Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (27 page)

moment at least, Robert and Jim thought they were safe.

They planned to leave the same day Robert visited Christiana at the health-food co-op, but the weather was bad and Jim’s mother wouldn’t let him leave the house. They needed to keep their plans secret from their parents, and they didn’t want to arouse suspicion by having Jim demand to go out that night. Their flight on hold, Robert invited Christiana to his house.

“Do you want to see my cut?” he asked her. Robert had visited school

nurse Charlotte Faccio on the day he returned to school to have her tend to it. It was fresh, still bleeding and hurting badly, though his mother had looked at it a day earlier and told him it didn’t need stitches. Faccio noticed it was two inches long, a horizontal cut across his right thigh, several inches above the knee. Robert told Faccio he had cut himself on a fence, but Faccio thought it looked like a surgical cut—made by a sharp knife—because it was too straight and clean to have come from a fence. She cleaned it, affixed a new bandage, and sent him on his way.

Neither Robert nor Jim knew exactly how Robert had gotten the cut, but they were certain where it had happened. “I think he had it during the murders,” Jim said later, “because he didn’t have it before and he had it afterward.”

Robert first mentioned the cut to Christiana on the phone a day earlier, telling her only, “I ran into a metal thing.” When they were alone in Robert’s room, Christiana asked again how it happened.

“Well, it’s embarrassing, so I just, I just told people I ran into a sap bucket in the woods,” Robert said. The real story, he told Christiana, was he dropped a knife on his leg. Christiana didn’t ask more about it, figuring it was one of those dumb things boys do.

They talked past midnight and made a list of fake names Robert might use on his journey, which he said he’d need to prevent his parents from tracking him down and making him come home. As they talked, Robert became unusually emotional. He got teary at the thought of not being able to say good-bye to his mother. Even the sight of his family’s cat made him cry.

“You don’t have to go right now,” she told him. “You could wait until you have more money, ’til you graduate.”

“Well, I have to go. I, I kind of have to go,” he said. “I’ve done something bad.”

“Really bad?” “Yeah.”

Christiana didn’t press further, figuring Robert would have told her if he wanted her to know, and anyway it was probably nothing worse than him stealing something to raise money for his trip. She remembered how the previous spring he had told her about stealing an all-terrain vehicle then trying unsuccessfully to sell it to raise travel money.

Robert and Christiana fell asleep in his room at 1
A
.
M
. They woke at eight the next morning and began saying their good-byes. After breakfast Jim showed up at Robert’s door, his silver Audi waiting outside to take them away.

T
hey drove an hour from Chelsea to the Vermont Transit Authority bus station in White River Junction. It was only a few miles from

Hanover, just over the state border. They went to the counter and told ticket agent Brenda Johnson they wanted to go “somewhere warm.” Their real goal was Colorado, but they didn’t tell her that. The first place they mentioned was “Syracuse, California,” but that destination had the disadvantage of not existing. Johnson suggested San Diego— not knowing it was Jim’s mother’s hometown. But one-way tickets there cost $159 each, and Robert and Jim balked—too heavy a strain on their wallets.

They borrowed an atlas from Johnson and leafed through the pages. They returned to the ticket window and told her they’d take two tickets to Amarillo, Texas, one way, at $139 each. Jim also paid for two weeks of parking, saying someone from his family would come by the station’s lot to collect the Audi.

They hung around for nearly two hours, calmly waiting for the 1:50

P
.
M
. bus. They didn’t strike Johnson as nervous or upset, just a little confused. “They didn’t seem to know just where they wanted to go,” Johnson said later. “That’s what stood out in my mind. Two young boys who didn’t know where they were going.”

They climbed aboard the bus and settled into their seats. By the following night, they had traveled through New York City, changed buses, and made it as far as St. Louis. But the reality of cross-country bus travel quickly took its toll. They were short on money, tired, and uncomfortable on the crowded, smelly bus. Neither could stomach

fast food, and the bus only made pit stops at places like McDonald’s. Making matters worse, Robert’s leg was becoming infected and growing ever more painful.

The first night, Jim called his parents to say he and Robert were on a road trip but he wouldn’t tell them where. “We needed to take a break,” he told his father. “We’re just taking off for a few days to go rock climbing.” Despite Jim’s assurances, the call sent Joan and John Parker searching for clues to where he was and fearing he was gone for good.

