On Wednesday, in a small courtroom at Grafton Superior Court in North Haverhill, Peter Mancini’s tangled story of deceit finally caught up with him. The 48-year-old West Lebanon man, dressed in the quiet, careful posture of someone who knows exactly what is coming, pleaded guilty to unemployment compensation fraud and perjury. Judge Lawrence MacLeod accepted the pleas and sentenced him to two and a half to five years in state prison. It was not the first time Mancini had stood before a judge. In fact, a suspended sentence from a 2022 witness tampering conviction was waiting in the wings, and this new fraud conviction activated it, pulling him into a deeper cycle of incarceration. As the judge held up documents and asked Mancini to confirm that he understood the rights he was waiving, there was little drama left in the room. The case had already been resolved through a negotiated plea agreement, and the most important human decision had been made weeks earlier: admit what he did, accept the consequences, and hope that the woman who helped him might somehow find a way through her own legal troubles. Still, the weight of the moment was unmistakable. Mancini was not just losing his freedom; he was confronting the accumulated cost of a series of bad choices that began long before he filed his first fraudulent unemployment claim.
The roots of this case lie in a surprisingly small crime. Mancini filed for unemployment benefits in August 2025, claiming that a job offer had been rescinded through no fault of his own. But that was not true. According to the affidavit supporting the charges, Mancini lost his job opportunity at Nissan of Lebanon because he had been caught on camera stealing parts from one of their trucks. It is the kind of detail that makes a case feel less like a faceless bureaucratic violation and more like a painfully human story of self-sabotage. Rather than acknowledging the loss and moving on, Mancini decided to turn to the unemployment system, which is designed to help people who lose work through no fault of their own, and exploit it. Over time, he received more than $11,000 in unemployment compensation, including more than $2,000 after he was locked up in January. The money was not an enormous windfall, but it was enough to matter, enough to lead to a felony conviction, and enough to pull another person into the mess with him. It also complicated his legal status: Mancini was already on probation for a 2022 felony conviction of witness tampering, and that prior conviction meant he had very little room to make additional mistakes. But he made one anyway, then another, and then a series of them that eventually became impossible to untangle.
Once Mancini was taken into custody in January, after pleading guilty to receiving stolen property and a probation violation, his benefits should have stopped. Instead, they continued, because he found someone willing to help him cheat the system from the outside: his girlfriend, Hannah Vanalstyne. The 42-year-old woman, with whom he shared a home in West Lebanon, began certifying weekly that Mancini was available for work, physically and mentally able to work without restrictions, and actively searching for a job. Those statements were wildly false. Mancini was behind bars at Grafton County Jail, with no computer and no internet access, and he was in no position to perform work searches or accept a job. The absurdity of the situation was captured in one particular claim: Mancini said he had made an in-person job search at West Lebanon Feed and Supply. The business told investigators he had never applied in person, and jail records confirmed he was in custody on the day he claimed to have walked in the door. It was a lie so careless that it almost seems like a cry to be caught. And in a way, it was. The recorded jail calls between Mancini and Vanalstyne made the scheme even more explicit. Time and again, Mancini asked and reminded her to file his weekly claims on the computer at their West Lebanon residence. He was directing the fraud from a jail cell, and she was carrying it out, perhaps out of loyalty, perhaps out of love, perhaps out of a misguided sense that she could keep him from falling further.
The investigation that unraveled their scheme began in a routine place. In March, Department of Employment Security investigators identified Mancini through a monthly review of jail rosters. That simple cross-check—comparing unemployment claimants against lists of incarcerated people—was enough to expose the deception. Investigators found that Mancini falsely represented that he was searching for work and available to work, omitting the obvious fact that he was incarcerated. The affidavit described Mancini and Vanalstyne as acting in concert, a legal phrase that captures the way their separate choices became one shared crime. Vanalstyne was indicted in May on felony charges of unemployment compensation fraud and theft by receiving stolen property. During an interview at the West Lebanon residence she shared with Mancini, she admitted to making the unemployment claims because Mancini had asked her to. There was no elaborate conspiracy, no sophisticated identity theft operation. Just two people, one jail cell, and a computer in a living room. Vanalstyne has since signed a notice of intent to plead guilty to unemployment compensation fraud, and she is scheduled for a plea and sentencing hearing on August 18 at 10:30 a.m. in Grafton Superior Court. The voicemail left for her on Wednesday was not returned, but her path through the legal system will now run parallel to the one Mancini has already walked.
At Mancini’s plea and sentencing hearing, the details of the agreement were laid out clearly in open court. Judge MacLeod accepted the guilty pleas to felony unemployment compensation fraud and perjury. Because Mancini had a previously suspended sentence of two and a half to five years from his 2022 witness tampering case, that older sentence was brought forward, now no longer suspended. The negotiated agreement, fully worked out by both the state and the defense, stipulated that the 2022 sentence would run concurrently with a sentence of two and a half to five years for unemployment compensation fraud. In addition, Mancini received a sentence of one and a half years for perjury, which was suspended for ten years. He was also granted 110 days of pretrial confinement credit, meaning the time he had already spent in custody would count toward his sentence. The court ordered him to pay more than $11,000 in restitution to the New Hampshire Department of Employment Security, money that would repay the benefits he had fraudulently collected. After the hearing, both the prosecutor, Amanda Jacobson, and the defense attorney, Dalton Ford, declined to comment. The silence was perhaps appropriate. There was nothing left to say; the legal system had done its work, and the sentence was meant to begin immediately.
What remains is a cautionary tale, but also a very human one. Unemployment benefits exist to help people who lose jobs through no fault of their own. Mancini undermined that purpose by claiming a loss that was entirely his own fault, then continued to exploit the system while in jail. He did not do it alone; his girlfriend helped, and she now faces her own felony charges. The harm extends beyond the money. There are investigators who had to trace each false certification, businesses that had to deny that Mancini ever applied for work, taxpayers who absorbed the cost of benefits that should never have been paid, and a relationship that will almost certainly not survive the strain of shared criminality. Mancini’s prior conviction, his probation status, and his decision to steal from a truck all paint a picture of a man who kept making choices that made his life harder. But there is something almost tragic in the details—the recorded jail calls, the girlfriend who admitted she did it because he asked, the claim of a job search at a feed supply store that he could not possibly have visited. It is the kind of story that could be dismissed as simply a criminal case, but it is also a reminder that fraud is often committed by ordinary people who convince themselves that the rules do not apply to them. Now Mancini will spend years in state prison, his girlfriend will face her own sentencing, and the two of them will have to live with the knowledge that their actions were not just illegal, but entirely avoidable.