Killer Dads (11 page)

Wilson and Daly further expanded their family-violence research to “familicides” or “family annihilations” in which fathers kill their spouse and one or more children, often also before committing suicide. They studied 109 familicides in Canada, England, and Wales (with a total of 249 victims) that occurred from 1974 to 1990.
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The murders in those cases were almost exclusively committed by men, and half of the men committed suicide—a far higher rate than males who kill only their wives or children (though
fewer men who killed their stepchildren in a family annihilation also killed themselves compared to fathers who killed biological children in family annihilations). Guns were used in almost half the Canadian cases and close to a third of the killings in England and Wales. Again, Wilson and Daly make a case that evolutionary drives are behind the murders even though, clearly, there's ultimately no fitness benefit for a father who kills himself after wiping out what's left of his gene pool. It's obviously a “maladaptation,” but it's fueled by evolution, just as in uxoricides, they argued. Some of the same jealousies that drive men to murder their wives can extend to the children in a familicide, wrote the researchers. If men suspect their wives have been unfaithful, they may also strongly suspect the children are not theirs. In this type of rage-driven familicide, the killer “professes a grievance against his wife, usually with respect to alleged infidelities and/or her intending or acting to terminate the marriage,” wrote Daly and Wilson.
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As for the wife, the man's thinking goes—the scientists believe—“If I can't have her, nobody can.” These “accusatory” familicides are often preceded by threats and actual violence against a wife, noted Daly and Wilson, who cited the case of a suicidal Canadian father who killed his wife and two young daughters after repeated violence to his wife and a threat to kill her and the children “if you ever leave me.”

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.
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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.
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“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.
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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 cash 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.