Operation Night Cat, Episode 2 – Behind the Brick Wall
“Operation Night Cat” is a special three-part series from NHPR’s Document team and Outside/In. Listen to the first episode here.
Episode 2: Behind the Brick Wall
The poaching investigation takes a surprising turn when it reveals another set of potential crimes – this time, behind the brick walls of New Hampshire’s State Prison for Men.
According to a 2023 New Hampshire Fish and Game report, then-Sgt. Thomas Kelley sent this photo to then-Sgt. Christopher Masse on Feb. 16, 2021. The report notes that the image shows "a hand holding multiple letters fanned out," with the top envelope addressed to Merrimack Superior Court. "It appears that there is discussion of retribution for the prisoner who wrote and attempted to send the letter," the report states. Photo: New Hampshire Fish and Game Memorandum / NHPR Records Request.
Thomas Kelley. Photo: State of New Hampshire / NHPR Records Request.
SUPPORT
Operation Night Cat is made possible with listener support. Click here to support independent, investigative journalism.
Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook.
Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
Above: Copies of text messages between then-Sgt. Thomas Kelley and then-Sgt. Christopher Masse were documented in a March 2023 memo by New Hampshire Fish and Game. All photos: New Hampshire Fish and Game Memorandum / NHPR Records Request.
CREDITS
Operation Night Cat is a special three part series from NHPR’s Document team and Outside/In.
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reporting by Nate Hegyi, Lauren Chooljian, and Jason Moon
Mixing by Jason Moon
Editing by Taylor Quimby and Katie Colanari, with help from Rebecca Lavoie, Jackie Harris, Dan Barrick, Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, and Marina Henke
Outside/In’s Executive Producer is Taylor Quimby
Document’s Senior Editor is Katie Colaneri
Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio
Original scoring by Jason Moon
Logo art by Nate Hegyi. Bobcat photo by Jill DeVito.
Operation Night Cat is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi, narrating: You’re listening to Operation Night Cat. I’m Nate Hegyi.
[PHONE DIALING]
Hegyi, narrating: For weeks, our producer Jason Moon had been trying to get ahold of a pivotal source for this series.
[PHONE RINGING]
Hegyi, narrating: A 55-year-old former inmate at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men. Shawn Cochrane.
Voicemail: I’m sorry, but the person you have called has a voice mailbox that has not been set up yet…
Hegyi, narrating: At the time, Shawn was out on parole and he had been a hard guy to reach until Jason finally got a hold of him on the phone on a Sunday morning.
Jason Moon, in studio: Hey, Sean, can you hear me? Okay.
Shawn Cochrane, on the phone: Yeah, I can hear you. Fine.
Moon: Cool. Alright.
Hegyi, narrating: In 2021, Shawn was one of more than a thousand inmates at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men.
It’s a massive compound on the outskirts of the state capital that honestly looks more like an east coast factory than a prison. It’s all red brick walls and tiny windows, built back in the 1870s.
Shawn had been in and out of that prison for more than two decades, so he knew it well. And he told us there are a lot of issues.
Cochrane, on the phone: The food is absolutely disgusting. Uh, the place is an absolute filth.
Hegyi, narrating: There have been rat infestations, mold problems, holes in the walls, the sewer backs up weekly, and it has long been understaffed. In the spring of 2025, more than a third of all positions in the prison remained unfilled. So, corrections officers there work long hours to cover the gaps.
Cochrane: So, nine times out of ten your interaction with them is very short, very disrespectful, because they’re grumpy, because they’ve worked 75, 80, 100 hours that week.
Hegyi, narrating: Back in 2021, Shawn was serving time after getting busted for theft. And he noticed a real difference between the older corrections officers he’d known for years and the new guys – the “kids,” as he calls them.
Cochrane: The kids are worse, uh, because they, they don't want to do anything. They just want to come by and pass out meal. Uh, they want to fuck with you. Like, for instance, you know, in the morning, at 5 o’clock in the morning, you go to breakfast, you come back, and your room is torn apart. I mean, why?
Hegyi, narrating: Shawn says the staff are all overworked and there aren’t enough of them. But in his experience, the younger guys tend to be more aggressive. And he struggled especially with a corrections officer named Corporal Tom Kelley.
[MUSIC IN]
Cochrane: Uh, he's an arrogant cock sucker. He's a punk. He’ll like, if you're a known, uh, teller, ok? He'll scream at you and have an argument with you and blast it out right on the tier that you're a fucking rat.
