Who Ambushed and Murdered This Prison Psychologist in the Mountains?

After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Louise Chaput reluctantly called off a hiking trip to Turkey she had been planning to take.

Chaput, a 52-year-old psychologist who worked primarily with prison inmates, lived in Sherbrooke, Quebec, a French-speaking municipality of 160,000 once known as the “Queen of the Eastern Townships.” Her best friend, Marie Pinault, was going to join her on the trip, along with Pinault’s husband, Denis Masson. But, like so many others, the two were feeling more than a bit rattled about flying.

“We said, ‘No, we’re not going abroad, because the planes and all this,’” Pinault told The Daily Beast. “So she said, ‘Let’s go to Mount Washington.’”

The idea didn’t particularly excite Pinault and Masson, who then had three young boys and felt it wasn’t worth finding a babysitter just to hike familiar trails in nearby New Hampshire. So Chaput, who had two daughters of her own, aged 10 and 18, recruited some other friends to join her the following weekend.

However, bad weather forced them to postpone, according to Pinault. The weekend after that, Chaput’s hiking partners weren’t available, and she decided to just go by herself. Her longtime partner, Pierre Raby, stayed in Sherbrooke with their kids. Chaput crossed the border into the U.S. from Canada in her silver Ford Focus station wagon at 11:45 a.m. on Thursday, Nov. 15, 2001. After a brief stop at a convenience store in Colebrook, New Hampshire, she made her way to Pinkham’s Grant, a 3.8 square-mile area within the White Mountain National Forest.

Chaput had a reservation to stay the weekend at the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Joe Dodge Lodge in Pinkham’s Grant. Before checking in, she stopped by the AMC visitor center and asked a desk clerk to recommend a short hike she could take before nightfall. He directed Chaput to the scenic Lost Pond Trail, a two-mile roundtrip that takes about an hour.

“This was typical of Louise,” Masson told The Daily Beast. “She was a strong, independent woman. And if everybody gave up, she would say, ‘I’ll go, and I’ll show you that it was a great trip,’ and so on and so forth. Which of course, unfortunately, was not the case at all.”

When Chaput didn’t return home to Sherbrooke on Monday as planned, Raby called police. Pinault, along with Raby and the couple’s older daughter, Corinne, headed to New Hampshire to assist with the search. Chaput’s car was found parked in a lot next to the visitor center, with the keys missing. One of her two backpacks was gone, though her hiking shoes were still in the vehicle.

Pinault, who is a medical doctor and works as a part-time coroner for the Outaouais region of Quebec, said she had been holding out hope that Chaput would be found “sick from something, or that she had fallen somewhere.” But on Thanksgiving Day, Chaput’s body was discovered a quarter-mile from the visitor center, on the more challenging Glen Boulder Trail. The next day, a detective told Pinault that Chaput “didn’t die from natural causes.”

“It was, like, unreal,” Pinault said, remarking that she still gets goosebumps when telling the story. “Even when we came back to Sherbrooke, we couldn’t figure out that thing about her being killed by someone. I mean, it didn’t make sense.”

Chaput had died from multiple stab wounds, an autopsy determined.

When she was told about her mother’s death, Constance Chaput-Raby was still too young to fully understand what had actually occurred. Her father and sister were “more conscious of that violence,” Chaput-Raby said, explaining that it was something she only began to ponder once she got older.

“I remember being sad, but I don’t remember being shocked about the way she died,” Chaput-Raby, now 30, told The Daily Beast.

Still, she said, “My father tells me things—he found me when I was 10, sleeping with a knife. So... I was probably really traumatized.”

Chaput-Raby, a documentary filmmaker in Montreal, has a collection of letters her mother wrote to her when she was still a child, beginning when she was about 5. The letters are written as if Chaput-Raby is an adult, and were meant to be read once she grew up. Presumably, Chaput thought she would be around to discuss the letters and reminisce with her.

“It’s hard to know what you’ve been missing, but I still miss her,” said Chaput-Raby. “Like, at every step. So many times that I needed her, I wanted her, and she wasn’t there. And my father is not very communicative. Now I’m working with a psychologist, but I think the fact that my mother wasn’t there made it really, really difficult for me to express my feelings.”

