In the Evil Day Read online

  IN THE

  EVIL DAY

  VIOLENCE COMES TO ONE SMALL TOWN

  RICHARD ADAMS CAREY

  ForeEdge

  ForeEdge

  An imprint of University Press of New England

  www.upne.com

  © 2015 Richard Adams Carey

  All rights reserved

  For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Carey, Richard Adams.

  In the evil day: violence comes to one small town / Richard Adams Carey.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61168-715-6 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-61168-819-1 (ebook)

  1. Murder—New Hampshire—Colebrook—Case studies. I. Title.

  HV6534.C635C37 2015

  364.152’34097421—dc23 2015004775

  For the people

  of the town

  of Colebrook,

  New Hampshire,

  and of the

  surrounding

  North Country

  And the family endures,

  just as ours had.

  The same must

  hold true for a town,

  I thought.

  Russell Banks | The Sweet Hereafter

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Acknowledgments

  PART ONE

  1 | The Noonday Owl

  2 | “The Sweet Smell of Newsprint”

  3 | Death or High Water

  4 | Decent, Sane, and Simple

  5 | The Rest Is Blank

  6 | The Reasons of the Heart

  7 | Code 3

  PART TWO

  8 | When Both Answers Are Wrong

  9 | In These Days of Carnage

  10 | Kill Your Blues

  11 | Going to War

  12 | By the Grace of God and Valhalla

  13 | No Inkling of Cat and Mouse

  14 | Like the Brush of a Wing

  15 | “This Is What We Do”

  16 | Patient in Affliction

  PART THREE

  17 | The Armor of God

  18 | Time Is the Fire

  19 | Fond Blue Hope

  Epilogue

  Sources

  Photographs

  PREFACE

  THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION and is as true and as accurate as I can make it after thirteen years of research and writing.

  My sources include 1,500 pages of transcribed personal interviews, 2,600 pages of police reports and documents, and a large archive of contemporary media accounts.

  Even at that, questions remain. In many instances, I found myself with conflicting testimony about the course of certain events. In this situation, I chose the version most widely corroborated. In the absence of such corroboration, I chose what I judged to be the most plausible.

  The dialogue in this narrative has been reconstructed from contemporary accounts and/or the memories of the participants in each scene. To a certain degree, I have used imaginative license to fill in the gaps in remembered conversations. Such invented dialogue is consistent in every instance with the concerns of the characters present in each scene and with the dramatic contours of each incident.

  Imaginative license has also been exercised in describing Carl Drega’s thoughts, memories, and state of mind as he climbed out of his Dodge pickup in the parking lot of LaPerle’s IGA and as he prepared to destroy his home and flee into Vermont. The rendering of such episodes from Drega’s point of view represents my best educated guess, as a storyteller, in the portrayal of moments that must ultimately remain inscrutable.

  Otherwise, everything in this narrative is founded in documented fact—at least as best as that may be defined through a haze of blood, grief, love, and time.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE RESEARCH AND WRITING of any nonfiction book is a team effort, and I was very fortunate in all who joined me in this effort—especially considering the grief that still afflicts so many of those who chose to help, and the tears that it cost them.

  First, my thanks to these citizens (or friends) of the North Country who consented to personal interviews: Steve Barba, John Begin, Steve Breton, Steve Brooks, Norm Brown, Earl and Irene Bunnell, Earl Bunnell, Jr., Tom Carlson, Jeff Caulder, Scott Champagne, Norman Cloutier, Dan Couture, Woody Crawford, Phil Ducret, Jan Corliss, Gene Ehlert, Jeff Fair, Paul Fink, Rob Haase, John Harrigan, Penny Henry, Steve Hersom, Dan and Dean Hook, Bud Hulse, Ed Jeffrey, Charlie Jordan, Kevin Jordan, David King, Jim Kneeland, Karen Harrigan Ladd, Beno and Karen Lamontagne, John Lanier, Helen Lord and her daughters Debbie and Linda, Claire Lynch, Dick Marini, Gerry Marcou, Sue Miller, Mark Monahan, Kim Nilsen, Audrey Noyes, Dan Ouimette, Mark Pappas, Kenneth and Isabelle Parkhurst, Marcia Parkhurst, Dave Perry, John Pfeifer, Brad and Jo Presby, Frank Prue, Albert Riff, Jana Riley, Dave Robidas, Terry Rosi, Julie Roy, Wayne Saunders, Bob Soucy, Sam Sprague, Kenn Stransky, Gerry and Margaret Upton, Bert von Dohrmann, Phil Waystack, Howie Weber, Chuck West, John Wimsatt, and Susan Zizza.

