Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (17 page)

took something from Will’s Store, it was handled with a quiet call to Diane and not the sheriff ’s office. Chelsea was a safety net.

Robert was busy doing what other elementary school–aged kids did—playing and fooling around. For a while he had a paper route, and he played on a Little League baseball team coached by Jack Johnson. The coach and teammates could tell he wasn’t really interested in the sport even though he was clearly a coordinated kid. In school Robert had become fast friends with Kip Battey, whose mind was as quick as Robert’s. Kip’s family was one of those Chelsea families that went way back, and his father, Ned, an insurance salesman, was active on the school committee and coached sports. By middle school Robert had a new best pal—Zack Courts, an upbeat kid who loved the thrill of rac-ing and got his first dirt bike when he was eight years old. Zack’s parents were divorced and Zack spent a lot of time at his father’s house on Main Street a few doors down from the Tullochs’. The two played on the same Little League team—“We laughed at each other’s jokes,” Zack said later—but didn’t really connect until middle school. Zack had attended the alternative Wellspring School until seventh grade. Wellspring, located behind a white picket fence in a white clapboard house on South Common, was a Waldorf School, where exams were downplayed and course work was designed to blend mental, physical, and spiritual growth.

Meeting in the single seventh grade class at Chelsea Public School, Robert and Zack hit it off. They were joined by two other boys who’d been with Zack at Wellspring—Coltere Savidge and Casey Purcell. The new buddy system became Robert, Kip, Zack, Coltere, and Casey. The boys found Robert smart, quick-witted, and fun to be around. In his own words, Robert saw himself as developing “into an incredibly smart, witty, and scheming individual.” Robert’s mullet was history. The boys slept over at each other’s houses, played sports, and romped in the woods. Sometimes a pretty, dark-haired girl in their class, Christiana Usenza, who’d also attended Wellspring, tagged along. Eventually Jimmy Parker entered the circle. On nice days, they might climb out Robert’s bedroom window onto the flat roof above the

front porch and lounge around, looking over Main Street. Zack eventually came up with a name for the six Chelsea boys: The Crew. “Robert laughed when he heard me using the name,” said Zack, “but then he’d sometimes use it too.”

The boys in Jensen Beach had thought Robert’s parents were strict, while the Chelsea boys saw them as laissez-faire. Mike was distant and didn’t have much to say. Diane was often busy coming and going with work. In fact, the parents were often not around. Robert’s oldest sister, Becky, was like a third parent, especially in keeping track of Julie. They seemed like a functioning family that, as some in town came to learn, had managed a number of private crises—Julie’s disability, Mike’s drinking and depression, and chronic money concerns. Sometimes Chelseans spotted Diane and Mike walking down Main Street hand in hand. The couple might stop at Will’s Store or S&L Video to pick up a movie and continue their walk around one of the commons before heading home. Renting movies was a Chelsea ritual—the nearest cin-ema was a thirty-minute drive.

But inside, all was not picture-perfect. The older Robert got, the edgier he seemed. The trouble could be his father or the household in general. “His relationship with his dad wasn’t as good as mine is with my dad,” Zack said later. By the time Robert was in high school, he was expected to pick up the slack now that Becky had graduated from high school and left the house to attend nursing school. In theory, Julie was next in line in the family pecking order to assume the role as “third par-ent,” but her disability prevented that. She could not be counted on.

“Robert washed a lot of dishes,” said Zack. “He mopped. He vacuumed. He carried a lot of wood. Robert carried a lot of chores on his shoulders.”

Sometimes Robert couldn’t take it anymore. “Goddamit, why do I have to do all these dishes!” he shouted one afternoon. Robert stood at the kitchen sink. He was washing, Zack was drying. The sooner they cleaned up the sooner they could run off. Julie prowled around the kitchen, and Robert began to badger her. He was fed up with her uselessness when it came to housework. If Julie were ever told to wash the

dishes she’d probably forget to. Or, if she did remember, she’d do such a lousy job someone would have to wash them again.

“I do everything,” Robert snarled at her.

