By Mark Gosztyla
Foster's Daily Democrat
June 15, 2008
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080615/GJNEWS_01/940554177
Over the past 25 years, Pat Boyle, Jim Boulanger and his sister, Ann Boulanger, have spent too much time wondering about the circumstances surrounding Shirley Thomas, the owner of a trunk discovered in 1983 containing the remains of five infants, as well as Irene Copeland, a Somersworth District Nurse rumored to be somehow connected to the performing of abortions in the late 1940s, and the possibility of a connection between the two.
The three agree the truth has never been told. They believe Copeland's death was a murder and that powerful people in the communities of Dover and Somersworth secreted that truth away.
Banished and forgotten
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| Irene Copeland |
In 1997, Mike Milotte, a senior current affairs reporter for the Irish TV network RTE, unraveled the story of more than 2,000 Irish-born children who were illegally adopted by U.S. citizens between the 1950s and 1970s. The book he wrote about this story, "Banished Babies: The Secret History of Ireland's Baby Export Business," detailed how the Irish-Catholic church facilitated the birth and adoption of these children using "mother and baby homes" run by nuns in Ireland, and the United States Catholic Charities organization to select "proper" parents.
In a 1998 NPR interview, Milotte said about his book, "it's a bit too easy and perhaps unfair to criticize Ireland's Catholic leaders for running this baby trade … I think, in justice, I do try to show their side of the story as well. And there is always a danger in writing historical works of this nature that, you know, one is judging the past with the benefit of hindsight. They had a problem on their hands that in a society where birth outside marriage was frowned upon, they were the only ones providing facilities for these women. Now I would say that the answer to that is not that one applauds what they're doing, but that one criticizes the society that failed to provide alternative solutions."
Milotte's book, written after confidential adoption paperwork was made public in Ireland in the 1990s, details how the trade in children was highly profitable for those involved. Lawyers in the United States would charge up to $3,000 for each infant placed with adoptive parents.
Often, the operators of the "mother and baby homes" would charge the mother, or family of the mother, significant amounts of money for the services to the shamed women.
What's even more shocking is that Milotte asserts there were in fact even more than the 2,000 known babies illegally moved from Irish mothers to American parents. He claims that a number of "mother and baby homes" would encourage American parents to travel to Ireland, and once there, would provide false birth certificates so the official record for the child did not include any trail of adoption.
The actual Irish birth mother's name never was recorded. These adopted children therefore have no chance of ever reuniting with their biological mothers.
The widespread commerce in infants practiced during these times was a big factor in Boyle's suspicions.
"When I investigated this (the "baby bones" and Irene Copeland) I heard that this was frequent up in Canada; supposedly Nova Scotia had a similar type of thing."
If this was happening everywhere else, why not Somersworth?
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In 1988, the Dover Police Department became an accredited law enforcement agency. They follow strict procedural standards in compliance with the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies.
They were the first police department in the state to gain accredited status. This accreditation means there is a series of protocols to follow in every type of investigation: pages of guidelines for each type of crime.
Dover law enforcement was not so organized in 1950; at this time there were few to no standard operating procedures for the Dover police to follow in the pursuit of a criminal. There were no specialized jobs within the force: no detectives, no patrolmen, no canine officers. There were the officers and the chief.
Most police work was done on foot, walking beats through the upper and lower squares of downtown Dover. The officers even had to buy their own uniforms. Specialization of the force did not occur until the 1960s, when Dick Flynn became chief.
He began to implement operating policies for the officers depending on the type of crime.
This information makes it hard to say with any certainty that the superficial investigation performed following the Copeland discovery was the product of a cover-up/cover up. It may just have been the way things were done back then.
It might explain several things:
n Why there's no record of the police trying to track down the second car seen on Watson Road the night Copeland died.
n Why there's no record of what happened to Copeland's Somersworth District Nursing car and no report of any investigation of its contents for clues.
n Why there is no record of the police verifying the alibi of Copeland's boyfriend, the last reported person to have seen her alive.
n Why the letter and papers found at the scene where Copeland's body was discovered never made their way into the investigative file.
The money trail
The Strafford Star was published in Dover from April 17 to July 29, 1950. It published an "exclusive series" in three parts on June 23, 24 and 26 looking into Copeland's death and Sarah Rollins' will.
