In the Evil Day

  The latter happened on a Tuesday night in April, after a winter in which starving deer had come to the roadsides to chew the new shoots off the spruce and tamaracks, and midway through Vickie Bunnell’s first term as a Columbia selectman. When Vickie saw Carl Drega begin to rifle through the town’s file cabinets that night, she decided it would be best if it were she—as the only woman present—who intervened.

  Early that evening Drega had appeared a few minutes after the start of a regular selectmen’s meeting, called to order by Kenneth Parkhurst. Bill Higgins was there as the third selectman, and also there, for a time, was the town’s part-time treasurer. As board secretary, Vickie was writing a series of checks to be taken away by the treasurer. Drega parked his Dodge pickup in front of the small clapboard building on Route 3, stood gravely before the board, and said he wanted a copy of the minutes from the selectmen’s February meeting.

  “Okay—but we just started this meeting, and I haven’t gotten into that file and pulled the minute books out yet, Carl,” Vickie said. “And the copier’s not warmed up. While we’ve got the treasurer here, we want to get some checks written. Can I get those minutes for you later and mail them to you? Would that be all right?”

  Drega, glaring at Parkhurst, required a promise that he’d have the minutes within a week. Then he left. The years had only strengthened Carl Drega’s conviction that zoning ordinances, and property tax assessments as well, were being unevenly applied in Columbia, that there was paperwork to prove this in the public record—if only he could find it, if only the guardians of that paperwork would provide it to him, as was their duty. Not wishing to leave this latest request to chance, Vickie finished her checks, excused the treasurer, and then made Parkhurst and Higgins wait while she located the February minutes, copied them, and put them in an envelope addressed to Drega.

  Two hours later, Drega reappeared without explanation. Vickie handed him the minutes, and he read them as Parkhurst wrapped up the board’s last bit of business and adjourned the meeting. “Okay, now I need some other minutes,” Drega said.

  “The meeting’s over, Carl,” Parkhurst said. “It’s been a long day. We’re going home.”

  Drega took a deep breath. “Well, I don’t suppose you need to be in a formal meeting to provide a citizen with a public document, to respond to a legal request.”

  “No, the town clerk can help you too. She’s here Monday and Wednesday, three to five—”

  “Your wife.”

  “That’s right, and by now you know Isabelle’s hours better than we do, Carl, all the trouble you’ve given her.”

  Vickie held up her hand. “What other minutes, Carl?”

  “That meeting from two years ago.” Drega pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and squinted at it. “February 3, 1988.”

  “Here we go,” Higgins said.

  “Carl,” Vickie said. “You know I can’t find minutes from two years ago at the drop of a hat. That was before my time, and I don’t even know what kind of notebook they’re in. I’ll be happy to pull those minutes for you, once I find them, but I really can’t do it right now. I can come back, though. We can set up a time.”

  “No, Vickie, that’s not your job,” Parkhurst said. “Isabelle can help the nice gentleman tomorrow afternoon.”

  At that, the die was cast. The chairman wanted Drega to come back for those minutes—and Drega wanted to grab Parkhurst by the scruff of the neck. When Drega dove into the file cabinets himself, initiating his own search through the length and breadth of the town’s records, it was Vickie who threw herself like a terrier between him and the files. Had it been Parkhurst or even Higgins, there would have been fisticuffs—or worse. And when Drega went to another cabinet, Vickie interceded again, slamming the drawers shut and demanding he leave. When Drega refused, she called the Colebrook police.

  Drega took a seat and was still seated when a Colebrook patrolman and two state troopers arrived ten minutes later. “I spoke with the woman that identified herself as BUNNELL,” wrote Trooper Kathleen Grealy in her report. “She stated that they had just completed a meeting of the town selectmen, and wanted to leave the building, but the individual seated at the table would not leave. I confronted the man sitting at the table by telling him he would have to leave the property. He stated he would not leave until he received minutes from a town meeting that took place several years ago.”

  Grealy asked the selectmen if it was possible for Drega to obtain those minutes. “BUNNELL told me that they had already explained the situation to the individual, and had told him that he would have to make an appointment with the selectmen to discuss his request. Knowing that the individual was aware of his options, I again asked him to leave the premises. He again refused. I advised him that he was under arrest for Criminal Trespassing. DREGA was taken into custody and transported to Colebrook Police Department.”

