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Mother in N.H. murder-suicide allegedly embezzled more than $600,000 from her job
Emily Long had been accused of stealing from her employer shortly before she shot and killed her husband, two of their children, and herself.
Shortly before she shot and killed her husband, two of their children, and herself, a New Hampshire woman was accused of embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from her employer.
Emily Long, 34, had worked as the operations manager for Wing-Itz, a chain of chicken restaurants with three Seacoast locations. The company’s owner, Derek Fisher, said he suspected Long of stealing more than $600,000 from the business over several years.
Previously:
According to The Boston Globe, the allegations were documented in a Hampton police report filed Aug. 11 — one week before Long’s body was discovered in her Madbury home alongside that of her husband, 48-year-old Ryan Long, and their two oldest children: 8-year-old son Parker and 6-year-old daughter Ryan.
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Authorities later concluded that Emily Long had shot and killed each of them before turning the gun on herself. A third child, a toddler, survived without physical injury.
Fisher said he first noticed the alleged embezzlement around June 18, when he realized a large number of checks from the business account had been written out to Long and deposited into her personal account. He confronted Long and asked her to provide three months’ worth of her personal bank statements — a request she did not fulfill until Aug. 5.
“Which was concerning,” Fisher recalled. “And also, once I received them, they were all scanned documents and they were missing pages and they just looked really odd.”
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He said he brought the documents to the bank that had supposedly produced them, “and they said that all the statements that I provided them had all been manipulated or doctored in one way or another.”
Fisher said he confronted Long again and expressed his concerns about the inconsistencies, asking her to accompany him to the bank and provide him the statements directly from the teller. They agreed to meet the morning of Aug. 11.
Shortly before they were due to meet, however, Long sent Fisher a text saying “that she was resigning from her position, but if I decided that I wanted to keep her for a remote capacity, then I could,” he recalled. “And then at the end, she said that I could terminate her if I wasn’t happy with either of those options.”
When Fisher pressed her about whether she planned on showing up to the bank, Long allegedly told him she was at an appointment and wouldn’t be able to meet with him until later in the week. At that point, he decided to take the matter up with local police.
Hampton Chief of Police Alex Reno confirmed the Aug. 11 police report identified Long as a suspect.
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“Our department was not able to engage in a meaningful investigation prior to her untimely death,” Reno said in an email. “The case remains open, but suspended.”
Further examination of Wing-Itz business records indicated Long had been taking cash deposits and writing checks to herself from the business’s accounts since January 2023, Fisher said.
“I have three restaurant locations, I was doing building, I had a lot of different things going on” at the time, he explained. “I gave her this responsibility because I trusted her.”
In the end, Fisher said, “we found out that there were zero cash deposits in any of my … business bank accounts since January 2023.” He estimated Long embezzled more than $660,000 from his businesses in a scheme that continued up until July — even after Fisher first confronted her.
Still, he said he doesn’t plan to seek recovery from Long’s estate, citing the family’s surviving toddler.
“In my heart and just me personally, I feel like the right thing to do is that that child deserves to get whatever’s left from the estate,” Fisher said. “I’m not going to punish him for something that has nothing to do with him. It’s not his fault. He didn’t deserve any of this, you know? It’s a tragedy. It’s probably one of the worst things I’ve ever had to deal with and go through in my life.”
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In recent videos posted to a now-private TikTok account, Long spoke candidly about feeling depressed and concerned for her children amid her husband’s treatment for the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma — a diagnosis he received earlier this year. New Hampshire officials have urged the public to avoid speculating that the murder-suicide “was caused by a single reason or stressor.”
