By Nicholas Brown
Staff Writer

Amidst a host of recent investigative news reports surfacing since the arrest of a 37-year-old Hopkinton man, Eric Windhurst, for the 1985 murder of a Hooksett man, Daniel Paquette, the courts may soon release official records regarding the 20-year-old case.

Senior Assistant Attorney General Jeffery A. Strelzin said WMUR-TV filed a motion in Merrimack Superior Court for records to be released, and said his office responded with a notice of no objection.

Windhurst, a construction worker and building contractor, was indicted on first-degree murder charges on Friday, Dec. 16. He was scheduled for arraignment at Superior Court on Wednesday, Dec. 21.

Defense lawyer Mark Sisti said Windhurst was planning to plead innocent to the charges. Windhurst is charged with shooting Paquette while the then 36-year-old was welding outside his Hooksett home at 898 Whitehall Road.

Investigators say Paquette was shot through the heart from a distance on Nov. 9, 1985, and later pronounced dead at the Elliot Hospital in Manchester. Windhurst was then 17.

Local and state police have withheld the details of the investigation since Windhurst's arrest, when he was taken from a Henniker job site.

Hooksett Police Chief Stephen Agrafiotis was in his second year on the town's police force as a patrolman when the alleged murder occurred. Agrafiotis has been working intermittently over the last 20 years with local and state investigators.

"We don't forget crimes, the victims, or the families," he said after the arrest. "Law enforcement never forgets."

State police Lt. Russ Conte said an arrest after such a lengthy investigation is gratifying.

"There's a victim's family, and for 20 years I'm sure they've wondered," he said.

Several family members and friends of Paquette's have publicly encouraged the investigation since the alleged murder. In 1990, the shooting was the subject of a television taping for the program "Unsolved Mysteries," according to Union Leader reports.

Jack Keller, a former Hooksett police sergeant, said he was the second officer on the scene after the shooting.

He said a fireman on the scene suggested that the hole in Paquette's chest may have been due to a severe electric shock, as Paquette was working with heavy-duty welding machinery.

But Keller said he received a phone call later that day from a surgeon at Elliot Hospital who found bullet fragments in the wound.

Keller said police secured the area around Paquette's home and soon found a shell casing 150 to 200 yards away.

"The area behind the house was heavily wooded and it was a fairly popular hunting area," said Keller.

The day after the shooting, Keller said, people in the neighborhood complained that their phones weren't working. Police then found a single bullet lodged in a telephone cable behind the area where Paquette was shot.

Keller said he remembers the caliber of the bullet being what he guessed to be .270, which is "high powered."

By the time Keller left the Hooksett force in the early 1990s, he said police hadn't yet ruled out the possibility of a hunting accident, but said Paquette's brother, Victor Paquette, would regularly visit the station to urge investigators to keep pursuing the possibility of murder.

Conte, who's worked on the case for about 10 years, said tips have led investigators throughout New Hampshire and to other states.

Longtime Hooksett Police Chief James Oliver, who retired in 1999, said he he never felt the case was cold.

"I always felt confident that something would be done at some point," he said.