Beatrice A. (Cabral) Langelier, 60, of Cumberland, with Yorkshire terriers Molly, Lily and Bentley. She and her husband of almost 40 years are being buried separately.

Courtesy of the family

NORTH SMITHFIELD — The cemetery of St. John the Evangelist parish sits on a hillside, overlooking the Slatersville Reservoirs, just south of the white-steeple church.

A granite slab marks the entrance to the treeless plot of sloping land filled with headstones, some dating to the early 1800s.

It’s the kind of small town cemetery where, after a funeral, people wander among the graves looking for the final resting place of a friend or relative so they can briefly pay their respects.

As the sun reaches its noontime apex, a soft breeze off the water soothes the funeral procession following a black hearse along the short path from the church.

At the very back of the cemetery, facing the bordering woodlands, a freshly dug grave awaits. An adjacent headstone bears the name of John C. Cabral, a longtime town resident and machinist who died in 1991 at the age of 86. On this day, his daughter, Beatrice A. Langelier, 60, will be laid to rest beside him.

The family eases the wheelchair of Beatrice’s 95-year-old mother, Lillian, her eyes swollen and red, up to the light brown wood casket.

Norman V. Langelier wanted to be buried alongside Beatrice, his wife of nearly 40 years. He made this last request in a note left on the passenger seat of his pickup truck.

It was a request that Beatrice’s family did not honor.

They made up their minds after the police determined that Norman, 61, had shot and killed Beatrice before ending his own life in a fiery explosion that leveled the couple’s stately residence on Nate Whipple Highway in Cumberland.

Norman, says Beatrice’s older sister, Linda Thibault, asked too much. “It’s really hard to bury the sister you loved with the man who killed her.”

THE YOUNGEST of three children, Beatrice was especially close to her mother. She checked in with her by phone three times a day and often brought her dinner. The day she was murdered was no different.

On that Wednesday, April 9, Beatrice ran some afternoon errands. At 5:30 p.m., she talked to her mother. The two made plans to have dinner the next day.

Typically, they dined at the two-story white house on Main Street in North Smithfield where Beatrice and her siblings, Dennis, 65, and Linda, 64, were raised and where Lillian still lives.

Everything about the call was normal — her mother detected no fear or urgency in Beatrice’s voice.

Roughly two hours later, Beatrice was dead, killed by a single shot to the back of her head. The police told Thibault that the medical examiner established the hour of death at about 7:30 p.m.

Norman probably spent the next nine hours planning his own demise. He placed five or six propane tanks in locations inside the house.

He put one tank in the bed of his pickup truck and affixed a handwritten sign: “Firemen, please do not enter/Explosives, gunpowder, ammo inside the house.”

Norman was a gun collector. The police say he had about 40 weapons in his home arsenal, some of which he used at a shooting club, the Cumberland Beagle Club, across the street.

At some point Norman wrote another note, this one on a single sheet of paper. He left it on the truck’s passenger seat, along with a briefcase and other personal effects.

How the fire started is a question the state fire marshal’s staff is still trying to answer. Rhode Island State Police Lt. John Blessing, who is acting fire marshal, says the office has not determined whether it was a fire followed by a series of explosions, or an explosion that triggered the fire. Investigators say that the starting point was probably in the basement or first floor.

However it happened, a loud explosion rocked the house shortly before 4:30 a.m. Thursday, April 10. Neighbors awoke to find the 3,300-square-foot house ablaze, with flames shooting up as high as 30 feet. They heard the rat-tat-tat of exploding ammunition.

Firefighters, heeding the warning on the handmade sign and hearing the explosions, stayed back and watched the house burn.

By about 6:30 a.m., the fire was under control and rescue workers descended upon the rubble. Television crews had video of the fire ready for the early morning news shows.

The phone rang at the Thibault home at 6:40 a.m. A nurse at Thundermist Health Center in Woonsocket, Linda had not yet started to dress for work.

The friend told her to switch on the morning news, which was carrying a report of a stunning overnight fire at her sister’s home in Cumberland. Thibault, president of the Town Council in North Smithfield, called local police, who put her in touch with Michael Kinch, the deputy police chief in Cumberland. He didn’t have many details, but he did tell her that a letter had been found.

