GARDEN CITY, N.Y. -- The closed caskets of a mother and her two daughters are blanketed in flowers, and a line of mourners stretched out the door of a Long Island funeral home during the wake for the three who were found brutally beaten and strangled last week.
Betty Parente, 58, and her daughters, Stephanie, 19, and Catherine, 11, were laid out in the Park Funeral Chapel in Garden City on Monday.
Manhattan tax lawyer William Parente beat and asphyxiated his wife and daughters in a Maryland hotel room, bought a knife and was later found dead with self-inflicted cuts in the room, near their bodies, police said.
Authorities have not listed a motive for the murders and suicide, but the FBI and others are investigating Parente's financial dealings.
