The Democratic candidate for Grafton County sheriff filed two formal complaints with the state and threatened to sue the county for nearly $400,000 last year after she accused the outgoing sheriff of creating a hostile work environment, making crude sexual remarks and launching a retaliatory internal affairs complaint against her.

Jill Myers, a part-time Littleton police officer and former Grafton County sheriff’s deputy, beat out two other candidates — including Grafton County Sheriff Jeff Stiegler’s handpicked successor — in the Sept. 10 primary.

When she launched her candidacy on Facebook in May, Myers highlighted what she saw as the need to “improve the department’s morale.” But the back story to her campaign and her experience with the department has only now come into public view.

Stiegler has openly discussed his feud with Myers in the weeks since her primary victory and denies any wrongdoing.

“Anyone who wants to tell lies about me, I look forward to my day in court when I can tell the truth about you,” Stiegler said in an interview with the Valley News. He added that the statements Myers attributed to him in her complaints to the New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights and the state’s Police Standards and Training Council were taken “so far out of context it is fictional or blatantly untrue.”

Myers, through her attorney, declined to comment in detail for this story, citing confidential matters.

When asked during a brief phone conversation why she had not publicly disclosed the alleged misconduct by Stiegler, Myers said she “didn’t want people to feel sorry for me” or for it to appear that she was seeking a “sympathy vote.”

The office

The genesis of the simmering dispute that culminated in the primary election occurred 18 months ago in the sheriff’s office, located on the basement level of the county courthouse building in North Haverhill, over what would seem to be a mundane issue of office management. But it metastasized into an ongoing turf war between elected officials that spilled into court and led to an exchange of accusations between Myers and Stiegler ahead of November’s general election, when Myers will face Republican Todd Matthew Eck, a Woodsville resident and Bath, N.H., police chief.

On Feb. 24, 2023, an administrative assistant raised concern that there was a “lack of communication” about when Sheriff’s Department employees were supposed to be at work that was inhibiting her ability to set a schedule. At one point, the administrative assistant went into Myers’ office, closed the door, emerged a few minutes later “visibly distraught” and explained she was “punching out,” according to testimony the assistant later gave at the hearing where the County Commission reversed a suspension Stiegler had imposed.

When Stiegler asked Myers what had transpired in her office, Myers’ told him, “ ‘Nothing. She didn’t say anything,’ ” Stiegler said in an interview this week.

Myers’ account, however, was at variance with the account given by the administrative assistant herself during the public hearing on the suspension on Feb, 28, 2023.

The assistant testified at the hearing she had told Myers during the closed-door meeting four days earlier that she felt Stiegler was “telling lies” about her and that she “was going to type a report and she would like (Myers) to look at it and she was going to take it to HR,” according to minutes of the commissioners meeting.

That led Stiegler to inform Myers that he was going to order an “internal affairs investigation” to get to the bottom of what the administrative assistant had told Myers behind closed doors.

(The issue is complicated further by the fact that the human resource director for the county — with whom Stiegler acknowledges he “does not have a good working relationship” — is Stiegler’s stepsister by marriage). 

In the interview this week, Stiegler maintained that as a sworn deputy, Myers was obligated to divulge her conversation with administrative assistant.

Myers “is telling me she didn’t say anything but (the assistant) is testifying on her own behalf that she said x, y, and z. So, which one is telling the truth? One of them is not,” Stiegler said.

Stiegler in a civil lawsuit he filed in 2023 accused the three-member county commissioners of unlawfully interfering in Sheriff’s Department personnel matters.

At the core of the dispute was a claim by Stiegler that the county commissioners had undermined his authority by reversing his decision to suspend the administrative assistant who Stiegler said had been insubordinate by refusing to go into his office and explain the reason why she was angry and wanting to leave work early one day.

The scene between Stiegler and the administrative assistant became so heated that it grew nearly physical, the assistant told the commissioners, as Stiegler blocked her way to the filing cabinet where she could place her radio in its charger.

But a Superior Court judge dismissed Stiegler’s claims that the commissioners had overstepped in reversing suspension order, ruling that the sheriff has personnel authority over only sworn deputies, while administrative assistants are county employees.

Stieger has appealed that decision to the state Supreme Court.

Stiegler, a former Bradford, Vt., police chief first elected Grafton County sheriff in 2018, said he told staff at the start of his third term that he never intended to serve longer than three two-year terms, “because I’m a believer in term limits for sheriff,” he explained.

‘Red in the face’

Myers has not talked publicly about her threats to sue the sheriff’s department and county in 2023, nor her concerns about Stiegler’s conduct, but correspondence between lawyers offer some details.

In a May 2023 letter from her attorney, Kathleen Davison of Pastori Krans in Concord, sent to Stiegler and the county’s attorney, Myers alleged she was a victim of harassment and retaliation directed at her by Stiegler because she had been talking to the county’s human resources officer about the sheriff’s alleged behavior.

