COPPELL, Texas – The mayor of an upscale Dallas suburb apparently shot her teenage daughter to death before fatally shooting herself, after leaving notes at their home warning officers about the scene they would find and outlining how to manage family affairs, police said Wednesday.

An envelope taped to the front door of Mayor Jayne Peters’ home contained a key to the house and a typed note advising police they would discover something unpleasant inside, Coppell Deputy Police Chief Steve Thomas said.

Three other notes contained instructions for handling affairs, such as taking care of the family dogs, but did not provide explanations for the deaths of the 55-year-old Peters and her 19-year-old daughter, Corinne.

“It appeared to me that there had been some thought,” Thomas said.

Police found the bodies Tuesday after the mayor failed to show up at a city council meeting. They said the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Wednesday that the case should be officially classified as a homicide-suicide investigation.

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COPPELL, Texas – Four notes were found at a home where the mayor of an upscale Dallas suburb apparently shot her 19-year-old daughter to death before fatally shooting herself, police said Wednesday.

An envelope taped to the front door of Mayor Jayne Peters’ home contained a key to the house and a typed note warning police they would find something unpleasant inside, Coppell Deputy Police Chief Steve Thomas said.

Three other notes contained instructions for managing family affairs, such as taking care of the dogs, but did not provide explanations for the deaths of Peters and her 19-year-old daughter, Corinne.

“It appeared to me that there had been some thought,” Thomas said.

Police found the bodies Tuesday after the mayor failed to show up at a city council meeting. They said the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled Wednesday that the case should be officially classified as a homicide-suicide investigation.

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As the 2010 World Cup trots to its Sunday climax, fans of the sport we call soccer and the rest of the globe calls football were reveling in the excitement the event has stoked in North America. TV ratings, through Wednesday’s semifinal matches, are up 36% over the 2006 games. Two weeks ago, the Saturday afternoon U.S.-Ghana game pulled 14.9 million viewers, the third highest U.S. audience for any men’s Cup match ever, and the largest for a game not shown in prime time.

This seeming surge has buoyed soccer’s most ardent admirers among the sportswriting and chattering classes. They get steamed when fans of football, baseball and basketball mock soccer’s severe scoring shortage, its amateur officiating, the whiny theatricality of prima-donna players feigning injury at the slightest contact. They believe that, this time, the World Cup has put an end to decades of American ignorance of the beautiful game. Surely now we will join the rest of the world and support soccer as a major professional sport. (See pictures from the 2010 World Cup.)

Naaah. In mass fandom, Americans‘ interest in soccer is a quadrennial anomaly, like the Olympics, the Presidential election and Leap Year superstore sales. We pay attention briefly, and then for four years we don’t. Consider NBC’s ratings for this February’s Winter Olympics. They were 14% higher than in 2006, but that won’t increase the long-term profile of bobsled or curling – or, among professional team sports, ice hockey, which spiked during the Olympics, then sagged to the usual levels soon after the NHL resumed play. In the past month, sports fans acceded to the 24-hour hype machine at ESPN (which, along with Univision, paid $435 million for TV rights) and watched a few games. Maybe they got involved, and resolved to follow the sport. This too shall pass, when the final games ends; and World Cup fever will again abate into soccer ague. (See pictures from the Vancouver Winter Olympics.)

Even in our brief hot spells, not many of us watch soccer, at least compared to the rest of the world. We think of American footbal’s annual Super Bowl as the highest-rated TV show. But the most widely watched show in TV history was the 2006 World Cup final between Italy and France, which lured anywhere from 400 million to 700 million. Even on the low end, that would mean that the game was seen by one in every 15 humans on the planet – and plenty of them have no access to a television set. The best the U.S. could do, for the U.S.-Ghana match, was one in 20 Americans. And, on Thursday, more of us watched another sporting event where nothing happened: ESPN’s broadcast of the LeBron James “decision.” As for the all-time top U.S. audience for any soccer game, that rating was earned by a women’s match: the 1999 U.S.-China final. In the 11 years since, women’s soccer hasn’t exactly challenged the popularity of the NFL.

In the great soccer debate, I’m on both sides. As a fan of “American” sports, I confess that I don’t get soccer. The spectacle of alpha males running around, falling down, pretending to be hurt and, all in all, achieving very little – um, when I was in school, that was called recess. Sure, it’s great exercise for the athletes, and it doesn’t require so much scrutiny from the fans that they can’t concentrate on getting drunk and planning their post-game riots. But there’s something bizarrely atavistic about a sport species that refuses to acknowledge that homo sapiens have hands. Using only feet to advance a ball puts soccer in a primitive level of development, like football before the forward pass.

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Brazilian goalkeeper Bruno never went to the World Cup this summer but he wouldn’t have looked out of place if he had. The captain of Flamengo, the Rio club that claims 33 million fans the length and breadth of this soccer-crazy country, Bruno led his team to the Brazilian championship last year and was highly rated between the sticks.

But now the big goalie faces a more serious and more profound challenge than he ever faced on the field – and a potentially greater disgrace than the national team players whose capitulation to Holland last week led to Brazil’s early exit from a tournament they were favorites to win. Bruno is a suspect in the disappearance and apparent murder of Eliza Samudio, 25, a former porn actress with whom he started a relationship after reportedly meeting at an orgy and who later bore his son. (See TIME’s World Cup blog.)

Samudio has been missing for a month and police say they have at least one witness who claims he was involved in the plot to kidnap her, kill her and then hand over their child to someone else. Blood found in Bruno’s Range Rover, police say, belonged to Samudio. The soccer star, who gave himself up to the police on Wednesday, denies all wrongdoing. (See the most beautiful footballers in the world.)

In graphic detail, they described how Bruno and his friends allegedly took Elisa to his ranch outside his home city of Belo Horizonte, beat her up and then strangled her. Bruno “is a monster for what he did to this young woman,” Edson Moreira, the homicide investigator in charge of the case, told reporters. “It was a pre-medidated, planned and coldly executed crime. Now, we can conclude the following: That Eliza is dead and the evidence indirectly proves it.”

Police say they have known of Bruno’s alleged reputation for violence ever since Samudio formally complained about her lover last October. She accused the 6 ft. 4, 176 lb keeper of forcing her to drink a cocktail of drugs that she said was meant to cause her to abort their baby. In taped testimony, she said his friends got her into a car and then gave her some “hard slaps” while he put a gun to her head and warned he would kill her and dispose of her body so no one would ever find a trace. “If you go to the police, I will kill you, kill your family and kill your friends because I know every one of them,” Samudio recalled in the recording. “I was afraid. He was really crazy.”

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NEW YORK – Britain’s Prince Harry took a tumble from his horse Sunday before his defeat in a New York polo match against the world’s best known polo player, Argentina’s Nacho Figueras.

But it was all for a good cause — to benefit 400,000 children of an AIDS-ravaged African nation.

The 25-year-old son of the late Princess Diana fell off his polo pony in the first half of the 3rd Annual Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic on Governor’s Island.

But he had a smile on his face as he got up and continued the contest, which Figueras’ Black Watch team won 6-5 in overtime. At first, the prince’s Black Rock foursome was ahead, with Harry scoring an early 2 points, despite his fall.

“I think his horse got spooked, or something,” Figueras told The Associated Press, adding, “It was a very tight match — right till the end, we didn’t know who was going to win so it was very exciting to play.”

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