New Hampshire cold case solved, suspect identified in Carrie Hicks killing

Carrie Hicks’s killing sat in cold-case limbo for 19 years before New Hampshire authorities finally pinned it on Wayne Ring, closing one of the state’s oldest unsolved homicides and ending the uncertainty around what happened inside a house in Acworth.

Hicks, 25, was found dead on a living-room sofa at 146 Beryl Mountain Road on the morning of February 24, 2007. The state says she died from two gunshot wounds to the head, while Ring was found alive but injured with a single gunshot wound to the head. Ring died on May 26, 2012, at age 57, so no criminal charges will be filed.

What broke the case open was not a single tip, but a fresh look at the evidence investigators had never been able to square in 2007. The New Hampshire Department of Justice said the renewed investigation re-examined forensic evidence, witness statements, and autopsy records, and that Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jennie Duval reviewed the original autopsy in 2026. Bloodstain-pattern reconstruction then showed Hicks’s first gunshot wound was a contact wound that would have immediately incapacitated her, making it medically and physically impossible for her to have fired the second, more distant shot.

That finding mattered because the first investigation never definitively established the order of events inside the house. Hicks had gunshot residue on her hand, Ring gave conflicting accounts, and the scene left open competing interpretations for years. New Hampshire Public Radio reported that Hicks had lived at times in Ring’s home, though the two were not romantically involved, and that both struggled with mental illness and depression. Investigators later learned the pair had openly discussed suicide and formed a pact. Hicks had also written journal entries describing a gun purchase and her intentions to kill herself, and witnesses said she told Ring to shoot her twice so she would not be left alive.

Attorney General John M. Formella and State Police Colonel Mark B. Hall said the New Hampshire Cold Case Unit has now formally closed and classified the matter as solved. The unit, created by law in 2009, handles homicides more than five years old that have gone stale because leads ran dry or resources were stretched thin. State officials have since expanded its staffing and forensic tools, and the Hicks case is now the clearest example of why that matters: old evidence can still speak, and when it does, it can finally settle a death that has haunted a family for nearly two decades. Carrie Hicks’s family said they deeply appreciated the state reopening and resolving her case, a long-delayed ending for a killing that no longer sits in doubt.