Julie didn’t cry, but she left abruptly. She went out the back door and toward the workshop. Minutes later, Mike Tulloch strode into the kitchen. Zack was taken aback, unaccustomed to seeing Mike Tulloch animated. Locking eyes with his son, Mike said firmly, “You cannot do that. She is not someone you can get mad at like that.” The father turned on his heels and left. Robert didn’t say a word.

Confrontations were an exception, not the rule, but Robert’s chaf-ing intensified regarding home life in general and his father in particular. “I think it was kind of rough for him,” said Jimmy Parker. “His father was a very—he was grumpy a lot and probably had some kind of depression or something. He would get angry a lot at just different stuff, sometimes be unreasonable. . . . I mean Robert cared for everybody in his family, his father, too. He just seemed like he wanted bet-ter for everybody because they seemed to have a very . . . his father was always struggling with work. I don’t know, I think I had a much better home life than he did.”

J
immy Parker came into The Crew during middle school by an altogether different route. Jimmy was neither in the same grade nor tak-

ing any of the same courses as Robert, Kip, Zack, Coltere, or Casey. He was Kienan’s elementary school classmate. The leapfrog over Kienan to Robert had the echo of Jensen Beach, where the neighborhood boys first got to know Kienan and then gravitated to Robert. Initially, Jimmy hung out with “both Robert and Kienan, and then, ah, I just became better friends with Robert.”

For Jimmy, choosing between the Tulloch brothers was no contest. Jimmy saw himself as a cool guy in the making. “I was maturing a lot and they weren’t,” Jimmy said about Kienan and other classmates. “They were still making fart and poop jokes.” Jimmy concluded that Kienan was “silly, unintelligent, and very uncoordinated.” Besides,

Kienan was shy and introverted, like his father, while Robert’s energy and bounce matched Jimmy’s. “Jimmy and Robert are kind of loud and very verbal, and Kienan isn’t,” Diane Tulloch once said.

It was Florida all over again—and Kienan let Robert know about it. “Kienan got upset,” said Jimmy, “because Robert was taking his friend away, like he always does. I guess it might have happened before.” Robert blew off Kienan and his complaints, making use of his verbal and physical edge. “He just kind of had all the advantages over him, so he could pick on him,” Jimmy said. “You know, really make him feel bad.”

For Jimmy, just as the Florida boys before him, Robert had an allure that Kienan lacked. “He’s just ready, you know, to do something exciting,” said Jimmy. “He’s very intelligent. Maybe not enough com-mon sense to go with it. That’s kind of the same for both of us.” The two complemented one another—Jimmy the actor, inspired by Robert’s theories and direction; Robert the idea man, emboldened by a partner overflowing with creative energy. They were one another’s best audience.

“We talked a lot about life in general, what’s going on, you know, what we’re supposed to be doing here—if this is it, maybe we should make the best of it.

“We didn’t think people were making enough out of life.”

Robert and Jim brought an attitude to The Crew. “Ninth grade and up, it was mostly, like, Casey, me, Zack, and Robert,” said Jimmy. “Kip and Coltere, because Coltere was Zack’s really good friend, so that was basically the group of friends we had.”

By high school, Robert’s house had become mission control. No one had a driver’s license yet, so if Jimmy didn’t go right to Robert’s house from school, any plans to get together became complicated. “We would have to arrange things with our parents to drive me to his house, so that was a big pain in the ass.” It worked out better for The Crew to just head directly there after school. Jim was there almost every day.

Robert was also the first one to get Nintendo 64. The console was

hooked up to the television in the living room. The boys played
James Bond, Beetle Racing,
and first-person shooting games like
Doom.
“Robert would steer the guy and I would shoot,” Zack said. Robert’s parents weren’t around much, and the boys often had the run of the place. The house became known as the best venue in Chelsea for ball tag. The rules were FFA—“free for all.” One boy took the ball—maybe a Nerf ball, but usually a fake-leather mini-soccer ball—and chased the others, trying to nail one so he would be “it.” The game was sometimes played at Jimmy’s or Casey’s houses, but Robert’s house was the best by far. It had front and back staircases and lots of rooms with two entrances, making it easier for players to avoid getting trapped. The popular contests were often expanded beyond the core crew to include Kienan and other boys. The house, said one boy, was “just awesome,” and Robert “had the greatest moves.”