“Dad is really sad because he thinks Jim has left home to be out in the world,” Joan wrote in an e-mail to her daughter, Diana. “He thinks he’s too young, and he wants him to graduate and not be a dropout, and he will miss him. He is worried that this is it, and Jim is gone. I tend to think he’s on a joyride, and will be back when he runs out of money. Mom.”

“Geez,” Diana responded. “I can’t believe Jim sometimes, but maybe after he realizes that he can’t make it out on his own, then he will come to his senses. I just hate that he thinks that he is Mr. Do-What-Ever-He-Wants cuz he is cool. And that he thinks he’s so grown up and beyond everyone else.”

When Diane Tulloch learned that Jim had called his parents, she was upset that Robert hadn’t called her and Mike. She considered the disappearance Robert’s first “strange behavior”—overlooking numerous earlier signs—while her husband considered it a huge surprise. Mike thought Robert hadn’t shown any signs of trouble.

By the second day of their trip, Robert and Jim had had enough. “What do you think, Jim?” Robert asked.

“Let’s just go home,” Jim answered. He explained later: “I kind of convinced myself that everything was OK. I really just wanted to go back home because I was tired, I was hungry, and ah, the bus ride sucked.”

Around 9
P
.
M
., on February 1, when the bus made a brief stopover, Jim called his parents a second time. They could hear in his voice that the adventure had gone out of him.

John and Joan Parker ordered Jim to come home immediately and

he agreed, having already reached that same conclusion. He and Robert would fly from St. Louis to Manchester, New Hampshire. Robert called Christiana. “We’re coming home,” he told her. “America is gross. The food is gross. My cut’s getting worse.” He asked her to pick them up at the airport the next day at noon.

After meeting the weary travelers at the airport, Christiana drove them to the bus station to get Jim’s car. Before leaving, they went into the station to seek $20 refunds on the unused portions of their tickets. When Brenda Johnson handed them the money, she said she was surprised to see them back so soon. They ran into bad weather, they told her, so they had turned around.

They returned to Chelsea, most of their money gone, their tails between their legs.

H
ome again, Robert and Jim ran into a storm of criticism and a bar-rage of questions. John and Joan Parker liked Robert, but now they

weren’t so sure this intense friendship was the best thing for their son. They denied Jim use of the car and the computer, and forbade him from seeing Robert for a month. The Parkers also warned him that, if it happened again, they’d call the police and file a missing persons report. Or, worse, they’d tell the police he had stolen their car. No one in Chelsea heard whether Robert was punished, but nothing in his behavior suggested there were consequences for his actions.

Kip Battey badgered Robert after his return, asking him why they went and doubting the answers. “I was thinking about, like, calling up the airlines to see if they really did fly back from St. Louis. I didn’t really buy it,” Kip said. He said he figured his friends “just screwed up really big and ended up doing something really, really stupid.”

“First you think, ‘Oh, you know, did they get caught drinking, or something like that, or drugs, or they got in trouble with their parents,’ ” Kip said. But drugs and drinking seemed unlikely pursuits for Jim and Robert, so Kip kept searching for an explanation.

No matter how many imagined offenses he ran through, Battey

never dreamed of a serious crime. If he had ticked off all the possible explanations for his friends’ sudden disappearance and mopey reap-pearance, murder would have been “like, number 395” on the list. Also, though the Zantop murders had taken place only a few days earlier and a short drive away, Kip explained, “Hanover is in another universe, really.”

He brought up Robert and Jim’s trip at a debate team practice, tossing around theories with the other debaters about what kind of mischief their friends must have gotten into to make them take off. That was the first time debate coach John O’Brien heard about the trip. Later, O’Brien needled Robert, trying to get some answers.

He joked about Robert’s wound and scoffed at his story. “What is this? A spout tap in the woods?” O’Brien said. He told Robert flat out that he didn’t believe that story. But rather than react with his usual arrogance, Robert backed down, letting O’Brien’s comments pass. It surprised the coach. He had expected Robert to go into hard-charging debate mode, snapping back at him, using knife-sharp rhetorical flourishes and fast-forming arguments to deflect O’Brien’s challenge and strike back with a counteroffensive. O’Brien felt pleased when Robert didn’t do any of that. He found himself liking this mellower, well-mannered, post-runaway version of Robert Tulloch. O’Brien thought it was a sign his young friend was maturing.

