Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (18 page)

Under the supervision of state police Sergeant James White and Timothy Pifer, director of the New Hampshire State Police Forensic Laboratory, a team of five state troopers and four lab technicians combed the rugs for hair. They took swabbings of five drops of what appeared to be blood. They documented five partial or near-complete

bloody bootprints. They identified nineteen partial or complete finger-and palm-prints.

The next day, medical examiner Dr. Thomas Gilson collected fin-gernail clippings from Half and Susanne’s bodies to see if either had scratched the killer or killers. He and his assistants took the couple’s finger-and palm-prints, plucked hairs from their heads, and drew samples of their blood, to distinguish between evidence left by the killers and the victims. Upon completing the autopsy, Gilson concluded Half died from “multiple stab wounds with injuries of airway, heart, and lung.” Susanne’s death resulted from “multiple stab wounds with injuries of skull, brain, major vessel, thyroid cartilage/airway, intestine, and spleen.” On both death certificates, Gilson wrote that death occurred within “seconds, minutes.” Under manner of death, Gilson wrote “04,” the code for homicide.

Throughout their work, investigators and medical examiners kept detailed logs of who did what, who went in or out, who handled what evidence, and who stood guard. They photographed everything in trip-licate and videotaped the scene. When they were finished, they called a locksmith to change the locks and an alarm company to re-code the security system, then hung “No Trespassing” signs and yellow crime-scene tape along the property line bordering Trescott Road.

For all the painstaking work, all the evidence labeled, diagrammed, and shipped out for testing, every one of the investigators knew that two items stood out from the rest: the knife sheaths. They weren’t smoking guns in the hands of a killer, but they were close. They had held the murder weapons. They had been touched by whoever murdered the Zantops. The fact that there were two of them strongly suggested there was more than one killer. They also were unusual, not the run-of-the-mill sheaths that could be found in the hands of everyone from Boy Scouts to longshoremen. They were the glass slippers of the Zantop murders: search the countryside to find their rightful owners and the mystery would be solved.

Given the sheaths’ importance, Major Barry Hunter of the New Hampshire State Police knew he needed to entrust them to a particularly dogged investigator, a cop who wouldn’t give up no matter how

frustrating the work became, no matter how many days, weeks, or months passed. A cop who would grind calmly ahead, inch by inch, without fanfare, ego, or complaint. The word “tenacious” kept coming to Hunter’s mind. So did the name Chuck West.

T
rooper West had become something of a legend almost four years earlier, in August 1997. He was working a routine narcotics case when

his radio barked out two dreaded words: “Officer down.” West pointed his car north, racing seventy miles to the scene. On the way, he picked up details of the danger he was rushing toward.

The crisis had begun earlier that afternoon, a mile outside Colebrook, New Hampshire, a town of 2,500 souls in the state’s remote North Country. A trooper from West’s barracks named Scott Phillips was on his way to get a haircut at a little place called Joanne’s Added Attraction when he saw a rattletrap 1974 Dodge pickup driven by a local misanthrope, Carl Drega. Most people around Colebrook knew the sixty-two-year-old Drega, and most knew it was best to stay clear of him. A carpenter and mechanic, Drega stood more than six feet tall, weighed more than two hundred pounds, and went everywhere armed, even to the end of his driveway to get his mail. He had feuded with almost everyone who crossed his path, particularly with town officials over zoning and property issues. Drega’s belief system boiled down to my land, my rules.

Phillips had tangled with Drega a few times, and the trooper had discussed Drega’s broken-down pickup with fellow trooper Les Lord. Both thought it wasn’t roadworthy, and they resolved to take action the next time either saw him driving around town. When Drega pulled into the lot at the IGA market, Phillips flipped on his flashing blue lights and followed him. Phillips was thirty-two, the father of two, a friendly family man who lived in Colebrook and had been assigned to protect the area since joining the state police seven years earlier. Knowing that Drega was trouble, Phillips radioed Lord for backup.

