Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (29 page)

“This ups the level a bit,” he said cautiously.

“You’re absolutely correct. It does up the level,” Bruno said.

“I don’t know if I should talk to an attorney or not,” Mike Tulloch said.

“That’s a decision you and your wife have to make. I’m not going to advise you one way or the other,” Bruno said. “If you tell me the boots stay here, they stay here.”

“I don’t think my son is involved in this case,” Mike said. “You have my permission to take the boots as long as it’s OK with Robert.”

They went back into the kitchen.

“Robert,” Bruno said, “I want your permission to take your boots. A print at the homicide scene was made by a Vasque boot. OK? I want to take your boots to compare them to that print that was found at the scene.”

The question played to one of Robert’s strengths—he had to

instantly calculate the risks and benefits of every possible answer. He understood intuitively that he faced a choice: Object to surrendering the boots and he’d cast doubt on his innocence, maybe ending up in custody as a result. Or play it cool and surrender the incriminating boots, buying himself enough time to run.

“Take the boots,” he said, “as long as I get them back.” Robert continued the nonchalant charade, saying they were his only pair of insulated winter boots and that he’d need them for the cold days ahead. Bruno said that wouldn’t be a problem. That is, as long as they didn’t match the footprint left at the scene. To be helpful, Diane got a brown paper bag and the boots were packed to go.

While Bruno stepped out of the room to speak with Mike and Diane, Hubbard asked Robert a question: By the way, what size are those boots?

Robert wasn’t sure—they had been his father’s and had been handed down to him. He thought they were size 12. No, maybe 11
1
/2
. Even with a Vasque boot the same size as the one that left the footprint, Bruno and Hubbard wouldn’t allow themselves to get excited. It flickered in their minds that one or both of these teenage boys might be seriously involved, but they didn’t allow the spark to burst into a flame. First off, the detectives were exhausted at the end of a long day that had followed a string of long days. Mostly, though, there had been too many dead ends in this case already. Until something was declared a perfect match—a fingerprint, a bootprint, anything—they needed to stay as calm as Robert seemed. Most of all, they still didn’t have the

murder weapons.

After taking the boots, Bruno, Hubbard, and Page escorted the Tullochs to the sheriff ’s office for fingerprints. While there, Robert caught brief sight of Jim.

No words passed between them, but none needed to. They were in the crosshairs of the police. If they were allowed to go home, both knew what they needed to do next—run. This time there would be no turning back.

14
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Two SOG

SEAL 2000 Knives

J
ust as they had hoped, Robert and Jim were allowed to return home with their parents after being questioned and fingerprinted at the sher-

iff ’s office. Although Jim had purchased two SOG SEAL 2000 knives and Robert owned a pair of Vasque boots and sported a nasty cut on his leg, it still seemed too farfetched to investigators to imagine these two bright boys from good homes were more than peripherally involved in the killings.

As midnight approached on Thursday, February 15, investigators were satisfied they were finally making real progress in solving the case. With the right questions and enough pressure to make these boys realize the trouble they were in, Robert and Jim would lead them to the killers. In the meantime, there didn’t seem to be an urgent need to place them in custody.

The phone rang shortly after Robert and his parents returned home

from the sheriff ’s office. It was his girlfriend, Christiana Usenza, checking to see if he was still suffering from the flu.

“Guess what happened to me?” he asked. “What?”

“Um, the police came and questioned me about those murders in Hanover,” Robert told her.

“WHAT?”

Robert explained that he and Jim had bought the same kind of knives used in the killings and that police had tracked their Internet purchase.

“Robert, this does look weird,” Christiana said. “You have a cut on your leg. . . . Did you do it?”

“No, I didn’t,” Robert answered. He told her the story about selling the knives at the Army-Navy store before the murders.

“Well, then you should be OK because they’ll find that guy and they’ll figure out that [you] didn’t have the knives at the time,” Christiana said.

“Yeah,” Robert answered, eager to get off the phone. “I gotta talk to Jimmy, ’cause I don’t know if they’ve questioned him.”

“Are you OK?” “No,” Robert said.

