———
I stayed in room 1029 at the Sheraton Towson, though it has been re-numbered because, as a maid explained, people are “superstitious about it.” I don’t like to think I’m superstitious, but I was hoping the room would give me an insight—or maybe I would sense something from the haunted souls there. The only thing it offered was a restless night, a fear that I would suddenly feel fingers on my shoulder, and a crushing, overwhelming sadness. I tried to imagine the blur of family members interacting in some sped-up time-machine past—with a dad slipping on his watchband, a sister ordering room service or telling her sibling to hurry up and get out of the bathroom so someone else could use it, a mother brushing her hair in front of the mirror, threading a silver hoop earring through her earlobe. I imagined the murmur of voices as they communicated the things families talk about in a hotel room as they share time away from home together. But they told me nothing.
The rest of Bill Parente’s devastation became apparent after the bodies of his family were found in the Sheraton Hotel room. Bruce Montague was convinced Parente’s failed investment operation triggered the murder-suicide. He met with his partners at his Queens law office to discuss what steps he should take. “Fortunately, I have a law firm,” he explained. “I knew there were other investors out there facing the same losses—and in many cases, more—without the resources I had.”1 Montague and his partners decided to go public. A lawyer from Montague’s firm contacted the New York attorney general, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and local FBI officials to reveal what Montague suspected was a Ponzi scheme likely operated by Parente for several years. Montague and his partner Steven Drelich talked to the press about the tragedy and its suspected link to the investment scam. The next day Montague’s office was inundated with calls from reporters—and pleas for help from investors now out millions of dollars. Montague’s office began collecting affidavits from investors to pass on to law enforcement authorities. Many Parente investors were elderly and came to him through his mother or his mother’s friends, like Dorothy Schimel. A number of them lost their life savings trusting Bill Parente. Montague’s office collected 22 affidavits, though subsequent research during legal proceedings regarding Parente’s estate would uncover some 66 investors. Not everyone lost money. Some earned more than they invested and, for a time, were considered targets in potential clawback actions in an operation that was estimated to have collected millions.
The unbelievability of the Parente family murders coupled with the decades-long scheme operated by the apparently super-straight, ultra-reliable Bill Parente spawned a bizarre myth about Parente’s crimes. Because he told clients some investments went to Russian developers in Canada, some investors became convinced he and his family had been assassinated by thugs in the Russian mob. Even Alan Kornblau was convinced, for a time, that Parente had been the target of a mob hit. Some of that was a human need to make sense of the senseless. “We tell ourselves they’re all in the witness protection program,” said Susan Deluca, a co-owner of a Brooklyn photo studio that took the Parentes’ Christmas photos for 18 years. “We know that’s not really true, but it’s a way for us to deal with it.”
In fact, as far as authorities could determine, there were never any developers who received loans from Parente or his clients. After being contacted by Montague’s office, the FBI seized files and computers from Parente’s office. “There were no co-conspirators” uncovered, a New York FBI agent told me months after the investigation was completed. “He may have made some penny stock investments or some loans over the years, but nothing showed up in his accounts. He had no separate investment accounts for any of his clients. He even co-mingled his own personal and business funds.” A police search of Parente public records showed some 30 different business names with a lower Manhattan address registered in his name, including Internal Resource Services (with the useful IRS acronym) and Flomar Accessories Corp., which Parente used to pose as investment or construction and mall-development operations. Other retail and restaurant business names registered by Parente likely served as paper fronts for imaginary distributors and stores in his imaginary malls.
A court judgment in the distribution of the assets of the Parente estate, which called the scam and murders a “tragedy of epic proportion,” described the lawyer’s operation as a classic Ponzi scheme in which money was never invested—only used to pay off earlier investors and Parente’s own expenses.2 Victims filed nearly $36 million in claims against Parente’s estate.
Parente’s tangled scheme became the focus of a macabre court battle over his assets. He had life insurance, including a $5 million irrevocable insurance trust he established in 2007 naming his wife and children as beneficiaries. The funds would be available even in the event of suicide. It’s possible the insurance policy was part of Parente’s Ponzi exit scheme. Perhaps he considered committing suicide even then, and leaving his family the $5 million, but eventually opted instead to take Betty and his daughters with him.
Figure 6.1. The Parente family poses for one of their annual holiday studio photos in 2005. Bill didn’t often have his photo taken with the family, but always accompanied his wife and daughters to watch them have their pictures taken. Reprinted by permission from Portraits by Joanne.
The insurance policy, and Parente’s other assets, were the target of a court challenge by a cousin of Betty Parente, Joseph Mazzarella, the 81-year-old owner of the Mazzarella funeral home that prepared the Parente bodies and was the administrator of Betty’s estate. Betty, Stephanie, and Catherine were buried together in a single grave, while Bill Parente was cremated separately at the insistence of friends and relatives furious with Bill. A suit by Mazzarella first challenged the determination of the heir in the suicide-murders. It demanded a hearing to determine definitively who was breathing last in Parente’s rampage, because that would be the ultimate heir, and that person’s “distributees” would get the estate’s assets. “No evidence was presented as to the order of death among Betty, Catherine and Stephanie,” the action stated.3 “Arguably, based upon the death certificates and the police report, petitioner has made a prima facie showing that Betty, Catherine and Stephanie died before William, and that William killed them before committing suicide. However, the court must hold a hearing so that the respondent is given the opportunity to rebut the evidence presented, as these issues and the issue of the entitlement of William and his heirs to inherit from these three estates are inextricably linked.”