Hegyi, narrating: Tom Kelley. If that name sounds familiar, that’s because he’s the hunter we talked about in the last episode.
Tom Kelley, on TikTok video: There’s blood everywhere. I absolutely smoked ‘im.
Hegyi, narrating: The guy at the center of a major poaching investigation that would come to be known as “Operation Night Cat.”
Kevin Bronson: It's like they're playing Grand Theft Auto behind their house. Except with animals.
Hegyi, narrating: While he seemed to be spending a lot of his nights illegally hunting game, Tom Kelley also worked as a corrections officer. A guard at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men.
Cochrane: He'll throw you food through the slot, or he'll just leave it on the slot long enough so it falls out of your tray, out of the cell, and then just not give you any more food. Purposely go out of their way to try to make your life miserable. That's who Mr. Kelley is.
[MUSIC POST]
Hegyi, narrating: America’s prisons aren’t a cushy experience, but the people held inside them still have rights. And are supposed to expect that – even behind bars – rules about what is and isn’t fair will be followed.
Shawn says that’s not how things actually go. To him, prison is literally and figuratively a brick wall.
Cochrane: And they can do whatever they want and get away with it because nobody can see over that wall!
[MUSIC POST]
From NHPR’s Document team and Outside/In, I’m Nate Hegyi and this is Operation Night Cat.
Episode 2: Behind The Brick Wall.
[MUSIC FADES]
[BREAK]
Hegyi, narrating: This is Operation Night Cat. I’m Nate Hegyi.
Back when we were first reporting this story, my producer Lauren Choolijan and I drove out to a little cabin near a fishing pond. We were there to see New Hampshire Fish and Game officer Ron Arsenault.
At one point during the interview, his cell phone literally chirped. It was a text message notification.
Lauren Chooljian: So, did your phone just ribbit?
Ron Arsenault: That's my cricket phone.
Hegyi: That's awesome.
Arsenault: So, when we sneak in the woods, somebody hears a cricket. They're not like, “Oh, that's a phone.” You know?
Hegyi: That's a great point. That's really smart.
Arsenault: I used to have ducks… [FADES DOWN]
Hegyi, narrating: Remember, it was Ron who kicked off Operation Night Cat.
It started with Tom Kelley’s game camera and a deer he’d shot. But eventually, Ron uncovered a group of hunters who seemed to be illegally killing dozens of animals — bobcats, foxes, coyotes, and more.
A lot of the evidence for these alleged crimes were on Tom Kelley’s phone. Text messages between him and his hunting buddies, like this one, which happened after Ron says Tom sent a picture of a dead coyote to the group chat.
Arsenault: Tom's like, you know, shot this ugly thing last night, and Randy says, lol. And then Woody says, why would you do such a thing? Tom Kelly says, I love killing shit. And they were all barking behind my house.
Chooljian: “I love killing shit?”
Hegyi, off mic: Yeah.
Arsenault: And then he says, “Hey, the season's closed, you damn outlaw.”
Chooljian: Just wait a minute. So, his friends call him out for, like, illegal hunting?
Yeah. And he just says, oh, I love killing stuff.
Hegyi: Yeah. So he knew what he was doing was wrong.
Arsenault: Oh yeah. One hundred percent.
Chooljian: Well and can I also just, the verbage there, like… “I love killing shit.” Like, you both love to hunt, but is that how you… talk about it?
Arsenault: No, no. You have to have the respect for the animal that you're hunting, you know. And clearly he didn't.
Hegyi: And how does that feel, also knowing that they have a badge?
Arsenault: Oh, it's just disgraceful because, you know, these guys are now in charge of humans, you know. And you're like, “Well, what else is going on?”
[MUSIC IN]
Hegyi, narrating: We’re gonna come back to the poaching case that triggered Operation Night Cat in the next episode. But first we’re gonna spend some time trying to answer that other question: what else was going on with Tom Kelley?
Ron wasn’t authorized to share anything outside the scope of his initial investigation. So, my colleagues and I went off on our own… and tried to see behind the brick wall.
[MUSIC POST]
Hegyi, narrating: Over the past year, our team has hounded the state for more information on Tom Kelley and the other former or current corrections officers who were allegedly poaching.
We filed public records requests, reviewed audio testimonies, and talked to current and former state officials. We even sued the New Hampshire Department of Corrections for documents.
And through all of this, we got access to some of Tom Kelley and his coworkers’ other text messages. Texts that reveal a pattern of disturbing and potentially illegal behavior happening at the prison.
