Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (13 page)

Based on anonymous sources described as “authorities close to the case,” the story began: “Investigators believe the killings of Dartmouth College professors Half and Susanne Zantop were crimes of passion, most likely resulting from an adulterous affair involving Half Zantop.” The story touched off a firestorm, as Susanne and Half’s friends rushed to defend their memories and reputations. Angry letters poured into the
Globe
as well as the
The Dartmouth
. “Was I reading the
Boston Globe
on Friday the 16th, or did the carrier mistakenly deposit a
National Enquirer
on the doorstep, with an anonymous story of sex and death in academe high above the fold?” Jim Zien wrote to the school paper. “My wife and I have shared a close friendship and close quarters in small sailboats with Susanne and Half Zantop for over fifteen years. Never in the intimate confines of our time and space together did any inkling surface of a relationship that might, in the
Globe
’s irre-sponsibly sensational speculation, motivate ‘crimes of passion, most likely resulting from an adulterous love affair.’ ”

The strongest denials came from McLaughlin, the attorney general: “No responsible and knowledgeable law enforcement official would provide the
Globe
with the information it attributed to official anonymous sources,” McLaughlin declared in a statement the day the story appeared. “In fact, investigators do not hold the belief attributed to them in the story.” The
Globe
did have well-placed official sources, but they were misinformed, having based their comments on one of many unproven theories discussed among investigators during the frustrating weeks of heavy scrutiny and little apparent progress. Still, had the paper waited long enough to seek confirmation of its sources’ claims, a painful episode might well have been avoided.

Five days after the story appeared, after new evidence emerged and the
Globe
’s sources admitted they had been in error, the newspaper published a page one retraction. It concluded: “It was certainly never our intent to increase the suffering of the Zantop family, their friends,

or the Dartmouth College community, and we express regret for the pain our story undoubtedly caused them.” Unknown to the
Globe,
the same day the story was being written, ground zero of the case had moved from Hanover across the Connecticut River, to an even sleep-ier and more isolated community.

7
‌

Snow and Blood

W
hen the Zantops were dead, Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker stepped over the bodies and bolted from the study. As they ran toward

the front door, Jim handed his bloody combat knife to Robert, and both bounded through the snow to the green Subaru they had left waiting outside. As Jim turned the ignition on his mother’s car, Robert stashed both knives under the passenger-side floor mat.

They had parked nose-in toward the Zantops’ garage, so Jim had to back out to make their escape. But the vaporous heat that rose from their breath and bodies fogged the windows, making it impossible to see where they were going. Jim felt on the verge of panic, fearing that the car would get stuck in the snow outside a home with dead people inside, making any alibi they might come up with useless.

They rolled down the windows and stuck their heads out as Jim began inching backward up the driveway toward Trescott Road. “Am I

hitting anything?” he screamed at Robert. “Am I hitting anything? Am I going off the road, or am I lined up?”

Robert assumed his usual role of providing guidance for Jim—not only was Robert a year older than Jim, by everyone’s reckoning he was the smarter of the two. With his partner calling out directions, Jim pulled slowly onto the street—not like a day earlier, when they had briefly scoped out the Zantop house then pulled out too quickly from the driveway and nearly slammed into another car.

Jim looked at his right hand and saw smeared blood in the crook between his thumb and forefinger, blood that had dripped down the blade onto the handle then onto his skin. He knew it wasn’t his; he was scared, but he was unmarked. Robert was worse off, physically at least. His khaki pants were drenched with blood from a deep cut above his right knee, and his pants and dark sweater were also sprayed with blood. His ruined clothes and painful wound aside, Robert was relatively placid.

“It was too easy,” Robert marveled. “That was really weird.”

His main focus for the moment was the wallet he had taken from Half Zantop. He rifled through its contents, counting out the money it held and trying to figure out if any of the numbers written on scraps of paper might be the code to the dead man’s ATM card. But there were too many numbers, and it would be too dangerous to try one after another to see which one worked. That realization led to another: they had failed.

Not failure like six months earlier, when they had spooked the guy on Goose Green Road so badly he refused to open his door then flashed his gun. Not failure like the week before, when they slunk away once the guy on North Hollow Road told them he was too busy tarring his pool to talk with them. This time, they had succeeded by getting inside the house with their story of an environmental survey. They had failed because their efforts were only worth the $340 in cash Robert found in the wallet, barely making a dent in the $10,000 they calculated they would need to start new lives in Australia.

As those conclusions settled over him, Jim found himself “unsure

about everything, surprised about how things went, pissed off because our plan didn’t work.”

“We screwed up,” they agreed. “We didn’t get, you know, any type of good money.”

Jim didn’t say so, fearing his partner would yell at him, but he had made a decision: “This is not the way I want to make money—killing people.” He wasn’t feeling particularly bad for their victims. He was feeling bad for himself, worrying about the potential fallout.

Robert was untroubled by such concerns. He announced: “We have to do something again.” Jim let the remark pass.

Jim steered the car through Hanover then across the Connecticut River. As he drove across the waterway, Jim stared at the huge concrete spheres that adorned the bridge. They got onto Interstate 91, heading north toward home. But less than a mile later they noticed the Subaru’s hood had partially unlatched, and they feared it might fly up altogether. Robert and Jim screamed at each other: “Oh shit, should we stop or should we not stop?” They decided one of them needed to get out and slam down the hood, so Jim pulled over and pushed open his door. Robert huddled in the passenger seat, worried that anyone who saw him might cast a suspicious eye and remark: “You’ve got some blood on your pants there, son.”

