Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (26 page)

be viewed as abuse. “It’s like saying another person is stupid. You can’t do that.”

In his seat, O’Brien hung his head. He knew immediately that Robert had gone too far, “in the same vein as the Ebonics thing.” Robert had ignored the foul line once again and had put his team’s fortunes in jeopardy. Seated beside O’Brien was his friend, Marialisa Calta, a freelance writer, and she was thinking the same as the others: Robert’s in trouble now. “Pointing out your opponent is not from the U.S. is not going to help you win,” she said later. “It seemed really dumb.”

Johannes smiled nervously. He didn’t feel particularly stung by the insensitive remark. He was used to a certain amount of kidding about his accent from friends at school. He’d just turn around and joke about their upcountry Vermont accents. But Johannes understood that the context was different: Robert’s comment had come during a debate. Robert, he thought, had gone and acted “pretty uppity.”

Robert ignored Luke’s entreaty and did not apologize. He just kept going until his time ran out, seemingly oblivious to the eye-rolling and gasps. He simply didn’t get it. Johannes and his teammate, meanwhile, quickly realized that Robert had handed them something to work with. When his turn came, Matt Gregg tried repeatedly to draw the judge’s attention to the remark and emphasize how rude Robert had been.

Luke tried to undo the damage, spending most of his rebuttal apologizing. Luke then tried to steer the debate back to the topic. He felt he’d succeeded, delivering a rebuttal he considered his best ever. After the debate, shaking Johannes’s hand, Luke apologized again. Luke figured he and Robert had pulled it out. “I thought the fire was settled,” he said.

O’Brien, too, was hopeful. Luke and Robert, in terms of the policy issue, had dominated; the other boys had been unable to make a dent in the lighting plan. He predicted the judge would award a “low-point win,” meaning a narrow margin to reflect Robert’s crude faux pas. Awaiting the outcome, even Johannes thought he and his teammate had lost. “Although we did think that the judge probably wouldn’t like Robert’s remark, we still expected the other side to win because of their better argumentation.”

They were wrong. Judge David Kelley, who debated in high school and at the University of Vermont, was a purist. “I was tempted to end the debate right there and forfeit Chelsea and announce, ‘Sorry, this is not the reason why we are here,’ ” Kelley said. “Simple civility is a building block of the competition.” Robert, the judge said, “first struck me as particularly bright,” but as the round unfolded Robert displayed “sheer arrogance.” Kelley found the nationality remark “chilling.”

“I was surprised and disappointed in this particular team, more so than in any debate I’ve ever judged.” The judge ruled that Johannes and Matt had won. Robert’s commentary, said Kelly, was “tantamount to watching a boxing match and having one of the boxers bring a fist into his opponent’s groin.”

Luke and Robert were crestfallen. But Luke got over it; he shrugged and accepted the fact that once Robert made the German comment the debate was no longer about their lighting plan. “Like when Holyfield fought Tyson and got his ear bit off,” Luke said, echo-ing the judge’s boxing metaphor. “Who’s going to care who’s winning the fight? Tyson obviously got disqualified, and the boxing didn’t matter.”

Robert was unable to accept the outcome. He was incensed. Outside in the hallway, in front of his coach and the coach’s two friends, Marialisa Calta and Paula Routly, two women he’d never met before that day, Robert flipped out. “We’re smarter than those guys. How could he do that to us?” Robert demanded to no one in particular.

Calta wondered how Robert could even think this way. “It was clear they weren’t going to win” after Robert’s ugly remark, she said. Routly, the publisher of an alternative weekly newspaper in Burlington, considered Robert’s harangue a “verbal version of kicking the wall.” She tried to calm Robert and move him off the subject, nod-ding in agreement that indeed life was unfair sometimes. She tried humor. But nothing worked. Robert was absorbed in his own angry world. “He certainly didn’t need much interaction to keep going,” said

Routly. “He wasn’t asking questions, like what we thought about this. He wasn’t really listening to us. It was like he needed an audience, but not much more. He just wouldn’t let it go.”

