Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (19 page)

A day later, at West’s request, SOG added a list of Arizona retail-ers. It was far afield, but West knew what he was doing. While he and Moran were chasing sheaths, several dozen other investigators were conducting scores of interviews, fielding dozens of phone tips, collecting and comparing thousands of pieces of information, to see if any reached the point of critical mass. Some of the first clues pointed them toward Arizona.

D
uring the first days after the murders, investigators swept through the halls of Dartmouth, serially interviewing faculty members in Half

and Susanne’s departments. Two state police detectives went to Fairchild Hall to meet with Half’s teaching assistant, Tom Douglas. Douglas had already been interviewed once, two days earlier, by West and Moran. During that interview, Douglas offered nothing much other than his belief that Half was “anal” about planning the academic field trips he led students on in Mexico. Douglas talked about two students he considered “cutters,” but he meant they cut classes, not people.

During his second interview, though, Douglas said he had been puzzling over what might have happened and had come up with a name of someone he thought might have had reason to kill the Zantops: a geology professor from Arizona State University named Stanley Williams.

In the small world of geologists, Stanley Williams was a big name with an ego to match. He was forty-eight and something of a celebrity because of an event that nearly killed him. In 1993, Williams was leading a group of fifteen scientists, engineers, and tourists to the crater at the summit of an active volcano called Galeras in southwestern Colombia. As they got ready to leave, the walls of the crater began to shake. The earth opened with a roar, yielding to the pressure of gases that had collected under the volcano’s dome. White-hot rocks spewed out in a fusillade, along with a cannonade of red-hot boulders the size of dishwashers. Nine members of the party died. Two of them were vaporized. A fist-sized rock plowed into Williams’s head, driving pieces of his skull deep into his brain. His jaw was broken, his right leg was nearly severed, and the bone of his left leg jutted through his pants. Two vertebrae were cracked and his back and arms were badly burned. Williams was carried down the volcano a changed man. Beyond his broken body, he was permanently brain-damaged—he lost a piece of his brain the size of a peach pit. He retained his lopsided grin but tended to erupt in anger. He was prone to depression.

Williams had received his master’s degree and his Ph.D. at Dartmouth under his friend and earth sciences mentor, Dick Stoiber. The same Dick Stoiber who had brought the Zantops to Hanover and had become Half’s close friend. On the day of the Zantop murders, Williams was in Hanover, having flown in from Arizona to attend Stoiber’s ninetieth birthday party. The same party Half had planned to attend. Douglas told the detectives that Williams seemed agitated at the party, sniping at him for failing to arrive early to park cars. Five minutes later, Williams’s mood shifted abruptly. He put his arm around Douglas and offered him a drink from a bottle of champagne. Douglas also told the detectives that Williams had made it known that he wanted to return to Dartmouth, and as Douglas saw it, the only job Williams was qualified to fill was already occupied—by Half Zantop. It also emerged that Half had been the thesis advisor to Williams’s wife, Lynda, when she received a master’s degree in 1984, and that Susanne Zantop had been in Arizona a few months earlier for a conference.

Douglas’s report sent investigators into high gear. Within hours, they had tracked down the white Daewoo sedan Williams had rented during his stay in Hanover. A search of the car revealed a large cardboard box in the trunk, stained reddish-brown by an unknown “organic material.” Investigators seized Williams’s rental contracts and his

$188.34 bill, a pair of sunglasses he had accidentally left behind, and the remnants of a McDonald’s meal. They took statements from Thrifty Car Rental workers, who said Williams was rude. They twice searched the guest bedroom and bathroom in the home where Williams stayed with friends on his long weekend in Hanover. They scoured records of his purchases at the Dartmouth Co-op. They re-interviewed members of the earth sciences faculty and asked pointed questions about Williams.

The height of investigators’ interest in Williams came a week after the murders, when Moran took a break from sheath duty to join Assistant Attorney General Mike Delaney and New Hampshire State Police Sergeant Russell Conte on a trip to Arizona. They took blood samples and fingerprints from Williams, and interviewed him and his

wife. In a two-hour interview at the Phoenix Police Department, Williams walked the investigators through his career, how he bumped into Half at Dartmouth the day before the murders, and his move-ments the day Half and Susanne were killed.

