Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (44 page)

Something Wicked This Way Comes

N
early six months would pass before the public was told the Zantops were marked for death arbitrarily. But from the moment Ranger became

a confidential informant, prosecutors stopped looking for more complicated motives and ended their search for links among the two boys from Chelsea and the two professors from Etna. After all the investigative trails and endless speculation about revenge, rock climbing, sex, scandal, and academic politics, by the summer of 2001 prosecutors were certain the Zantops were murdered for the banal reason that Robert and Jim had come to 115 Trescott Road planning to rob and kill whomever they found there.

For Attorney General Phil McLaughlin and his assistants, Kelly Ayotte and Mike Delaney, the case was falling neatly into place. Physical evidence tying Robert and Jim to the murders was overwhelming—the bloody commando knives found hidden in Robert’s

bedroom would surely impress a jury, as would Jim’s fingerprints, the Zantops’ blood on the floor mat of Jim’s mother’s Subaru, the bloody footprint that matched Robert’s Vasque boot, and so on. Robert and Jim’s porous alibi about selling the knives at the Army-Navy store wouldn’t be much help to the defense. And Ranger’s account of Robert’s jailhouse musings would add immeasurably to the prosecution’s case by reducing or removing questions about provocation.

The case for first-degree murder wasn’t a slam dunk—the defendants were teenagers with no known history of violence, represented by highly capable lawyers. Also, as an inmate facing fraud charges, Ranger wasn’t an ideal witness, though his cooperation wasn’t tainted by any special consideration. He had received nothing—no dropped charges or reduced prison time—for telling his story. Still, investigators and the prosecution team felt confident they had solved the case and assembled all the tools needed to win convictions and long—possibly lifelong—prison terms for Robert and Jim. The only uncertainty that remained for authorities was whether one of the two best friends might turn on the other and offer a firsthand account of the murder, as well as its planning and aftermath, in exchange for a lesser sentence.

However, there was another court entirely separate from the one in which prosecutors were operating—the court of public curiosity. Satisfying the legal standard of guilt or innocence wouldn’t fully explain what Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker had done to Half and Susanne Zantop, or why they had done it. Missing was a deeper explanation of what still seemed a senseless butchery.

When reporters invaded Chelsea in February 2001, they heard then retold stories of two bright, clean-cut, well-liked boys from stable homes, one a student council president and talented debater, the other a musically gifted, dramatically inclined class clown. They heard that both shunned alcohol and drugs, had a taste for health food, and devoted themselves to Frisbee playing and rock climbing. By all outward appearances, Robert and Jim seemed like normal, high-spirited teenagers. Neither had a history of mental illness, a criminal record, or even a reputation for delinquency. To some, they were mischievous

and a bit arrogant, with a craving for attention and a tendency toward heavy-footed driving. But that hardly qualified them for the stereotype of young killers.

Nothing the prosecution or police had uncovered could explain why these two particular boys would purchase commando knives in a long-planned plot to steal money, kill strangers, and disappear into lives of crime. Investigators were happy to end the inquiry into why Robert and Jim killed Half and Susanne with a straightforward, jury-friendly answer—money. But that wouldn’t be enough to make sense of the murders in two New England communities—one missing two elders, one missing two children, and both missing their sense of shel-tered innocence. It also wouldn’t satisfy a wider world at once repulsed and fascinated by the crime. Even after the official investigation was complete, the answers to the deeper questions surrounding the Zantops’ deaths lay hidden in Chelsea.

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n early 2000, a year before the killings, other members of The Crew were focusing on school, sports, hobbies, jobs, girlfriends, and plans

for college. Robert and Jim’s parents and siblings were involved in their own lives of work and school, leaving them little time or inclination to worry about the intensifying friendship. Christiana Usenza had transferred to a high school in Montpelier, and she and Robert rarely saw each other. By choice and by default, Robert and Jim were left largely to their own devices, alone except for each other. With only occasional work with Jim’s father, little direction from their parents, and paltry school demands because they were far ahead on graduation credits, Robert and Jim had more freedom than ever and huge swaths of free time on their hands.

Then, by early spring, came Robert’s near-impeachment and the debacle at the state debate tournament—two dizzying, self-imposed falls for which he blamed others. Both left him angry and confused— he hadn’t done anything wrong, he was certain, so how dare they do this to him? In the bitter wake of those public humiliations, Robert filled his free time by allowing his fertile, febrile imagination to focus

on fleeing Chelsea forever, Jim by his side, both of them unfettered by rules of society.

“So now, after defying school for the last five years,” he wrote in a school paper at the time, “having regular conflicts with the teachers, enjoying myself by doing exactly what I want, I am ready to depart. School is not for me, and now I can leave. I do not think I was old enough or knowledgeable enough to leave before, but now that I know what I want, I can begin the rest of my life.”

