Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (15 page)

He lived a boy’s life that was reflected in the look of the Parkers’ property: the two tree forts that were built over time, the tire that swung from another tree, the basketball hoop that hung from a wooden pole, and the pedal bike that was later replaced with a dirt bike. Looking back, Jimmy portrayed himself in the school essay as “very brave and coordinated as a young boy, and [someone who] loved to eat.” His toddler years were “full of energy and smiles.” He learned “to walk, swim and bike at an early age” and he had parents who fed him “their simple—be kind and think for yourself—morals.”

Jimmy said he “enjoyed praise,” admitting he sought the spotlight. “He would never shut up,” a teacher once laughed, talking about a boy who seemed to be here, there, and everywhere, bidding for an opportunity to make a splash—literally. Jimmy’s early birthday parties were legendary among the other boys in town. The Parkers’ large yard allowed for a long, running takeoff into the outdoor kiddie pool. “Jimmy was always the craziest one jumping in,” said his longtime friend Zack Courts, a rangy, outgoing, upbeat boy with close-cropped dark hair and an easy smile. To the herd of preschool boys like Courts, who was a year older than Jimmy, the sprawling Parker homestead was “a cool setting,” and “cocky” Jimmy Parker was an easy kid to like.

In elementary school, Jimmy hung around with Brad Johnson, a strong, outdoorsy boy the same age who lived about a mile away on West Hill. It was a friendship mixing new and old Chelsea—John and Joan Parker being from “away,” while Jack and Annette Johnsons’ bloodlines were pure Vermont. Brad’s mom sometimes wondered what Jimmy’s mom made of the fact that logger Jack Johnson cut down trees for a living. Joan Parker was what locals called a “tree-hugger.” If privately Joan Parker disapproved, she never let on, and, besides, Jimmy and Brad got along fine.

Some people considered Jimmy a pain in the butt, like when he tagged along with his father on a work site and got in the way. Or John might take Jimmy to a sport-and-card show that the elder Parker was passionate about, and Jimmy would get restless and impatient. But Jimmy loved to fish and the Johnsons enjoyed having him around. The boys camped together and Jimmy even accompanied the Johnsons on a few family vacations.

Yet the two grew apart as they got older. Brad idolized Davy Crockett and was becoming an experienced hunter. Brad began with a BB gun and then his dad handed him a small rifle to practice target-shooting out back on their land. “It’s kind of a parent, hereditary thing,” Jack Johnson said. Brad eventually grew into felling deer with a .243-caliber rifle or a muzzle loader, a single-shot, long-barreled rifle. Jimmy, meanwhile, was a boy who, when they all went camping, was spooked by the dark—and would remain that way into his teens. He was against hunting, and began asking Brad, “How can you kill an ani-mal?” Words right out of his mom’s mouth.

Brad, filling out, was whole hog into team sports—soccer, basketball, and baseball—while Jimmy was a talented but indifferent participant. Jack Johnson and John Parker coached their sons in basketball in elementary and middle school, but Jimmy brought a different kind of game to the court. “He could have been a good ball player,” said Brad’s mom, “but he didn’t care if he won or lost.” John Parker would coach and play, year after year, but Jimmy would not. One by one, Jimmy bailed from organized sports, quitting basketball after freshman year and soccer the next year. John Parker’s JV basketball team featured many of Jimmy’s friends, but not his own son. Jimmy dabbled in other things. He briefly took karate with Jill Pomerantz. He began tak-ing piano lessons at age seven. Trombone lessons followed. Turning thirteen, he started playing bass guitar and really got into it. By the time he was in high school, he had an electric keyboard set up in the living room and a full drum set in the cellar. Jimmy might not have been his father’s son in terms of sports, but it didn’t spark any tension at home. “They’ve always been really supportive with me and always there for me,” he said later. His parents hung a framed collection of his school photos on one wall in their home, twelve oval spaces in all, arranged clockwise, with his first grade photo in the one-o’clock position, and so forth. By 2001, the circle was nearly complete, all but Jim’s senior year photograph and a large space in the center for a graduation-day picture.

One consistent quality of his youth was a desire to stir things up. The sixth grade basketball team had won all but one game, so Jimmy challenged the coach: shouldn’t we let the other team win now? “He was that kind of kid,” said Annette Johnson. “Jimmy always wanted to stand out for being different.”

