In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  There was nothing fraudulent, though, about the Eagle Scout look, the Dudley Do-Right urge to make things better. Karen Harrigan Ladd remembered a Colebrook woman who had moved hastily out of her boyfriend’s house and then was prevented from fetching her belongings. Phillips went with her and smoothed things over with the former boyfriend—“That silver tongue of his always came in handy,” wrote Stepanian—and helped the woman load a girlfriend’s truck with her possessions.

  “He just dug in and helped,” the woman told Karen in a News and Sentinel story. “After we’d gotten the truck loaded, I thanked him and told him he could go, but he said he’d go with us and make sure we got to my new apartment okay. We lost a few things out of the truck on the way, and he’d stop and turn on his blue lights, jump out, and pick stuff up. When he got to my place, he helped us unload too.”

  Then he stayed to give the woman legal advice on separating her finances from those of the ex-boyfriend. “He knew I had kids and was having a hard time, and he just wanted things to work out for me,” she said. “He was a family man, and whatever he’d do for his family, he’d do for anyone else.”

  Phillips had married his high school sweetheart from Lancaster, and Christine Phillips worked as a secretary at the Balsams. He was an avid skier and runner, and many photos exist of him pushing a baby buggy ahead of him as he jogged around Colebrook during off-duty hours. First it was son Keenan, born in 1994, and then a two-seater buggy for daughter Clancy as well, born in 1996. That year Phillips was the torch bearer for Colebrook’s annual Law Enforcement Torch Run, a fund-raiser for the Special Olympics—torch held aloft in one hand, Keenan and Clancy pushed ahead in their buggy by the other.

  Border Patrol agent Dave Perry remembered hearing from a grateful citizen how wonderful Phillips had been in providing aid at the scene of a minor accident. Les Lord was there with Perry, and Lord, barely containing that rolling laugh of his, said, “Well, that’s just who he is—he’s our Mr. Wonderful.” So “Mr. Wonderful” duly became Phillips’s nickname among his peers, though in fact Lord was repeating a sobriquet previously assigned Phillips by his friend Stepanian.

  “I must admit I was kind of jealous of Scott,” Stepanian wrote. “I used to ask Scott how many babies he kissed today. When he was hot, he was on fire, like a campaigning politician always trying to get more votes.”

  And he got votes from his peers because there was more to Phillips than the smooth-talking Mr. Wonderful. Les Lord, for example, was notorious for his readiness to trample on the fussier aspects of state police protocol, as much for its own sake as for a laugh. “But Scott was just as nuts as Les was,” said Perry, “only Scott was sneakier about it.”

  Perry remembered being puzzled one day to get a call from Phillips at his Border Patrol office in Beecher Falls, Vermont. “Hey, buddy, I need some help down here,” Phillips said.

  The call for help wasn’t unusual. In the North Country there are no turf battles between the various law enforcement agencies. With so much ground to cover, they routinely cooperate on even the smallest jobs, and officers socialize without prejudice off duty. “It was this ‘buddy’ thing,” Perry recalled. “He never called me ‘buddy.’”

  “Just come on down,” Phillips said. “I’ll buy you some ice cream.”

  “Scott, what do you want?”

  Perry couldn’t get it out of him, and Phillips said he was frankly hurt by Perry’s suspicions. When Perry got to Colebrook and slipped into Phillips’s cruiser, the vehicle’s door locks snapped shut. “Did I mention there’s a brawl going on down in Woodale Village?” Phillips said.

  “No, but you could have—I still would have come.”

  “Couldn’t take that chance, buddy.”

  Sometimes Phillips needed backup, and sometimes he just wanted company. “He hated to ride alone,” Stepanian wrote. “He would always ‘kidnap’ you and go cruising. It seemed a lot of the times I rode with Scott, something big would happen (i.e., a fatal, a burglary, or something like that). A short ride could easily turn into a complete shift.”

  Norm Brown, the supervisor of the Coös County Jail and one of Phillips’s regular running partners, remembered a young detainee who broke into the jail’s laundry room and crawled out a window. “We found out about the break at 5 a.m., and Scott and Sergeant Wayne Fortier of the state police were there within the hour,” Brown said.