During the two weeks that followed, O’Brien wasn’t the only one who noticed a more subdued Robert. Kip, among others, thought the antibi-otics he was taking for the infected cut were making him lethargic.

Robert started attending school with greater frequency, but revealed little, even when discussions turned to the ubiquitous news stories about the murdered Dartmouth professors. At one point Christiana asked him, “Did you hear about the murders in Hanover?” “Yeah,” Robert answered. “It’s too bad.” The conversation moved on.

His self-assessment of his work in Joan Feierabend’s art class the week he and Jim returned to Chelsea had only a small hint of his usual smarter-and-better-than-everyone bravado: “Joan, It was a bad week. My leg, a botched trip, and a general negative attitude made my week a real downer. But I like art. I don’t like doing stuff I don’t like when

I’m angry. And it calmed me. It was relaxing and simplistically satisfying. I really like my sculpture. Thank you, Robert.”

Privately, after returning to Chelsea, Robert and Jim willed themselves into denial and talked about what to do next. “We could make money other ways, and, you know, everything’s going to be OK,” Jim said. “We’ll work for my dad and different stuff like that.” Robert went along with that for a few days, but soon he reverted to form, telling Jim, “Let’s do some illegal stuff again.”

Jim wasn’t interested. He told himself: “I want to graduate and just work.” He was thinking about doing a national outdoor leadership program. Jim didn’t share those thoughts with Robert because he knew that would have led to one of the brief but explosive arguments they had over anything from the best climbing shoes to the state of the world. Jim knew that Robert hated when people disagreed with him, and he hated it worse when anyone proved him wrong.

One thing they agreed on was a story they would tell if anyone asked about the knives. Jim couldn’t deny buying them—jimibruce was his Internet handle, and the knives had been sent to Jim Parker of Chelsea, Vermont—so he’d claim to have sold them to a stranger at an Army-Navy store in Burlington, the same store where they’d bought their black commando sweaters. If anyone asked, Robert would cor-roborate that account.

As days passed, old routines reemerged. Jim retrieved his tennis racket, paintball gun, and Frisbee from Gaelen McKee. Movies were always a favorite pastime, but with Jim grounded, Robert needed a new film buddy. On Valentine’s Day, February 14, he visited Christiana and then he and Kip Battey drove to Hanover, not far from the Zantops’ house, to see the war-on-drugs film
Traffic.

Kip and Robert talked the whole way there and back. Robert wasn’t his usual witty and cynical self, Kip thought, but he wasn’t much different from usual, and he never mentioned if something was bothering him. “He’s normally very verbose,” Kip said. “He still talked, but he seemed a little bit withdrawn. I just thought he was a little quieter.”

The next day, at school, Sada Dumont saw both Robert and Jim, whom she had dated once a couple years earlier and always considered

nicer than Robert. She noticed that Jim didn’t seem as funny or happy lately, but that day Jim seemed his usual easygoing self. Robert joked around with her at lunch and played with the crutches she needed for an injured leg.

That night, just when it seemed they were in the clear, the police came knocking.

A
s Chuck West began his drive along the winding roads into Vermont, his two fellow New Hampshire State Police detectives were

already making the rounds in Chelsea.

On the afternoon of February 15, Sergeant Robert Bruno and Trooper Russ Hubbard dropped by the local sheriff ’s office to get directions and find out what they could about the SEAL 2000 buyer, jimibruce, a.k.a. Jim Parker. A captain in the sheriff ’s office, Arnold Covey, surprised them with the news that they were looking for a sixteen-year-old boy. Covey couldn’t add much beyond a record of a cou-ple of traffic citations and a comment that, as far as he knew, Jim Parker wasn’t one of the local teenage troublemakers. One more thing the New Hampshire detectives picked up at the sheriff ’s office was an escort. Bruno remembered that his friend Tim Page, a Vermont State Police sergeant, lived upstairs from the sheriff ’s office. It was good police practice to bring along a local officer when outside one’s jurisdiction, so Bruno invited Page to join them.