A Gillett couple who implicated the city’s police chief in a domestic incident relied on second-hand information and a hunch for the basis of their accusations.
Howard Smith said conversations with the sister of Chief Jess Keplinger’s ex-girlfriend caused him and his wife, Mary, to believe the ex-girlfriend might have been verbally abused. Both the chief and the ex-girlfriend have strongly denied these accusations.
The ex-girlfriend and her sister requested the Times Herald not disclose their identities.
Keplinger and the woman dated for six years and had been living together in a home in Mountain before the relationship ended in October.
Howard Smith said comments made by the ex-girlfriend’s sister about the break-up made him suspicious.
“I don’t know of any violence or any hitting or anything in Mountain. I know nothing of that,” he said. “I’m not assuming that. But as far as verbal abuse, there was probably that.”
According to Howard Smith, the sister expressed concern about Keplinger’s girlfriend on the night of the break-up, telling his wife, “I didn’t sleep that night at all worrying about her, what she was going to do, where she was going to go.”
The sister, however, told the Time Herald she didn’t make these comments.
“No. All lies. They don’t like the police chief, so they’d say anything,” she said.
Mary Smith admitted to disliking Keplinger.
“Never liked him from Day 1,” she said.
She formed this negative impression when they met for the first time at a Lions Club meeting.
She was just as frank about their allegiance to Sgt. Dennis Heise, whom they contacted about their allegations.
“You can put it in bold letters that Denny Heise is our friend,” she said.
After a city investigation into the alleged incident and due to friction in the department, the city and Heise reached a retirement/separation agreement, effective Dec. 5.
The Smiths said Heise, a 15-year veteran of the department, was treated unfairly when he was not promoted to police chief in 2013 and again when he was assigned to work night shift for the department.
“He’s been wronged,” Mary Smith said.
Retaliation was not the reason they confided their worries to Heise about Keplinger’s ex-girlfriend, however, Howard Smith said. Instead, it was because they were worried about the woman’s safety.
Although they didn’t know what abuse might have occurred, they didn’t want to keep quiet in case there was abuse, he said.
The girlfriend’s sister said the Smiths went too far.
“People fight. Howard overexaggerated,” she said. “Boyfriend, girlfriend, normal disagreements, and they made it into whatever they wanted.”
The Smiths originally asked Heise to keep their names confidential, but once they read articles in the Times Herald, they agreed to be identified.
The Green Bay Police Department, contacted initially by Keplinger, is wrapping up a criminal conduct investigation into the incident. Oconto County Sheriff Mike Jansen said he authorized the investigation in order to determine if a false report had been filed.
Suggestions that Heise falsified the report are untrue, Howard Smith said.
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