In the Evil Day

  The explosions heard the night before, McMaster said, were probably from gunpowder and ammunition, along with—possibly, we’ll never know—a booby trap or two. McMaster mentioned that this was all weaponry that could be legally obtained, and probably was. “This was a bomb factory, but what its purpose or reason was, we don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s obvious he was a very angry man.”

  People offered theories about what it was for. Maybe a bomb on Main Street in Colebrook when the streets and sidewalks were crowded for the Moose Festival, which ended up being canceled that year. Or else a bomb to breach the dam on First Connecticut Lake in Pittsburg, unleashing something like a tsunami through Pittsburg, Stewartstown, Canaan, Colebrook, and Columbia. But nothing like a plan, or the clues to such, could be found in the ruins of the barn or cabin.

  Another of Karen’s photographs revealed that part of the barn’s foundation where, years before, the builder had meticulously blocked his name into the concrete. Only a portion of the last name was legible above bent sheets of aluminum roofing and carbonized wisps of tarpaper. The rest had been shot away, obliterated, by volleys of .223 rifle fire.

  Among the big-city reporters who came to Colebrook that week was John’s sister Susan Harrigan—then a financial reporter for Newsday and a resident of Manhattan. Susan appeared sometimes in John’s newspaper columns as Hanoi Jane, a name he gave her for the antiwar, left-leaning politics of her youth. She had grown up with Vickie, and she came not as a reporter, actually, but as a mourner. She stayed through Vickie’s funeral and went back to Manhattan that night.

  Before she had even arrived in Colebrook, though, she had written an article for Newsday that was picked up by the Los Angeles Times–Washington Post News Service and reprinted on Wednesday in dailies throughout the nation. In it she described Colebrook as a place where people bragged about never locking their houses or cars. And until last Tuesday, she wrote, “violence always had to travel far to get to Colebrook. Christopher Wilder was from Florida, and Harry K. Thaw, the killer of Stanford White, nabbed in Colebrook near the turn of the century, was a genuine big-city crazy person. Although Colebrook did not exactly consider Drega one of their own, he was no flatlander.”

  Susan Harrigan was one of their own, but she had fled to the flatlands. “I had to kick Colebrook pretty hard to get away,” she continued. “Small towns, as people who come from them know, can be suffocating—especially if your parents have a pretty high profile. I’d always resented the attention my parents lavished not only on the people in the gray building, but the residents of the whole town. Adolescent as I was, I thought they should spend more time with their family. But as I tried unsuccessfully to sleep Tuesday night, with images of Vickie and Dennis covered with blood flashing through my head, I understood something for the first time. This was family. It was special. And I was lucky to have had it.”

  On Thursday, Susan herself was corralled by an outside reporter for an interview. When asked about the impact of the killings, she took an angle that John, a little more than four years later—on September 11, 2001—would find eerily prescient. “Four people out of a town this small?” she said. “Well, you can just run the numbers. That’s like—what?—five thousand people dying in Manhattan on one day. That’s your impact.”

  In late August, Beno Lamontagne drove out to the Joos place in West Stewartstown. He steered past Dennis’s “No Hunting” sign, the one that said he didn’t want to get shot, and then into the driveway. Polly’s gardens had gone to seed, and when Beno saw Polly in a bathrobe, with her hands tight to the railing of the front porch, he thought about his wife, Karen, who lately had been crying herself to sleep. If Karen were a house, the windows would be broken, the paint peeling, Beno considered; with Polly, the roof had fallen in. “I understand Dennis was in your store,” Polly said.

  “He was,” Beno replied. “He finally bought that antenna booster. Did Aaron install it for you yet?”

  Polly shook her head. “I don’t even know where it is. And Aaron’s not here right now.”

  Dennis’s pickup was parked near a shed, and Beno found the booster, still in its packaging, lying on the passenger seat of the truck. “Let me just get this installed for you, then.”

  Polly looked at her old friend like he was a bear come out of the woods and into her blueberries. “I’ll pay you,” she said finally.

  “No, you won’t—taken care of.”

