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Portrait of a woman: Missing pieces of a lifelong battle with mental health, addiction and pain
MANCHESTER, NH — Eleven months ago, Kristie Chapman ventured on a new life, one drug-free and without calling the streets of Manchester her home.
She had turned her life around after participating in an intensive program through the Hillsborough County Superior Court Northern District Drug Court.
That came to a crashing end on Wednesday, April 8, when she was arrested for stabbing Michael McGann, 71, in the neck and robbing him of $194.
Yet, last May Chapman couldn’t stop smiling when she was graduated from Drug Court. For 18 years, she had been addicted to cough medicine. Eleven of those years, she was homeless, finding refuge under stairwells inside old tenements or sleeping under bushes.
The day she graduated, she had been clean for 15 months and was looking forward to finding an apartment and moving on with her life.
Her street life was the result of mental health issues and drug abuse with “copious” amounts of cough medicine pills her drug of choice, she said.
Kristie is well-known to police, having dozens of convictions, mainly petty offenses and a rap sheet that was 42 pages long in 2016.
Shoplifting cough medication is what landed her in the New Hampshire State Prison for Women in Concord.
It was her third arrest for theft which, under state law, makes it a felony. Kristie was sentenced to 1½ to 3 years in state prison. It didn’t matter that what she stole was a $5 box of cough medicine from Market Basket.
“It was kind of harsh because I slept next to eight murderers in my dorm,” she said. “I think I had the most pathetic charge in the whole place. That was really sad.”
She said she never shoplifted anything worth more than $20. They were things she needed, like underwear, and cough medicine to feed her habit.
Before Drug Court
In November 2016 she was still on parole from that theft charge when her grandfather died. Kristie said she doesn’t drink but for whatever reason, she decided she wanted the $2.50 alcoholic beverage Twisted Tea and stole two cans of them from Cumberland Farms on Hanover Street. When police arrived, she threw a can at an officer, according to published reports.
She was arrested on various charges, including violating parole, which put her at a high risk of returning to a prison cell.
“That’s when it really shook me and I realized I had to get a handle on my addiction,” she said.
She didn’t take drugs until her late 20s. She had a rough childhood and at 16, gave birth to her first child. By the time she was 21, she had four children under the age of 5. She was back and forth with the fathers, but mostly single.
Kristie worked at MacDonald’s and cleaning hotel rooms, which she enjoyed. Into her late 20s, she had her life together, she said.
But then came the drugs. She said she was falsely arrested and spent a couple of months in the Valley Street jail awaiting trial. The fathers of three of her children pulled “a disappearing act” and took her kids. She didn’t know where they were, and she became depressed.
She never saw her 10-year-old daughter again until she was 14 and then, she said, the father did another disappearing act and she didn’t see her daughter until he dropped her off on her doorstep when she was 17½. She didn’t see her son again until he was 19 and her other daughter was put up for adoption. They reconnected when she turned 14 and had a relationship for about four years but that dissolved.
Then there were the years when she was homeless. Some nights she slept in bushes. Other nights she walked along the Merrimack River and the next morning would head to a city park to sleep.
Other times, she would find an old apartment building to sleep in, under the stairwell. She stayed as far away as possible from New Horizons shelter, she said, because it was a wet shelter and many people are high or inebriated.
“It’s not safe,” she said. “It’s really tough to be homeless in this town.”
Her lifestyle resulted in her having no relationship at all with her three older children.
She said she did something right, however, with her youngest daughter, who is 23 and doing exceptionally well.
“I’m so proud of her,” she said.
As her stolen Twisted Tea case was heading to court, she asked her attorney if she could get into drug court, an intense diversion program that helps those with substance abuse issues and who are at the highest risk of reoffending. None of her charges were drug offenses but Kristie said that’s probably because cough medicine is legal.
Filling out the application, she explained she suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome stemming from a tough childhood, is bi-polar and suffers from anxiety. She wrote that her addiction was cough medicine.
No easy road to recovery
Kristie was accepted and went from prison directly into a rehab program. For the first six months, she said she was a superstar who followed all the rules
But then, she said she was sexually assaulted by a man she met at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and it threw her off the “deep end.” She doesn’t go to AA anymore.
“I wound up in a psychiatric ward at Holy Family Hospital in Methuen, Mass.,” she said. Dan Canniff, Drug Court Coordinator for Hillsborough North Drug Court, was the one who drove her down to the hospital.
She was there for about a month to get her medication regulated for her mental health issues. That May she said she was handling it well with proper medication and counseling.
She slipped up another time when she called Manchester police to find out what was happening with the investigation into the assault. Kristie said she was told there wasn’t enough evidence to arrest the man. Upset, she cut off the monitoring bracelet she wore and police immediately arrived and arrested her.
Kristie said in April 2018 she saw her assailant at Wal-Mart and she immediately left the store. Tearing up, she said it angers her that the man is still out on the street, knowing he has gotten away with assaulting her and knowing that other women may be at risk.
After the attack, she was still using drugs and went into a Keystone rehab program for about four months. Since then, she said, she’s been good.
She was looking forward to continuing that sober life.
Her concern then was housing because her Social Security disability check wasn’t near enough to pay for an apartment in the city.
“They want three times my Social Security,” she said
Still, Kristie was optimistic about life and, standing outside Superior Court last year, she said she was proud of what she’d accomplished and thankful for drug court. And, she was happy.
Three weeks after her graduation, Kristie spoke to a reporter by phone. She was still sober, continuing her relationship with her boyfriend and reconnecting with her parents. She still did not have permanent housing so she lived wi
The sober life
Kristie was 15 months sober, continuing her relationship with her boyfriend and reconnecting with her mother and father. She did not have permanent housing so she lived with her father and sometimes stayed with her boyfriend.
“I’m getting my relationship back with my mother,” she said. “I gave her my phone number on Mother’s Day and I hadn’t given her my number in years.”
She was in daily contact with her youngest daughter.
“These are important relationships,” she said. “That’s a big change for me. I definitely like it.”
Kristie laughed frequently during a phone call and said people now actually wanted to talk to her. “It’s not, ‘Oh, God, Kristie’s here,” she said.
She said she’s connected with old friends and has made new ones.
“So that’s pretty awesome,” she said.
A few months later, a reporter was unable to get in touch with Kristie. Her cell phone was disconnected.
Then on April 8 Manchester police sent out a news release announcing Chapman was arrested for first-degree assault, armed robbery and being a felon in possession of a deadly weapon.
According to court documents, police were called to Catholic Medical Center where McGann had walked to get treatment for his wound.
McGann suffered a four-inch-long wound that was a half-inch deep along the right side of his neck.
McGann said Kristie stabbed him during an argument involving several men and Kristie. During the altercation, Kristie took $194 from his pockets.
When Officer Kevin J. Lally spoke to Chapman at the apartment building, he wrote she had “moments of lucidity where she would agree that a fight took place but then refuse to elaborate.” She told the officer she was inside the apartment with “Mike” her neighbor.
Police recovered the knife from Apt. 11 and McGann’s bloody clothing from his apartment.
On Thursday, Kristie Superior Court Judge William Delker ordered her held on preventative detention.
