TORONTO — What pushed Keith Delong over the edge? Why would the retired IBM employee stab to death his wife and two adult children, and then kill himself with a rifle?
As Toronto detectives Thursday pieced together a horrifying murder-suicide on a tidy residential Scarborough street, a catalogue of concerns emerged that may have been quietly building within the walls of the Delong family's modest bungalow.
The pressures of a remortgaged home, a volatile stock market, a shrinking family income and two ailing kin – one dependent on pricey medication – may have boiled over with violence.
There had been widespread speculation that the bloody interior of 12 Welwyn Ave. was the site of a quadruple murder and that the prime suspect was Mr. Delong's 44-year-old son-in-law, James Tompkins, led away from the crime scene in handcuffs, weeping.
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Police are still trying to piece together why someone killed their three family members and dog before committing suicide in an east-end Toronto home.

But after speaking to Mr. Tompkins for several hours and examining his townhouse in Whitby, just east of Toronto, police released the 44-year-old welder, concluding he had nothing to do with the slaughter that claimed the lives of Keith Delong, his wife Wanda and their two children, Elizabeth, 41, and Richard, 38.
Rather, Detective Sergeant Pauline Gray of the Toronto police homicide squad, said “the tragic deaths of the family was in fact a triple homicide-suicide.”
Autopsies are scheduled for Saturday Det. Sgt. Gray would not confirm the names of the victims or the killer, or say how any of them died.
Police sources confirmed, however, that detectives are certain the murders were committed by Keith Delong and that, after stabbing his family to death and also killing the family poodle, Charlotte, he shot himself.
Mr. Delong's fishing-lure-decorated hat was a common neighbourhood sight, in sun or snow, and residents struggled to understand the concerns percolating beneath its broad rim.
“I can't believe it,” said Katherine Harper, a neighbour, whose driveway Mr. Delong often shovelled. “They were both good, very nice people.”
Taped to the Welwyn Avenue bungalow's front door, below a loon-shaped welcome sign, was a note scribbled in blue ink on white paper. Written in a leaning, unsteady hand, it urged the reader not to step inside and to call police.
But there was no explanatory note offering what drove Mr. Delong to despair, and no criminal history. As far as is known, none of the four slain Delongs had had any prior contact with police.
What does seem clear is that Mr. Delong may have been under some financial pressure.
One concern may have been his mother-in-law, who lives in Mexico and is unwell – sufficiently so that on the same day the family were found dead, Keith and Wanda had been scheduled to head to Mexico to help care for her.
A second worry may have involved the couple's son Richard, who suffered from a degenerative bone disorder and lived in the basement of the beige-brick bungalow. Neighbours said his condition had worsened in recent years, that Richard was in an increasing amount of pain, and that the cost of his medication had risen.
A friend of Richard's who visited the crime scene Thursday said that a few years ago his condition had forced him to leave his job at Sears, where he had been a member of the IT department. Tears filled her eyes as she recalled that she had made plans to come over for pizza and a movie with Richard while his parents were away.
“They were such good, gentle people,” she said.
Keith Delong had recently incurred a slab of fresh debt, money that may conceivably have been sunk into some ailing investments. Certainly the timing would fit that scenario.
The Delongs purchased their home in 1975 for $60,000, and remortgaged it at least once before moving their banking arrangements to the Bank of Nova Scotia in 2002.
Mortgage documents show that on Sept. 30 of this year, Scotiabank registered a new mortgage with the Delongs for $240,000. How much the couple already owed the bank at that point is unclear, but the new mortgage was at least $70,000 more than the discharged mortgage it replaced.
At that stage – before Toronto's housing market began to weaken, and before severe turmoil began roiling financial markets – there may have been little reason for Scotiabank to hesitate about advancing cash to the couple. What the Delongs did with the extra money is unknown.
But if any of it was tied up in the stock market, they may have had some concern.
On Sept. 30, the TSX composite index stood at 11,752.90. By Nov. 18, the day before the killings, it had slumped to 8,835.73, a drop of roughly 25 per cent.


Summary: A recent muder of the Welwyn family has now been linked to the next door neihbours, and more precisely Mr. Delong. Other nieghbours say that they are shocked and said that the Delong family was a very nice one.

Questions:

1. What do you think made Mr.Delong do this?
2. Would you feel safe if you lived in that neighbourhood after this muderer?
3. What things in Mr.Delong's family might have put him in a depressioned state?