In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  Before joining the state police, Begin had worked four years as a beat cop in some tough neighborhoods in Manchester. He had dealt with angry people, some of them high or simply crazy, but he had never seen anyone like Drega. “Carl didn’t like me because I was a cop, but he hated Scott in a whole different way,” he said. “It was personal. It was like he blamed Scott for everything, the civil suit and this whole deal, even though it was me who actually made the arrest, and it wasn’t as if this was a major offense. It was an hour out of the guy’s life, and we’re just cops doing our jobs. But there was something really cold in the way Carl looked at Scott, a different quality of animosity. You had a feeling this guy was capable of anything.”

  A second hearing on Drega’s failure to pay Ouimette was scheduled for June 27. Drega attended, but he didn’t pay. On July 19, a lien was placed on his property, and the debt was paid a week later. Drega then filed a civil suit against the estate of John Morton, the Coös County sheriff, who had recently died, alleging that Morton had known he was working in Vermont the previous June and would be unable to attend the original hearing.

  Mark Pappas was glad to know there was at least one person in the building interested in his gun.

  In February 1997—a few days before Vickie Bunnell would knock on Eric Stohl’s door in Columbia and ask to borrow Eric’s Smith & Wesson .38—Pappas was carrying an unloaded Colt AR-15 assault rifle up and down the aisles of a gun show at the Shriners Auditorium in Wilmington, Massachusetts. He was standing in front of the Bushmaster manufacturer’s booth, and the rep there had just said, no, he wasn’t interested in the rifle, when a tall, bearded man—someone whom Pappas would remember as a “gray-haired wrinkled old man, a guy who looked like someone’s grandfather”—had come up behind him and said he might take a look.

  “This made by Colt?” the man asked.

  “Made by Colt,” said Pappas.

  “You sure about that?”

  Pappas said he was, that he had bought it used three years before from Roach’s Sporting Goods in Cambridge. Pappas was twenty-eight years old, working at a family-owned pizzeria in Brookline, Massachusetts, and part of a circle of friends who were fishermen and recreational shooters.

  The man took the rifle, absorbed its weight, and cracked it open to see how clean it was. Pappas watched the way he handled it. He judged that this was a guy who knew his way around this stuff. Around them stretched ranks of folding tables, milling people, and a multitude of rifles laid side by side in rows like fence posts. Most were assault weapons like this.

  “Why you selling it?”

  “I just don’t use it anymore,” Pappas said. “Somebody gave me a new gun for a present, and that’s what I use now. This has been under my bed for two months.”

  Pappas had first brought the gun back to Roach’s and then to several other gun stores. He wanted a thousand dollars for it, but the most any of the stores would offer was two hundred. Then a friend told him he could get better money at a gun show.

  “Is it pre-ban?”

  “Yep—I can guarantee it. I got the bill of sale right here.”

  In 1994 Congress had passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which had made illegal the possession of a gun like this—namely, a semiautomatic rifle with a detachable magazine (allowing the option of high-capacity ammo clips) and two or more additional features. These might include a folding stock, a pistol grip, a bayonet mount, a flash suppressor, or fittings for a grenade launcher. The law, however, was toothless. Assault rifles manufactured before 1994, regardless of their features, were exempt from the ban and could still be bought, sold, and possessed. Pappas’s gun came with a detachable magazine, a folding stock, and a pistol grip.

  “I’d like to change the scope attachment, do some other things. Can it take Bushmaster parts?”

  “Hmm—I don’t know.” Pappas gestured to the Bushmaster rep only a few feet away. “You could ask him. He could tell you.”

  The bearded man flicked only a glance in that direction. “So how much you want?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’d take eight hundred.”

  The guy had eyebrows, Pappas saw, that pitched teepees over both eyes. These elevated and descended as the man looked up and handed the gun back. “Well, I guess that’s pretty high. Thanks anyway.”

  Pappas let him walk away, but he resolved to keep track of him. If the guy stuck around and if Pappas couldn’t get eight hundred from somebody else, he’d catch him before the end of the show and see what happened then.