  There were tracks in the snow that vanished onto pavement. Phillips, Fortier, and Brown talked to neighbors, who had seen nothing. They put out a bulletin, and then the three men went to breakfast at a restaurant in West Stewartstown. There Phillips got a call from Dave Perry, who was on duty that morning but returning from a meeting in plainclothes and without handcuffs or a weapon. Perry had been traveling north on Route 102 in Vermont and had seen a hitchhiker thumbing for a ride south—on a remote stretch where it was unusual to see a hitchhiker. Perry turned around, went back, and pretended to be on his way somewhere else. He told the hitchhiker he’d be coming back, though, in twenty minutes. “If you’re still here, I’ll pick you up, okay?”

  Perry had a radio in his unmarked car, but not one that shared frequencies with either Vermont or New Hampshire state police. He sped to a pay phone at DeBanville’s General Store in Bloomfield, Vermont, and made enough phone calls to learn about the escape, get a description of the fugitive, and locate the investigating officers. After talking to Phillips, Perry went out to flag down southbound cars: “If you see a hitchhiker, don’t pick him up, whatever you do.”

  Phillips and Brown arrived in Phillips’s cruiser, with Fortier following behind. They trailed Perry’s car down Route 102 and dropped farther behind as Perry slowed and stopped slightly ahead of the hitchhiker. The cruisers stopped as well. “Scott got out one side, and I got out the other,” Brown said. “This kid’s running towards Dave’s car. We got him by the arms, slammed him against Dave’s trunk, and cuffed him. His feet never touched the ground after that.”

  Fortier left on another assignment, and in the sergeant’s absence there was the temptation to just drive across the bridge into New Hampshire, as if the kid had been captured on that side of the river, and so avoid the extradition process from Vermont. “It’s a nice idea, but my lieutenant would be bullshit,” Phillips said. “If we arrest him in Vermont, we got to process him in Vermont.”

  Mr. Wonderful had been tempted, but finally the Do-Right side of him prevailed. It might have helped that the lieutenant in charge of Troop F, Leo “Chuck” Jellison, was also Phillips’s uncle.

  “So we go down to St. Johnsbury, and they tell us they don’t have jurisdiction in Bloomfield,” Brown said. “We have to go back and way the hell up to Derby Line on the Canadian border. We ended up spending five hours in the car with that kid, who did not want to come back to New Hampshire and who refused to waive extradition. We finally needed a governor’s warrant, and I guess it was two or three months before he was back in the jail.”

  Stepanian wrote, “Scott never took the job dead serious, but just serious enough. He never lost sight of the fact that he was a person too.” In fact troopers are wary of those in their ranks who take the badge—and themselves—too seriously, who drink too deeply of the authoritarian, paramilitary elements in the agency’s esprit de corps. Les Lord was a walking daily affront to those elements. Mr. Wonderful was more subversive, striking a guarded and personal balance between the philosophy and its statutes, on one hand, and the reasons of the heart, on the other.

  John Harrigan was a runner too, and Phillips used to love to creep silently up on John in his cruiser as the newspaperman beat up and down the roads of Colebrook. Then Phillips would pop his siren and lights, and declaim over his speaker-phone, “Come on, pick up the pace!”

  Too much pace was the problem one day in 1992 when John had to delay a press run for his newspapers in order to attend Rudy Shatney’s wake. John couldn’t miss that wake, even for a press run, but he was in a good hurry to get to Lancaster when it was over. He was bar
reling through Stratford on Route 3 when a cruiser heading north passed him, flipped on its blue lights, and made a U-turn. A moment later Phillips was at his car window, grinning and shoving back his Stetson, said John, “like Andy Griffith.”

  “Well, well, well—Mr. Harrigan,” Phillips said. “Do you know how fast you were going?”

  “Um—pretty fast.”

  “I’ve got you at seventy-five. So what’s going on? What’s your hurry?”

  John explained the circumstances. Phillips looked down at the pavement for a moment and then said, “Rudy Shatney was the best man who ever walked these woods. Go ahead—get back on the road.”

  John marveled that Phillips didn’t even warn him to slow down. “He knew how much Rudy meant to me,” he said, “and he had a real good feel for the culture of the North Country.”

