Episode 6: Trafficking Drugs on the Old Dirt Road Part 2

After a group of drug traffickers were arrested by the Vermont State Police in "the biggest drug bust in Vermont history," the group tried everything they possibly could to stay out of prison. That led to a lengthy appeals process and eventually a manhunt. Find out more about what happened in the final episode of "True Stories from an Old Dirt Road."

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
I needed a lot of help on this episode, so I'm going to cite a few sources before I begin.

(00:04):
I found the details from the original court case from the website Justia.com and CourtListener.com,
which both have the opinions from the cases discussed in this episode as well as the appeals.
I supplemented that with multiple articles from the Rutland Daily Herald.
The first was written by Megan Price and appeared in the January 30, 1980 edition of the Daily

(00:24):
Herald, titled Lawyers Grill Corporal About a Drug Bust.
Another was written by Lois Webby and the February 26, 1981 edition of the Daily Herald,
titled Sharon Drug Case Defendants Sentenced.
The last was an AP article that appeared in the Daily Herald, October 8, 1997, titled
Vermont's Most Wanted List Gets Announced.

(00:46):
Additional information came from multiple articles out of the Democrat and Chronicle
from Rochester, New York.
The first was written by Brian Cohn and published in the June 23, 1998 edition of the Democrat
and Chronicle, titled Fugitive Found in Fairport.
The other, titled Lawyer Stands Up for Fugitive Friend, was also written by Brian Cohn and
appeared in the July 5, 1998 edition of the Democrat and Chronicle.

(01:08):
Thanks.
Enjoy the episode.
When you find yourself traveling along an old dirt road in your town, or even in a place
you've never been, try to imagine the things that have happened there and who might have

(01:29):
lived there.
The dirt road you're thinking of might be tree-lined, bordered by thick forests and
hills with swamps on either side.
Or maybe it stretches off forever in a straight line through a dusty desert.
Your imagination probably doesn't take you to actors, rock stars, and even drug traffickers.
But there's a reason they say truth is stranger than fiction.

(01:51):
My name is Anthony Cerdelli.
I'm a journalist.
Well, a sports journalist living in Southern California.
I'm about to tell you a story about the dirt road in Vermont that I grew up on.
When I found out the truth behind the urban legends about this small part of Sharon, Vermont,
the place where I spent a lot of my childhood, my mind was blown.

(02:11):
This is True Stories from an Old Dirt Road.
Last we left the old dirt road in Sharon, Vermont, the biggest drug bust in the history
of Vermont to that point had just taken place.

(02:33):
Roger Ducharme and David Lace, along with their right-hand man, Gary Butz, and later
some of their associates, were arrested for trafficking Colombian marijuana and Lebanese
hashish.
The police found a total of $5 million worth of weed and hashish in the house, along with
$250,000 in cash.
Jareese Bergstrom, who was in the middle of running Sun Treader Studios with her husband

(02:55):
John just next door, was wary of the connection people would make between drugs, a recording
studio, and rock stars.
In addition to that, she and John had another reason to be concerned.
We were gobsmacked when they were raided because since we had lived there, you know,
we had our DNA all over the place.
While DNA wasn't in use back then, they had lived there.

(03:17):
And if they'd left anything, they might be wrongly connected to the case.
Luckily, they weren't.
If you asked most older residents of Sharon, they'd likely remember it.
When I was researching this podcast, I visited Sharon Town Hall, and some of the older people
who worked there remembered the case.
But back when it happened, not everyone knew, including the new tenants of the house.

(03:40):
Obviously, Gary Butts and the rest of the traffickers were evicted after the bust and
the owners needed new tenants.
Those tenants had no idea what had happened.
Their names were Barry and Sarah Clark.
You met Sarah and Barry in the last episode.
We were living in an apartment in West Lebanon.
Barry was running the WNNE.