  The AR-15 is sometimes described as a clone of the U.S. military’s M16 combat rifle, but it’s more accurate to say that the M16 is a clone of the AR-15. Research conducted by the U.S. Army after the Korean War revealed that most rifle hits on enemy soldiers were made at relatively short range (within three hundred meters) and largely at random. What the army needed, then, was not a rifle firing a single large bullet, like the venerable M1, but rather a lighter, smaller rifle that could fire multiple small-caliber, high-velocity bullets—bullets light enough to be carried in large quantities but fast enough to penetrate body armor or a steel helmet at five hundred meters. In 1957 the army asked the ArmaLite Division of the Fairchild Aircraft Corporation to design such a rifle. ArmaLite engineer Eugene Stoner, a former marine and a small-arms expert, produced the AR-15. At the same time Remington produced a new bullet—a .223-caliber projectile—tailored to Stoner’s gun.

  At five and a half pounds, the weapon delivered to the army for testing was two pounds lighter than anything else under consideration. It was also accurate at both close quarters and its maximum range of six hundred meters, comfortable to shoot thanks to its light recoil, and flexible—a Swiss Army knife of a weapon accommodating a wide variety of barrel lengths, trigger units, butt stocks, and attachments. The gun performed impressively in testing, but a combination of military politics and ham-handed outside tinkering with its design delayed its adoption. By 1959 Fairchild had sunk $1.45 million into the gun’s development and was looking to get out of the small-arms business. So it sold production rights to Colt for $75,000 and a small royalty on subsequent sales.

  Finally, in 1961, a thousand AR-15s were issued to South Vietnamese troops and their Special Operations advisers. Their battlefield reports so lavishly praised the rifle that within two years the AR-15, rechristened the M16, was standard-issue in all branches of the military. There were losses—jammed guns, dead soldiers—as the military learned how to maintain the weapon, but by 1968 the M16 was an American soldier’s best friend. In fully automatic mode it can dispense hellfire at 850 rounds per minute. In semiautomatic, it can shoot nearly as fast as a vintage machine gun, but with much more accuracy. And because photographs of enemy soldiers killed or maimed by M16 fire remained classified for two decades, only GIs in the field knew about the devastating wounds that it inflicted and its brutally efficient kill rate. This was thanks to a bullet that not only tumbles as it penetrates steel and flesh but fragments as well, cutting starburst swaths through muscles and organs.

  Nearly half a century later the M16 remains the rifle of choice for the U.S. military and for militaries around the world. A similar if simpler gun, the Kalashnikov AK-47, is still held to be more reliable under harsh conditions, but in other respects the more powerful M16 has to be counted the deadliest handheld weapon ever devised. Stoner’s gun is now made by at least a dozen large companies besides Colt, and one civilian who knows how to use an AR-15 could hold off a platoon of Korean War GIs. The gun’s .223 “varmint” bullets would crack their helmets like eggshells.

  At the end of the day, Pappas still hadn’t found anyone willing to pay eight hundred dollars for his gun. But the old guy was still hanging around, empty-handed, and had wandered back to the Bushmaster booth. Pappas waved and went over to him. “What do you think?” he said. “You still interested? You want to make an offer on this?”

  They haggled and finally agreed on a price of $575. Pappas took the man’s license and w
rote out the bill of sale, two copies. “So the name’s Drega?” Pappas said, as if it rhymed with “Vega.”

  “Drega,” the man corrected him, pronouncing it with a long “e.” “And be sure you write ‘pre-ban’ on my copy of the bill.”

  Pappas wasn’t sure if that was appropriate, and he wondered if this sale had to be entered into a registry somewhere. The old man became agitated at that point, but Pappas didn’t want to run afoul of any gun laws. “Calm down,” he said. “Let me just ask this Bushmaster guy about it, okay?”

  The rep said it would be legal to specify pre-ban on the bill of sale. “And no, you don’t need to do any government paperwork on this,” he said. “That’s just for handguns. It doesn’t cover rifles, so long as they’re pre-ban.”

  They signed their respective copies. Pappas passed the weapon to its new owner, along with a nylon carrying bag and some extra magazines, and the old man pulled the purchase money in cash out of his pocket. Pappas’s last glimpse of him was with the rifle already stripped down and its parts spread across the table at the Bushmaster booth.

