Wicked Intentions - Kevin Flynn

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People/Incredible Stories

      For Lily

       Author’s Note

      The point of view of this book is based on the investigative journalism of Kevin Flynn and reflects his perceptions of the past, present and future. The facts about the Sheila LaBarre murders recounted in this book are true to the best of his knowledge and recall. Some of the names have been changed and identifying characteristics altered to safeguard the privacy of individuals. The personalities, events, actions and conversations portrayed in this book have been taken from extensive personal interviews, police reports, court documents, including trial transcripts, letters, personal papers, research, press accounts and the memories of some participants. Quoted testimony has been taken from interviews, pre-trial and trial transcripts and other sworn statements. Some minor characters are composites. Some conversations have been reconstructed. Events involving the characters happened as described; only minor details have been altered.

       Prologue

      Dusk was falling on the New Hampshire town. It was around 6 P.M. The trip to the farmhouse took the officers down a long, wooded private road. The branches of the trees on either side of the path reached out to one another, touching fingers midway across. The canopy of bark and early spring buds enveloped the police cruiser and its passengers.

      When Epping Police Detective Richard Cote and Sergeant Sean Gallagher pulled up to the property at 70 Red Oak Hill Lane on Friday, March 24, 2006, they noticed the wooden gate to the horse farm was closed and padlocked. Neither could remember a time the gate had been secured like that, but they knew historically the homeowner had disputes with the town road agent about plowing beyond her gate even though she herself had chained it shut on him.

      The officers had come to conduct a well-being check. Not on the homeowner, but on someone who had recently moved to town.

      Cote and Gallagher knew the property well. There was a farmhouse, a large barn and several outbuildings. Tonight, the house seemed quiet. There were no lights on inside. They scanned the yard and all of the owner’s cars seemed to be there. They knocked on the door, assuming that someone was home, but no one answered.

      There was some activity on the farm, however. As they stood at the front door, Cote pointed out a completely burnt mattress and box spring. It was right in front of the porch entrance, about twenty feet to their right. About thirty-five feet away from the mattress was a second burn area. It was a rusty metal barrel and a pile of hay. Although there was no one on the property, both of these areas were actively burning.

      Gallagher approached the pile of debris. There was an awful smell in the air.

      The police officer’s step stuttered with disbelief. No. That can’t be what I’m seeing, he thought to himself. Sticking out of the burning hay pile in plain sight was a bone. The bone was only about three and a half inches long, but appeared to be jagged at the bottom. It was as if it had been cut or hacked in some sloppy way. The top of the bone sprouted into a round ball meant for some corresponding joint. It turned the cop’s stomach with horror.

      Immediately, Gallagher made a phone call. Cote, however, didn’t hear the conversation. He had moved in for a closer look at the bone in the fire pit. When the sergeant snapped off the phone he told Cote, “We’re kicking in the side door to find this kid.”

      Cote watched Gallagher steady himself at the door. He punched through with the heel of his foot right under the doorknob, breaking the wooden frame. Cote knew the sergeant was so deeply focused on what he was doing that Gallagher probably couldn’t hear what he heard: a set of wheels, a car of some kind, making its way up the windy dirt road approaching the farm. Soon they would not be alone.

      “Someone’s coming,” he said.

      Cote turned back and looked closely at the bone, braced for the odor. On the ball at the top, he saw something he’d never forget. The bone was covered with soft tissue that looked like a burned hunk of human flesh.

       PART 1

       The Farm

      “‘Oh, you dear children, who has brought you here? Do come in, and stay with me. No harm shall happen to you.’ She took them both by the hand, and led them into her little house.”

      - Brothers Grimm, Hansel and Gretel

       1

       On a Secluded Farm...

      Until the day he left the state prosecutor’s office, Peter Odom would never really know exactly what happened on that farm. How some people could fall off the face of the earth. How some people could be directed like puppets. How some people could watch eagerly with wide-open eyes and could simultaneously look away. Odom understood the stresses that caused one to strike down another: jealousy, hatred, rage and greed. Even madness. They all bloomed from the same emotion: fear. Pushed far enough, fast enough, any human could give into temptation. They could kill in self-defense or kill in selfish abandon.

      Odom had yet to learn why some people seemed predestined to murder, why they had been born to kill. These were people in whom murder had been incubating their whole lives. They didn’t kill as an impassioned powder keg, which exploded once and released its malicious tensions. They didn’t attack as a bee does, stinging once then dying. They attacked like a wasp, stinging repeatedly and easily without consequences.

      Odom knew nobody would ever know all of what happened on that farm. Nobody except Sheila LaBarre.

      The unmarked police car moved through the town of Epping, New Hampshire, without lights and siren, but with a sense of urgency, past brick buildings that house mom-and-pop restaurants and barbershops doing business out of garages. Assistant Attorney General Odom watched the March sun comfort the town in the last throes of a New England winter, spring peeking through cracks. He made a note of the date: Sunday March 26, 2006. The prosecutor did not know the way there, but knew the destination. Murder. That’s why Odom and the homicide division had been called in. This whole mess was falling into his lap.

      “I have seen more fucking shit on this job,” the man in the passenger’s seat said. New Hampshire State Police Lieutenant Russ Conte was talking almost to himself. But his comments were intended to ease the driver. The town’s police chief had never seen anything like this and, for all Conte’s world-weary expression, doubted Conte had seen anything like this either.

      Odom, riding in the back, watched the little houses fall away and the country roads stretch farther and farther to the next landmark. The car’s wheels squealed a little as it cut right at a fork. Odom noticed the hand-painted sign offering farm fresh eggs up ahead. He had never visited this section of Epping before. So few of the other rural New Hampshire towns still offer anything like a real working farm. Today, the only things that grow from much of those early settlers’ soil are suburbs and subdivisions.

      Mixed among the tiny houses sprinkled on Red Oak Lane were the original farms and their elderly owners who made thousands systematically selling off parts of their land in order to make ends meet. The road climbed.

      “I have seen shit you wouldn’t believe,” Conte continued. As head of the NHSP’s Major Crimes Unit, Conte could back up his claims of being witness to all kinds of depravity. The olive-skinned man was wearing a gray suit with a handgun hidden beneath its folds. Conte’s shoulders took up most of the space as he stretched out in the front seat.

      “We’re going down here,” said Police Chief Gregory Dodge as the car left the paved road and cut into the woods. A street sign marked the way as “Red Oak Hill Lane,” a slight variation on the name

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