The Hardest Deadline
When horrific violence came to a small New Hampshire town, the staff of the weekly newspaper had to somehow get the issue out and let the community know what had happened, even though their editor and close friends were dead.
By Richard Adams Carey|Jul 02 2018|
The public account of a murder, its story, typically begins in a newspaper. But on August 19, 1997, in the little North Country town of Colebrook, New Hampshire, the story began also on the very ground on which two murders had just taken place. It was a Tuesday, the day on which each week’s issue is put to bed at Colebrook’s News and Sentinel newspaper. John Harrigan—the Sentinel’s owner and publisher, and one of New England’s best-known outdoors writers—had been called away on business to Lancaster. Before leaving that morning, Harrigan had said goodbye to Vickie Bunnell, the lawyer who kept her office in the Sentinel building. Their long-running love affair had cooled, but Harrigan, at 52, had hopes of rekindling that romance.
Later that afternoon, New Hampshire state trooper Scott Phillips followed a pickup truck belonging to Carl Drega into a supermarket parking lot. For 25 years Drega, a 62-year-old carpenter, had been waging various property-rights disputes with local authorities. Vickie Bunnell had been caught up in those during her tenure as a town selectman. Phillips intended to speak to Drega about recent public threats against Vickie’s life.
That conversation never began. Drega climbed out of his pickup with a loaded AR-15 assault rifle. He murdered Phillips, and then a second trooper, Les Lord, who had pulled into the lot without knowing that a shooting was in progress. Drega climbed into Phillips’s cruiser and drove to the News and Sentinel. There he shot and killed not only Vickie but also Sentinel editor Dennis Joos. A pacifist and former Franciscan novice, Joos had tackled Drega in a vain attempt to wrest the rifle away from him. Then Drega fled into the Vermont woods. He would die that evening in a shootout with police.
Harrigan arrived half an hour after the murders to find the woman he loved still lying in the parking lot behind the building. Joos had been taken to a hospital, and had died there. Members of the newspaper staff—dazed, incredulous, grieving—had lingered. Charlie Jordan, a fellow journalist and friend to Harrigan, had been at the Colebrook public library when he heard gunfire from across the street. He arrived at the scene just after Drega had fled, and had taken photos of the shooting’s aftermath.
Harrigan didn’t know if it was grief, rage, or the newspaper ink running in his veins that shook him out of his own daze when Jordan said, “I’ve got pictures.” The Sentinel was due out on the street the next morning. The issue they had prepared would have to be blown up and redone. Would that be possible in one night, in the midst of this very crime scene, with a shell-shocked skeleton staff? Harrigan deputized Jordan as editor in Joos’s place and asked him to collect people for a meeting. The story would begin at ground zero.
In Colebrook, New Hampshire, the News and Sentinel door is draped in black following the shooting there in August 1997. Attorney and part-time judge Vickie Bunnell, one of the victims, had an office in the same building.
Credit: Courtesy of the Coos County Democrat, Lancaster, NHCredit: Courtesy of the Coos County Democrat, Lancaster, NH
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John Harrigan stood in the newsroom of the News and Sentinel with the newspaper’s pasteboards, cross-hatched with the stories originally planned for tomorrow’s edition, reared up behind him. “This is what we do,” he said. It was somewhere around 4:30 p.m. Charlie Jordan and Sentinel photographer Leith Jones were in the darkroom watching—with the hair prickling on the backs of their necks—the prints of Charlie’s black-and-white photos rise like fever dreams out of their chemical baths. Kenn Stransky, the Sentinel court reporter in Vermont’s Essex County, had been posted to the front door to answer the phones and keep the out-of-town reporters from bursting in. Ad designer Chandra Coviello had fled straight home after taking shelter next door in Ducret’s Sporting Goods. Reporter Claire Lynch said she had gotten a phone call from Jana Riley, who ran the front desk. Jana was safe with some friends at a hair salon on Main Street, Claire said, but she wasn’t coming back. And co-editor Susan Zizza had gone to Dennis’s home in Stewartstown to tell his wife, Polly, what had happened. The rest, for whatever reason, had not left, and were still here—now ranged around John in chairs at the press table or in front of the desks that lined the room: Claire, shivering as she recalled the forebodings that had haunted her that morning; compositor Jeannette Ellingwood, an exuberant woman in her seventies who had no truck with forebodings, who had been blindsided today like the rest; the gentle typesetter Vivien Towle, who was being held up, almost literally, by her boyfriend, Monty Montplaiser, an off-duty U.S. Customs officer; and the courtly bookkeeper Gil Short, who had no bookkeeping to do, but who couldn’t find it in himself to walk out the door just then. No one sat in the empty chair before Dennis’s desk. “We’ve lost him,” John had said a moment before. He had learned as much from a nurse at the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital. Kenn Stransky, just back from the hospital, also knew that, and by then had whispered the news to Claire and Gil. The announcement struck the rest like one more lash of a whip.