  “You look at him, and you could see two different futures ahead of him,” said Dave Perry. “Either he was going to rise to the rank of colonel and run the whole agency from Concord or else he was going to stay in Colebrook and raise his kids because he loved it so much there. Either scenario was available to him.”

  Scott Stepanian saw the glimmer of that former scenario almost as soon as he met Phillips: “It was at the academy that I realized Scott was a gifted and exceptional human being. It was there that I told Scott that I would not salute him when he became colonel of the state police.”

  On the morning of August 19, 1997, Ed Jeffrey needed diesel fuel. The owner and president of the little New Hampshire Central Railroad had a crew of workmen replacing the ties on a length of track, and the machine used for extracting the old ties from beneath the rails and inserting the new had run dry. Ed got a call about it at his office in Columbia. He jumped into a pickup with a fuel tank in the bed and drove to the Blue Mountain Variety Store, nestled on Route 3 between that mountain to the east and Monadnock to the west. He saw that Carl Drega’s orange Dodge pickup was already pulled up to the lone diesel pump.

  Jeffrey had met Drega in 1995 when Jeffrey was replacing worn crossing planks on track traversing the driveways of private property owners. The planks were actually the property and responsibility of the property owners, but Jeffrey liked to keep an eye on them, and he charged a lowball fee of a hundred dollars for replacing them when he thought it was time. Drega’s looked worn, but Jeffrey had had no luck contacting the owner about it—telephone calls were never picked up, mail went unanswered.

  Finally Jeffrey stopped with his crew one day at the top of the driveway. He walked down toward the cabin alone, but Drega met him halfway, standing in the driveway with a rifle. “You’re trespassing,” Drega told him.

  Jeffrey thought Drega had a glazed look to his eyes, and he felt chills running in relay down his spine as he explained his concern about the crossing planks. “Those planks look fine to me,” Drega said.

  “Okay, then, it’s up to you,” Jeffrey replied. They talked a few minutes more, amiably enough. Drega had several questions about the railroad business, and then Jeffrey walked out over planks that certainly felt punky. Jeffrey had run into Drega once or twice since then and had made a point of being cordial—“The way you handle a pet rattlesnake,” he said.

  Today Drega—with a darkly gnarled beard, wearing jeans and a blue plaid shirt and a red GMC baseball cap—was both cordial and talkative. The whole bed of his pickup was covered by five-gallon plastic fuel containers, all bound by a single length of clothesline threaded through their handles. That was all that held them—the truck had no tailgate. Jeffrey noticed other pieces of clothesline securing, sort of, the truck’s front fenders. Drega was filling each of the containers in turn with diesel fuel. To help speed things along, Jeffrey leaned in and started replacing the caps on full containers.

  Drega asked after a used locomotive Jeffrey had just bought, then wondered if it might be possible to reroute the railroad tracks on his land through another part of the property. Jeffrey didn’t think so, but he kept that to himself and promised to check into it. He also thought this was a lot of fuel. “Carl, what are you doing with all this diesel?”

  Drega laughed. “My tractor’s out of gas.”

  He clipped the nozzle back on the pump and marched into the store to pay. Jeffrey stared after him. He had never seen Drega smile, much less laugh. He glanced at the gauge on the fuel pump—61.5 gallons—before he reset it, and then watched as the pickup started reluctantly and turned south on Route 3 with its body swaying back and forth over the chassis.

  Ed Jeffrey met Les Lord in 1994, shortly after he had moved to Columbia from Meredith, in central New Hampshire. Jeffrey had just finished a meeting with a client at that man’s home. He came out the door to find Lord’s cruiser parked next to his car and Lord leaning against the cruiser’s fender. He held Jeffrey’s license plates in one hand, tossed a screwdriver up and down with the other, and said—wearing that chipmunk grin of his—“Well, Mr. Jeffrey, we’ve been looking for you.”

  Jeffrey had left an unpaid traffic ticket behind in Meredith. Lord wanted to know where Jeffrey wanted the car parked while it was off the road. The next day Jeffrey made good on the ticket and met Lord at his railroad’s gravel yard, where the car had been left overnight. The cop made the event into something of an awards ceremony, shaking Jeffrey’s hand and jubilantly presenting the plates while a friend of Jeffrey’s snapped a photo.

