Killer Dads

by Mary Papenfuss

  Yet far from all family annihilations are driven by anger. Some, if not most, may be, strangely, inspired by a twisted idea of love and devotion to a family.28 The killers in these cases are often inordinately devoted family men and “good providers” before their crimes. This type of familicidal male tends to command an organized, successful life that tends to serve the family exceptionally well until his “care” is mangled by the dark trajectory of machismo in some kind of distress. These men tend to be “depressed and brooding” after suffering some kind of setback or failure and humiliation, such as a pending bankruptcy or discovery of a financial crime. “Expressions of hostility toward the victims are generally absent” in these cases, noted Wilson and Daly, and there’s often no known history of violence. The killer dads tend to see a family annihilation as the only way out. The fathers’ logic, sometimes expressed in letters left behind, is: “No one can care for them the way I do.” Daly and Wilson cite a number of examples, including the case of a 55-year-old American man who used a hammer to fatally bludgeon his wife and son in their beds, but bungled his own suicide attempt. He explained: “I kept thinking about the bills coming, the house taxes, piling up, piling up in my mind. I thought everything was going to fall around my head. I knew it could be a catastrophe in a short time. My son wouldn’t be able to stand the stigma, my wife wouldn’t have the things she was used to.” In another case, a suicidal South African killer dad left behind a note saying: “I cannot let my family suffer the degradation of losing everything we possess and being thrown penniless onto the street.”

  Despite their differences, murderers in both categories of family annihilation subscribe to a rationale that “invokes a proprietary conception of wife and family,” noted Wilson and Daly.29 “In either case, the killer apparently feels entitled to decide his victims’ fates.” In 2008, Manhattan lawyer William Parente, who was about to suffer a devastating economic setback, humiliation, and almost certainly prison time, took it upon himself to sentence his family to death and arranged a special trip to his daughter’s college so they could all die together.

  STEPHANIE IS WITH HER FAMILY.

  —William Parente, on the phone to his daughter’s college roommate after killing his wife and children

  New York attorney William Parente had a habit of sitting extremely still and staring intently when he was collecting his thoughts.1 He did that two days after Easter in 2009, at his desk in his Manhattan law office on Lexington Avenue. Parente was pale, sweating slightly; he didn’t look well. In the previous two weeks he had written several bad checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So he was considering his future, slowly moving a palm over the top of his head, staring into the distance. His midlength hair was receding, neatly trimmed, dyed brown to cover most of the gray, and had a tendency to be slightly unruly. Parente, 59, was not, unruly—usually—and it annoyed him when his hair didn’t follow suit. But that day, his demeanor matched his hair. He was frazzled, on edge. He had just confessed to Dorothy Schimel, a friend of his late mother and a woman he had known since he was a boy growing up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that he had lost millions she had entrusted to him to invest. He told her that “someone” had threatened his life. The shaken Schimel, who had come to Parente’s office with tax forms in hand so he could complete and file them for her just days before the deadline, would later tell police that he had become involved with the “wrong kind of people.”

  Bill usually kept it together. The unassuming, slightly nerdy, bespectacled lawyer with kindly, almost-grandfatherly eyes had a reputation as a bit of square—but that worked to his advantage in his business. His suits were expensive, but understated and traditional, nothing flamboyant, nothing that shouted the net worth most believed he had earned after decades of hard work in a lucrative practice on Manhattan’s East Side. He dined well, vacationed in his condo in the Hamptons, lived in a spacious, white clapboard Long Island home in upscale Garden City, but he had the quiet, modest manner of a boy with a respectable middle-class upbringing, the only child of a New York State trooper and a stay-at-home mom, both of them Italian immigrants. He was under five foot ten and thick, tending toward pudgy. He was the kind of guy who usually kept his suit coat on, even sitting alone in his office and not expecting visitors. “You never, ever, saw him with his shirt out,” said Jonathan Bachrach, a lawyer who once shared a suite of law offices with Parente. “If anything, he was a bit too much on the side of uptight and organized.”

  People trusted Bill. He had a reputation as a devoted family man and frequently stood out as the sober, meticulous adult in any situation. He rarely socialized with colleagues, opting whenever he could to head home instead to be with his family. “The only thing he was passionate about was his family,” said Bachrach. “It was always his girls. They were his life. I’ve never seen a man as proud of his family as Bill was.” In a previous workplace, Parente was responsible for collecting the rent from 12 lawyers who shared offices along with secretaries and a receptionist. Each month he tracked down the dollars from each suitemate, meeting the rent deadlines, carefully accounting for what was paid and what was owed. “Bill was considered the most trustworthy, and certainly the most reliable among our group of attorneys,” said Bachrach. “We looked to him as the final word on suite management. As far as the other lawyers were concerned, whatever Bill said was solid.” As for his own work, Parente rarely pushed, rarely appeared to be selling anything, a facet of his personality that, paradoxically, tended to boost his business.

