Sheila LaBarre killed two men who lived with her on a horse farm in Epping, New Hampshire. Michael Deloge died there in the fall of 2005. Kenneth Countie, a 24-year-old from Massachusetts whose family described him as a trusting young man with special needs, died there in March 2006, about a month after he moved in. Police found what was left of his body in a burn pile outside her front door.
She never stood trial on whether she killed them. In February 2008 she conceded that the state could prove her guilty of two counts of first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Her lawyers told a jury that she believed every man in her life was a pedophile and that God had sent her back to earth as an angel to punish them. Prosecutors called her crude, manipulative, cruel and vindictive. On June 20, 2008, after a five-week trial, the jury found that she had been sane. She was sentenced immediately to life in prison without parole, and the New Hampshire Supreme Court upheld the convictions in 2010.
Little about her early years is documented outside her trial. She was born about 1958; she was 47 when she was charged in 2006 and 49 when she was sentenced. Her sister, Lynn Noojin, lives in Fort Payne, Alabama, and testified for the defense in 2008. A defense psychiatrist, Dr. Roger Gray, told the jury that she grew up with an alcoholic, abusive father and a mother who did not protect her. A defense psychologist told the jury that Noojin had seen two instances of sexual abuse against her sister in childhood, and Noojin said in 2012 that her sister had been physically and sexually abused as a child. These accounts come from the defense case and from family, and they were offered to explain her later beliefs, not to excuse the killings.
She went through several marriages before New Hampshire. An Associated Press report in 2006 described Wayne Ennis, whom she married in 1995, as her fourth husband. Court papers show that she had used the surnames Bailey and Jennings.
In 1987 she came to New Hampshire after answering a personal ad placed by Wilfred LaBarre, a chiropractor more than 30 years older than she was. He was born in 1926 in Norwich, Connecticut, served in the Navy in World War II as an aerial gunner, was licensed in New Hampshire in 1953, and built a well-known straight chiropractic clinic in Hampton. He had lived in Epping since the early 1960s and had once served as the town's health officer. His wife, Edwina, had died in 1983.
They never married, but she took his surname. She lived with him on his farm at 70 Red Oak Hill Lane, a property of about 115 acres with a farmhouse dating to about 1777, a barn and pastures. His daughter, Laura Melisi, said she warned her father against the relationship from their first phone call and that he twice took out restraining orders against Sheila, then relented. Melisi said Sheila had men on the farm, for work and for relationships, even while her father lived there, and that he eventually moved into an apartment above his office. These are the family's accounts, given to the Hampton Union in 2006.
The record of police calls is clearer. Lt. Michael Wallace of the Epping police testified that the first time he went to the farm, on a domestic call in 1988, Wilfred LaBarre came outside with scratch marks on his face and neck. Over the next two decades the Epping police logged more than 100 calls involving her, from complaints about the road and plowing to domestic disputes with the men who lived on the farm. Chief Gregory Dodge testified that he set a rule that at least two officers must answer any call there, and kept a large file of her letters to the department. He denied her request to carry a concealed weapon because of her domestic violence history.
Wilfred LaBarre died at the farm on December 2, 2000, at 74. Melisi said the autopsy listed a massive heart attack, hypertension and hardened arteries as the causes. Sheila arranged his cremation. His will left almost everything to her: the farm, the Hampton practice and rental houses in Somersworth and Portsmouth. She then asked the courts to recognize her as his common-law wife, which would have spared the estate about a quarter of a million dollars in inheritance tax. The state's Department of Revenue Administration contested the claim, arguing that the two had not lived together as husband and wife in the three years before his death, and she dropped it. On April 10, 2006, after her arrest, Probate Judge John Maher ruled that she had not been his spouse, and the Rockingham County Superior Court later set aside two wills she had presented, dated 1990 and 1992, that left most of his estate to her and nothing to his children.
