Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Not Suspicious: How the State Closed the Book on Megan Robinson

A registered sex offender led police to her body. Within two days, before the toxicology was back, the New Hampshire State Police called her death not suspicious. Then they stopped talking.

Full disclosure: Megan Robinson was my fiancée and is the mother of my daughter. I am a source for parts of this account, including the text messages reproduced below, which come from my own phone. I have set out my involvement plainly so you can weigh it against everything that follows.

At 12:54 on the afternoon of October 20, 2021, a Sanbornton police lieutenant walked down an open bulkhead into the basement of a house at 753 Sanborn Road and found a woman on the floor, face down. Her name was Megan Ann Robinson. She was 33, and she was the mother of my daughter. The man who walked the lieutenant to that bulkhead lived in the house. His name is Richard Glover, a registered sex offender. Eleven days later, on a roadside in Campton, the police would arrest him as a wanted fugitive.

By the next afternoon the state had its answer. An autopsy had been completed at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Concord. The cause and manner of death were listed as pending toxicology, which means unknown. And the New Hampshire State Police still told the public the death did not appear suspicious, that there was no danger to anyone, and that all relevant parties had been identified. They added that they did not expect to release anything further, and they kept that promise. A woman was found dead in a registered sex offender’s basement after a car crash no one had reported to police, and the state announced its conclusion before the laboratory finished its work.

I have spent four and a half years asking the State Police a version of the same question. How do you decide a death is not suspicious before you know what caused it? Here is what the public record shows, and what the people who were paid to look chose not to chase.

The afternoon at 753 Sanborn Road

The account of that afternoon comes from the Sanbornton Police Department’s own narrative, written by the reporting lieutenant and entered the next day. A little before one o’clock he responded to a call about an unfamiliar, damaged vehicle in the driveway. The property’s co-owner, Sheryle Wentworth, said she had never seen the car. It was a 2013 Toyota Highlander with front-end damage and no airbags deployed, and a plate check came back to Megan Robinson of Tuftonboro.

Glover, who lived at the address, did the talking. He told the lieutenant he had heard a crash in the pre-dawn hours and had let an impaired female driver bring the car back to the house. No such accident had been reported to police anywhere nearby that night. When the lieutenant said he would tow the car if no one could reach the owner, the narrative records that Glover began speaking lower and volunteered that the driver was in a shed out back, and that he would be thrown out of the house if the owner found out. The lieutenant checked the sheds and found no one. Then Glover walked him to the rear of the house and said she was right down here in the basement. The bulkhead doors were open. Megan was at the bottom of the stairs.

That is the scene the state inherited. A crashed car with no reported accident, a registered sex offender moving his story from a shed to a basement, and a dead woman the public would soon be told was nothing to worry about.

Who was living in that house

Richard R. Glover, born June 20, 1970, who also goes by Rico, is on New Hampshire’s sex offender registry. His qualifying offense is felonious sexual assault — sexual penetration of a victim aged 13 to 16 — adjudicated in 1993 out of an Orange County, Florida court. New Hampshire requires him to register for it.

The registry also carries his criminal history, and it is long. It lists convictions for simple assault, criminal threatening on two occasions, criminal mischief, cruelty to animals, two violations of a protective order, a felony drug sale, and a years-long run of failures to comply with the sex offender registry itself. This was the man at the scene. This was the last person known to have been with Megan alive.

He was also a man the courts were already chasing. On October 31, 2021, eleven days after Megan was found, the Campton Police Department stopped a car on U.S. Route 3 for an equipment violation and recognized Glover, then 51, riding as a passenger. He was wanted for skipping his own sentencing on a 2019 conviction for failing to register as a sex offender — a warrant that did not appear overnight. He was held without bail and taken to the Grafton County House of Corrections. The 2019 case, indictments for not reporting a change of address and a new social media account within the required window, had listed him as a resident of Sanborn Road in Sanbornton. The same road. The same kind of house where Megan was found.