Drega braked to a stop and Phillips pulled up behind him. As Phillips began walking toward Drega’s pickup, Drega got out holding a

Colt AR-15 assault rifle. Before Phillips could react, Drega began shooting. Phillips returned fire, emptying his gun without hitting Drega; one of Drega’s shots had struck him in the hand, making it difficult to aim and impossible to reload. Wounded, Phillips stumbled toward tall grass at the edge of the parking lot, hoping to hide and, perhaps, draw Drega away from shoppers in nearby stores. Just then, Lord pulled into the lot and Drega turned toward the approaching cruiser. Lord, known as “Lucky,” was forty-five, the father of two, a man with more than two decades of law enforcement behind him. Drega leveled his gun and began firing. A bullet passed through the passenger-side window, hitting Lord in the head and killing him instantly. Drega returned his attention to Phillips. He strode purposely to the field and executed the bleeding trooper.

With two dead troopers sprawled behind him, Drega knew he had nothing to lose. He went back to his pickup, but it wouldn’t start, so he climbed into Phillips’s cruiser and drove a short distance to a brick building that housed the local newspaper, the
News and Sentinel,
and the office of Vickie Bunnell, a local lawyer and part-time judge who had taken out a restraining order against Drega. The two had faced off repeatedly over the years, starting in 1991 when Bunnell was a select-woman in nearby Columbia and she ordered Drega removed from a meeting in handcuffs when he threatened her during a zoning dispute. When Bunnell saw Drega drive up in the bullet-pocked cruiser, she ran through the halls screaming, “It’s Drega! He’s got a gun!”

Drega stalked the forty-four-year-old lawyer through the building and out to the parking lot, where he fatally shot her in the back. Newspaper editor Dennis Joos tried to wrest the gun away. “Mind your own fucking business,” Drega was heard to say as he executed the fifty-one-year-old Joos with eight shots.

Drega drove the cruiser home, shaved off his beard, changed clothing, and grabbed more ammunition. On his way out, he poured gaso-line on his front door and set it ablaze. He apparently wanted to kill more police and firefighters—he had rigged an explosive device to his front door—but no one took the bait. Elsewhere on his property, he had stored eighty-six sophisticated pipe bombs and four hundred

pounds of high-grade ammonium nitrate—a fertilizer that when mixed with fuel oil creates the same explosive used in the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.

Drega then headed west, toward Vermont, with New Hampshire troopers and game wardens in pursuit. Drega kept firing during the chase, hitting warden Warren Saunders through the windshield of his truck. Saunders’s shield, pinned over his heart, stopped a second bul-let that might have been fatal. Drega drove to a deserted logging road, parked the cruiser, and turned the police radio to high volume so it would be found. He slid into Phillips’s bulletproof vest and donned the slain trooper’s Stetson hat. Drega then hid on a nearby hill, giving himself a clear line of fire to the cruiser.

A team of Vermont and New Hampshire state and local police officers, along with a group of U.S. Border Patrol agents and a police dog named Major, converged on the scene. By then Chuck West was among them. The dog spotted movement on the hill, and Drega sprung his ambush, critically wounding New Hampshire Trooper Jeff Caulder and Agent John Pfeifer of the Border Patrol, and shooting a third officer in the foot. West stepped into the line of fire and dragged Caulder to safety. Then West and two other officers tried to rescue Pfeifer. Drega opened fire again. A gun battle raged for forty-five minutes while Pfeifer bled. Saving him meant stopping Drega.

“I really don’t want to do this,” West said, knowing he would do it anyway.

“This is really going to sting,” responded Border Patrol Agent Stephen Brooks, who joined West in the mission.

With Drega hiding behind a tree, West led Brooks up the hill. When Drega came into the open, ready to kill again, the lawmen fired. West delivered the deadly blow, hitting Drega with a shotgun blast that crushed his chest despite the bulletproof vest. West and Brooks then carried Pfeifer to a Jeep for transport to the hospital. Four people were dead and four more were wounded, but Drega’s siege was over.

For his heroism, West was named the nation’s 1998 Police Officer of the Year by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. When

he accepted the award to a thunderous standing ovation from ten thousand police officials gathered in Salt Lake City, West deflected the credit, praising Brooks and honoring the fallen troopers.

W
est was relaxing at home when he got the call about the Zantops’ deaths, and he immediately drove his unmarked blue Chevy Lumina

to the scene. He was forty-three but looked years younger, a Pennsylvania native with a wife and two teenage sons. West had a wrestler’s build yet carried himself lightly, with a thoughtful, bemused look that could be mistaken for docility. He joined the state police in 1984, after stints in the Air Force and as a member of the Hampton, New Hampshire, police force. Though he had risen to plainclothes detective, West was more from the school of Columbo than Kojak.