In the Sentinel newsroom, editor Dennis Joos interviews Republican presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan and his wife during the 1992 New Hampshire primary. Joos was shot and killed during Carl Drega’s rampage in 1997 as he struggled with the gunman.
Credit: Courtesy of Charlie JordanCredit: Courtesy of Charlie Jordan John sighed and groped for the right words in getting around to what he really wanted to say. Eventually he found phrases to the effect that state troopers and municipal cops, emergency-room doctors and EMTs, all shared something in common with journalists: They had to be there, sometimes, at the worst moments in people’s lives. And sometimes those suffering people—especially in a small town—were colleagues, near neighbors, family members: “People you know, people you love.” A muttered curse—or was it a moan?—came from the darkroom. Claire couldn’t tell if it was Leith or Charlie. John looked down at the floor, rubbed his eyes. “But, you know, they keep doing their jobs,” he said. “They’re dying inside, but they keep at it. And today it’s been our turn for something like that. And reporting—yeah, this is what we do.” John knew that every daily in the Northeast had someone out on Bridge Street, or on their way there. He knew that down at the Coös County Democrat, Gene Ehlert, with his bigger staff, was dispatching reporters to the IGA, to Bloomfield, to Drega’s house, to wherever else the story had gone—as John would want him to. In an industry where the reporting done by weekly newspapers was often discounted, even held in contempt, at least one of John’s weeklies would have a good accounting of a story that involved the gunshot murder of a weekly’s editor. This paper, though, the one robbed of that editor, was uniquely positioned, an industry analyst might say, to tell the story. Or was it just the grief that John wanted to scream aloud? Claire remembered how exasperated John usually got when a big story broke on Tuesday afternoon, on press day. Well, there are big stories, and then there are nuclear bombs. Jeannette was biting her lower lip, trying to keep from breaking into pieces in her seat. “I don’t know—it’s like a meteor dropped on us from outer space,” John said. “But some of us are still standing, crawling out of the crater—to tell the story, to say what happened and write down who these people, these friends of ours, were. Well, okay—that’s all I’ve got. What do you think?”
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“You know how to do paste-up?” Jeannette Ellingwood was speaking to Charlie Jordan as if she had just learned he could speak Aramaic. “I do,” Charlie said. “So where exactly are you in the process here?” Jeannette and most of the other staffers didn’t know Charlie, had no idea he had once worked for John at the Democrat. Now he’d been deputized as this newspaper’s acting editor while John locked himself away to write the feature story and a new editorial. “Just give me an hour,” John had told him. “When you tear up the front page, leave a couple of Claire’s stories there, about a third of the page—I don’t want the whole front page to be about this. And you can rip all the sports stories. We’ll need that space for jump pages for the feature.” Jeannette took Charlie through the finished content in the newsroom, the stories printed in two-inch columns and cut into long strips by Jeannette’s scissors or X-Acto knife, then run through the roller of the hot-wax machine, then pressed with a burnishing roller onto the pasteboards. Now it would be Charlie’s task to cut all this into pieces and puzzle the stories and graphics on to sticky art boards, each of which would be one page of the newspaper. Twenty-four art boards made a complete issue, what was called a mechanical. That, and photo negatives taken by Leith Jones of each board, would go this very night to John’s Coös Junction Press in Lancaster, where the image of each page would be etched into an aluminum roller and printed.
Vickie Bunnell and Sentinel owner John Harrigan on vacation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the 1980s.
