For the small-town historian recalling days gone by, care must be taken to avoid a “Mayberry Effect.” In these pages, we have recounted many fond memories of Milford past — From a wartime Santa Claus passing out candy to tots at the Oval to the glories of the 1972 boys’ basketball championship to the pleasure of licking a strawberry cone on summer nights at Haywards. Those memories are authentic and recall the joys of growing up in an American small town. And yet every community has its own parallel underbelly that should not be ignored in an effort to simply recall "good times." In Milford, what went on behind one closed door was exposed in dramatic fashion in the summer of 1981.
At 7:00 on the evening of July 29, 1981, 38-year-old Priscilla Szelog stood on the doorstep of the family home at 43 Ridgefield Drive in Milford waving her hands frantically. When her brother-in-law and sister ran into the house, they found Priscilla’s husband, Hank Szelog, dead on the floor from a shotgun wound. As the family gun lay next to her, Priscilla Szelog cradled her husband, exclaiming, “I must have shot him. I didn’t mean to do it.” She was taken to the County Jail as her husband was pronounced dead at the scene.
It quickly became clear that the Szelogs and their three teenage sons lived in an extremely troubled household. Both parents worked at the local Dunkin Donuts, Henry as a baker and Priscilla working the cash register. But all was not well at home. Hank beat his wife frequently and barred her from the telephone. Priscilla experienced severe weight loss and suffered several mental breakdowns resulting in trips to Manchester State Hospital. Hank was later described by Priscilla’s lawyers as a “severe, reprehensible and cruel man” who had literally driven his wife crazy, threw his sons out of the house, and planned her murder. But Priscilla seemed to demonstrate a passionate loyalty to her husband, even after his death, telling police: “He should have killed me or beat me or shot me. I've been afraid of that man. He pulled my hair and he's slapped me around — he's done just about everything, but I took it 'cause I loved him,'”
Priscilla Szelog’s April 1982 second-degree murder trial held at Hillsboro County Superior Court was followed closely by locals in the Milford Cabinet and Nashua Telegraph. Both defense and prosecution lawyers agreed on the primary question at trial: “Did Priscilla Szelog knowingly kill her husband?” But defense attorney Francis Holland defined “knowingly” rather broadly. He told the jury that “Henry Szelog had abandoned all morality and responsibility for his family, took up with other women, absenting himself from the house at all hours of the day and night and constantly throwing the fact, verbally, physically, and vilely into the face of his wife and children. He treated his wife like a possession or chattel.” Holland claimed that Priscilla was justified in shooting her husband “in self-defense as an unconscious instinctive survival action.”
The prosecution admitted that Hank Szelog was “not a very nice man” but said that his behavior had little to do with whether Priscilla should go to jail for murder. Dramatically holding the murder weapon before him during closing arguments, prosecutor Donald Perrault said Szelog knew what she was doing when she “picked up the shotgun, pushed the cartridge fully in and shot her husband.”
In April 1982, a 7-man, 5-woman jury returned a decision of “innocent” on both the second-degree murder and manslaughter charges. Priscilla Szelog was free to go. While that resolution seems, at the very least, a humane result, it remains difficult to wrestle with Szelog’s words immediately following the jury’s decision: “The verdict is fine, but I just miss my husband.”
Priscilla Szelog with her attorney Francis Holland after the acquittal.
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