In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  This didn’t make sense to Wayne Saunders: he had just taken a shotgun slug to the chest, he must have, and yet he felt like he was still alive. If he wasn’t, then this wasn’t heaven. If he was, he might not be alive much longer if the gunman—whoever it was, for whatever reason—was coming to finish him off.

  Saunders’s shotgun was in a boot on the left side of his seat, but he couldn’t move his left arm to get it. He struggled to quiet the roar of his breathing, his gasping, fearful of the racket it made. With his right hand he popped his seat belt, and then, reaching across his bloody shirt, he managed to find the door handle.

  The door fell open, and the cruiser was pitched enough for Saunders to feel as if he were dropping out of an airplane. He slid and fell several feet down the bank, almost into the water. With his one good hand he worked his sidearm, a .40-caliber Sig Sauer P229, out of its holster. Then he lay still a moment, gasping.

  At last he began climbing up through the underbrush, on his knees and one hand. He was like a drowning man struggling to the surface, and with no sense of how far that was. Eventually he heard someone—who was that? Steve Breton?—calling his name.

  Vickie Bunnell and Tallak in Vickie’s office at the News and Sentinel Building. Fred Harrigan’s law books line the bookshelves behind Vickie. Photo courtesy of the News and Sentinel, Colebrook, New Hampshire.

  Donna Jordan, Charlie Jordan, Vickie Bunnell, and John Harrigan on vacation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during the 1980s. Photo courtesy of Charles Jordan.

  Dennis Joos interviewing presidential candidate Pat Buchanan and his wife in the newsroom of the News and Sentinel during the 1992 New Hampshire primary. The door through which Vickie Bunnell and newspaper staffers would flee in 1997 is in the background. Photo courtesy of Charles Jordan.

  Trooper Leslie G. Lord in a photo taken by Charlie Jordan for an Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital advertisement. Photo courtesy of Charles Jordan.

  Trooper Scott E. Phillips at an accident scene. Photo courtesy of the News and Sentinel, Colebrook, New Hampshire.

  Where the shooting began: LaPerle’s IGA supermarket in Colebrook. Photo courtesy of the author.

  Carl Drega, in the driver’s license photo that was circulated to law enforcement agencies and media outlets. Photo courtesy of the New Hampshire Office of the Attorney General.

  Dennis Joos attended by emergency medical personnel moments after being shot by Carl Drega. Photo courtesy of Charles Jordan.

  The remains of Vickie Bunnell lying beneath a blanket in the parking lot behind the News and Sentinel Building. From the left, standing vigil, are John Brunault, Dave Robidas, and Paul Nugent. Photo courtesy of Charles Jordan.

  The Bloomfield, Vermont, railroad trestle, from behind which Carl Drega ambushed Conservation Officer Wayne Saunders. Drega stood to the left. The bright photo tents on the right side of the road mark the locations of ejected shell casings. Photo courtesy of the New Hampshire Department of Fish & Game.

  The badge that saved Wayne Saunders’s life, now on permanent display at the Concord headquarters of the New Hampshire Department of Fish & Game. Photo courtesy of the New Hampshire Department of Fish & Game.

  Wayne Saunders’s bullet-pocked cruiser. The white rods indicate bullet entry points. Photo courtesy of the New Hampshire Department of Fish & Game.

  A wounded Jeff Caulder, clutching Todd Bogardus’s shotgun, being carried out of the woods at Brunswick Springs. Assisting the EMT are, left to right, Sam Sprague, Bogardus, and Steve Brooks. Photo courtesy of Toby Talbot and the Associated Press. © 2015 The Associated Press.

  John Harrigan being interviewed by Fredricka Whitfield of CNN in the aftermath of the shootings. Photo courtesy of the Coös County Democrat, Lancaster, New Hampshire.

  The front door of the News and Sentinel Building draped in black. Photo courtesy of the Coös County Democrat, Lancaster, New Hampshire.

  Funeral procession of law enforcement personnel for Scott Phillips and Les Lord led by Governor Jeanne Shaheen and her husband, Bill, Saturday, August 23. Photo courtesy of Charles Jordan.

  News reporters gathered for a press conference around a display of the pipe bombs and other weapons and explosives recovered from the ruins of Carl Drega’s barn. Photo courtesy of the Coös County Democrat, Lancaster, New Hampshire.