W
eeks passed before O’Brien saw Robert again, a break that O’Brien didn’t mind. But then one day O’Brien bumped into Robert

near the school. It was all chitchat, with O’Brien asking Robert what he was up to and Robert casually replying he had big plans in the works. “I’m not going to be around here,” he told his coach. “I’m going to be in Europe.”

Europe? Where in Europe?

Robert shrugged. Europe, was all he’d say.

In the wake of his back-to-back humiliations in student council and debate, Robert was stepping up his talk with Jim about their breakout from Chelsea. Robert told some of his friends he was thinking of going to Germany’s Bavaria region. “I’m not sure why he came up with that,” Zack Courts said. “Maybe because it’s a green and mountainous region, kind of like Vermont.” Or maybe Robert wanted a rematch with debate opponent Johannes Gamba. Then Robert and Jim began talking about a destination even farther around the planet— Australia. Zack remembered them saying, “It would be sweet to go to Australia.” Zack was quick to grasp the appeal of life down under, say-ing Australia “seems cool. It’s foreign. It’s weird, and they do speak English there.”

Around this same time, Chelsea school officials and board members held a series of special sessions with parents, some of whom had grown alarmed by stories of drug use, bullying on school buses, and a general lack of discipline. The sessions began contentiously—one selectman called them “bitch-and-complain meetings”—but they proved productive. The school handbook was overhauled, spelling out beefed-up regulations and policies on everything from hazing to weapons. Principal Pat Davenport later said proudly the new handbook addressed “some post-Columbine issues.”

But the new bright lines for student conduct had little impact on Robert and Jim—not with the growing free time they had on their hands, time they spent mostly with one another. Friends continued to hear accounts of their ambitious travel plans, although specifics were rarely forthcoming. The boys’ means to their end remained a very private work in progress—disconnected from The Crew and a closely held secret. In a number of ways, though, Robert and Jim had commenced in earnest their training days.

After Robert had honed his sharp tongue and felt the intellectual high of debate, he and Jim were soon getting in shape and experiencing the physical kick of rock climbing. Climbing became an obsession during the spring of 2000, their new big thing to do. They spent hours on end at indoor rock-climbing facilities, mostly riding in Jim’s car to Petra Cliffs in Burlington, an 8,500-square-foot training complex about an hour away. They bought and borrowed equipment and threw themselves into a sport that devotees say provides a supernatural and gravity-defying rush, an escape from life’s ordinariness.

It was also a sport of bonding, where rope-mates had to learn to work as one, as one climber belayed, or managed the safety rope, for the other. Perfect for Robert and Jim. Climbing became a way to test themselves, to see if they had the nerve to push themselves to the next level, where the thrill was greater but so was the risk. Climbing meant relying on each other, hanging there together, driving toward a summit and prodding each other past fears and doubts. The goal could only be reached in tandem, each step along the way requiring careful and deliberate planning but also an ever-ready nimbleness to shift left or right if suddenly they faced a rough route. Only by talking it through and working closely together could they succeed.

Devoting themselves, they improved quickly. “I would say they were maybe not experts but upper-end intermediate climbers,” said Petra Cliffs’ owner, Chip Schlegel. In short order, he said, the two boys had become “strong climbers.” Christiana Usenza tagged along on occasion and even tried climbing, but neither she nor any of The Crew

took to climbing with the intensity of Robert and Jim. It was their thing, theirs alone. Kienan was once asked to identify his brother’s rock-climbing friends. He replied: “He didn’t have any rock-climbing friends—just him and Jim.”

Just Robert and Jim.

13
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Vasque Boots

I
n the first days after the murders, Robert and Jim tried to live as normally as possible—in denial, Jim called it—while plotting their long-

planned, now-urgent departure from Chelsea. They knew the knife sheaths might lead police to Jim, and that would inevitably lead to Robert. Unless they escaped, that would destroy their dream of living lives of great adventure.