The verdict came before the science

Here is the timeline that should trouble anyone. Megan’s body was found around midday on October 20. The autopsy was completed on October 21. On that same day, the State Police and the Sanbornton department put out a release identifying her and stating the cause and manner of death were pending toxicology. In the same statement they said the death did not appear suspicious, that everyone involved had been identified, and that there was no danger to the public. Belknap County Attorney Andrew Livernois confirmed her body had been found inside a residence she was visiting. The Conway Daily Sun reported that the State Police did not expect to put out anything more.

Read it again. The toxicology was not back. The cause of death was, by the state’s own words, unknown. Not suspicious is a conclusion, and you do not get to reach it while the central fact, what killed her, is still sitting in a lab. A dead woman, a crashed car, a wanted sex offender whose story slid from a shed to a basement, and the determination the public got was that there was nothing to see here.

The questions I asked, and the answers I got

I did not let it go. In the weeks after Megan died I traded messages with a New Hampshire State Police investigator who identified himself to me as Brian Ross. He was courteous. He checked in on how my daughter and I were holding up. He asked me for my daughter’s date of birth, and I gave it to him.

I also kept asking about Megan, and I told him plainly that things did not add up. I offered what I had, writing that I had a stack of texts and voicemails and other information about her if any of it was needed. The substantive answer never came. What came back, more than once, was a version of the same line: I don’t have any further information to share about the investigation. I told him I appreciated the reply and asked him to tell me if there was anything I could do. There was a thumbs-up reaction, and then there was nothing.

I am not going to pretend a returned text message is misconduct. It is not, and he was decent to me. But an investigator telling a victim’s family there is nothing more to share, while a wanted sex offender sits at the center of the scene and the toxicology is still pending, is not the picture of a case being worked. It is the picture of a case being closed.

The registry the public was trusting

There is one more failure here, and it belongs to the state’s own public-safety machinery. The sex offender registry exists so an ordinary person can look up a name and learn who is living nearby. I have two versions of Glover’s registry record. In the one bearing a July 2022 photo, the criminal-history field is blank. In the one bearing a July 2025 photo, that same field lists more than a dozen convictions going back to 2004. A parent who pulled his record in 2022 would have seen a man with a qualifying sex offense and, where his record of assaults and threats and protective-order violations belonged, nothing at all.

The two records do not even agree on who he is. One lists his race as white and his weight at 130 pounds. The other lists his race as black and his weight at 175. This is the document the state asks the public to trust with their children’s safety.

And to answer the question I am asked most often: yes, his record has grown since Megan died. The 2025 registry shows two new class A felony convictions for failing to comply with the registry, entered in February and April of 2023, the felony reserved for offenders who keep failing after they have already been convicted of it once. The man the state was not worried about in October 2021 went on to collect two more felonies for refusing to obey the one law meant to keep track of him.

What I want

This is not a demand for a particular answer. It is a demand for the work. Granite State Report has filed Right-to-Know requests with the Sanbornton Police Department, the State Police Major Crime Unit, and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for the complete file: the full incident report, the medical examiner’s final cause and manner of death, the scene photographs and logs, and any record of whether anyone ran Glover for warrants that afternoon.

Four and a half years on, the cause of Megan’s death has never been made public. The man who led police to her body kept breaking the law, and his record kept growing. And the people whose job was to look closely told a young girl’s father, in so many words, that there was nothing left to say. A death is not suspicious when the evidence shows it is not. It is not suspicious because a press release said so two days in, before anyone had finished looking.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. The author was Megan Robinson’s fiancé and is the father of her daughter; see the disclosure above. Every factual claim was checked against the sources in the table; documentary records carry a VERIFIED status, while the registry-change comparison and the text exchange are marked ATTRIBUTED and tied to the dated material provided. Megan’s recorded date of death is October 19, 2021; her body was found around midday October 20. As of publication the State Police characterization of the death as “not suspicious” stood and the final cause and manner of death had not been made public. Where the public record offered no answer, this piece says so rather than guessing. GSR is aware of further allegations the author has raised about private individuals connected to Megan’s life; because they cannot be independently corroborated from the public record, they are not published here. This account is built on documents, not on theories. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when. Reach the editor at granitestatereport@gmail.com.