  The name that Carl Drega had blocked into the foundation of his barn in 1971, partially eradicated by gunfire. Photo courtesy of the Coös County Democrat, Lancaster, New Hampshire.

  The monument to Vickie Bunnell, Dennis Joos, Scott Phillips, and Les Lord that was raised next to the News and Sentinel Building in 1998. Photo courtesy of the author.

  Earl (Bunny) and Irene Bunnell, with a friend, as they sell Kiwanis raffle tickets on Main Street at the 2008 Moose Festival. Photo courtesy of the author.

  11

  GOING TO WAR

  IT’S NOT JUST MARGARET SMITH—all emergency medical technicians (or cops) in a small town are harrowed by work involving people they know and the laments of those people’s friends and family. Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital doctor’s aide and volunteer EMT Penny Henry, twenty-eight, had heard the shots at the IGA from the nurse’s station at the hospital, which is not far from the supermarket as the crow flies. She and Barbara Daley, another young EMT, raced there in the Colebrook 1 ambulance. Margaret Smith had arrived just ahead of them.

  Penny knew from the badge number of the stranded cruiser that it belonged to Les Lord, a family friend. “You can’t help him,” someone told her. “He doesn’t have a head.”

  She had come to know and like Scott Phillips from his visits to the hospital on casework. In death his skin was as white as a Styrofoam cup—Margaret said she had never seen such a ghastly white before. Penny bent to lay a stethoscope against Scott’s chest, working around the hollow wounds, simply because she wanted so grievously to hear something.

  They had been there only three minutes when they were paged to yet another emergency in progress, this at the News and Sentinel. But here the parking lot was still in chaos, and Penny couldn’t bear to leave Scott to the gawkers arriving from all directions. So Margaret and Barbara drove away in Colebrook 1, and Penny stood vigil.

  Chief Mike Sielicki arrived at the supermarket in his civvies, and then some other officers showed up, and crime scene tape went up around Les’s cruiser. Soon Sielicki came over to this plot in the grass. “He became very emotional,” Penny would say in her witness report. No less emotional was Scott’s neighbor on Pleasant Street, Jules Kennett, who came after Sielicki.

  When the fire truck arrived, Penny begged for a tarp that she could use for covering the body, and the crew produced one, but they warned her not to use it until Bob Soucy, the medical examiner, said so. Then the fire truck was called away to a structure fire in Columbia. Penny went to her knees to brush away ants, the occasional fly.

  Scott Stepanian was off duty that day, and he arrived, like Sielicki, in his civvies. Stepanian “lost it,” Penny would report, mourning loudly enough to turn heads in the parking lot. At last Stepanian left, vowing to come back, doing so just as Dr. Soucy approached from the direction of Les’s cruiser and as a helicopter came churning up over Route 3 from the south.

  The left side of Wayne Saunders’s blouse was drenched in blood, and Steve Breton presumed he had been hit in the shoulder. “Wayne, put your gun away,” Breton said. “He’s gone.”

  “Who’s gone?” Saunders said. “Who is that guy? What the fuck’s going on?”

  Breton helped the wounded man get the Sig holstered. Then he and George Nugent pulled him up the bank, out of the brush, onto Nugent’s lawn. Breton told him that the guy in the cruiser had also shot Scott and Les, but didn’t mention they had died. Saunders himself didn’t look good, Breton thought. His face had gone pale and he might be slipping into shock. Saunders didn’t seem to be in pain—in fact seemed oddly euphoric. Breton made him sit down on the grass, though Saunders protested he was fine.

  Dick Marini was in his Plymout
h and on the radio. He had gotten through to Troop F, reporting that there was another officer down, that the suspect was again mobile, heading south on Vermont 102 toward the Maidstone Lake or Lancaster areas.

  “Wayne needs a hospital—fast,” Breton said to Marini. “I don’t know if there’s time for an ambulance or if there’s even one available with all the shit going on.”

  “Sure, and now there’s another crime scene to secure,” Marini said. “We need my car here to keep a lid on the traffic.”

