“Nope,” said Harvey drawing deep on his cup of coffee. “That was a fight that poor civil servant didn’t want. Sheila took it real personal and went after her with everything she had. You don’t cross Sheila.”
“She sounds like a colorful character,” I said.
Harvey looked back at me incredulously. “She’s not colored. She’s white.”
I swallowed the laugh that was pushing out the corners of my mouth. I didn’t want to be disrespectful. “Are you friends with her?” I asked, raising my voice in hopes of better clarity.
Harvey didn’t answer for a moment, but not because he hadn’t heard the question. “Oh, I don’t suppose anyone’s that close to Sheila. But she comes by and says hello to me and the missus. When she colored her hair blonde she said she looked like she could be my daughter. So she started sayin’ she was one of my kids.”
“How would you describe her?”
“Sheila,” he chuckled, “Some people’d say she’s crazy.”
Years later, one neighbor explained to me why she shut the door on me that day and didn’t comment about Sheila. She was afraid of what Sheila would do to her if Sheila heard the neighbor commenting negatively about her on TV or in the newspaper. It didn’t matter if Sheila was in custody or sentenced to jail or given the electric chair. If there was the slightest chance that Sheila would be able to come back around, the neighbor was sure Sheila would make it a priority to get her.
This woman and her husband often walked past the entrance to Red Oak Hill Lane, glanced down the wooden lane and joked about the nasty, sexual things Sheila must have been doing to those men. They joked about it being a “stud farm.” They also giggled that she was doing “Jeffery Dahmer things” down there.
“I suppose Gordon would be able to say more about her,” Harvey told me in his home. He was referring to Gordon Winslow. His farm along the dirt road was visible from the street and, at three-quarters of a mile, was the closest neighbor Sheila had.
“They didn’t get along?”
“Ah-yep.”
Harvey knew the Winslows shed no tears for Sheila LaBarre’s current predicament. The two farmers had talked over the fence post many an afternoon. Winslow had seen things. And he had questions about the men he knew had lived there. Where were they? Where was Wayne? Where was Jimmy? Where was Mikey? Now Kenny?
“Sheila could be a bad hostess to those boys,” Harvey went on. “Even to Dr. LaBarre. There were quite a few nights she ran Doc off the farm and he slept on my couch. One of the boys told me she waved a gun at him. So he ran off and spent the night in my orchard. I think he slept in a tree,” Harvey winked.
Like a skilled car salesman, I sensed now would be a good time to ask if I could invite the cameraman in and ask some questions. Harvey agreed. We chatted for a few minutes more on camera. I had my sound bite, but my questions about who Sheila LaBarre was were still largely unanswered.
When I finished my cup of coffee, the old man brought it to the sink and walked me to the door. Harvey had been a selectman in the small town for years. And although retired from service, a New Englander is never retired from politics. He still followed all action and remained plugged in.
“Did you know they have to have a special meeting later this month?” Harvey was referring to the Board of Selectmen. There had been a fight between a male and female member and a complaint was filed. “He called her a ‘camel’s foot.’ Have you ever heard of such a thing?”
Again, I stifled the laughter. “Have never heard of anything quite like that.”
“Darn fool,” he swore.
I left the Harvey home and breathed in the morning air. I had to pass that dirt road again and caught a glimpse of the Winslow farm. Looking at it, I remembered one of the stories Dan Harvey had told me and it brought a chill to my spine.
It had happened about two years earlier. It was winter and a snow had just covered the ground. One of the young studs from the farm—he thought it was the one named “Michael”—came stumbling down the dirt road. Gordon Winslow was out and working near the fence. As the man came closer, he noticed he was on a slow run. There was a gash on his head that was bleeding. Drops of red fell into the snow. It looked like his ear was ripped. And his skin tone was odd. His complexion was no longer a healthy pink, but not the shocking pale a winter wind does to an uncovered face.
He limped by Winslow and caught his eye. The man opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Then like an old hinge, he croaked out a single word.
“Sheila,” he said.
The man’s eyes glanced back into the woods, toward the Silver Leopard Farm, his trail of blood and footprints and the mysteries too bizarre to be real. He looked back, but his feet kept him moving forward, past the stunned farmer. In my mind, I could hear him speak one last time.
“Sheila.”
6
His First Love
On February 14, 2006, about six weeks before police would scour an Epping farmhouse in search of Kenneth Countie, the young man could be found sitting alone in the barroom of a seaside hotel. It was a ritzy restaurant on Hampton Beach, with staterooms that overlooked the Atlantic Ocean. The orange plastic snow fence was still wrapped around the beach and large patches of white snow lay on the eroding sandbars.
The lounge was moderately filled for Valentine’s Day. The mood was upbeat with a deejay spinning tunes to keep it that way. The manager came to the bartender, Tony Thibeault, with a request.
“Keep an eye on him,” he said pointing to a young man who had wandered in from a very cold night. The man hadn’t requested a table nor asked for something to drink. “I think he’s a transient.”
Thibeault asked the young man what he was doing at the Ashworth. He responded that he was waiting for his girlfriend, so Thibeault told him he could sit at the bar while he waited. The young man said his name was “Kenny.”
Thibeault noticed Kenny had a hard time making conversation and maintaining eye contact. He assumed the kid had some kind of learning disability and checked on him frequently.
An hour passed and no one showed up. Most people who spent that much time alone in the bar—on Valentine’s Day—usually got the hint and left. But Kenny stayed, patiently. He wanted a relationship, thought this could be a turning point in his life.
Thibeault noticed a woman breeze into the barroom and scan the place. She was bleached blonde and stocky, and she wore a denim coat, cut at the hip like an Eisenhower-style jacket. She faced the bar as Kenny came up from behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.
What do you know, the bartender thought. He really did have someone coming for him. But Thibeault didn’t believe the woman was Kenny’s girlfriend. He was quite sure, by the way they looked at each other, that they had never seen each other before that moment. Thibeault wondered if the woman was a call girl.
The couple sat down at the bar, their backs to the picture windows overlooking the street and the beach. She ordered a bourbon on the rocks; he got a soda. It was obvious she controlled the conversation.
The woman hailed the bartender. “The music is too loud. Will you tell the disc jockey to turn it down?”
Thibeault went to Dan Guy, who had been deejaying at the Ashworth for nearly twenty years. Guy was also one of the most sought-after radio engineers in New Hampshire. He could keep his own counsel on the acoustics of the L-shaped room. He knew damn well the music wasn’t too loud and there