The writer, Burt Nichols, claimed: "While the Copeland case has been officially closed, several questions remain, some of them connected with Sarah A. Rollins which will be heard Monday in Probate Court."
On June 23, Nichols stated that, "Were she alive (Irene Copeland), she would quite probably have been called in as a leading witness if a contest of the will were to be made ... That Mrs. Copeland was concerned over the will has been evidenced in several ways-possibly in a diary."
On the 24th, Nichols brought new evidence to light quashing any thoughts of suicide in the Copeland case.
"She (Copeland) had planned to leave early Tuesday morning, the day that her body was found, for Providence to see her daughter, Mary, in a style show at the Rhode Island School of Design where Mary has just completed her junior year. Mrs. Copeland had suggested to her friends that the show was as important to her as her daughter's graduation next year. She had talked of little else for several weeks."
He then claimed Copeland had been preparing a signed statement as to what had transpired in the Rollins' home around the time of the new will being executed.
On the 26th, Nichols' article began with, "'One more pair of lips are sealed,' were the words of a person very close to Mrs. Irene Copeland after learning of the sudden and mysterious death of the 44-year-old Somersworth visiting nurse on a lonely woods lane in Dover, six weeks ago today."
He claimed the investigating authorities had answered the basic questions of the case, i.e. How did Copeland die? But the why remained unanswered.
He concluded: "It is a strange accident that caused her to die from an 'excessive intake of alcohol and some trace of barbituric acid' when, according to friends, she was not known to drink to excess or to use barbiturates."
Nichols seemed convinced this will was indeed the reason Copeland was killed. Did the authorities pursue this possibility? If they did, the evidence no longer exists.
Irene Copeland, baby snuffer?
By 1984, Boyle, with the help of two Union Leader reporters, had discovered Copeland's connection to Rollins and Harold and Lloyd Skillings (see "The Widow and the Mechanics," Foster's Sunday Citizen, June 8).
He began to dig, interviewing anyone who was still around from the case. He talked to Beulah Cole, a woman who helped to take care of Rollins in her final days; she occasionally would help in collecting rent from Rollins' tenants. At 77, she was prompted by Boyle to launch into a tough-to-follow burst of information and denial:
"I don't think she (Irene Copeland) died by herself ... There's some trickiness there ... It was right after that that Harold Skillings beat it ... I tell you I wouldn't want him after me ... Nope I don't know nothing about it ... Irene had been up with the Chaney girls the night before ... She was good friends with them ... They liked her ..."
The woman told Boyle that Irene and other members of the McGreal family had been friendly with Rollins even before her illness.
Boyle says today that Cole, "Knew everything going on," but wouldn't tell all because she felt snubbed in a way for not being a part of it all. She was simply an observer; that was not enough for her.
Roy "Red" Gardner, a former Skillings employee, Gene Barry, a GE executive, and former Sheriff Mose Pare all talked about Rollins' money coming from her being the owner and madam of "the old Eagle House," one of Somersworth's most notorious houses of ill repute.
Boyle read the transcripts of Lloyd Skillings' criminal trial. He was particularly interested in the testimony of Christine Pierrochakow (Perry). She recounted a time when Rollins asked her to look at a safe full of money in Rollins' bedroom closet.
"She asked me to look and when I looked I couldn't see the box itself because it was so dark but I saw four shoe boxes and then I didn't care anything about looking because the minute she opened that door it was just like the smell of death or decayed meat and it smelled something terrible and I just stepped back and said it is a nice looking box."
Boyle's copies of the transcripts have this section underlined, and there is an exclamation point in the margin as well.
To Boyle, this "smell of death" in Rollins' closet was the connection that was missing. If Rollins was a madam as people told him, then one of the things she'd have to deal with would be the unwanted pregnancies of the prostitutes working for her. Copeland's personality seems to indicate she would have wanted to help these women out.
She could have delivered the children and handed them over to people she thought she could trust.
"The smell of death or decayed meat could have been more boxes or trunks with the remains of those unwanted pregnancies in them," Boyle concludes now. And, "these women would have held onto these remains if they were blackmailing the fathers of these children."
Thomas, like she claimed, was part of something much bigger.
