You're listening to Operation Nightcat. I'm Nate Hedgie. For weeks, our producer Jason Moon had been trying to get a hold of a pivotal source for this series. A 55-year-old former inmate at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men, Sean Cochran. I'm sorry, but the person you called has a voice mailbox that has not been set up yet. At the time, Sean was out on parole. And he had been a hard guy to reach until Jason finally got a hold of him on the phone on a Sunday morning. Hey, Sean, can you hear me okay? Yeah, I can hear you fine. Cool. All right. In 2021, Sean was one of more than a thousand inmates at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men. It's a massive compound on the outskirts of the state capitol that honestly looks more like an East Coast factory than a prison. It's all red brick walls and tiny windows built back in the 1870s. Sean had been in and out of that prison for more than two decades, so he knew it well. And he told us there are a lot of issues. The food is absolutely disgusting. The place is an absolute fill. There have been rat infestations, mold problems, holes in the walls, the sewer backs up weakly, and it has long been understaffed. In the spring of 2025, more than a third of all positions in the prison remained unfilled. So corrections officers there work long hours to cover the gaps. So nine times out of 10, your interaction with them is very short, very disrespectful, because they're grumpy because they've worked $75, $80, $100 that week. Back in 2021, Sean was serving time after getting busted for theft. And he noticed a real difference between the older corrections officers he'd known for years and the new guys, or the kids, as he calls them. The kids are worse because they don't want to do anything. They just want to come by, pass out meal. They want to fuck with you. Like, for instance, you know, in the morning at five o'clock in the morning, you go to breakfast, you come back and your room's torn apart. I mean, why? Sean says the staff are all overworked and there aren't enough of them. But in his experience, the younger guys tend to be more aggressive. And he struggled especially with a corrections officer named Corporal Tom Kelly. Tom Kelly. If that name sounds familiar, it's because he's the hunter we talked about in the last episode. There's blood everywhere. I absolutely smoked him. The guy at the center of a major poaching investigation that would become known as Operation Nightcat. It's like they're playing Grand Theft Auto behind their house, except with animals. While he seemed to be spending a lot of his nights illegally hunting game, Tom Kelly also worked as a corrections officer, a guard at the New Hampshire State Prison for men. He'll throw your food through the slot, or he'll just leave it on the slot long enough so it falls out of your tray, out of the cell, and then just not give you any more food. Purposely go out of that way to try to make your life miserable. That's who Mr. Kelly is. America's prisons aren't a cushy experience. But the people held inside them still have rights. And they're supposed to expect that, even behind bars, rules about what is and isn't fair will be followed. But Sean says that's not how things actually go. To him, prison is literally and figuratively a brick wall. And they can do whatever they want and get away with it because nobody can see over that wall. From NHPR's document team and Outside In, I'm Nate Hedgie, and this is Operation Nightcat. Episode 2, Behind the Brick Wall. starting a business can be overwhelming you're juggling multiple roles designer marketer logistics manager all while bringing your vision to life shopify helps millions of business sell online build fast with templates and ai descriptions and photos inventory and shipping sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl that's shopify.nl it's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and Start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. This is Operation Nightcap. I'm Nate Hedgie. Back when we were first reporting the story, my producer Lauren Chuljan and I drove out to this little cabin near a fishing pond. We were there to see New Hampshire fishing game officer Ron Arsenault. And at one point during the interview, his cell phone literally chirped. It was a text message notification. Animal cruelty are domestic animals. Oh. You know, so. Did your phone just rib it? That's my cricket phone. That's awesome. So when we sneak in the woods, somebody hears a cricket, they're not like, oh, that's a phone, you know. That's a great point. That's a really smart. I used to have ducks. Remember, it was Ron who kicked off Operation Nightcat. It all started with Tom Kelly's game camera and a deer he'd shot. But eventually, Ron uncovered