PEEKSKILL - Police thought they were investigating just one death - a young man's suicide - until they went to see his ex-girlfriend and found she'd been killed with the same weapon.

Now they believe Joel Diaz Garcia killed Kristin Kudelka in her parents' Peekskill home, then drove to a riverfront park and killed himself.

He and the sawed-off rifle were found near the bank of the Hudson River.

Kudelka, 25, had stopped dating Garcia a few months earlier, Peekskill police Chief Eugene Tumolo said Monday, but they apparently had some kind of ongoing relationship. A friend, Lisa Winkler, told The Journal News that Kudelka told her, “We're still really close.”

Kudelka, who lived in Poughkeepsie, liked to ride horses and Garcia, 23, was a caretaker at a Dutchess County horse farm.

Tumolo refused to elaborate on the relationship, but added, “Relationships can be deadly.”

He said there was no sign of forced entry at the residence where Kudelka had been house-sitting for her vacationing parents.

The investigation began when Garcia was found dead on Saturday.

He had a key chain tag from a Poughkeepsie restaurant, and a worker at the restaurant led detectives to Garcia's brother.

The brother told them about the relationship with Kudelka.

They found Kudelka fully dressed in her bedroom, dead from a shot to the back of her head.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions,” Tumolo said.