(04:00):
He was one of the first employees at the television station, WNNE.
He decided he didn't want to be in an apartment in West Lebanon.
He needed to find his pioneer roots.
So we had a relatively newborn son.
He was born in March of 78.
And that fall, no, the next fall, so it was because I was pregnant with our daughter,

(04:21):
she was born in 80.
So in 79, the fall of 79, we moved into that house.
It was quite rustic, to put it loudly.
Barry and I were sort of reminiscing, trying to remember stories that we could tell you.
One of my favorites.
So Barry was never home because he was running the news station and they had a six o'clock

(04:43):
news and then a lot of clock news.
And so he wanted to have this wonderful pioneer experience.
And he pregnant me with a baby out in the woods and said, bye.
It was really quite delightful.
We're still married in spite of it.
It's like we ran out of water and I couldn't figure out why we ran out of water.
So I went down in the basement and the water system was this enormous open cistern.

(05:06):
It was just like a great big cement tank.
I remember it well.
It still was when I was a kid until I was probably nine or ten.
Okay.
So, you know, no top on it.
And it was just a pipe, a really small pipe that came out of the wall.
And that filled the tank from up on the hill.
It was just a strength.
Yeah.

(05:26):
Well, when we ran out of water, I went down and there was a salamander tail sticking out
of the pipe.
And that happened more than once.
That's the one I used to find snakes in.
Anyway, the Clarks moved there in the fall of 1979.
The drug bust happened that May.
When they got there, the door was still broken from when the Vermont State Police had busted

(05:48):
it in.
The owners hadn't bothered to fix it.
They also hadn't bothered to tell their new tenants why the door was broken.
So imagine being a pregnant woman home alone in a new, very isolated place when this happens.
I was out there by myself and people would pull in the driveway and just sit there.

(06:13):
I couldn't figure out why.
And of course, they were former customers.
And so at one point, a guy pulled in the driveway, parked up next to the garage, put garbage
bags on his feet and disappeared into the woods.
And in a panic, I called Barry and said some guy just put garbage bags on his feet and

(06:34):
went into the woods.
And he said, well, go look in the car.
I said, there's no way I'm going to go look in the car.
There could be a dead body in the car.
So he called the police because he was at work.
And the police came out and it was one of the lawyers for the guys who got busted.
And what he was doing was walking around because apparently they use night vision goggles and

(06:56):
high security cameras and stuff.
And the FBI or the police or whoever it was that busted them would observe from the other
side of the pond, from the back side of the pond.
They were observing the house.
And this guy was going up into the woods looking for evidence of where they had been apparently.
We had helicopters flying over, people showing up and walking around the property.

(07:20):
More than once I kicked somebody off.
Yeah.
That's frightening.
It was.
It was terrifying.
You know, I was what, 24?
And as I say, quite pregnant and with a little baby and all these bizarre people kept showing
up.
And that's of course when we found out from the police that there had been at that point
the largest drug bust in the history of the state of Vermont.

(07:41):
It was so ironic because as I said, we were living in West Lep in the path of the airport
and Barry decided he wanted to live out in the woods and have the, you know, have a garden
and cut our own wood and all that kind of stuff.
And lived the pioneer life.
And it was like Grand Central Station for months at that house with people just showing
up in the driveway and the lawyers and, you know, and I didn't understand how the lawyer

(08:05):
could just show up on the property.
Maybe they could file papers with the other attorney, but that nobody notified us that
this guy was going to show up and park in the driveway and disappear.
There were likely a lot of people around the house because there were a lot of defense
lawyers involved.
Not only that, but the case took a number of interesting twists and turns.

(08:29):
The first was that the state of Vermont claimed it didn't have the resources to prosecute
the case.
So the state dismissed the case and allowed the federal government to refile it.
When they did, they made history in the state of Vermont.
I know at the time it was the first Rico case in the federal district of Vermont.

