A Matter of Trust, Part 1
Introduction: Two deaths in the Monadnock region, one a reported domestic-violence related shooting in Stoddard and the other the suicide of a beloved Keene police chief.
The official investigations were open and shut. As far as the world knew, these were two, unrelated tragedies. But that is because New Hampshire State Police investigators hid evidence connecting the two events in order to protect the Keene chief’s reputation.
Now, questions remain about what really happened, and who to believe.
InDepthNH.org is reporting on the investigation into the killing of Michael Carney, officially deemed self-defense, and how it might be connected to the death of Chief Brian Costa after learning detectives were ordered not to look into deleted text messages. This is the first of a three-part series that will run today, Tuesday and Wednesday at InDepthNH.org.
By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
Two tragic and violent deaths in the Monadnock region, officially unconnected, take on a new light as evidence emerges that investigators hid connections to protect the reputation of a police officer.
In a house in Stoddard, Nicole Carney used a 30-06 rifle to shoot her husband, Michael Carney, in his back and behind his ear in a Feb. 9, 2017 homicide that was later ruled justifiable self-defense.
A month later, on March 9, 2017, Keene Police Chief Brian Costa took his own life inside his Keene home.
The two deaths shocked the community where the Costa and Carney families were known.
The deaths were investigated and the official explanations seemed open and shut. One was a dreadful case of a woman defending herself against a reportedly abusive husband. The other was a veteran police officer who lost his battle with mental health demons that have been known to plague some in law enforcement.
But key facts were left out of the official explanations because investigators were told to leave those facts alone and to drop the connection between Costa and Nicole Carney. That includes evidence that shows the two were in communication on the day Michael Carney was killed.
“My brother was not violent and he was not abusive,” Caryn Perkins, Michael Carney’s sister, told InDepthNH.org.
Perkins has been fighting for years to get information about the shooting death of her brother. The State Police investigation and subsequent New Hampshire Attorney General’s
report that ruled it a case of self-defense never made sense to her.
Perkins’ statements in the Attorney General’s final report were taken out of context to fit the narrative Michael Carney was killed during a domestic assault after years of alcoholism and violence on his part, she said.
“We had never seen any kind of violence with him,” Perkins said. “He was a selectman out in his town and very highly thought of by everyone.”
Kelly Carroll, Michael Carney’s best friend, told InDepthNH.org he also felt taken out of context in the official public report, a sign the investigation aimed to confirm the theory of self-defense rather than seek the truth.
“When they took the report, originally, I felt it was a bit out of context. I don’t really feel like it was conveying my feelings on it,” Carroll said.
Michael and Nicole Carney did not have a happy marriage. Michael Carney engaged in extramarital affairs, and by all accounts, drank too much.
“He was hardly perfect,” Carroll said. “But Mike was always the one that was trying to bring the family back together.”
Nicole Carney was contacted for this story, but she declined repeated requests to comment.
Before the February shooting, Perkins and Carroll both said Michael Carney had reached his limit with Nicole Carney and wanted a divorce. He reportedly threw her out of the house in March of 2016.
But the couple stayed married, with Michael Carney living alone in the family’s Sullivan home and Nicole Carney supposedly living with her mother in Troy.
What Michael Carney did not know is that Nicole Carney was not staying with her mother. She had secretly bought a house in Stoddard in May of 2016 and had been living there with their young daughter and her teen son from a previous marriage.
Michael Carney discovered his wife’s secret Stoddard home on the morning of Feb. 9, 2017, setting off the events that would lead to his death that evening.
Michael Carney also did not know that Nicole Carney had an ongoing, though undefined, relationship with the married Costa.
Costa’s name was never mentioned to Perkins or Carroll during the first investigation in 2017. His relationship with Nicole Carney was never mentioned in the official Attorney General’s report on the shooting that was released in July of 2017, months after Costa took his own life. But evidence investigators obtained in the days after the February shooting showed Costa was advising Nicole Carney on the day of the shooting about how to handle a confrontation with her husband.
“You need to protect yourself and you know what I mean by that Nic,” Costa texted to Nicole Carney in a text stamped at 7:25 p.m. on the day of the shooting.