Cumberland Mayor Daniel J. McKee, a friend, called to escort her to the scene.

When she got there, the police told her no bodies had been recovered, but it was obvious to her that no one would be found alive.

She didn’t stay long. She went to her mother’s home to break the bad news. Then she returned home, shut off the TV, and waited.

Norman’s brother, Stephen, and a sister and at least one nephew also visited the scene.

Firefighters found the first body by late morning. The second was found by 1 p.m. Both were badly burned and dental records were necessary to identify them.

The worst was yet to come.

LATE THE next afternoon, Cumberland Police Chief John Desmarais disclosed that the fire was no accident. The state medical examiner had determined that Beatrice was murdered and that Norman committed suicide. Beatrice died from skull fractures and brain injuries resulting from a gunshot wound to the head, and Norman died from multiple blunt force injuries from the explosions.

Why had Norman killed Beatrice?

The letter Norman left behind — one the police characterize as a suicide note –– offers few answers and little insight into his state of mind.

“It wasn’t angry, it wasn’t … anything,” Linda Thibault says of the letter, which the police decline to release.

Undated and addressed to no one, it was “a rather benign note” with a “few paragraphs” and “a lot of words.”

Thibault was unmoved.

Norman does not admit to killing his wife, or to setting off the explosions that would take his life and level his home.

“There is nothing that specific.”

Yet, “You knew from the note that that is what he did. There is no doubt that he did what he did.”

THE LACK of emotion in Norman’s letter fits Thibault’s image of her brother-in-law.

He was not personable. He had few friends. He could be quiet and withdrawn at times. He was even estranged from some members of his own family.

“He was just not a warm and fuzzy guy,” Thibault says.

Norman did not like social gatherings, especially large ones, which is why Thibault found it strange when a few months earlier he had proposed having a celebration for the Langeliers’ 40th wedding anniversary.

“It was not like him,” she says.

Thibault was helping her sister with the details for the June celebration. It would be at Bella Restaurant in Burrillville. There would be 150 guests and a band to play ’50s music.

“He said to Bea, ‘We should celebrate because we might not make it to our 50th,’ ” recalls Thibault. She took it as a joke then. Now she wonders if it was something more.

What Norman did like was building his collections. Of guns. Of furniture. Of antiques. “He liked his things, his possessions.”

He lived a regimented life. “He’d always been a meticulous man. Orderly to the nth degree. He valued perfection.”

Yet it does not appear that he was particularly demanding or overbearing, at least not to Beatrice.

She was a perfect counterbalance. Where he was introverted and reticent, Beatrice was outgoing and social. She loved the Red Sox and the music of Jimmy Buffet. She loved to dance.

“Bea knew everyone,” agrees Wanda Greaves, her friend for over 25 years. “If she didn’t know you, she soon would.”

Beatrice and Norman began dating while they were juniors in high school. He was a student at Mount St. Charles Academy in Woonsocket. She was at the now shuttered St. Clare’s High School, also in Woonsocket.

They married June 14, 1968, soon after Norman graduated from Norwich University in Northfield, Vt. He served in the Army and Beatrice worked as an assistant in the tax assessor’s office in North Smithfield and attended the former secretarial school Katharine Gibbs, when it was in Providence.

Both were very “scheduled people,” not the type to “go with the flow.” They crafted their days exactly how they wanted them and rarely changed plans on a whim. In that way, they were kindred spirits.

“The typical type-A personalities,” says Thibault. “Strapping, healthy and fastidious about appearances.”

WITHIN DAYS of the tragedy, people were quick to speculate that the murder was a crime of passion. Maybe Norman had discovered that Beatrice had had an affair, or that she was planning to leave him.

But there was no affair, says Thibault. Norman was not seeing another woman, and Beatrice was not seeing another man, as far as anyone in the family knew. Nor did Norman suggest that possibility in his suicide note.

There were no indications that the childless couple was separating or that the marriage was failing. As far as anyone in the family could tell, the two loved each other and led a life of affluence and ease.

