Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (36 page)

church Thursday night, with Pomerantz hoping parents would find strength in numbers.

But Pomerantz, like other Chelseans, was himself turned inside out, and there was no sign of any letup in the aftershocks following the original news about Robert and Jim. The disclosure that the boys were wanted for murder was a roundhouse punch to the face, and the fast-paced developments that followed were slaps back and forth across the cheeks that left Pomerantz and most all Chelseans stag-gered and woozy. While Pomerantz and the Friends of Chelsea School on Wednesday were putting in play plans for the meeting, Robert was brought back to New Hampshire for his arraignment in Grafton County Superior Court and the start of his incarceration in the county jail. News about the case gushed nonstop in local and national papers and on television and radio. There was no escaping the gale-force coverage—reports that continued to deepen the wound, from the disclosure about a bootprint in blood investigators found inside the Zantop home to the partial fingerprints on a knife sheath that linked the boys to the killings. There also were the quick media snapshots of Chelsea that residents considered tabloid assaults on town life, as if beneath the postcard veneer roiled a weird, real-life
Blue Velvet
of depravity and deceit. Pomerantz was having night-mares about the case, and he wasn’t the only one. Treating trauma might be one of his specialties, but what about when he was one of the traumatized?

The morning of the meeting Pomerantz also awoke to the realization that what began as a comfort session for parents had ballooned into something bigger. The hunger for connection ran beyond parents. Even on such short notice, Pomerantz and other organizers now knew to expect several hundred people to show up at the church. News of the meeting, spread mostly by word of mouth, had also been picked up by the media. Pomerantz left his home to the ringing of the telephone in his ears and arrived at his hospital office to a pile of phone messages and a secretary at wit’s end. From the start he’d made a decision not to talk to reporters—too much was happening too fast. But he and other town leaders were realizing their ad hoc policy of no comment was

wrongheaded and would have to end. The early media reports streaming out of Chelsea were quoting anyone in town whom scrambling reporters could get to talk. In some instances reporters managed to lasso a town leader or longtime resident, but too often they grabbed the nearest warm body, which meant kids and young drifters—the corner-hangers stationed on Main Street outside the pizza shop and the South Common for hours on end. The early outside view of Chelsea was coming from them—many of whom didn’t live in town and many of whom didn’t know Robert and Jim, although their comments gave the impression they were experts on both. “Most responsible people were refusing to talk to media,” Pomerantz said later, “which left a whole other group of people who were getting quoted, and the world was getting a skewed view of Chelsea.” It was a lesson in Mass Media 101. Pomerantz and other town leaders began to discuss opening up and talking to reporters. But Pomerantz first wanted to get the community together, where this very point would be made. The calls and messages went unreturned.

Pomerantz couldn’t get any real work done. He was anxious, full of doubts, even panic. “In a daze pretty much all day,” he wrote in a journal. For five days Pomerantz had been fielding questions from neighbors and friends that ran the gamut—some afraid and fearful for their safety, others angry at the school, the media, the police, or all three— while at the same time shifting roles “between shrink and community person.” Pomerantz wanted to bear down and focus the meeting on how adults could best support the town’s children. He hoped that parents would have some of their trust in each other and their kids restored, but he wasn’t sure he’d be able to harness the passion and panic he’d detected even as he reached a clear idea about his role.

T
o escape the telephone calls at the hospital, Pomerantz left work early. To escape the telephone calls at home, Pomerantz headed into

the woods to seek the solitude of cross-country skiing. More than ever he was looking for the angle of repose he usually found by skiing across the snowy hills of Chelsea. But not this time. “Tried skiing in the

woods, but noisy clatter and ice stopped this,” he wrote in his journal. Pomerantz fretted. “Pacing, wondering if this could work. Risk or no risk? Called on for something I have never done before and didn’t consider my strong suit. But this is my town.”

