Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (31 page)

Home alone in his house, Zack Courts was watching
The Tonight Show with Jay Leno
when he answered his telephone. The caller was a reporter from the
Boston Herald
who wanted to know about the two boys suspected of slaying the Zantops. Questions came nonstop, and Zack, knocked for a loop, found himself answering one after another about Robert, the only one whose name was identified publicly so far. “He’s got hobbies, he’s got friends,” Zack was quoted saying. “He’s an extremely intelligent person, very quick-witted.” For Zack the news was unfathomable.

“I’d have to say he didn’t do it,” Zack told the reporter. “He’s not like that. I mean, it’s always possible, but Robert, no way, man.”

Suddenly done, the reporter hung up and moved on. Zack, in shock, held the receiver. He called Coltere and blurted out all he could recall about the interview. Coltere listened and then told Zack that he already knew, that he and his dad had figured it all out during his questioning by police.

“You OK?” Coltere asked. “Well, I don’t know,” said Zack.

“My mom says you should come up here right away.”

Coltere drove back into town and scooped him up. Zack spent the

next several nights sleeping over at Coltere’s house. The boys tried watching
Gone in 60 Seconds,
but had trouble paying attention. They had trouble sleeping that night, too—catching only about three hours. Gone in the last six hours was any sense of peace.

“We were kinda scared shitless,” said Coltere.

T
he next morning, Dr. Andy Pomerantz was lying in bed listening to National Public Radio. He was waiting for the popular show
Car Talk,
which was part of his usual Saturday-morning ritual of lingering in bed

and gazing lazily out a big window into the woods. He and his wife, Jill, liked to take their morning coffee slowly and then Andy would put on his gear and head out to cross-country ski.

Pomerantz was only half-listening when his wife said, “Did you hear that? They mentioned Chelsea on the radio.” Pomerantz turned up the volume. He listened hard, but the news report had moved on to the economy or some other topic. Nothing more about Chelsea. But Jill Pomerantz told her husband she was certain she’d heard Chelsea mentioned on NPR. The couple sat anxiously awaiting the next news cycle.

Then it came: a nationwide search was under way for two teenagers from Chelsea, Vermont, suspected of murdering Dartmouth professors Half and Susanne Zantop in their New Hampshire home.

Pomerantz felt like a tree had fallen on his chest. The small town ran through him; Chelsea was in his soul, defining who he was. These two boys, he was thinking, are our kids, too. He reeled at the news, flashes of Robert and Jim racing through his head. He pictured young Jimmy running up the basketball court. He recalled seeing Robert the previous summer at the wedding of Robert’s sister Becky and Charles Johnson, one of Jack and Annette’s sons. Robert hadn’t been very friendly that day, a mood Pomerantz chalked up to normal teenage angst.

The flashing images kept coming, in no particular order. He pictured Robert and Jim paddling together at the raft race during the Spring Festival, and remembered how tall and strong they looked. Kids

grew up so fast, he recalled thinking at the time, a truism that never ceased to amaze him.

The psychiatrist found himself pacing around his house. His wife telephoned a friend, and the friend had already heard the news. It was a scene being repeated time and time again: heads were shaking, hearts were dropping, stomachs were falling, as despair and disbelief swept through town. The news had to be a mistake, thought most. No way two Chelsea boys could have done this. This was wrong. Maybe, some even thought, a police frame-up. It seemed beyond belief. As a psychiatrist, Pomerantz had witnessed despair, and this was what it looked like.

Teacher DeRoss Kellogg was at his home in Bethel when he and his wife, Imogen, heard on the radio that the big break in the Zantop case involved Robert and Jim. Kellogg collapsed into a chair in his liv-ing room. “Life has changed forever,” he told her. Kellogg felt para-lyzed. He sat in the chair for an hour, zoning out. In her Main Street house, poet Cora Brooks, having watched the police take over the Tulloch home across the street, was thinking like a lifelong pacifist: this had to be a horrible police mistake, an abuse of police power. Not for a second that morning did she think Robert and Jim could have killed the Zantops. “Killing like this involves jumping off the edge of existence, with no thought of consequences,” she said. “It is incom-prehensible.” Two boys who had memorized her
Sock Monster
story couldn’t have taken such a leap, she thought.

