching TV in the dark, the light from the screen flickering on his face, his thumb hitting the remote button, channel surfing. Two movies were rented on the hotel TV late that afternoon. Maybe he lay beside his family as he watched. When a worried Julieanne Malley spoke to Parente at midnight, Stephanie, her mom, and her sister were already dead.

Parente left the room after the murders of his family to walk across the street to the Towson Town Center Mall, where he purchased a boxed set of six black-handled Robert Welch kitchen knives at the Crate & Barrel store. Hours after he returned to the room, he used three of the knives to slash at his wrists, and finally stabbed himself in the neck in the bathroom, eventually collapsing just outside the bathroom door. Parente also had redness and discoloration on his nose and left eye, possibly from struggles with his victims. When police entered the room, the bathroom sink was partially filled with blood, and a blood-slicked knife lay on the counter. Blood spatter surrounded the sink and was on the floor. Several blood-soaked towels were folded and stacked on the edge of the bathtub. Tollen noted two partially eaten cookies in the trash can next to the desk in the room. An empty can of coke with apparent blood stains was also recovered from the garbage. The remaining four knives still lay in their box alongside the wide-screen TV, next to keys and cells phones and a half-eaten roll of Life Savers.

After the crime was publicized, local police were contacted by a couple
who stayed one floor up from the Parentes and across the hall. They told investigators that they had reported to hotel management the afternoon of the murders that they had heard a woman scream, twice, followed by what sounded like gargled sounds of a strangulation. Hotel management confirmed that they investigated the report but were unable to determine which room the sounds had come from.

Quinn heard of the murders Monday morning from her husband, who called her as she was driving to work. He was on the local school board and had been informed early of the killings as board members discussed how to handle announcing the tragedy at Catherine's middle school. “Pull over. I have something to tell you, and you shouldn't be driving when you hear it,” he said. She immediately called in to work at her insurance office to report she wouldn't be in that day, and sped to the Parentes' house, which was already surrounded by news trucks. She mistakenly believed they were vehicles for paramedics or some other kind of “rescuers”—a part of her still hoping someone could save her friend.

Julieanne Malley's mother called her the same day and told her to sit down. Police had found a murdered family in the Towson Sheraton, but the media initially incorrectly reported that two parents, a daughter and son were dead. “That's OK, Mom,” Julieanne reassured her mother. “Stephanie didn't have a brother.”

While the Parente family was in Baltimore County, Bruce Montague—and several other investors—were discovering that no funds existed to cover the post-dated checks Parente had written. He called Alan Kornblau that Monday. “Have you heard?” asked Kornblau, who had already been contacted by police. “The Parente family is dead.”

Montague was devastated. “You can replace money, but you can't replace those lives,” he said. “I felt horrible for his wife and daughters. In some twisted way he was he hoping to spare them pain. But to murder someone to save them is psychopathic. It's unfathomable to me how someone could commit murder, especially that kind of murder—to take the lives of your wife and children. As bad as things are, for him to believe that his family was better off dead was absolutely crazy.”

Bizarrely, just days before the Parente murder-suicide, another dad in
Maryland shot to death his wife and three young children in their home an hour away from the Towson Sheraton. Christopher Wood, 34, who also committed suicide, was $450,000 in debt and suffering from depression at the time of the attack. He left behind six notes citing the family's financial problems and expressing remorse for what he had done.

Parente “was a good man who had a bad day,” said the family's psychic. “I don't believe he ever meant to cheat anyone, but he became overwhelmed by the debts. Garden City is a competitive, very status-conscious community, and he didn't want to leave his family behind to deal with his humiliation and a financial crisis in that kind of atmosphere. Maybe he wouldn't have killed them if he had a sibling he could have counted on to take care of them, but he didn't.”

The murders haunt Quinn, who first met Betty when she worked as an assistant teacher at a nursery school, and watched over a three-year-old Catherine. “What I want to believe is that he took them because he loved them so much. But the attacks were brutal. He hit Betty in the face with a hotel lamp—there was no open casket. Did he mean to kill her when he hit her? Or did they fight? Was it premeditated? Stephanie was the most bruised; she put up the biggest fight. The baby had bruising on her chin. And she was in a cast.”