In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  When Jellison approached, Wilder drew a .357 Magnum from a jacket on his car seat. The ensuing hand-to-hand struggle ended with Wilder shot through the heart by his own hand. A previous bullet had passed through Wilder and lodged near Jellison’s liver. Beno Lamontagne heard the two gunshots from Lazerworks, and when he arrived at the Getty station, Doc Gifford and Eric Stohl were already tending to Jellison, who lay bleeding on the pavement. Wilder lay stretched across a car seat. Jellison looked up at Beno, his face gone white, and said, “That idiot just shot himself and me.”

  Jellison, now the lieutenant in charge of Troop F, had nearly died of that wound. On this day he almost wished that he had as he sped west from Mt. Washington, picking up information in bits and pieces along the way.

  At DeBanville’s, Vermont State Police officers directed him down 102. A mile later, he saw an unmarked New Hampshire State Police vehicle parked at the right-hand turn into Dennis Pond. The operator turned out to be Chuck West, who showed Jellison a set of tire tracks in the intersection’s gravel. West said the tracks had to have been made by a vehicle traveling at a high rate of speed, and maybe not long ago.

  Everything was not long ago. It had been only ten minutes since West had met New Hampshire trooper Steve Hersom at just that point on 102. Hersom had turned around and then had spun around again when he saw a Vermont Fish & Game officer—Paul Fink—coming south. Hersom led Fink and Vermont trooper Tom Roberts back to Dennis Pond Road. Roberts continued south, Hersom and Fink went up the dirt road together, and West stayed to secure the intersection.

  Vermont State Police lieutenant George Hacking arrived moments later, and this wide turnoff, far from any houses and bordered by woods on all sides, seemed a good spot for a command post from which to coordinate some complicated search patterns. Dennis Pond Road has spurs that go off to several smaller ponds: Tuttle, Big Wheeler, and Little Wheeler. Maidstone Lake is about four miles to the south—it’s bigger and there is a more extensive knot of roads wrapped around it, along with spurs to South America Pond and Notch Pond and a backdoor outlet to the west over a mountain.

  The problem of too much traffic on all radio channels was compounded by the fact that New Hampshire and Vermont law enforcement shared very few channels. Jellison and Hacking managed as best they could by parking their cruisers side by side and reversed, with their windows open, allowing their radios to be in the most literal sort of audio contact.

  Then Jellison set about dispensing assignments. He made contact with Kevin Jordan, assuring Jordan of his right to pursue and telling him to join the several units circulating through the Maidstone area. When Border Patrol agent Steve Brooks arrived, jumping out of Denny Welch’s cruiser, he was paired with Chuck West in checking houses along 102. Gerry Marcou, ashen-faced from what he had just learned from Frank Prue, was sent with a partner to scour some of the many short spurs off 102.

  It took Fink and Hersom half an hour to follow each road to its end in the Dennis Pond area, to survey the various camps and houses. When they came out, Jellison was at the door of Fink’s cruiser before it had come to a stop. “Talk to me—talk to me,” Jellison demanded.

  Fink said he doubted the suspect had gone up this road, no matter the tire tracks, though there was still one stretch, a spur along the west side of Wheeler Pond, that needed checking. He also confessed himself still ignorant about much of what was going on. Fink would write in his report, “I was saddened to hear him say four people had been shot/killed in cold blood. I knew all four. Lt. Jellison became choked when he added, ‘Scott Phillips was my nephew.’”

  Between twenty and thirty miles of dirt road wind around Maidstone Lake, and so many cruisers were pounding them that Kevin Jordan felt like he was part of an invading army. Several of these vehicles looked just like 608, and all were coming suddenly around corners and tight bends in these narrow, leafy roads—around bends where radio communication would blink from nearly useless to completely so. And who was to say Drega was still driving a cruiser?

  Around the pond, people came out of their houses to gaze in wonder at the fleets of cruisers. Some were on their porches brandishing shotguns. Others were being hauled out of their trucks or cars by nervous lawmen with their sidearms drawn. Most of the lawmen were in uniform, but some—like Jordan and Wimsatt—were not. Sooner or later, Jordan thought, somebody was going to pull a trigger before enough questions got asked.

