Reader’s choice: The most read Valley News stories of 2024
Published: 12-28-2024 6:40 PM
Modified: 12-29-2024 7:48 PM |
As the calendar prepares to turn over, it’s an opportunity to look at the Valley News stories that most captured the attention of our readers.
As usual, it’s an eclectic mix, including dairy cows, the trials and tribulations of Dartmouth College and small-town politics.
The list was compiled using analytics from our website, vnews.com. In other words, this is what you clicked on, Upper Valley.
As always, thanks for reading. Happy New Year!
Suspicions about a serial killer in the Upper Valley have persisted for decades, premised by a string of unsolved murders in the 1970s and ‘80s.
An avalanche of renewed speculation was set off in May when investigators from the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Cold Case Unit showed up in Sullivan County to search a residential property on John Stark Highway in Kelleyville, an unincorporated community halfway between Claremont and Newport where two of the victims were discovered.
The home’s occupant — a reclusive man with an effervescent name — says there’s no reason for the attention nor grounds for speculation.
“I think there’s too much in the negative publicity they got out there, whatever the electronics is,” Jeffrey Champagne told Valley News Staff Writer John Lippman in the days after his property was searched. “I don’t want to do anything other than stay private. This is only a private home.”
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Ultimately, investigators took with them two “antique Samurai swords” that Champagne stored in a gun cabinet and “bush” knives used to cut meat and a “meat cleaver” that had belonged to his late father, a supermarket butcher who died in 1984.
The Attorney General’s Office never specified which cold case it was investigating that day in Newport, and there haven’t been any further public updates about May’s search operation.
Dartmouth College has long had a reputation for its unbridled Greek life on campus. Fraternities and sororities host boozed-soaked blowouts that help keep students entertained in a college town where the nightlife tends to be anything but lively.
It was a decade ago that lurid tales of binge drinking and bodily fluids got Dartmouth featured on the cover of Rolling Stone.
The issue is back this winter after a Dartmouth student came forward to police to report that he had been assaulted — hit with a wooden paddle — during hazing episodes that included being forced to eat a raw onion that caused vomiting.
“I enjoy a lot of things about Dartmouth,” Ulysses Hill told Valley News columnist Jim Kenyon. “I just want to see change.”
A Dartmouth senior and two men in their late 30s — a Dartmouth alum and a “graduate” member of the national Omega Psi Phi fraternity — were charged with hazing, a misdemeanor, in connection with the incidents.
The college has suspended the fraternity pending the results of an internal investigation, but Hill, who said he tried to make Dartmouth officials aware of the magnitude of the problem, said he’s not optimistic things in Hanover will change.
“The administration is willfully blind,” he said. “They didn’t want to know.”
The Vermont legacy dairy industry has struggled for years, with the total number of dairy farms statewide now less than one-third of what it was at the turn of the century.
This year in the Upper Valley, two poignant stories exemplified how challenging it has become for small farmers.
In April, staff writer Chris Dolan shared the story of the Millers, who owned the last herd of dairy cows in Hartford on a farm that had been in the family for more than 100 years.
George Miller had milked cows at the farm for nearly five decades.
When their lone customer, an artisanal cheesemaker, stopped buying the herd’s milk, the Millers decided to sell their 27 cows and six heifers and retire.
It was an emotional decision.
“It’s different when you take care of animals. They depend on us and we depend on them,” George Miller said.
And then in August, Valley News correspondent Kate Oden told a similar story at Westland Farm, situated on the Royalton-Sharon town line. The farm had been home to a commercial dairy operation since 1857. But this summer, an assortment of 75 Brown Swiss and Holstein cows and heifers were shipped off and the farm was set to be sold.
Owner Peggy Ainsworth, whose late husband David’s family owned the farm for more than 150 years, said an operation the scale of the one at Westland no longer made financial sense.
“You couldn’t get big enough here to do what you wanted,” she added. “And the infrastructure’s outdated.”
Housing — availability and affordability — is a perennial issue in the Upper Valley, with the situation typically referred to as a crisis.
