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 methodical killings over a period of hours Sunday, but a crime with no clearly defined motive since the killer left no suicide note.
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 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.
Investigators found no note, Baltimore County Police Chief James W. Johnson said, but they have learned about William Parente's "questionable financial dealings." County police are forwarding information, which Johnson would not describe, to the FBI's New York office.
"We continue to interview family, friends and work associates to determine the motive and the circumstances behind these violent acts," Johnson said.
An FBI spokesman in New York said an investigation into William Parente's financial dealings is under way. Also, a lawyer in Queens has written to the New York state attorney general's office alleging that he was defrauded by Parente.
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.