  He and Wimsatt were working their way down a stretch of road with a number of hunting or fishing camps, going into each to look around and tell the occupants, if any, to stay inside. One camp gave them pause. “It looked empty, but its door was open,” Wimsatt said. “We approached on foot, very slowly, using trees for cover. But it looked like whoever owned it had just been careless. We cleared it and moved on.”

  They were still moving when they overheard a broadcast from Sam Sprague. Sprague, thirty-two, was a Fish & Game CO who had been cleaning a live bear trap in Twin Mountain. The agency had just relocated a bear grown too fond of the chicken fingers fed it by tourists at the Mt. Washington Hotel, and it had fallen to Sprague to hose out the trap’s residue of bear shit. But when the scanner started squawking, he quit that to help at the roadblock near Guildhall and then to join the forces deployed around Maidstone.

  Sprague was on his own, and he had announced over the radio, to whoever might hear, that he had pulled into a camp and seen a white Cadillac with New Hampshire plates. Then he saw a tall, bearded man in a plaid shirt standing at the camp’s picture window—a man who had backed suddenly away at the sight of the Fish & Game truck and its emergency lights. Sprague had paused, backed out, and decided to solicit advice.

  Jordan answered immediately, telling Sprague not to go in there without backup, to meet him first at the junction with 102. So far as Sprague knew, they were chasing a guy who was joyriding in a cruiser. Sprague would remember listening to Jordan and thinking, Jesus, what’s this guy done besides that? And then he began to worry.

  At the junction, Sprague, Jordan, and Wimsatt were joined by Gerry Marcou and another Fish & Game CO, Todd Bogardus. Sprague was quickly briefed. They caravanned in several vehicles back to the camp and parked at the bottom of the driveway. Then they crept into the site on foot from several directions.

  Bogardus would summarize the incident in his report: “We found the guy inside the camp, secured him, and found it wasn’t the guy we were after.”

  New Hampshire attorney general Philip McLaughlin looked down from several hundred feet at the crisp greens and emerald fairways of the Concord Country Club. Two men on one of the greens looked up into the sky and waved. McLaughlin couldn’t help raising a hand in response.

  Earlier, McLaughlin, only a few months into his job, had received a call from the secretary of Dick Flynn, commissioner of the Department of Safety. “Commissioner Flynn is heading to the airport,” the woman said. “The commissioner thinks that you should get somebody from the Homicide Unit and meet him at the airport now. He hopes to be up in the air in a couple of minutes.”

  Mike Ramsdell of the Homicide Unit took off in the first helicopter. McLaughlin and Flynn traveled together in the second. In a column in a 1998 issue of New Hampshire Trooper magazine, McLaughlin would write, “The mountains are beautiful on a clear day. From a helicopter at a thousand feet, it’s difficult to understand why anyone worries about creeping development when almost all that you see north of Tilton is the beauty of New Hampshire’s endless forests and the clarity of its lakes. Rocks are visible twenty feet below the surface of Squam Lake.”

  McLaughlin and Flynn were able to chat through their headsets. “We talked about the headwinds, the updraft as we cleared Waterville Valley, the mountains of the Kancamagus,” McLaughlin wrote. “We spoke about the beauty of the Presidential Range, the green of the valleys, the black of the mountains.”

  They chatted as well with Ramsdell in the chopper twenty miles ahead of them. “We talked about everything and about nothing. Franconia Notch was stunni
ng. Cannon Mountain to the left, the small airstrip at Twin Mountain. Then came flashing blue lights on a road below and a question as to whether the cruiser or helicopter was going faster.”

  As they flew higher into the North Country, the talk faded away. “The line of smoke to the left by Columbia was noticed but ignored. The bends in the Connecticut were beautiful and gave no inkling of danger, of pursuit, of cat and mouse, of ambush.”

  Finally they heard a voice from the ground telling them they were in sight and to come in straight. “And there it was—a supermarket, a large parking lot, the other chopper, and the voice, muddled with static,” McLaughlin continued. “Engines, voices, and static. That’s what you hear in a chopper. It’s easier to see than to hear, but Dick Flynn was heard, ‘There they are.’ There they were. A blue tarp on a knoll to the right, a blue tarp over a cruiser to the left. A single police officer in the doorway of the store. A hundred yards from the touchdown and a group of men to the left approaching the chopper. Mike Ramsdell I knew, Chief Mike Sielicki of Colebrook and Sergeant Howie Weber I came to know.”