Tyler Vermette, who’d gone to sleep thinking his friends had gotten swept up in some sort of computer crime, awoke and saw a newspaper headline: “WANTED.”

“My heart pretty much sank to my feet,” he said.

One town over, in Vershire, Andrew Patti dropped by a neighbor’s house to say hello. “Did you see the article in the newspaper?” the neighbor asked. Patti looked at the headline, then glanced at the photograph that accompanied it. The caption said it was Robert Tulloch, wanted in connection with the Zantop murders.

“Holy shit!” Patti said. It was the face he had seen through the win-dowpanes of his front door seven months earlier. Patti thought back to

the young man who claimed his car had broken down and who seemed so intent on getting Patti to open the door. Patti thought about how he had flashed his gun to scare the visitor, then launched into a five-minute soliloquy.

“Goddamn it, this is why we have to have the Second Amendment! This is why you’ve got to be able to have a gun,” he yelled. “If it wasn’t for that goddamn Glock I’d be dead today and so would my son. That goddamned gun saved our lives!”

The paper didn’t print a photograph of Jim Parker—as a sixteen-year-old, he briefly enjoyed some added privileges as a juvenile. But his name and photograph would soon come out as well. Then Patti would be in for another surprise. After the frightening incident at his front door, Patti had scouted around for a builder to install a locking storm door and a secure new sliding door around back, to make it harder for anyone to get in. To safeguard his family, Patti had hired a builder everyone in the village recommended as competent and trustworthy: John Parker.

B
y late morning, Coltere Savidge and Zack Courts were up and out of Coltere’s house and heading back to Zack’s house so he could get a

change of clothes. The convoy of police vehicles in the village was now outnumbered by television camera trucks, media vans, and reporters racing around in cars. A small-town boy like the rest, Zack had never seen anything like it. Chelsea’s quiet Main Street had gone insane, he thought.

The moment Coltere pulled into Zack’s driveway, reporters moved toward them in a swarm, shouting questions. You know Tulloch? What about Parker? C’mon, you must know them.

No, no, no, the boys said, shaking their heads as they ducked and ran inside.

The boys headed over to Tyler Vermette’s house just south of the village, where a bunch of boys, mostly members of the basketball team, were gathering: Brad Johnson, Kip Battey and his brother Nick,

and Coltere’s younger brother Cabot. Even surrounded by the warmth of some of his closest friends, Zack felt numb.

They decided to stay away from town and the reporters, but were soon glued to the news on CNN and other television channels that kept replaying the press conferences showcasing police and New Hampshire prosecutors discussing the Zantops and the manhunt for Robert and Jim. “We were torturing ourselves,” Zack said, “but we couldn’t help it.”

Eventually the spell was broken by Tyler’s father, Mark, the varsity basketball coach. He wanted his players to talk about the game scheduled for that night in Barre. The players had a choice. In light of the circumstances, the coach was willing to postpone the game. To a boy, they said, Let’s play. “If something horrible was happening, I’d rather play a basketball game than sit in a chair and look at the wall,” said Zack. It seemed logical. Don’t dwell on the news. Stay active and play the game, they figured.

They figured wrong. Coltere Savidge was known around Chelsea as a stoic kid, a school leader, a poised athlete. Tall, light-haired, and handsomely built, he was low-key and showed little emotion. Teachers considered him a role model to younger kids. “If Coltere ever swears, it turns people’s heads,” said Zack. But during the game Coltere couldn’t get into any kind of rhythm. He couldn’t find his game head. In the first outing against the Websterville team, the Chelsea Red Devils had won 59–53. This time Chelsea was flat and getting its butt kicked, and Coltere’s sloppy, unfocused play was part of the problem. “It was weird, very weird,” Coltere said. He was trying not to think about Robert and Jim and the police manhunt, “but it was always in the back of my head.” The second half began with his team trailing. “I just wasn’t in my right mind.”

Losing a battle for an offensive rebound, an opponent elbowed Coltere in the face and Coltere went down. But no foul was called. The Websterville players took off down court on a fast break and scored. Coltere smoldered as he climbed up off the floor. A few plays later, Coltere felt the referee missed another call, and that was it.

Coltere blew up, something his teammates and coach had never witnessed before on the court. The senior began swearing and flailing and then went over and kicked the wall. The referee was not impressed. Coltere was called for a technical foul.

