Hancock’s Town Clerk Joan Joseph said it was sometime in June when she waited until the office was empty to search for the name of a N.H. plateholder based on a four-digit number given to her by a longtime friend, according to a court affidavit.
Joseph, 52, found the contact information for the plateholder, and gave it to Richard Ellingwood, a fellow teacher at ConVal High School. According to an arrest affidavit, Joseph is a special education paraprofessional and Ellingwood is a life skills teacher.
Ellingwood called the woman whose information Joseph had obtained on Aug. 22, according to the affadavit. The woman, who is referred to as D.L., said she received a call at about 9 p.m. that evening. She told police that the caller sounded nervous and said he said he was interested in obtaining her license plate because he said it had been in his family for many years.
D.L. said that she was upset by the call. She asked the caller how he had obtained her phone number because it was not listed in the phone book. She said the caller initially told her that he had acquired her personal information from the internet, but later admitted he had obtained the information from a town clerk or a law enforcement officer. D.L. said the caller eventually gave his name.
The day after the call was made, D.L lodged a complaint with the state’s Department of Safety. NH State Police Detective Sergeant David McCormack was assigned to investigate the complaint.
McCormack said on Sept. 12, he spoke with Ellingwood at his workplace. Ellingwood said he had been trying to find out who it belonged to for years.
The same day McCormack said he spoke with Joseph.
“Joseph told me that she knew I was there because she ‘gave a … name out on a plate,’” McCormack said in the arrest affidavit.
Joseph told the officer that she had known Ellingwood for a long time and he asked her if she ‘could run a plate or find out who owned the plate because the plate number had been in his family as long as he could remember.’”
She said Ellingwood thought that if he was able to describe the situation to the current plate holder, she would surrender it.
Joseph told McCormack that she was aware she was not supposed to disseminate the information. She said she “didn’t think it would get … this far.”
She also told the officer she thought Ellingwood already knew the plate owner’s name and where she lived.
The Department of Motor Vehicles is the administrator of the Municipal Agent Automation Project, or MAAP. The program gives towns online access to DMV motor vehicle registration and title system. Certificates show Joseph is a municipal agent and had completed a training course required by law, which includes a certificate that she completed a training course in the Driver Protection Privacy Act. Joseph signed a DPA form that specifies that motor vehicle information is confidential.
The act says it’s a crime to knowingly disclose information from a department record to a person known who is unauthorized. The crime is classified as a Class A misdemeanor, which carries a maximum of one year in prison and a $2,000 fine.
Joseph’s defense attorney, Ted Lothstein, said a pre-trial conference has been scheduled for Jan. 30. A clerk at the 8th Circuit District Court in Jaffrey said the two parties will have time to negotiate a settlement between now and the pre-trail conference, although if no resolution is reached the case could make its way to trial.