Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (10 page)

Upon entering the house, Verona took off her coat and draped it with her purse on the ladder-back chair at the end of the entrance hall, then turned left to enter the main area of the first floor. Verona headed for the dining-room table, where she found room among Susanne’s papers to drop her bag with the salad. She looked into the kitchen but saw no one.

“Susanne? Susanne?” she called out. No answer. The only sound was her own voice, calling her friend’s name. Verona sensed something unusual about the silence. The shower wasn’t running. No footsteps

could be heard from the bathroom or master bedroom. The house seemed empty but for her.

Verona turned toward the study, where the light was on and the wooden door was wide open. Her mind expected the room to be as it always was, in perfect order, an efficiency expert’s dream, with every paper in place and the hundreds of books on the floor-to-ceiling shelves lined up like soldiers at attention.

Instead, she saw bloody carnage. Verona’s eyes burned with the sight of her dear friend Susanne, lying chest-down near the door, a halo of blood pooled on the hardwood floor around her head. Blood had also soaked through her brown-and-black pullover sweater and extended down to her tan corduroy pants. A card table was toppled over, resting on her calves. A few feet away, also on the floor of the study, was Half. He was lying on his right side, but it was an unnatural repose: His head was resting on the bottom shelf of a blood-spattered bookcase. The force of the impact pushed back a half-dozen books, including a thick volume on homeopathic medicine and a paperback called
How Your Heart Works
. Half ’s gray-and-white lambswool sweater was drenched in blood, and more blood outlined a ragged slit in the left leg of his blue jeans. Indeed, blood was pooled or sprayed everywhere—on papers and photographs strewn on the floor, on the bookcases, on an ergonomic computer stool, on a wicker trash basket pressed against Half’s body, on a wooden folding chair, on an Oriental rug crumpled under Half’s sock-clad feet.

There also were two items that Verona would never have seen before in the Zantop home: two black knife sheaths made from some kind of hard plastic. One was near Half’s left foot, atop an overturned, bloodstained Birkenstock sandal that belonged to Susanne. The other sheath was four feet away, under an upright, metal-and-wood chair with a cane seat. The knives they had held were nowhere to be seen, but they must have been big. The sheaths were each more than a foot long and three inches wide.

Verona couldn’t see Susanne’s face—her head was turned from the open door—but she could see Half’s. It was drained of blood, as white as the hair of his beard. Verona looked back to Susanne and saw her

right hand, gripping her glasses, her skin the same lifeless shade as her husband’s. In death, Half’s arms stretched forward, reaching toward Susanne.

Verona was frantic; frightened, too. She thought of calling 911, but her friends were clearly beyond help, and whoever killed them might still be in the house. Verona ran to the foyer, grabbed her coat, and flew through the door. She ran to her car and turned the key, knowing almost without thinking where she was headed. She had dined several times with the Zantops’ next-door neighbors, the McCollums, and she knew Bob McCollum was a doctor.

I
nside the McCollums’ tastefully furnished house, the cheese fondue was bubbling and the glasses were raised for a toast. Audrey and Bob

were celebrating Bob’s seventy-sixth birthday, joined by their daughter, Cindy, and her husband, John. They had spent part of the day in Woodstock, Vermont, at the Suicide Six ski area, then had come home to enjoy dinner and each other’s company.

Their toast to Bob’s health was interrupted by a pounding on the door and a woman’s screams. They ushered Verona inside and listened as she choked out a garbled version of what she’d seen. Audrey McCollum called 911, while Bob and Cindy rushed out the door and drove next door. Verona returned as well, following in her own car.

“A guest went there for dinner and came to us in hysterics and said that the woman whose house it is was lying on the floor in a pool of blood,” Audrey McCollum told the dispatcher. “My husband’s a doctor and is going over now.”

While she waited, wondering if her friends were dead and worrying that her husband and daughter might be in peril, Audrey McCollum called Steve Gordon, an editor of the local newspaper,
The Valley News.
She wrote occasional pieces for the paper, and she knew its reporters kept a close ear on the newsroom police scanner.

“Steve,” she said, “something awful has happened next door. Have you heard anything on the scanner?”