  Eric Stohl not only consented to several interviews but also generously loaned me a valuable collection of memorabilia. In the New Hampshire attorney general’s office, Marie Howard was patient and helpful in providing lengthy public records. Scott Stepanian and Tom Yorke generously supplied direction and references. My colleague Jeff Fair provided an interview, much sound advice, and several crucial introductions. Granvyl G. (Bud) Hulse, Jr., was an invaluable and authoritative source on Colebrook history.

  Certain people not only provided multiple interviews but also consented to read drafts of the manuscript and correct errors of fact. These included Earl “Bunny” Bunnell, John Harrigan, Karen Harrigan Ladd, Charlie Jordan, Kevin Jordan, and Susan Zizza. Major Kevin Jordan of New Hampshire Fish & Game arranged access to a crucial collection of documents and reports.

  Many of the photographs in this book are here thanks to the generosity of the following individuals and organizations: Charlie Jordan of the Colebrook Chronicle and the former Northern New Hampshire Magazine; Karen Harrigan Ladd of the Colebrook News and Sentinel; Kevin Jordan of New Hampshire Fish & Game; Cathy Grondin and Bruce Pelletier of the Coös County Democrat; and Frank Chilinski, president and publisher of the Salmon Press.

  My friend Jim Brewer donated his time to provide precious copy editing and early feedback as drafts of the manuscript were produced. At the University Press of New England, copy editor Mary Becker found the glitches both Jim and I had missed.

  In the later stages of the project, I received wonderful editorial guidance from members of the faculty of Southern New Hampshire University’s MFA in Fiction and Nonfiction program. These included novelists Robert Begiebing, Diane Les Becquets, and Katherine Towler. Also on that faculty, novelist Merle Drown was—after reading the entire manuscript—as wise as he was frank in weaning its author from some, well, less than optimal narrative devices.

  Credit for that is owed as well to my editor at the University Press of New England, Richard Pult. Richard first championed my project in that house and then worked patiently with me to make it better. Good suggestions and precious support also came from my agent, Anna Ghosh of the Ghosh Literary Agency.

  Support is something that exists as a community dynamic as well, and it’s like oxygen to the isolated spirit of a writer. I’m grateful for the oxygen provided by the Holderness School community and its head of school, Phil Peck, and especially for that provided by the Southern New Hampshire University MFA community and its legion of writers: its students, faculty, and alumni. At Holderness I owe special thanks to librarian Mary Kietzman for help in my research.
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br />   In Colebrook, support, trust, and dozens of make-or-break introductions were provided by Earl and Irene Bunnell and by John Harrigan. The Bunnells were particularly gracious in welcoming me into their home during my many visits to Colebrook. They and John Harrigan—in their courage, resilience, and refusal to yield to bitterness—provided inspiration as well.

  Finally, I am grateful to my wife, Susan Carey, who for thirteen years has shared me with this other very demanding alliance and has done so with grace, forbearance, good cheer, and plenty of good commonsense advice of her own.

  PART ONE

  1

  THE NOONDAY OWL

  IT’S JUST A SMALL NEW HAMPSHIRE TOWN, 2,500 souls or so, but still—there should have been portents, signs more universal than personal, omens more public than the terror Vickie Bunnell kept almost entirely to herself or state trooper Scott Phillips’s hunch that the situation with Carl Drega had entered a darker phase. There should have been a blood moon over Monadnock, or a noonday owl calling from a cornice on Colebrook’s Main Street, or unnatural births among North Country dairy herds.

  There should have been something like the celestial theater performed over Titus Hill in the early years of the Civil War. “It happened on a dull overcast day, as the farmers of Titus Hill and Columbia cast a weather eye at the clouds and hurried to get the hay in ahead of the oncoming storm,” wrote physician and Colebrook historian Dr. Herb Gifford. “Suddenly the clouds parted and there in the sky was a great battle in progress—hundreds of men, horses, and guns in a massive struggle. This phenomenon was reported by at least 21 people scattered from Titus Hill to Columbia, and all claimed to have seen it at the same time.”