  He was released that night, under his own recognizance, on three hundred dollars’ bail. On his bail bond form, above his signature, he wrote: “I DO NOT UNDER STAND.”

  The other responding trooper was Les Lord. Drega refused Lord’s offer of a ride back to town hall, where Drega’s pickup was parked. Instead he walked the entire distance from Colebrook to Columbia, six miles, with the stars like bone chips overhead and the April rush of the Connecticut loud in his ears.

  The trespass charges were later dropped. “It’s not worth the trouble,” Vickie told Parkhurst. “We got him out of there. Let’s forget about it and move on.”

  Carl Drega’s disputes came to involve others beside the Columbia town government. Eric Stohl remembers his sole visit to Drega’s cabin by the river. In January 1991, Stohl parked his cruiser at the head of the driveway off Route 3. He hiked up to the bluff where the old gravel pit was and from there took a narrow footpath, between deep banks of snow, down to the barn and cabin. Inside the cabin, the lights were on and loud country-and-Western music was playing.

  Stohl knocked on the door several times, received no answer. He tested the door and found it unlocked. He opened it slightly—“Carl?” Finally he opened the door and stepped inside the foyer—“Carl, are you here?”

  Inside Stohl saw a space that was less a living area than a tidy workshop: a single chair, unfinished plywood floors, a table saw, a saw bench, a pair of sewing machines, some wooden benches. Drega’s living quarters, in fact, were in the basement. Light on this floor came in only from the west, from the ice-bound river, since the windows facing east were boarded with plywood. Leaning against a wall near the door were a 12-gauge shotgun and a high-caliber bolt-action rifle. “Carl!”

  Stohl nearly spun out of his boots when Drega spoke up behind him, “Where the hell are you going?”

  Stohl took a breath to compose himself, explained that he had knocked and heard music. Drega received this without comment. “So what do you want to show me?” Stohl asked.

  Drega turned and motioned him to follow. They went down another footpath to the river and then over the ice to a hole Drega had chopped. The hole had started to freeze over at the bottom, and both men bent to clear it. At its bottom a rock was visible beneath clear running water. Drega gestured to a post on the corner of his cabin. “I’d like you to come and measure the distance between this rock and that post.”

  They measured the distance—eighty feet. Drega produced from his hip pocket a rough overhead sketch of his cabin and the riverbank, with several rows of stone fringing the latter. He also had a handwritten document with a blank line at the bottom for a signature. “My permit lets me put riprap down here out to eighty feet, as far as this rock,” Drega said, pointing to a rock on the sketch. “I’d like you to sign this statement, verifying that you saw this rock, and it’s eighty feet, and the riprap stops here.”

  By then it had been five or six years since Stohl—floating down the river in spring as he released schools of young hatchery-raised trout into its waters—had come around a bend and noticed a new rampart of stone extending from the shoreline of t
he Drega property into the river. Stohl saw that the stones jutted out far enough to alter the course of the current and accelerate the rate of erosion on the opposite bank, which was Bernard Routhier’s farmland.

  Stohl had grown up on this river and loved how wild and pristine it remained here. He didn’t think that the state Department of Environmental Services in Concord would approve someone dropping that much fill into the river, but when he checked, he found that DES had in fact granted Drega a permit to replace land washed away from his property during the breakup of an ice jam in 1981. Drega had put the stones in with help from Dan Ouimette, a local contractor, and Gerry Upton. Stohl advised Concord that this amount of fill far exceeded mere land replacement, and there the matter rested until 1990, when Drega filed an application to lay down more riprap. This was necessary, the application read, to make the bank completely stable.

  As required, a public notice was circulated about the application, and Stohl was joined by Routhier and a Fish & Game biologist in raising objections to it. Stohl also provided Concord with aerial photographs of that bend of the river before and after the presence of the fill. Drega maintained that he had abided by what was specified in his permit, and his countermove was the affidavit that he wanted Stohl to sign that January day.

  Stohl read the document and said, “I can see a rock there, Carl, but I don’t know if it’s the rock in your drawing, or if your fill goes out farther than this or not. There’s no telling this time of year. I can’t sign this.”

