The Murder of Bernard Egounis (New Hampshire)

One ordinary day during August of 1983, in a quiet patch of parkland just off the road in Penacook, New Hampshire, a teenager found something that didn’t belong. What followed rippled through the small community for years.

Interviews, rumors, and timelines never quite fit together. Voices clashed over what was seen, what was said, and what couldn’t be proved at all. This is a story about how quickly attention can settle on one person, and how hard it can be to find the truth once it does

Discovery

It was August 13, 1983, and a young man named Melvin was taking a casual stroll through a park in Penacook, New Hampshire, overlooking the Contoocook River. The low hum of the nearby hydroelectric site blended with the steady rush of water over the dam. It was a familiar soundtrack in this small mill town. But beneath a park bench just twenty feet from the road, Melvin noticed something unfamiliar that didn’t belong in the park.

A man lay face down on the ground, wearing nothing but his underwear. There was blood pooled beneath his body.

Melvin froze. Whatever he’d found, he wanted no part of it. Instead of calling police himself, Melvin waved down his friend Paul and asked him to handle it.

When Paul returned with Concord Police to the scene, they found the man lying near the corner of East and Bridge Streets, close to the Boscawen town line. The spot was quiet and shaded, tucked into a small grove of trees, a place locals might pass every day without a second glance. Paul realized he knew the guy. He’d babysat for Paul when he was a kid and painted their family’s fence once.

The victim was 53-year-old Bernard Egounis.

What began as an ordinary Saturday morning was suddenly the start of a case that would haunt the community for years to come.

About Bernard Egounis

Bernard was a familiar face around Penacook and the neighboring town of Boscawen, where he was born and raised. His parents had immigrated from Lithuania decades earlier and built their lives in the greater Concord area. They ran a small grocery store in town, and Bernard later followed in their footsteps. 

With his former wife, Beverly, he opened Bernie and Bev’s Market in West Concord. They had a few kids together, but the partnership didn’t last. The two separated in 1960, and relatives later told the Concord Monitor that Bernard’s alcohol use played a role in the split.

He lost his driver’s license after multiple OUI convictions, and eventually gave up driving altogether. Most people in town knew Bernard from seeing him on foot, walking Main Street, stopping to chat with locals with his signature corncob pipe in hand.

Bernard was an outdoorsman at heart. He loved to hunt and fish, and his son Stephen said his father was a good woodsman, someone who could handle himself in the forest and had even done some lumberjacking.

Those who knew him described Bernard as old-fashioned when it came to manners and relationships. He never used foul language around women, and when walking arm-in-arm with a date, he always took the outside of the sidewalk.

At the time of his death, Bernard worked at the Colby Lumber Company in Boscawen, though people said he’d fallen on harder times recently. He wasn’t a troublemaker, but he drank a little more than other regulars at the bar in town. Still, when fights broke out, Bernard wasn’t part of them. His son said that if a tussle started, Bernard would simply turn the other cheek and walk away. Violence wasn’t in his nature and he didn’t have enemies. In fact, Bernard often befriended younger people around town. Many of those friends called him Bernie.

Though he didn’t have much, when payday came, Bernie was generous; buying rounds for friends even when his check wouldn’t stretch that far. As reported by David Olinger and Sharon Voas, Bernard’s son remembered how his dad’s paycheck would be gone by Saturday morning, and sometimes, he’d have to borrow a few dollars from those young friends to make it through the rest of the week.

Investigators learned that Bernard had cashed a paycheck, or even multiple checks, the day before his death. That Friday night, he spent the evening drinking beer at a pizza place in the village. It was possible he still had some of that cash on him when he left the pizza place, so could this have been a robbery that turned into something worse?

Some locals told reporters that Bernard had been robbed several times in the weeks before he was killed. The kids who supposedly robbed him were known to hang out at the same park near Bridge and East Streets where his body was found. If this was true though, police records didn’t back it up. Bernard didn’t report any robberies before his death.

Whatever happened that night, it seemed to start and end in the same quiet patch of grass where Bernard was later discovered. And for investigators, the question now shifted from who Bernard was to who could have done this.

Investigation Begins

The medical examiner determined that Bernard had been stabbed seven times in the chest. His time of death was estimated between midnight and 6 a.m., with 2 a.m. being the most probable. The coroner noted that the wounds could have been caused by almost any kind of knife. There was nothing distinct enough about them to narrow it down.

Reporter Bill Sanderson of the Concord Monitor wrote that investigators collected everything they could find at the scene – trash, bottles, bits of debris – anything that might offer a clue. Some of it was sent to both the state crime lab and the FBI for analysis. A pair of pants, believed to belong to Bernard, was found draped over the park bench near his body. Those, too, would be tested for trace evidence.

One of the earliest leads in the case didn’t come from debris in the park though. Surveillance footage from a nearby bank captured Bernard sometime the day before the murder, easily recognizable with his trademark corncob pipe in hand. When police found his body, that pipe was missing. Later in the investigation, they learned that someone else in town had been seen carrying it around.

This is an excerpt from the full episode covering the case of Bernard Egounis. Press play wherever you get your podcasts to hear the full episode on Dark Downeast.