Whatever the determination, officials should leapfrog over Parente as the final holder of the estate in any case because he was a murderer and neither he nor his “distributees” should profit from his crime, Mazzarella’s suit further argued. “It is well established law that one who takes the life of another should not be permitted to profit from his own wrong and shall be barred from inheriting from the person slain . . . no one shall be permitted to profit by his own fraud, or to the advantage of his own wrong, or to found any claim upon his own iniquity, or to acquire property by his own crime,” the suit said. The familicide required a hearing to officially determine Parente’s status as a murderer, the lawsuit argued, a legal procedure usually skipped in such a situation once police determine what happened.
The court action was an attempt by Mazzarella to wrest away assets headed to Parente’s defrauded investors and steer them to Betty’s side of the family. The Nassau County probate court ultimately ruled against Mazzarella, and noted it’s “undisputed Stephanie and Catherine predeceased William and that Betty died first, followed by Catherine, then Stephanie and finally William.”4 And regardless of William Parente’s criminal actions, Betty’s “collateral relatives could not have had any reasonable expectation of benefit from the insurance policy on William’s life. It cannot be said that equity would be better served by directing the proceeds of the life insurance trust to Betty’s relatives, leaving the victims of William’s Ponzi scheme with no hope of recovering even a small portion of their losses.”
Figure 6.3. An angelic Stephanie Parente, 8, smiles down at her baby sister, Catherine, for the photo that would be their 1998 holiday card. Reprinted by permission from Portraits by Joanne.
Nevertheless, Mazzarella, as administrator of the estate of Betty and the girls, was granted control over some $500,000 in Parente family assets as part of a settlement with the Nassau County public administrator representing the Parente estate. That included proceeds from the family’s properties—the Garden City home, the condo in Westhampton, and Parente’s mother’s Bay Ridge co-op—along with all personal effects, including the family cars, which hadn’t yet been paid off. Part of the money would cover the $30,000 bill for the family funeral, and Mazzarella agreed to spend up to $15,000 to erect a “permanent memorial tribute dedicated to the memory of Betty Ann Parente, Stephanie Ann Parente and Catherine Ann Parente, in the form of a dignified plaque.”5 Most of the proceeds from the sale of the properties would go to the husband and two children of Betty’s late sister. The $5 million life insurance trust as well as proceeds from other life insurance policies were directed to be divided among Parente’s scammed investors to cover some of the losses, though funds had not yet been dispersed by the time of this writing, late 2012, as the estate administrator attempted to validate the size of each claim. The judge concluded after the settlement: “I would like to say this is a very tragic event and these things, not only do they have emotional and family and personal aspects, but they have legal aspects. And with respect to the legal aspects, perhaps, this is the end of that part of it. I know this will never be the end to the personal sorrow.”6
For a man “ruined” by his schemes and driven to murder-suicide, after his death Bill Parente’s estate held millions in life insurance, even though he had less than $5,000 in the bank, making Parente, like Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman, worth more in dollars dead than alive. But everyone had a claim on those dollars.
The Parente family possessions were distributed in a “tag sale” set up by the Mazzarella family at the Garden City house. Goods not purchased were distributed to charities. Marianne Quinn is left with memories of Betty and the kids, and notes from her pal. From the Mozzarellas’ tag sale she managed to take home a photo of Betty that she had given her friend for her last birthday. The Lenox frame holding the photo urged: “Celebrate life.”
WE BLIND OURSELVES TO THE STRUCTURAL PROPERTIES OF A FAMILY AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION THAT MAKES IT OUR MOST VIOLENT INSTITUTION WITH THE EXCEPTION OF THE MILITARY IN TIME OF WAR.
—Prof. Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at the University of Pennsylvania1
As confounding as William Parente’s murder-suicide rampage was, it was hardly unique. It was part of a cluster of similar cases that year and others, and it bore an uncanny similarity to other family annihilations in the United States, and in other nations—so alike it’s almost as if the murderous dads’ fortunes were designed by a single mechanism, and their actions when fortunes fell were commanded by an unseen dictator. Parente’s British “clone” pulled off his attack just eight months earlier across the ocean. Their personalities were dramatically different. British killer Christopher Foster was a bit of a blowhard and could be volatile, unlike Parente, and was also warmer, more charismatic, handsome, and athletic. But like the New York lawyer, Foster became a roaring success from a modest background, enjoyed his wealth, basked in the attention of his well-provided-for all-female household, and was utterly devoted to the family he annihilated.