“I’ve gotten my share of fouls, but never a technical.”

The game was a lost cause, a complete bust. The final score was 54–40, and afterward Coltere strode into the locker room and began tearing off his red jersey. He kicked open the door to one of the bathroom stalls. Teammates streaming into the locker room heard the unthinkable sound of Coltere Savidge crying. The locker room fell silent. Zack Courts realized he hadn’t seen Coltere cry since they were in kindergarten.

Coltere emerged a few minutes later and went to a bench, avoiding eye contact. He tried to undress, but was suddenly back in the bathroom crying some more.

Coltere was shedding the town’s tears. Other teammates began crying, too.

Someone tried to comfort Coltere. Take it easy, man, it’s gonna be OK. Coltere would have none of it. “I’m not gonna take it easy,” he said.

“My friends are murderers and that’s not OK.”

W
ithin hours of their arrival in Chelsea on Friday night, investigators found themselves propelled on a fast track. The engine was an evi-

dentiary bonanza, one that would remain a secret from Chelseans and the rest of the world for several weeks.

The police operation had been assembled quickly once the boys’ disappearance was reported that morning. Nearly two dozen New Hampshire and Vermont detectives and crime scene specialists mobilized at the state police barracks in Bethel near Interstate 89. They crowded into the small “Troopers’ Room” in the center of the low-slung, pre-fab cement building.

Then the wait began for prosecutors to obtain court-approved search warrants.

The two cruisers that Chelsea residents noticed outside the Tulloch and Parker homes were sent there mid-afternoon to secure each home until the warrants were ready, and to keep tabs on the parents. John Parker was followed when he left his house and drove down West Hill to the post office and then to the gym located next to The Pines for a workout. No one was home at the Tullochs’ when a trooper first swung by near two in the afternoon, but an hour later Michael Tulloch’s red pickup was spotted in the yard. Vermont State Police Trooper Michael O’Neil explained to the elder Tulloch that a search team would arrive at some point later in the day. Mike Tulloch, shaken, telephoned Dan Sedon, the lawyer whose firm had handled the closing on their house. Sedon wasn’t available, so Tulloch left a message. Diane Tulloch arrived home from work around four o’clock to find a trooper with her husband.

The Parkers, moving about, kept police wondering—were Joan and John doing anything to impede the investigation? The Tullochs, meanwhile, stayed put. It was a tense holding action all around until the warrants arrived. Moving about town between the two homes were Chuck West and Frank Moran. Then, around five o’clock that evening, Moran happened to telephone the Hanover station to check in, and his chief told him about a preliminary finding: a confirmed match between Jim’s fingerprints and one lifted from a sheath found in the Zantops’ study. Moran quickly called West with the news, and the murmurings passed from investigator to investigator. Police were getting over their initial hesitation about a murder case that had brought them into Chelsea and to two apparently wholesome families. Although the fingerprint didn’t prove Robert and Jim were the killers—it could have been left on the sheath earlier—it confirmed suspicions that the SEAL 2000s Jim bought were the same ones used to kill the professors.

While the wait for the warrants continued, the hunt for Robert and Jim was well under way. With each passing hour, investigators’ worries increased. Would the boys elude the dragnet? Were they already dead by their own hands? Would they embark on a violent crime spree? By

6:30 Friday night, a briefing at the barracks was held to finalize team assignments. Shortly after nine o’clock, the warrants finally arrived, and within the hour the convoy was en route to Chelsea, led by Ray Keefe. The thirty-four-year-old Vermont detective had been assigned to oversee the search of the Tulloch house, while another group of investigators would comb through the Parker house.

D
an Sedon hadn’t been able to return the call from Mike Tulloch until around five o’clock. Sedon, a thirty-five-year-old criminal-defense

attorney with a decade of practice under his belt, had spent the day in Burlington working on a run-of-the-mill case. When he called back, Mike and Diane told him about the trooper at their house and the fact that police wanted to conduct a search. Sedon wasn’t overly concerned at first. In his criminal-law experience, a warrant is a warrant is a warrant—it could be about almost anything, from drugs to stolen sneakers. Calling from a commuter parking lot off I-89, Sedon said he’d get there as soon as he could. He needed to stop for gas for his Toyota 4-Runner, return other calls, and check in with his wife.