Behind the grim stats about occupancy rates, waiting lists and rising rents are hundreds of residents struggling with housing insecurity. But few struggles are as public as the one documented in a story by former staff writer Frances Mize.
In March, Nichole Rogers and Ben Harper parked their dilapidated trailer at a pull-off on Route 14 just feet from the blacktop.
“It’s not like we’re trying to be a pain in the ass,” Rogers told Mize. “We’re just trying to live.”
The trailer, the couple and their dogs soon became a focus of rumors and criticism. The town appealed to the state because the property was owned by the Vermont Agency of Transportation, which issued a no-trespass order. When the deadline passed for the couple to move the trailer, it was impounded, leaving them homeless.
The couple’s ordeal led the Agency of Transportation to adopt a new policy to make it easier to uproot people squatting on the agency’s properties.
In early April, prior to the towing, “the agency adopted a policy ‘for consistent approach to addressing encampments on state high rights-of-way and other properties,” it controls, a spokeswoman told the Valley News.
As was the case on many college campuses around the nation, the 2023-24 academic year brought once-in-a-generation upheaval to the Dartmouth campus.
After the deadly Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas and the subsequent military incursion into Gaza by Israel, Dartmouth drew plaudits for its initial efforts to foster a constructive dialogue.
By the end of spring term, however, both supporters of Israel and those sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza said they felt targeted and marginalized on campus.
Events came to a head on May 1 when 89 peaceful protesters, most of them students, were arrested by police in riot gear at the behest of college officials.
The arrests further divided the campus community, with some welcoming it as decisive action that restored order and others decrying it as a heavy-handed overreaction that trampled free speech rights.
This divide was on full display in June at the college’s commencement ceremony.
Several students declined to shake hands with Sian Leah Beilock, the college’s first-year president, while scores of students walked out during her address near the end of the ceremony.
“Remember the humanity of your colleagues, friends, and neighbors, and understand their points of view, even when they are in sharp opposition to your own,” Beilock told the Class of ‘24.
In the Upper Valley it’s not unusual for the smallest communities to see some of the biggest political squabbles and such was the case last spring in Bethel.
It started in March with a horrific accident on Interstate 89, where a Vermont state trooper crashed into the back of a Bethel Fire Department truck that was parked on the highway responding to an accident. By the time the fallout was over, the longtime chief of Bethel’s volunteer fire department had resigned in what boiled down to a First Amendment dispute.
The trooper was hospitalized with catastrophic injuries and the crash drew extensive media coverage. On his personal Facebook page, a Bethel volunteer firefighter wrote a critical post referencing “karma” and relayed a story of being mistreated by the injured trooper years earlier in a traffic stop.
Dave Aldrighetti, who has headed Bethel’s volunteer fire department for 35 years, submitted his resignation to the town after he was informed by town officials that the social media post about the injured state trooper was not grounds for dismissing the volunteer who authored it. Aldrighetti contended the post incensed fellow firefighters and was creating tensions within the department.
“I’m too old school … it’s time for me to walk away,” Aldrighetti told supporters.
A tense interaction between police and a parent just off the campuses of Lebanon High School and Hanover Street School ended without incident, but not before reminding the Upper Valley of the lockdowns, security concerns and fears of violence that have become permanent features of the nation’s education system.
The mid-March incident began when police received a report about a man who was threatening to harm himself, known to be in possession of firearms and believed to be headed toward Hanover Street School.
After the call, Lebanon police sent officers to the school, and the man showed up at the campus around 2:15 p.m. When the man was pulled over, police found four guns, all loaded and “in plain sight” in his car, Lebanon Police Chief Phil Roberts said.
For about 90 minutes after that, the man was “non-compliant,” police said. While officers on the scene were able to “contain him,” they weren’t able “to get him out of the truck.” Over the course of the standoff, multiple police officers surrounding the car had weapons drawn.