Ennis, a Jamaican man, married her in York, Maine, on August 22, 1995, while she was still living on Wilfred LaBarre's farm. She filed for divorce in December 1996, and the divorce file portrays Ennis as the abuser; she obtained a restraining order against him and had filed assault charges against him in 1995. After her arrest Ennis, who had been deported to Jamaica in 2002 for overstaying a work permit, gave a very different account in letters to a newspaper and to the state police. He said she fired guns over his head, burned his clothes and threatened to send him back to Jamaica in a box, and that in 1996 she had asked him to kill Wilfred LaBarre so that they could have the farm. None of this was tested in court, and it remains his allegation.
She also had a long relationship with James Brackett. She was charged with second-degree assault after Brackett was stabbed in the head with scissors; reports date the incident differently (see the disputed points below), and she was never convicted. Tapes played at her trial captured her ordering Brackett off the property while he accused her of assaulting him and breaking his teeth, and, in another recording, talking about killing a dog with a gun or a hammer. A defense psychologist told the jury that Brackett had managed to leave, and that if he had not, he might have become another victim.
Michael Deloge's mother, Donna Boston, lived in Somersworth, New Hampshire. She said he could go long stretches without being in touch, which was why she did not at first report him missing. He met Sheila LaBarre in 2003, his mother said, while he was living at Cross Roads House, a homeless shelter in Portsmouth, where she would go to find men to work on her farm.
The last time his mother and her husband, Gordon, saw him was in July 2004, when he came to their apartment with LaBarre. His mother said she did most of the talking, and that the two seemed to have been arguing. He told his mother he was happy, but she thought he had changed for the worse: he had lost a great deal of weight, his skin had broken out, and he barely spoke. She was ill at the time and sent them away. It was the last time she saw him.
Investigators later established that he was last seen alive at the farm between September and October 2005. A farm hand told state police he had seen LaBarre beating Deloge before he disappeared, and later saw her burning a mattress in front of the house. Prosecutors never put forward a theory of how he died. In a recorded interview played at her trial, LaBarre told the state's psychologist that after she found one of her favorite rabbits dead, Deloge admitted hurting her animals, and that she beat him with a chain in the kitchen. She said he lay on the couch for about two weeks and died in September 2005.
Jurors also saw a video of Deloge. In it he said his mother had allowed him to be abused as a child, and that scratches and bruises on his face came from gathering sticks. LaBarre made the same kind of accusation against both men's mothers. Investigators said the allegations were false, and no evidence was ever presented that either man had harmed a child.
Kenneth M. Countie lived in Wilmington, Massachusetts, and had grown up in Tewksbury and Billerica. His father, Kenneth J. Countie, lived in Tewksbury, and his mother, Carolynn Lodge, lived in Billerica. His death notice names a brother, Brian, and siblings Zachary and Lauren. When his family placed his death notice in 2006, they asked for donations to the Tewksbury Youth Hockey League in his memory. At his arraignment hearing his mother held a formal portrait of him in military uniform; he was known to have a background in the military, though the family did not discuss it publicly.
His mother told police that he had had mental deficiencies since birth and could not live on his own, and the family's lawsuit described him as a person with special needs. After the trial she described him as "a kind, caring, gentle young man who could not socially defend himself," someone who trusted others easily and who believed he was starting a new life with LaBarre.
Countie met LaBarre through a telephone dating service in February 2006. According to prosecutors, their first date was on Valentine's Day at the Ashworth Hotel in Hampton, and he moved onto the farm a few days later.
His family was alarmed at once. On February 24, 2006, they called Sgt. Shawn Gallagher of the Epping police to say she had taken their son from Wilmington, where police had listed him as missing. Gallagher, who had dealt with LaBarre about two dozen times since 1995, went to the farm with Detective Richard Cote. She first said Countie was not there, then that he was in the bathtub, and then brought him to the door. He told the officers he was there of his own free will, and they left. Two days later she called Gallagher three times to say the police had no right to come onto her land and to threaten to sue anyone who did.