  A few days before, Sergeant Howie Weber had come around with a woman from the Attorney General’s Victim’s Advocate office. The woman wanted to leave a packet of articles with Polly about the resources available to her for grief counseling and legal help. Howie was also an old friend—Polly had been the speech therapist for one of his sons. “She’s a great lady,” Howie said. “But she didn’t have a lot to say, didn’t want to talk with us.”

  Twenty minutes later, safely down from the slick shale roof Dennis had fallen from, Beno drove out thinking that if Dennis had been here to enjoy that reception, he’d have wished he’d bought the booster three years ago.

  He hoped Polly would like it, but he would never find out, and in fact would never see her again. Polly had already begun to close her doors to the friends and acquaintances of that former life.

  When once, years later, John Harrigan called to say he had a package that someone had asked him to deliver to her, Polly told him just to leave it on the front steps. Her friend Sue Miller, who stayed with her on the night of the shootings, would see her only once or twice after that.

  Polly would die a recluse at the age of sixty-two, with her son, Aaron, and his wife at her side, in the house she and Dennis had built for living the good life, a few days after Christmas in 2010. “She was always a very private person,” Susan Zizza says. “I think she just lived the balance of her life the way she was happiest.”

  The 45th parallel had indeed become the center of the Northern Hemisphere. The letters and emails arrived first in a torrent from all around New England and then, swelling to a flood, from all over the country and from several continents. Three complete pages of the August 27 News and Sentinel were devoted to “Letters to the Editor,” an amount of column space that would be sustained through the next five weeks, with many going unpublished for lack of space.

  The letters expressed shock, sympathy, a communal grief—and recall a time in America when gun rampages were unusual. Some stretched out into analysis. In the August 27 issue, Jack Authelet, a Massachusetts newspaperman, wrote about a knowledge now peculiar to many in Colebrook: “At times like this I am reminded that inside each of us is an enormous, unanswered question: How would we react in a life-threatening situation for which there was no warning, no preparation, no opportunity to plan a response or to consider the consequences? Would we boldly face the danger or turn away to live a coward’s life? For most of us, the question will remain unanswered. We will not, in our lifetimes, face the greatest of human challenges.”

  Others drew on characterization and anecdote. “I think back 34 years and wonder if this writer of ‘strange stories’ is the same Dennis Joos who wrote strange stories in a room down the hall in a small Franciscan educational enclave in Callicoon, New York State,” remembered Bill Halpin of Camden, Maine, in the September 24 issue. If so, “the Dennis I knew would tilt his head, half-smile, and begin to compose a strange story about a new kind of holy person, a new version of the catcher in the rye, where the ‘called’ learn how to divert bad guys and gals from their misguided behaviors. I bet there’d be a poor, happy and whimsical anti-hero with a glint in his eye. May we be merciful and compassionate with each other in memory of Dennis Joos.”

  By the end of September, Susan Zizza still felt all unraveled, was still harrowed by headaches. She began to wonder if the letters, as compassionate and well intentioned as they were, might have something to do with that.

  Later that month, John Harrigan—once his daughter Karen had, reluctantly, gone back to Newmarket and
her beat with the Union Leader—asked Charlie Jordan to come aboard on a full-time basis; in effect, to replace Dennis. Susan was spiraling into the gloom that would send her on a leave of absence for several weeks, and she preferred not to continue as coeditor. Instead she became associate editor, an assistant to Charlie, and she supported Charlie’s suggestion that they cut back on the space apportioned to letters. John wrote in his October 1 editorial that the newspaper henceforth would print only letters “celebrating the rich lives” of the victims, as opposed to mourning their deaths.

  Some letters satisfying this criterion came from people who knew none of the victims. Ekeanyanwyn Chukwudi of Owerri, Nigeria, wrote in the October 18 issue that he was “shocked to my marrow” to read in Time magazine about the murders and that he had witnessed murder himself. “You people are fortunate to have a good system which ensured the prompt stopping of the carnage Carl Drega unleashed on the people, unlike over here where lawlessness, poverty, a weak legal system, and general insecurity prevail,” he continued. “I love you all in America, your values, democracy, human rights, and all that the Stars and Stripes stand for. God bless America.”

