The death of Belinda Taylor last week marked the state’s sixth homicide of the year – and the third that occurred as the result of a domestic violence dispute.

According to Public Safety spokesman Steve McCausland, autopsy results indicated that the April 28 deaths of Westbrook couple Belinda and Ken Taylor were a murder-suicide, in which Ken Taylor stabbed his wife to death before killing himself.

Monday, friends packed the Westbrook-Warren Congregational Church for a joint funeral for the couple, where they shared stories about the Taylors, focusing not on the tragedy, but on the positive impact they had on the lives of others.

McCausland said the Taylors’ deaths came two weeks after Belinda Taylor told her husband she wanted to get divorced.

Lois Reckitt, executive director of Family Crisis Services, said of the 31 homicides in the state last year, 22 could be attributed to domestic violence.

She said the best course of action for a person who wants to get out of an abusive relationship is to seek help from a domestic violence program and develop a safety plan “before you walk out the door,” she said.

“Murder-suicides don’t come out of nowhere,” she said. “The most frequent trigger point for this is for the wife to decide to do what everyone is telling her to do, which is to get out of there.”

Reckitt said that other than reading about the Taylors’ deaths in the news, she was not familiar with the couple’s relationship, but was not surprised to hear that Ken Taylor was described by those who knew him as a caring, affable man.

“This may not have been an act of violence,” she said, but one borne out of the notion that “if I can’t have you, no one can.”

Reckitt said she also was not surprised that police had been called to the Taylors twice before in the past 10 years, or that no charges had been filed, which she described as a typical scenario.

However, knowing the recent efforts by Police Chief Bill Baker to prevent domestic violence, Reckitt said if those incidents, which occurred in 1999 and 2000, had happened this year, she believes they wouldn’t have gone unnoticed.

Baker said the deaths came on the same day he was scheduled to have a conference call with representatives from the Maine Association of Psychiatric Physicians and the Maine Council of Churches to craft a public service announcement for statewide distribution to prevent suicides and murder-suicides.

According to Baker, his department has received more than 100 domestic violence calls in the past six months, or about 18 per month, which, he said, is a conservative estimate, because many are categorized differently, for example, as sexual assault, harassment or attempted suicide.

“The number is a moving target,” he said.

At the funeral Monday, friends, family members, and co-workers passed around a microphone and talked about what remarkable people the Taylors were.

Belinda Taylor, they said, could talk all day. She loved to travel and was passionate about her work as an aerobics instructor. They said Ken Taylor was a talented basketball player, who was quick to lend a hand and always knew how to make the people around him smile and laugh. Most of all, they were remembered as loving parents.

Ken Taylor had worked in the warehouse at Overhead Door Co. on Riverside Street in Portland for the past nine years. Though his co-workers were initially reluctant to talk about Taylor, they shared their thoughts late last week.

“In nine years, I’ve never seen him lose his temper,” said Robyn Manchester, who was friends with Taylor both at and outside of work. She said he talked about his family every day.

“This is a shock to every party involved,” said Angela Louros. “Not to see his happy, smiling face every day is painful.”