Their home, a four-bedroom Colonial with yellow clapboards and white trim, sat on 7.2 acres, far back from Nate Whipple Highway, a busy east-west road. Built in 1989, the house had a two-car garage, a rear porch and a barn in the back. Norman bought it in 1999. “The house was second to none,” says neighbor Thomas St. Godard.

They had the finest furniture. Tasteful décor. The right lighting. “Think Home & Garden or Martha Stewart Living,” says Thibault with a bit of awe.

The house reflected Beatrice’s refined taste. “She could have been an interior decorator, she was so good at it,” says Greaves, a pastor at the United Methodist Church in Burrillville.

Beatrice had a comfortable life. She doted on her three Yorkshire terriers — Molly, Lily and Bentley — and her nieces and nephews. She was stylish, always dressed “like she had stepped out of Vogue magazine,” her friend says.

She worked outside the home for perhaps one year of her life. Instead she kept busy with volunteer work. She was a volunteer guide for the Historical Society of Sanibel Island in Florida, where the couple kept a second home. They spent large chunks of the year there.

Thibault says she never got the sense that her sister was unhappy, much less in an abusive relationship.

“To the naked eye, they had the perfect life.”

THE BEST GUESS as to why Norman Langelier murdered his wife and then took his own is tied to money troubles.

His suicide note “alluded to financial problems,” but, Thibault says, it does not mention his business. “It was more about ‘providing’ for people, for Bea. Whatever that means.”

The company, Barber Electrical Manufacturing in North Attleboro, makes metal electrical equipment and supplies. It has been in operation since 1912. Norman has been its sole owner since at least 2001, according to Massachusetts corporation records.

Located across the street from the town police station, it employs 22 people and generates an estimated $1.5 million in sales, according to Manta.com, a business-information Web site.

The one-story factory resumed operations last week, after closing April 10, the day of the fire. An employee, who declined to give his name, said that operations managers were keeping the company going while the ownership of the company is resolved.

Property records at Cumberland Town Hall do not hint of any financial problems. Norman took out his first mortgage on the house at 500 Nate Whipple Highway in 1999, a $262,000, 30-year loan from Citicorp Mortgage, of St. Louis, Mo.

He took out another $300,000 loan in November 2002, again for 30 years, from First Alliance Bank in Jacksonville, Fla. At the start of 2003, he paid off his first mortgage and added Beatrice’s name to the deed. There are no liens on the property, and the characteristically meticulous Norman was up to date on his tax payments, according to town records.

But even if Barber Electric was failing financially –– which Thibault doubts –– or there was something else looming, it should not have been a big deal, she says.

“They had many, many other assets. It didn’t have to come to this.”

PERHAPS NORMAN realized that he was asking too much.

If he could not be buried next to Beatrice, as he requested in his final letter, he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered on the couple’s property.

It is not clear if that will happen. No funeral arrangements have yet been made for Norman. Attempts to contact his relatives last week were unsuccessful.

Beatrice’s family holds “no malice” toward the Langelier family, says Thibault.

The Langeliers and Cabrals grew up on the same block on Main Street in North Smithfield, just three houses down from each other.

Norman’s two brothers, Geoffrey and Stephen, asked if they could attend the funeral services for Beatrice. The answer was yes. “Norman’s family did nothing wrong,” Thibault says. If anything, they are in a tougher position. “He is lost, and he is the cause of all of this, and they have to deal with that.”

But there will be no forgiveness, no understanding, no sympathy for Norman anytime soon. “We’re not there yet.” Thibault’s bitterness is apparent from the narrowed eyes and clenched, forced smile. “We are human beings.”

No one may ever learn what drove Norman Langelier to do what he did. He took his story with him.

Thibault says the note left her believing that Norman had determined to end his own life, but out of a “twisted” belief that everything under his roof was his, he resolved to destroy it all. Call it selfishness.

That is all that Beatrice’s family has left to believe. It had come down to keeping for himself what he valued the most, his possessions. Beatrice included. “I think he decided if he was taking his life, he was taking everything with him and no one else could have it,” Thibault says.

Thibault could grant Norman his material possessions. Every man should have something he is willing to die for. But, her voice firm, her eyes unblinking, she will argue: “He had the right to take his own life, but not hers.”

pmarcelo@projo.com