Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (33 page)

For all that was ultimately seized, Lawrence’s discovery of the two SOG SEAL knives around midnight Friday was a eureka moment. Although it would remain a secret for weeks to come, inside the circle of investigators word spread rapidly from White to Keefe and from the searchers at the Tulloch house to their colleagues at the Parkers, where Chuck West was stationed outside in the drifting snow.

Chuck, you’re not going to believe this, Frank Moran said shortly after midnight. It was déjà vu in that Moran was again passing along good news, though this was even better than the fingerprint match he reported earlier in the day.

What’s up, Frank?

Moran told him about the knives, and the two investigators stood together outside the Parker house allowing the significance to sink in.

Things were falling into place, West thought. The hard work, all of it, was paying dividends. Even so, it was no time to gloat or celebrate. No time to let up. Time instead to maintain focus, keep pressing, and not get ahead of themselves.

They had the murder weapons, West thought, now let’s find those boys. Maybe then we can figure out why these killings happened.

15
‌

On the Run

W
hen Robert and Jim first came begging for a ride at the Sturbridge Isles truck stop, trucker Rowdy Kyle Tucker turned them

down flat. But his wife and traveling partner, Nancy Lee Tucker, had other ideas. The thought of the two stranded boys gnawed at her as she picked at her dinner. Nancy told her husband she thought they might be runaways because “they looked pretty fresh, not like they’d been out on the road a long time.” The Tuckers, Alabama residents in their thirties with two young daughters, had been married for a decade. That was long enough for Rowdy to know what his wife was thinking.

“You ain’t gonna be happy until we give them boys a ride, are you?” he said.

“It’s snowing out there. Coming down hard,” Nancy answered. “Do what you want to do.”

Nancy jumped up from the table and ran to a television lounge

where she had last seen the pair. “Y’all want to go, let’s go,” she told them. A look of relief washed over the boys.

Robert told the couple his name was Sam. Jim introduced himself as Tyler. Despite Christiana’s efforts to help Robert pick a new name, he and Jim fell back on the names of two classmates: Sam Sherman and Tyler Vermette. Jim thought they sounded like “normal names” that wouldn’t attract attention.

“Sam” and “Tyler” told the Tuckers they were headed to Southern California in search of jobs on boats. The Tuckers were sympathetic to young men with wanderlust and gave them each $10 so they could buy provisions for the ride before leaving Sturbridge. Once inside the truck, a 1999 Peterbilt with green flames painted on the cab, Rowdy watched the road while Nancy kept an eye on their riders. She had the impression that “Sam”—Robert—was the kind of kid who might have gotten into a fight with his father and had taken off to prove himself. “Tyler”—Jim—gave her the impression of a follower, a nervous young man on the timid side. At one point they were whispering so intimately, their bodies so close together, she thought they might be gay. She gave them the phone number of her lesbian sister in Modesto, California, so they could look her up when they reached the coast.

When Rowdy left the cab to take care of business, Sam/Robert climbed into the driver’s seat and played around like a kid.

“How long does it take to learn to drive one of these things?” he asked Nancy.

“You have to go to school—six to eight weeks,” she answered.

Then he noticed the thirty-two gauges on the dashboard. “Do you have to watch all these gauges all the time?” he wondered.

“Yep,” Nancy said, “all of them all the time.” That cooled his ardor for trucking.

As the hours went by, the Tuckers started to think there was something shady about these two. Rowdy told his wife to zip down the dividing curtain between the back of the cab and the seats up front, so if “Sam” and “Tyler” tried to jump them, at least they’d have some warning. But nothing untoward happened, and soon they were talking

again. Nancy urged them to turn on the TV or the radio, but they repeatedly declined.

The Tuckers drove the two to the TA truck stop in Columbia, New Jersey, near the Pennsylvania border, some 220 miles southwest of Sturbridge. They arrived around mid-afternoon Saturday, February 17—the ride took so long because Rowdy had to make nearly a half-dozen stops on the way from Sturbridge. Before they parted ways, the Tuckers let “Sam” and “Tyler” use their CB radio to seek out truckers going farther westward. The couple got on the air, too, to vouch for the pair.