Chaput-Raby said investigators at first took a hard look at her dad as a possible suspect, “because, you know, unfortunately, in these cases, a lot of women are killed by their partners. But he had this strong alibi because he was with me and with my sister [at] home. So, it wasn’t him.”

Cops also considered the idea that Chaput might have been having an affair with someone in New Hampshire, and that things somehow turned ugly. But that, too, was cast aside as improbable, if not impossible.

No witnesses to Chaput’s murder have ever emerged, and authorities have never released the names of any suspects—a statewide policy, according to the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office.

Detectives have kept in touch with Chaput’s family fairly regularly, although the lead investigator they worked with has now retired. In any event, Chaput-Raby said she is unaware of any names that may have emerged as suspects in the investigation.

“We know they had a few suspects that the investigators told us about,” she said. “But we don’t know much more.”

There were “two guys” in the area who at one point claimed to have information about Chaput’s killer, then began pointing the finger at each other, according to Chaput-Raby. One of the men claimed he had Chaput’s missing backpack and car keys, which Chaput-Raby said turned out to be untrue. Around 2005, someone called Chaput-Raby’s older sister Corinne and said, “I know who killed your mother.” Corinne called the police, who traced the call back to one of the two men who had inserted themselves into the investigation. Police followed the lead, Chaput-Raby said, but decided that “it obviously wasn’t him.”

Raby, now 74, was “really into the case” for the first few years, but no longer speaks to the media, said Chaput-Raby, explaining that his way of finally finding some sort of peace and semi-closure was to “not get involved anymore.”

About a decade after Chaput was killed, police told the family that they had a person of interest in their sights, but warned against reading too much into it. Some had been ruled out, while others were still the subjects of “investigative focus,” a cold case detective said at the time.

And then, nothing.

“That was very weird, we never understood what happened,” said Chaput-Raby. “It was as if they were about to arrest someone. And finally, they didn’t. They called [Marie Pinault] and [my] family when nothing came out of that… We don't know what happened.”

Sherbrooke was once a stronghold for the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, which had a compound in town consisting of three fortified buildings with bulletproof windows and “armed surveillance.” The clubhouse was the site of a 1985 quintuple murder, and was demolished by the province in July 2021.

Most of the patients Chaput saw in her prison practice were bikers, according to Chaput-Raby. At one point, she said, detectives considered the possibility that the killer might have been someone who followed her down to New Hampshire from Canada.

“But I think police checked the cameras, everything passing by the border the day before, and they didn’t see anything,” Chaput-Raby said. “So the most possible is [that it was] someone who [didn’t] know her.”

It would be “too strong a statement” to say that investigators have ruled out the notion that someone may have tailed Chaput down to the White Mountains, according to New Hampshire Associate Attorney General Jeffery Strelzin.

“The reality is, if you have an unsolved case, until you find out what happened, it would be difficult to say that you’ve ruled out anything,” Strelzin told The Daily Beast. “Certainly, one aspect of the case was trying to determine what Louise's activities were, to give a timeline for her. And, you know, there was always the possibility that someone did follow her down from Canada.”

New Hampshire is one of the safest states in the nation, Strelzin pointed out. “Random crimes are rare,” he said. “And random murder cases are even more rare.”

Chaput’s body was exposed to the elements for a week before it was found. But the cold temperatures meant decomposition wasn’t an issue, said Strelzin. The area, which is along the Appalachian Trail, is popular with tourists from across the country.

However, Strelzin said the week-long delay means there “could have been people in that area from other parts of the country that might have seen or heard things that didn’t mean anything at the time. But had they known what happened to Louise afterwards, it may have had some significance.”

Not everybody watches the news, Strelzin noted, and Chaput’s murder didn’t make national headlines.

“It’s certainly possible that people had seen her or interacted with her and seen her, potentially, with our suspect or suspects, but then left the area and have no idea that anything ever happened to her,” Strelzin said. “And so they wouldn't think of coming forward with that information, and we wouldn’t know about them.”