Credit: Courtesy of Charlie Jordanowner John Harrigan on vacation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the 1980s.
Credit: Courtesy of Charlie Jordan Charlie saw that the original content of the issue had been nearing completion: features, the editorial, letters to the editor, the locals, obituaries, sports. He noticed the headline piece among the features, a story by Dennis about the town manager’s resignation. Big news until this afternoon, Charlie thought. He’d keep it, but he’d have to move it back to page three or five. Page four would be staked out as usual for John’s editorial and readers’ letters. Also among the features was Dennis’s piece about the lost 45th parallel sign that Charlie and his wife had found in an outbuilding at the Lancaster Historical Society. “It’s nice to be in the middle of things, and Clarksville is once again taking note of its place in the center of the Northern Hemisphere,” Dennis had written. “Last week Charlie and Donna Jordan erected an original 45th parallel sign on Route 145 near the old Clarksville School.” Charlie and Donna had lived in that school building for years, had made a good house out of it. Charlie remembered the day Dennis had knocked on its door in 1975. Dennis had just written a profile of J. C. Kenneth Poore, a 90-year-old hill farmer who had also done some newspaper work. Poore was of the opinion that any young writer should go meet Charlie, who was publishing pieces in Yankee Magazine then. Dennis and Charlie became friends. Two decades later, Dennis had loved the feel-good quirkiness of this 45th parallel story. Now Charlie had to finish it for him. The Colebrook police log, assembled by Claire, had a sweet poignancy to it: a car off the road on Vermont 102 after it swerved for a deer, for example, or the theft of a picnic table from the Route 3 rest area. That was what they’d had to worry about yesterday. Charlie saw in the obituaries that a joint memorial service for Dr. Herbert Gifford and Dr. Marjorie Parsons—Doc Gifford and Parsie, husband and wife, physicians to the whole town—was planned for Saturday afternoon at the Colebrook Village Cemetery. Most likely the family would want to postpone that; Charlie would have to check. Many of the ads in the newspaper had to do with sales, offers, or events connected to the Moose Festival next week. What the hell was the town going to do about that? And what about the photos to accompany John’s lead story? Leith was still in the darkroom, hanging wet prints on clothesline strung from the ceiling. Charlie would have to talk to John about which ones to use. That would be a tough call. Claire had run out the door to learn what else had happened. Jeannette and Vivien—with pitch-in help from Leith, Gil, and Monty—were proofing, printing, and waxing whatever hadn’t made it to the pasteboards yet. Charlie went back to where the features were posted, to what would have been the front page. He stood where people had run for their lives two hours before and went to work, pulling columns of text off the boards.
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Kenn Stransky never saw the Sentinel’s newsroom that night because the three telephone lines at Jana Riley’s desk were constantly lit up. “When reporters called, I tried to keep my statements down to thirty seconds,” he said later. “I told them as much as I knew was true from what people at the Sentinel had told me, what Claire was finding out on her trips back and forth between us and Town Hall and the police department, and what was coming over the scanner.” One call came from a TV station in Texas. The voice on the line said, “Hold on just a minute while I get somebody to talk to you.” “Sorry, I don’t have even a minute,” Kenn said. “If you want any information, it’s now or never.” Kenn wasn’t surprised that the calls were coming from all over the country, given that in this event “all three points of the triangle,” he said, were represented in terms of people whom civil societies most need to protect: cops, judges, and journalists. Of course a lot of the calls were local. Many thought that the editor killed at the Sentinel had been John Harrigan. Some wanted to talk to John, but that wasn’t possible. John was in and out of his office, but not taking calls. Twice he went to see Vickie’s parents, who were at their son Earl’s house, just down the street. Both times he paused to talk to the out-of-town reporters outside the building, all of whom were barred from entering while John’s staff was at work. Otherwise the reporters made do with Kenn’s periodic updates. John went back to the newsroom once to see how production was going, and disappeared once into the darkroom with Charlie Jordan. But his instructions to Kenn were explicit: no calls unless it was from his daughter Karen, who was driving up from Newmarket in southern New Hampshire.
New Hampshire State Trooper Scott Phillips, 32, was shot and killed after stopping Carl Drega in a supermarket parking lot.
Credit: Courtesy of NH Department of Safety
