Killer Dads (12 page)

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 Catherine 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.

Figure 5.4. Catherine, Bill, Betty, and Stephanie Parente pose for a Christmas photo in 2006. The family did a holiday photograph with the same studio each year for 18 years the day after Thanksgiving.
Reprinted by permission from Portraits by Joanne.

Quinn spent hours gabbing with Betty on her cell phone the Tuesday after Easter as Marianne drove to Boston to visit colleges with her high-school-aged son, and Betty never mentioned plans for the family's trip to Loyola the following day. “The only thing odd was our conversation about sharing a baby gift for the grandchild of a friend of ours,” recalled Quinn. “I suggested a small swing you can set up in the house, which would have cost us about $50 apiece. But she said it was too expensive—the kind of thing I had never heard from her—and that she wanted to spend half that amount.” The following day, the Parentes were on the road to collect Stephanie. “She never mentioned anything to me about going to Loyola,” recalled Quinn.

———

Someone else surprised by the family's trip was the college sophomore. Stephanie was perturbed when she got the call that her parents and sister
were coming down. She had just left home Monday, and the family was already back on the road to visit her 48 hours later. She was settling in to classes after the Easter break and had a major chemistry exam coming up after the weekend. It was unusual for Stephanie to ever be testy. The high-voltage, long-haired brunette was almost always up, and her peals of laughter could be heard across campus. She was sassy and funny. While so many female students wore the standard college “uniform” of black North Face jackets, Stephanie had opted for the hot-pink version of the parka. She liked to stand out, and she did, even though she barely tipped the scales at 90 pounds and wasn't nearly 5 feet tall (though insisted she was). She was so petite that her nickname was “Little Steph,” which distinguished her from “Big Stephanie,” another of five Loyola suitemates who called themselves “The Mates.”

Stephanie liked to party, enjoyed dressing up in a “naughty nurse” costume for Halloween one year, and, just like her mom, threw herself into activities and connected deeply with her pals. She warned friends their work lives could be a grind, so they should enjoy life whenever they could. But Stephanie was also a serious student, and serious about a career, as were each of her suitemates, and they shared their plans for the future. They were each preparing to spend junior year abroad, and Stephanie intended to go to Newcastle, England. In fact, there was a meeting for students and families the following week at Loyola about spending junior year abroad, which made it even odder that her parents were coming down just days after Easter.

Julieanne Malley, one of Steph's closest friends of their group, seemed to have a sixth sense that week about something troubling. She watched out for her roomie. She knew Stephanie needed some extra sleep, needed to study, and needed to relax because she was nervous about the chem test. But she also knew Stephanie wanted to please her parents. Julieanne kept tabs on her friend's plans and spoke briefly with the Parentes Saturday morning at breakfast at a campus cafeteria. She knew Steph's mom slightly more than her dad because Betty was so outgoing. Bill Parente was quieter, but polite and friendly. He worked along with Julieanne's dad getting their daughters settled when they had first moved into their suite. That Saturday, Steph planned to spend a few hours with her family, watch a Loyola lacrosse game,
then return to study. That had generally been the routine since the family arrived on Wednesday. Stephanie would attend classes and study, then meet up with them for shopping or meals, and would head back to her own suite to spend the night in. Saturday afternoon in Garden City, meanwhile, Quinn stopped at the Parentes' house to show Betty some magazine clippings on alternate baby gifts to buy together. She was surprised Betty wasn't at home, and noticed newspapers and a bill for an awning outside the front door, indicating the Parentes hadn't been home for days. Quinn rang her pal on her cell phone. Betty explained they had suddenly decided to take a trip to visit “the sister,” referring to Steph. She “sounded happy, a bit rushed and breathless, and mentioned they were going to some kind of game,” said Quinn.