"It clearly was not a happy, friendly separation," Lt. Randy Horowitz of the Chesterfield County (Va.) Police said Monday.
Last weekend, authorities say, their breakup exploded into a level of rage that no one could have predicted.
Late Friday or early Saturday, police say, an armed Leonard Egland, 37, went to the house he owned but no longer occupied.
In an upstairs bedroom, he fatally shot 40-year-old Scott Allred, his estranged wife's boyfriend. In the nearby master bathroom, he shot Doylestown native Carrie Egland, 36, multiple times, killing her.
And with a single shot, police say, Leonard Egland also killed Allred's 7-year-old son, Morgan. Police found no sign of a break-in or struggle before the gunfire.
Then, as Hurricane Irene swept northward up the East Coast, so did Leonard Egland and his wave of violence.
About 9 p.m. Saturday, police say, he pulled his black pickup truck into a long, wooded driveway off Church School Road in Buckingham Township, Bucks County.
As winds whipped and rain from the hurricane poured, he broke a glass door pane, reached inside, and unlatched the dead bolt of the house where his widowed mother-in-law lived alone.
Barbara Ruehl, 66, who reportedly suffered from medical problems, never got up from her easy chair, District Attorney David Heckler said. Police would find her there hours later, shot once in the head.
Leaving the house alongside Egland was his small daughter, Lauryn, who, according to published reports, is 5 or 6. Police in both states theorize that he had brought her from Virginia, but have not ruled out that she had been visiting Ruehl.
In the increasingly bizarre hours that followed, Egland would deposit his daughter safely before midnight at St. Luke's Hospital in Quakertown, where the girl announced, "Grandmom went to heaven."