There was plenty of outdoor action too. “Mostly within the area, because we couldn’t drive anywhere yet,” said Jimmy. “We’d go swimming a lot. We tried building a couple of forts. Taking boats down the river, canoes during the floods. Taking sticks into the woods and kicking down trees and stuff like that.”

The boys always seemed to have one fort or another going all through high school. Robert and Zack were juniors in the spring of 2000, when Zack told Robert and Jimmy about a new spot he’d found. It was across the footbridge behind Zack’s house on Main Street, in the woods and up a hill, a hidden spot with a commanding view across the village and the valley. The boys went to work: they found four trees that formed a square and cleared out the brush between them. They chopped down four other trees and nailed them to the standing trees to form a support for a platform. Kip joined the construction crew, and the four boys took time to carve the initials of their first names into one of the four supports. The site wasn’t on the Courtses’ land, and the boys probably should have asked for permission before starting the fort, “but do before ask is one of those things fifteen-and sixteen-year- olds are real good at,” said Zack.

It wasn’t an easy spot to reach, up a hill that got steeper and steeper

and included a final stretch that was a rock face. Robert and Jimmy seemed to like the last part best, said Zack, so much so that rock climbing would become Robert and Jimmy’s passion. “Rock climbing is hard, a challenge,” said Zack, “and if there’s anyone who likes to take up a challenge it was Robert.”

The boys had other big plans, like installing a zip line to a nearby tree that would run down a back hill. It would be a thrill ride. But they never got that far; indeed, like so many projects, they never finished the fort. Instead one hot day someone had a new idea—why don’t we dam the small waterfall down a bit from the fort and make a sitting pool to cool off in? Soon enough the boys were dragging the logs used in the viewing platform down to the waterfall. It was hardly an uncommon outcome, the boys racing through one idea to another. “This is fun, but I have a better idea,” said Zack about the pattern. “Like Legos, the pleasure was in the building, not playing with what you’ve built.”

It was Huck and Tom in Chelsea—and a good thing, too, because one fact of life for Chelsea boys all through the ages was the need to find ways to cope with the peace and quiet of a rural place. Older Chelseans all knew this. Like Will Gilman, owner of Will’s Store and son of the town’s late historian, who “learned early, if you wanted to do things you had to learn to make them up yourself. You entertained yourself.” This was the yin and yang of Chelsea—there was everything and nothing to do. The everything was mostly outdoors: the camping and hunting, the hiking, biking, and skiing, the high school sports and traditional town events, like winter carnival, born decades earlier to combat the isolation. But there was little of what teenagers everywhere consider to be “something.” To see a movie, go to a mall or superstore, eat Chinese food, go bowling—all that required a road trip to places like Barre, Vermont, twenty miles north on back roads. Said Gilman, Chelsea “is a great place to live if you like to hike or camp or hunt or bike. For kids who crave more excitement, it’s a tougher place.”

Growing up in Chelsea required imagination—never more so than

when Robert and Jimmy and their friends hit their teen years in the late 1990s. They had more free time on their hands than teens in Chelsea had ever known. “There’s really not a whole lot to do,” said Kip Battey. Robert and Jimmy decided they were lucky to at least have each other.

“We were both very adventurous,” Jimmy said. “A great pair.”

9
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The Sheaths

F
or three days after the Zantops’ bodies were found, investigators scoured the house for clues. They seized 105 items they thought

might offer evidence, from door knobs to a key ring, a wine glass to Post-it notes. They took a calendar, a Rolodex, a cell phone, a business card to Valley Acupuncture Health Clinic, two torn ticket stubs to
Best in Show,
a regional telephone book, twelve volumes of a blood-splattered German encyclopedia, an Apple laptop computer, an Apple desktop computer, and anything else that might lead them to the killers.