U
ntil that moment, being alone together in the car had always felt good. It was a private place to reveal themselves, to riff about using

their superior brains and higher consciousness to become world-trav- eling adventurers, hired assassins, or both. They could fantasize about figuring out the codes that would let them cheat the computer program that they imagined ran the world, allowing them to do whatever they pleased with no fear of consequences. They could talk about what happens when someone dies, or how other people didn’t understand them, or how Jim thought “people weren’t having enough fun with their life.” They could talk about what a waste of time college would be for them. They could argue about stupid things like the color of a

rock-climbing shoe or how Robert always thought he was right, which Jim thought he wasn’t.

Jim could talk about working for $10 an hour on construction sites for his “simpleminded” father, being fed health foods by his mother, and getting picked on by his older sister. Robert could complain about how his father was always angry, how his mother should leave—if she could “do her own thing she’d be much more happy”—and grouse that his parents “suck and don’t have shit for money.” Robert could fantasize about starting to run for president at twenty-five so by the time he was legally allowed to serve, at thirty-five, the nation would recognize his supreme greatness. From there, it was a quick hop to global con-quest. Robert would talk about ruling the world, being a “higher power” who would bend the planet and its inhabitants to his will.

They could talk about becoming British Special Forces commandos, then decide it would be “a real pain in the ass to go through all the training.” So instead they would train themselves to kill people and steal cars and whatever else they needed, and maybe hijack boats and sail them to different islands. After first learning to sail, that is. Once they got to the islands they could hunt with spears. That would be Robert’s job because he thought killing animals would be good practice for killing people. Jim didn’t like hunting and couldn’t imagine why anyone would hurt an animal. Maybe they could figure out how to replace their bodies with robotic parts or make their way to Egypt to track down myths of immortality and “find some way to live forever.”

None of that could happen, of course, as long as they were stuck at home.

T
hose thoughts were far away as they drove up Interstate 91 the afternoon of January 27, 2001. With blood literally on their hands, all

they wanted was to get back home to Chelsea. They got off at Exit 14 in Thetford, Vermont, and drove on Route 113 past a Congregational church, a volunteer fire department, and the Hale Funeral Home. They drove deeper into Vermont on the winding, pitted, two-lane road,

past weathered homes with satellite dishes, past country stores and silos. They could have driven Route 113 directly into Chelsea, but they weren’t quite ready for that.

“What are we going to do next?” one asked. “We need to clean this stuff off.”

Jim took a detour, turning onto Eagle Hollow Road, a hilly route with dense evergreen forests pressing in on both sides. They knew the area well—they had gone rock climbing at a boulder-strewn area just off Eagle Hollow Road in warmer weather. Jim pulled the car onto the shoulder and they walked into the woods. The two newly minted killers used handfuls of snow to scrub the blood from the knives and the floor mat, and Robert took off his pants and dropped his long johns to look at the cut on his leg. Then Jim realized something was missing.

“Oh shit, where’s the knife sheaths?”

They searched the backpack they had used to carry their sheathed knives and fake survey papers into the Zantops’ house, but the sheaths weren’t there. They weren’t in the car, either. As fear washed over them, they talked about turning around, but Jim said no. He didn’t want to see the dead bodies. That didn’t especially bother Robert, and he kept pressing the point.

For the moment, there was nothing to do but go home, change clothes, and consider their options. They got back into the Subaru, drove to the end of Eagle Hollow Road and turned onto Goose Green Road. That took them past Andrew and Diane Patti’s vacation home and also past the road where they had dug graves for the Pattis six months earlier. Goose Green led back to Route 113, so they turned onto the road to Chelsea. Nearby was the defunct ski area known as Judgment Ridge, a place they had passed innumerable times. Now they had crossed over Judgment Ridge completely, literally and figuratively.

Route 113 dumped Jim and Robert into the heart of Chelsea, by the North Common and the county jail with the sheriff ’s office inside. They turned right onto Route 110, Main Street, and almost immediately pulled to a stop at Robert’s house near the center of

town. Jim waited in the car while Robert ran inside and changed pants, and then they went to Jim’s house on the west side of town. Jim stopped outside his father’s woodworking shack, a short distance from the house. They stuffed the knives, Robert’s bloody pants, Half Zantop’s wallet, duct tape, and plastic zip ties into a black gym bag and tossed it behind the front seat of a broken-down blue Volvo parked near the shack. Later they would return to fetch the knives and burn the pants and the wallet, minus the cash, in a furnace inside Jim’s father’s workshop.

After stashing the gym bag, they dropped briefly by Jim’s house, where his parents were admiring a new entertainment center his father had just finished. Not knowing what to say, but knowing they couldn’t just hang around and make small talk about furniture, Robert and Jim got back into the Subaru and headed north toward Burlington.

They drove to a Barnes & Noble bookstore where they hoped to find books about how to deal with killing people. They leafed through one,
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,
an academic study by an Army colonel. But they didn’t find it particularly useful, so they looked at magazines awhile, then left.

It was dark as they drove from Burlington. The initial fear had passed, and they knew their work wasn’t finished for the day. As they approached Chelsea, they veered eastward, back toward New Hampshire. It was dangerous, they knew, but they had to return to Trescott Road to see if they could break into the house and retrieve the sheaths. If police found the sheaths first, Jim knew, “that could really screw us.”