  He started out soon after graduation from Brooklyn Law School with his own practice begun with another attorney, Alan Kornblau, whom he had been introduced to by a cousin. The men eventually struck out on their own with separate businesses but stayed lifelong friends. Parente started out as a real estate and tax attorney, but soon also served as an investment advisor to scores of clients. Most of his investment customers were referred to him by others, and he gave investment advice matter-of-factly, at times, reluctantly. “I had to press him to talk about stocks,” said Bachrach. “The only time he put the bite on me was to buy church raffle tickets. Every few months there would be tickets to something.”

  Figure 5.1. A young Stephanie poses with her little sister in 2003 for a holiday shot that would become their Christmas card that year. Reprinted by permission from Portraits by Joanne.

  By 2009 Parente was managing millions of investment dollars entrusted to him by a growing pool of clients. Parente pitched penny stocks to some investors, but also “bridge loans” earmarked for developers, particularly mall builders, unable to get quick capital from banks, he explained to his clients. He supplied launch money from his stable of investors, and the grateful, successful mall developers repaid the loans—plus lucrative interest—as soon as their bank funds came through, which tended to be very quickly, according to Parente. Each loan was secured by reliable developer securities worth at least 150 percent of the loan—securities not acceptable to conventional banks for some reason—so the loans were risk-free, Parente assured his clients. The investments consistently paid a return of at least 12 percent. His investors were pleased. The real estate market had been booming for years, and the financial statements from Parente always showed a tidy profit.

  Queens attorney Bruce Montague was one of Parente’s happy clients—happy for a time, that is, until his nagging doubts slowly grew into a deep concern. He was referred to Parente by Kornblau, who invested in the bridge loan operation himself and was thrilled with the money he was making. “Everything Parente said made sense when I met with him,” Montague told me in an interview at a Garden City diner. “He came highly recommended, and he was a serious, sober kind of guy, who fully explained all the details of what he was doing. It sounded like a safe bet. I got regular statements showing a 12 percent return on my investment, and he provided full records and 1099s on the income. But my accountant was suspicious, and he urged me to take some money out of the operation to make certain it was legitimate. When I asked Bill to cas
h out some of my investment, he did. Sometimes there was a delay, but he always came through.”

  But the situation continued to bother Montague. He knew it was too good to be true. “No investment consistently provides that kind of return,” he said. “I always advise my own clients that something too good to be true is a scam. But I didn’t listen to my own advice. I always used to think, ‘How can people be so stupid?’ But I was just that stupid. I wanted to believe in something that was too good to be true. It was a humbling experience.”

  The buzz of concern in Montague’s mind became impossible to ignore in the wake of the massive Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme that blew up in late 2008. Madoff ripped off thousands of investors for billions of dollars in the largest financial fraud in US history. Other Parente investors whom Montague knew were also getting increasingly squeamish after the Madoff news broke. The economy was weakening and many of them now needed cash, and Madoff had made them nervous about their invisible funds. Parente’s clients began calling back their money. “I wanted to pull back, and so did others,” said Montague, who had entrusted Parente with close to $1 million. “But Bill put a lot of us on hold, on hold, on hold. He paid out some checks, but told people not to cash them. I started to get a really bad feeling.” Montague was persistent about his funds. Parente finally, reluctantly, wrote out two checks worth $400,000 each to Montague, telling him not to cash them until tax day. That was just days before Dorothy Schimel came into Parente’s office to have her taxes done, and found the lawyer looking “awful,” she would later tell police. Alan Kornblau, too, turned up with his tax forms in hand about the same time and was alarmed by Parente’s uncharacteristic, nervous behavior.

  So there was Parente, finally, alone, just days after signing the Montague checks and soon after dropping the Schimel bombshell, sitting at his desk, staring into the distance, making decisions. He faced what a colleague once described as an “explosion” of family photos—on his desk, his bookshelf, his credenza. There was the professional family Christmas portrait of the four of them, the girls, Catherine, then 11, and 19-year-old Stephanie in red gowns, Bill and wife, Betty, in elegant black; a shot of Catherine’s First Communion; a photo of a beaming Stephanie in cap and gown at graduation at Garden City High School; a picture of Betty at the annual Sugar and Spice mother-daughter dinner and dance to raise money for a local cerebral-palsy fundraising association; a snap of Betty and the kids at a backyard barbecue.

  In five days they would all be dead.

  ———

  Parente left the following day with Betty and Catherine to visit Stephanie at Loyola University outside Baltimore, where she was a sophomore studying to be a speech therapist. The family made the trip frequently, often driving Stephanie there simply to drop her off after one of her visits home, then turning around and heading back to Long Island. Steph was a member of the crew team freshman year, and one of her teammates noted how often her family turned up to watch her. “They would always come to the regattas,” said the sailor. “It was weird for a family to be at every single regatta. But they wanted to see Stephanie.”

  Catherine was a quiet, gangly athlete who was beginning to make a mark on her middle-school basketball and soccer teams and had recently played Pamina in her fifth-grade production of the Magic Flute. She was wearing a removable boot cast on her foot because of a growth-plate crack in a bone from playing soccer, but she was going to Loyola because the Parentes always made the trip together; they did nearly everything as a family. They were extremely close. Betty’s best friend, Marianne Quinn, said the women rarely saw each other weekends because that was “family time.”