Well into the interview, Conte asked Williams flat out: “Did you kill the Zantops? Did you kill Half? Did you kill Susanne?”

“No,” Williams answered. “I can’t even see how you could kill anybody.”

Conte persisted: “Did you hire anybody to kill the Zantops?” “No,” Williams said.

“Were you part of a conspiracy . . . ?” “No,” Williams said again.

Williams remained in investigators’ sights for almost two more weeks, but in the end, authorities found no evidence against him. One of the most potentially damning findings, the stained cardboard box in the trunk, turned out to be much ado about moose stew. While taking the North Country delicacy to a friend’s house for a dinner two days after the Zantops’ death, Williams had placed the stew pot in the box to avoid soiling the car.

In the meantime, however, Williams’s name had leaked to the media. His wife—not knowing that Half Zantop’s teaching assistant had pointed investigators toward Williams—blamed reporters for the fallout. “Because of a moose stew stain,” Lynda Williams wrote in a caustic letter to the media, “you have slandered my husband’s work, insinuated he was a suspect in murder, and accused me of having an affair with my advisor. Your stories have sickened us and caused heartache for our teenaged children. There is no excuse.” Investigators never corrected her misimpression about how Williams became their focus.

Meanwhile, Stoiber died February 9, two weeks after the Zantops, of natural causes. He was never told of their deaths, and never knew that his protégé Williams had been a potential suspect.

10
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Smarter Than Everybody

R
obert had the idea first: Let’s get my CD from Casey’s house.

But they’re away, one of the other boys pointed out.

So what? said Jim—to most, he was no longer Jimmy. He’d stick with Robert.

We go in, Robert riffed, we get the game, we leave. The others went along. Rash? Maybe.

“We were looking for something to do,” Jim said later.

Along with Robert and Jim were Zack Courts and Gaelen McKee, another Chelsea boy who sometimes hung out with The Crew. Even though Gaelen was only a freshman, while Jim was a sophomore and Robert and Zack were juniors, the boys thought Gaelen was cool. Zack and Gaelen had baseball practice and needed to get back for that. Even so, if they hurried they might have enough time to squeeze in some fun at Casey’s house—a game of ball tag.

Robert, acting on impulse, had found a way to kill yet another weekday afternoon on a cold day in April 2000. It was the conclusion of another long winter—a time known as “mud season”—when the thaw and vanishing snow wreaked havoc on the miles of unpaved roads, rendering many impassable until the dirt hardened and the ravines created by streams of water were filled in. To entertain themselves this time of year, some Chelsea boys went “mudding,” a back-road sport where they piled into a pickup truck and raced up and down the roads, bouncing around the craters and mounds, rocking and rolling inside the cab.

To entertain themselves, Robert and Jim came up with their own version of rocking and rolling, by deciding to head over to the Purcells’ house.

Robert wanted his CD game back. By now, all the boys had computers. They had CD games, they surfed the Internet, and they “instant-messaged” one another. But it wasn’t as if they could spend endless hours online. Most hookups were through a family’s one telephone line, which meant tying up the phone to go online. No problem when parents weren’t around, but a single line hampered unlimited use. Jim was the exception; his parents put in a second telephone line for Internet use in one of the two computers the family had set up in a second-floor hallway. John Parker used one for work and the other one was Jim’s domain. But none of the boys had high-speed service; they all had the maddeningly slow dial-up connection. In short order, Jim chose the screen name jimibruce—a compound moniker based on one of his favorite musicians, Jimi Hendrix, and the name of a family pet. “The Parkers got a kitten, a really neat, totally black kitten, when Jim was in high school,” explained Zack Courts. “Jim named it Bruce, even though it was a girl.” Zack was calzone07, because he’d eaten his first calzone right around the time he needed to pick a name. Robert was light08. Zack wasn’t sure how Robert came up with that, except that Robert had always liked the word and often used it as a name when he played games on the computer or on Nintendo 64.

