TOWSON, Md. - A father shoots his wife and three children to death and then kills himself. A few days later and about 40 miles away, a family of four turns up dead in a hotel room in another apparent murder-suicide.

The two chilling cases in Maryland in the last week are the latest in a string of family slayings and subsequent suicides that leave neighbors and friends grasping for answers when entire households around them are suddenly wiped out by violence.

Authorities on Tuesday revealed more details about the family from New York's Long Island found in a hotel north of Baltimore the day before. Baltimore County police described the deaths as a murder-suicide, but did not indicate who was the killer or how the family died.

They seemed like an ideal family: William Parente was a lawyer, his wife Betty a stay-at-home mom active in the community. Their daughters were well-liked by teachers and classmates.

Friends and neighbors said they never suspected anything was amiss and were dumbfounded to learn the family was found dead at the hotel after they failed to check out on time.

Experts say that's typical of family killings. Several similar high-profile cases in recent months have been tied to families' economic woes, though there's no indication that was the case with the Parentes.

They lived in a neighborhood of million-dollar homes in Garden City, N.Y., next to a golf course. William, 59, was a tax and estate planning attorney who commuted to Manhattan. Betty, 58, volunteered.

They were in Maryland to visit older daughter Stephanie, 19, a sophomore at Loyola College in Baltimore. With them was her sister, Catherine, 11, a sixth-grader at Garden City Middle School.

The Parentes ate breakfast together Sunday morning and an employee of the hotel saw them together Sunday afternoon. On Monday, after they failed to check out of their room on time, a housekeeper found their bodies.

Cpl. Michael Hill, a police spokesman, said that the Parentes were not shot or stabbed. He declined to release the results of autopsies conducted Tuesday.

Maryland was already dealing with a similar tragedy when word of the Parentes' deaths began to spread. Sometime late Thursday night or Friday morning, a father in the northwestern Maryland city of Frederick fatally shot his wife and their three young children, police said.

The father, Christopher Wood, 34, then shot himself. Police revealed Tuesday that the family was having extreme financial problems.

An analysis by the Violence Policy Center in Washington, D.C., found an average of nine or 10 murder-suicides a week. But familicides in which both parents and all their children are killed generally only happen two o said Kristen Rand, legislative director for the center, a nonprofit gun-control advocacy group.

Familicides have also occurred this year in Los Angeles and Santa Clara, Calif., and in Belle Valley, Ohio.