BRENTWOOD — When police drew up an arrest warrant for Coast Guard petty officer Jeffrey Ruggiero, they thought they were seeing all the telltale signs of a domestic violence case.
His ex-wife, Kristin, showed East Kingston police a dozen threatening text messages on her cell phone, laden with curses and threats. There were phone calls, too. And she had her ex-husband's phone number to prove he was the one texting and calling, according to a police affidavit.
Jeffrey Ruggiero, 39, was eventually convicted on misdemeanor criminal threatening and other charges. He was sentenced to two years in the county jail.
But after he was behind bars for several days, police say, they got a fuller picture of what was happening.
Ruggiero, police now believe, was not the one making the threatening text messages or phone calls to his ex-wife.
Police allege Kristin Ruggiero, in fact, was doing it herself under her ex-husband's name. She was indicted by a Rockingham County grand jury in May on 12 felony counts of falsifying physical evidence and a single misdemeanor count of making a false report to law enforcement.
The technique she allegedly used to make it appear her ex-husband is a riff off what's known as "spoofing" — using technology to pretend you are someone else.
Authorities believe Kristin Ruggiero, 33, of East Kingston bought a disposable cell phone and registered it under her ex-husband's first name and used his date of birth, according to a police affidavit.
She is now free on bail and is expected to head to trial this fall. Her lawyer, Charles Keefe, could not be reached for comment.
Police, former law enforcement and defense lawyers say false allegations in domestic cases are nothing new. But the use of technology to wrongly accuse somebody is a first in the county.
Evidence didn't hold up
Assistant County Attorney Jerome Blanchard credits East Kingston police Chief Richard Simpson with following the evidence that led to Kristin Ruggiero's arrest.
"He put a lot of time and effort into this — and the average police department wouldn't put the time and effort into it," Blanchard said.
The core piece of evidence against Kristin Ruggiero is that police eventually figured out the signal from the phone used to send her the first threatening message was about sixth-tenths of a mile from where Kristin Ruggiero was staying in California, a police affidavit said. A second and third call also matched up with flight records from a trip Kristin Ruggiero took between Nashville, Tenn., and Oakland, Calf,. in March, the affidavit said.
Meanwhile, police collected notarized statements from a Coast Guard chief, who testified it wouldn't have been possible for Ruggiero to make the call or leave his post during those time periods, the affidavit says.
Simpson's department had been taking complaints from Kristin Ruggiero for nearly three years before the latest set of complaints led to her ex-husband's arrest. Simpson had been investigating complaints that Jeffrey Ruggiero had been mailing explicit photos of himself to his ex-wife and sending her threatening messages.
The case against Jeffrey Ruggiero eventually went to Exeter District Court, where he was convicted then sentenced in absentia.
He was actually on his way to his sentencing and got as far north as Massachusetts when he was advised by his superiors that he would be court-martialed if he did not return to his Coast Guard post for leaving without permission, Simpson said.
Last summer Kristin Ruggiero waged a public campaign claiming the Coast Guard was protecting her ex-husband. She even detailed her worries about him carrying through on years of threats during a television interview with New England Cable News. In August, Jeffrey Ruggiero was extradited to New Hampshire.
Police chief had suspicions
Simpson said he started to get a feeling something wasn't right when Jeffrey Ruggiero's case headed to court.
"We were starting to get a funny feeling on the case," Simpson said.
After being sentenced to county jail, Jeffrey Ruggiero asked Simpson to investigate the case further.
"I said, 'OK, I will give you that,'" the police chief said. "I could substantiate what he was saying. I couldn't really do that with her."
Police began executing search warrants on the phone Kristin Ruggiero claimed was being used by her ex-husband to threaten her and their daughter. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Ruggiero turned over the user-name and password for his cell phone.
"I had to do a lot of search warrants on Trac phones," the chief said. "Essentially, what she has done to the legitimate victim of domestic violence is to take away the protection by law enforcement because she has now taught us a lesson."
In average cases, police are required by law to arrest the aggressor when they respond to a questionable domestic call. Now, further due diligence with search warrants and subpoenas may be necessary before police can know what really happened, Simpson said.
"He was locked up," Simpson said. "I was in contact with the county attorney's office and I said, 'Listen, we need to look at this stuff.' I said, 'It's not looking good.'" As tough as it is to say as a law enforcement officer, we might have ... I honestly feel he was wrongfully convicted."
Jeffrey Ruggiero eventually was freed after Simpson was able to prove that Kristin Ruggiero sent the messages to herself. Jeffrey Ruggiero was appealing his conviction when the state dropped the charges against him.
Fabricated charges are not unheard of
Those who have worked as prosecutors or defense lawyers in domestic violence cases say their careers have shown episodes of trumped-up charges.
Salem defense lawyer Mark Stevens, who regularly defends such cases, recalled two in Rockingham County where people fabricated charges and came to court, only for police to find the allegations were fabricated.
Stevens stressed the number of legitimate cases generally far outweighs those who fabricate charges.
"People who do this horrible thing of spoofing cause doubt for people who really need to be protected," Stevens said. "It takes two scoops of evil in your cereal bowl to do something like this."
Stevens said he has seen scorned lovers take extreme measures to get revenge in a courtroom in the last two years.
"I had one woman who actually gave herself a black eye by slamming her head into a bathroom countertop," he said. "But if you looked at her and looked at photos the police took, it looked like someone beaten her."
That woman's claim fell apart when a witness came forward who saw the woman hurt herself, Stevens said.
In another case, a woman claimed her boyfriend assaulted her with a phone. The boyfriend was charged with four counts of domestic assault and one count of obstructing justice.
Prosecutors wanted the woman to take the stand and testify. She only agreed to do so after being granted immunity, Stevens said, after which she testified that she fabricated the assault.
"He could have been looking at a couple of years in jail," Stevens said of his client. "She was mad because he was spending too much time with his mother."
Hampton defense lawyer Brian Lavallee, a former assistant county attorney who exclusively tried domestic violence cases between 1997 to 1999, said hearing about people fabricating charges isn't a surprise. But it is usually few and far between, he said.
Disposable phones are frequently used in drug cases or other crimes in which people try to hide their tracks.
Lavallee said it was only a matter of time before technology came into play with domestic violence cases.
"Unfortunately, the abuse of technology outpaces the pace of the technology used in law enforcement to stop it," he said. "It usually comes to light when technology is used for a criminal purpose. Government is usually slow to respond, particularly law enforcement, but it's not for a lack of intent or trying. It's just that law enforcement is usually more reactive than proactive."
Simpson said he has never seen or heard of a case like Ruggiero's in his 20-plus years in law enforcement.
"What was going on through my mind was the question of who was actually telling the truth the whole time," the police chief said. "I decided I'm not going to charge anybody unless I could prove one person did it instead of another."
Lawyers in the case are expected to meet sometime in the next several weeks to schedule a trial date.
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