  They argued. They argued until they got cold feet and went back to the cabin. Stohl felt like he was trying to talk one of those rocks in the river into moving. And eventually, as Drega became more strident, the hair started to lift on the back of his neck. At last—mostly just to get out of there—Stohl signed a statement allowing that he had seen a stone eighty feet from a shoreline landmark, nothing more.

  Theirs was not a friendly parting. Stohl walked that path through the snow back up the hill wondering if Drega had left it so narrow to prevent him from dodging, left or right, should Drega want to train the deer rifle on him. He allowed himself a long, easy breath once he cleared the crest of the bluff.

  DES would go back and forth on the permit, first ordering Drega to remove all the riprap—a much more difficult procedure than installing it—then reinstating his permit (“Once Carl had gone down to Concord to pound his fist on their table,” said Stohl), and finally revoking it again.

  In 1994 Drega filed suit in the Colebrook District Court against Stohl, charging that the officer was carrying out a personal vendetta in “giving unsworn falsification to the N.H. Wetlands Board.” Acting as his own attorney, Drega disputed Fish & Game’s jurisdiction and swore to the rectitude of his work, but—when prompted by Judge Paul Desjardins—had no evidence or testimony about Stohl exceeding his duties or acting out of malice. Desjardins quickly dismissed the suit.

  Drega was furious, but he had to remain at the courthouse that day for another proceeding. He had withheld half of Dan Ouimette’s fee for work on the riprap and for some trenches Ouimette had dug, since he was dissatisfied with the work done by Ouimette’s crew. Now the contractor was suing Drega for the balance. Drega would again act as his own counsel and lose that suit.

  By the summer of 1997, the riprap—and a little more of it, in fact—was still in the river.

  “Hey, Norman, want to meet Mr. Drega?” Vickie Bunnell said one afternoon in May 1993. She had appeared unexpectedly at the garage of Columbia excavator Norman Cloutier, now a fellow selectman. By then Kenneth Parkhurst was no longer on the board, and Vickie was into her second term. “Could be today’s your lucky day.”

  “What’s going on?” Cloutier asked. He didn’t say so, but he had met Drega once before, back when Drega was casting around for help on his riprap project. Drega had hired Dan Ouimette instead, which was a good thing, Cloutier decided, given how that went for Dan, whom he knew to be a skilled excavator.

  “I got a call at my office from Louis Jolin, the tax assessor,” she said. “The poor guy’s scared out of his wits, and I would be too. He’s also on foot.”

  Vickie told Cloutier the story. Jolin, a careful and amiable man in his mid-sixties from Berlin—a man who had been doing tax assessments for Columbia for several years—was visiting all the properties in town, and the town had mailed notice of this to homeowners. That day Drega’s place was on the docket. Jolin had parked his Jeep Cherokee at the top of the bluff overlooking the cabin, the great barn, the several outbuildings, the neat lawn with its stony beachhead, and had taken the footpath down to the buildings. He found Drega working outside and tried—mostly in vain—to engage him in conversation. Finally Jolin shrugged his shoulders and set about measuring a storage wing, with neat board-and-batten siding, that Drega had recently added to the barn. One side of the addition was against the hillside and choked by brush, so Jolin went inside the barn to take that measurement.

  When he came out, he found Drega angry that he had entered the building without permission. “I would’ve asked, but he didn’t seem in the mood for small talk,” Jolin had told Vickie. “And he was standing right there. He could’ve stopped me.” Then Drega demanded to see Jolin’s clipboard and to know exactly what the addition was going to cost him in taxes. He claimed to have been taxed the previous year for a fireplace he didn’t have.

  At last Jolin fled up the hill to his vehicle. When he started the Jeep, he saw Drega planted at his rear bumper like a hitching post, preventing him from backing up. “If you won’t move out of the way, sir,” Jolin said, “I’ll have to go get help.”

  “Help?” Drega tugged thoughtfully at the chinstrap beard he had recently grown. “You got any help in mind?”

  “I’m here for the selectmen today. I know Ms. Bunnell is in her office. She’s a lawyer.”

  “A lawyer, huh?” Drega gave a low whistle. “You’re not just trying to scare me, are you?”

