Читать книгу Wicked Intentions - Kevin Flynn - Страница 11

3

Proof of Murder?

Writers who describe crime in a small town often try to make the community seem smaller than it is. Just a wide space in the road, where nothing extraordinary happens. Communities that the evils of the world have failed to notice. As if that town were the sole repository of innocence and purity left in the Western world, then the suspect is one who not only committed a crime but also soiled an Eden.

Epping, New Hampshire, is a small town, but probably no more or less shocked by violent crime than any other. Much of New Hampshire’s modern development occurred south to north, along the pathways of the two major arteries out of Massachusetts. Along Interstate 93, Salem grew into a major retail destination; Derry and Londonderry became huge bedroom communities. Up Route 3, a.k.a. the Everett Turnpike, Nashua became a fine city that was named Best Place to Live in America twice: in 1987 and 1997. Both highways shake hands in Manchester, the state’s largest city and the state’s center of economic activity.

Aided by demand for available and accessible land, the communities within this triangle flourished as Massachusetts expatriates settled in. But small towns outside that area remained landlocked, linked instead by a series of back roads and secondary highways that tempered sprawl. Those dozens of towns, with their New Deal-era road plans, worked to keep growth to a minimum and to preserve their perception of small town New England. Epping was just such a town.

Residents meet each March for the annual town meeting. While the town has a part-time Board of Selectmen, they’re relatively powerless. It’s the residents who vote Norman Rockwell-style to approve spending plans. The previous year, Police Chief Greg Dodge watched quietly as about thirteen hundred people voted on whether to approve his proposed $4.3 million operating budget for that year. Dodge asked the citizens of Epping to give him two new officers. The cost to taxpayers would be only $20,810 , because a federal grant of $50,000 would cover the rest. But in true Yankee fashion, residents rose from their seats and voiced their concerns about what would happen in three years when the grant expired. By a hand vote, citizens amended the request to one officer, but the proposal still failed 527 to 811. Dodge did not go away empty-handed from the town meeting. Epping residents had okayed his request to lease a new police cruiser by a vote of 791 to 558.

Epping was experiencing growing pains, as developers finally had spotted the town and recognized its key position if further growth was to happen. Residents wryly called it “The Center of the Universe” and bumper stickers saying so can still be spotted. At one point, Epping was considered the Great Crossroads to the state, back when highways were two lanes wide. Windy, crooked Route 101 had been renovated a decade ago to be a multi-lane east-west route from Manchester to the Atlantic. That sowed a row for commercial and residential development to also blossom. Epping is roughly halfway to Portsmouth from Manchester, and State Highway 125 intersecting there offers good shortcuts to Durham and other eastern communities.

After the Wal-Mart opened off exit 7, Epping’s police department felt the impact. Shoplifting calls and fender benders in the parking lot were consuming time in what once was a Mayberry-like patrol route. The extra calls, which included criminal assaults and one rape, did not sit well with Dodge.

The crimes reported at Wal-Mart were serious and sometimes violent. But as far as anyone could remember, there had never been a murder in the town of Epping.

I rarely had a need to go to Epping as a television reporter in New Hampshire. To me, the signpost merely meant halfway to the ocean or halfway back to the station after a live shot. But after one hour on the story, I knew it would change my life.

Sunday afternoons are deadly quiet in newsrooms everywhere, deadly for the young college graduate-cum-television producers who have to fill thirty minutes of news at 6:00. I had been blessed (and that’s definitely the way we viewed it) the previous two Sundays with breaking news. A week prior there was the murder investigation in which one woman in the mountain town of Tamworth stabbed another woman to death at a party in a fight over beer money. The weekend before in the woods of Alstead, a closeted-homosexual shot his roommate and chased another man through the forest with a handgun, all after smoking one-third of a marijuana cigarette. It’s these examples of stupidity and tragic miscalculation that give reporters “happy feet” and make producers high-five one another.

The assignment desk had little for me and my videographer to do when our shift began at 2:00 P.M. on Sunday, March 26, 2006. Indiana Senator Evan Bayh was speaking at a campaign event for a democratic state senator. No one comes to New Hampshire to speak at a political gathering who isn’t running for president.

WMUR-TV, an ABC affiliate, is the only network station in the state. Channel 9 wields a lot of power within New Hampshire’s borders and beyond. It’s the big fish, small pond dynamic that has suited it well. Dozens of television reporters have made the jump from New Hampshire to Boston (where starting salaries are tripled and anchormen and women can still earn a million dollar paycheck). Some WMUR alumni have gone on to much greener pastures, such as Nannette Hanson on MSNBC or Carl Cameron on Fox News. Even Chris Wragge, former Entertainment Tonight host and former husband to Swedish model and Playboy playmate Victoria Silvstedt, once did the weekend shift at channel 9 as a sportscaster.

I had no intention of leaving WMUR anytime soon. But I really wanted to get off of weekends. It was murder on my family life. I had too little time with my five-year-old daughter and the hours were fraying on my wife.

