NEWPORT, N.H. — Robin Simoneau’s daughters said they’ve lived for decades with the anxiety they one day would receive “the phone call.” But when it finally came shortly before midnight on March 24, what they heard was beyond even what they’d braced themselves for.
Erin Andersen and Crystal Stone were told their 67-year-old mother was found dead of an apparent drug overdose in an apartment where she had been staying in Newport. Simoneau may have been dead for as long as two days before the woman who rented the apartment revealed the information “in a panic” to a friend, who then told a co-worker, who in turn contacted authorities, according to investigators.
“As her children, we dealt with our mother’s drug use all our lives, but we never envisioned it ending like this,” Andersen said. “We just don’t have words for it.”
Whether or not the apartment’s tenant, Maryanne Baldauff, 31, had been away and just discovered Simoneau’s body or was present during the intervening days is under investigation by authorities.
Baldauff told police she hadn’t been home in the two days before Simoneau’s death was reported. However, police allege Baldauff, who is under investigation for providing the drugs that led to the overdose, declined to call 911 to report the dead woman in her apartment, even after she was urged to do so by her friend.
Simoneau’s suspected overdose was likely from a mix of fentanyl and heroin — a final determination won’t be made until police receive a toxicology report. Her death would be one of the more than 400 opioid-related deaths New Hampshire has seen every year since 2016.
(Vermont set a record for overdose deaths in 2021 with at least 215.)
While one among many, Simoneau’s demise highlights the toll the opioid crisis has taken across generations and the prevalence of drugs in close-knit, rural towns.
While she has yet to be charged, Baldauff, who was friends with Simoneau’s granddaughters, might be linked to three overdoses — including her own — over five days in March in Sullivan County, prosecutors contend.
But even if Simoneau’s toxicology report confirms an opioid overdose, it is far from certain anyone would be prosecuted.
Bringing “death resulting” charges against a supplier is difficult, according to Justin Hersh, a deputy county attorney in Sullivan County since 2011.
“The way the statute’s written, it’s a pretty high threshold,” he said.
The week after Simoneau’s death last month, John Fortune, of Meredith, N.H., was found guilty in Sullivan County of supplying the fentanyl that resulted in the 2021 overdose death of a Newport man.
The Fortune case follows that of Christopher Santolucito, of Claremont, who pleaded guilty in 2020 in Sullivan Superior Court and was sentenced to at least six years in prison for selling drugs laced with fentanyl to Kacey Grizzaffi, a 22-year-old Lebanon woman who was pregnant at the time.
Hersh said those are the only two death-resulting cases he’s prosecuted since the statute allowing them was enacted in 2013.
“You have to show that somebody engaged in the sale of the actual drug, you have to show the death was caused by an antecedent like injection or inhalation and you have to show that the death is not too remote in its time from the sale,” Hersh said. “It’s a lower burden to establish sale of a controlled drug from person A to person B than is to show the death resulting, even if there was a death connected to the original sale.”
On the evening of March 24, the same day that Baldauff told her friend about Simoneau’s death in her apartment, Newport police arrested Baldauff in a sting operation in which police say she sold heroin or fentanyl to a confidential informant in the parking lot of Shop Express on Main Street.
The sting was launched only a few hours after police received the tip about Simoneau, according to a police affidavit.
On March 25, Baldauff was charged in Sullivan County Superior Court with possession, conspiracy to sell and sale of a controlled substance, including an aggravating factor of selling within 1,000 feet of Richards Elementary School, which is across the street from the Shop Express.
Authorities are awaiting a toxicology report to determine whether to pursue a “death resulting” case against Baldauff in Simoneau’s death.
Robin Simoneau, born Robin Gobin in Newport in 1954, had a difficult life laced with drug addiction, her daughters said. She worked only intermittently — her last job, more than two dozen years ago, was as an in-home care companion. For the most part, she survived on disability payments, government assistance programs, the generosity of friends and help from her adult children, Stone said.
“I was 14 when Mom went into her first rehab,” said Stone, who at the time in the late 1980s went with her brother to live with their grandmother.
She recalls seeing her mother “overdose, frothing at the mouth, her body convulsing.”
“It taught me a lot. I did not want that life. I certainly didn’t want my kids or my grandchildren to have that life,” said Stone, who works in the kitchen at Woodlawn Care Center in Newport.
Nonetheless, despite her admonitions, Stone’s younger daughter fell victim to opioids and is now enrolled in a rehab program for substance use.
Stone recalls how she implored her daughter to get help when it became clear she had a problem: “I told you my stories. I tried to walk you down my road. What are you doing?”
Stone and Andersen said their mother had been living in a homeless shelter in Claremont but was required to leave a couple months ago.
Maryanne Baldauff, who worked with Stone’s older daughter at Dunkin’ in Claremont, agreed to take Simoneau in and let her stay in a spare bedroom in her apartment on Whipple Road in Newport, the daughters said.
Although authorities estimate that Simoneau died on March 22, they were not alerted to her death until March 24 when someone reached out to an acquaintance on the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Drug Task Force.
The caller reported that Baldauff had showed up that day at his job site in Newport “hysterically crying” to one of his co-workers, who was a friend of Baldauff’s, that “there was someone deceased in her apartment,” according to the affidavit prepared by Newport Police Detective Noah Gooch in support of the charges brought against Baldauff for selling drugs.
