Sheila LaBarre: Victims, Insanity Defense, and Appeal

Sheila LaBarre is a convicted double murderer serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for killing two boyfriends on her horse farm in Epping, New Hampshire, and burning their remains in pits on the property. A Rockingham County jury rejected her insanity defense on June 20, 2008, and found her guilty of first-degree murder in the deaths of Kenneth Countie, 24, and Michael Deloge, 38.¹²

Background and the Epping Farm

She was born Sheila Kaye Bailey in 1958 in Fort Payne, Alabama, the youngest of six children in a household her sister later described as troubled. At her murder trial, her sister Lynn Noojin testified that Sheila had been sexually abused twice in early childhood and that, as a young adult, she had spent eight days in a coma after taking sedatives following a fight with her first husband, Ronald Jennings.³

In 1987, she answered a personal ad placed by Wilfred “Bill” LaBarre, a 61-year-old widowed chiropractor from Hampton, New Hampshire, and moved to his horse farm in Epping.⁴ The two were never legally married, but she took his last name and later described herself as his common-law wife. Wilfred died in 2000 at age 74; his death certificate listed natural causes, and she had him cremated. She inherited an estate valued at roughly $2 million, including the farm. Members of his family contested the inheritance, alleging she had obtained control through threats, and his daughter Laura Melisi had obtained a restraining order in 2002 accusing Sheila of chasing Wilfred with a gun. After Sheila’s 2006 arrest, state investigators re-examined Wilfred’s autopsy, but no public conclusion from that review has been reported.⁵

She was known to recruit men from the Cross Roads House, a homeless shelter in Portsmouth, to work on the farm.⁶ In 1999, she was charged with second-degree assault for allegedly stabbing a boyfriend in the head with scissors but was not convicted.⁷

The Victims

Michael Deloge was a 38-year-old man from Somersworth, New Hampshire, who had stayed at the Cross Roads House shelter before meeting LaBarre around 2003. He moved to the farm and was last seen alive around July 2005. Two workers who did odd jobs on the property, Arthur Wiggin and Gregory Clark, later told police they had watched LaBarre beat Deloge repeatedly. Wiggin described her striking him with an 18-inch stick; Clark saw her beat him about the head, shoulders, and face next to a burn barrel. When Wiggin asked about Deloge a month after last seeing him, LaBarre said he had left and that his family wanted nothing to do with him.⁸

Investigators later recovered a notebook on the property, in handwriting that appeared to be LaBarre’s, listing methods for disposing of a body — “incinerated, burned, ashes, flushed, scatter” — with the word “DEATH” circled on the page. The notebook included a sketch of a body with measurements similar to Deloge’s and bore the date July 1, 2005.⁸ In a recorded interview, LaBarre said she was “driven to kill Deloge because he was hurting and killing her animals.”²

Kenneth Countie was a 24-year-old man from Wilmington, Massachusetts, who met LaBarre through a personal ad in February 2006 and moved to the farm. Court records described him as having developmental disabilities present since birth.⁹ His family quickly reported him missing. When Epping officers visited the farm on February 24, 2006, LaBarre initially denied he was there, then produced him; he told police he was staying voluntarily.

On March 17, 2006, police encountered the pair at a Walmart in Epping. Countie was in a wheelchair, his face and hands cut, one hand swollen, his skin ashen. LaBarre blamed a car accident. That was the last time anyone outside the farm saw him alive. Around 1:00 a.m. on March 24, LaBarre herself called police and played them a recording of herself interrogating Countie and accusing him of raping children; on the tape he could be heard heaving, and she told officers he was faking vomiting and fainting.⁹

When officers returned that evening for a welfare check, they found a burnt mattress in the yard and a second burn pile containing a knife handle with a melted blade, tree-limb clippers, a partially burnt chair, and a piece of bone roughly three and a half inches long with fleshy material still attached. LaBarre first said the bone came from a rabbit, then from “a rabbit or a pedophile.” Police executed a search warrant the next day and ultimately recovered three burn pits on the farm.¹⁰ She was arrested and charged with Countie’s murder in April 2006. She later admitted killing him but called his death an accident and said she had cremated his remains.²

Trial and the Insanity Defense

LaBarre was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, effectively conceding the state could prove she caused the deaths but arguing mental illness drove her actions.¹ Under New Hampshire law, the defense had to prove both that she suffered from a mental disease and that the killings were a direct product of it.

The trial, held in Rockingham County Superior Court before Judge Nadeau, lasted about six weeks. More than 40 witnesses testified, and jurors heard hundreds of recordings LaBarre had made of herself interrogating and berating her victims. Defense forensic psychologist Malcolm Rogers testified that she suffered from a schizoaffective or delusional disorder and believed she had died of a drug overdose years earlier and been sent back to Earth as an angel with special powers, which led her to see the men in her life as pedophiles.²

Prosecutors, led by Attorney General Michael A. Delaney and Associate Attorney General Ann M. Rice, called her “crude, manipulative, cruel and vindictive.” The state’s forensic psychologist, Dr. Albert Drukteinis, testified that he had interviewed LaBarre three times over more than 12 hours and reviewed over 8,000 pages of case files, and concluded she was sane. He said her ability to explain away incriminating evidence was not what he would expect in a genuinely psychotic person.²

After 13 hours of deliberation, the jury found LaBarre sane and guilty of both counts of first-degree murder on June 20, 2008. She was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.¹¹

Appeal

Her defense team filed a mandatory appeal with the New Hampshire Supreme Court in July 2008, raising four issues: denial of a change-of-venue motion based on pretrial publicity, denial of a motion to suppress her statements to police, the sufficiency of the evidence on sanity, and the exclusion of a defense psychiatric expert’s testimony.¹² On the suppression question, the court held that officers’ entry onto the property on March 24, 2006, was justified under the community caretaking exception to the warrant requirement because they were acting out of concern for Countie’s welfare, and that LaBarre had voluntarily consented to the later search of her home. The Supreme Court affirmed the trial court’s denial of the suppression motion on March 25, 2010.⁹

Where She Is Now

LaBarre was first held at the women’s correctional facility in Goffstown, New Hampshire. By December 2008, she had been transferred to MCI-Framingham, a women’s prison in Massachusetts, where she continues to serve her life sentence.¹³

The farm itself, a circa-1777 property at 70 Red Oak Hill Lane, sat vacant after her 2006 arrest and was heavily damaged by vandals. On May 28, 2009, the 119-acre property was sold at a foreclosure auction for $600,000, well below its appraised value of roughly $860,900, to a New Hampshire couple.¹⁴

1
Foster’s Daily Democrat. LaBarre Jurors Say They Feel Confident in Verdict
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NBC News. N.H. Woman Convicted of Killing Two Boyfriends
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Foster’s Daily Democrat. Sister Testifies About LaBarre’s Childhood
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Oxygen. Sheila LaBarre Case: Who Did She Kill
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Rutland Herald. Family, State Looking at Autopsy Report in Horse Farm Murder Case
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Foster’s Daily Democrat. Murder Experts Analyze LaBarre Call
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Foster’s Daily Democrat. LaBarre Had History With Guns
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Seacoastonline. Documents in Sheila LaBarre Murder Case
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FindLaw. State v. LaBarre, No. 2008-494
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Seacoastonline. Mom Searching for Son Linked to LaBarre
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Seacoastonline. Sheila LaBarre Ruled Sane
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Foster’s Daily Democrat. LaBarre Team Files Appeal
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Foster’s Daily Democrat. Sheila LaBarre Transferred to Massachusetts
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Seacoastonline. Murderer Sheila LaBarre’s Farm Sold at Auction