  Jolin shook his head. “I just mean she could help you with some of your questions.”

  Drega seemed to nod slowly. “I bet she could. I bet she won’t. But that’s okay—you go tell Vickie Bunnell to get her fucking ass down here.”

  With that, Jolin abandoned the Jeep, sprinted for the driveway gate, and called Vickie from the T&T Mobile Home Park on the opposite side of Route 3. “So I’m going to pick Mr. Jolin up at that park, and then help him get his car,” Vickie explained to Cloutier. “It could be ticklish. Want to come along?”

  Cloutier had acquired a customer in the meantime, and he ended up following a few minutes behind. Vickie parked in the trailer park and walked with an apprehensive Jolin back through Drega’s gate and up to the bluff. “He’s gruff and occasionally nasty,” Vickie told him. “But his bark is worse than his bite.”

  There was no sign of Drega around the Jeep, but they found railroad ties placed as chocks behind its rear tires. As Vickie bent to remove one tie and as Jolin unlocked the driver-side door, a gunshot rang out behind them.

  “Drega fired a shot and hollered something about what did we think we were doing,” Vickie wrote in her report of the incident. “By that time he had come up behind the Jeep, clutching a rifle with a pistol on his hip, faced me and demanded that I get my ‘fucking hands off [his] property.’”

  Jolin wrote, “I looked up to see Mr. Draga [sic] approaching towards us with a rifle leveled towards her and I and a pistol in a holster. Ms. Bunnell attempted to reason with him and let me drive my vehicle off his property. He then brought up some past town business using some abusive language.”

  After a dose of that, Drega clapped the stock of his rifle, a .30-06, and dared Vickie to touch the second tie. That was when Cloutier came up the rise, seeing what he thought at first was Drega out hunting varmints. He soon understood otherwise, but stood with Vickie and Jolin while Drega renewed his demands for Jolin’s paperwork. When Cloutier joined in the argument, he “was ordered off the property [by Drega, who was] holding his rifle in crossward position and
very close to Mr. Cloutier,” wrote Jolin.

  All three turned to retrace their steps. “Well, we’ll just have to go up another avenue,” Vickie said, once they were out of earshot from Drega. She sounded calm, but later her friend David King—the lawyer who had taken her place in the Waystack practice—would say that she left the property no less terrified than Jolin.

  Half an hour later three state troopers walked up Drega’s driveway in a row across its breadth. Their cruisers were at the driveway’s locked gate, and they saw that a tractor had been parked behind Jolin’s Jeep. They walked in a row so that if they were fired upon, Detective Howie Weber could return fire while Troopers Scott Stepanian and Tom Yorke took cover. They wore no body armor and carried only sidearms.

  “Procedures were a little different back then,” Weber said later. “You didn’t necessarily call in a SWAT team the first thing whenever a situation like this arose.”

  At the top of the bluff the driveway angled right, took a wide sweeping turn toward the river, and was bordered on either side by a low wall as it neared the barn. They saw the owner on his knees laying rock into an unfinished portion of the wall. The troopers halted and called out to him. “He heard us, but he didn’t look up,” Weber said. “He just kept building that wall.”

  The troopers advanced and called a second time. This time Drega looked up, laid a stone aside, rose, and walked slowly into the barn. He still wore a pistol on his hip, and he came out of the barn with the .30-06, now equipped with a scope and sling. The troopers stopped about a hundred feet away. Scott Stepanian knew Drega a little bit, had been leading an investigation of some firearms burglarized from Drega’s cabin. Weber let the even-keeled Stepanian do the talking.

  It was mostly a one-sided conversation. A sphinxlike Drega offered no response to a request to lay his weapons on the ground. Eventually Stepanian wondered if he might at least sling the rifle on his back. Drega simply stood with the rifle pointed off into the brush but capable of being raised much faster than a trooper could draw a pistol. Stepanian kept talking, and Drega asked why he had once gotten arrested for trespass at the town hall, a public building, while a trespasser on his land gets police protection. After fifteen minutes, long enough for each trooper to sweat through his shirt, Drega lowered his rifle and—per Stepanian’s latest suggestion—went to stow his weapons in the cabin.