On March 17, 2006, the same two officers answered a call about a disruptive person at the Wal-Mart Supercenter in Epping. They found LaBarre with Countie slumped in a wheelchair. His skin was ashen, his face and hands were cut, and one hand was swollen and did not work properly. She said he had been in a car accident and told him not to speak to the officers. Both officers later testified at her trial, and the Associated Press reported that neither had reported their observations of his condition, a point his mother would later press against the department.
On March 22 LaBarre called Gallagher to complain about being described as a suspicious person and said Countie had left her. The next day his mother called police: if he were on his own, she said, he would have contacted someone. She filed a missing person report on March 23.
At about 1 a.m. on March 24, 2006, LaBarre called Gallagher and played him a tape recording. On it she identified herself as a justice of the peace and questioned Countie about raping children; he answered yes in a soft, muffled voice. Gallagher heard a heaving sound, and then her voice telling Countie to stop pretending to throw up, and then to stop pretending he had fainted. In the background he could hear her crying and asking "why, why, why?"
That evening at six, Gallagher and Cote went back to the farm. The gate was closed, the house was dark, and all her vehicles were in the yard. They saw a burned mattress in the front yard and a second burn pile. By flashlight they saw a knife handle with a melted blade, tree limb clippers, a partly burned chair and a piece of bone about three and a half inches long. After getting advice from an assistant county attorney, they called for a third officer, knocked repeatedly, and kicked the door open. At that moment LaBarre walked up from the gate. She invited them in and gave them a tour of the house. In the basement were sneakers she said were Countie's, but she would not let them take them. Asked about the bone, she said it came from a rabbit, since she usually cremated her rabbits; when Cote said it was too big for a rabbit, she said it was from either a rabbit or a pedophile, then denied saying so. She asked them to leave, and they did.
On the morning of March 25 the Epping police and the New Hampshire State Police returned with a search warrant. According to the police account, she was covered in soot and ashes and was armed with a loaded .38-caliber handgun, which she handed over before going to the station. She asked officers to shoot her. Before the search she had written a suicide note. She signed a consent form for a search of the house and went to the police station for questioning. Detective Jill Rockey of the state police, who interviewed her three times between March 25 and 27, found her articulate and intelligent, with a grasp of the law unusual in the people she interviewed. She was released after the third interview, on March 27.
The search lasted 17 days. In the first week nearly 100 officers combed the woods, fields and brush. Court documents later described human bones in a Wal-Mart bag and bone fragments in a burn pile, and police reported finding three burn pits. They took about 100 blood samples from nearly every room of the house; blood was spattered in the kitchen, the dining room and the living room, and testing matched it to Countie. Under layers of dust in an upstairs bathroom and bedroom they found older dried blood, which matched a DNA profile supplied by Deloge's mother. When state police drained the septic tank, they recovered a bone, a spent shell casing and Deloge's birth certificate.
Among her papers was a notebook entry dated July 1, 2005, months before she met Countie, showing a sketch of a human figure with notes listing ways to dispose of a body, the word "death" circled. Police also found about 330 audio recordings she had made between 1990 and 2006, many of them sessions in which she questioned or berated the men in her life. Prosecutors later had samples tested for poison, because witnesses said Countie had looked sick and ashen in his last days; the results were not reported.
The New Hampshire SPCA removed her horses at the investigators' request. The case changed from a missing person inquiry to a homicide investigation with little public explanation, as the warrants and affidavits stayed sealed for weeks. When a reporter later asked for her account of the March 25 visit, she wrote from jail that the police had trespassed, never showed her a warrant and left her family portraits broken. In the police account, when an officer asked her where Countie was, she pointed to a plastic Wal-Mart bag and said he was in it.