  Figure 5.2. “Two Santas,” Stephanie and Catherine go cheek-to-cheek in a 2008 photo. Reprinted by permission from Portraits by Joanne..

  Betty Mazzarella Parente, 58, was as gregarious as her husband was quiet. She had a musical voice, had a frequent laugh, and touched people often, resting a hand on an arm, grasping a friend’s shoulder. She met Bill in a Bay Ridge bar; Bill asked her for her phone number the second time they saw each other there. They married soon after. Betty worked as Bill’s secretary for years until she became pregnant with Stephanie after several rounds of fertility treatments. Eight years later, she was stunned to find she was pregnant with Catherine at the age of 46. She doted on her daughters, was active in Girl Scouts, volunteered for most of their school events, attended every activity. She also quickly became a social force when the family moved to Garden City from Bay Ridge. She was the queen bee of the local Bunko club, which functioned as a kind of welcoming committee to wives moving to town. “Betty was one of the first friends I made when I came to Garden City, and we were still close ten years later,” said Lucille Messina. Lucille shared her heartache with Betty over her late daughter, Jacklyn, who suffered from severe disabilities, and Betty eventually pitched in to help Messina with her work when Messina became president of the Tri-Town Auxiliary of the United Cerebral Palsy Association of Nassau County. Betty was also a Eucharistic minister at St. Joe’s Catholic Church in town. She continued to nurture her past friendships, and frequently drove back to her old neighborhood and returned with Italian pastries to share with her Garden City pals. Betty was known for showering her friends with notes—thank you cards and “buck up” jottings. “Betty truly cared about people; she had a way making each one feel like they were special to her,” explained Messina. “You are a dream come true as a friend, you bring out the best in me,” Betty wrote to Quinn, thanking her for a framed photo she had given Betty as a birthday gift. “As the kids say, you ROCK. Love you to pieces, Betty.”

  But she wasn’t a pushover. Betty had survived an ugly bout with breast cancer, and she had the strength to help others who were diagnosed. Quinn introduced her to a friend diagnosed with cancer a second time, and the three women had dinner together. They talked about difficulties the friend was having with her husband. “Betty said, ‘That’s your cancer stick. Get rid of him,’” Quinn recalls. “She could call the shots.”

  Trouble with a husband was not Betty’s problem. “Bill was just a quiet guy, and always good to her, as far as I could tell,” says Quinn. “He frequently watched Catherine at night when Betty and I had some commitment on a week night. He went with her on all her doctor appointments when she had cancer. He was there for her on her journey.”

  Figure 5.3. Catherine Parente smiles as she stands alone on a cruise ship stairway for a photo during a cruise with her mom in early 2009. She would be murdered by her father two months later. Courtesy of Marianne E. Quinn.

  Like Bill, the rest of the family appeared to be well off without being particularly flashy. Betty and Bill did each drive a Mercedes—a four-door sedan for Bill, and a sports utility wagon for Betty, that were updated every few years—but their home was relatively modest, though elegant. Betty and the girls spent summers at their condo in West Hampton, and Bill commuted there when he could. The family also took a major annual vacation on top of the summer getaway. Betty and Catherine took a cruise to Jamaica early in 2009, but Bill didn’t accompany them that year because, Betty explained to Quinn, he had “lost a very big client” and wanted to save the cost of his passageway and spend the extra time working. Besides the disappointing loss of a client, Bill was also struggling with the death of his mother the previous year, Betty confided to Marianne. The first anniversary of her death was nearing, and he seemed more dejected about losing her than ever. Betty asked Marianne if she thought it was a good idea to still take the cruise, given the circumstances. “Go, have fun with Catherine,” Quinn advised her. “Life is short.” Parente’s sadness over his mother’s death was also an issue at his meetings with a Long Island psychic. Both Betty and Bill had been seeing the woman in Hicksville for about 10 years, visiting her separately every six months or so. Bill would usually arrive from work still in his suit. He was a “brilliant, good-hearted, generous man who loved his family very much,” recalled the family’s psychic in an interview. But shortly after Betty and Cathe
rine returned from the cruise, he confided to the psychic that he was worried about his business and was scrambling to move money around to save it. He asked her about heaven and if she thought God was forgiving. “I told him people have to suffer everything they’ve done to others in life, but then God forgives all,” she told me. “I assumed he was talking about his mother and the afterlife.”

  Quinn was surprised just two months after the cruise, the week of Bill’s building crisis, that the Parentes were on the road again to visit Stephanie just two days after their daughter had returned to school from Easter break. Betty had hosted a party for Bill’s relatives on Easter Sunday, and Stephanie went back to school on Monday. The day before the party, Betty called Quinn to ask if she wanted some pasta from a special Italian store Betty still shopped at in Bay Ridge. “She always made pasta and a ham for Easter,” said Quinn. Though Quinn turned down the pasta offer, Betty and Bill drove up to her curb later that day. It was pouring rain, so Bill ran out of the car alone with flowers for Quinn and chocolate Easter eggs for Quinn’s two sons. They hugged and wished each other a happy Easter. It was the last time she would see Bill and her longtime friend. Betty’s face through the car window was blurred by the rain on the glass.