Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (40 page)

A more complete explanation for the timing of the final search of the Zantops’ property would follow two weeks later. A new real estate listing would appear on Page C7 of
The Valley News:
“115 Trescott Road, Etna. Lovely, private 3+ acre setting, 3 BR, 2.5 BA, First Floor Master Suite. Offered at $475,000.” The home would soon have new owners, and Ayotte and her team wanted to be sure only memories were left behind.

One thing Ayotte didn’t need to worry about was having enough resources to press her case. The week before the Dartmouth graduation, New Hampshire’s governor and executive council set aside an extra $100,000 to help prosecute Robert and Jim. Attorney General Philip McLaughlin said the money would be spent on experts in crime-scene reconstruction, DNA evidence, computer forensics, and psychiatry. Left unstated was the common understanding that this case was so high-profile that New Hampshire didn’t dare screw it up. Only one member of the executive council, Ruth Griffin, voted against the appropriation. She was annoyed that similar attention hadn’t been devoted to an unsolved, ten-year-old double murder of a poor, black couple in Portsmouth. “If the case in Hanover is so very important,” Griffin wanted to know, “why isn’t the case in Portsmouth

just as important?”

As Dartmouth’s graduation day ebbed, an unnatural quiet enveloped the Zantop house. The bird feeders were uncharacteristically empty, hosta and ferns grew lush and untamed around the front yard, and the lawn would soon need a trim. Susanne’s old-fashioned drying rack was empty and forlorn. Half’s boat was gone.

As New Hampshire’s attorney general was fond of saying, time had stopped on January 27. Long past their useful season, two sets of cross-country skis, one long and one short, remained propped against the house, like loyal pets standing guard at their masters’ grave, waiting endlessly for their return.

T
wo days before the Dartmouth graduation, the Chelsea Public School staged a downscale version of the same rite of passage. On a

perfect spring evening, the town turned out in force to wish its daughters and sons Godspeed as they ventured out into the world. Robert Tulloch’s class was moving ahead without him, though he and Jim Parker remained very much in the public eye and private thoughts.

Three weeks earlier, Colorado Governor Bill Owens had released a two-hundred-page report on the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. Its bottom line was that if local and school officials and the killers’ parents had acted on clear signals from the troubled trigger-men, the tragedy might have been averted. The report concluded that everyone around the murderers had ignored a series of blatant red flags showing “suicidal and violent tendencies” during the year before they went on a shooting spree at their school. The signals mentioned were quite public at the time, including the boys’ arrest for breaking into an electrician’s van; their suspension from school for hacking into the school computer system; the discovery by the police of a pipe bomb behind one boy’s house; an essay written by one that described a school siege; and a homemade videotape showing the boys brandish-ing their weapons and describing their plans for a massacre.

The report’s finding made national news. Chelseans were as star-tled as the rest of the country by all the missed danger signs. Comparing notes, though, they were left wondering about their situation. The creepy, public buildup to murder by Columbine students Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris didn’t sound at all like Chelsea’s own Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker. The disconnect only made all the more vexing the conduct of their own boys. Where were the red flags, the in-your-face, murderous clues that the Colorado town had overlooked? It was seventy degrees as dusk approached on the evening of the Chelsea graduation. The sky was a cloudless blue, the air carried a hint of fresh flowers, and the tree-covered mountains that ringed the valley town wore a coat of leaves that looked dense enough to walk across. Jersey cows chewed cud in pungent fields, and stacks of fresh cord-wood patiently waited for the following winter. Signs advertising maple syrup competed with those urging Vermonters to “Impeach Jeffords,” as punishment for Senator Jim Jeffords’s decision two weeks earlier to

quit the Republican Party and become an Independent.

Mud-caked Subarus and rust-eaten pickup trucks moved slowly up and down Main Street. A family of six tumbled out of an old minivan held together with duct tape to grab a pizza dinner. American flags dangled from poles on farmhouses, S&L Video Plus did a steady trade, while Dixie II restaurant sat empty. On Dixie’s menu were pancakes with Vermont maple syrup for $2.75; a Dixie burger with onions, mushrooms, and cheddar, for $3.75; and Dixie’s chicken fillet for the same price. For atmosphere, there was floral wallpaper, plastic table-cloths, a wood-burning stove, and a television atop a stainless-steel milk dispenser.

As the start of the festivities approached, four boys gathered at the basketball court in the center of town, taking faraway shots that rarely came close to the backboard. Instead of moving closer, they tested their range by edging even farther away, with predictable results. Ten minutes of perfect shooting—all misses—was enough to bore them, so they walked across the street to the misspelled Chelsea Laundramat to sit on the front steps and share a cigarette.