After her release on March 27 she left Epping. On the morning of March 28 a man picked her up on the side of Interstate 293 in Manchester and, for $100, drove her to Dorchester, Massachusetts. He told police she ducked down when they passed a police car, carried a large roll of cash, said sex offenders must die, and said she had died and come back as an angel. On March 29 a Roxbury man, Kenneth Washington, met her in a mall parking lot. She told him her name was Casey, that she was from Tennessee and in town on real estate business, and he spent the next several days moving with her from hotel to hotel around Boston; he later testified that he stayed because she was paying, giving him about $1,000.
On March 30 she sent a letter to WMUR-TV in Manchester proclaiming her innocence. The next day, Friday, March 31, the state obtained a warrant charging her with the first-degree murder of Kenneth Countie, alleging that she killed him around March 21 and burned his body. Assistant Attorney General Peter Odom, who led the prosecution, said the complaint alleged she purposely killed him and incinerated his body. The state police issued a nationwide alert, warning that she might have changed her appearance and was carrying a substantial amount of cash.
On Sunday, April 2, 2006, acting on a tip from the public, Revere police arrested her without incident at the Northgate Shopping Center in Revere, Massachusetts. She first gave her name as Casey Washington. She had cut her hair and dyed it red with purple streaks, and she was carrying about $30,000 in cash and a $50,000 check, along with marijuana. The next day, in Chelsea District Court, she waived extradition; the marijuana charge was dropped, and New Hampshire State Police took her back.
She was arraigned on April 13, 2006, in Portsmouth District Court on one count of first-degree murder. Her lawyer, Jeffrey Denner of Boston, said she steadfastly maintained her innocence and was in shock. She was held without bail at the Strafford County jail in Dover. At the probable cause hearing in late April, the lead investigator, state police Sgt. Robert Estabrook, laid out the evidence, and the affidavits were made public. Her lawyers sought bail when she had been held more than 130 days without an indictment; it was refused. A Rockingham County grand jury indicted her for Countie's murder in September 2006, and she pleaded not guilty in Superior Court in October.
Police had suspected her in Deloge's disappearance from the start. He had been listed as missing since late March 2006, when officers searching the farm found a letter with his mother's name and address. "We know we have one victim, and certainly the possibility exists that there may be more," state police Capt. Russell Conte said that May. But she was not formally connected to his death until 2008.
In November 2007 her lawyers asked Judge Tina Nadeau to suppress the evidence from the farm and her statements to police, arguing that the officers had entered her property without a warrant and questioned her before advising her of her rights. Lt. Wallace testified that when he asked her on March 25 whether she had any other weapons, she lifted her shirt and began to undo her pants. Her lawyers presented this and other conduct as evidence of a confused and frightened woman. The judge denied the motion, finding that the March 24 entry was justified as a welfare check and that she had freely consented to the search of her home.
On February 12, 2008, in Rockingham County Superior Court in Brentwood, she pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the murder of Kenneth Countie. At the same hearing she waived indictment and entered the same plea to the first-degree murder of Michael Deloge. The plea was an admission that the state could prove both killings; the only question left was whether she had been legally insane. Assistant Attorney General Kirsten Wilson said the state did not accept that she was insane and would put the question to a jury. Prosecutors, Wilson and Senior Assistant Attorney General James Boffetti, told the court they would not offer a theory of how Deloge died. Under New Hampshire law the burden was on the defense to show both that she had a mental disease and that the killings were a product of it. A sane verdict meant life without parole. An insane verdict meant commitment to the secure psychiatric unit at the state prison, with a review every five years.
Before trial the state wanted to call an FBI profiler who had analyzed the case, including toes found at the farm that police said belonged to an unidentified man. Judge Nadeau refused, ruling that telling the jury about the toes would be more prejudicial than helpful. The jury never heard about them.
Jury selection began on May 5, 2008. Nadeau told the panel that New Hampshire law has no fixed definition of insanity, and that jurors could weigh the nature of her acts, whether she suffered delusions or hallucinations, whether she knew right from wrong, and whether she planned the killings and used cunning to avoid detection. Twelve jurors and six alternates were chosen.