(08:50):
Rico being racketeering and organized crime charges.
So that was the first time in the federal courts in the state of Vermont that they ever
had an organized crime case.
So Ways and Ducharme were the first defendants convicted.
And at one point in time in the federal district out of New York, some of the case law that

(09:13):
was on surveillance was case law for the federal district, U.S. District 2 out of New York.
For the longest time, we made case law in the federal case law about surveillance and
surveillance techniques.
It was kind of an interesting new era.
Rico stands for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

(09:35):
It's a tool prosecutors use to try to hold members of criminal organizations accountable
for their actions.
I'm not a lawyer, but to boil it down to what I understand, it helps streamline the
prosecution of members of an organized crime group and can impose harsher consequences.
As a result, Lace Ducharme and Butts were charged with possession with the intent to

(09:55):
distribute marijuana and hashish.
Ducharme's girlfriend, Patricia Ekman, was charged with aiding and abetting.
Lace Ducharme, Butts, Ekman, and five accomplices were also charged with conspiring to traffic
drugs.
Finally, Lace and Ducharme were also charged with operating a continuing criminal enterprise,
which I believe was the Rico aspect of the case.

(10:15):
Those charges were obviously very serious.
For just the third count I mentioned, Lace and Ducharme were facing a minimum of 10 years
in prison.
So they're various lawyers set to work trying to keep their clients out of prison.
The next sentence is going to be a little tough for me to spit out, but bear with me.
The defense employed a local optometrist, a weather reconstruction expert, and a psychopharmacologist,

(10:40):
all to try to disprove the government's case.
The optometrist was employed to conduct experiments to see just what the police could see using
the naked eye versus with its various spotting scopes and binoculars.
Both the weather reconstruction expert and the psychopharmacologist were used to try
to disprove the government's claim that the police could smell the marijuana by trying

(11:01):
to disprove that the wind was blowing in the correct direction to carry the smell and that
the smell was even powerful enough to travel that far.
They succeeded in that respect, but the judge found that that was not the police's main
contributing factor in establishing probable cause.
The defendants and their lawyers drafted over 80 pretrial motions, which the judge, James

(11:22):
Holden, who was at the time chief judge for the United States District Court for the District
of Vermont, had to sort through.
Of the 80 pretrial motions, there were only two major factors that would have any bearing
on the case.
The first and most important was the invasion of privacy of the defendants because the police
had surveilled them using binoculars and spotting scopes without a warrant both inside and outside

(11:44):
the house.
The defendants claimed that the surveillance was a violation of the Fourth Amendment or
the right against unreasonable searches and seizures and that all of the warrants they
used that surveillance to get were invalid.
And therefore, the evidence the police found with those warrants were inadmissible.
Violating the Fourth Amendment was something Valley said they were very aware of.

(12:08):
Our observations that were of value, although there were with the aid of scopes or binoculars
or whatever, you know, they were able to make some comments about seeing something like through a window from afar.
But none of those things were really usable in the sense of defining our need.
It was the comings and goings that you could observe or ultimately where somebody picked

(12:31):
up a load and then that load got taken down on the road.
That's a key kind of observations and also putting the specific people at the place.
In other words, tying the comings and goings of let's say Roger or David or whoever to
the site where ultimately the goods were found.

(12:53):
We were always cognizant of trying to stay clear of violating that kind of personal privacy stuff.
And it made me cringe a bit when we had the comments in the log of the guy masturbating
because that's the kind of thing where it could have weighed on a judge's mind that
we went too far, but it was what it was.

(13:15):
You could drive down the road and have seen that.
As Valley mentioned, the judge found that the state police had in fact violated the
privacy of those within the house, Lay's, Ducharm, Butts and Eckman, on the days they
were surveilled there, and that any evidence obtained from the surveillance on those days
had to be suppressed.
Unfortunately for the defendants, he found that since the rest of the property outside

(13:38):
the house was not posted no trespassing and that their actions outside the house could
be seen by any passerby, that they had not had their rights violated for what the police
observed outside the house.
Crucially, the judge also upheld the warrants obtained by the state police because their
informant had given them such accurate information and had admitted to buying drugs from them
himself.