I was not the typical TV reporter. I spent ten years in radio and I never got the shtick out of my blood. I was sent to fires and blizzards and car accidents, but my niche was feature reporting. I had no problem doing funny stories. Getting clocked playing dodgeball, singing karaoke in the shower, getting sacked by the members of an all-woman’s football team. No stunt was off-limits for me. Viewers loved it. I loved it.

But the face of television news was changing, even in secluded New Hampshire. There were fewer reporters, but they were being asked to cover more stories in a single day. We seemed to be doing less politics, fewer stories on education or health. The greater emphasis was being placed on the sexy, the sensational. As one videographer said to me, “We used to do stories about people. Now we just do stories about victims.”

I was in a funk. I considered myself a storyteller; it was why I was recruited out of radio to fill an open position at the TV station. I didn’t like the direction my job was going. I needed something that was going to shake up my career.

The Evan Bayh event moved at a glacial pace. Bayh shook hands with every alderman and selectman who could someday become a presidential campaign worker. His big political blunder was, of course, not talking to me. I was the one who was going to be putting him on television and introducing him to thousands of presidential primary voters. Instead, I was standing off in the corner, sneaking mozzarella sticks from the hot buffet.

My cameraman for the day passed me his pager: call newsroom ASAP.

Ah, holy hell, I thought. What grief am I getting myself into now? I sneaked outside to place a call.

“Newsroom,” someone answered.

“It’s Kevin. I got your page.”

“Where are you guys?” the assignment editor asked.

“Still at Bayh. He’s running long.”

Pause. “Do you have any sound with him?”

They’re rushing this. What’s going on? “We’re waiting for his speech to finish up before we can get a sound bite.” Behind me, I could hear applause. Bayh just said something I assumed I should have been there to hear.

“Okay.” I could tell she was turning over the information in her head, calculating something. “We’re going to pull you out of there and send you to Epping.”

Oh, fuck me up the ass.We’ve been standing here this long. We’re this close to getting the sound bite.

“What’s shaking in Epping?” I snapped.

“There’s a search for a missing person,” she said. “And it could be a homicide.”

“Tell me about the bones. Is there enough for DNA?”

Assistant AG Peter Odom was discussing the case with State Police Lieutenant Russ Conte and Epping Police Chief Greg Dodge. They were sitting around the police department in the Epping Safety Complex, a modern building for an old town.

Peter Odom had spent more than a decade as a deputy county attorney in Strafford County before coming to the Attorney General’s homicide unit. Previously, he prosecuted cases of child abuse and sexual assault. He spearheaded the prosecution against a defrocked Catholic priest in his seventies who stood trial for allegedly molesting eight children, some of them altar boys. Odom won a conviction, but the man died in jail of natural causes after serving less than a year in his forty-four to eighty-eight year sentence.

Odom ran for office in 2002, seeking the Merrimack County Attorney’s post on the Democratic ticket. Odom convinced presidential candidate Howard Dean to come speak at a fundraiser at his home in Bow, New Hampshire.

“I knew that we wanted to have a kickoff event for my campaign, and I decided to try Dean,” Odom later wrote in a political blog. “The county attorney’s slot appears just above dog catcher on the ballot and we knew we would need someone with stature to draw a paying crowd.”

Odom reported they served 100 pounds of fresh fruit, passed out seven cases of water and juice and watched Dean eat half a watermelon before giving his speech. The day was documented by the never-blinking-eye of a public affairs cable television network. But Republicans had long coattails that year and Odom was defeated.

“You want to know about DNA from those bones?” Lieutenant Conte responded to Odom’s initial question. “That’s going to be tough. DNA breaks down in heat. It melts. We’re going to be sifting through ash looking for something undamaged.”

Several months prior, the state police helped on another case in Rockingham County where a crematorium was accused of all types of horrible procedures. Investigators looking into improprieties by a disgraced medical examiner paid a visit to the crematory. There they were shocked to see remains mislabeled and mixed together, two bodies being cremated in the same oven and a cadaver rotting in a broken cooler.

The public outcry was enormous, especially from the families of those cremated at the facility. No one could be positive that the ashes they had truly belonged to their loved one. They begged for officials to run tests to verify identities. The county attorney went on television announcing that the cremation process destroys the DNA and positive identification would be impossible. Everyone in New Hampshire was now well aware what fire did to DNA.

Odom turned to the chief. “What about the bone Sergeant Gallagher saw? Where was it?”

“We haven’t found it. She’s probably burned it since.”

“The DNA isn’t going to be your problem, Pete. We can probably find enough to prove he’s dead. The trick is going to be finding enough to prove he was murdered.”

The chief sat up straight. “What do you mean? We’ve got cutting tools! The burn pit! The mattress! The blood on the rabbit! Let alone what’s inside the house!”

Odom rubbed his chin silently. “It doesn’t prove he was killed,” he said finally. “Forget about what a defense attorney could do with a jury in court. If the medical examiner can’t determine the manner of death is homicide, then our case isn’t very strong, is it?”

Chief Dodge fell back into the chair. There was no air for his lungs. She couldn’t actually get away with it, could she? he thought. All those years of angry phone calls, nuisance complaints. Threats. This crazy woman in my town finally went off and did it, did it in the most gruesome way, and there’s a chance they can’t prove it?