Like Parente, Foster also had a dark secret. Before his murderous spree, his financial success had been rotted away by profligate spending, tax liens after years of evasion, and lost court judgments over slippery financial dealings, though his family had no idea how desperate his situation had become. Just weeks before his home was to be repossessed, he not only killed his wife, Jill, and 15-year-old daughter, Kirstie, but every living thing on his tony Shropshire farm.2
Foster was a proud, self-made millionaire who had traded up a nondescript home in Wolverhampton in England’s East Midlands for his sixteen-acre multi-million-dollar Obaston House estate near Maesbrook when he made it big with an invention for fireproof insulation. Foster always went for broke. To prove to investors that his insulation worked, as he prepared to launch his company, he mortgaged his house (pre-Obaston) to pay for an expensive, dramatic demonstration to prove that his invention could withstand a dramatic blaze. If the insulation held, he had it made; if it burned, he lost everything. It worked. Within months he was boasting to his mom and pals that he was a multi-millionaire and had so much extra cash he couldn’t spend it fast enough.
Foster reveled in his new life and was such a gregarious life of every gathering that he “sucked all the oxygen from the room,” said a pal. “To come in second place wasn’t his style,” another friend recounted in a documentary about the crime, The Millionaire and the Murder Mansion.3 “He had to be up front with the winners.” Foster bought his palatial home—for cash—after his wife spotted it featured in a story in a country living magazine. He quickly donned the lifestyle of a wealthy gentleman farmer, collecting cars and guns, and traipsing through his property on hunting parties shooting pheasant with his Labrador retrievers. At various times he owned two Range Rovers, a silver Jaguar, a Mercedes, a Bentley, an Aston Martin, “his and hers” Porsches, and a collection of custom-made rifles, which he once told a friend could be Jill’s “insurance policy” if anything happened to him because they were worth a small fortune.
But Foster could erupt unpredictably, too. He shot Jill’s doves when they strayed into his multicar garage, and he shot Kirstie’s beloved, but stubborn Lab, Holly, after the dog ran onto a neighboring farm and chased the sheep. He could be angry, headstrong, impulsive. That’s when Jill and Kirstie steered clear. His housekeeper revealed in the documentary that she was unsettled by his obsession with guns; he always left one in the kitchen and in his bedroom.
Foster lost his company to liquidation shortly before his rampage. He never told Jill or Kirstie that the firm was gone. He still pretended to work every day and boasted at a party that he was close to signing a $17 million insulation deal with a Russian company. Creditors would never get his home, he vowed ominously to a friend. “They have to take me out in a box for that to happen,” he said.
Before everything imploded, nothing seemed amiss, just like the day Bill Parente climbed in the car for the trip to Maryland to pick up his daughter. Foster had just turned 50 and was a bit more emotional than usual. He was looking though family photos and watched his wedding video, taken 21 years earlier, with Jill, and they both cried, according to their housekeeper. But otherwise, Chris was “in a cheerful mood and larking about” with his wife and daughter, the housekeeper told police in a videotaped interview.
Four days later, CCTV surveillance cameras Foster had installed on his estate show Jill and Kirstie hopping out of his Range Rover as Foster pulls it into their garage as they return home from a neighborhood barbecue bash. Kirstie disappears from the video frame, apparently to free the Labs from their kennels because the excited dogs suddenly appear on camera wagging their tails and simpering around Foster. Soon after, before bed that night, Kirstie texted a 16-year-old boy in her class, eventually telling him that her dad was about to “shut down the Internet,” she wrote. “Night night. Bye. Love u,” she signed off. By the predawn hours, Jill and Kristie were dead, killed with a single bullet to the head. The several dogs and five horses would also be shot dead, or perish in the fire set by Foster as he torched his farm and posh country home in an attack so massive that authorities initially thought kidnappers had struck Foster’s home, or that it was some kind of “organized r
eprisal situation,” recalled a detective on The Millionaire and the Murder Mansion. British media initially talked of possible terrorism. Twelve fire crews had responded to the blaze at the farm, where a horse trailer with its tires shot out initially blocked access to the gates. When the fire was finally extinguished, the house was a gutted shell and the expensive cars little more than charred metal hulks. Fire investigators would discover later that Foster had turned his home into a kind of funeral pyre by using a hose to pump hundreds of gallons of oil from a tank on the estate into the basement of the house before setting it ablaze.
Arriving investigators were perplexed. “When we first arrived, in a very few minutes we realized the extent of the damage. Everybody said someone’s making a statement here rather than it being a straightforward fire or a murder,” senior forensics investigator Paul Beeton explained from his office in the documentary. But footage from the CCTV cameras showed Foster calmly walking through his grounds in the predawn hours as he cradled one of his custom-made rifles, outfitted with a silencer, with his dogs. Blood spatters indicated he took the Labs into their kennels, where he shot them, then carried their bodies to lay them next to two horses he had shot earlier. Kirstie and Jill were likely already dead in their beds, though they wouldn’t be found for days after the fire was extinguished because the house and their corpses were so ravaged by the blaze. “He shot the dogs in the head, shot the horses in the head, shot the wife and daughter in the head,” remarked an investigator in The Millionaire and the Murder Mansion. “No distinction, is there?” Foster was found dead next to his wife’s body, the rifle by his side. He had died of smoke inhalation.
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