The man who testified in court Monday that Marshall Swan paid him to vandalize a Whitefield contractor’s property in 2012 is a career criminal who said he hates people who cooperate with police.

In February, the U.S. attorney’s office filed documents in federal court saying Swan paid two people $200 to vandalize property owned by contractor Frank Monroe. In early 2011, Monroe went to the Kennebec County Sheriff’s Office to report that Swan’s wife, Carole Swan, then chair of Chelsea’s selectmen, was demanding kickbacks from him.

Four days after both Swans were indicted on federal charges in 2012, eight pickup tires were slashed and two excavator windows smashed at Monroe’s home and business. Only one of the men allegedly involved in the spree, William Dalrymple, was named.

Until his testimony at Marshall Swan’s sentencing hearing on tax fraud charges on Monday, 54-year-old Samuel Stone’s identity was shielded by the federal government as a confidential witness. Dalrymple, a Bowdoin native and felon, wasn’t charged in the incident before his suicide in Vermont last year.

After a review of Maine and Vermont state records, court files and past media accounts, the Kennebec Journal discovered Stone’s identity in February. However, the newspaper did not publish details of his criminal history and links to Swan’s family after the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office raised concerns for his safety if he was identified publicly.

Dalrymple’s one criminal connection to Chelsea was Stone, who gave the town as his home in 2001, when he was convicted with Dalrymple after a burglary spree through Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom years earlier.

Marshall Swan’s estranged sister, Roberta Jean Rood, now of Kissimmee, Fla., said earlier this year that she testified at Stone’s trial in Vermont. She later got a protection-from-harassment order from him in Maine.

Her late husband was Stone’s father-in-law, and she said Stone had taken her husband to a garage in Chelsea, where he showed him some of the money he had stolen. Before that, in 1998, Rood said Stone bragged to her about shooting through someone’s home in Chelsea. She said she responded by telling him to hope that the police don’t ask her about it. Then, Rood said, Stone threatened her.

“I can stand on that lawn while you’re doing the dishes at nighttime, shoot through that window and you’ll never know what happened to you,” she quoted him as saying.

A BREAK IN THE CASE

The damage at Monroe’s property happened on March 4, 2012, just after the Swans’ Feb. 29 indictment.

The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office would hand the case to FBI agents, who Clark’s memo said found distinct shoe tracks leading through snow to and from the damaged trucks. Door windows of two excavators were also found smashed by projectiles, perhaps pellets or BBs, and there were tire tracks in mud indicating that a two-wheel-drive truck had been there.

Then, the FBI, along with the Kennebec and Lincoln county sheriffs’ offices, went to the Swans’ house to meet with Carole and Marshall Swan. They denied involvement.

But about two weeks later, Monroe discovered a small silver flashlight in a damaged excavator. He gave it to a sheriff’s deputy, who sent it to the Maine State Police Crime Lab. That July, the lab said DNA recovered from the flashlight’s battery pack belonged to Dalrymple.

Later that month, the FBI learned Dalrymple once lived and committed crimes with Stone, who became the government’s informant.

In 2000, the Associated Press reported that Stone, then of Chelsea, was charged alongside Dalrymple in a burglary spree years earlier in Vermont. Police said that between 1993 and 1994, Stone committed a series of burglaries in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. Both Stone and Dalrymple were convicted for stealing $313,000 from a Vermont couple’s safe — the money Rood said Stone showed her husband.

Stone left a Vermont prison in 2006, said David Turner, a spokesman for Vermont’s corrections department. He was, however, still on probation in Maine, according to Scott Fish, spokesman for Maine’s corrections department. Fish said when his state supervision ended in 2010, Stone was living in New Hampshire.

As FBI agents investigated the Monroe case, Clark’s memo said they got phone records between Dalyrmple and Stone, finding that they were in contact the day the damage was done at Monroe’s.

YEARS OF CRIME, VIOLENT DEATH

Dalrymple, who court records say stood 5-foot-4 with blue eyes, couldn’t stay out of trouble. He spent only about two years out of Maine’s prison system between 1989 and 2009, Fish said.