  There was nothing like that in 1997—only an odd little incident recalled in a one-column story in a corner of the August 13 edition of the News and Sentinel newspaper. On Friday the eighth, a man from Columbia, a town of seven hundred just south of Colebrook, had gotten into an argument at a grocery store with a couple driving a van bearing North Carolina plates. The van followed the Columbia man to his home on Bungy Road. Then five shotgun blasts were fired into the house as the van—sporting a “Tennessee Volunteers Militia” bumper sticker—drove back and forth on the road in front. The homeowner returned fire with an unspecified weapon. “Although several state police units responded,” wrote reporter Claire Lynch, “the van could not be found.”

  That Columbia man was not Carl Drega, who would not have called the state police for help in any event, and the incident has no known relationship, direct or otherwise, to the events of Tuesday, August 19, 1997. It was just a sort of noonday owl.

  That day John Harrigan woke, as he usually does, at 5:00 a.m. Streaks of light feathered the sky from the direction of Bear Rock and Mudget Mountain, and the last of the stars were making a stand over Canaan, on the far side of the Connecticut River. Except for a couple of pets, he was alone in the rambling farmhouse—which had been built in 1850 and had become Harrigan property when bought and renovated by John’s parents, Fred and Esther, sometime in the ’60s. John was fifty years old, and his older children, Karen and Mike, were out on their own. Sixteen-year-old Katie still lived at home, but she was in New Mexico, visiting her mother.

  The only sound was the creaking of old floorboards, white pine and balsam fir, as he eased himself out of bed, careful of his back, and padded downstairs to the bathroom. His parents had once had the floorboards shimmed in a vain attempt to quiet them. Noisy floorboards were all right with John. He liked being able to hear what was moving around at night.

  That morning he heard the toenail-clatter of Kane—a 110-pound Labrador retriever–bear hound mix, a present from Vickie Bunnell—as the dog thundered across the floorboards to greet him. Cody the black cat, his tail spiked in the air, advanced mincing in the great dog’s wake. Once John got out of the bathroom, he went to the kitchen and filled their bowls. Then he went into the living room, which looked out on the front yard, on South Hill Road, and on his pastureland beyond the road.

  Bisecting that view was a flagpole. Its American flag flew throughout the summer and served as a handy combination of anemometer and weather vane. John looked to the Stars and Stripes with some old verses running through his head:

  Wind from the north, venture forth;

  Wind from the west, the fishing’s best;

  Wind from the east, the fishing’s least;

  Wind from the south, gotta put it in their mouth.

  The flag ruffled faintly in a mild northerly, and John smiled. The fish would be hitting. He and Bunny—the fly-fishing father of Vickie Bunnell, the woman he had almost married—had picked a good day.

  He let Kane and Cody out and went upstairs to dress while the coffee brewed. He had coffee and an English muffin on the deck he had built outside the bedroom, beneath a sky laced with only a few thin clouds, like cobwebs, high and pale and distant. This is a region where a hard frost can occur each month of the year, and had done so two years before. But not last year, and this year July and—so far—August had been frost-free. The weather was shaping up like yesterday’s: sunny and dry, midday temperatures in the 70s, one of those clear, ringing days in the North Country—a day made like a summerhouse for the angels—on which it was impossible to stay inside.

  After breakfast John read the first of three newspapers he devoured each day, if he had time. He spread the New York Times out on his kitchen counter, out of the breeze, enjoying the pillowy feel of its paper, the sweet mild scent of its ink, and the newspaper industry’s best writing, in his opinion. He decided he didn’t have time for the Caledonian-Record, out of St. Johns­bury in Vermont, the only daily published in this area and another paper he admired. But once he got to the office, he’d get to the Union Leader, published down in Manchester but whose stories covered all New Hampshire.