Thirty minutes before the meeting was scheduled to begin, he drove into town from his home up a dirt road off Route 110. The snow-covered North Common was surrounded by reporters. The nearly two hundred-year-old church was all lit up, awash in the klieg lights of television satellite trucks. An orange glow filled the church’s stained-glass windows. It was eerie, as bright as midday. A light snow began to fall. “There’s Dr. P. now,” one reporter said, and suddenly reporters moved en masse. The common seemed to tilt in Pomerantz’s direction. He gave them little, reiterating organizers’ position that no media would be allowed inside, and that the meeting was to support families, not to find blame or to explore the boys’ possible role in the slayings. To enforce the no-media rule, a uniformed deputy sheriff stood guard at the entrance to the white-steepled church. Seeing all the people work their way inside in twos and threes, past the hordes of reporters, Pomerantz thought, “They’re more scared, confused than me.” He recognized many faces, but not all. It was clear the meeting had attracted newcomers and old-timers alike, people who got along well and some who didn’t, but neighbors all. As he was climbing the steps, part of a headline flashed through his mind. It had said, “Chelsea Psychiatrist.” He couldn’t recall the rest of the headline, which was atop a news story about the meeting just minutes from starting. But Pomerantz had enjoyed fleeting comic relief at a word combination that could be read to mean a psychiatrist whose patient was a town, just as “child psychiatrist” signaled a therapist who treated children. Thinking about the phrase, he smiled—the idea of it, that he was a community’s shrink.

Yeah, right.

D
an Sedon arrived in time to take one of the few remaining seats in a rear pew. The young lawyer had come with his wife and a friend, suc-

cumbing like so many had on short notice to a pull as relentless as

gravity. He felt a need to be there, not just as a member of the community but also in his capacity as counsel to the Tullochs, to see what people were saying about the case. He didn’t intend to speak. Sedon thought barring the media was constitutionally suspect, but he wasn’t about to complain, not on a night like this, not during a time in town like this. Sedon planned to be a fly on the wall.

The temperature outside was well below freezing, but inside it was steamy from shared body heat. The church was packed with nearly three hundred people, a number that approached a quarter of Chelsea’s population. People were seated in pews and standing along the two side walls and in back. The low buzz of chatter ended when Pomerantz, up front, said they should start. He began by referring to the newspaper headline, and then he shrugged and remarked that “Chelsea Psychiatrist” must mean he was the town’s therapist. The joke seemed to break the tension; some smiled, some laughed, and some rolled their eyes. The body language in the room relaxed momen-tarily, as if in a collective sigh.

Pomerantz said his main concern was Chelsea’s children. “The kids need us right now. The kids are confused. The adults are confused. I’m confused.” Pomerantz was emphasizing that he was one of them—a Chelsea parent and family man—not an objective therapist conducting an intervention. He wanted to use his understanding of the people and their town to guide the meeting, “rather than trying to work the thing intellectually.” That meant allowing people to vent and express whatever crossed their minds and then trying to guide the discussion back to the kids. At first, ideas bounced off the walls, at times like non sequiturs. Several residents dwelled on the brutality of the killings, but most spoke about a kind of paralysis—the inability to wrap their heads around the idea that Robert and Jim had killed the Zantops. It had to be a giant misunderstanding. Someone mentioned Robert’s fleeting effort at the start of his junior year to open a teen center. If that effort had succeeded, asked the woman who brought it up, would the boys be in jail now? Someone else complained about the “media assault” on Chelsea and its citizens, as if the town was to blame for the murders. “The media says we are heathens,” the offended resident said. Another

said maybe the negativity wasn’t so bad: “We don’t want them to like us and move here,” he said, openly sarcastic. Comments about the media segued into a point Pomerantz wanted to make. He urged residents to talk to reporters and share Chelsea’s strengths. Their silence so far had ceded the floor to the sometimes careless-talking corner-hangers. The discussion shifted again when a woman told the story of a classmate in grade school who had committed a murder, a tragedy that still haunted her. The woman’s point was that they all needed to take care of their kids, and it was an anecdote that brought the room back to where Pomerantz wanted to be: “Kids need their parents in times like this.”

More than anything else, residents voiced concern for the two teens accused of murder—distress that often came out emotionally, sometimes with tears. There was even some talk about baking the boys cookies. ”People worried about two innocent boys in jail,” Pomerantz would write in his journal. From the back, Cora Brooks shot up her hand and took the floor. She wanted to ease peoples’ minds. The white-haired poet and teacher knew firsthand what she was talking about. One day in the early 1970s she was in Lebanon, New Hampshire, to demonstrate against the Vietnam War. To make her point, Brooks had plopped down in front of a bus loaded with military draftees en route to their medical examinations. Soon joined by other protesters, Brooks and the others were arrested by police and carted off to the Grafton County Jail, where Robert was now incarcerated. “I mopped floors in that jail and, as far as jails go, it wasn’t that bad,” Cora Brooks told the others.

