WEST LEBANON — In March, the Croydon town office abruptly closed for a week after a resident attempted a citizen’s arrest of the town clerk.
The office reopened the following week but by appointment only.
“I have started to carry a firearm … and I should not have to deal with threats of violence, perceived or otherwise,” Croydon Town Clerk Paul Freitas stated in a March stalking complaint against Paul Whipple, 60.
The incident is one of three recent cases of disgruntled residents who have disrupted municipal operations in Upper Valley towns this spring. Though the circumstances of the individuals involved differ, the situations all have caused municipal officials to fear for their safety, and that in turn has affected access to town services.
Threats against public servants across the country and all levels of government and political affiliations have increased dramatically since 2013, with reports of violent threats against local public servants rising by 2,030% since 2015, according to recent data compiled by the Impact Project, an initiative of Public Service Ventures Ltd., a private corporation that compiles information from government and media sources.
In April, a Strafford resident allegedly violated a protection order a court had granted to the town clerk against him in August 2025 by turning up to the town office without making an appointment.
The clerk had obtained the order against Keith Billian, 67, after his numerous unsolicited emails and impromptu visits to her office. She subsequently changed office availability for all residents to appointment-only for about two months.
In May, a judge granted stalking petitions the Hanover town manager and all five Selectboard members sought against Hanover resident David Vincelette, 70.
The officials had filed stalking petitions against him in March after his comments at a February Selectboard meeting in which he told all six they needed “protection.” After that meeting, police escorted town officials to their cars.
The orders prohibit him from coming within 300 feet of the six town officials, which meant that Vincelette was barred from last month’s Town Meeting.
Meanwhile, the three men who are the targets of these sanctions seemingly remain undeterred from their campaigns to prove to anyone who will listen that they are ones who have been mistreated from the start.
‘How can we now owe somebody … to exist?’
Weary from years of working in construction and selling cars since graduating high school in 1984, Whipple “pretty well retired” in 2018. He considered but decided against someday going to law school.
He’d previously lived in Lebanon, White River Junction, Claremont, Newport, but upon retiring, he returned to Croydon, the land of his forebears. Initially, he rented rooms from a friend and family members before buying land about four years ago in the woods on the east side of Croydon to build a cabin.
Whipple purchased the five acres on Cash Street as a test of survival.
“This is where they were leaving civilization and going to a promised land,” Whipple said of his ancestors, who helped settle Croydon in 1766. “They were going to a wilderness that was foretold.”
Whipple was seeking that same promised land, literally in his interpretation. At the end of spring 2022, he started building a cabin by himself. He had it up and insulated before winter, passing the ancestral test.
But the cabin is also what ran him afoul of town officials.
Whipple currently owes more than $4,000 in delinquent taxes on the property, June town records show.
But to his mind, the town has no authority to tax him.
“We were here before this country so how can we now owe somebody … to exist?” he said. “This world should be: when the people turn full age, there should be acceptance of your inheritance … freedom … God almighty made you an heir.”
In addition to the move to Croydon, Whipple’s 2018 also marked the beginning of a new “quest” challenging the validity of the entire infrastructure of state, county and municipal government.
Seeking dialogue, he began writing “notices” to the town, the sheriff’s department, the courts, clerks, judges, attorneys, the attorney general, the secretary of state, the governor, questioning “points of fact, points of law,” asking, “how did we get here?”
It all culminated with the attempted citizen’s arrest at town hall on March 30.
For the past few years, Whipple had been “representing” extended family on the losing side of a property dispute in court. He grew frustrated at getting no responses from all the agencies he was sending notices to since retiring.
“The people have the right at any time to assemble, debate, deliberate, examine, even alter or abolish a former government,” he said in an interview. “Article 10 of the New Hampshire Bill of Rights is literally the right of revolution.”
Last June, he showed up to town hall for a public meeting he had scheduled to declare a constitutional crisis only to find a Planning Commission meeting happening at the same time.