(13:59):
After that happened, the writing was on the wall for all the defendants.
And according to the Rutland-Darley Herald, they all reached plea deals before the case
went to the jury.
The ringleaders, David Lay's and Roger Ducharm, received 10-year prison sentences.
Butts' sentence was delayed, and there's no reporting about his subsequent sentence,
but he served fewer than two years.

(14:21):
Eckman, Ducharm's girlfriend, received a 90-day jail sentence and one year suspended
with three years probation.
The rest of their associates received between one and two years in jail.
But the story doesn't end there.
Far from it.
The defendants all appealed, and according to Judge Ellsworth Alfred Van Graafeland,

(14:42):
one of the judges who oversaw the appeal, they filed over 200 pages of legal briefs
in support of their arguments.
I won't get into all of those, but Van Graafeland had one nice burn when he said,
quote, The Appelants have now filed over 200 pages of briefs in our court in which the
word innocent is conspicuous only by its absence.

(15:02):
As in, the defendants know they're guilty of the actions they're accused of.
As you probably guessed, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld
all of the convictions, but there was one interesting side note.
One of the judges, John Newman, wrote a scathing critique of the state police's methods,
even in finding that they, by the letter of the law, did not violate the Fourth Amendment.

(15:27):
Newman called the state police's methods paramilitary surveillance.
Newman went on to say, quote, But when police officers execute military maneuvers on residential
property for three weeks of round-the-clock surveillance, can that be called reasonable?
Can it be doubted that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable the expectation
of the tenant and his guests that the property will not be invaded for such purposes?

(15:51):
I should think that even those in our society not overly fond of the Fourth Amendment and
its implementing exclusionary rule would agree that every person may enjoy the privacy of
his backyard, secure in the belief that police officers are not biovacked on his property
just beyond the nearest tree line, observing him with high-powered telescopes day and night
for three weeks.
Still, that's not the end of the story.

(16:14):
Not for Roger Ducharme, at least.
When Ducharme appealed his conviction, the court stayed his sentence of 10 years until
his appeal was heard.
When the court finally confirmed his conviction, they ordered him to surrender to the U.S.
Marshal in Burlington, Vermont by December 20, 1982.
When that day finally came, Ducharme… disappeared.

(16:37):
Ducharme was nowhere to be found.
He was so elusive that 15 years after he vanished, he was placed on Vermont's most wanted list.
Fast forward a little now to the mid-1980s, when a woman named Rayann French was working
at a bar, probably the only bar, in the tiny town of Tacopa, California, just outside Death
Valley National Park.

(16:59):
A man walked into the bar and introduced himself.
His name was Richard Martin.
Martin and French hit it off.
She told Brian Cohn, a reporter for Rochester, New York's Democrat and Chronicle, quote,
"...he was clean-cut, well-dressed and articulate.
He talked about working summers in New England and taking the winters off to travel."
According to Cohn, Martin convinced French, who was a single mother and used to work in

(17:21):
Death Valley's mines to make ends meet, to come with him.
The two struck up a relationship and traveled around the country.
French noticed oddities about Martin, but they weren't enough to extinguish the love
between them.
Martin never drove, claiming he had a seizure disorder.
He didn't use credit cards or have a checking account.
Still, Martin and French were able to make ends meet and traveled the country.

(17:44):
In 1990, their travels took them back out west, where they met a man named Peter Lahren
on a Greyhound bus traveling from Utah to Las Vegas.
Martin and Lahren quickly stoked a friendship fueled by their mutual love of the Boston
Red Sox and traveling.
Lahren, a bankruptcy lawyer, treated Martin and his girlfriend to a couple meals and
once they'd reached Las Vegas, they exchanged contact info and parted ways.

(18:08):
According to Cohn, Martin traveled the country by bus and even bicycle, something he and
Lahren had in common.
Lahren took a liking to Martin because he wasn't, quote, part of the country club set.
The next year, Lahren invited Martin and French to stay with him for a short time in Fairport,
New York.
As the years passed, Martin and French spent more and more time in Fairport.