After trying for about fifteen minutes, one trucker on the CB said he wasn’t sure he’d be able to drive the boys, but he agreed to let them hang out and sleep in his cab until they found a ride. Robert and Jim said their good-byes to the Tuckers and holed up with the other trucker for the rest of that day and overnight until Sunday morning.

The trucker had a satellite television hookup in the cab, and at one point a news show began reporting about two young men from Chelsea, Vermont, who had fled after being questioned in the murder of two Dartmouth professors. As soon as the report began, “Sam” and “Tyler” asked the trucker to switch to the Weather Channel, and he did. He showed no sign of connecting his bunkmates to the wanted teens.

The trucker’s name was James Hicks and he was hauling a load of M&Ms from New Jersey to Chicago. He was forty-five, a barrel-chested man with a handlebar moustache. Sitting alone in his Freightliner cab at the TA truck stop, Hicks was tired and feeling unsure about making the trip. He had never before driven with hitchhikers, but when he heard Robert and Jim calling out on the CB, he decided that having company might help. Hicks was thinking about his own sons, one seventeen and the other thirteen, back home in Sumter, South Carolina. A third son, fourteen years old, had died four months earlier in a motorcycle accident. “I got three boys,” Hicks explained later. “One’s in heaven and two are still here, and I just felt sorry for them.”

When Robert and Jim climbed into his truck, Hicks thought they looked bone-tired. He tried to strike up conversation but didn’t get

very far. He asked if they missed their parents. “No, not really,” they answered. He could tell they didn’t want to talk, and he never got their names, fake or otherwise.

Hicks gave the pair a sheet and let them crawl into the top bunk of his cab. Soon they were fast asleep.

M
eanwhile, with help from John Moran’s tip about the brief stop at the Sturbridge Service Center, authorities picked up Robert and

Jim’s trail.

Although they had dodged the media dragnet by asking Hicks to switch to the Weather Channel, Robert and Jim began to realize they had miscalculated the response to their flight. As Jim put it, “We didn’t expect any type of big media thing.” In fact, it was national news—the Big Story—from the moment late Friday night when authorities announced that arrest warrants had been issued, the suspects were running, and the public should consider them armed and dangerous. The story only grew larger as the weekend continued without arrests, competing for attention with the death of race-car driver Dale Earnhardt at the Daytona 500.

After John Moran’s tip, authorities focused their search around Sturbridge, in case Robert and Jim had holed up there. Proof that they had been and gone came more than a day later. Massachusetts State Trooper Walter Combs had been told to keep an eye out for the missing teens as part of his regular tour of duty. Combs, at forty-six a veteran trooper, checked out motel parking lots, looking for Parker’s car. Then he had a better idea. Combs thought two teenagers with little cash wouldn’t spend it on lodging, so he focused on area truck stops.

The trooper’s first stop turned up nothing, so he went to the Sturbridge Isles. Driving around back, Combs noticed that only one car was covered with a frosting of snow—which meant it must’ve been there a couple of days. When he got closer, he noticed a sliver of green on the license plate—Vermont’s color. Concerned that Robert and Jim might be hiding inside, Combs pulled his cruiser around to block the car into its spot. He walked carefully toward the car and peered

through the windshield to see empty seats littered with knapsacks and crackers. Then he confirmed the car was in fact a 1987 silver Audi 5000. He looked more closely at the license plate: Vermont CDG690. The fugitives had abandoned their car.

As he stood by the car waiting for backup, Combs’s biggest worry was that Robert and Jim had hitchhiked a ride with a trucker, and the trucker might be their next victim.

