WARREN –– Light snowfall hid Halley’s Comet in the southwest sky on a cool evening in December 1985, when the police closed in on the little house on Baltimore Avenue.

The raid began with a knock.

James A. Soares, then 38, answered the door. When he saw police officers with a warrant, he screamed “Cops!” and slammed the door so hard he shattered the glass.

Soares and his wife, Marian, scrambled to flush evidence down the toilet, according to Warren police reports.

It was too late. The police sat the couple at the kitchen table and took inventory of the cocaine business run from a small house at the end of a quiet street: white powder, mirrors and straws, cash and guns.

At the kitchen table, Marian Soares sat with the couple’s 18-month-old baby, James Jr.

That baby, the police now say, would grow into a killer.

In the years following the drug raid, James Soares Sr. would join Narcotics Anonymous and would lead a “fairly model life,” according to a federal judge.

“A lot of people have a past,” says Tracey Rasmussen, a former neighbor and close friend to Marian. “They did something wrong. They’re real people. They paid the price. That’s not who they were.”

James and Marian had a great relationship, she says. “Some people just get comfortable with each other over the years, and some people are still in love. They were still in love.

“Their only problem,” Rasmussen says, “was James.”

James Jr.

“Big Jim” couldn’t say no to his son, Rasmussen says. There were the expensive sneakers, the cars, the money. James and his mother often clashed over the son’s alleged drug use, his attitude and his chronic unemployment, Rasmussen says.

“They gave him everything, but he wanted more, and he wanted more, and he wanted more,” she says.

Last weekend, the police returned to the little house on Baltimore Avenue. They found blood in the basement, maggots in the blood. And in the backyard cesspool, they found the bodies of James Sr. and Marian Soares, apparently beaten to death with a garden hoe.

James Soares Jr., cradled by his mother during the drug raid in 1985, is charged with his parents’ double murder.

The attorney general’s office, which will prosecute Warren’s first murder in 30 years, is still trying to answer the prime question about the killings:

Why?

JAMES AND MARIAN Soares were married 30 years ago, soon after James’ first marriage fell apart. James had been just 18 when he married Donna Soares, on Feb. 13, 1965, a day before Donna’s 18th birthday and seven months before the couple’s first daughter was born. They had another girl two years later.

In 1977, Donna Soares filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences and James Soares’ “extreme cruelty.” Donna Soares feared for her own safety and that of her children, according to Family Court documents. James had hit her, pushed her against a wall, tried to strangle her and threatened to burn her car, she said. Once, Donna Soares alleged, James smashed all her car windows with a sledgehammer. She moved out of the couple’s Barrington home to a Bristol apartment, which she said Soares broke into numerous times by stealing her keys or picking the lock with a credit card.

Their divorce was granted in 1979. Donna Soares was given primary custody of their children, ages 11 and 9 at the time.

Court papers do not say when James Soares began dealing drugs from his home in Warren. Anonymous tips led the police to put the house under surveillance in 1985. The police witnessed a variety of people visiting the house after dark and staying just a few minutes — a common signal of drug dealing. After a reliable informant told the police that Soares was selling cocaine, the Warren police applied for the search warrant. In the house, they found cocaine, marijuana and prescription pills, a scale for weighing drugs, $1,350 in a cashbox, “numerous” shotguns and rifles in the living room and a .357 Magnum handgun under a mattress.

James Soares admitted to felony drug charges in 1986 and served a three-year suspended sentence and five years’ probation. Marian Soares was arrested and charged. There is no record of whether she was prosecuted.

JAMES AND MARIAN were the first people Tracey Rasmussen and her husband, David, met when they moved to Baltimore Avenue in 1997. For eight years, the Rasmussens lived two houses away; Marian and Tracey became best friends and confidantes.

Rasmussen found Marian funny and caring. “A lot of people considered Marian their best friend,” she says. “She taught me how to have an open heart and how to be a true friend.”