Like Strelzin, local journalist Barbara Tetrault has followed the Chaput case from the beginning and knows the family as well as the cops involved. If Chaput wasn’t killed by an acquaintance of some sort, Tetrault thinks there “must have been some interaction between her and someone who was hiking.”

“I can’t imagine that she initiated some altercation but someone might have been having a bad day and said something to her and she responded,” Tetrault told The Daily Beast. “You know, usually stabbings are considered crimes of passion. To physically stab someone—and I understand there were multiple stab wounds—there’s a degree of anger. So there had to have been some spark... some small thing that set it off.”

In an attempt to try and shake loose some answers, Pinault and Masson have traveled to the area annually, often with one or both of Chaput’s daughters, on or around the anniversary of her death. There, they speak with residents, hang posters around town asking for information, and meet with investigators.

As in most investigations, they have run into a lot of leads that ultimately went nowhere. The second or third year that Pinault and Masson visited New Hampshire, Masson said a shopkeeper told them, “Oh, yeah, I remember the woman hiker from Quebec. She came here and she bought something.”

They mentioned it to police, who checked the credit card data and ruled it out.

“People want to help, and then they say things like this and the police have to kind of sort it out,” said Masson.

For years, when she joined Pinault and Masson, it was “a traumatizing experience,” said Chaput-Raby. “I mean, we knew that the murderer was probably around there.”

But they continue to make the trip, never letting too much pessimism seep in.

“It’s been 20 years,” said Pinault. “It’s certainly not an active case. That’s why we do what we do every year. Because she was not known to anyone there. So if we don’t do it, nobody will.”

The New Hampshire Department of Justice Cold Case Unit currently has 140 unsolved murders on its plate.

Cold cases “are the hardest cases to solve,” Strelzin conceded. “Not to sound trite, but that's why they’re cold—they’re the most difficult cases.”

Cases such as Chaput’s have periods of dormancy, and then flurries of activity, Strelzin continued. There is no way to predict when tips will come in, and obviously some cases are more promising than others.

“The more recent cases, within the last 20 or 30 years, are typically more solvable,” he said. “But, you know, sometimes you make your own luck, and sometimes you get lucky.”

Masson is hopeful that new advances in DNA technology might offer a break in the case. The last time he spoke to police, he said they told him they were “using touch DNA,” or trace samples of DNA harvested from skin cells left at a crime scene. And although modern forensic systems are now sensitive enough to analyze tiny amounts of DNA, questions have been raised about touch DNA falsely targeting an innocent person.

Chaput-Raby said she has long kept the most explicit details of the case at arm’s length “because sometimes you lose hope. And I think the closer you are to the person, the harder it is to be into that horror of the murder story.”

But as of 2019 or so, she feels she is old enough, and has enough distance from her mom’s killing, to dive deeper. She has set up a Facebook page about the crime, in hopes of someone seeing it and submitting a tip to police. She is also considering making a documentary about the case.

“I now kind of understand what people find interesting about the case, like it’s an unsolved puzzle, right?” she said. “But when you’re too close to it, you cannot see it like that.”

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Tetrault still holds out hope that Chaput’s murder will eventually be solved. However, she said, “in my heart of hearts, I think that if it hasn’t been solved by now, the trail is getting pretty thin. But, as a reporter, stranger things have happened.”

Strelzin said the hope is that his office can ultimately solve every case it works on, to “provide justice for that victim and their family. That's our goal.”

“I can tell you that State Police detectives and our office worked very hard on day one, to try to figure out what happened,” he said. “And since then, have worked very, very hard. And are obviously disappointed that we have not been able to solve this case for Louise and her family.”

After getting to know Chaput’s friends and relatives, Strelzin said it has become clear to him and his colleagues that she was “an amazing person...professionally and personally.”

“She was fearless,” said Chaput-Raby. “So it was OK for her to go alone in the mountains for a weekend, you know? So yeah, she was a beautiful woman. A beautiful mother.”