Cape Coral police confirm mother shoots son in murder-suicide

Tuesday, Cape Coral Police Department responded to a home where a mother and son were both found dead and began to conduct a death investigation. Police have now determined the mother shot the family dog, her son, and then herself.

Cape Coral Police confirms Joanne Lynn Walpole, 59, shot and killed her son, Michael Edward Walpole, 37, before killing herself at her home in Cape Coral.

Amid the death investigation, we also confirmed Michael was a convicted sex offender. He was arrested in 2012 after admitting to accusations against him. Michael was convicted of a crime against a child under 16 years old, which he served two years in prison for.

There is no confirmed information if that factored into the investigation.

Neighbor Erika Lefande said she knew Joanne for 12 years and won’t forget their last conversation.

“I asked her, ‘How are you feeling? ‘How’s everything going?’” Lefande said. “And she said, ‘I feel great,’ and that night she was dead. So I don’t know what took place In that house.”

And, that night, Lefande says one of her neighbors told her she heard a disturbance at Joanne’s home.

“My neighbor over here said, when she was walking by at nine o’clock at night, she heard someone scream, ‘No,’ coming from the house.”

Lefande told us her daughter used to go over to Joanne’s home to play with her granddaughter. That changed when Michael moved back into the home.

“It’s weird because she had kind of said things to me to give me a heads up to keep my kids away from there,” Lefande said.

The family dog was removed by Lee County Animal Control and has survived.