The night after the man she considered her grandfather pleaded guilty to assaulting her as a child, Haley Dempsey had a dream.

“It was the same scenario: everything looked like that day in the courtroom,” she recalled. “But as he was put in handcuffs, he turned and said, ‘I’m sorry.’”

For three years leading up to that day last month in a Merrimack County courtroom, Dempsey had plodded through the criminal legal system in search of some modicum of justice for the years of sexual abuse she endured.

In the end, that system delivered a conviction – albeit not on sexual assault charges. And it delivered a jail term – albeit a short one.

But it never delivered an apology.

“That was so hurtful because that was all I wanted,” Dempsey said.

For the 29-year-old mother of two, it was the latest shortcoming of a system that had repeatedly failed to hold those who have harmed her accountable.

‘People get hurt’

The foundational failure came on Valentine’s Day, 1997.

Dempsey was just two years old that day when her mother, Dawn Gagne, called police to report that her husband, Roland Gagne, had assaulted and threatened to kill her.

Gagne was arrested and charged with domestic violence assault, according to a contemporaneous news account, but a Concord District Court judge elected to release him on personal recognizance.

Four days later, Roland returned to the double-wide trailer in Andover where the family of five lived and murdered Dawn, before turning the gun on himself. Dempsey and her two siblings were in adjoining rooms.

“The courts, the police, support groups, we just can’t save everyone from everything,” the district court judge, Arthur Robbins, said in an interview following the murder-suicide. “People get hurt.”

Dempsey got hurt over and over – by the family members who were entrusted to protect her and by the child welfare and criminal legal systems that should have held them accountable when they did just the opposite.

After their mother’s death, the Division of Children, Youth and Families ultimately placed Dempsey and her siblings in the home of Roland’s brother, Darren, and his wife, Stephanie, in Loudon.

The kids bounced between the Gagne’s and the home of Stephanie’s parents, William “Billy” Fiske, and his wife, Jean. Though they were not related to Fiske by blood, they called him “papa.”

The abuse started when Dempsey was young, she said. Fiske would slip his hands under her clothes as he carried her around the house. When Dempsey hit seventh or eighth grade, the assaults escalated.

Billy Fiske, through his lawyer, declined to comment for this story. Jean Fiske, who Dempsey described as her husband’s “accomplice,” hung up when a reporter called her this week.

At one point, Dempsey confided in a cousin, who told her mother, horrified. But when her aunt reported the pattern of abuse to the state police and to DCYF, the Fiske couple forced Dempsey to lie, she said.

“They made me write this whole statement that I got drunk, which was not true,” Dempsey said. “And then I think a day later, when DCYF and the state police showed up at my school, when they asked me what happened, I had to say nothing, because I had the absolute life scared out of me.”

A DCYF spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Dempsey said she previously requested her DCYF records but learned that they had been destroyed.

As a teenager, Dempsey said she eventually called the Loudon Police Department herself but her allegations were not investigated. Instead, when the officer who took her report learned the identity of the person she was accusing, she said he brought up a school fight that the teenage Dempsey had recently gotten wrapped up in and threatened her with legal consequences of her own.

It was no coincidence, Dempsey believes, that the cop’s boss, longtime Loudon Police Chief Robert Fiske, happened to be the brother of Dempsey’s abuser.

“His family had a lot of pull,” Dempsey said. “I knew that even then, when the abuse was happening.”

Robert Fiske, who also served as a selectman in Loudon, did not respond to a request for comment.

Current Loudon Police Chief Dana Flanders II, who was not in the department when Dempsey made her report, declined to comment on the specifics of Dempsey’s assertion that her complaint was ignored.

“The job of law enforcement officers is that we stand up for people in our communities who can’t always stand up for themselves,” Flanders wrote in a statement.

Dempsey said the non-response from the Loudon police department devastated her.

“Them not taking my report seriously or caring totally validated my feelings at the time that there was no help and that no one cared,” she said.

Over the next 10 years, Dempsey dissociated from the abuse she had endured, aged out of the child welfare system that had placed her in Fiske’s home, went to college, got married, had two children, and became a real estate agent.