[MUSIC POST]
There are three sets of exchanges I wanna take you through.
The first shows the use of aggressive and violent language.
Like, in one exchange I viewed, Tom Kelley and another CO texted about an inmate who tried to escape. Tom wrote, quote, “please shoot him.”
And then the other guy wrote back, “I want to feel his skull cave in with my fists.”
[MUSIC UP AND OUT]
Hegyi, narrating: There are other examples, too.
Lauren and I were surprised to see these violent exchanges laid out so bluntly. They’re the sort of thing that could hurt the public reputation of the prison and the people who work there - nevermind that if the prison’s HR specialist saw these texts, these guys could be in trouble.
But it might also be good to put them in context.
Chooljian, off mic, walking into a house: I'm Lauren.
Claudia Cass: Hi, Lauren.
Hegyi: I'm Nate. Nice to meet you.
Cass: Nice to meet you, too.
Chooljian: Come on in, puppy… [FADES OUT]
Hegyi, narrating: Claudia Cass worked at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men from 2006 to 2022. She worked with a lot of the guys in this story, including Tom Kelley, though she didn't know him well.
Cass: So, he was, like, big into hunting. He would go, you know, I don't know where, where one goes to, to kill things. But that's what he did.
Hegyi, narrating: Claudia says the prison… is a pressure cooker. It’s been way understaffed for years. Officers work huge amounts of overtime.
Cass: I averaged 100 hours a week working there.
Hegyi, narrating: Claudia was actually fired in connection with this staffing crisis.
In 2022, she told the warden she would be locking down the prison overnight. There just wasn’t enough staff, she said, to keep officers safe, she said. Two days later, she was suspended… and then later fired. She’s suing the Department of Corrections for wrongful termination.
That staffing crisis hasn’t gotten any better in the years since.
Instead of spending time with their families, guards are working overtime with inmates. And the state prison holds everyone from low-level offenders, to people convicted of murder and rape. It can be a rough crowd.
Cass: I'll be doing rounds, you know, and they'll be like, “Oh, you know, you have smelly crotch,” or they'll be calling the guys the n-word. They'll be, uh, um… Some threaten your family. Um, yeah, I've seen I've seen it all.
Hegyi, narrating: Point is, it’s not an easy job. Tempers flare.
Tom Kelley wouldn’t talk to us for this podcast. So, we reached out to Claudia because we wanted to know what it’s like to work inside the pressure cooker. And as a corrections officer for almost two decades, what did she see in these texts from Tom?
Lauren read the messages we found back to her.
Chooljian: And Kelley says, “Please shoot him.” And Masse says, “I want to feel his skull cave in with my fists.”
Cass: Mhm.
Chooljian: Is that language that you would use?
Cass: Well, no, I wouldn't do that. That said, there's some people that, you know, society wouldn't be worse off without. Um, so I don't know who this particular person is, but there's some that it's really difficult to hide your disdain for the person. Um, because, you know, we deal with, um, really bad people.
To Claudia, in this environment with these inmates, words are just words.
Cass: They didn't shoot him. They didn't punch him, didn't cave his head in. But would we talk, like, “Yeah, it would be a tragedy,” you know? Uh, yeah.
[AMBIENT MUX FADES IN]
Hegyi, narrating: This brings us to our second big set of texts we viewed because in these next exchanges… it wasn’t just words.
I’m gonna bring Lauren into the studio to help me read these texts. I’m reading for Tom Kelley. Lauren is reading for a coworker that we’re not going to name.
Hegyi: Alright. It's February 25th, 2019 at 8:48 p.m.. Tom texts, “It's Kelley from work.”
[TEXT SWOOP SOUND]
Choolijan: “What's up bro?” “You guys mash Tappan?”
Hegyi: Tom, “Fuck yes.”
[SWOOP]
Choolijan: “How bad he look? You guys send his ass in an ambulance?”
[SWOOP]
Hegyi: Tom, “He refused medical. You will see his face tomorrow LOL.”
[SWOOP]
Hegyi, narrating: From these texts, it appears Tom Kelley is bragging about assaulting an inmate.
This inmate, Devin Tappan – he actually tried suing Tom over this incident. In court documents, Devin Tappan alleged that Tom and a crew of guards threw him to the floor, held his hands behind his back, and then punched, kicked and tasered him. That lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year because he didn't file suit within the statute of limitations.
Alright, back to the texts.