On March 30, Whipple served Freitas with a document alleging “crimes against (Whipple) and his ‘person’ and that I was to vacate the building and that I was relieved of my duty as Town Clerk Tax Collector,” Freitas alleged in a March complaint filed in Sullivan Superior Court.
Whipple’s motivation seemed pretty straightforward to Freitas.
“I think that everything that (Whipple) has done, it comes back to the (property) taxes,” Freitas previously told the Valley News.
A Sullivan County Judge deemed Whipple to be “a threat” in the protection order he granted against Whipple in April of this year.
On the day after Easter this year, New Hampshire State Police arrested Whipple in connection with the March 30 incident on two misdemeanor counts of obstructing government administration.
The offense carries a penalty of up to a year in jail.
Whipple is scheduled for a trial later this month. Freitas’ restraining order against him expires next month.
‘A pattern of disordered and rambling thought’
Before a judge granted Town Clerk Lisa Bragg a stalking order against him last August, Billian had sent around 200 emails to Strafford officials. They included letters, poetry, incomplete thoughts and sentences, rife with spelling errors, unnecessary capitalization and misused words.
In the final order on the town clerk’s stalking petition, Orange Superior Court Judge Daniel Richardson found that Billian had “on more than one occasion … followed, monitored, surveilled” or “threatened” Bragg.
Billian was ordered to stay 300 feet away from her, not make any contact through “telephone, text, mail or email” and to make an appointment before entering town offices. The order expires this summer.
Billian currently has two pending cases against him in court for violating the initial August protection order. The first violation is alleged to have occurred when he sent more emails within minutes within minutes of receiving the order.
The other alleged violation occurred this past April, when Billian visited the town offices without an appointment, as required by the order. He showed up at the clerk’s office in an effort to pay his taxes in-person, according to the affidavit in support of the charge.
Assistant Town Clerk Regina Josler told police that on April 6, she was alone at the Strafford Town office when Billian began knocking on the door, the affidavit states.
“He was saying something to the effect of ‘I want to come in, is no one here today’ and ‘are you not going to let me in,’ ” she told police.
She said he was at the door for just a few minutes.
“Josler said that she stayed inside of the town office behind closed doors while the defendant was outside and that she was fearful of what he may do,” the affidavit states.
A couple hours after being locked out of the town office, the April affidavit stated, Billian sent an email to the town “discuss(ing) how easily a magnetic door lock operated by a buzzer release can be defeated.”
He is facing several misdemeanor charges of violating an abuse prevention order. Each charge is punishable by up to one year in prison, a $5,000 fine or both.
In response to Billian’s behavior in August 2025, town officials switched town office hours to appointment-only for around two months.
In December 2025, the Strafford Selectboard adopted a “Digital Civility and Anti-Harassment Policy for Public Officials and Town Business,” which is linked on the town’s website.
Guidelines of the policy include engaging respectfully, focusing critiques on decisions or policies instead of “personal attributes or private lives,” refraining from spreading misinformation and avoiding “name-calling, threats or coordinated attacks.”
The town will report serious incidents such as “threats, stalking (and) doxing … to appropriate legal authorities,” according to the policy.
“The Selectboard affirms that civic engagement is strongest when it is civil, inclusive and safe,” the policy states. “Harassment — online or offline — undermines democracy, discourages participation and threatens the well-being of public officials and community members alike.”
Beginning last August, Billian started sending numerous emails nearly daily to entities across the state, ranging from the Windsor County Sheriff’s Department to the Orange Unit of Vermont Superior Court to the Attorney General’s Office and also including the Strafford Selectboard.
In an email from November, he stated that a “DOCUMENTED PATTERN OF BIAS HATE” began after in 2024, “I was refused a scheduled Covid vaccine from a state funded health clinic.”
“Vermont told me, a disabled senior citizen is not considered a Vulnerable Adult, Excuse me, WHAT?” he wrote.
In an email from February of this year, Billian claimed to be suffering from heart disease, bi-lateral small fiber neuropathy, spinal degeneration, advanced arthritis and chronic pain.
This spring, Orange County State’s Attorney Colin Seaman made a motion in Orange Superior Court for a competency evaluation before trial on one of the charges of violating the protective order.