“No,” he said. “Oh, wait a minute. . . . They are saying, ‘Two down at 115 Trescott.’ ”

Cindy McCollum called 911 a few minutes after her mother, from the Zantops’ house, after seeing the horror Verona had found. Bob McCollum went to the doorway of the study and placed his hand on Susanne’s right arm—it was cold to his touch—and felt for a pulse that wasn’t there. He looked over to Half, but he didn’t step toward him. A half-century of practicing medicine was more than enough for him to know his friends were gone.

While Bob McCollum viewed the bodies, his daughter ran outside to flag down a police officer. Meanwhile, Verona moved as far from the study as she could, holing up in the kitchen. In her mind she kept try-ing to lift Susanne and Half, to restore them to their normal, upright postures, to stop the horrible scene from replaying in her mind. Standing in the kitchen, Verona noticed a half-prepared meal. On the counter were cut vegetables, chopped herbs, sliced bread, two blocks of cheese, an unfinished soup, an open bottle of Merlot wine. Once the makings of a meal, now they were a way to estimate time of death.

O
fficer Brad Sargent of the Hanover Police Department was the first to respond to the McCollums’ 911 calls. Within minutes he was

joined at 115 Trescott Road by more than a half-dozen officers from Hanover, the New Hampshire State Police, and the Grafton County Sheriff ’s Department. They searched the home to make sure the killers were gone, then one by one walked to the study to witness what for some would be their first major crime scene. An ambulance was called as well, but Sergeant Patrick O’Neill looked inside the study and radioed the dispatcher: Cancel the ambulance and summon the medical examiner.

A few minutes later, Hanover Police Chief Nick Giaccone arrived. He and the other officers quickly noticed a trail of blood drops leading from the study out of the house. Giaccone saw a partial bloody bootprint in the foyer, and two more outside. Normally soft-spoken, with a

fondness for well-tailored suits, he looked around at the officers pouring into the house and issued a quick command: Everyone out! Giaccone even ordered them to walk away from the house through vir-gin snow, to avoid smearing the footprints of the killer or killers.

A crime scene could be polluted in an infinite number of ways, and Giaccone wanted to preserve as much evidence as he could for his detectives and the New Hampshire State Police Major Crime Unit, whose commander, Major Barry Hunter, would arrive the next morning. There had never been a double murder quite like this in Hanover, and Giaccone was determined to get the investigation right.

When the Zantops’ house was secured, officers told Roxana Verona and Bob and Cindy McCollum to go home. Audrey McCollum went outside when she saw her husband and daughter shuffling down their driveway, heads bowed, escorted by a police officer with a flashlight. Audrey ran toward them, yelling, “Don’t tell me they’re dead.”

The policeman turned away. Cindy McCollum said, “Mom, come in the house.”

A
round that time, a green Subaru drove down Trescott Road toward the Zantop house. Inside the car were two young men, each of whom

had left a knife sheath at the house earlier in the day. As they drove closer, they hoped they could drop by and collect their belongings without anyone noticing. But as they neared 115 Trescott, they noticed a New Hampshire State Police cruiser in the driveway. Disappointed, they drove on past.

W
ord of what happened soon began to spread. It passed intimately at first, investigator to investigator, then civilian to civilian. It raced

along the predetermined branches of a telephone tree that led from one Dartmouth administrator to the next, from one faculty member to another. Then it reached a Dartmouth College student named Omer Ismail.

Earlier that evening, around the time Verona was finding the bodies, Ismail ate dinner with a friend at the Thayer Dining Hall a block from the Dartmouth Green. Then he walked next door to Robinson Hall, where he climbed the stairs to the offices of
The Dartmouth,
the college’s five-day-a-week student newspaper. Ismail was twenty-one, a soft-spoken, studious-looking government major from Pakistan who had been elected the newspaper’s president, a job that made him both publisher and editor-in-chief. When Ismail arrived, only one other per-son was hanging around the usually bustling office—there was no Sunday paper, so the next deadline was more than a day away, an eternity in the newspaper world. The other staffer soon left Ismail alone, which is just what he wanted. He had come to quietly exercise a perk of office: He planned to use the newspaper’s phone to save himself the cost of a long-distance call to a friend at the University of Pennsylvania.