a group of hunters who seemed to be illegally killing dozens of animals. Bobcats, foxes, coyotes, and more. A lot of the evidence for these alleged crimes were on Tom Kelly's phone. Text messages between him and his hunting buddies. Like this one, which happened after Ron says Tom sent a picture of a dead coyote to the group chat. Tom's like, you know, shot this ugly thing last night. And Randy says, LOL. And then Woody says, why would you do such a thing? Tom Kelly says, I love killing shit. And they were out barking behind my house. I love killing shit? Yeah. And then he says, hey, the season's closed, you damn outlaw. Wait a minute. So his friends call him out for, like, illegal hunting? Yeah. And he just says, oh, I love killing stuff. Yeah. So he knew what he was doing was wrong. Oh, yeah, 100%. Well, can I also just, the verbiage there, like, I love killing shit. Like, you both love to hunt, but is that how you talk about it? No, no, no. You have to have the respect for the animal that you're hunting, you know, and clearly he didn't. And how does that feel, also knowing that they have a badge? Oh, it's just disgraceful. Because, you know, these guys are now in charge of humans. You know, and you're like, what else is going on? We're gonna come back to the poaching case that triggered Operation Night Cat in the next episode. But first, we're gonna spend some time trying to answer that other question What else was going on with Tom Kelly Ron wasn authorized to share anything outside the scope of his initial investigation so my colleagues and I went off on our own and tried to see behind the brick wall Over the past year, our team has hounded the state for more information on Tom Kelly and the other former or current corrections officers who are allegedly poaching. We filed public records requests, reviewed audio testimonies, and talked to current and former state officials. We even sued the New Hampshire Department of Corrections for documents. And through all of this, we got access to some of Tom Kelly and his co-workers' other text messages. Texts that reveal a pattern of disturbing and potentially illegal behavior happening at the prison. There are three sets of exchanges that I want to take you through. The first shows the use of violent and aggressive language. Like in one exchange I viewed, Tom Kelly and another CO texted about an inmate who tried to escape. Tom wrote, quote, please shoot him. And then the other guy wrote back, I want to feel his skull cave in with my fists. There are other examples, too. And Lauren and I were surprised to see these violent exchanges laid out so bluntly. They're the sort of thing that could hurt the public reputation of the prison and the people who work there. Never mind that if the prison's HR specialist saw these texts, these guys could be in trouble. But it might also be good to put them into context. Hi. Hi. Nice to meet you. Good to meet you. I'm Lauren. Hi, Lauren. I'm Nate. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, too. Claudia Cass worked at New Hampshire's State Prison for Men from 2006 to 2022. And she worked with a lot of the guys in this story, including Tom Kelly, though she didn't know him very well. He was, like, big into hunting. He would go, you know, I don't know where one goes to kill things, but that's what he did. Claudia says the prison is a pressure cooker. It's been way understaffed for years, and officers work huge amounts of overtime. I averaged 100 hours a week working there. Claudia was actually fired in connection with the staffing crisis. Back in 2022, she told the warden she would be locking down the prison overnight. There just wasn't enough staff to keep officers safe, she said. Two days later, she was suspended, and then later fired. She's suing the Department of Corrections for wrongful termination. But that staffing crisis hasn't gotten any better in the years since. Instead of spending time with their families, guards are often working overtime with inmates. And the state prison holds everyone from low-level offenders to people convicted of murder and rape. It can be a rough crowd. You know, I'll be doing rounds, you know, and they'll be like, oh, you know, you have a smelly crotch. Or they'll be calling the guys the N-word. There'll be some threat in your family. Yeah, I've seen it all. The point of all this is that it's not an easy job. Tempers flare. Tom Kelly wouldn't talk to us for this podcast. So we reached out to Claudia because we wanted to know what is it like to work inside the pressure cooker? And as a corrections officer for almost two decades, what did she see in these texts from Tom? Lauren read the messages we found back to her. And Kelly says, please shoot him. And Massey says, I want to feel his skull cave in with my