  Not all the messages offered comfort or blessings—as Rick Estes had predicted. Some from the local area John simply discarded. In late August, a reporter from Vermont’s Burlington Free Press, a daily, looked to see what was being posted on the Internet and in certain chat rooms.

  In those forums, for example—and regarding John Pfeifer, still fighting for his life in a Burlington hospital—a resident of Nashua, New Hampshire, wrote that the Border Patrol agent should be “thrown into the dumpster with the rest of the garbage.” A man in Cincinnati pronounced that “they [the troopers] got what they deserved. Pulling a guy over for rust in a pickup is an abuse of power. Drega held them accountable.” A Memphis correspondent called the theft of Phillips’s cruiser merely “asset forfeiture of a vehicle used in the commission of a crime against him. He should have burned it on the spot.”

  Ed Brown, forty-two, of Plainfield, New Hampshire, consented to an interview with the Vermont reporter. In 2007 Brown would orchestrate a nine-month standoff with police over his and his wife’s refusal to pay income tax and would ultimately receive a thirty-seven-year prison sentence. But in 1997 he was leader of a group he called the Constitutional Defense Militia, and he asserted that Phillips and Lord had only themselves to blame: “He [Drega] enacted Article 10 of the Constitution—the right to revolution in the State of New Hampshire.” Such actions might be unethical but not illegal, Brown said, adding, “Enemy officers are fair game wherever they are and whatever they’re doing, so I don’t mind it when I read in a paper that a couple of cops got killed.”

  Vin Suprynowicz, forty-seven, an assistant editor at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, a daily newspaper, shot out an eight-page single-spaced press release on September 21 that was picked up in a few media outlets and would be shared for years on the Internet. Drega was a martyr, claimed Suprynowicz. “Carl Drega tried to fight them, for years, on their own terms and in their own courts,” he wrote. “We know how far that got him. What I do know is that this is why the tyrants are moving so quickly to take away our guns. Because they know in their hearts that if they continue the way they’ve been going, boxing Americans into smaller and smaller corners, leaving us no freedom to decide how to raise and school and discipline our kids, no freedom to purchase (or do without) the medical care we want on the open market, no freedom to withdraw $2,500 from our own bank accounts (let alone move it out of the country) without federal permission, no freedom even to arrange the dirt and trees on our own property to please ourselves—if they keep going down this road, there are going to be a lot more Carl Dregas, hundreds of them, thousands of them, fed up and not taking it any more, a lot more pools of blood drawing flies in municipal parking lots, a lot more self-righteous government weasels who were ‘only doing their jobs’ twitching their death-dances in the warm afternoon sun, and soon.”

  In 2002 Suprynowicz would publish—through Mountain Media, his own publishing company—a book, The Ballad of Carl Drega: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1994 to 2001. There an account of the Colebrook shootings leads off a collection of pieces celebrating Drega and others “who have given their lives in this War On Freedom.” The book’s cover illustration depicts Sam Adams, in Boston’s North Church, proffering a rifle to a group of men gathered around him. All are dressed in Revolution era garb, but Adams’s rifle is a modern (and oversized) AR-15.

  In the fall of that same year, in Nashua, Suprynowicz would be the guest of honor, the featured speaker, at the thirtieth annual convention of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party. “I am horrified that anyone would attempt to find excuses for the actions of Carl Drega,” said Governor Jeanne Shaheen, when asked for a comment by the Concord Monitor. “Carl Drega was not oppressed—he was unwilling to follow the law. Carl Drega was not a modern-day patriot—he was a murderer.”

  The News and Sentinel would ignore the event, but John Harrigan would be asked for comment as well. “And they would shoot a woman in the back,” he said to the New Hampshire Sunday News, adding, “I have a real short fuse when people call and try to pick apart what happened here, in this beautiful place in God’s country, and try to apply it to their own damned, zealous agenda. I’m so angry that people from away would think that he’s some kind of symbol, some kind of role model. He doesn’t even deserve the ink to spell his name.”

