Explosives Found in Home of Gunman Who Killed 4

A longtime troublemaker who gunned down four people before being killed by police had hidden hundreds of pounds of booby-trapped explosives throughout his rural property, officials said Wednesday.

Authorities found at least 400 pounds of ammonium nitrate in “a fairly elaborate system of tunnels” at Carl Drega’s home, Associate Atty. Gen. Michael Ramsdell said Wednesday.

Ammonium nitrate is used in some explosives, as a fertilizer and in rocket fuel. Diesel fuel mixed with ammonium nitrate was the explosive mixture used to bomb the World Trade Center in New York and the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Drega, who had a long-running feud with local officials over zoning and other property issues, had bought 61 1/2 gallons of diesel fuel Tuesday. Ramsdell said Drega used some of the fuel to burn down his house in the middle of his killing spree.

The state police bomb squad said Drega’s entire property was booby-trapped. And Wednesday night authorities decided to burn down his barn as a precaution. More than 40 small explosions were heard as the barn burned.

U.S. Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bomb disposal experts were on the scene. One official called the site “a giant bomb factory.”

Officials said that a local contractor who had been hired by Drega to dig trenches on the property with a backhoe told them that each day he returned to the property, the trenches he dug the day before had been covered or filled.

State police also found bomb-making books and a weapons manual Wednesday in the smoldering ruins of Drega’s house in northwestern New Hampshire.

There was no immediate indication from officials about what Drega may have planned to do with the explosives.

Efforts to put tighter controls on access to such bomb-making materials or to lace them with chemical “taggants” to make them traceable have been shot down by industry lobbying or have languished in government bureaucracy.

Authorities said Drega gunned down a part-time judge that he had a grudge against, a newspaper editor and two state troopers before being shot to death after a 45-minute gun battle with police. Four people were wounded.

Authorities gave this account of Tuesday’s violence:

In the afternoon, Trooper Scott Phillips pulled Drega over because there was too much rust on his red pickup truck. Drega quickly shot Phillips with an assault rifle but did not kill him.

Not aware shots had been fired, Trooper Leslie Lord arrived and was shot to death.

Drega then returned to the wounded Phillips and killed him, shooting four times, point-blank with a pistol. He then stole the trooper’s bulletproof vest and police cruiser.

“He was so nonchalant about the whole thing,” Roland Martin, a former police officer, told the Concord Monitor. “He never showed any excitement. . . .

“He gave me the feeling that mentally he wasn’t all there, to be so cool, so methodical.”

Drega then drove to the weekly News and Sentinel newspaper building, which also housed the law office of Judge Vickie Bunnell. Bunnell and other employees fled out the back door, but Drega shot her five times.

Editor Dennis Joos, 51, tried to help, but Drega wrestled free and shot him eight times.

Drega drove off, set fire to his own home and went searching for a neighbor, who was not home.

He then drove across the Connecticut River into Vermont, nearly killing a New Hampshire Fish and Game officer who tried to stop him. Continuing south, he parked the stolen police cruiser on a logging road.

James Walton, Vermont’s commissioner of public safety, said it was a carefully laid ambush.

“He had a narrow but clear line of fire on the cruiser,” Walton said.

A pair of Vermont troopers with a police dog were the first officers to approach the cruiser. Walton said when the dog signaled that something was up a hill, one of the troopers yelled, “Ambush! Hit the dirt.”

“The only thing that saved lives, I think, was that dog that alerted them and that gave them a second to take cover,” Walton said.

In the gunfire that followed, U.S. Border Patrol officer John Pfeifer, 33, was critically wounded in the chest; New Hampshire Trooper Jeffrey Caulder, 32, was shot in the pelvis; and New Hampshire Trooper Robert Haase, 38, was cut on one foot by shrapnel.

New Hampshire Game Officer Wayne Saunders, 28, escaped serious injury when one bullet fired by Drega struck his badge, which saved his life.

Officials said Drega had repeatedly threatened people, including Bunnell and Kenneth Parkhurst, another former town official.

After Drega confronted Bunnell and a state trooper who came to his house in 1993, he was arrested and charged with reckless conduct. Drega was ordered not to carry a gun into town buildings, Atty. Gen. Philip McLaughlin said.

Tuesday afternoon, Drega drove up to Parkhurst’s home in the police cruiser, then left when he found no one home.

Parkhurst was at a dentist’s appointment. His wife was visiting a relative.

“He wasn’t sane, I knew that. He could do anything at a moment’s notice,” Parkhurst told the Monitor.

“It’s very scary to think that we sat in the house last night and to think a killer being in the house,” Parkhurst said. “It gives you the shudders.”

Neighbors described Drega as a terror in this small community in a bucolic region of the state known as the North Country. His home sat about 50 feet from the bank of the Connecticut River that separates the state from Vermont. It was well back from the dirt road nearby, and neighbors said Drega wanted it that way.

“He didn’t want people to be able to see it,” said Shery Phillips, a neighbor. “He was just a different person.”

Her husband, Gary, had a blunter view: “He’s somebody that you should be . . . damned afraid of.”

Drega took a gun with him when he went to get his mail from his roadside box, he said.

For the last two or three days, the Phillipses and neighbor Beverly Smith said they heard gunshots coming from Drega’s property. They assumed it was target practice.

Robert Crawford, 58, a local truck driver, said: “I guess in Oregon you would call him [Drega] a survivalist, but out here he was just a loner.”

A state demolitions expert was on the way, and authorities want to defuse as soon as possible the tunnels Drega dug.

On Tuesday, the Colebrook Fire Department found some books on the site of the burned house, and it was about how to make booby traps. So they backed off right away.