It was why one day substitute teacher Cora Brooks found Jimmy standing on his desk in fourth grade. Some teachers considered Jimmy “needy.” Jimmy later put it differently. “I’d say about the fourth grade I started getting really tired of school. Because it was slow for me,” he said. He considered himself a “truly intelligent person.” Looking around, Chelsea increasingly seemed like a yawner of a place to grow up in. “I just started thinking that I could be doing better things.”

Clowning around helped to make life more interesting. The same with the dramatic arts. In middle school, Jimmy found himself teamed up with Cora Brooks for a movie tryout. Filmmaker Jay Craven was casting parts for a movie he was shooting in the area. The film was an adaptation of Howard Frank Mosher’s
Stranger in the Kingdom,
a novel about a black minister who moves with his son to a tiny Vermont town in the late 1950s and eventually finds himself accused of murder. Among the casting needs were small parts for a mother and a son. Joan Parker telephoned Cora Brooks and asked if the poet would try out

with Jimmy. Brooks threw herself into the tryout, tracking down a ’50s-style, blue print dress with a white collar in a thrift store. She and Jimmy rehearsed together and then gave it their best shot. They didn’t get called back, but Cora didn’t mind. “For a few moments we were mother and son,” she said. They had fun, and Cora told Jimmy he should pursue drama.

“I thought he was really good.”

Jimmy seemed a natural—ever eager to assume a part and play out a fantasy that took him to places beyond Chelsea and turned him into characters other than himself.

D
iane and Mike Tulloch and their four kids—two girls followed by two boys—began renting in Chelsea in 1992. People meeting the new-

comers were quick to realize that Diane, quietly attractive, served as the family’s point person. Mike was a background figure, a recluse who wore dark glasses as if to avoid eye contact and carried himself with an air of resignation. Mike once likened himself to the younger of his two daughters, who had a brain abnormality that resulted in developmental delays and impulse-control problems. Mike said he had a handicap of his own, “that is for me a serious one. I am painfully shy.”

There was more to it than that. The road to Chelsea had not been an easy one for the Tullochs. Going back to the early years of their marriage in 1977, Mike had struggled with alcoholism and depression, and had at times been suicidal. The couple was from New Jersey originally— Mike from Jersey City and Diane from the more affluent Glen Ridge. They married in Frankford Township when Mike was twenty-three and Diane was twenty-two, with Mike listing his occupation on the marriage certificate as “paper carrier.” Five or so years into the marriage, Mike had an affair, but he and Diane stayed the course and seemed to come out stronger for it. The couple had struggled personally and financially, and there were other struggles as well—such as trying to figure out where to make a go of it as the family grew.

During the 1980s, the couple had bounced around among several Vermont towns—North Pomfret, Bridgewater, and Sharon. Robert was

born in North Pomfret, a home birth on a farm. Robert waxed romantic about his entry into the world. “No hospitals, no doctors, no medicine, a pure birth, just like the days of old,” he once wrote. “I was born in the same manner as Jesus or Moses.” The family’s move to Sharon, wrote Robert, covering his toddler years in his auto-hagiography, marked “the humble beginnings of an intellectual giant.”

“Sharon was great,” he wrote. “I played every day, learned every day, and ate the best homemade food. We had a huge yard, and every neighbor would let us explore their land. We would pirate the seas of a giant green straw field, climb the castles of the forest, and rain down arrows on attackers.

“Our mother would go to the library and check out a billion different books. Dinosaurs, machines, animals, mysteries, biographies, everything a child would find interesting. She would read to us until we learned how to read ourselves. We did what we wanted, read what we wanted, and played at what we wanted. And then the food, the won-drous food of my childhood. Fresh jam, homemade pickles, fresh grown vegetables, four loaves of fresh bread every day, endless stacks of pancakes and waffles, excellent milk bought from a neighboring farmer, elaborate meals stacked to the ceiling, completely vanished by bedtime.

“I led a charmed life, a child could want for nothing more.”

Robert and his family were acquiring a taste for the rhythms of life in the Green Mountain State. It seemed a natural fit, the Tullochs and rural Vermont. But they didn’t decide on Vermont permanently until after taking a sharp detour into an entirely different world.