The next morning Tom Kelley texted that same coworker again to ask how Tappan was looking. The guy said Tappan’s face was “fuck[ed]” and that he wouldn’t even eat. And in that exchange Tom said something important. He said, quote, “LMAO. My fist is killing me.”
[MUSIC POSTS AND FADES]
Hegyi, narrating: We told Claudia about all this, too. And this time, her reaction was different.
Chooljian: We've seen information that suggests that Kelley, uh, punched Tappan in the face because he texted another co-worker to say, “Let me know tomorrow when you go in how bad he looks.”
Cass: Whoa. Um, and there's very few reasons that we can punch anybody. Um, you know, you have to be in a struggle that you feel is basically life or death before we're close fist punching people
Hegyi, narrating: Of course, violence is often part of American prison life. The New Hampshire Department of Corrections has an entire handbook dedicated to use of force, which lays out when they consider it justified… and when they don’t.
Cass: So, for us to punch them, it would in my, my experience is only if they're attacking you.
[MUSIC IN]
Hegyi, narrating: Here’s where things take another twist. A couple weeks after bragging about beating an inmate, Tom Kelley texts someone else: Randy Inman.
If that name also sounds familiar, it’s because he’s another member of the group being investigated in the poaching ring – the guy who apparently came screaming home from work when the cops got a search warrant for his house.
Randy also worked at the prison - as a supervisor.
Back to the texts. I’ll read again for Tom Kelley. Lauren is reading for Randy.
Nate Hegyi: March 11th, 2019, 7:45 p.m. Tom writes, “My hand is still fucked up, so I need to tell Mindy so I can get it looked at. You still on board saying you stepped on my hand?”
[SWOOP]
Now, Mindy, by the way, is an HR specialist at the prison.
Lauren Choolijan: Randy texts back, “Yes, because I did.”
[SWOOP]
Nate Hegyi: Tom, “Exactly. Thank you.”
Nate Hegyi: Then a little later, Tom writes, “I told Mindy” and she says she would contact you at some point today. I said you stepped on my hand.”
[SWOOP]
After this exchange, Randy filed what’s called an “employee accident/injury report.” In it, Randy writes he was doing a cell extraction of Devin Tappan – that’s when guards forcibly remove an inmate from their cell.
During this extraction, Randy says Devin “charged” at him, QUOTE “swinging his arms at me.”
He writes that he struggled to handcuff Devin.
And then QUOTE “it was during this time that I unknowingly stepped on Corporal Kelley, Thomas’ hand. I instantly felt his hand move under my boot and I quickly moved my foot.” END QUOTE.
Randy sent a photo of this form to Tom.
Lauren, reading as Randy Inman: “FYI I’m putting this in Mindy’s box on her door.”
Nate, reading as Tom Kelley: “Awesome, thank you so much.”
Lauren, reading as Randy Inman: “Just don’t forget who loves you.”
[MUSIC POST AND OUT]
Hegyi, narrating: We don’t know exactly what happened here.
But one interpretation of this exchange is that Tom Kelley bragged about hurting his hand, quote, “mash[ing]” an inmate.
And then he asked one of his hunting buddies to help him cover it up: to falsify a witness report – maybe so he could get treatment covered.
If that’s true, it would be a crime.At minimum, it’s grounds for more investigation.
[MUSIC IN]
Regardless of how you might feel about America’s prisons - the people held there have constitutional rights. The eighth amendment bars cruel and unusual punishment.
And after all… it’s called the New Hampshire Department of Corrections… not the Department of Punishment.
Dignity and honesty are actually two of the values written into their mission statement.
The department says its overall goal is to, quote, “promote successful re-entry into society.”
Some people could write that off - as unrealistic or naive.
If we choose not to take it seriously… if we assume that prison is a pressure cooker, and this is just the way things are… we might not know if the very people charged to uphold the law are guilty of breaking it.
And that brings us to the third set of texts we found: the missing mail.
Shawn Cochrane: It's not ethical. It's not fucking ethical.
Hegyi, narrating: That’s after the break.
[MUSIC POSTS AND FADES]
[BREAK]
Hegyi, narrating: I’m Nate Hegyi. You're listening to a special series of Outside/In called Operation Night Cat.
Jason Moon, on the phone: Is it alright if I record this call like last time?
Shawn Cochrange, on the phone: Yeah, that’s fine. No problem.
Jason Moon, on the phone: Okay, cool.
Hegyi, narrating: That again is producer Jason Moon talking with Shawn Cochrane. The guy who railed against Tom Kelley earlier in the episode.