At the Tulloch house, the computer had started out in Robert’s bedroom. This gave Robert mastery, but it also caused friction. Kienan

liked playing computer games, even more so than Robert. Robert would come home and find Kienan on his turf. “You’ve been on the computer for a long time,” Robert would say. “Get out of my room.” Another friction point was that Kienan liked to stay up late playing on the computer, while Robert liked to hit the sack early. The solution to the fraternal standoff came when they eventually agreed to move the computer into Kienan’s bedroom.

To head over to the Purcells’, the boys left Robert’s house and piled into a champagne-colored Porsche owned by Zack’s father. Zack was the wheel man, Robert rode shotgun, and Jim and Gaelen folded themselves into the tiny backseat. The boys followed their standard policy of “My car, my music.” Zack favored the hard, raucous sound of two punk-pop groups from California—blink-182 and Green Day. Robert’s taste was more diverse: disco, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, heavy metal. He liked Bela Fleck and The Flecktones. Jim, the musician, liked jazz and dismissed anything remotely considered pop. That meant pretty much everything Zack liked.

From Chelsea, the boys headed east on Route 113, driving the mile or so to a turnoff past Ward’s Garage. The Purcells were renting a section of a larger house occupied by another family. The boys didn’t want the other family to notice them, so Zack pulled over before they got there and parked out of sight. The four boys hiked to the house and tried the door. It was locked. They tried the other doors—all locked. “What should we do?” Jim said.

Not to be denied, they checked windows and found one was unlocked. Soon they were inside. Robert looked around and found his CD game. He also came across a movie on videocassette belonging to Casey, one he hadn’t seen, so Robert picked that up, too. Now they had something to do later. The boys munched on chips and someone grabbed a bottle of sparkling cider. “Stupid stuff,” said Zack. The world was their oyster. There was even time for a brief game of ball tag. Zack said, “We’re done here,” and Gaelen scribbled a note for the Purcells: “Ate Food. Thank You.”

It would have ended there—and likely stayed a secret—except the family from the other side of the house returned and realized some

boys were rambling around in the Purcells’ house. Knowing the Purcells were away, they called the sheriff ’s office. Thinking they had gotten away unnoticed, Zack drove the Porsche back toward town on Route 113, right past the sheriff ’s office and the North Common. The boys were inside the car talking, listening to music. Zack actually drove right past the sheriff, who was idling in an unmarked pickup truck. The sheriff did a U-turn and began to follow Zack, who was oblivious.

In town the sheriff pulled the boys over. The three passengers were dismissed, while Zack, as the driver, was questioned at the sheriff ’s office. “I got the third-degree,” he said later. He missed baseball practice, but no criminal charges resulted. “It seemed innocent to me,” Casey’s mother, Fran Purcell, said after being told about the boys’ escapade in her house. Casey wasn’t bothered about it at all. Eventually, Zack performed three hours of community service, shoveling snow off the basketball court across from the South Common and working in the school library. Robert, Jim, and Gaelen got off scot-free. Just another afternoon filling free time in their hometown.

T
een life in Chelsea could indeed be dull, and part of the problem was school. Robert, Kip Battey, and the other high-octane students from

DeRoss Kellogg’s sixth grade class had gotten such a jump acquiring the twenty-three credits needed for a diploma that a free-time crisis had developed. It was an unintended consequence, but real nonetheless. It was also totally out of sync with much of the rest of the country. In towns and suburbs throughout the United States the operative term for teenagers was “overbooked.” Baby boomer parents worried their kids were frantic and stressed out: too much homework, too many sports, too many clubs and extracurricular activities, too many social demands. Parents had become chauffeurs in the 24-7 ride around town to get kids to the next appointment on time. The grown-ups might fret, but, like an addiction, they couldn’t seem to kick the habit of what had become the rat race of growing up in America. It became the stuff of newspaper lifestyle articles, cultural studies, and books with names like
The