former reporter chronicles the Sheila LaBarre murders in ‘Wicked Intentions’

“Wicked Intentions”
by Kevin Flynn
New Horizon Press, 2008 312 pages

One would think that if anyone had a legitimate shot at pulling off the insanity plea, it was Sheila LaBarre. The former Epping resident murdered at least two of her boyfriends (emphasis on the words “at least”), chopped them up with gardening tools and incinerated their bodies. She claimed that she was an avenging angel on a mission from God to rid the world of pedophiles. She dreamed that her victims appeared to her and thanked her for killing them. Pretty loony, eh?

But on June 20—exactly 115 years after a New England jury found Lizzie Borden not guilty of slaughtering her father and stepmother with an ax—a New Hampshire jury found LaBarre “sane and guilty” of murdering Michael Deloge and Kenneth Countie. She is currently serving a life sentence in the N.H. State Prison for Women in Goffstown. An appeal is pending.

Since reports emerged in spring 2006 that a developmentally disabled man had gone missing from the farm on Red Oak Hill Lane, the Sheila LaBarre case has captivated New England and made national headlines. It was only a matter of time before someone published a book about the case. And lo, that first book, “Wicked Intentions: The Sheila LaBarre Murders,” will be released by New Horizon Press in December. The author is Kevin Flynn, a former WMUR TV reporter who closely covered the case for more than two years.

Even after the verdict came in on June 20, a number of tantalizing questions remained about the case. It is still unknown, for example, exactly how LaBarre killed Deloge and Countie. And authorities have still not publicly spoken about the other human remains that were found on the LaBarre farm—including an unidentified set of human toes.

Despite diligent and painstaking reporting by Flynn, his book cannot possibly solve all these mysteries. But the book also raises questions that are more philosophical. Is Sheila LaBarre crazy, as her defense team contends, or is she the calculating, manipulative killer that prosecutors portrayed her as? Perhaps even more importantly, should Epping police have intervened sooner to prevent the murders from happening?

It’s in these areas that Flynn’s book provides some genuine insights. He flew to LaBarre’s hometown in Alabama to speak with her family and learn about her tortured childhood. He interviewed ex-boyfriends, neighbors and investigators, as well as family members of the victims. He even spoke to Sheila LaBarre during a jailhouse interview in June 2007. The vivid illustration he paints of her gruesome saga leaves readers with more than enough factual information to form their own theories about the case.

For anyone who enjoys a good crime story, this book is a real page-turner. Few, if any, murders in northern New England’s quiet farm towns have been so utterly bizarre, deranged and terrifying. There were fleshy bones sticking out of makeshift pyres, rabbits covered in human blood and strange tape recordings of the victims confessing to acts of pedophilia they did not commit. There was a sighting of Countie, just days before he disappeared, being carted around Wal-Mart in a wheelchair by LaBarre, his body covered with cuts and bruises and his skin discolored, as his murderer piled jugs of diesel fuel on his lap.

From the beginning of the book, Flynn sets up a spine-tingling portrait of the killer. A once ravishing, long-haired southern belle, LaBarre’s ability to charm and seduce her potential victims only made her creepier. Flynn builds up so much tension around his protagonist’s name that, before long, “Sheila” seems to carry the same horrific undertones as “Freddy” or “Jason.”

“And sweetly, as sunbeams for cherubs, she told them, ‘My name is Sheila LaBarre,’” Flynn forebodingly writes when she is first introduced.

LaBarre’s shocking track record of violence includes reports of firing a gun at her fleeing boyfriend, stabbing a man in the head with a pair of scissors, knocking a man’s front teeth out with a barbecue brush and crashing her truck into a man’s parked car while he was lying inside. The months-long search of her property yielded all kinds of weirdness, including flecks of blood, rabbit feces and dried vomit all over her house. 

“The bone was covered with soft tissue that looked like a burned hunk of human flesh,” concludes the prologue.

Flynn’s narrative jumps around in time, going back and forth between LaBarre’s distant past, the investigation and the trial. It also occasionally slips into a first-person account of Flynn’s own journalistic coverage of the case, which mostly seems superfluous. Although the media frenzy that surrounded the case is a necessary facet of the overall story, most of Flynn’s first-person interjections do not contribute anything of interest to the plot.

Flynn also tends to repeat himself, at times, and there are quite a few typos in the text. Nevertheless, his exhaustive research and vivid detail make for a compelling read. His analysis creates a surreal window into LaBarre’s twisted and deluded world.

Some of the most interesting segments involve Dr. Wilfred LaBarre, the kindly widowed chiropractor who took Sheila into his home and left her all his property. Although they were never legally married, Sheila adopted the doctor’s last name—even as she invited other romantic interests to share their home.

Flynn surmises that Dr. LaBarre was the only steady presence in Sheila’s life who could keep her, to some degree, under control. When he died in 2000 (whether of natural or suspicious causes remains unclear), Sheila’s inner demons ran amok on the farm, and her darkest instincts took over.

In the book’s epilogue, Flynn creates a pair of grisly hypothetical scenarios to describe how Michael Deloge and Kenneth Countie might have died. Readers are left to decide whether Sheila LaBarre is a disturbed and troubled woman, a deranged psychopath or a pure incarnation of evil. Whichever is the case, you’ll probably be relieved to know the “black widow” is behind bars.