  They decided to commandeer a civilian vehicle. The driver of the Jeep Cherokee that Saunders had nearly hit in the intersection was Vermonter Harry Stinson, who had just come back from the New Hampshire side with his wife, Christiane. Now the couple was among the onlookers on Nugent’s lawn and the first to whom Steve Breton turned. “Sir,” Breton said to Stinson, “do you have a valid driver’s license?”

  Later Breton would remember that question—in all its officious vacuity—as a sign he wasn’t thinking clearly. Nor was Saunders. When Breton told him that they’d be riding in Stinson’s Jeep to the hospital, Saunders looked at DeBanville’s—where people stared in ranks from the deck and parking lot, ignoring Marini’s demands that they go inside—and said, “Can we stop there for a soda first?”

  Stinson was told to drive north up 102, which would have less traffic than Route 3, and to cross the river at Colebrook. He left Christiane at the scene and pushed the Jeep as fast as he dared, its hazard lights blinking. A Vermont game warden flashed by them in the opposite direction, and once they had crossed into Lemington, Breton noticed that same pillar of smoke he had seen just a few minutes before on the opposite side of the Connecticut.

  Saunders was in front, bleeding copiously over Stinson’s passenger seat, while Breton, using a rag from the Jeep’s trunk, applied pressure to his shoulder from the rear seat. Breton was also slapping him on the back of the head, hard, and shouting into his ear to for him stay awake, not to die on him.

  In Colebrook, they found people and cars clotting up Bridge Street in front of the News and Sentinel. Breton put his head out the window and yelled for them all to get the hell out of the way.

  Dr. Bob Soucy had grown up in northern Maine and gone to medical school in Iowa with Bill Gifford, the son of Doc Gifford and Parsie. Bill talked warmly about Colebrook and would put issues of the News and Sentinel in Soucy’s mailbox. In 1988 Soucy visited the hospital Bill’s dad had founded, and the next year he joined a medical practice based there.

  By 1997, as Coös County’s medical examiner, Soucy was familiar with violent death, and the frequency with which he knew its victims. Nonetheless, he was shaken to find Les Lord dead in that cruiser at the IGA. Lord had been a patient of his. Soucy was treating him for hypertension, had told him to lay off junk food. “There are worse things than Twinkies,” Lord said.

  Indeed there were. Soucy put on his gloves and battled his emotions as he went about his task amid that carnage. He didn’t like it that the vehicle was still running and in gear, that it might take off across the parking lot if the dead man’s foot happened to slip off the brake. “We can’t turn it off,” one of the investigating officers told him. “We’ve got to leave everything just as is until all the evidence is collected.”

  Soucy worked carefully, mindful of that foot and brake pedal. Then he had to go to where Scott Phillips lay. Mike Sielicki walked with him across the parking lot. They glanced up at the chopper in the sky and Sielicki said, “Probably news media.”

  Penny Henry was there with Phillips, who lay in a contorted position, Soucy noted, on his back and on top of an anthill. The examination took only a moment, and Penny pleaded permission to lay a blue tarp over Scott. “They’re probably up there taking pictures,” Soucy said. “Go ahead.”

  But Sielicki said no. Again, nothing could be disturbed in any way for the sake of evidence and its integrity. “Evidence for what?” Soucy asked.

  “The prosecution—once we catch this asshole.”

  Soucy boiled at the mere thought of that. “I’m doing my job,” he snapped. “If you guys do your job, there won’t be any prosecution.”

  He said he’d be back to make out the death certificates and hoped these men would be covered by then. He went back to his car steeling himself for another dose of bitters downtown. He thought back to his one meeting with Drega, that office visit two months ago, and the hair lifted on the back of his neck as he recalled the particulars of that odd conversation.

  Prosecution? Well, he didn’t think Mr. Drega was the surrendering type anyway.

  Steve Hersom, New Hampshire trooper first class, thought that in the morning he’d deliver some reports, forms, and supplies from Troop F to Scott Phillips up in Colebrook. Then they’d have lunch and work some traffic patrol together. Instead Hersom spent much of the day at the scene of a traffic accident near Mount Washington.

  By midafternoon he was at Troop F headquarters in Twin Mountain working on a diagram for his accident report. Then—like Dan Couture at the Colebrook Police Department—Hersom was asked to take the place of the regular dispatcher on the telephone for a moment. That was when the call came from Colebrook Dispatch that two troopers were down.