The friend drove Baldauff to her apartment, where she went inside and a few minutes later emerged and “said that her roommate was either dead or possibly dead or in need of medical attention,” Stephen Lee, a Newport police detective who was assigned to investigate, said during the initial bail hearing for Baldauff on April 1.
When the friend urged Baldauff to call 911 for help, she declined, Lee told the court, and the friend then drove Simoneau back to his job site, where his co-worker called his contact on the task force to report the information about Simoneau.
Lee testified that when he arrived at Baldauff’s apartment, he could easily tell that “morbidity” had set in on Simoneau’s body, indicating that her death had occurred some time earlier. He found a hypodermic needle at the scene and evidence of drug use within reach of Simoneau’s body. On the wall, he noticed a note that said “Robin’s to-do list.”
A search of Baldauff’s apartment did not uncover any drugs, although it did uncover two plastic bags of the kind frequently used to package heroin or fentanyl, Lee said.
Newport police already were watching Baldauff before Simoneau’s death. She was a suspect in a nonfatal overdose of a Newport resident on March 19. Police said witnesses had observed her visiting the overdose victims shortly before it occurred. And Baldauff herself had been found unconscious due to a suspected overdose in her vehicle in the parking lot of Burger King in Claremont on March 22, according to Lee’s testimony. That was two days before Simoneau’s death was reported.
While Lee continued to process the scene at the apartment on March 24, other detectives immediately began to set up a sting operation to arrange a drug purchase from Baldauff. A confidential informant contacted Baldauff seeking 2 grams of heroin or fentanyl, and they scheduled a transaction for later that evening at the Shop Express parking lot, according to the police affidavit and Lee’s testimony at a bail hearing earlier this month.
Newport police arrested Baldauff shortly after the sale.
In an interview at the police station following her arrest, Baldauff denied supplying anyone with drugs and said she had agreed to meet the informant only because she owed the informant money.
Lee also said Baldauff further acknowledged that she provided rides to an alleged drug dealer to his source in Grantham “50 to 60” times, although she maintained she was “not a drug dealer in a traditional sense, but that she occasionally helped friends out when they are in need of assistance in finding drugs.”
Then when Lee probed Baldauff about Simoneau’s overdose in her apartment, Lee said Baldauff twice professed not to know about it.
“I asked (Baldauff) about what had happened to Robin Simoneau, and she initially twice told me that she didn’t know anything about that because she had not been home in a couple of days,” Lee testified at the bail hearing.
But when Lee pressed Baldauff about declining to call police to report Simoneau’s death, she admitted she did not call 911 because “she was scared. She didn’t know if she would get in trouble or if she would lose her children,” adding that Baldauff said she “had plans to go the police station later that night” with another friend.
As for Simoneau’s death, Lee said that Baldauff said she “suspected it was a drug overdose,” possibly on drugs stolen from her own supply in the apartment. Although she acknowledged she had on a “couple of occasions” shared her own drugs with her roommate, she denied selling her any and said that as a condition of having Simoneau as a roommate, she had insisted on a “no needles” policy.
At the April 1 bail hearing, prosecutors couldn’t decisively establish that Baldauff supplied the drugs that led to Simoneau’s overdose, and Lee acknowledged under cross-examination by Tony Hutchins, Baldauff’s public defender, that no drugs were found in his search of her apartment.
After breaking for a few minutes, Judge Martin Honigberg rendered a decision that visibly upset Sullivan County Attorney Marc Hathaway.
At the end of the one-hour, five-minute bail hearing, Honigberg released Baldauff on her own recognizance from the Sullivan County House of Corrections. The judge noted that she had no prior criminal record and agreed to a host of conditions — including wearing an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet — and said supervised release represented a “low risk” to the community.
“I understand she’s charged with serious offenses and there are investigations that indicate that she may be involved in other things, but here today, she’s innocent,” Honigberg said, directly addressing Baldauff that if she violated any of the terms of her bail “they’re going to put you back in pretty quick.”
“Yes, sir,” Baldauff replied from behind a face mask.
On April 3, two days after Baldauff’s release, an officer at the county jail received an electronic alert that the fiber optic line in Baldauff’s ankle bracelet was interrupted, suggesting the device had been tampered with, according to court records.
A Newport police officer was dispatched to Baldauff’s apartment on Whipple Road and initially received no reply at her door. After 20 minutes, “Baldauff opened her door and held out an ankle bracelet that had been clearly cut. (She) claimed that the bracelet had been put on too loose and that she had just pulled it off.”
But police examined the bracelet and determined “that it had been clearly cut off,” according to the probable cause for arrest warrant.
Baldauff was back in the county jail that afternoon.
On April 4, another hearing was held in Sullivan County Superior Court — this time with Baldauff appearing via video conference from the jail — to consider whether she should be re-released again on her own recognizance or be detained until trial.
Arguing for Baldauff’s release, public defender Amanda Natoli noted that Baldauff had gotten her job at Dunkin’ back and was complying with the bail order when she woke up on Sunday morning “in excruciating pain because the monitor had been put on her to loosely and it slid during her sleep from around her ankle to underneath her heel and was cutting off circulation to her foot.”
Judge Honigberg said he reviewed the photos of the bracelet, which he said showed a “clean cut,” and thought Baldauff’s version of what happened was implausible.
“Here’s my problem,” Honigberg said. “I just don’t believe the story.”
The judge agreed with the state’s request to set cash bail at $25,000, an unusually high amount given Baldauff’s financial situation, essentially ensuring her incarceration until the drug charge is resolved.
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
