Killer Dads (15 page)

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 Pennsylvania
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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.
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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
.
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“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 reprisal 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.

“My worst nightmares are that in the spilt second before he shot her, Jill sensed him there or woke up and knew what was happening,” Foster's brother, Andrew, explained on the film. But even more troubling to his brother was what Foster—viewed as a “bully” by Andrew long before the murder-suicide—stole from Kirstie. “It's what's been taken away from her that I find the most difficult to come to terms with,” he said. “She was never given that choice. There were no questions asked; it was just taken away with the pull of a trigger.”

Foster's mom was devastated by the actions of a murderous son she didn't recognize, but still desperately missed, as much as she mourned the loss of her daughter-in-law and grandchild. She was left grappling with her own shaken ideals of love and family. “Your whole concept of everything changes,” said Enid Foster in the documentary. “But you always love your child, don't you? No matter what they did, you forgive them.”

Such family annihilations, or familicides, are almost exclusively
committed by fathers. This particular “brand” of murder-suicide, like William Parente's, usually involves white males of apparently moderate to well-to-do means. They're often committed with a gun and are frequently preceded by a financial fall, usually with some kind of extra humiliation—court cases, bankruptcy, charges of fraud, or a firing. Murder-suicides, including family annihilations—whether fueled by rage or a twisted sense of concern—are on the rise in the United States. The number of murder-suicides in the United States increased a third in six months of 2011,
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compared to the same period in 2007,
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from an average of nine incidents each week to 12 each week. The number of deaths jumped 34 percent to 691 in those months. In 2011, 80 percent of all murder-suicides in the nation occurred in the home,
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and family annihilators accounted for most of all murder-suicide incidents with three or more victims.
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Close to three-fourths of murder-suicides in the United States the last several years have involved the murder of an intimate partner or spouse, almost always by a male.
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In 2008, 45 of the victims in murder-suicides in a sixth-month period were children, and 55 were kids in 2011.
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Forty-four children witnessed some aspect of the crime in that time in 2008,
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with 66 surviving child witnesses in 2011.
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An estimate of 1,382 murder-suicide deaths for all of 2011 is extrapolated only from media accounts tracked periodically since 2002 by the Violence Policy Center, a non-profit organization in Washington, DC. There are no official statistics for the phenomenon; no government agency tallies murder-suicides. The numbers are only part of the picture for another reason. Figures gleaned by the Violence Policy Center don't include family annihilations in which the father (at least 90 percent of familicides over the years have been committed by dads) either doesn't attempt to commit suicide or fails in a halfhearted attempt, a more common situation when intimate partners and children are killed in a rage, as opposed to what Parente or Foster might have rationalized as “mercy killings” committed out of a sense of love and protectiveness.

Family annihilations like Parente's are a tiny subset of homicides, and a small portion of child homicides, yet they draw the attention of domestic-violence experts because they are so confounding—generally committed by upstanding, devoted fathers with little or no history of domestic violence—
and because their secrets may help unlock a hidden, elemental vulnerability to violence and a susceptibility to social stresses that lie deep within even apparently strong, healthy families. “Even though familicides are relatively rare, they raise critical questions about the very fabric of modern social life,” said Northern Arizona University sociology professor Neil Websdale, who has extensively studied the phenonmenon.
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Richard Gelles, one of the nation's leading experts on domestic violence, and currently the dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Policy and Practice, believes familicides demand attention. Family annihilators “either view their family members as possessions that they control, or don't see any boundaries between their identity, their wife, and their children. And so these are ‘suicides' of the entire family, where the overly enmeshed individual can't bear to leave the pain behind and so takes his wife and children with him,” Gelles explained at a 2010 videotaped conference focusing on research regarding domestic and sexual violence held in Arlington, Virginia, by the National Institute of Justice. “What commonality do you find in these guys? They're the atypical ones for whom there isn't much of a record of domestic violence or of child abuse. They're the ones where the neighbors typically say, ‘He would be the last person on earth I would see doing that.'” Gelles has noted similarities between such a father and the leader of a cult: “It's a different kind of cult. It's a cult with the father/husband seeing himself as the head of the family, the king, the Jim Jones, and everybody's going to drink the Kool-Aid because Jim Jones doesn't want to be around any longer. Cult mass killings seem to also be male-driven. I can't think of the last female cult leader who had a mass killing involved with her.”