Michael Carney was fatally shot sometime between 7 p.m. and 7:40 p.m., according to the police reports. The autopsy estimates his time of death as 7:25 p.m.
That text, and others, as well as a nine second call Nicole Carney made to Costa after the shooting, were never made part of the original investigation.
“There’s so much information in here that shows all the misconduct by law enforcement,” Perkins said of the documents she has obtained through right-to-know requests.
Perkins wouldn’t start to find out the truth until after one of the original investigators, who shared her questions about the case, pushed his bosses.
The day before he retired in November of 2019, more than two years after Michael Carney and Brian Costa died, State Police Detective Shawn Skahan sent an email to Major Joseph Ebert and then-Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Strelzin laying out his concerns about the original investigations. Costa’s involvement was front and center to those concerns.
Skahan’s email triggered a State Police review of the Michael Carney shooting that stretched into 2020. During that investigation it was learned someone intentionally deleted texts, calls, and Costa’s contact information from Nicole Carney’s phone moments after the shooting, according to multiple reports.
The deletions were discovered a day after the shooting when Cheshire County Sheriff’s Deputy Todd Faulkner conducted a forensic search of Nicole Carney’s phone for the State Police. According to a report Skahan would write in December of 2018, State Police Lieutenant Joseph DiRusso spoke with Costa on March 7, 2017, and the Keene chief asked DiRusso about the Carney investigation. DiRusso then told Costa investigators were looking for and finding deleted data on Nicole Carney’s cell phone.
“It was at this point Costa informed Lt. DiRusso that we would find his information on Nicole’s phone,” Skahan wrote.
At that point, Costa would live two more days before he took his life on March 9, 2017. After Costa took his life, DiRusso ordered both Skahan and Faulkner to drop the connection between Costa and Nicole Carney, they said during the 2020 review.
“Skahan said he was told by Lieutenant Joseph DiRusso not to pursue the phone download any further and that it would only disparage the memory of Chief Brian Costa,” Ebert wrote in his report.
Skahan reports that investigators learned after Costa’s death that the Keene chief replaced his department cell phone within days of the Carney shooting. His old phone, turned back into the Keene Police Department, was reset to factory settings on March 1, 2017, erasing all prior call and text data on the device, according to the 2020 review.
Neither Skahan, Faulkner, nor DiRusso responded to a request for comment. InDepthNH.org reached out to Costa’s family, but did not get an on the record response.
Michael Garrity, communications director for the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office, initially told InDepthNH.org no evidence was covered up during the Carney investigation.
“I can tell you that while we are always open to hearing about any new information in any case, this particular case was closed, then later reviewed. It was ruled a matter involving self-defense. We have no evidence of a coverup,” Garrity said via email.
When told by InDepthNH.org the 2020 review did reveal that police hid evidence, Garrity stated he would get back to InDepthNH.org with more information but hasn’t done so.
Despite the way State Police handled the evidence that Costa and Nicole Carney tried to hide their relationship from investigators, and the fact the two seemingly tried to hide their communications on the day of the shooting, the 2020 review did not change the outcome. The shooting is still considered self-defense.
“[T]here is no evidence that Brian Costa had any involvement in the [shooting], nor that his decisions to take his own life had any connection to the [shooting,]” wrote State Police Detective Christopher Elphick, the lead investigator in the 2020 review.
But Perkins is not satisfied with that answer. The fact investigators quashed seemingly important evidence during the initial investigation, and hid that for years, leads her to believe there are serious problems with aspects of the shooting investigation.
“I do not trust their findings,” Perkins said.
There are still major questions about what happened on Feb. 9, 2017, such as was there anyone in the house besides Nicole and Michael Carney, what exactly Michael Carney did that led to him being justifiably killed by his wife, and when did all of it happen.
Kris Walker, a childhood friend of Nicole Carney, spent months as a person of interest during the 2020 review after witnesses suggested he was in the house during the shooting before police determined there was no evidence to back that up, he told InDepthNH.org.
“It doesn’t add up, absolutely not,” Walker said of the investigation. “But I’m not saying it wasn’t self-defense.”
More on Walker’s role in the case will be reported in Part II of the three-part series, which will be published by InDepthNH.org on Tuesday. Part III will be published Wednesday.
