Pelham swingers club worries neighbors

By STEPHANIE HOOPER, Telegraph Staff
hoopers@telegraph-nh.com

PELHAM – Neighbors of a home that formerly held swinging sex parties say they are concerned about how news of the club has affected their children.

“I’m just very upset that all the kids know what was going on,” said Pamela Deangelo of 3 Shelly Drive.

Pelham police served the owners of 8 Shelley Drive, Thomas and Diane Lynch, with a cease-and-desist order a week ago, shortly after conducting an undercover operation at a swinging party at the home.

The couple allegedly was using the home to operate Club E’lan, advertised as a “premier swing club” serving adults 25 and older.

Deangelo, whose two sons are 7 and 10, said many of the young children in the neighborhood have been talking about the alleged activities at the house ever since news reports began circulating at the beginning of the week.

The matter has been fodder for many jokes in Pelham.

On the town’s message board, one person posted the “Top 10 reasons why swingers clubs don’t belong in Pelham,” which included the impossibility of a booth at the town’s Old Home Days celebration and the fact that Pelham doesn’t issue permits for dungeons.

Many of the parents who live on Shelly Drive, however, are not amused.

“At least before, the kids didn’t know what was going on,” Deangelo said. “Now my 7-year-old is asking questions and the 10-year-old is talking about it like it’s funny.”

Two Pelham police officers posing as a couple attended the club on two occasions during a monthlong investigation and said the Lynches were charging people $50 to attend. Rooms in the home had been decorated in different themes, and the basement was reportedly remodeled to look like a dungeon.

Police said the Lynches, who live in another home in Wakefield, Mass., violated town zoning ordinances by installing hot tubs without obtaining the proper permits and operating a “sexual-encounter center” in a residential neighborhood.

With the cease-and-desist order, the town also ordered the couple to apply for permits within seven days for the hot tubs already installed at the home or face fines of $275 a day.

The couple has not applied for any permits, an official at Pelham Town Hall said Friday. The Lynches did not return phone calls to their Wakefield home seeking comment.

Pelham police Lt. Joseph Roark, who initially said the club was being investigated for criminal charges, said Wednesday that no charges were forthcoming.

In fact, the parties can resume as long as the couple is not operating a business, he said.

“If they want to have a swinging Christmas party, they are more than entitled to,” Roark said. “But they cannot charge a fee.”

Roark said the parties must also not affect traffic or disturb neighbors with loud noise or indecent activities out in the open.

One mother of two who lives near the Lynches’ home said she wants the Lynches to sell the property.

“I just hope they sell the house and get out of here,” said the woman, who did not want to be identified.

She said she is disturbed by the fact that many of the people who attended the club were from out of state. Police had reported that many of the cars had license plates from Massachusetts, New York and Maine.

“You never know who these people are,” she said. “I just don’t want that going on in my neighborhood.”

She said it didn’t matter to her if the parties were legal.

“All I know is that I will be one of those people that if I see traffic, I’ll call the cops. I will make it very difficult for them,” she said.

Susan Keenen of 1 Shelly Drive said she is angry with the Lynches for bringing the parties into her neighborhood.

“I think it is pretty tasteless to do that in a nice neighborhood like this. Why didn’t he do it at his house in Massachusetts?” Keenen said.

“He thinks something is wrong if he is not doing it there,” she said.

Keenen said she and her neighbors began to suspect something was going on at the house when cars began to “stream” up the street to the Lynches’ home late in the evening.

“It was sneaky. It was like they met somewhere else and then they came here,” Keenen said.

Two residents said curious children have been poking around in a large, brush-filled area around the home, and parents have been scooting kids off the property.

“They have been going down there and looking around,” said Suzette McColgan of 7 Shelly Drive.

McColgan, whose three children are 9, 11 and 13, said she was put in the awkward situation of talking about the swinging lifestyle with her 13-year-old.

She said she told her two youngest children just that the couple was in trouble for running a business out of their home.

McColgan, who has lived in the area for 12 years, said the neighborhood has always been “tight-knit,” with block parties and other activities in the summer months.

She said the Lynches did not participate in the neighborhood functions, and that she had heard the couple had bought the home as a “getaway,” which she thought was strange since they lived not far away in Massachusetts.

“I would have gone to the beach,” she said.

McColgan said the Lynches were very polite to children who trespassed in the woods on their property with off-road vehicles, and added that she wouldn’t wish to have them move.

But McColgan doesn’t see how the swinging parties could resume legally without disturbing the neighborhood.

“Now that it has been discovered, I certainly would not want it to continue,” she said. “The kids know. They are not stupid. If they see cars parked up the driveway, they are going to know what is going on.”

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