  Jeffrey laughed his way through the whole experience. “Oh, Les Lord was just a peach of a guy,” he said.

  Growing up in Pittsburg, Lord had been the kind of peach who seemed an unlikely candidate for law enforcement. He was always in trouble, though most often for pranks—once, for example, supergluing his school principal’s coffee mug to his desk. Pittsburg fire chief Tom Carlson grew tired of chasing the boy’s snow machine off town roads in the winter, but nonetheless he recommended Lord for a two-week summer cadet program for teenagers at the State Police Academy in Concord. The next summer Carlson recommended him again, and Lord got accepted again—which prompted Carlson to dub him “Lucky,” a moniker used more around Pittsburg than Colebrook.

  That cadet training led to work as a part-time officer in the Pittsburg Police Department, once Lord got out of high school in 1971. Four years later he married Beverly Frizzell, a Colebrook girl who worked as a dispatcher for Emery Trucking and who loved to ride snow machines. That was also the year that the onetime town scamp got promoted to chief of police. Lord was only twenty-three, but people were fine with that.

  “Well, Les knew everybody in that town, and he was everybody’s best friend,” said Dave Perry. Perry remembered a Saturday night on which he and Lord were guests at Tom Carlson’s house. The phone rang, and Carlson’s daughter answered. After a moment she handed the receiver to Lord with an appalled expression on her face. “I think this is an obscene phone call,” she whispered.

  Lord got on the line, listened a moment, and said, “Bill, is that you?”

  Indeed it was. Lord said that Bill was drunk and babbling, and that was the end of it. The girl wasn’t troubled again.

  Lord was popular, and he proved himself tough. Perry once went with him on a search warrant into a house on Indian Stream, where they found a number of burglarized goods and an angry suspect with a handgun. “Les had to physically wrestle that gun away from him,” Perry said, “and then we put him in the back of the cruiser, where the guy lunges forward, trying to head-butt Les.”

  Lord reached back and restrained the suspect by grabbing his beard. “Just because your name is L-O-R-D,” the man spelled out, “you’re not God almighty!”

  “He’s got a good point there,” Perry said.

  “Shut up and drive,” said Lord, his fist still full of beard.

  As the years went by, though, Lord tired not only of being the only full-time officer in the Pittsburg police force and taking too many risks alone, but also of having to play God almighty in respect to some of his civilian friends’ failings—and then having to help prosecute them. In 1986 he applied
for an opening in the state’s Bureau of Highway Enforcement and attended the Police Academy for real this time.

  One of his classmates was a young municipal cop from Gorham named Gerry Marcou. “Les had a tough year at the academy,” Marcou recalled. “He showed up one Monday morning with a black eye because he’d had to break up a brawl in some club up there, and somebody had cold-cocked him. In a town that small, Les had to go home and work on the weekends while the rest of us could do homework because we were getting time off. So halfway through the year I was assigned to help tutor him, and he made it all right.”

  Highway Enforcement was not then part of the state police, and once on the job, Lord could pretty much specialize in motorists, truck drivers, and their machines. It was work he enjoyed, and eventually he talked Gerry Marcou into abandoning fourteen years of seniority at the Gorham Police Department for his own cruiser and better retirement benefits with Highway Enforcement. Lord then became Marcou’s field training officer.

  “I didn’t like Colebrook, and I still don’t—it’s just too cold,” Marcou said. “And I was a criminal man. I didn’t know a thing about trucks and cars and highways. But on my first night—this was 1989—I go up there, and park my cruiser, and jump in with Les. It’s January, about ten below and snowing, and I’m bundled up like an Eskimo.”

  They drove to Clarksville, where Lord pulled over a logging truck loaded with a long bed of spruce and fir. “Come on,” Lord said. “I’ll show you how to weigh a truck.”

  “We’re going to weigh a truck? In the snow? At these temperatures?”

  Lord fetched a set of scales out of the trunk, a pair of fifty-pound mechanisms that he positioned in front of the truck’s rear tires. “You got to be a little bit careful if the roads are slippery,” Lord said. “Sometimes these will kick out.”