  Among his siblings, Carl Drega was closest to his brother Frank and sister Sophia. By 1997 Frank had retired and left Connecticut for Florida. They spoke regularly on the phone, but Carl had to abide by a rule Frank had laid down: no talk about his personal affairs in Columbia—it got them both too upset.

  Drega could be more candid with Sophia Linnane, who still lived near New Haven. In January 1997, before starting a job at the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Massachusetts, Drega went to Connecticut for Sophie’s birthday. He told her then that the state police had him under twenty-four-hour surveillance in Columbia, that when he drove home he tried to arrive at two or three in the morning to best elude that surveillance.

  In July, on his way back from a job in Detroit, Drega stopped at Sophie’s and told her that the state police were now out to kill him. Well, Carl needed to get away from there and unwind, she thought, and they made plans to visit Frank together in the fall. Around that time Drega mentioned to his girlfriend—a woman in Colebrook with whom he maintained a long and very discreet relationship—that Scott Phillips had threatened him. Drega claimed that Phillips had told him to sell everything and leave town before it was too late.

  That same month, Drega visited Dr. Bob Soucy in Colebrook for treatment of a sinus problem. Drega was a new patient, and Soucy was surprised when Drega asked, “Do you know who I am?”

  “Well, I suppose not,” said Soucy.

  “It’s just that I’ve got a history here in town,” said Drega, who by then had allowed his chinstrap whiskers to spread into a full salt-and-pepper beard. In fact, outside of Columbia town government and some, if not all, in law enforcement, few people in the area knew who he was. Unbidden, Drega launched into a history of his mistreatment at the hands of the Columbia selectmen.

  “So do you hold a grudge?” asked Soucy.

  Drega nodded and chose understatement. “Kind of. I suppose I do.”

  “Do you have any problems with the police?”

  Drega smiled and said, “No, I have a plan for the police.”

  Soucy himself did contract work for the police and acted as coroner in incidents of violent death. He knew about a few individuals in town who were on the police watch list, but the list didn’t include any Carl Drega. And this man made good eye contact and seemed generally calm and reasonable. Soucy got on with the examination and forgot about their conversation until later.

  By then it had been a month since several near neighbors in Vermont—the farmer Bernard Routhier, and also Lance Walling, the manager of LaPerle’s IGA supermarket in Colebrook, and Amos Colby, the sheriff of Vermont’s Essex County—had noticed all-day reports of gunfire from the Drega property during times when he was home. And it had been six months since Drega had begun occasionally pulling up outside Vickie Bunnell’s office in the News and Sentinel Building and staring at her through her office window. The February night that Vickie had appeared on the doorstep of Eric Stohl, begging to borrow a handgun, had been after the first such instance.

  On the afternoon of Friday, August 15—the same day that John Harrigan and Vickie would arrive at the Balsams’ together for Ellsworth Bunnell’s birthday party—Drega happened to meet Vickie by chance on a Main Street sidewalk. Bystanders reported that he swore and vowed to “get even with her” as Vickie turned scarlet and hastened away.

  On Saturday, Drega called Sophie to talk more about the Florida trip. It seemed to Sophie that her brother was more than usually upset about something, but if so, he didn’t want to talk about it.

  In his cabin, near the sewing machines that he used to repair his own clothes, Drega kept a calendar upon which he recorded his daily activities. The last entry, on Saturday, the sixteenth, was “PAINT ROOF ON BARN CUT SOME LAWN.”

  The rest is blank.

  6

  THE REASONS OF THE HEART

  IN 1869 A PIECE OF LEGISLATION ENTITLED “An Act to Create a State Police in Certain Cases” came before New Hampshire governor Onslow Stearns. At that time many local police departments were choosing not to enforce antidrinking laws, and this new agency was conceived primarily to remedy that. But too many New Hampshire voters feared that state police would also be used in a strike-busting capacity against labor unions, and the act failed to achieve the approval of the necessary two-thirds of male voters.