The initial correspondence asked the county to pay $25,000 — the amount of her attorney’s fees — to settle privately her alleged misconduct complaint against Stiegler.

Nine months later, Myers’ “demand” was upped to $385,000 after the county had failed to act on her initial request, according to letters exchanged by attorneys in the matter.

The threat to sue came around the same time Myers filed two official complaints against Stiegler alleging professional misconduct — one with the New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights and another with the state’s Police Standards and Training Council.

The complaint filed with the Police Council was referred to the state’s Attorney General’s Public Integrity Unit, whose Conduct Review Committee found that the allegations against Stiegler “if sustained,” would not “constitute an act of misconduct” under state law and therefore declined to pursue Myers’ complaint, according to a letter from committee’s attorney sent to Myers’ attorney.

The status of Myers’ complaint to the Human Rights Commission — which Stiegler said “mirrors to a degree” the complaint made to the Police Council — is by law confidential and not publicly available.

Myers contended the sheriff had fostered a hostile work environment “which made her feel so unsafe … that no reasonable person would have continued working there under the circumstances,” according to a letter that Myers’ attorney sent to Stiegler and the county’s attorney in May, 2023. It warned that the “baseless and retaliatory investigation is holding up career opportunities” for Myers and put the county on notice it would be held liable for damages.

Indeed, the stakes for Myers were far greater than “he said/she said” version of the events, the attorney explained.

Although Stiegler “correctly noted” in the required notice of Myers’ resignation submitted to the state’s Police Standards and Training Council that it did not involve a matter that would land her on the so-called “Laurie List” of police misconduct that can spell the end to an officer’s career, it nonetheless was “apparent” that Stiegler intended the investigation he had ordered challenging Myers’ veracity to be a Laurie List “threat,” Myers’ attorney said.

Myers’ attorney wrote that her client had feared for her own safety as Stiegler “became absolutely irate” when he learned that Myers was talking with the county’s human resources director “regarding his behavior.”

Stiegler “was red in the face, shaking and screaming, while wearing his service weapon” because Myers “did not provide the testimony (Stiegler) wanted to support the baseless suspension” of the administrative assistant,” the attorney’s warning letter said.

The sheriff’s fury led him to retaliate against his deputy by informing the Police Standards and Training Council that Myers resigned after she had been informed that an “internal investigation” against her “was going to move forward.”

Among the claims that Myers made against Stiegler was that he told her “HR” had wanted him to rescind his job offer to her when Myers learned during the hiring process with the county that she was pregnant. (She has three children.)

But that the human resources director affirmed to Myers that “such a conversation never occurred,” according to the attorney’s letter.

“Sheriff Stiegler acted as though Sgt. Myers should thank him for not illegally withdrawing her offer,” the letter said. “This also made her feel unwelcome in the department as a pregnant woman.”

Stiegler also commented to the department’s lieutenant that “Jill shouldn’t be the one trying out the new pants as they make her butt look good,” Myers alleged, which made her “embarrassed and humiliated.”

Myers repeated those incidents in her complaint against Stiegler filed with the Police Standards and Training Council, and added additional instances of him sharing “unprompted” crude sexual jokes and stories about sexual behavior of officers while on duty.

Criticizing, then courting

Myers also leveled a charge of “official oppression” against Stiegler, a little-known statute in state law that makes it a misdemeanor crime to inappropriately use one’s office “with a purpose to benefit oneself,” Myers’ attorney cited in the complaint filed with the Police Standards and Training Council.

That was the intention, according to Myers, when Stiegler ordered her to participate in piece by Valley News columnist Jim Kenyon in 2022 highlighting “a new generation of police officers” and his efforts to diversify the sheriff’s department by hiring female deputies.

The coverage, despite the positive light in which it portrayed Myers and her colleagues, did not sit well with its subject.

Myers said she was taken to task by other deputies in the department over agreeing to be interviewed by Kenyon, who “had been known for his lack of support for police officers,” Myers said in her complaint.

”I had to explain that we only did the interview because we were told that we had to do it by Stiegler,” Myers replied.

”This made me feel further singled out as a female and recently pregnant deputy and caused me to feel alienated my male peers who were less pleased about the article,” Myers explained in her complaint.

Whatever unease she felt about the 2022 Valley News interview, Myers reached out to Kenyon this summer when she was running in the Democratic primary.

In a July 3 email, Myers asked if Kenyon would be willing to profile her again because, “I have many ideas and goals for the department,” noting that “I have the law enforcement background, leadership skills and mindset to make the department much more than it is.”

“I am writing to see if you would be interested in another interview and article on my journey to the top,” Myers wrote in her email to the columnist. “I look forward to hearing from you.”

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.