Robert returned to school the Monday after the killings, strolling into Joan Feierabend’s advanced art class at 10:20
A
.
M
. He announced that he was joining the class even though he had missed the first week of the semester. That didn’t thrill Feierabend, who had last taught him in the sixth grade. DeRoss Kellogg might have thought Robert was wonderfully spirited, but she considered him grumpy and sarcastic. She let him know that attitude wouldn’t work in a class filled with students serious about art. Robert said he understood, and to her surprise he seemed more subdued than usual.

The only other class Robert needed to take to graduate was environmental science, and before that class settled down to work his friend Kip Battey brought up the Zantop murders. “You hear about this?” Kip called to the teacher, Richard Steckler. As they talked about the mysterious killings, Robert sat impassively. He wasn’t his usual quick-with-a-quip self, but he was as composed as ever.

After school that day Robert called his sometime girlfriend, Christiana Usenza.

“What’d you do this weekend?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he lied. “I called you. I was really bored. I wanted to see what you were doing.” As it happened, Christiana had spent Saturday taking the SAT.

On Tuesday, the day after their phone call, Robert visited Christiana at work at the Hunger Mountain Co-op in Montpelier. When he walked in, she noticed him carrying his careworn brown teddy bear. She ran over and gave him a hug. “Yay, you did it! You’re ready to go,” she said. For months she’d been hearing about his plans to leave Chelsea and see the world with Jim—she understood instinctively that bringing her his teddy bear was a sign that he was casting off his childhood and readying himself for the road.

One other person Jim and Robert told they were leaving was their friend Gaelen McKee, but they only told him they were going rock climbing in Colorado, saying nothing of their plans never to return. McKee wasn’t especially alarmed by the news, knowing that both were ahead on credits in school and could probably afford some time off. Other friends noticed nothing strange about Robert and Jim.

While Robert was saying good-bye to Christiana, Jim was raising money for what they called their trip fund. For starters, they had $340 that had belonged to Half Zantop, the cash they had found in his wal-let. To add to the pot, Jim sold his saxophone, bass guitar, and ampli-fier to a music store in Burlington, and his snowboard to Tim Courts, the father of his friend Zack Courts. He tried to sell his paintball gun

and tennis racket, but couldn’t find any takers, so he gave them to Gaelen in a cardboard box along with an old Frisbee. Together, Robert and Jim had about $800, but then they bought some fancy climbing shirts for more than $100 each, and then Robert wanted new rock-climbing shoes to match the ones Jim had been given for Christmas.

Those purchases reduced their stake by more than $300, which ate up the money they had taken from Half’s wallet. In the rough math of robbery-murder, the lives of Half and Susanne Zantop were only worth two shirts and a pair of shoes to Robert and Jim.

They already owned the rest of the clothing, sleeping bags, and other gear they’d be bringing, including their matching SOG SEAL 2000 knives, minus their Kydex sheaths. Instead, they wrapped the blades in homemade sheaths, one made from a sock and the other from a mitten, both crudely cocooned in duct tape.

Jim and Robert had talked about throwing the knives in the river, or burying them, to rid themselves of damning evidence. But, as Jim put it, “If, you know, it became a problem to have the knives, then we were screwed anyway. We weren’t thinking about trial or how we could maybe defend our case or anything like that. . . . Plus, we wanted to keep them, you know? Wherever we went we needed survival knives.” They also kept busy monitoring news of the Zantop murder investigation, looking at papers at Will’s Store and once or twice in the school library. Later they did the same at home, surfing the Internet. Several times Jim typed in a simple search—“hanover and homicide”—and got back hundreds of responses. None of the news accounts suggested that police were working on hot leads, and none mentioned Chuck West and Frank Moran’s painstaking search for SEAL 2000 sales. For the