T
he Tullochs’ two-year Florida experiment began the summer of 1990 when the family moved to Jensen Beach, a sun-drenched town

about two hours north of Fort Lauderdale, where the big event was the annual Pineapple Festival. Diane’s parents had moved to the neighboring town of Stuart a few years earlier, a major reason for making the Florida relocation in the first place. Years later, Robert would tell his girlfriend that his maternal grandparents were “really rich,” but that was a gross exaggeration.

The Tulloch family found a home on one of the winding streets of Jensen Park Estates, a middle-class development whose name, in the Florida tradition, was far grander than reality. The modest, ranch-style homes were set close to each other and hard by the streets; few would command six figures. The Tullochs paid $90,000 for a three-bedroom house, tan with green trim, on Northeast Lima Calle. Robert shared a room with his brother Kienan, one year younger than Robert and the youngest of the four kids. The girls shared another room. There was Becky, five years older than Robert, and next came Julie, who had the brain disorder. The four kids were enrolled at the Jensen Beach Elementary School, a mile away, the “Home of the Vikings.”

The Tullochs tried to fit in but never did. “Sort of a weird family,” Bart Fletcher, another boy on the block, recalled. Bart was in first grade with Kienan, a year behind Robert, and he and his brother, Nick, would play with the Tulloch boys. They were joined by John Donovan, whose family also lived in Jensen Park Estates. The neighborhood kids at first thought Robert and Kienan were twins—both had mullet haircuts— bangs on top and long in the back—and both had dour expressions and frail-looking bodies. The Tulloch brothers shared clothes and had one dresser, but not much else for furnishings in their bedroom. They slept on two mattresses; their parents either never bothered or never could afford to buy them bed frames. There wasn’t much in the way of toys either, so Robert and Kienan appeared regularly at Bart Fletcher’s house to play with his stuff. Robert came off as kind of “strange” to older kids around the neighborhood. “He was picked on by other kids—an outsider, not really accepted,” one neighborhood parent said. “You know, kids can be cruel,” said Bart Fletcher. “They felt that.”

Because Kienan was in their grade, Bart Fletcher and John Donovan initially played mostly with him. But they found Kienan cautious, Robert bolder, and gravitated to the older brother. “Robert was more outgoing, always, ‘Let’s go for it,’ ” said Bart Fletcher. “We connected more on that basis.” In the neighborhood the boys played pickup games and built forts in a lot across the street from the Tullochs’ house, on the edge of a small, manmade lake. They’d also experiment—like the time at the Tullochs’ when they tried to poison lizards.

Robert and John Donovan mixed chemicals from Robert’s chemistry set and used an eye dropper to shoot the potions in the lizards’ mouths. “Nothing happened,” said Donovan.

“Then we decided to try some ourselves—since we were macho guys. I ran home because I thought I was going to die and I told my parents.”

Robert soon sold the chemistry set to Bart Fletcher for $20. He and John Donovan never heard if the lizard stunt got Robert in trouble, but they suspected it did. “The kids were afraid of the parents,” Bart Fletcher said. Robert and Kienan told their friends about the severe discipline that came their way for infractions as slight as being late for dinner. Fletcher once went over to their house and found Robert sitting inside filling page after page with a one-line phrase beginning, “I will not . . .” Beyond that, Fletcher didn’t know what form the punishments took.

Neighbors could tell the Tullochs didn’t have much money. But it wasn’t finances that set them apart. Most yards might be modest-sized but they were well-manicured. Not the Tullochs’, which was ill-kept by neighborhood standards. Socially, Diane and Mike Tulloch were far from a dynamic couple on the cook-out circuit. “They were very withdrawn, quiet, rather asocial,” said Bart Fletcher’s mother, Ginny Luther.

“They kind of gave me the creeps,” she said.

Part of the unease involved Julie Tulloch. There was the time Julie tried to teach the family’s two green-and-blue parakeets to talk and lay eggs and ended up drowning them as part of the misguided “lesson.” Julie also had a tendency to roam the neighborhood, collecting items that didn’t belong to her.

“She’d take stuff from other houses,” said Bart Fletcher. “That caused a lot of tension.” Neighbors who couldn’t find something would think: Julie Tulloch. “Julie would deny it, even if it was sitting right there, and it would be a big ordeal.” Fletcher was once a victim, when Julie “borrowed” his scooter.

But Julie wasn’t the only Tulloch with quick fingers. Not long after Robert left his house one day, Fletcher realized he was missing one of his