It would take years of therapy and a relationship forged with a victim’s advocate while Dempsey examined the foundational trauma of her life – the murder of her mother – before Dempsey decided to give the criminal legal system another shot.

‘That doesn’t sound right’

Dempsey graduated from Merrimack Valley High School in 2012, left Loudon, and tried to move on as best she could.

In 2019, motivated by a desire to learn more about her mother, she submitted a Right-to-Know request to the Attorney General’s office for the murder file.

When victims of violence make requests like that, it is customary for them to be paired with a staff member, and Dempsey was connected with a tenacious victim-witness advocate named Joelle Wiggin.

As the two women poured over the murder file, they began to bond and Dempsey opened up about the abuse she had experienced.

“The things she was saying at the time – I was like that doesn’t sound right,” Wiggin recalled.

Dempsey had assumed the statute of limitations had run out, but Wiggin informed her it was still very much open. (In New Hampshire, the statute of limitations for sexual abuse perpetrated against minors lasts until the victim turns 40.)

“William had access to the next generation of children, so I decided to come forward again,” Dempsey said.

In the summer of 2021, she and Wiggin went to the Concord Police Department, where she gave an account to Detective Paul Shaughnessy. From there, the state police took over the investigation.

‘Validated’

What followed was “two full, miserable years” of waiting, Dempsey said.

State investigators began to interview witnesses, but the pace was plodding and the updates came sparingly. At one point, Dempsey was told her case was “on the back burner.”

“I felt defeated, and it brought back the same emotions as when I first tried,” Dempsey said. “Because I didn’t really get an answer as to what was taking so long, I interpreted it that they didn’t care.”

Dempsey pushed, repeatedly asking for updates on the investigation. At times, she wondered what would have happened had she not had the wherewithal to advocate for herself.

“I wanted justice and I was going to fight for it,” she said.

On the day last July that a grand jury returned an indictment, Dempsey was camping with her family. She got a call from her county attorney advocate: Fiske, then 70, had just been indicted on six felony and one misdemeanor sexual assault and attempted sexual assault charges. Combined, he faced decades in prison.

“It was one of the most emotional moments of my life; I felt validated for the first time,” Dempsey said. “…I was nervous but that validation was something I needed my whole life, so to have finally gotten that gave me a lot of peace and relief.”

But the indictment – however validating – was a fleeting step in the process. Last fall and into this year, the case continued to move haltingly. The attorneys agreed to extensions in November and again in December. Eventually, in early January, a Merrimack County judge scheduled a trial for Nov. 5, Election Day.

‘Better than nothing’

As that day approached, Dempsey began to face the very real prospect that she would have to testify.

“I was terrified to testify because I didn’t want to get into the details in front of strangers,” Dempsey said. “But I was willing. I had finally gotten angry enough that I was ready to tell my story.”

But in early October, Dempsey felt a shift. Melinda Siranian, the prosecutor in the case, had up to that point been resolute that the case “had enough evidence for a trial.” Then Siranian began introducing the possibility of a plea deal.

“Juries haven’t been quite fond of the state lately,” Siranian said, according to Dempsey.

Weeks earlier, a jury had failed to return a verdict in the first child sexual abuse case to go to trial amid New Hampshire’s sprawling youth detention center scandal. Siranian didn’t mention that case, but Dempsey now wonders whether it had any impact on the apparent shift.

For a week or two, Siranian and Fiske’s defense attorney, Lauren Breda of Shaheen & Gordon, lobbed plea deals back and forth. Initially, Dempsey said, Fiske refused to accept any sentence that involved jail time.

Negotiations came to a head on Oct. 15. Seated in separate conference rooms of the county courthouse, Fiske agreed for the first time to accept a deal that involved jail time. Still, it would include a tiny fraction of the term a guilty verdict could bring. And more troubling to Dempsey, the deal would involve Fiske pleading guilty not to sexual assault, but rather to second-degree assault.

Siranian reminded Dempsey that “something is better than nothing” but Dempsey did not feel that “something” approached justice.