On May 13 the jurors toured the farm and the Epping Wal-Mart. The house, vandalized by trespassers after her arrest, was judged unsafe to enter. A memorial to Countie that his family and friends had built around a tree along the driveway was taken down for the visit with the family's agreement, then put back. LaBarre went along, wearing a stun belt under her clothes. Opening statements were scheduled for that afternoon.
The defense went first. Its case rested on her history and on the tapes. Her lawyers told the jury she believed she had once died of a drug overdose and been sent back to earth as an angel with special powers. Noojin testified about their childhood.
Dr. Malcolm Rogers, a forensic psychologist, testified that she had schizoaffective disorder or a delusional disorder, that her belief that the men were pedophiles was a delusion that had grown worse in the years before the killings, and that she had been insane when she killed them. Her attempts to hide the evidence, he said, were too disorganized to show a rational cover-up; in her own mind she did not see the killings as morally wrong, though she understood they were illegal. During his testimony the defense played a tape of her questioning Deloge, who sounded weak and tired, and she broke down so badly that the judge stopped proceedings for the day. In another tape, made in the days before Countie's death, she complained about being banned from Wal-Mart, then said all pedophiles should be shot on sight. Countie's family released a statement through their lawyer, Peter Eleey, saying there was no truth to her claims about Kenneth's family.
Dr. Roger Gray, a psychiatrist from Newton, Massachusetts, who interviewed her four times, also diagnosed schizoaffective disorder. He traced a progression from childhood trauma to personality disorder to psychosis, said her condition worsened after Wilfred LaBarre's death, and argued that she was not faking. Burning the remains in front of her house, he said, was like sending up smoke signals for help. As he described her childhood, she sobbed and was taken from the courtroom.
The prosecution answered with the people who had dealt with her. Gallagher and Cote described the Wal-Mart encounter and the tape. Dodge and Wallace described two decades of calls and said she always knew what she wanted. Former tenants of her Somersworth apartment building described dead fish, overturned furniture and words of scripture written on a wall. A plumber described being grabbed by her at the farm in 2004. Michelle Bennett, an Epping woman who spent time with her in March 2006, said that when she noticed a smell of burning at the farm, LaBarre told her not to mind it, she was burning garbage, and that she had seen cuts on LaBarre's hands. Bennett said that LaBarre, while they were drinking, had jokingly shown how she would stab someone; from the defense table LaBarre called out that she had not. Kenneth Washington described the days in Boston.
The state's expert, Dr. Albert Drukteinis, a forensic psychologist, had read more than 8,000 pages of the case file and interviewed her three times, for more than 12 hours. He found mood and personality disorders and a sexual preoccupation, severe enough to make her psychotic at times, but not enough evidence that mental illness caused the killings. "She answered questions well, she tried to explain evidence away that made her look bad," he testified. "This is not what someone sees over many hours in a person who is psychotic." Jurors saw his recorded interviews. In them she gave her account of Deloge's death and said Countie had died by accident: that he had attacked her and confessed to stealing from her, that they fought, and that he slipped in a bathtub and hit his head. She said she wrapped him in linen and burned him where she usually cremated her rabbits, not to hide a crime but so his mother would never see his body. When Drukteinis suggested that she, not Deloge, had been hurting the animals, she shouted from the defense table that she had never hurt an animal and was led out.
The prosecution rested on June 17, and closing arguments were heard on June 18. The jury began deliberating on the morning of Thursday, June 19.
On Friday, June 20, 2008, after about 13 hours of deliberation, the jury found that she had been sane. That made her guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, and Nadeau sentenced her at once to life in prison without parole. Relatives of both men applauded as the jurors filed out.
"This is for my son," Carolynn Lodge said. "For two years, my son could not rest. Now he can rest." She told the court that LaBarre had taken advantage of her son, deliberately tortured him and stripped him of his dignity and self-worth before murdering him. Denner said he would appeal. "It continues to be our belief that she's deeply crazy and insane," he said, adding that a huge amount of emotion in the case clouded the issue.
