Mother in N.H. murder-suicide allegedly embezzled from her job

Shortly before she shot and killed her husband, two of their children, and herself, a New Hampshire woman was reportedly 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, told The Boston Globe he suspected Long of stealing about $660,000 from the business over several years. 

According to the 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. 

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 told the Globe that he and his bookkeeper first noticed the alleged embezzlement on June 18, when they realized a large number of checks from the business account had been written out to Long and deposited into her personal account. Neither Fisher nor the Hampton Police Department responded to Boston.com’s requests for comment Friday. 

Fisher reportedly confronted Long and asked her to provide three months’ worth of prior bank statements — a request she did not fulfill until Aug. 5, according to the Globe. But according to Fisher, the statements Long sent were missing pages and looked “very unusual.”

“My bookkeeper went through them and they weren’t matching up. They were all over the place,” he told the Globe. Long’s bank also determined the statements were “doctored and manipulated,” the newspaper reported. 

Fisher told the Globe he confronted Long again and asked her to accompany him to the bank and provide him the statements directly from the teller, and they agreed to meet up on Aug. 11. He explained that he tried to be flexible on timing, knowing that Long’s husband had been diagnosed with cancer just months earlier. 

Shortly before they were due to meet, however, Long sent Fisher a text saying that “she was resigning, or she could stay in some sort of remote capacity, or I could terminate her,” he told the newspaper. “She gave me three options, essentially, of how we could proceed.”

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, per the Globe. The Hampton Police Department hadn’t completed its investigation prior to Long’s death, and she was never arrested, the newspaper reported.

Fisher told the Globe he was devastated when he heard about the family’s deaths and particularly “heartbroken” for the Long children. He also said he doesn’t plan to seek recovery from Emily Long’s estate, citing the family’s surviving toddler. 

“I feel like the child should get all those assets,” he told the Globe. “That’s the only fair thing, or what I feel is right.”

In recent videos posted to a now-private TikTok account, Emily Long spoke candidly about feeling depressed and concerned for her children amid her husband’s treatment for the aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma. However, New Hampshire officials urged the public to avoid speculating that the murder-suicide “was caused by a single reason or stressor.”

Abby Patkin is a general assignment news reporter whose work touches on public transit, crime, health, and everything in between.