Wicked Intentions. Kevin Flynn
for available and accessible land, the communities within this triangle flourished as Massachusetts expatriates settled in. But small towns outside that area remained landlocked, linked instead by a series of back roads and secondary highways that tempered sprawl. Those dozens of towns, with their New Deal-era road plans, worked to keep growth to a minimum and to preserve their perception of small town New England. Epping was just such a town.
Residents meet each March for the annual town meeting. While the town has a part-time Board of Selectmen, they’re relatively powerless. It’s the residents who vote Norman Rockwell-style to approve spending plans. The previous year, Police Chief Greg Dodge watched quietly as about thirteen hundred people voted on whether to approve his proposed $4.3 million operating budget for that year. Dodge asked the citizens of Epping to give him two new officers. The cost to taxpayers would be only $20,810 , because a federal grant of $50,000 would cover the rest. But in true Yankee fashion, residents rose from their seats and voiced their concerns about what would happen in three years when the grant expired. By a hand vote, citizens amended the request to one officer, but the proposal still failed 527 to 811. Dodge did not go away empty-handed from the town meeting. Epping residents had okayed his request to lease a new police cruiser by a vote of 791 to 558.
Epping was experiencing growing pains, as developers finally had spotted the town and recognized its key position if further growth was to happen. Residents wryly called it “The Center of the Universe” and bumper stickers saying so can still be spotted. At one point, Epping was considered the Great Crossroads to the state, back when highways were two lanes wide. Windy, crooked Route 101 had been renovated a decade ago to be a multi-lane east-west route from Manchester to the Atlantic. That sowed a row for commercial and residential development to also blossom. Epping is roughly halfway to Portsmouth from Manchester, and State Highway 125 intersecting there offers good shortcuts to Durham and other eastern communities.
After the Wal-Mart opened off exit 7, Epping’s police department felt the impact. Shoplifting calls and fender benders in the parking lot were consuming time in what once was a Mayberry-like patrol route. The extra calls, which included criminal assaults and one rape, did not sit well with Dodge.
The crimes reported at Wal-Mart were serious and sometimes violent. But as far as anyone could remember, there had never been a murder in the town of Epping.
I rarely had a need to go to Epping as a television reporter in New Hampshire. To me, the signpost merely meant halfway to the ocean or halfway back to the station after a live shot. But after one hour on the story, I knew it would change my life.
Sunday afternoons are deadly quiet in newsrooms everywhere, deadly for the young college graduate-cum-television producers who have to fill thirty minutes of news at 6:00. I had been blessed (and that’s definitely the way we viewed it) the previous two Sundays with breaking news. A week prior there was the murder investigation in which one woman in the mountain town of Tamworth stabbed another woman to death at a party in a fight over beer money. The weekend before in the woods of Alstead, a closeted-homosexual shot his roommate and chased another man through the forest with a handgun, all after smoking one-third of a marijuana cigarette. It’s these examples of stupidity and tragic miscalculation that give reporters “happy feet” and make producers high-five one another.
The assignment desk had little for me and my videographer to do when our shift began at 2:00 P.M. on Sunday, March 26, 2006. Indiana Senator Evan Bayh was speaking at a campaign event for a democratic state senator. No one comes to New Hampshire to speak at a political gathering who isn’t running for president.
WMUR-TV, an ABC affiliate, is the only network station in the state. Channel 9 wields a lot of power within New Hampshire’s borders and beyond. It’s the big fish, small pond dynamic that has suited it well. Dozens of television reporters have made the jump from New Hampshire to Boston (where starting salaries are tripled and anchormen and women can still earn a million dollar paycheck). Some WMUR alumni have gone on to much greener pastures, such as Nannette Hanson on MSNBC or Carl Cameron on Fox News. Even Chris Wragge, former Entertainment Tonight host and former husband to Swedish model and Playboy playmate Victoria Silvstedt, once did the weekend shift at channel 9 as a sportscaster.
I had no intention of leaving WMUR anytime soon. But I really wanted to get off of weekends. It was murder on my family life. I had too little time with my five-year-old daughter and the hours were fraying on my wife.
I was not the typical TV reporter. I spent ten years in radio and I never got the shtick out of my blood. I was sent to fires and blizzards and car accidents, but my niche was feature reporting. I had no problem doing funny stories. Getting clocked playing dodgeball, singing karaoke in the shower, getting sacked by the members of an all-woman’s football team. No stunt was off-limits for me. Viewers loved it. I loved it.
But the face of television news was changing, even in secluded New Hampshire. There were fewer reporters, but they were being asked to cover more stories in a single day. We seemed to be doing less politics, fewer stories on education or health. The greater emphasis was being placed on the sexy, the sensational. As one videographer said to me, “We used to do stories about people. Now we just do stories about victims.”
I was in a funk. I considered myself a storyteller; it was why I was recruited out of radio to fill an open position at the TV station. I didn’t like the direction my job was going. I needed something that was going to shake up my career.
The Evan Bayh event moved at a glacial pace. Bayh shook hands with every alderman and selectman who could someday become a presidential campaign worker. His big political blunder was, of course, not talking to me. I was the one who was going to be putting him on television and introducing him to thousands of presidential primary voters. Instead, I was standing off in the corner, sneaking mozzarella sticks from the hot buffet.
My cameraman for the day passed me his pager: call newsroom ASAP.
Ah, holy hell, I thought. What grief am I getting myself into now? I sneaked outside to place a call.
“Newsroom,” someone answered.
“It’s Kevin. I got your page.”
“Where are you guys?” the assignment editor asked.
“Still at Bayh. He’s running long.”
Pause. “Do you have any sound with him?”
They’re rushing this. What’s going on? “We’re waiting for his speech to finish up before we can get a sound bite.” Behind me, I could hear applause. Bayh just said something I assumed I should have been there to hear.
“Okay.” I could tell she was turning over the information in her head, calculating something. “We’re going to pull you out of there and send you to Epping.”
Oh, fuck me up the ass.We’ve been standing here this long. We’re this close to getting the sound bite.
“What’s shaking in Epping?” I snapped.
“There’s a search for a missing person,” she said. “And it could be a homicide.”
“Tell me about the bones. Is there enough for DNA?”
Assistant AG Peter Odom was discussing the case with State Police Lieutenant Russ Conte and Epping Police Chief Greg Dodge. They were sitting around the police department in the Epping Safety Complex, a modern building for an old town.
Peter Odom had spent more than a decade as a deputy county attorney in Strafford County before coming to the Attorney General’s homicide unit. Previously, he prosecuted cases of child abuse and sexual assault. He spearheaded the prosecution against a defrocked Catholic priest in his seventies who stood trial for allegedly molesting eight children, some of them altar boys. Odom won a conviction, but the man died in jail of natural causes after serving less than a year in his forty-four to eighty-eight year sentence.
Odom