At the end of his prison time in Maine, he was handed directly to Vermont officials to serve time for the spree with Stone. He served a short amount of time there, but they soon released him and his parole expired in 2011.

After that, he lived in St. Johnsbury, a town 10 miles from the Quebec border, after his release. His death record said he worked as a flagger for FairPoint Communications.

He found more trouble in February 2013, when a warrant was issued for his arrest after he failed to appear in court to face a drunk-driving charge, according to The Caledonian-Record, a St. Johnsbury newspaper.

Less than a month later, Dalrymple killed himself with a gunshot wound to the head in a cabin in that town, the Vermont medical examiner’s office ruled.

His criminal record in Maine dates back to 1987, when he was convicted after breaking into SSS Country Store in Bowdoin to steal beer and chips. He’d later be convicted of setting a fire there. In 1995, he landed back in prison after pleading to 13 theft and burglary charges, drawing later convictions on firearms charges and theft.

ALLEGED MOTIVE REVENGE

Clark’s memo said Stone told the FBI that they heard Monroe had snitched on the Swans in March 2012.

That was more than a year after Monroe went to the Kennebec County Sheriff’s Office to report that Swan asked him to overbill the town $10,000 for work he wouldn’t do, then give the money to her as a kickback. It prompted the wider investigation into the Swans’ dealings, public and private.

According to the federal government, Stone said Monroe’s snitching prompted him and Dalrymple to drive from New Hampshire to Maine to meet with the Swans. In their driveway, Stone said he suggested to Marshall Swan that Monroe should get revenge for turning the Swans in.

“Someone will pay for that,” said Marshall Swan, according to the witness. That meant the Swans would pay them for retaliating against Monroe.

Marshall Swan then took $200 from his truck as payment, Stone said. After the hit on Monroe’s property, Stone also reported talking to Marshall Swan about the incident. Swan told the witness that “the feds” came to his house to ask about it, also saying that he and his wife were staying together at her sister’s house and his wife’s public allegations of abuse at his hands were “a show.”

After the vandalism at Monroe’s, Stone wasn’t done with him, according to the federal government’s sentencing memo. The contractor reported to the FBI that in August 2012, the witness pulled into Monroe’s business parking lot to tell him that he had just gotten back into town after doing prison time in Vermont, also saying that he would never go to jail again and he “would shoot anybody so that he did not have to go back.”

But Stone wouldn’t go back to jail. The FBI didn’t interview him until October 2013. Dalrymple was dead and Stone snitched on Swan. Nobody was charged, and the federal government used Stone to up the legal ante on the Swans.

On Monday, FBI Special Agent agent Mark Miller testified that Stone targeted Monroe for “ratting out” Swan and targeted Andy Swan for making some antagonistic comments about the Swans that were published in the Kennebec Journal newspaper on Nov. 2, 2012.

Stone, a balding man with a gray beard and mustache who now lives in Poland, took the witness stand at Marshall Swan’s sentencing hearing, and repeated the story about “taking a ride to Augusta to go down to see Marshall” and getting two $100 bills from Marshall Swan. Stone said he slashed some of Monroe’s tires himself when Dalrymple did not do enough damage. Stone also said the two destroyed the excavator windows with BB gun pellets. He also said he and Dalrymple — with a third person driving — then went to the house of Andy Stone, Marshall Swan’s brother, and stole a small Honda generator and two chainsaws from the garage because the vehicles were parked too close to the house and they didn’t want to be seen. Stone said Dalrymple later traded the items for drugs.

Stone told investigators that he hated rats.

“I hate myself now,” he told Marshall Swan’s attorney Walter McKee. Stone got full immunity from prosecution for the damage and the stolen items in exchange for agreeing to testify truthfully at Swan’s trial.

Michael Shepherd — 370-7652 | mshepherd@centralmaine.com | Twitter: @mikeshepherdme

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