Shawn, he’s been in and out of New Hampshire’s state prison for almost two decades.
And in his younger years, he also spent time in the state’s juvenile jail - a place called the Youth Development Center or YDC.
Now, if you live in New Hampshire, you might know that the YDC is at the center of a huge government scandal here.
Shawn is now one of more than a thousand people who’ve come forward with allegations of sexual and physical abuse they say they went through there.
Almost a dozen former staffers have faced criminal charges.
Shawn Cochrane, on the phone: I have a law firm that's part of my Ydc case. They wanted me to write a narrative about the YDC.
Hegyi, narrating: Shawn had to write down details of what he says staff did to him when he was a kid – very personal details – and send them in the mail to his lawyer.
He did this while he was incarcerated at the men’s prison.
Shawn Cochrane, on the phone: I wrote two narratives. The first one was 23 pages. Never made it to his office. Still, to this day, wrote a second one. Never made it to his office still to this day.
Jason Moon, on the phone: Wait, so you're saying you wrote those YDC narratives in the prison and they never made it out?
Shawn Cochrane, on the phone: That is correct.
[MUSIC IN]
Hegyi, narrating: You probably know that opening or stealing someone’s mail is a federal crime.
The post office has a whole branch of investigators who deal with this kind of thing.
But mail in prison works a little differently.
Sometimes, people send drugs to inmates – concealed in envelopes that are meant to look like they’re coming from their lawyers or someone else official.
So prison staff are allowed to comb through that incoming mail, to make sure it’s legit.
But outgoing letters sent to a lawyer, or the courts? They can’t be opened or interfered with.
Jason Moon, on the phone: Just to spell it out. What do you think happened to those narratives?
Shawn Cochrane, on the phone: That's my question. I mean, all that personal fucking written stuff about sexual abuse and what went on and what happened to me. Those are substantial things that I wrote in there. Where are they? Who's reading them?
Hegyi, narrating: We don’t know exactly what happened to those narratives.
But we do know what happened to some of Shawn’s other mail.
[MUSIC POSTS AND ENDS]
Hegyi, narrating: In 2021, Shawn was trying to file legal complaints about how he was being treated at the men’s prison.
This happens a lot, and you can imagine that some guards see it as a huge headache.
Some officers go so far as to call these complaints “rat notes.”
[MUSIC IN]
Hegyi, narrating: And Shawn was known for writing a lot of them.
Lauren’s back to help me read another text thread.
Nate Hegyi, in the studio: I’ll be Tom Kelley - and you’re one of his buddies, a correction officer named Chris Masse. Chris, by the way, not a part of the poaching ring, but he's someone that Tom went to law enforcement academy with. And we should also note that Chris did not respond to our requests for comment for this story.
Lauren Chooljian, in the studio: OK, so this conversation happens almost midnight, February 15th, 2021 Chris writes. “Holy fuck dude, this legal mail and rat notes are out of fucking hand.”
[TEXT SWOOP]
Nate Hegyi, in the studio: Tom: “dude, it's bad. I took a ton home with me that probably contained your name.”
[SWOOP]
Lauren Chooljian, in the studio: Chris texts back “from who? Lol. Cochran.”
[SWOOP]
Nate Hegyi, in the studio: Tom, “Yep.”
[SWOOP]
Lauren Chooljian, in the studio: “Thanks for saving my ass haha.”
[SWOOP]
Hegyi, narrating: After that, Tom sends a photo. Six envelopes, fanned out. It’s mail addressed to a court that he seems to have taken directly from the prison.
That mail – it belonged to Shawn Cochrane.
The guy whose YDC narratives went missing, and who was actively filing complaints against Tom Kelley’s work buddy, Chris Masse.
After Tom sent that photo of the envelopes, Chris Masse texted back:
Lauren Chooljian, in the studio: He writes, “yeah, dude, you're the true hero here tonight. Haha. Think we're going to have to search some cells tomorrow, Tom?”
Nate Hegyi, in the studio: Tom: “Yep.”
Lauren Chooljian, in the studio: “Let's do it,” Chris writes back. “Me and you.”
Hegyi, narrating: And Shawn told us that, around this time, Tom Kelley did tear his room up.
Shawn Cochrane, on the phone: They ripped our whole tier apart because they knew that I was filing complaints against them.
Hegyi, narrating: Public records back him up. They show Tom and some other guards searched his cell two days after this text exchange between Tom and Chris.
