Town note
Epping was originally part of Exeter, one of the four original New Hampshire townships.
about 0:07:31The story
Epping is a small town in Rockingham County, New Hampshire, in the far south-east corner of the state, close enough to Boston. It covers 26.2 square miles and has a population of 6,835, and it was once part of Exeter, incorporated in 1741 and named after Epping in England.
Her father was a highway worker and a drunk. The episode records that he sexually assaulted her when she was six, knocked her out by hitting her in the head with a metal can of antifreeze, and let a friend of his abuse her. She graduated from Fort Payne High School in 1976, worked at a motel and in a nursing home, and in 1981 attempted suicide and spent thirty days in a mental institution.
At the end of 1981 she married John Baxter. Within six weeks he discovered that she had been locking his young daughter in a small room while he was at work, and by Valentine's Day the marriage was over; she filed for divorce on 14 December 1982.
In 1987 she answered a personal ad placed by Wilfred J. LeBaire, a chiropractor who was well known in Epping, recently widowed, wealthy and about twenty-five years older than her. She moved into the apartment above his office, then into his farm, took over the running of his office and took his name without ever marrying him. His daughter Laura Melisi distrusted her from the start. In 1995 she married Wayne Ennis, a Jamaican man, while still living on the farm and still using the LeBaire name.
One night in 1996, driving the back roads, she told Ennis that she wished a horse would kick LeBaire in the head, and then asked him to kill the doctor himself. She divorced him and took out a restraining order. Ennis said she beat him, fired a gun over his head and told him she would send him back to Jamaica in a box, burned his clothes and made him sleep outside in winter, and once tore off her clothes and struck herself before calling the police, telling him no court would believe a black man over a white American woman. Ennis was deported in 2002.
In 2000 LeBaire died suddenly of a heart attack.
From the farm she ran her own kind of office. The Epping police logged more than a hundred calls from her. She faxed them, wrote letters, turned up in person to complain about the neighbours and the town, and when officers came out she met them in various stages of undress or raging, sometimes throwing things. The police did not want to deal with her, which is part of how she got away with so much. In 2004 she took in Michael Deloge, a 38-year-old homeless man, from a shelter. They took a lot of drugs, she hit him in front of people, and she forced him to make a video accusing his mother of abusing him and then made him cut off contact with his family. A neighbour once saw him limping down the dirt road to her house with his ear sliced half off and a trail of blood behind him; another time she stabbed him in the head with scissors. In the fall of 2005 he disappeared.
In February 2006, just before Valentine's Day, she met Kenneth County on a singles chat line. He was 24, with the mental capacity of a 12-year-old and a form of autism, and he was easy to manipulate. They met on Valentine's Day, had sex in a car, and he moved into the farmhouse the same day without going back to Massachusetts for his belongings. His mother, Carolyn Lodge, used to hear from him every day. On 24 February she filed the first missing person report.
Sergeant Sean Gallagher and Detective Richard Cote went out to the farm. The gate was locked and a barbed wire fence ran along the property, so they climbed through. After a while she brought him out. He looked fine and said he was there of his own free will, so the officers left. A few days later she telephoned Gallagher to complain that the police had no right to come onto her property and threatened to sue.
On 17 March 2006 the police were called to the Walmart Super Center in Epping about a suspicious person. She said he had been in a car accident. She was buying large yellow diesel fuel tanks. The officers could not take him into custody.
At one in the morning on 24 March she called Gallagher to say that Kenny had gone and was a pedophile, and played him a tape over the phone. On it she could be heard calling herself a justice of the peace and questioning County about raping children while he answered yes to everything in a meek voice. At the end of the tape he was crying and she was shouting at him that he was faking being sick and faking fainting.
Police went back to the farm. The house was dark but all her cars were there, and in the yard Gallagher saw a burnt mattress and a burn pile. In the pile, under flashlights, were a knife handle with a melted blade, tree limb clippers, a partly burnt chair and a piece of bone about three and a half inches long with flesh attached. They called the assistant county attorney, got authority for a well-being check, and forced the door. In the basement were sneakers she said were his, though she would not let the officers take them. Outside they asked about the bone. She said it came from a rabbit she had cremated, then said it was either from a rabbit or a pedophile, then denied saying it. She refused to let them take the bone and they left to get a search warrant.
When they came back she was in the kitchen covered in ash and soot, holding a handgun. She told Lieutenant Michael Wallace and Chief George Dodge that she had been burning a pedophile, and said County was in a bag outside. There were human bones in the bag. She handed over a loaded pistol from her waistband and, asked whether she had any other weapons, flashed her breasts. At the station she produced a suicide note saying County was a pedophile and a drug user who had threatened to kill himself and left the farm.
The next day, with more warrants, police took the place apart. They found Deloge's clothing, blood on a knife blade, blood spatter in the kitchen, living room, dining room, two bathrooms and a bathtub, human bones and human teeth, and older burn pits layered with dust. Neighbours described her talking so fast she seemed to be on speed, bouncing between a dozen stories at once. By then she had gone. She had hitchhiked out of town. A warrant was issued on 31 March and a nationwide manhunt followed on 1 April.
On 2 April she was found outside a Taco Bell in Revere, Massachusetts, her hair cut and dyed red, using a different name, carrying a large amount of cash and marijuana.
A psychologist, Malcolm Rogers, said she had either a schizophrenic affective disorder or a delusional disorder that made her believe all these men were pedophiles; she also believed she had died and been sent back as an angel with a mission to kill pedophiles, and that her notary public stamp, bought for twenty-five dollars, gave her the authority to do it. The state's psychologist said she killed not because they were pedophiles but because she was sadistic and the label was an excuse. Kenneth Laura Melisi got nothing.
The farm was auctioned on its front lawn on 28 May 2009 for $600,000. In July 2012 the woman who bought it found toes at the edge of the property, the remains of a third, unidentified man, neither Deloge nor County, and the police said they would look into it if anything developed. Wilfred LeBaire is buried in Hillside Cemetery in Seabrook.