Christiana hung up, telling herself there was no way he was mixed up in murder. Yet something nagged at her enough to make her pray it was all a big mistake.

Meanwhile, in his house across town, Jim felt the same need to talk with Robert, so he dialed the Tullochs’ phone number. Earlier, Jim had asked his parents if he could sleep at Robert’s, or if Robert could come to their house, but they said no. Joan and John also told him not to speak with Robert, but he disobeyed that order by picking up the phone.

It was a brief conversation, summed up by a single phrase: “We’re kind of fucked here.” They agreed they’d be better off communicating via computer, using the AOL Instant Messenger system, in case their phones were tapped.

Jim went upstairs to the family computers and Robert went into his brother Kienan’s room to use their shared computer. But soon Diane

Tulloch came in to see how he was doing. She believed her son’s story about selling the knives, and now she wanted him to get some rest. When his mother asked how he was feeling, Robert answered, “I’m sick, I’ve missed school, and now I’m wanted for murder.”

She told him to go to bed and stay in his room—a move that cut him off from the computer. Around the same time, John Parker realized his son was communicating with Robert over the Internet and ordered him to stop. After that, John and Jim sat together watching TV awhile, then John said what they all needed most was sleep.

When his parents went to bed, Jim called Robert again. “We’ll meet at Red Ass,” they agreed, using a nickname for Kip Battey as a code in case someone was listening in on their conversation. Each knew that “Red Ass” meant the Batteys’ house near Chelsea’s Beacon Hill, where the snowmobile trail crossed the road.

They hastily filled backpacks with whatever they thought might be useful: a compass, some fishing hooks and bobbers, the Boy Scouts’
Handbook for Boys,
a camping ax, cans of tomato soup and black beans, Chap Stick, pens and pencils, duct tape, matches, a flashlight, Band-Aids, climbing shoes, vise grips, and assorted clothing. Robert also grabbed a Vermont junior driver’s license belonging to Kip Battey that had somehow found its way into his possession. Useful, perhaps, as false identification. They also grabbed whatever cash they had, a thin stack of bills including a fifty and a few twenties that together added up to far less than they had on their first flight two weeks earlier.

Before Jim left home, he tore a piece of paper from a notebook and scrawled a note to his parents:

I Just had to talk

to Robert alone, I will be back

be th morning don’t call cops!!

It was after three in the morning on Friday, February 16, when Jim left the note on the kitchen counter and slipped out of the house. He climbed into his silver Audi and drove the winding back roads to the far side of Beacon Hill from the Batteys’ house, parking the car on the side of the road and trudging through the snow along an unpaved route that was impassable to cars in winter. It was hard going, but he figured it was the safest way to meet up with Robert while avoiding any troopers who might be roaming through town.

As Robert prepared to meet Jim, he walked past his parents’ bedroom.

“Robert, go back to bed,” Diane called.

“I’m going down to get some tea,” Robert lied on his way out the door.

They met as planned near the Batteys’ house and from there hiked back to Jim’s car for what would be their final departure from Chelsea. This was it: Chelsea was history; indeed, neither boy would step foot in town again.

Soon after they hit the road, Robert made a stunning announce-ment: In his rush to pack, he had forgotten the knives. It was an extraordinary admission, a loud echo of what had happened twenty days earlier when they left the sheaths at the Zantops’ house. Now authorities would have two matched sets of knives and sheaths, shattering their alibi about selling the knives at the Army-Navy store.

Maybe it was simple forgetfulness by a teenage boy on the run from police. Or maybe Robert wasn’t as prepared to leave home as he thought he was. Whatever the reason, Robert and Jim both recognized the risk. As they drove from town in the predawn darkness, they discussed going back for the SEAL 2000s. But almost as quickly they realized that returning to Robert’s house might be just the opportunity his parents or the police would need to forever prevent them from leaving. They dropped that idea and pressed on, with Jim driving back roads from Chelsea then picking up Vermont Route 14 toward Interstate 89.

J
ohn Parker switched on the light in his bedroom when he heard Jim turn the ignition in the Audi. He and Joan ran to the window, threw it

open, and yelled into the cold night for him to stop. But Jim was already pulling down the driveway.