Big Jim, as Rasmussen calls James Soares Sr., was a hard worker — an apprentice laborer with Laborers’ Local #271— who took pride in his property, a 670-square-foot house in a quiet neighborhood of single-family homes. The Soarses took motorcycle rides on James’ bike, and vacationed in South Carolina. Every summer they hosted a big neighborhood barbecue. Last year, Marian made mussels with hot sauce. James and his son played basketball together at a park across the street.

At age 15, James Jr. suffered a laceration to his cornea and a fracture to the bones around his right eye when a car in which he was a passenger crashed into a UPS truck slowing to make a delivery on Bristol Ferry Road in Portsmouth.

The Soareses were at James’ bedside in Rhode Island Hospital, where he stayed for five days. Hospital records show that Marian Soares had to be reassured by a nurse after she was “verbally upset” about a delay in getting her son to the CT-scan machine.

The family’s hospital bills totaled more than $25,000. James was out of school for two months.

The family filed a personal-injury civil suit against the 17-year-old driver and his father, who owned the car. In 2004, a court arbitrator awarded the Soareses $183,922.

James Jr., in court papers, said he expected that the partial vision loss, blurriness, headaches and sensitivity to light he suffered would be permanent.

AFTER MANY years without conflict with the law, James Soares Sr. was indicted in 2002 on federal weapons charges –– he had 15 rifles, shotguns and pistols at his home, but as a felon from the 1985 drug case, Soares was not allowed to have firearms.

He faced a maximum of 10 years in prison.

But in an unusual departure from federal sentencing guidelines –– which called for 37 to 46 months in prison –– U.S. District Judge Ernest C. Torres sentenced Soares to a year of home confinement and specifically allowed him to travel to work and to his ongoing drug counseling and Narcotics Anonymous meetings. He also permitted Soares to drive his wife to meetings with her psychologist.

Torres explained that he didn’t believe Soares kept firearms for any criminal intentions. “Your conviction was long ago,” Torres told Soares at sentencing, referring to the earlier drug-dealing case. “There is no suggestion that you have engaged in any illegal activities since then. It appears that you have led a fairly model life since that time.”

James Soares Jr. would soon begin his own tangles with the law. He was arrested by Warren police twice in 2005, first on a vandalism charge for throwing a rock at a woman’s car. Soares Jr. was placed on probation for one year. Six months later, he was charged with disorderly conduct and placed on probation for six more months.

His 20-year-old girlfriend, Nicole Pacheco, was arrested twice within six days this summer on charges of larceny for allegedly stealing an automobile GPS system and other items from parked cars in Warren and Bristol. Pacheco was also charged with possessing marijuana and tampering with a car. She was placed on probation for two years.

After kicking James Jr. and his girlfriend out of the house some time ago, the Soareses recently allowed the young couple to move back, says Rasmussen.

As of Friday afternoon, investigators were still looking for Pacheco, whom they have been unable to find since the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Soares.

Marian was recently seeing a therapist for depression over her rocky relationship with her son and also the back and heart problems that kept her out of work, Rasmussen says. Court documents show that Marian Soares had collected Social Security disability insurance since 2004 and suffered from “several medical and mental health issues.” She previously worked as a teacher’s aide for special-needs children and as a secretary at Regine Printing, in Providence.

Last November, Marian was arrested by Providence police for allegedly assaulting a woman involved in a dispute with Marian’s brother. Soares pleaded no contest and the case was filed.

A MEMORIAL has cropped up at a utility pole outside the little house on Baltimore Avenue.

People have left photos, candles, short poems –– proof that James and Marian were loved. Someone posted several No Trespassing signs on the property to warn people away from the home and its infamous cesspool. Family members of James and Marian reached by The Journal last week declined to be interviewed.

“I didn’t cry this hard when my mother died,” says Tracey Rasmussen, her eyes filling with tears. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with.”

“I just want people to know they were good people,” Rasmussen adds. “Everything was about family and friends for Marian.”

James A. Soares Jr. is due in Providence District Court on Friday for a bail hearing. He’s being held without bail at the Adult Correctional Institutions.

mwims@projo.com