  The New York Times was a day old. Colebrook was at the nub end of the Times’s distribution route in New England, and only a half dozen copies got dropped late in the day at LaPerle’s IGA, the big supermarket north of town. John had the manager there put one copy aside for him. So news about the rest of the world arrived late for John, but soon enough. Most of what happened out there wasn’t going to change anything in his world anyway. “If a hurricane’s coming or war breaks out,” he wrote once in one of his newspaper columns, “someone will let me know.”

  The local news was another thing. Improbably (since journalism wasn’t what he had in mind growing up), it had befallen John to be the messenger of all that happened around there in the Upper Connecticut Valley, whether hurricane-scale nor’easters or Bungy Road wars or, more commonly Kiwanis scholarships and Old Home Day celebrations. He did so with the two weekly newspapers he owned—the Coös County Democrat, based in Lancaster, thirty-six miles south of Colebrook, and the News and Sentinel, out of Colebrook—as well as the print business he owned in Lancaster, the Coös Junction Press, which published both newspapers.

  John bought the Democrat in 1978, when his father, Fred Harrigan, owned and ran the Sentinel, its nearest competitor. Ticklish? Yes, it was. Then John inherited the Sentinel after Fred’s death in 1991. John used to be editor in chief at both papers but lately had eased away from that. He still wrote editorials for both and also two syndicated columns: “Woods, Water, and Wildlife,” which appears in the New Hampshire Sunday News, an affiliate of the Union Leader; and “The North Country Notebook,” which runs throughout the state in other small weeklies like the Sentinel and Democrat.

  The Democrat was printed on the other side of the Connecticut, in Vermont, when John bought it. He soon tired of accommodating his print runs to somebody else’s schedule, especially since he was as much interested in that publishing end of the business anyway, and in 1980, at an abandoned printing plant in southern New Hampshire, he found a Goss Community web offset press—seventeen tons, thirty-three feet long, four printing units and a folder, a sort of Rube Goldberg machine on steroids. He and a friend jackhammered the rig out of its concrete flooring and rolled
it on a dozen steel bars to a loading dock. From there a flatbed truck took it to an empty cement-and-cinder-block structure, the former Whitney Machine Shop, built over the site of the Coös Junction railroad station in Lancaster.

  John learned to run the behemoth himself, supervising noisy print runs that stretched deep into the night. It wasn’t hard to stay awake. He was piqued as much by what might go wrong—the thing might throw a plate or break a web or, if your attention wandered, take your arm off—as by what came out at the other end when it all ran smoothly. The scale of the stories was different from those in the New York Times, sure, but they invested their subjects with at least something of the history-as-it-happens gravitas that the Times provided its tycoons and statesmen.

  Last week’s history would go to press today, and Tuesday was always the craziest day of the week at both the Democrat and the Sentinel. You try to get all your news copy, photographs, and advertisements squared away by Monday night, but it never fails that there are late-breaking stories and other post-deadline arrivals on Tuesday. So you try to jam that stuff in at the same time you do your typesetting, proofreading, and pasteup work. Each Tuesday was its own sort of problem, but at least you could go home when the mechanicals went out the door to Lancaster. On good days that might be early afternoon, but usually the pre-press work took until 5:00 p.m., sometimes 6:00.

  John couldn’t help feeling sorry his employees had to be inside in weather like this. Susan Zizza, who took turns each week with Dennis Joos (rhymes with “dose”) as editor in chief of the Sentinel, believed that regional holidays should be called on days when the weather was this good. John wouldn’t mind, really, if only the rest of the North Country took the day off and if everybody behaved while they did so. But that was too much to ask, even up here—some might say especially up here.

  John recalled it was Susan’s turn this week. He himself would leave early, once he’d taken care of a few things. He had a Kiwanis Club meeting at the Wilderness Restaurant on Main Street at seven this morning. That was a regular event on Tuesdays, and it was time to start planning the fall fund-raisers. Vickie Bunnell, a lawyer and one of the club’s first female members, would probably be there. So would Vickie’s dad, Earl—a.k.a. Bunny, who had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and then worked by the side of his father, Sliver Bunnell, for twenty years as a barber in a shop just off Main. Bunny and his wife, Irene, knew everyone in town and had been special friends of Fred and Esther Harrigan’s. John remembered being taken to the Bunnells’ barbershop for haircuts while Vickie and Earl, Jr., played on the sidewalk outside.