Dead Man's Testimony Used To Challenge Farmington Double Murder Case

By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH

DOVER, NH — Testimony from a dead witness helped convict Timothy Verrill in the bloody double-murder of Christine Sullivan and Jenna Pellegrini nine years ago in Farmington, but now it may help overturn those convictions.

Verrill is appealing the jury’s guilty verdicts on two counts of second-degree murder, in part, due to the testimony from Stephen “Spider” Clough, who was dead at the time of the 2024 trial. Verrill is serving two back-to-back prison sentences of 45-years to life for the brutal killings.

The 2017 Sullivan and Pellegrini murders are a tangle of conflicted federal drug informants, police misconduct, and serious prosecutorial lapses that fed into the first 2019 trial against Verrill getting shut down as a mistrial. In his appeal brief, filed last month with the New Hampshire Supreme Court, Verrill challenges Clough’s testimony, the lack of convincing evidence in the case, and inappropriate comments by the prosecutor during closing arguments.

Strafford Superior Court Mark Howard allowed prosecutors to play recordings of Clough’s witness testimony from the botched 2019 trial to jurors during the 2024 trial. This might be all Verrill’s legal team needs as the New Hampshire Supreme Court has repeatedly, and clearly, rejected the use of witnesses who do not testify in person.

The right to confront witnesses is constitutionally fundamental, according to the Supreme Court. In March, the justices overturned the sexual assault convictions of Matthew Brusseau partly on the grounds one of his alleged victims testified via video link.

“The New Hampshire Constitution provides that an individual accused of a crime ‘shall have a right . . . to meet the witnesses against him face to face.’ We have characterized the right to confrontation as ‘one of the basic safeguards of liberty,’” the justices wrote.

Even without Clough’s posthumous testimony, the whole case against Verrill is riddled with unanswered questions, and sanctionable behavior by prosecutors.

Sullivan and her significant other, Dean Smoronk, ran a drug dealing business that supplied cocaine and methamphetamines to customers throughout New England. Verrill was a factotum for Sullivan and Smoronk’s operation, who occasionally lived at the couple’s Farmington house.

But the drug dealing power couple were in the midst of an ugly break up that started before the January, 2017 murders, with Sullivan and Smoronk fighting about the house and the business.

“I am going to cut you right to the bone because you’re a greedy, self centered, piece of s***Smoronk texted Sullivan on Jan. 17, 2017.

Sullivan and Pellegrini were murdered on Jan. 28, 2017, according to the state’s autopsy, though prosecutors claimed Verrill killed the women on Jan. 27, 2017.

Smoronk had started a new drug dealing venture with Joshua Cowell, an enforcer and member of the Mountain Men Motorcycle Club. Smoronk was looking to extract himself from the business with Sullivan, and force her to move out of his house. Smoronk didn’t hide his feelings from Cowell, according to texts the two exchanged.

“Bro, I’m so f…ing sick of that bitch … I have got to get her out of my life ASAP,” Smoronk texted Colwell.

Smoronk left the state on Jan. 26, 2017, flying to Florida to stay with another woman. Though he was due to fly back on Jan. 29, Smoronk cut his trip short because he was reportedly worried after not being able to contact Sullivan, the woman he told his friends and associates he hated, and the woman he had threatened to kill.

“I wish you were dead already … I f***ing swear Christine you just turned this lethal, motherf***er. You might as well call the cops right now,” Smoronk texted Sullivan weeks before the murders.

The supposedly concerned Smoronk had Colwell pick him up from the airport and the pair made their way to the Farmington house where the bodies of the women were discovered. Sullivan and Pellegrini had been stabbed repeatedly, and their bodies wrapped in a tarp and hidden under a porch.

Verrill was soon arrested on the theory he committed the murders in a drug-fueled, paranoid rage and believed Pellegrini was a police informant. It turns out Pellegrini was merely Sullivan’s friend and house guest, but there were police informants involved in the case.

According to some of the records police and prosecutors failed to hand over to the defense in 2019, Clough was an active Drug Enforcement Agency informant during the 2019 trial.

Cowell himself later avoided prison time after he was arrested in 2018 on federal drug charges, despite facing up to 20 years in prison. At the time, prosecutors cited his work in recovery as reason for the lenient treatment.

The 2019 trial against Verrill featured multiple disclosures by prosecutors that they had failed to hand over exculpatory evidence to the defense. After the third disclosure, a mistrial was called, setting up the 2024 trial.

Among the evidence the state did not originally hand over in 2019 is the fact that Clough was a suspect in the murders, but his DNA was never tested. Police also did not hand over a report on a witness who claimed Smoronk wanted to hire him to kill Sullivan.

The case that the state did present in 2024 did not include any clearcut evidence that Verrill committed the murders. DNA samples taken from Sullivan’s rings, which broke when she fought off her killer, excluded Verrill. Additionally, Verrill’s fingerprints are nowhere on the tarps used to wrap Sullivan and Pellegrini after the murders.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.