  Attitudes changed in the wake of the Eighteenth Amendment and the federal enforcement of antidrinking laws. The violence of that era raised public fears of crime, while the 1933 repeal of Prohibition pretty well loosened up the antidrinking laws. In the meantime the automobile and improved roads had made it harder for local police to apprehend fugitives within their jurisdictions. The increased fluidity of New Hampshire society also argued for a single agency to keep records, statistics, and fingerprints and to carry out statewide pursuits and investigations.

  So it was that in 1937 “An Act Creating a Department of State Police” was signed into New Hampshire law, authorizing an original cadre of forty-eight state troopers. These were issued .38 revolvers that they shared with the National Guard. They were told to get the telephone numbers of gas stations along their patrol routes so that station attendants could put flags on their pumps whenever headquarters wanted to contact a trooper. Bunny remembers the flag that used to fly regularly at Nugent’s gas station on Main Street before World War II.

  In 1997 there were about four hundred state troopers in New Hampshire. The pay wasn’t anything special—“A few years ago there were twelve local police departments that paid better than the state police,” said Jeff Caulder, a trooper who attended the New Hampshire State Police Academy in Concord with both Scott Phillips and Scott Stepanian—and the benefits only slightly better. But there was more variety than with municipal work: murder cases, speed chases, VIP security, and so on. And there were special units that did particularly adrenaline-charged work: the Major Crime Unit, for example, and the SWAT teams.

  There was also what the New Hampshire Department of Safety’s website calls the legacy of those first volunteers: “They were truly a special breed, willing to endure long, arduous tours of duty, meager compensation, and incredible personal risks. As the first New Hampshire State Troopers, they established an esprit de corps, a philosophy, and a total way of life that has transcended time and the evolution of social values.”

  According to Caulder, a former marine and current SWAT team member, it was that legacy and the appeal of the agency’s elite image that made it so hard to get into the force. He, Phillips, and Stepanian were three out of a class of twelve at the State Police Academy in 1990, and they were picked from some 2,400 applicants. Getting into the Academy was tougher than getting into Harvard.

  In fact it took Phillips two tries. He grew up in Lancaster and went from high school into the Army Military Police Corp, serving four years in Panama. He applied to the state police on his discharge in 1989 and, when rejected, went to work as a s
ecurity officer at a Concord hospital. He tried again in 1990. “They must have been a little more desperate that year,” Caulder told him later.

  Stepanian recalled meeting this other Scott at state police headquarters in March that year. “I can remember talking to everyone that day,” Stepanian wrote in a 1998 issue of New Hampshire Trooper magazine. “I also remember speaking with Scott. Right away, it was obvious that Scott had a ‘way’ about him. He had charm and warmth. You just felt good being around him.”

  Phillips had good stories to tell about his military police days, and enough experience polishing leather and brass to help those without previous military experience—like Stepanian—get through inspections. Academy graduates went on probation for a year and were assigned to two different duty stations. Phillips helped Stepanian prepare for a probationary stint at Troop F in the North Country, while he himself reported to Troop D in the Concord area.

  There Phillips made a name for himself by daring to arrest a local judge for drunk driving. The judge threatened to have the young trooper fired if the case wasn’t dropped, but the charges stuck through a trial and an appeal, and the judge was fined and suspended. “It made the news in a big way,” Stepanian wrote. “It is kind of funny, but shortly after that he put in his request to return to Colebrook. I am sure that a lot of people thought that because he arrested a judge he got sent to Colebrook. But Scott wanted to return to the North Country.” As did Stepanian, who also requested Troop F as his permanent assignment.

  The most widely circulated photo of Phillips is a headshot of a young man who looks more Eagle Scout than trooper. There is the forest-green shirt with its epaulets, brass name tag, and blue, white, and gold badge; the crisp white triangle of the undershirt; the gold-badged Stetson with its black band and its felt brim as flat and stiff as a phonograph record. Softening those angles and planes are the clean, boyish features, rightly proportioned, the black eyebrows and fair skin, and a smile—John Harrigan’s daughter Karen labeled it a “smart-alecky grin”—that outshone the spit and polish of the uniform. John liked to call Phillips “Dudley Do-Right” and to point out that the Stetson hid a cowlick the trooper could never quite tame.