By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The son of a hedge fund founder was arrested on Monday and charged with the murder of his father, who was discovered shot to death in his New York apartment over the weekend, police said.

Thomas Gilbert, 70, founder of the Wainscott Capital Partners Fund, was found shot once in the head Sunday afternoon in the bedroom of his Manhattan apartment, police said.

His son was taken into custody and questioned, and he was arrested on charges of homicide and criminal possession of a weapon on Monday, according to New York Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce.

The son was identified as 30-year-old Thomas Gilbert Jr.

The younger Gilbert had visited his parents on Sunday, when he asked his mother to leave the apartment so he could speak privately with his father, Boyce said at a news conference.

When the mother returned, she found her husband shot in the head, with a gun resting on his chest covered by his left hand, Boyce said.

Detectives called to the apartment determined it was a "staged crime scene," he said.

"The gun laying where it was, it didn't seem it was a self-inflicted wound," he said.

Police apprehended the younger Gilbert at his apartment in another part of Manhattan, Boyce said.

Police said a .40-caliber handgun was recovered at the scene of the shooting, on Manhattan's affluent East Side. Ammunition matching the gun as well as the manufacturer's box for a Glock handgun was found at the son's apartment, Boyce said.

The elder Gilbert, a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Business School, founded Wainscott in 2011 and was the fund's chief investment officer, according to a profile on its website.

Gilbert also was a co-founder of Syzygy Therapeutics, a private equity biotech asset acquisition fund that he left to form Wainscott, the profile said.

Wainscott returned 10.48 percent in the first 11 months of 2014, lagging the S&P 500’s roughly 12 percent gain and its 43.92 percent return in 2013, according to a source with access to the fund’s performance figures.

(Additional reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss; Editing by Bernadette Baum, Andre Grenon and Steve Orlofsky)