The Parkers suspected Jim was headed to Robert’s house, but it was anyone’s guess where the boys would go from there. The Parkers called the Tullochs in a bid to intercept them. The phone rang awhile but no one answered, so John pulled on his clothes, grabbed his coat, and ran outside. He pointed his pickup truck toward Main Street.

Mike and Diane Tulloch were lying in bed when they heard the ringing phone that, unknown to them, was their last chance to prevent their son and his best friend from becoming fugitives. They never imagined the caller was John Parker desperately trying to reach them, and as they lay there hearing one ring after another they wondered why Robert wasn’t answering it, as he had the earlier calls. After the ringing stopped, Mike rose from bed and checked Robert’s room. Empty. He scoured the house, with no better luck. Before he and Diane could do anything more, they heard a knock on the door—John Parker. When he learned that Jim wasn’t there and Robert had disappeared as well, John drove around town for more than an hour looking for them. When John returned empty-handed, all four parents shared the hope that their sons had just gone off somewhere to talk, and that they’d be back by morning. The Parkers hadn’t yet found Jim’s note, but when they did a few hours later, it buoyed their spirits. Maybe he was just upset about the police visit and he’d come home, after all. But as more hours passed with no sign of them, a hard question formed in

their minds. As Diane put it: “Why would these boys be running?”

The manhunt began around eleven that morning, about eight hours after Robert and Jim set off. It was triggered when John Parker realized that his son wouldn’t be keeping the promise he made in his note. After talking with his wife and the Tullochs, John Parker called Detective Chuck West. “Jimmy’s gone,” he said.

Two months later, the Vermont sheriff whose territory included

Chelsea would blast New Hampshire authorities for not keeping a closer watch on the pair and for not asking him to do so. “If they even gave the slightest indication . . . that they would flee, we’d have watched them,” fumed Orange County Sheriff Dennis McClure. New Hampshire authorities defended their approach, but there wasn’t much they could say in response. The failure to post guards outside the boys’ homes was the clearest evidence yet that, even after they questioned Robert and Jim, it remained too far a stretch for West, Bruno, Hubbard, and the other investigators to imagine them responsible for the crumpled, bloodied bodies in the Zantops’ study.

O
nce they got out of Chelsea, Robert and Jim drove along Interstate 89 for more than an hour and then picked up Interstate 93, heading

south toward Boston. They made their way to the Massachusetts Turnpike, the state’s main east-west corridor, and headed west. It was a roundabout escape route, with only one apparent benefit: It kept Robert and Jim away from Interstate 91, which they considered the main highway through Hanover.

It occurred to them that the police would soon be on the lookout for Jim’s Audi, so they decided to abandon it and try to hitch rides toward California with cross-country truckers—an idea they’d picked up from watching movies. Their first attempt was a dud. They stopped at a Massachusetts rest stop and asked about long-haul truckers only to learn that most of the truck traffic on the turnpike was involved in close-range work of a hundred miles or fewer. One trucker told them to head toward Sturbridge, Massachusetts, Exit 9 off the turnpike, where they might find truckers veering south toward New York and beyond.

From the exit they took a right onto Route 20 West, and from there they wandered onto Route 131 and into the parking lot of the Sturbridge Service Station. By this time Robert had taken the wheel to give Jim a break, and as he pulled into the station he noticed a tow truck idling in the lot. The driver was John Moran, a twenty-one-year-old, part-time police officer in Brimfield, Massachusetts, who was making ends meet by driving a wrecker while waiting for a full-time police job. Moran—no relation to Hanover detective Frank Moran— had just dropped off a car and was drinking coffee to stay warm and awake on the overnight shift when the Audi pulled in. Robert rolled down his window and asked Moran for directions to a gas station— Sturbridge Service had no gas pumps. Jim piped up from the passenger seat and asked how to get back to the turnpike. Moran gave them directions to both, then watched them drive off. Moran thought something about the two young travelers didn’t seem right. They looked nervous, he thought. He considered checking their license plate to see if the car was reported stolen. To his regret, Moran let the idea pass and went back to work.