Most days, working alongside West on sheath detail was Detective Frank Moran, a thirty-five-year-old lieutenant from the Hanover Police Department. Moran was a thirteen-year veteran of the department, with jet-black hair and a wary demeanor. As they dug into the task, West and Moran learned that they faced good and bad news in roughly equal proportions.

The best news was that the sheaths were indeed unique and hadn’t been around very long. They were designed to fit a knife called a SOG SEAL 2000, a commando weapon with a seven-inch, powder-gray blade and a five-inch, contoured black handle. The SEAL 2000 had been sold for five years by a Washington State company called SOG Specialty Knives. The company’s name came from an elite and once-secret American military unit, the innocuously named Studies and Observation Group. During the Vietnam War, highly mobile SOG teams operated behind North Vietnamese lines to sabotage military installations, pinpoint targets for U.S. bombing missions, launch psychological warfare missions, and rescue U.S. pilots downed in enemy jungles. The company’s line of SEAL knives—in addition to the 2000, there were the shorter Pup and the longer Tigershark models—were named for the Navy SEALS, whose own name derived from their ability to fight on “sea, air, or land.” The SOG SEAL 2000 had been honored as the “official knife” of the Navy SEALS. It could only be considered a hunting knife if the intended prey were human.

Although the SEAL 2000 had been on the market for five years, the sheaths were more recent additions to the product line. Made of a composite hard plastic called Kydex, each sheath found at the Zantops’ home bore a one-inch-square SOG logo stamped on the back, which company officials told West and Moran had only been added in March 2000. That narrowed the search considerably, to sheaths and knives sold during the previous ten months. Investigators thought they also might find clues in a dagger-shaped design carved onto one of the sheaths.

The bad news was that the SOG SEAL 2000 was an extremely popular knife, the company’s bestselling blade, with buyers from all over the world. When Moran first made contact with the company two days after the killings, assistant marketing director Vicky Karshna estimated roughly five thousand were made each year. They could be purchased directly from the company, in retail stores, through catalogs, and over the Internet. Some were sold by SOG to wholesalers, who in turn resold them to dealers who were lower in the weapons food chain. West likened it to a spider’s web with a potentially infinite number of branches. Worse still, neither the knives nor the sheaths had serial numbers, and, unlike firearms, no laws required sales to be recorded or reported. Some sales were in cash, some sales came at small-time weapons shows, and some sales led to seemingly impossible to trace resales on a vague and shadowy secondary market. None of that especially troubled West.

The sheaths, for all the hurdles, were a known quantity. “We take what we can get,” he shrugged. He’d stay focused on a process of elimination, keeping his spirits up and his energy from flagging by reminding himself how important the sheaths were to solving the case.

Unbeknownst to West, he was following a trail that had been blazed seventy-seven years earlier, in a similarly high-profile case: the investigation of the mysterious death of a wealthy Chicago boy named Bobby Franks. A pair of round, horn-rimmed reading glasses was found

with the body, and the police concluded they had been left behind by the killer. The frames and the prescription were common, but some deft sleuthing determined that an unusual, patented hinge connected the earpiece to the nosepiece. Only three had been sold in Chicago, and detectives tracked down each. One belonged to a woman considered a particularly unlikely suspect. A second pair was owned by a lawyer who was traveling in Europe at the time. The third was sold to a brilliant but odd young man named Nathan Leopold. He read widely in philosophy, and was a devotee of Friedrich Nietzsche. Leopold subscribed to Nietzsche’s notion that laws didn’t apply to “the supermen.” In Leopold’s eyes, that title squarely fit him and his best friend, Richard Loeb. The lost glasses were eventually Exhibit A in the 1924 murder trial that ended with the convictions of Leopold and Loeb.

For the first few days of their search, West and Moran cast around with little to guide them. They called some sport shops and together went to the Dartmouth Outing Club, the largest organization on cam-pus, to learn if the club kept knives among its equipment. It didn’t. Two days after the killings, SOG produced the names of several mail-order catalogs that carried the SEAL 2000, companies with names like Ranger Joe’s and Smokey Mountain Knifeworks. A day later, the company provided a list of merchants in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut, and New York. West and Moran immediately began the painstaking process of contacting the sellers one by one, to ask if they had sold any SOG SEAL 2000s with Kydex sheaths since March, if they kept records of buyers, and most of all, if anyone had purchased more than one.