By 5:30
P
.
M
. the graduates started to arrive at the South Common, where seven hundred folding chairs were arranged in rows in the shad-ow a fifty-foot maple tree. Sunlight bounced off the snow-white Orange County Courthouse at the far end of the common. Six ushers, including Tyler Vermette and Matt Butryman, handed out eight-page programs listing the graduates and detailing all Commencement Week events.

By 6
P
.
M
. the crowd overflowed the folding chairs by some two hundred people, meaning the equivalent of nearly the entire population of Chelsea was on hand to witness the passage of thirty-nine newly minted graduates. John Parker was among them, hanging toward the back of the crowd and exchanging quiet hellos with friends and acquaintances. Joan Parker didn’t come, and neither did Mike or Diane Tulloch. The Tullochs’ house, a short walk down Main Street from the ceremonies, was dark.

When the crowd was seated, friends and neighbors chatted and laughed, leaning over from one row to the next to offer greetings. Some stood on chairs, calling out to latecomers. The dress was Chelsea

Casual—tie-dyed shirts outnumbered ties, and shorts outnumbered khakis. Footwear ran to Birkenstocks, running shoes, work boots, and clogs for men as well as women. Children passed time with games of duck, duck, goose. No one talked on cell phones; as always, they didn’t work in the valley. A black-and-tan Labrador-collie mix wandered through the crowd, collecting pats.

At 6:30
P
.
M
., the graduates walked out of the school building and onto the adjacent common to “Pomp and Circumstance,” played by a school band with adults filling in on tuba and trombone. The girls wore silver gowns, the boys black—together, the class colors—and each carried a single red rose. They walked two-by-two. Had Robert been among them, there would have been twenty pairs. In his absence, the thirty-ninth graduate was left to walk alone, giving the procession the look of military jets flying a missing-man formation. A dozen of the seniors had been with Robert in DeRoss Kellogg’s sixth grade class.

The graduates found their places in front of a banner with the class motto printed in silver letters on a black background: “The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious.” The class chose two decades-old songs to be remembered by: “School’s Out for Summer” by Alice Cooper and “Staying Alive” by the Bee Gees.

Principal Pat Davenport took the microphone and praised a class she called “supportive, stimulating, cooperative, and caring.” Without mentioning the missing class member or his best friend, Davenport congratulated the town for coming together to support the new graduates. “As a community we have much to be proud of,” she said, her voice cracking.

The valedictorian was Anna Mulligan, who had succeeded Robert as student council president. She had spent a semester at the Mountain School and would be attending Brown University. In florid prose, Mulligan talked about a trip she had taken to Ghana and described how guilty she felt being a tourist in a Third World country. Salutatorian William Funk IV, en route to Norwich University, happily remembered second grade with Kip Battey and Zack Courts, and reminisced about later school years with other friends. He didn’t mention

Robert or Jim, but like Davenport, tried to reassure the crowd: “It does take a whole village to raise a child, and looking at my peers, it looks like you did a good job.”

Before collecting their diplomas, nearly all the graduates received some kind of award, scholarship, or both. Anna Mulligan collected an armful. Coltere Savidge won the coveted Balfour Award, for his combination of all-around “scholarship, loyalty, and achievement.” Kip Battey, Robert’s erstwhile debate partner, received a speaking award.

The closest anyone came to a direct reference to the killings was guest speaker Willem Lange, a New England essayist who, it happened, lived in the Zantops’ town. “It would be foolish of me to try to pretend there isn’t a very sad connection between your town and my village of Etna,” he said. “Personally, I feel that the connection is largely the creation of various media, to whom getting a story is sometimes more important than the privacy or feelings of the people involved. We may regret that, but wishing it weren’t so won’t change it. . . . Our job here this evening is to put that behind us, at least temporarily, and focus on the work that’s ahead of us.”

Lange then decried “the disintegration of common civility” and urged the graduates to tear down walls that divide people and build bridges to join them. “If ever there was a group of people uniquely qualified to help heal the wounds in the body of our culture, it’s you.” Lange’s sentiments were well received, but the townspeople knew that before healing could begin they still needed to know why two of their boys were in jail awaiting trial for murder. As more physical evidence was revealed, most Chelseans had come to accept that Robert and Jim had killed the Zantops. But with no known links to the professors and no word of motive from police or prosecutors, the struggle

for understanding continued.

To the people of Chelsea, Jim was still the musically gifted class clown, the smiling child of well-respected parents, the native son who didn’t like to hunt and was afraid of the dark. Robert was still the whip-smart student council president, the talented debater, the arrogant but harmless son of introverted parents. Together they were the clean-cut, drug-free, fort-building, Frisbee-playing, rock-climbing, fast-driving

buddies who might win a raft race one day and entertain the town in a talent show the next.

What the people of Chelsea didn’t know was those images were long out of date. The Robert and Jim they thought they knew had disappeared long before they bought knives, put them to use, then took flight from the police.

Part III
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