Seated in that conference room, she dug her toes in. Echoes of her previous interactions with law enforcement a decade before reverberated.

“I fought until the very end, until I knew that I was on my own,” Dempsey said. “It was my husband, myself, the advocate, and the prosecutor, and I knew I was the only one in that room who was ready to go to trial.

“That feeling of ‘I was fighting for myself’ didn’t change. I was the only one willing to see it through,” Dempsey said.

Siranian did not respond to a request for comment. Merrimack County Attorney Paul Halvorsen declined to comment on the record, citing Dempsey’s privacy.

‘I’m not afraid of you’

In court a week later, Fiske pleaded guilty to two counts of second-degree assault. The amended complaint stated that he “recklessly caused serious bodily injury … in the form of emotional trauma.” 

The plea terms acknowledged Fiske committed those offenses for “sexual gratification” and ordered him to register as a Tier I sex offender.

“Are you pleading guilty because you are in fact guilty of the two second-degree assault charges that we have in front of us this morning?” Judge Martin Honinberg asked.

“Yes,” Fiske responded.

And then it was Dempsey’s turn.

“I’m not afraid of you anymore,” Dempsey told him.

“I refuse to let the cycle continue and that’s why I’m here,” she said. “I wanted just a shred of justice for everything I went through.”

For seven powerful minutes, Dempsey recounted the abuse she had experienced as Fiske peered down at the defense table.

“You did make a mistake in choosing the wrong one. I’m not weak or afraid. I can sleep at night knowing I did everything I could to put a monster away,” she said.

Fiske was sentenced to serve six months in the Merrimack County Jail and led out of the courtroom in handcuffs. A lengthier prison sentence of up to seven years was fully deferred. 

‘The person that I needed’

In the weeks since Fiske’s guilty plea, Dempsey has reckoned with a legal process that can feel closer to defeat than triumph. Not only did she not get the apology she desperately craved, but she felt exposed and on her own.

“I’m just still in this heartbroken phase where I feel like I fought as hard as I could and I still lost,” Dempsey said.

At least, Dempsey knows Fiske admitted to hurting her. At least he won’t be allowed around children again.

But the system, Dempsey has concluded, is broken. Though she was grateful for Siranian, the experience reinforced that the victim’s interests are not always the same as the prosecutor’s.

That realization is unfortunately common for survivors of child sexual abuse who choose to pursue legal action, according to Amanda Grady Sexton, the director of public affairs at the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence.

“We owe it to victims and to survivors and to the public to ensure that we create systems that are victim-centered and trauma-informed,” Grady Sexton said. “There are ways that law enforcement and prosecutors can absolutely create a system that victims are going to be more comfortable engaging in.”

Dempsey’s experience navigating the criminal justice system has galvanized her to become a victim’s advocate herself.

“Seeing how hard it was for me and how badly – even when I didn’t want to admit it – how badly I needed a support system, that was really when I decided … if I could be the person that I needed growing up, that would be like my life’s biggest achievement,” she said.

‘I want to make her proud’

On a chilly late fall afternoon earlier this month, Dempsey and her husband, Connor, took the short walk to their children’s elementary school in Manchester, arriving early.

Sophia, 5, came out first, dashing over to her parents in a puffy pink jacket and an upside-down sticker. Michael, 8, emerged minutes later, upset over not getting into French club. The third grader is an emerging polyglot, having already learned Spanish via Duolingo.

As other families headed home, the Dempseys headed for the playground. Sophia, an acrobat on the monkey bars, swung from her feet and hands, spending more time upside down than right side up.

“Momma, let go of me and when I flip, don’t hold,” she directed, as Michael tossed a football with two other boys nearby.

Dempsey is well aware that to others, the life she has built looks like the picture of shining success in the face of unimaginable odds. She knows she should have a lot of pride, but she acknowledges she struggles to tap into that emotion at times.

Now, as ever, it is the steadfast pursuit of her late mother’s approval that guides her.

“I don’t want to face my mom someday and have her be disappointed,” Dempsey said. “I think every day that I want to make her proud.”

Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.