  This was all excruciating for John, not least because he describes himself as libertarian, even beyond libertarian—“close to being an anarchist,” he would say. He wears the dirt of the Indian Stream Republic beneath his fingernails, is himself a living hybrid of New England’s “communal libertarianism,” per Jason Sorens, and the frontier license of the American West. But in “communal” John allies himself, at bottom, with people—not agendas.

  Phippsburg is a little town, about the size of Colebrook, hidden like a periwinkle on the coast of Maine—on the west bank of the Kennebec River, to be exact, just about at its mouth. Once you leave Route 1, you drop like a plumb line due south into one of those stalactites of land that bite into the Gulf of Maine. The scent of the river is laced with salt, and you think from the ranks of staghorn sumac and pitch pine lining the road that you’re farther south than you are, that you’ve suddenly driven to Cape Cod, if only the Cape were still as forested as this.

  This is the town where former Colebrook patrolman Dan Couture lives now. These days he’s a patrol sergeant in Bath, a town back up on Route 1 and almost four times the size of Colebrook. In 1999 Couture took a trip to Portland, Maine, to visit the girlfriend who would become his wife. There he noticed ads in the newspapers for municipal cops. “In Bath they had a nineteen-man department,” he recalls. “I walked in, said I’m a New Hampshire cop, and they talked my ear off. Then they offered me a job, and from day one I was making three dollars more an hour than I was in Colebrook—where all the guys in our department were eligible for food stamps.”

  “A cop gets paid less than a school janitor,” Dick Marini once observed. “Where else do you take bigger risks for less pay? I can’t think of anywhere.”

  By that time, Colebrook police had already gone several years without raises. Couture had joined a department of four full-timers, if you include Chief Mike Sielicki, at a time when the rank and file—which is to say, Steve Breton and one other guy, and also some part-timers—were trying to unionize for better pay. Sielicki was not standing in the way, which kept morale high in his department but also helped to make for strained relations between the chief and Colebrook selectmen. Certainly Sielicki must have felt that in this political/budgetary climate, he and his men couldn’t afford any bad news.

  Then came August 19, 1997, and that moment when a limping, inexperienced young cop in civvies and with a sidearm in his shorts, saw someone who had just shot at him and Steve Breton drive by in a stolen cruiser. The kid wondered for only an instant if he should risk a shot on this pu
blic road at an obvious bad guy, though not someone he knew then to have succeeded in hurting anybody. He remembered his training at Police Academy—you can’t call a bullet back—and kept his handgun in his pocket. Later he choked back tears as he told his story to a state cop from Concord.

  Then, once the funerals were over, people wondered who was to blame. Why wasn’t this stopped before it began? Why wasn’t Carl Drega punished more severely for refusing to leave the Columbia town hall, for firing a gun over the heads of Vickie and tax assessor Louis Jolin? Why wasn’t he jailed for his threats against Vickie?

  “Is our legal system so lax that a nut like him is allowed to run the streets and do as he pleases?” said one of Drega’s neighbors to the Maine Sunday Telegram. “I think the community deserves an explanation of why we didn’t know what was going on there. Had all those bombs gone off at one time, it could have wiped out my house and everyone around here.”

  For his part, bank president Bill Bromage suggested that the news industry itself was part of the problem. “If the town had arrested Drega last week or a year ago when he was threatening people in authority like Bunnell,” he told the Los Angeles Times, “you people in the media would be up here pounding on us for locking up some guy just because he looked weird, or for taking away his rights because he was a strange dude.”

  Nonetheless, the newspapers and TV reports were full of statements by people near and far who thought authorities should have done something earlier. Libertarian John Harrigan would have none of it. “The North Country is proud of its eccentrics, and nothing’s going to change that,” he told Life magazine. “We give them the space they need to get the snakes out of their heads, and most of them do. This guy won’t change the way we treat our crazies.”

  Some in Colebrook and neighboring towns wondered just who it was that appointed John Harrigan as spokesman and psychiatrist for the whole region, even if it was his old gray building that had been one of the crime scenes. Others were glad there was somebody willing to accommodate so many of the reporters who kept coming back, like wolves to a cached carcass, to take the pulse of Colebrook. At least it meant that other people were left in peace.