  McLaughlin was already putting out of his mind the splendor of that journey up the Connecticut, and so was Flynn. “It’s going to be a hard day,” Flynn said as they trudged toward the parking lot.

  Amos Colby, sheriff of Essex County, Vermont, lived in Bloomfield in 1997, on the banks of the river and within sight of the Drega property. “I thought he did just a super job on that waterfront of his,” Colby said later. “He hired an excavator, put those stones in. People should be doing more of that. It was the feds who set him off.”

  According to an Associated Press newspaper clipping that Colby keeps framed on his wall, Essex County—statistically—is the safest county in the United States. So far as that goes, it’s just a matter of the right approach, Colby says.

  His family had run a sawmill for several generations. “But then logs from subsidized mills in Canada drove us out of business in the ’70s.” Colby sold logging and snow-grooming equipment, and then trucks and log loaders until he got fired, he says, for not lying to customers about the condition of certain used trucks. He also served a nine-year stint in the Vermont legislature and for fun went riding on patrol—when invited—with a friend in the Vermont State Police. In 1986 a neighbor, who happened to be the local chairman of the Democratic Party, suggested Colby run for sheriff. Though Colby was a Republican, he won against several experienced candidates in a predominantly Democratic county.

  “This really is a safe place, but all the same people get upset sometimes,” he says. “There have been several times when there could have been gunshots fired. You’d have a guy with a gun, and he’d be yelling, ‘The troopers won’t take me.’ Well, I’d show up instead. I’d holler at him, tell him who I was, run my mouth a while. It takes time. It might take several hours. But eventually people settle down.”

  Colby and his neighbors had been hearing gunfire from the Drega property all that month. On the nineteenth, Colby was home doing some maintenance work on his Jeep Cherokee cruiser, a vehicle he kept in showroom condition. He sped down to Guildhall, where he recalls preventing local police from setting up a roadblock at a dangerous point in the road and then found his way back to the command post on Dennis Pond Road. He was unimpressed by the tire tracks at the junction. “They were made by someone coming out in a hurry,” he said, “not going in.”

  Chuck Jellison was poring over topographical maps and had a call out to the area’s chief landowner, a paper company, to confirm that no new logging roads had been put in off 102 or around the ponds. He also kept Colby close at hand as his best authority on local roads.

  By this time the sheriff was among those suspecting that Drega had ditched the cruiser off one of the eastbound roads from 102 and forded the river back into New Hampshire. But which road? Paul Fink remembers Colby coming up to him and saying, “You know, that cruiser could be down there in Brunswick Springs, right across from us.”

  Fink went alone to check the two more northerly of the area’s hidden entrances and found both blocked with cables and undisturbed. He was on his way to check the third, the one that local farmers used, a half mile south of the command post, when he stopped at the post to check for news. At that point Jellison sent him and Tom Roberts to clear that last spur of road along Big Wheeler Pond.

  Ten or fifteen minutes later, at 4:52 p.m., Colby, and everybody else present, was astonished to see a civilian vehicle, a gray Chevy Cavalier sedan, approach the command post from the south. The man in the passenger seat—bearded and wearing a plaid shirt—had a rifle held across his chest.

  Pistols were whisked from holsters. Safety catches were clicked off. The car slowed, and lawmen raced to its side. Several thrust shotgun barrels through the Chevy’s open windows. Colby brought up the rear in a dead sprint, shouting, “No, no! Don’t shoot!”

  TROOP F RADIO LOG, AUGUST 19, 1997: NO TIME GIVEN

  Unit 500: Troop F.

  Troop F: [responding to another caller] I didn’t know if anybody would be there.

  Unit 500: The vehicle, the cruiser, has been located on the Vermont side. Everybody’s going near the river—the river.

  Troop F: Are you still with me? Okay, 500—you broke right out. You said you located the cruiser? Which is on the Vermont side, just over the river? Okay, what route? Do you know what route number they are on, and the town?