Her lawyers filed a notice of appeal in July 2008, saying they would challenge the refusal to move the trial because of publicity and whether a rational jury could have found her sane. The case the New Hampshire Supreme Court decided turned on the search. David Rothstein, deputy chief appellate defender, argued on January 13, 2010, that the officers had no warrant and no emergency when they entered her property on March 24, 2006, and that her consent to the house search was not voluntary given that her door had just been kicked in and one officer carried a rifle. Associate Attorney General Ann Rice argued that she had given up the right to appeal by admitting the killings, and that in any case the police had a man in serious danger to find.
On March 25, 2010, the court unanimously affirmed the convictions in State v. LaBarre, 160 N.H. 1. Writing for the court, Justice James E. Duggan held that she had not waived her right to appeal, because her lawyer had altered the waiver form to limit it to the non-insanity phase, but that the entry was justified under the community caretaking exception: the officers had specific reasons to believe Countie might be injured and still at the house, and that concern outweighed the intrusion. The court also upheld the finding that she consented freely to the search of her home, noting that she had invited the officers in without hesitation and had been assertive with police in the past. No further appeal or post-conviction ruling was found in any source opened.
The Associated Press reported in May 2009 that she was serving two life sentences without parole in a Massachusetts prison. By 2012 she had been moved to Lowell Correctional Institution in Ocala, Florida, under an interstate compact. That July the New Hampshire Union Leader reported that she had written to the paper saying staff and inmates there had abused her and asking to serve her sentence in New Hampshire or Massachusetts. A Florida Department of Corrections spokesperson said she was in close management, separated from other prisoners, after battering a fellow inmate. Her sister said she was in solitary confinement after a fight with a younger inmate. Denner, her former lawyer, said she had told the prosecution's psychologist she was sane and claimed it was her lawyers who wanted the insanity defense.
No later public report on where she is held was found. As of the latest source located (September 2012), she was in Lowell Correctional Institution in Florida, serving life without parole.
Countie's parents sued her for wrongful death in April 2006, seeking at least $10 million, and a judge froze her assets. She tried to represent herself, missed the deadline to answer and was found in default. In May 2007 Judge Patricia Coffey ruled that the roughly $83,000 in cash and checks seized at her arrest could be released only to Countie's family, not to her for her defense. Wilfred LaBarre's children, meanwhile, went to probate court to recover their father's estate.
The empty farmhouse drew trespassers. By October 2007 Epping police had been called back more than a dozen times, and four juveniles had been fined for trespassing; visitors broke windows and took jewelry and dishes as souvenirs. On May 28, 2009, the farm, then 119 acres, was sold at a foreclosure auction for $600,000. Carolynn Lodge, who still visited her son's memorial on the property, watched from the crowd. "There will never be any closure," she said. She said she hoped the house would be torn down and the land left alone.
In 2012 Lodge started an online petition asking the attorney general to hold the Epping Police Department accountable for negligence, arguing that officers had seen her son beaten and in a wheelchair at Wal-Mart days before his death and did nothing. Her civil suit against the department had already been dismissed.
Two books tell the story at length: Kevin Flynn's Wicked Intentions (2009) and Michael Benson's The Burn Farm.
Proven and final: the first-degree murders of Michael Deloge and Kenneth Countie, by her own concession that the state could prove them and a jury's finding that she was sane, affirmed on appeal in 2010.
Not established: how either man died. She gave the state's psychologist an account of beating Deloge with a chain and said Countie's death was an accident in a fall; prosecutors said Countie was beaten over a period of days before he was killed and burned, and offered no theory for Deloge. The jury did not have to decide the manner of death, only her sanity.