(18:29):
Martin did renovations on Lahren's house while French made jewelry that she sold at
local craft fairs.
Lahren told Cohn, quote, Rick is an incredible craftsman.
He did some great work for me over the years.
Martin and French continued to do this for nearly a decade, living on the East Coast
in the summers, frequently staying with Lahren at his Fairport home before traveling west

(18:50):
for the winter.
That whole routine was disrupted on June 22, 1998.
Martin had been trying to run a post office box at mailboxes, et cetera.
The clerk suspected that the Social Security card Martin handed them wasn't real and
turned him down.
When he left, they called the police.
The next time Martin showed up to try again, the police questioned him and his answers

(19:13):
were evasive.
When the officers told Martin they wanted to fingerprint him, he told them his secret.
He was in fact Roger Ducharm, and he'd been on the run since he disappeared in 1982.
Neither Lahren or French say they had any idea who Ducharm was.
Lahren, who you might remember was a lawyer, told Brian Cohn, quote, In my line of work,

(19:35):
I'm used to respecting people's privacy.
Besides, I'm looking at the person.
I'm not looking at the papers in his wallet.
Maybe that's foolish, but I wasn't guaranteeing his authenticity.
I was just being his friend.
Lahren also told Cohn, quote, You could tell this was a person of the highest quality.
Rick is just a genuine person.
Finally, Lahren told Cohn, quote, I think he was never a bad person to begin with.

(20:00):
He got in over his head, but once he left Vermont, I think he was pretty resolved to
put that part of his life in the past.
Ducharm's girlfriend, Rayann French, told Cohn, quote, There were times when I would
think to myself that something seemed kind of odd.
There were just little things that I don't know how to describe.
But I love the man.
She also said, When I first found out, I was shocked and went through being angry.

(20:24):
But then I sat down and just thought about it.
We don't throw people away in my family.
Both French and Lahren were deeply affected by Ducharm's arrest and both went to bat
for him in court.
Lahren collected character references and both planned to attend his trial, according to
Cohn's article.
Still, even if he was a person of great character, he didn't want to go to prison and still

(20:45):
tried his best to avoid it.
Like the fish his associates were fishing for in the pond, Ducharm didn't give up trying
to spit the hook even after he was in the boat.
In addition to his previous crimes, Ducharm was charged and convicted for going on the
run.
That's not the legal jargon, but basically he was charged with not surrendering to the
US Marshal when he was ordered to in December of 1982.

(21:07):
He appealed that ruling and in September of 1999, he went on trial trying to get off on
a technicality.
He claimed that when he lost his final appeal, the court made an error by ordering him to
surrender to the US Marshal.
He claimed the US Marshal is not an official court officer, meaning he didn't have to
surrender to him.
Though the appeals court agreed that a US Marshal is not an official court officer,

(21:30):
they disagreed with Ducharm and said that the court could still designate who he had
to surrender to and that he had still violated the law.
And so Ducharm went to prison and started his prison sentence after every single one
of his co-conspirators had been released from prison already.
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, David Lace served about six years and was
released in October of 1988.

(21:52):
Gary Butz served less than two years in prison and was released in June of 1984.
Patricia Eckman, who was sentenced to 30 days with a suspended sentence of a year, was released
in December of 1982.
The rest of Ducharm's accomplices, besides Lace, were all out by the mid-1980s.
Ducharm faced five years and or a $5,000 fine for going on the run on top of his original

(22:15):
10-year sentence.
I couldn't find what he actually was sentenced to, but according to the Federal Bureau of
Prisons, Ducharm was released from prison April 15, 2004, nearly 25 years after the
police began 24-hour surveillance of the Sharon House, but only six years after his capture.

(22:37):
So that's it for now.
I hope you enjoyed hearing these stories as much as I did telling them.
Whether it be the Hollywood star whose country home later became my house, or the successful
recording studio and the rock stars who hung out next door, or this massive drug bust I
just told you about.
I enjoyed researching and reporting it all to you.
But like you, it leaves me with a few questions and observations.