Near the front of the church stood a large flip chart on an easel, placed there by one of the meeting’s organizers, Phil Mulligan, Anna’s father and a member of Friends of Chelsea School. The poster-sized chart was there to allow Pomerantz and anyone else to scribble down topics or ideas that arose. But after someone wondered how the community might convey support for Robert and Jim, another mentioned maybe they should send a card. Pointing to the unused flip chart, Pomerantz said people could come up later to write messages and greetings to the boys.

In his seat near Cora Brooks, Dan Sedon was more skeptical than most. The idea of writing a note to the boys on the flip chart took him aback. He hadn’t expected the atmosphere to be “so pro–Robert and Jimmy.” But Sedon was in a different place from everyone else, both professionally and psychologically. Not only was he a criminal defense attorney, he knew facts that no one else in the church did. He’d seen thirty or so bags of evidence taken from the Tullochs’ house. Most notably, he’d figured out since the Friday-night search that investigators had found the knives. So it took him a moment, but once he recognized his unique status, the general mood made sense. It was an instinctive response—a community rallying around two of its kids in trouble. Feelings for the boys were rooted in the loyalty that was part of the gospel of a family-oriented town. In the absence of knowledge about what investigators had found, people around Sedon spoke passionately about “our kids,” meaning not just Robert and Jim but all children growing up in Chelsea. Sedon found himself thinking “it was like open group therapy.”

The line of commentary turned legal—several people worried that the boys would be railroaded at trial in New Hampshire, and another wondered whether a defense fund for the boys was in order. Pomerantz spotted Sedon and asked the attorney for help in fielding the legal questions. Sedon stood, reluctantly, and began to identify himself when Pomerantz urged him to come up front. Sedon ended up taking questions for nearly fifteen minutes about trials and criminal procedure, a discussion that included his explanation that a trial in a high-profile case like this would be at least a year away. Sedon told the audience the Tullochs were grateful to those who had dropped off groceries, and said the couple had stayed away from the meeting because they wanted oth-ers to feel they could speak freely. Regarding Robert’s defense, Sedon said the boy had a pair of top-shelf defense attorneys in New Hampshire public defenders Richard Guerriero and Barbara Keshen. “Even if the family had the money, I’m not sure they could do any better,” Sedon said. Someone asked about Jim, and Sedon said he couldn’t speak for the Parkers, and when someone asked if the families might need financial help to cover expenses, Sedon replied that might be an idea to explore.

But he reiterated he didn’t see a need for a defense fund. Guerriero and Keshen, he repeated, are as good as it gets.

When a couple of psychology-related questions came up, Pomerantz happily called on two counselors in attendance from a community mental-health agency. This way Pomerantz could stay with the crowd— one of the townsfolk. Scanning the standing-room-only sanctuary, he sensed the meeting was just what these people needed—each other.

Pomerantz could see that both new and old Chelsea were well represented. Cora Brooks, like himself, was part of the 1970s hippie influx. Not far from Cora stood Doug Lyford, Cora’s polar opposite. He was old Chelsea—the Lyford family went back five generations in town. Lyford was fifty-four, a Vietnam War veteran who grew up dirt poor and was one of those no-nonsense Vermonters. “There was no money, but there was always work to do—we always had a farm,” Lyford once said about his boyhood. “In the early sixties, we almost starved to death on the farm. There was just no money.” To help out, a teenaged Doug drove a milk truck after school and worked on the town’s road crew. “I never had to worry about free time—my father made sure we didn’t have much.” He graduated from high school in 1965 with fourteen others, and five days into his freshman year at Vermont Tech his draft notice arrived in the mail. Lyford didn’t try to get a college deferral; he obeyed orders and reported for service. Returning home after combat duty, Lyford earned a degree from the University of Vermont. For thirty years he taught math and industrial arts to high school students in Chelsea—a popular math teacher, in part because he’d put lessons in real-life terms. “It was stuff you needed,” said a teenager named Rob Olsen who’d had Lyford for math in eighth grade. “He would write problems like: how much fence do you need to buy to fence a field that is X big. Or you have a field that’s a certain size, and how many cows can you put on the field if each cow eats X amount of grass.” Lyford retired after the 2000 school year, but retired was in quotes. He was busy most days from before sunrise until after sunset, either logging, caring for eleven farms with a partner (“We hay and plow, that’s what we do”), or trying to keep up with the maintenance on a collection of old John Deere tractors he either used in his