“Tell me again about our victim, Chief.”

Dodge pulled the notes from the missing person’s report and handed them to Odom. “The guy’s name is Kenneth Countie. He’s twenty-four years old. Came from Wilmington, Massachusetts.”

Odom flipped through the paperwork. “And…he and Sheila…how long have they been together?”

“Not long, according the mother. They met about a month ago.”

“And this is the last time we can confirm he was alive? Last Friday, March 17?”

“The last time we can confirm it. Yes. I’ll see about getting the videotapes from the store.”

“For now, this is a secret. Nothing comes out of this department! Nobody makes a statement except me! Our public position is this kid is missing. That’s what we tell the press. That’s what we tell the family.” With that last statement, Odom’s voice turned from angry to sad.

“We gotta see what’s inside the house,” Conte said.

“Get your forensics crew in there, Russ. This whole case will rise and fall based on the work they do.” Odom shuddered at the thought. “And the work they need to do will take days.”

“I’ll have some people call the airport,” Conte said. “We’ll have the sheriff’s office looking for her to make sure she doesn’t get on a plane.”

“What if she shows up here?” Dodge asked.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s Sunday night. Sheila pops in here all the time. If she comes home and we’re still on her property, she’ll come down here to give us a piece of her mind.” Dodge looked back and forth between them. “Do I arrest her?”

It was decided that, no, Sunday night was not the time. For a female suspect, there were special considerations for searching her person, checking her body for wounds or evidence. Conte wanted to do it back at the state police barracks during a normal nine-to-five shift when a female crime technician could do the job. “Be nonchalant about it. If she does show up, tell her to come back tomorrow.”

Being nonchalant about any encounter with Sheila was a tall order.

“You know,” Conte said again. “I have seen…”

“…more fucking shit on this job. And guys either write a book or they never talk about it again.”

I heard these words from Lieutenant Russ Conte clear as day. Because the Epping Safety Complex, while a model of modern municipal construction, has extremely thin walls.

I was sitting in the lobby of the police department waiting for a sound bite. If this truly were a search for a missing person, where were the searchers? Why won’t the police talk to us? A search and rescue means “cooperation” from authorities (they’ll give us a name and a photo, make a public plea for assistance). A homicide, that was a major pain in the ass. In New Hampshire, no one except the prosecutor could publicly comment on a homicide, so cops and other sources clammed up. True, this would be my third murder in three Sundays, and all of those stories came together fairly well. But an at-large suspect, a lengthy interrogation or an unidentified victim are all things that could delay a press briefing.

And I had to have something to report at 6:00.

I was alone in the lobby of the Epping PD, alone except for the newspaper reporter who had wandered in on the same tip. Editors on the desk overheard a blurb on the Manchester police scanner dispatching a squad car to check on a subject “in connection with a possible homicide investigation out of Epping.” Odom, who had been fielding phone calls, denied they were conducting a homicide investigation. It was a missing person’s case.

The two of us sat quietly, waiting for someone to talk. My videographer was in the tiny parking lot helping the satellite truck operator find someplace to set up. It was 5:15. They had to point the dish to the south in order to hit the satellite moving in geosynchronous orbit along the equator, and a tuft of tree was blocking the line of sight.

“Do you think she burned the body before she dismembered it or after?”

The voice came through the wall and echoed in the lobby. The other journalist and I looked at each other in shock. There was no way in hell we should have been hearing this, but the wall is thin and Conte’s voice was strong.

“Did you get that?” I asked the newspaper reporter. I don’t know how he could have missed it. He had his back up against the wall while I stared so hard at the wall I thought I was going to burn a hole in it.

“I heard ‘dismembered.’ Didn’t you?”

“Ya.” Neither of us could believe what we were getting.

“Who is checking on that?” Conte asked someone. “Hold on to that rabbit.” Then there was some mention of blood on the animal.

I looked at the notebook resting on my lap. The page was still white, crisp and blank. I should have been writing all this down. But you learn there are some things you’re not going to forget and taking the time to write them down only distracts you from hearing further details.

Someone asked Conte a question. “We’ve already got the file sealed,” he said. “The press is going to want that bad boy big time!”

I knew three things:

There had been a homicide and the suspect was a female.

If the files were sealed and no one went on the record with me, I was royally fucked for 6:00.

I had unexpectedly found the story of my career.

On the other side of a very thin wall, Chief Dodge made notes. It was starting to get dark and it was going to be a long night ahead. He realized the calm balance of their town had been upset. “There’s one more thing,” he said.

“What is it, Chief?”

“There were others.”

Conte and Odom looked at each other. Now there was no air in their lungs.

“What do you mean?”

At first, Dodge wouldn’t make eye contact, tapping a pen on his desk as he spoke. But saying the words brought out more strength in the chief.

“There are others who’ve lived on that farm with her. Other young men. Other guys we’ve seen around town with her.”

There was silence in the room. “Go on.”

“And there’s at least one or two that…I can’t say I’ve seen in quite some time.”