fists. Is that language you would use? Well, no, I wouldn't do that. That said, there's some people that, you know, society wouldn't be worse off without. So I don't know who this particular person is, but there's some that it's really difficult to hide your disdain for the person. because, you know, we deal with really bad people. Claudia, in this environment with these inmates, words are just words. They didn't shoot him, they didn't punch him, didn't cave his head in. But would we talk like, yeah, it would be a tragedy, you know? Yeah. This brings us to our second big set of texts we viewed. Because in these next exchanges, it wasn't just words. I'm going to bring Lauren into the studio to help me read these texts. I am reading for Tom Kelly. Lauren is reading for a co-worker that we're not going to name. All right. It's February 25th, 2019. At 8.48 p.m., Tom texts. It's Kelly from work. What's up, bro? You guys mash-tappin'? Tom. Fuck yes. How bad he look? You guys send his ass in an ambulance? Tom. He refused medical. You will see his face tomorrow, lol. Now from these texts, it appears Tom Kelly is bragging about assaulting an inmate. This inmate, Devin Tappan. He actually tried suing Tom over this incident. In court documents, Devin alleged that Tom Kelly and a crew of guards threw him to the floor, held his hands behind his back and then punched, kicked, and tasered him. That lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year because he didn't file suit within the statute of limitations. All right, back to the texts. The next morning, Tom Kelly texted that same co-worker again to ask how Tappan was looking. The guy said Tappan's face was fucked and that he wouldn't even eat. And in that exchange, Tom Kelly said something important. He said, quote, LMAO, my fist is killing me. We told Claudia about all of this as well. And this time, her reaction was different. We've seen information that suggests that Kelly punched Tappan in the face because he texted another CO to say, let me know tomorrow when you go in how bad he looks. Whoa. There's very few reasons that we can punch anybody. You know, you have to be in a struggle that you feel is basically life or death before we're close fist punching people. Of course, violence is often part of American prison life. The New Hampshire Department of Corrections has an entire handbook dedicated to use of force, which lays out when they consider it justified and when they don't. So for us to punch them, in my experience, is only if they're attacking you. Here's where things take another twist. A couple of weeks after bragging about beating an inmate, Tom Kelly texts someone else. Randy Inman. If that name sounds familiar, it's because he's another member of the group being investigated in the poaching ring. The guy who apparently came screaming home from work when the cops got a search warrant for his house. Randy also worked at the prison. As a supervisor. Now, back to the texts. I'll read again for Tom Kelly. Lauren is reading for Randy. March 11th, 2019. 7.45pm. Tom writes, My hand is still fucked up, so I need to tell Mindy so I can get it looked at. You still on board saying you stepped on my hand Now Mindy by the way is an HR specialist at the prison Randy texts back yes because I did Tom exactly Thank you Then, a little later, Tom writes, I told Mindy and she says she would contact you at some point today. I said, you stepped on my hand. After this exchange, Randy filed what's called an employee accident slash injury report. In it, he writes that he was doing a cell extraction of Devin Tappan. That's when guards forcibly remove an inmate from their cell. During this extraction, Randy says Devin charged at him, quote, swinging his arms at me. He writes that he struggled to handcuff Devin. And then, quote, It was during this time that I unknowingly stepped on Corporal Kelly, Thomas' hand. I instantly felt his hand move underneath my boot, and I quickly moved my foot. End quote. Randy sent a photo of this form to Tom. FYI, I'm putting this in Mindy's box on her door. And then Tom responds, awesome, thank you so much. Randy writes back, just don't forget who loves you. We don't know exactly what happened here. But one interpretation of this exchange is that Tom Kelly bragged about hurting his hand mashing an inmate. And then he asked one of his hunting buddies to help him cover it up, to falsify a witness report, maybe so he could get treatment covered. If that's true, it would be a crime. And at minimum, it is grounds for more investigation. Regardless of how you might feel about America's prisons, the people held there have constitutional rights. The Eighth Amendment bars cruel and unusual punishment. And after all, it's called the New Hampshire Department of Corrections, not the Department of Punishment. Dignity and honesty are actually two of the values written into their mission statement. The department says its overall goal is to, quote, promote successful reentry into society. Some people could write that off as unrealistic or naive. But if we choose not to take it seriously, if we just assume that prison is a pressure cooker and that this is just the way things are, we might not know if the very people charged to uphold the law are guilty of breaking it. And that brings us to the third set of texts we found. The Missing Mail. It's not ethical. It's not fucking ethical. That's after a break. Thank you. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. I'm Nate Hedgy, and you're listening to a special series of Outside In called Operation Nightcat. Is it all right if I record this call like last time? Yeah, that's fine. No problem. Okay, cool. That, again, is producer Jason Moon talking with Sean Cochran, the guy who railed against Tom Kelly earlier in the episode. Sean, he's been in and out of New Hampshire's state prison for almost two decades. And in his younger years, he also spent time in the state's juvenile jail, a place called the Youth Development Center, or YDC. Now, if you live in New Hampshire, you might know that the YDC is at the center of a huge government scandal here. Sean is one of more than a thousand people who've come forward with allegations of sexual and physical abuse they say they went through there. Almost a dozen former staffers have faced criminal charges. I have a law firm that's part of my YDC case. They wanted me to write a narrative about the YDC. Sean had to write down details of what he says staff did to him when he was a kid. Very, very personal details. And then send them in the mail to his lawyer. He did this when he was incarcerated in the men's prison. And I wrote two narratives. The first one was 23 pages. Never made it to his office, still to this day. Wrote a second one. Never made it to his office, still to this day. Wait, so you're saying you wrote those YDC narratives in the prison and they never made it out? That is correct. You probably know that opening or stealing someone's mail is a federal crime. The post office has a whole branch of investigators who deal with this kind of thing. But mail in prison works a little differently. Sometimes people send drugs to inmates, concealed in envelopes that are meant to look like they're coming from their lawyers or someone else official. So prison staff are allowed to comb through that incoming mail to make sure it's legit. But outgoing letters sent to a lawyer or to the courts, they cannot be opened or interfered with. just to spell it out, what do you think happened to those narratives? That's my question. I mean, all that personal fucking written stuff about sexual abuse and what happened to me, those are substantial things that I wrote in there. Where are they? Who's reading them? We don't know exactly what happened to those narratives. But we do know what happened to some of Sean's other male. In 2021, Sean was trying to file legal complaints about how he was being treated at the men's prison. This happens a lot, and you can imagine that some guards see it as a huge headache. Some officers go so far as to call these complaints rat notes. And Sean was known for writing a lot of them. Lauren's back to help me read another text thread. I be Tom Kelly and you going to be one of his buddies corrections officer Chris Massey Got it Chris by the way not a part of the poaching ring but he someone that Tom went to law enforcement academy with And we should note that Chris also did not respond to our requests for comment for the story. Okay, so this conversation happens almost midnight, February 15th, 2021. Chris writes, holy fuck, dude, this legal mail and rat notes are out of fucking hand. Tom, dude, it's bad. I took a ton home with me that probably contained your name. Chris texts back, from who? LOL, Cochran? Tom, yep. Thanks for saving my ass, ha ha. After that, Tom sends a photo. Six envelopes, fanned out. It's mail that he seems to have taken directly from the prison. That mail, it belonged to Sean Cochran, the guy whose YDC narratives went missing, and who was actively filing complaints against Tom Kelly's work buddy, Chris Massey. After Tom sent that photo of the envelopes, Chris Massey texted back. Chris writes, yeah, dude, you're the true hero here tonight, haha. Think we're going to have to search some cells tomorrow. Tom, yep. Let's do it, Chris writes back. Me and you. And Sean told us that around this time, Tom Kelly did tear his room up. They ripped our whole tear apart because they knew that I was filing complaints against them. Public records back him up. They show Tom and some other guards search