  Unit 500: It’s between 102 and Route 3, 102 and 3, near the river.

  Troop F: 10-5. Troop F to all units. Troop F to all units. Vehicle located. The vehicle has been located on the Vermont side, intersection of Route 102 and 3, just over the river.

  Unit 500: Not the intersection. There is no intersection. It’s sort of between 102 and Route 3.

  Troop F: Between 102 and Route 3. All units—between 102 and Route 3.

  14

  LIKE THE BRUSH OF A WING

  YOU COULD ARGUE that Dean Hook was just being prudent, checking out his route through the Brunswick Springs woods before he took his tractor through there. But he was also acting on a hunch, a tingling in his bones, that this guy they were all looking for might be holed up in there. Certainly these woods were eerie enough for that to happen.

  If you take the most northerly of the three entrances into the area, one that Paul Fink found cabled off in 1997, and that still is, you’ll have to fight your way through the deadfall trees crisscrossing the abandoned tote road behind the cable. Eventually you’ll reach a road that is clean and still used, that will take you on an easy walk around Silver Lake, which lies at the heart of these woods. At the southeast corner of the lake, you’ll be surprised to see—unless you’re looking for it—a weed-choked concrete staircase climbing inexplicably out of the woods and up a steep bluff that overlooks the lake. At the top of those stairs, on the bluff’s other side, you’ll gaze upon a wide stretch of the Connecticut River. You’ll also catch a whiff of sulfur in the air.

  Another weedy staircase descends this other side, but only halfway to the river. It stops at a concrete slab jammed like a wafer into the slope. Water issues as if from a tap out of five separate iron pipes jutting from the slab, and another water source seeps from the earth nearby. At the foot of the slab, where it joins the slope, you’re liable to find a cloth spread with offerings from people who still visit this spot, some to draw water: coins, fishhooks, cigarettes, Christmas bulbs, ribbons, and so on.

  Once these six springs were sacred to the valley’s Native American tribes for their healing powers. In 1748, during the French and Indian War, a wounded British soldier was brought here by his Abenaki allies. The soldier came away so much improved, and so impressed, that he returned after the war with the intention of bottling and selling the water. When the Abenakis objected, a struggle broke out in which a man and child were killed. According to North Country legend, the child’s mother, a shaman, then pronounced a curse on anyone who tried to profit from the springs.

  In 1860 a local dentist bought a hotel near the s
prings, added a bottling plant, and offered the “curative waters” to the tourists who stayed at the hotel. The hotel burned to the ground in 1894, was rebuilt and bought in 1910 by local businessman and politician John C. Hutchins—who would be the Democratic Party’s failed candidate for governor in 1916—and burned down again in 1929.

  Hutchins decided to replace the building with something like the Balsams, a vast luxury hotel of the sort once common in the North Country. No doubt he was looking to capitalize on the mystique that Robert L. Ripley, of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, had lent the springs in one of his early columns, one in which Ripley dubbed them “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” Local historian Joseph A. Citro explains: “Ripley deemed the six springs a wonder because they all flow from a single knoll, forming a semicircle of about fifteen feet. Though nearly as close together as spigots on a water fountain, the mineral content of each is completely different from that of its neighbor. Moving left to right, they are: iron, calcium, magnesium, white sulfur, bromide, and—if you are brave enough—arsenic.”

  Hutchins’s new hotel, the Brunswick Springs House, was four and a half stories tall and featured what was trumpeted as “the Mineral Waters of the Great Spirit” piped into every bath and shower. But while the building was still under construction, fire struck again in the spring of 1930, and fire crews couldn’t get enough water to stop it, despite the proximity of a lake, a river, and the mineral waters of the Great Spirit. “New Brunswick Springs House a Total Loss on the Verge of Its Opening,” lamented the Coös County Democrat.

  Hutchins rebuilt the whole thing within a year, but once again the structure burned to the ground on the eve of its opening. Whether he suffered from arson, bad luck, or an ancient curse, Hutchins had had enough. Remnants of the great hotel’s cement foundation can still be found near the middle entrance into the woods.