This theory of Boyle's seems to account for why Copeland's death wouldn't have been investigated with all the fervor a crime of its magnitude dictated.
Too many politicians
When Pat interviewed Huc Davey in 1984, Huc said the nurse's death was not investigated because of "too many politicians" being involved. Who those politicians were is uncertain, but a number of prominent politicians were involved in the probate case surrounding Sarah Rollins' estate.
Examination of the court documents that still exist from that time shows that Phillip G. Peters, of Wyman, Starr, Booth, Wadleigh & Langdell, Louis Wyman's firm, the New Hampshire Attorney General from 1953 to 1961, was the attorney representing the Rollins' estate.
Wyman's tenure as Attorney General is now remembered for the zeal with which he investigated supposed communists in New Hampshire.
Perkins Bass, a future U.S. Congressman, represented Harold Skillings before Harold's disappearance from the country during his brothers' criminal trial. Perkins Bass was a member of the Manchester firm Sheehan, Phinney, Bass and Green.
His partner, Walter Phinney, was the state Attorney General at the time of Irene Copeland's death. Phinney, in his capacity as Attorney General, was one of the many men Irene and Christine Perry contacted in January of 1950 after Lloyd Skillings began trying to involve the ladies in his scheming to get his hands on Rollins' wealth.
Also representing Harold Skillings in the probate proceedings was John Brant, from the Rochester law firm of Cooper, Hall, and Cooper. John Brant, who a year later would be the Strafford County Solicitor in charge of the prosecution of Lloyd Skillings.
More questions, no answers
Pat's memories of his final days working the case of baby bones are still bitter for him to recollect.
Sometime in the early part of 1985, Boyle was called into Chief Ronald Perron's office to discuss the infant remains case — the case that to Boyle had become the Copeland case.
Boyle, I think you've been working on this infant case long enough.
Chief, I think I've found a new connection though ...
If there's something there, fine; if not, I don't want you wasting any more time on it. You've got two more months. This is starting to affect a lot of people in town. There are a lot of people in town who are connected or related to this, people in town whose parents aren't really their parents. I don't want to hurt any more people in town.
Shortly after this meeting, Boyle called the Attorney General's office and talked to Gregory Swopes, the assistant AG who had been working the case with him the past two years.
"I called to ask him whether we were going to offer immunity to Thomas, or what the next move was, and he says to me, 'We want this thing to die a slow death.'"
Boyle hung up. He heard in his head the comment of one old-time cop he'd interviewed, "He said that if this was 15 years ago, I would have been taken off the case, been fired or been found dead. He said I didn't realize the political implications of this thing."
When Swopes said that, Boyle cashed out.
"If no one wants this thing to get solved, then I'm done too. There's some kind of cronyism behind all this. That's when I left and went to Portsmouth," Boyle says.
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What Boyle hopes now is what Jim and Ann Boulanger hope too; that finally, after all these years, people will be willing to let the truth come into the open. They want to know, good or bad, what happened to Copeland.
Was she killed over Sarah Rollins' money like Burt Nichols suggested when he ended his exclusive series in The Strafford Star, by saying, "It is a strange coincidence that she should suddenly have died on the day that steps which might lead to a will contest, in which she likely would have been a 'star witness,' were taken"?
Or was Copeland killed, like Shirley Thomas' co-workers communicated to Pat Boyle, because she was going to confess to her role in an illegal adoption and baby-snuffing operation in Somersworth and Dover?
Or was she killed, like her sister thought, simply for stumbling across this racket; a witness that needed to be silenced?
Did Irene Copeland really die of an accidental overdose? Or was she murdered-strangled or beaten-like the gossips said?
Was there a cover-up orchestrated when Irene was killed? Did Irene's brother, a powerful, respected priest, like her niece and nephew now contend, persuade the authorities not to dig too deeply in his sister's death in an attempt to protect his family from her past? Or was it to protect his interests?
Was Lloyd Skillings simply the "fall guy" for a conspiracy of lawyers and politicians trying to steal Sarah Rollins' immoral fortune? Or was he a cruel, calculative criminal willing to do whatever it took to get his slice of the pie?
Was Shirley Thomas a part of all this intrigue? Or was she just trying to divert the police from her own sordid history?
Has enough time now passed for the answers to these secrets to be told?
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