After his call, Ismail sat at a computer and began composing e-mails when the phone rang. A woman from a local television station was calling to ask if
The Dartmouth
had heard anything about a report that had crackled over the police scanner about two professors found dead at a home on East Wheelock Street.

“No, I haven’t heard anything about that at all. I’ll let you know,” he answered.

Ismail hung up and immediately began trying to reach two friends and colleagues: managing editor Mark Bubriski, a twenty-one-year-old junior from West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and features editor Julia Levy, also twenty-one, a junior from a Philadelphia suburb. Ismail left phone messages, and then, at 9:39
P
.
M
., he sent both a hastily written e-mail: “come to the office now. its urgent.” Ismail then sent another e-mail that would prove prescient, summoning Hank Leukart, a Dartmouth senior who managed the newspaper’s Web site.

The messages connected. As soon as she walked into Robinson Hall, Levy began calling every college official and faculty member she could think of. Ismail and Bubriski hustled into a Jeep that Bubriski had borrowed from a friend and went searching for the crime scene. It was around 10
P
.
M
.

The caller said the police scanner mentioned East Wheelock, a

road that cuts through campus, so the two young journalists drove there looking for police cars. They found none, so they went to a nearby dor-mitory, the newly built McCulloch Hall, to ask if anyone had heard sirens or seen an ambulance. Again, nothing. Frustrated, Ismail and Bubriski returned to the newspaper office. Ismail called
The Valley News
to see if he could pry some information from his off-campus competitor. He got nowhere at first, but eventually a sympathetic
News
staffer relented, telling Ismail that something big seemed to be happening on Trescott Road in Etna.

In his three-plus years at Dartmouth, Ismail had never been over that way. It was only four miles away, a straight shot due east, but there was nothing in the sleepy village but nice homes and a few stores. For most students, life at Dartmouth revolved around the campus, the business district of Hanover, and the great outdoors. Ismail went to a computer and clicked on the
Yahoo.com
Web site to create an instant map of Trescott Road. In the meantime, Levy searched a campus directory for the names of professors who lived along the street. Ismail and Bubriski grabbed the list and left. Levy stayed behind and continued canvassing school officials for scraps of information.

Bubriski and Ismail drove along the winding, hilly blacktop, not quite knowing what they were looking for. But they knew immediately when they found it: a herd of police cars, lights flashing, parked outside a modern, ranch-style house largely hidden from the street. It was about a quarter to eleven at night.

Dartmouth
reporters like Ismail and Bubriski don’t get much practice working crime scenes, but they followed their instincts and began peppering officers with questions. Who lives here? What happened? Any arrests? They were repeatedly rebuffed. One cop after another told them they’d have to wait for a news conference scheduled for sometime after midnight.

But this was their turf. If two Dartmouth professors were dead,
The Dartmouth
wanted the story. They kept at it and eventually confirmed a small yet enormously important detail: the address. They checked the Trescott Road faculty list Levy had given them. Next to

the number 115 they saw the name Zantop. Ismail and Bubriski looked at each other with the same thought: We’re onto something.

The pair hurried back to the newspaper office and began working the phones with Levy. While they were gone, Levy’s calls had been fruitless, but then she reached Edward Berger, dean of the faculty. Not long before, Berger had received a call from a campus safety and security official informing him of the Zantops’ deaths. He provided Levy with the confirmation
The Dartmouth
needed.

With Levy calling out quotes and Ismail editing over his shoulder, Bubriski began typing as fast as he could. None of the three knew the Zantops, but they understood they had a major newsbreak on their hands. At 11:15
P
.
M
., not five hours after the first 911 call,
The Dartmouth
posted a story on its Web site. It bore the bold headline:
TWO PROFS DEAD
;
POLICE INVESTIGATING POSSIBLE DOUBLE MURDER
.

“Two professors are confirmed dead,” the story began, “and police are investigating the possible double murder late this afternoon at 115 Trescott Road in Etna, just miles from the campus, according to Dean of the Faculty Ed Berger. Professors Susanne and Half Zantop died sometime Saturday evening, but the police told
The Dartmouth
that they could not comment until after the state Attorney General Philip McLaughlin issued a press release.” It was a sketchy story, with few details, but
The Dartmouth
had it. At roughly the same time, the local ABC affiliate, WMUR, reported the Zantops’ deaths during its eleven-o’clock newscast.