Uncharged: the toes of an unidentified man found on or near the farm. Prosecutors said in 2008 that they belonged to a man she had killed, but the judge kept that claim from the jury, and in 2012 a senior assistant attorney general said only that testing had not matched them to anyone and that a new homicide investigation could follow if the man were identified. No charge has been reported.
Speculation only: that she had a hand in the death of Wilfred LaBarre. His autopsy listed heart disease. After her arrest his family said investigators were re-examining it, and Wayne Ennis claimed she had once asked him to kill the doctor. No finding of foul play was ever reported, and she denies any involvement.
Her accusations against the men: there is no evidence that Deloge or Countie, or their mothers, did anything she accused them of. Investigators said her allegations were false, and both men's statements on her recordings were made in her custody, in poor health and under questioning.
Points on which sources differ: the year of the scissors incident with James Brackett (1988 in one Hampton Union report, 1998 in court records described by another paper, and a 1999 charge in an Associated Press report); Countie's age at the time (24 in nearly all sources, 23 in one trial report); Deloge's age (reported as 38, though his mother said he turned 38 in March 2006, after his death); the date Countie died (around March 21 in the warrant and the civil suit, March 23 or 24 in other reports); the check she carried when arrested (described as a cashier's check and as a traveler's check); the place of arrest within the shopping center (reported as a Taco Bell); whether she met Countie through a personal ad or a telephone dating service; and the dates of the wills she relied on (1988 in one report, 1990 and 1992 in court records described by another). The farm is variously given as 114, 115, 119 and 125 acres.
About 1958: Sheila LaBarre is born; she grows up in a family later based in Fort Payne, Alabama.
1987: answers a personal ad placed by Wilfred LaBarre and moves to his farm at 70 Red Oak Hill Lane, Epping.
1988: Epping police answer their first domestic call at the farm.
August 22, 1995: marries Wayne Ennis in York, Maine; she files for divorce in December 1996.
December 2, 2000: Wilfred LaBarre dies at the farm, aged 74; she inherits his estate.
2001 to 2002: her claim to be his common-law wife is contested by the state and dropped.
2003: meets Michael Deloge at a Portsmouth homeless shelter.
July 2004: Deloge's mother sees him for the last time.
July 1, 2005: notebook entry listing ways to dispose of a body.
September to October 2005: Deloge is last seen alive at the farm; she later says he died in September.
February 14, 2006: first date with Kenneth Countie, who moves in days later.
February 24, 2006: police check on Countie at the family's request; he says he is there by choice.
March 17, 2006: officers see Countie injured in a wheelchair at the Epping Wal-Mart.
About March 21 to 23, 2006: Countie is killed.
March 23, 2006: his mother reports him missing.
March 24, 2006: about 1 a.m., she plays police a tape of herself questioning him; that evening officers find bone in a burn pile.
March 25, 2006: search warrant executed; a 17-day search begins.
March 28 to April 2, 2006: she leaves New Hampshire for the Boston area.
March 31, 2006: warrant charges her with Countie's first-degree murder.
April 2, 2006: arrested in Revere, Massachusetts.
April 13, 2006: arraigned in Portsmouth District Court.
April 2006: Countie's parents file a $10 million wrongful death suit.
September 2006: indicted for Countie's murder.
November 2007: suppression hearings; motion denied.
February 12, 2008: pleads not guilty by reason of insanity to the murders of Countie and Deloge.
May 2008: judge bars evidence about unidentified toes.
May 5, 2008: jury selection begins.
May 13, 2008: jury tours the farm; trial opens.
June 20, 2008: jury finds her sane; convicted of two first-degree murders and sentenced to life without parole.
July 2008: notice of appeal filed.
May 28, 2009: the farm is sold at auction for $600,000.
January 13, 2010: New Hampshire Supreme Court hears argument.
March 25, 2010: convictions affirmed.
2012: reported held in Lowell Correctional Institution, Florida; her sister and a prosecutor discuss the unidentified toes; Countie's mother petitions over the police response.