Seaman said Billian’s emails “exhibit a pattern of disordered and rambling thought.”
Billian’s attorney, Lamar Enzor, opposed the state’s motion on April 2.
Four days later, Billian showed up at town hall unannounced to pay his taxes.
Efforts to reach Enzor were not successful.
In a May email to the Valley News that was also addressed to over 40 other email addresses including the Town of Strafford, Vermont State Police, Senator Bernie Sanders and the White House, Billian wrote:
“LISA LIED … LISA WHY? … REGINA LIED … REGINA WHY? … VSP … WTF? … GUILT … DA? … AG? … BIAS … IDIOTS! … ELDERLY ABUSE … DEATH THREATS … PROVE ME WRONG!”
‘Veiled threats’
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness,” Dartmouth’s biblical motto, is what drew David Vincelette, Class of 1984, to Hanover.
“That’s John the Baptist calling people to be baptized,” he thought before applying. “That’s awesome.”
With nowhere to go before Dartmouth, he skied around Colorado, hitchhiked down to Florida, got picked up by a “Jesus Saves” bus in Georgia and professed Christ as his lord and savior in a southern town he can’t remember the name of.
When he found Mink Brook, he was “just wiped out” in amazement. For the last 40 years, he has lived in a cabin on the brook about a mile from campus. Though not an ordained minister, he took to using the brook as baptismal pool, offering the sacrament to Upper Valley residents, Appalachian Trail hikers, anybody passing through.
When the water doesn’t cleanse his spirit, it drowns his thoughts. The condition of the water that runs along his property has troubled him for decades and fuels his feud with the town.
Vincelette “suffers under the misapprehensions that the Town of Hanover and Dartmouth College have ‘polluted’ Mink Brook by disposing of asphalt in the brook; that the town unlawfully took his properties from him for failure to pay the real estate taxes on those properties; and that the town ‘imprisoned’ him and his family by erecting a fence, pursuant to a Superior Court order, to prevent defendant from placing his personal junk materials on the town’s property,” according to six stalking petitions filed by the town manager and every member of the Selectboard.
Town officials also stated that over the course of 30 years, Vincelette has “made veiled threats against the Town and its employees,” citing an incident in 2016 when he was arrested and convicted of criminal contempt of court after he “aggressively confronted town officials and a contractor attempting to carry out a court order” to remove “junk materials” from his property spilling onto the abutting Tanzi trail.
About a year later, Vincelette stepped in a rut and wrenched his spine.
“I’m just wiped out,” Vincelette recalled telling the doctors at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, not forgetting to mention to them that he was also there because, “I believe somebody’s poisoned my water and it’s not a fantasy.”
Doctors told him he had a fixed delusion, prescribed him antidepressant and antipsychotic pills, which he takes to this day, he said.
Still Vincelette’s concerns about his water have persisted and at a February Selectboard meeting he again accused town officials of committing crimes against “me and my family” and told them they “need protection.”
In March, Hanover Town Manager Robert Houseman, Selectboard Chairman Carey Callaghan and Selectboard members Joanna Whitcomb, Jennie Chamberlain, Athos Rassias and Jarett Berke filed stalking petitions against Vincelette, citing the February Selectboard meeting as well as other troubling interactions.
Houseman wrote in his petition that “for approximately 10 years, (Vincelette) has attended public meetings and repeatedly directed verbal attacks toward me.”
Additionally, he wrote, Vincelette confronted him at his office this past December and “referenced his Second Amendment rights.”
As a result of the stalking orders the judge granted last month, Vincelette was forced to give up a .22 rifle and a “couple old shotguns.”
The orders are in effect for the next year. Vincelette is permitted to attend town meetings virtually, which he said he plans on doing.
“I plan to go on their Zoom meetings,” he said. “I feel I have that responsibility.”
He was unable to attend Town Meeting this past May as the temporary orders of protection, which were in place before the judge finally granted the final orders, prevented him from doing so, Vincelette said.
“I resented that,” he said.