R
obert and Jim awoke in Hicks’s truck at about two in the morning on Monday, February 19. Their exhaustion had eased, but now they

were hungry. Millions of M&Ms were rattling around in the semi-trailer behind the cab, but Hicks handed them chips and soda. An hour or so later, Hicks was driving west through Indiana, some six hundred miles from Sturbridge. Despite all their hours together, they exchanged little conversation or information about one another, and now it was time to part ways. Hicks was heading north to Chicago while they wanted to continue west. He reached for his CB handset: “Can anybody give a ride to two boys who want to go to California?” He mentioned that they were hitchhiking from New Jersey.

By then, based on Combs’s discovery of the Audi, police had viewed security videotapes taken at the Sturbridge Isles. One showed the boys getting into a white 1999 Peterbilt with green flames painted on the hood. Authorities quickly traced its owner, and from there began tracking the Tuckers’ progress using a sophisticated Global Positioning System device that homed in on a truck-mounted beacon. They got the Tuckers’ cell phone number from Rowdy’s boss, but police didn’t dare call it. They feared a call might spook two armed and dangerous fugitives who might be holding the Tuckers hostage. As it turned out, by the time authorities began tracking the Tuckers, the couple had already handed off the boys to Hicks. Afterward, the Tuckers went out “trashing around”—killing time between required stops—and had gotten lost on an abandoned logging road, making it difficult for FBI agents and local authorities to find them.

When the Tuckers finally made their way back to a main road, they

drove to a truck stop in Brookville, Pennsylvania, to get some sleep. A few hours later, late on the morning of Sunday, February 18, their truck was surrounded by gun-pointing FBI agents and an entire SWAT team. The Tuckers told the agents how they had dropped off the boys at the TA truck stop and how “Sam” and “Tyler” had gotten a ride from a trucker heading west.

Early the next morning, while the manhunt was sweeping westward, Hicks was on the CB, describing two boys hitchhiking from New Jersey looking for a ride to California. Puzzle pieces were falling into place.

Hicks waited a moment then heard a man’s voice come back: “Sure, I can.”

As they spoke, Hicks was approaching the Flying J Travel Plaza in Spiceland, Indiana. That would be a fine spot to meet, said the voice on the other end of the CB. “Why don’t you just drop them off at the fuel desk?” he said.

“OK,” Hicks answered.

Hicks pulled into the Flying J at about 3:45 in the morning and began saying his good-byes. As a parting gift, he reached into his wal-let and gave his young riders $10 for breakfast. That increased their combined stake to $146.04.

As Hicks’s time with Robert and Jim was nearing an end,
The Dartmouth
newspaper was preparing to print a letter from a man named Jim Moody of Ithaca, New York. “I’m so afraid these boys might kill themselves, being so cornered, so afraid, so guilty,” he wrote. “Whatever their involvement with the Zantop murder is, let’s face it, the Zantops are dead. Can’t we have compassion for these two boys on the run? Can’t you appeal to the Attorney General to make some kind of national media statement that . . . they should not now act rashly, and that all efforts will be made to treat them fairly? . . . Seize the moment. Save these two kids’ lives. Now.”

A day later,
The Dartmouth
would print two letters slamming Moody. “I can’t believe that anyone would be afraid of these two boys committing suicide rather than take responsibility for their alleged involvement in this horrendous crime,” wrote a Susan Waterman. “If

someone wants to save the boys, look into what can enable two young people to carry out such a horrific act. Focus on saving other boys from becoming the kind of person who could do this.”

U
nknown to Hicks or his passengers, the man on the other end of the CB conversation was Sergeant Bill Ward, a twenty-two-year veteran of

the Henry County, Indiana, sheriff ’s department.

Ward was working the overnight shift, and earlier that evening he’d been at the Flying J with three fellow officers, enjoying a post-midnight meal he called lunch. The restaurant had opened just two weeks earlier, so it was a nice break in their year-in, year-out routine. While they ate, Ward told the other officers about a report he had heard on
CNN Headline News
about two teenage males wanted for murder in New Hampshire who were believed to be hitchhiking across the country. By virtue of geography, Indiana might be a stop along their route. And if it were, they’d probably pass through Henry County, which was bisected by Interstate 70, one of the nation’s busiest east-west highways. Keep an eye out, Ward said.