[MUSIC POSTS AND FADES]
When he was interviewing Shawn, producer Jason Moon told him about the texts we had discovered. He read them out verbatim.
We’ve bleeped some of the names.
Jason Moon, on the phone: Tom: “I just read all of them.” Chris: “and lol?” Tom: “you need to be careful what you say in front of the nurses because he's trying to call them as witnesses and he says he's filing criminal charges against you.” Tom: “Also, he filed charges against [bleep] for slamming his head into a wall I guess. Lol.” Chris: “yeah, I'll talk to [bleep] this morning. Literally all I've done to this cunt is call him a junkie.” Tom: “Yeah. He wrote [bleep]’s name down. Chris I'll talk to her. And we really got to intercept this cunt's shit bad. Gotta have the boys tear that room up.”
So what do you make of these messages, are you surprised?
Shawn Cochrane, on the phone: Yeah I’m really surprised. you have them outrightly admitting that they stole my fucking legal mail. That's a lawsuit. That's a slam dunk lawsuit. They could lose their job for that.
[MUSIC IN]
Hegyi, narrating: Shawn says he tried to talk to one of the older COs… a guy he respects and knows personally…. about all the ways Tom Kelley was treating him.
Shawn Cochrane: I said, why are you allowing this to go on, on your unit? And he said, I'm in blue.
[MUSIC POSTS]
Shawn Cochrane: And I said, okay, I get that, I get that, I said, but at the end of the day, it's not ethical. I said, you're allowing these men to treat us this way, knowing that they're treating us this way and you're not doing anything about it.
[MUSIC POSTS AND FADES]
Hegyi, narrating: Back when we interviewed conservation officer Ron Arsenault, he showed us around this wooden cabin in the woods near a fishing pond.
Ron Arsenault: …pretty cool, huh?
Lauren Chooljian: It is pretty cool!”
Hegyi, narrating: The place had major summer camp vibes. This is where Fish & Game will sometimes teach hunters’ ed.
The kind of thing you need to do to get your license.
Ron Arsenault: …And this is where I come, like, after kids fishing day. Yeah. I'll hide my truck and I'll hide in here and I'll watch over limits. This is my secret hiding place, so don't tell anybody...
Hegyi, narrating: At this point, all we knew about Tom Kelley was what Ron had told us about Operation Night Cat. That he had been caught baiting deer and killing bobcats at night.
Back during that initial investigation, Ron was already thinking about how he was going to use Tom Kelley’s text messages.
Ron Arsenault: I like to think of it, um, from the very beginning, how would I prosecute this? Because that, you have a really solid foundation, thinking like that. Because then you're like, oh, what do I need to prove? What do I have? What do I need for evidence?
Hegyi, narrating: But this is also when Ron found all of these other text messages. Stuff that was way outside his areas of expertise – not to mention totally outside his purview as a conservation officer.
Ron Arsenault: So at that point, I was like, oh, that's not good.
[MUSIC IN]
Hegyi, narrating: Ron could have chosen to stay in his lane - to keep focused on the charges he knew he could personally make stick.
But he didn’t. He reported what he found up the chain of command.
And from there, it went to the New Hampshire Attorney General. It went to federal investigators.
And it went to Tom Kelley’s bosses - at the Department of Corrections.
Ron Arsenault: We have a duty. We need to hold people accountable.
Hegyi, narrating: One group of alleged poachers. Two sets of potential crimes.
Ron: And, you know, just because you're wearing a badge doesn't mean you should get away with stuff.
Hegyi, narrating: So… did they?
That’s next time on Operation Night Cat.
Dean Williams: It's the embarrassment. It's the embarrassment to say, “how in the world did this happen?”
Ron Arsenault: You know, we're taught, you know, oh, report all this stuff, You know, everything, you know, report it and we'll do something. Report it. Bullshit.
[THEME MUSIC UP]
Operation Night Cat is a special three part series from NHPR’s Document team and Outside/In.
This episode was reported and written by me, Nate Hegyi, with help from Lauren Chooljian and Jason Moon.
Jason produced and mixed this episode. He also wrote the music.
It was edited by Taylor Quimby and Katie Colaneri, with help from Rebecca Lavoie, Jackie Harris, Dan Barrick, Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, and Marina Henke.
Special thanks to Rick White and Bill Chapman.
Fact-checking by Dania Suleman.
Taylor Quimby is the executive producer of Outside/In. Rebecca Lavoie is Director of On-Demand at NHPR.
Operation Night Cat is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio.
[THEME MUSIC UP AND OUT]