to sell two days after this text exchange between Tom and Chris. When he was interviewing Sean, producer Jason Moon told him about the texts we had discovered. He read them out verbatim. We've bleeped out some of the names. Tom, I just read all of them. Chris, and, lol. Tom, you need to be careful what you say in front of the nurses, because he's trying to call them as witnesses, and he says he's filing criminal charges against you. Tom, also he filed charges against *** for slamming his head into a wall, I guess. Lol. Chris, yeah, I'll talk to this morning. Literally all I've done to this cunt is call him a junkie. Tom, yeah, he wrote the name down. Chris, I'll talk to her. And we really got to intercept this cunt's shit bad. Got to have the boys tear that room up. So what do you make of these messages? Are you surprised? Yeah, I'm really surprised. You have them outrightly admitting that they stole my fucking legal man. That's a lawsuit. That's a slam-dunk lawsuit. They could lose their job for that. Sean says he tried to talk to one of the older COs, a guy he respects and knows personally, but all the ways Tom Kelly was treating him. I said, why are you allowing this to go on in your unit? And he said, I'm in blue. And I said, okay, I get that. I get that. I said, but at the end of the day, it's not ethical. I said, you're allowing these men to treat us this way, knowing that they're treating us this way, and you're not doing anything about it. Back when we interviewed Conservation Officer Ron Arsenault, he showed us around this wooden cabin in the woods. Pretty cool, huh? It is pretty cool. So they all do like... The place had major summer camp vibes. This is where Fish and Game will sometimes teach Hunter's Ed, the kind of thing you need to do to get your license. And this is where I come, like, after kids' fishing day. Yeah. I'll hide my truck, and I'll hide in here, and I'll watch Overlimits. This is my secret hiding place, so don't tell anybody that. At this point, all we knew about Tom Kelly was what Ron had told us about Operation Nightcat, that he had been caught baiting deer and killing bobcats at night. Back during that initial investigation, Ron was already thinking about how he was going to use Tom Kelly's text messages. I like to think of it from the very beginning. How would I prosecute this? Because that you have a really solid foundation thinking like that, because then you're like, oh, what do I need to prove? What do I have? What do I need for evidence? But this is also when Ron found all of these other text messages. Stuff that was way outside his areas of expertise. not to mention totally outside his jurisdiction as a conservation officer. So at that point, I was like, oh, that's not good. Ron could have chosen to stay in his lane, to keep focused on the charges he knew he could personally make stick. But he didn't. Instead, he reported what he found up the chain of command. And from there, it went to the New Hampshire Attorney General, It went to federal investigators. And it went to Tom Kelly's bosses at the Department of Corrections. We have a duty. We need to hold people accountable. One group of alleged poachers. Two sets of potential crimes. And, you know, just because you're wearing a badge doesn't mean you should get away with stuff. So, did they? that's next time on the final episode of operation nightcap it's the embarrassment it's the embarrassment to say how in the world did this happen you know we're taught you know oh report all this stuff you know report it and we'll do something report it bullshit Operation Nightcat is a special three-part series from NHPR's Document Team and Outside In. This episode was reported and written by me, Nate Hedgie, with help from Lauren Chulgin and Jason Moon. Jason produced and mixed this episode. He also wrote the music. It was edited by Taylor Quimby and Katie Culinary with help from Rebecca Lavoie, Jackie Harris, Dan Barrick, Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, and Marina Hanke. Special thanks to Rick White and Bill Chapman. Fact-checking by Danya Suleiman. Taylor Quimby is the executive producer of Outside In. Rebecca Lavoie is director of On Demand at NHPR. Operation Nightcap is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio. What is healthy spirituality and how does it help us thrive? We explore these questions on the new season of With and For, hosted by me, Dr. Pam King. With and For bridges psychology and spiritual wisdom to help you thrive, featuring conversations with experts like self-compassion pioneer Kristen Neff and author activist Parker Palmer. So go ahead, follow With and For, hosted by Dr. Pam King, wherever you get your podcasts. improving and even saving lives. Follow Tomorrow's Cure wherever you listen to podcasts.