(23:01):
The first obvious one is why did all this stuff happen in this rural area of Sharon,
Vermont?
I tried throughout my reporting to make some connections between the people and the events
in this story.
I thought maybe Brandon DeWilder or Graham Parsons mentioned the area to someone in the
recording industry, who later mentioned it to someone in Fog Hat or Nick Jameson or Fanny.

(23:26):
I couldn't find anything.
I wondered if someone's drug habit, either at my house with Brandon DeWilder or at the
recording studio, led to the massive drug trafficking operation in 1979.
I couldn't find any evidence of that either, and Jareese Bergstrom was pretty adamant there
was no connection.
Not to mention, in the mid-1960s when DeWilder was in Sharon, the drug traffickers were preschool

(23:47):
aged.
The answer I think is more obvious.
It's the same reason Vermont still attracts celebrity residents and why so many people
still visit.
Vermont is just nice.
It's beautiful.
It's serene.
And if you like nature, it's fun.
Whenever I come back, especially in the winter if there's a fresh layer of snow on the ground
and in the trees, and when there aren't any frogs or crickets humming and chirping, it's

(24:12):
so quiet it feels like I'm underwater, especially compared to the city I live in now.
That would obviously appeal to a child star who's been the center of attention since
he was eight years old and grew up in the noise factory that is New York City.
He said so himself.
It was a peaceful place to concentrate on writing and performing music for Fog Hat and
many of the other musicians that recorded at Sun Treader.

(24:34):
It was far from the distractions that are easily found in LA, New York, and London.
And finally, it was an isolated and quiet spot to do something illegal, like Roger Ducharme,
David Lace, and their associates did.
But it was still close enough to major highways that they could traffic their product easily.
Reporting this story and talking to my old neighbors and people in the community, including

(24:55):
my parents, also made me realize another thing.
The importance of how small communities remember their history.
If you look online about Sharon, all you read are things I mentioned at the start of this
podcast.
That it's Joseph Smith's birthplace and the birthplace of Charlie Parkhurst, the famous
stagecoach driver.
You don't read about the drug bust and DeWilda, and you won't find much about Sun Treader

(25:17):
unless you know where to look.
You don't find out about those details unless you talk to the locals, the people who experienced
the events.
Even then, you have to go deeper.
You can't just leave it at that.
You have to go to the town clerk.
You have to reach out to the actual people involved if they're still alive.
Because like a game of telephone, details can be lost or obscured.

(25:38):
Fantastical stories that might sound ridiculous might even be true.
Here's the best part.
You don't need to be a journalist to do it.
Going to the town clerk to look up old property records, filing FOIA requests, interviewing
people.
It's not complicated.
It just involves patience and some willingness to be turned down.
But it's also really, really fun.
So I urge you, if you have some urban legend you've been hearing about that seems far-fetched,

(26:02):
even impossible, look into it.
You never know.
Well, that's it for True Stories from an Old Dirt Road.
For now.
There will be a bonus episode coming out in the near future about a local fishing club

(26:22):
which has an interesting history.
There are also some questions I couldn't find the answers to.
If I can, you might hear from me again.
You can find True Stories from an Old Dirt Road on every major podcast hosting site,
like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.
If you like it, please share it with others.

(26:43):
It's a story I'm very passionate about telling and I'd love as many people to hear it as
possible.
Finally, if you can, please give it a good rating so that more people can discover it.
True Stories from an Old Dirt Road was created, reported, and produced by me, your host, Anthony
Ciardelli.
I had additional help from Resonate Recordings, Julius Shepard Morgan, who produced, and Adam

(27:04):
Townsall, who was our audio engineer, with Tina Wills helping to coordinate.
Thank you to my parents, Ian Dunlop, Joey Steck, Ralph Scala, John and Theis Bergstrom,
Nick Jamison, Robert Valley, Nick Ruggero, Barry and Sarah Clark, Dennis Mason, Michael
Livingston, and Terry Stanley.
I also owe a huge thanks to Jereese Bergstrom, who, as I mentioned, passed away before this

(27:28):
podcast was released.
This has been Anthony Ciardelli.
Thanks for listening.