At about 2:30, the schools were put into lockdown, which was complicated by the fact that it coincided with dismissal at the high school. Some of the first students to leave actually drove by the scene, others remained stuck in their cars, while dozens more were sequestered in the high school’s locker rooms.
At Hanover Street, teachers extended a regularly scheduled assembly without letting students know what was unfolding outside.
About 90 minutes after the lockdowns began, the man voluntarily exited the vehicle and was taken into custody. He pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. A trial in the case scheduled for early October was postponed.
Two Dartmouth students lost their lives in the Connecticut River this year.
The first drowning occurred in May when authorities found the body of Kexin Cai, 26, of West Lebanon, a graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.
Authorities and Cai’s friends had been looking for her for multiple days. Volunteers searched the 436-acre Boston Lot Conservation Area, near Cai’s Sachem Village apartment.
Her bicycle was located in a parking lot near the Wilder dam, several miles upstream from where her body was spotted by a fisherman in Windsor.
Cai reportedly had been experiencing a mental health crisis.
Then in July, the body of 20-year-old Won Jang, a member of the Class of 2026 who was on campus for the college’s “sophomore summer,” was recovered from the Connecticut.
Authorities believe Jang drowned after attending a Saturday night event hosted by his fraternity, Beta Alpha Omega, and the sorority Alpha Phi. Alcohol was served at the party and then students went to the swimming dock maintained by the college.
Jang was intoxicated and did not know how to swim but was said to be using a flotation device, Hanover police said. Sudden rainstorms moved through the area, and as students scattered, no one noticed that Jang did not exit the water. He wasn’t reported missing until the next day.
In the wake of Jang’s death, the fraternity and sorority were suspended. Two members of the fraternity were charged with furnishing alcohol to a minor and the sorority was criminally charged as an organization with hosting the party.
The college also considered ways to improve safety at the swim dock.
“Our location on the Connecticut River means that water safety is of paramount importance, particularly during the summer months,” College spokesman Morgan Kelly said via email. “We are constantly assessing whether, in concert with public safety officials, we have the right level of oversight and precaution to promote safe use of the river.”
Whether it’s a restaurant opening or closing, news about Upper Valley dining opportunities consistently draw the attention of hungry readers and 2024 saw its share of food news.
Examples include the since-opened Happy Dumpling and the yet-to-open Cold Stone Creamery in the Powerhouse Plaza in West Lebanon. And the sale of the landmark Molly’s restaurant and bar in downtown Hanover to a longtime employee. And the two new offerings from experienced restaurant owners in White River Junction, which now rivals Hanover and Woodstock as a dining destination.
There also were stories about major fast food chains coming to Claremont, a small brewery’s efforts to open a location in downtown Enfield and the region’s gradually expanding fare, including a new spot focused on Caribbean flavors.
But some of the stories are bittersweet, including the closing of what was once an Upper Valley staple, C&A Pizza. Generations of the family behind the restaurant had been dishing out distinctive Greek-style pies in Hanover for nearly 50 years before closing up shop this summer.
The proprietors were reluctant to adapt to the UberEats era.
“Call and give me your order and I’ll make it,” an owner said. “But it’s not like that now. Everything’s online.”
It’s not often that a coach leads a team to a championship and then ends up losing her job, but that was what happened at Hartford High School last spring.
Kylie Young, who played hockey for the Hurricanes as a high-schooler, helped turn the program around as a coach.
In the four years before she arrived, the program had nine wins. At the end of her fourth season on the bench, the team had 58 wins, the last one a 5-3 triumph in the Division II state championship game.
Behind the scenes, however, there was friction. Young acknowledged her coaching style rubbed some players and parents the wrong way, but she defended an approach that yielded success on the ice.
“I came in hearing from players that they wanted someone who’s a hard-ass and will push them,” Young told former staff writer Tris Wykes. “I wasn’t there to be a pushover, and I was going to coach girls not just the way they wanted to be coached, but to be successful.”
Young’s contract was year-to-year, and as is the case with personnel issues, school officials declined to comment on the situation.