Family’s End a Tale of Sad Recrimination

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. —  Jeffrey McIntosh saw the hose in the car window, the blue exhaust fumes and his parents next to him in the Cadillac parked in the garage of their $350,000 lakefront home.

“For all of his 8 years, he knew what was going on,” wrote his father, 72-year-old developer Bob McIntosh. “He begged us to stop and we did. It was the most awful day of our lives. . . .”

So they turned off the car, went into the house and went to sleep. Jeffrey missed a day of school--his only absence of the year--but he never told his teachers at the exclusive Palm Beach Day School.

That was Jan. 8. It was supposed to have been, McIntosh wrote later, an anguished act of revenge aimed at what he saw as his ungrateful grown son, Robert Jr.

Last month, McIntosh and his wife, Marcia, 49, completed that act, carefully packing and labeling their belongings, indicating who should get each item.

They left a neat arrangement of financial documents, family pictures, a list of friends and relatives’ phone numbers and letters on the kitchen counter.

And they taped a note on the gate for the pool man: “There’s been a terrible accident, call 911.”

Then McIntosh, a foundering alcoholic whose financial empire was crumbling, and his wife went into their son’s room. McIntosh shot Jeffrey and the boy’s mother, a willing victim who was holding her son and her rosary, and turned the gun on himself.

Police found their pajama-clad bodies March 17. The only loose end was the family dog, Ajax, a friendly bichon frise who had been left without food and water in the house in an exclusive West Palm Beach neighborhood.

Marcia McIntosh typed a poignant farewell letter to the local newspaper, beginning: “This will be a headline, and I am sorry to have to be it.”

She offered a chilling tip to parents: “The message here is to love your children and educate them, but keep your business in your name--and all the shares.”

Her husband explained in his suicide letter that the deaths were intended to forever remind his grown son from an earlier marriage, Robert A. McIntosh Jr., of what they considered his betrayal.

The elder McIntosh had made his first millions in Toronto in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, his company, Robert McIntosh Holdings Inc., built the 600-home Counterpoint Estates in Royal Palm Beach. He invited Robert Jr. and two business associates into the Florida development venture, keeping only 30% for himself.

They thrived until the savings and loan crisis in the mid-1980s cost them millions.

McIntosh told of being forced from the company seven years ago by his son and his two other business partners because of his alcoholism. And he said his pleas to his still-wealthy son for financial help went mostly unanswered.

“Alcohol was just an easy excuse for you to get rid of me,” he wrote. “I wasn’t coming to the office anymore and had no more money, so dump the old man. Put me out on the street at age 67 to start over.”

He wrote that he had been unable to sell the lakefront house and couldn’t pay his bills. His wife, who hadn’t worked in 24 years, had been unable to find a job that would pay more than $5.50 an hour, he added. His remaining business venture, an office plaza, faced foreclosure.

The humiliation was too much to bear. Last fall, McIntosh tried unsuccessfully to kill himself by slitting his wrists. He then went into therapy.

He said the failed asphyxiation attempt in January was also aimed at Robert Jr. “Our intention was to die on your birthday,” he wrote. “We wanted you to remember the day that your cold and heartless actions, lack of love and compassion, caused the destruction of a perfectly good family.

“I am dead now, Bob, so do a dead man a favor. . . . Since we literally have no money, please pay for our cremations.”

Robert Jr. and one of the partners, Peter Cowie, said through a spokeswoman that they would not comment. The other partner, Donald Bainbridge, did not answer messages left at his home.

McIntosh’s former tenants recalled him as a friendly landlord always flexible about late payments and considerate about making repairs.

Nicholas Sheffer, a chiropractor at McIntosh’s Palm Beach Executive Plaza, was especially upset about Jeffrey’s death. “We would have gladly adopted Jeffrey,” Sheffer said, choking back tears.

That was not an option Marcia McIntosh would consider.

“There has been such a great love and dependency between Bob, Jeffrey and I that Bob and I saw no way to leave Jeffrey behind as a financial burden upon another,” she wrote.