Former Hancock police chief indicted on felony theft charges

Sep. 27—An area law-enforcement veteran who served in overlapping years as Hancock's police chief and officer-in-charge of the Richmond Police Department has been indicted on felony theft charges.

A grand jury indicted Andrew Wood, 53, of Fitzwilliam in Cheshire County Superior Court on Monday on a count of unauthorized taking and a count of theft by deception, according to court documents.

The indictments allege that between Jan. 5, 2017, and June 27, 2019, Wood deprived his employer — the town of Richmond — of more than $1,500 by submitting weekly worksheets noting hours he did not work.

Wood was officer-in-charge in Richmond between those dates, according to Michael Garrity, a spokesman for the N.H. Attorney General's Office, which announced Wood's indictment in a news release Tuesday. Garrity declined to comment on the total amount of money Wood is alleged to have stolen.

Both felony counts are punishable by a 7 1/2 to 15-year state prison sentence and a $4,000 fine, according to the AG's Office. Wood is scheduled to be arraigned in court Oct. 22. He could not immediately be reached for comment by phone or when messaged on social media Tuesday.

N.H. Police Standards and Training Council records indicate that between the dates in the indictments, Wood was also Hancock's police chief, a position he had held since 2009, according to Maj. David Parenteau, a bureau commander with the council.

Those records indicate Wood had first been hired in Hancock in 1993 and left the department in 1998, the same year he joined the Richmond department, where he would serve until the department closed in June 2019, Parenteau said in an email responding to questions. Wood returned to the Hancock department in 2008 and remained through the end of 2020, Parenteau said.

Bill Daniels, who serves as chair of the Richmond selectboard and was re-elected to the board for a three-year term in 2020, said in a phone interview Tuesday he did not know how much money Wood is alleged to have taken from the town. The selectboard received information leading them to believe there was a problem, and the AG's Office completed the investigation, he said.

The Richmond Police Department was dissolved in 2019 for financial reasons, and the town has received law-enforcement coverage from the Cheshire County Sheriff's Office since, Daniels said.

The Hancock town manager did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.

In 2020, the Monadnock Ledger-Transcript reported that an investigation by the Hancock selectboard found cause to fire Wood for allegedly consistently submitting inaccurate and false timesheets.

The selectboard in a letter to Wood that summer cited nine instances of alleged timesheet discrepancies between January and August 2017, including instances of overlapping hours on Richmond timesheets, and also faulted him for the hiring of an officer who had been accused of sexual harassment at another department, according to the Ledger-Transcript.

In a letter responding to the Hancock selectboard, Wood — who submitted his resignation in September 2020 — wrote that he believed the town's timekeeping policy applied to non-salaried employees and defended some of the discrepancies, saying that Richmond's timecard policy had him record a minimum of four hours per court visit regardless of actual time spent there and a minimum of one hour per phone call regardless of a call's length, the Ledger-Transcript reported.

"Given the passage of time, it is certainly difficult to gie [sic] precise details of dates and shifts," he wrote, according to the Ledger-Transcript "... I have never worked less than my 40 hours."

Ryan Spencer can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1412, or rspencer@keenesentinel.com. Follow him on Twitter at @rspencerKS