  Troop F commander Chuck Jellison was off duty, but everybody knew what to do: get in a vehicle with some weapons and ammunition, head north, keep your ear to the radio—but stay off the air unless you have something of Code 1000 priority. Troopers flew out of the building like it was on fire.

  Hersom drove up Route 3 as fast as he’d ever pushed a cruiser—“at warp five factor,” he said—with Detective Chuck West, thirty-nine, following in an unmarked car. Hersom didn’t like not knowing who was down, but he feared Scottie had to be one of them. He didn’t think about Les Lord. Lord had been with Highway Enforcement for so long that Hersom still didn’t quite think of him as a trooper—which was fine with Les. But he remembered Lord when the radio said the suspect had stolen cruiser 719.

  In Lancaster, Hersom waved West over to the road shoulder. They decided that West would take the Lancaster bridge across the river and go north on Vermont 102. Hersom would continue up Route 3, and that way they’d cover both arteries to the south, with only two crossing points—Northumberland into Guildhall, Vermont, and North Stratford into Bloomfield, Vermont—between Lancaster and Colebrook.

  Hersom had just cleared Lancaster when he heard that shots had been fired in downtown Colebrook. Nearing North Stratford, he heard someone identified as Liquor 13 report that another officer was down, that the suspect had just left Bloomfield, driving south on 102. Hersom answered and got Liquor 13’s location.

  He slowed, perhaps, to warp three across the bridge into Vermont, confident that either he or West would soon meet this fugitive. He was about to veer past the sedan blocking the intersection after the bridge when he was waved to a stop by a man he recognized as Dick Marini. “Jesus, I can’t get anybody to answer at Troop F,” Marini said. “I’m glad somebody’s finally here.”

  “You got everything under control?”

  “Well, no, I could use some help with this fucking crime scene. Everybody’s just standing around gaping, won’t clear the area. But that’s all right—you better get after that guy.”

  Hersom himself couldn’t help but gape at the Fish & Game cruiser with its lights still popping on the riverbank. Marini told him that there were at least three dead, and who they were, and that Wayne Saunders might not make it.

  Hersom was about Scott Phillips’s age, the son of a rescue paratrooper who trundled his family around the country until he retired to Pittsburg in 1972. Hersom was an athlete, and he might have had a career in baseball had he not partied too hard at college in Louisiana. He got straightened out in the U.S. Army, and was a cop in Nashua until nine years ago, when Chuck Jellison suggested he try the state police.

  He knew Carl Drega well enough to say hi, had considered him just a grouch—by no means a killer. Vickie Bunnell had drawn up Hersom’s parents’ will and cou
nseled him through a divorce. He’d be the first to admit he wasn’t good at keeping his family and professional lives separate—as Scottie had been. Troop F was the first place that really felt like home to him, mostly because Jellison ran it so well, and guys like Scottie and Les made it so much fun to work there. If Troop F was home, they were his family.

  Hersom took leave of Liquor 13 and steered under the railroad trestle. He felt he was doing what he had prepared to do in the army—go to war.

  Penny Henry was still with Scott Phillips when Stepanian returned, now in uniform. He asked her if he could sit with his friend alone for a while. By then Penny had learned that two other shooting victims had come into the ER.

  “I think they need some help at the hospital, and I should probably get over there, if I can find a ride,” she said. “Is it okay if I go? You’ll stay with him?”

  Stepanian said that he would. He settled himself down in the grass and the ants next to Scott, and Penny heard Stepanian speaking softly to him as she left. “Hey, buddy,” he began.

  Word had gotten around the IGA crime scene that Wayne Saunders had been shot in Bloomfield and taken to the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital. Dan Couture asked Chief Sielicki if he might go there to check on him, and Sielicki told him to hurry.

  If Kevin Jordan in Fish & Game could have claimed Saunders as a dependent in Groveton, Sielicki could have done the same in Colebrook—could have claimed both Couture and Saunders, in fact, since the two of them ate so many meals with him and his wife. The young men had been roommates at the Police Academy. Now they shared a little A-frame in Dixville Notch, went barhopping together in Canada during their off-duty hours. Saunders’s happy-go-lucky temperament always left Couture feeling better about things.