He didn’t want to go alone—“I have always and will probably always have a real live audience,” he wrote in the same paper—and so he began methodically drawing Jim into his web. In their private moments together, in the car, rock climbing, communicating over the Internet, Robert spun fantasies of life on the road that he knew would appeal to the actor in Jim. Robert stoked his immature friend’s rebellious streak and preyed on Jim’s childish self-image as a bold adventurer-in-waiting. “Ever since we started becoming best friends,” Jim would say, “we were doing all this adventurous stuff and, you know, considered ourselves better than everybody else.”

They began talking about destinations, focusing first on distant parts of the United States, then looking across one ocean to Italy or France, or another to New Zealand. They looked a little more and settled on Australia, for no better reasons than it was far away, seemed exotic, had a variety of climates, and used English as its primary language.

Under Robert’s leadership, they began trying to turn that fantasy into reality by crudely calculating how much it might cost to live down under. Earlier they had blown off a school project to research foreign cultures, but they threw themselves into their secret version of the same assignment, scouring the Internet and the Chelsea Public School library for information. Soon they developed a budget for their travels, estimating their cost of food at between $8 and $18 a day. They figured that would eventually drop to zero, because they would learn how to live off the land or buy what they needed with the spoils of their crimes.

To get started, they decided, they needed an initial stake of about

$10,000, for airfare and enough money to last a year. Robert couldn’t be bothered raising that much legally—that would take patience, responsibility, courtesy, hard work, preparation, and genuine planning, none of which he had much use or aptitude for. He became fixated on plotting criminal ways to raise the money.

Most of the initial ideas were Robert’s, and then together he and Jim would polish off the rough edges. At times Jim would tire of the scheming and urge that they give it a rest—he wanted to go outside, see movies, play ball tag, and hang around the way they used to—but Robert wouldn’t hear of it. He was determined to set in motion their two-man traveling crime team, modern pirates on land and sea.

To other friends, his parents, and his teachers, Robert would casually mention his global travel plans and his disdain for college. He told Christiana Usenza that higher education was a waste of time, which ruined good minds and homogenized society. But privately, with only Jim as audience, assistant, and foil, Robert was allowing his resent-ments to simmer and his imagination to run free.

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t first, Robert and Jim let their minds wander over all manner of potential schemes and scams. They talked about holding up a bank or

stealing an ATM machine, and several times walked into banks to scope things out, once driving around back to see what they’d find. But robbing a bank was complicated, and that idea didn’t last long.

Some of their scheming in the spring of 2000 took shape during drives to a quarry in Barre, some twenty miles north of Chelsea. During quarry visits a year earlier, Robert had fantasized with Jim about stealing cars and joyriding, but nothing had come of it. Jim didn’t like that idea at first, but the more Robert talked about it the better it sounded. Robert used adolescent logic to convince Jim there was no risk, because they would abandon the cars afterward, and then no one would bother looking for them, because the cars would end up returned to their owners. That made sense to Jim and appealed to his sense of fun: “I like driving cars around really fast, and shit like that,” he’d say.

An opportunity presented itself on one of their visits to the Barre quarry. A truck was sitting there, unattended, its key in the ignition. So they took turns driving it around. They stole a gas can from the pick-up’s bed, then headed home. Another day, they drove back to the quarry in a beat-up Mazda pickup that belonged to Robert’s family. They figured they’d find the quarry truck and go joyriding again, but with a modified
Thelma and Louise
twist. “We were thinking about driving it off a ledge,” Jim said. “You know, jumping out first.”

They never got the chance—soon after they began joyriding in the quarry truck, a worker arrived at the rock pit. He placed himself between the truck and the exit, so there was no way out. Robert made a quick decision. His family’s Mazda was also in the quarry, so he couldn’t avoid capture. But Jim could. Robert told Jim to jump out of the quarry truck before the worker realized there were two of them— Robert would take the heat for them both. Jim obeyed Robert’s command, sneaking out of the truck without being seen. He ducked behind some rocks and made his way out of the quarry, then hid alongside a nearby road to wait for Robert.

Jim escaped, but things looked bad for Robert. When the quarry worker saw the stolen gas can in the Mazda, he had Robert red-handed. He also accused Robert of stealing some expensive drill bits that were missing previously. Robert hadn’t stolen them, but with the gas can sitting there in plain view, he was in no position to argue his innocence. The quarry worker called the Barre police, and when Chief Michael Stevens questioned Robert, he was struck by the teen’s amoral, argumentative insistence that he had done nothing wrong. “Robert stated the pit was not locked, nor [were there] any signs to say he wasn’t supposed to be there,” Stevens wrote in his report. “Robert Tulloch stated that he . . . felt there was nothing wrong with driving the truck, since the keys were in the truck and he never left the pit area. I informed Robert that it was not his property to use.”

Afterward, Robert told Jim that the penalty for their misadventure had been steep—community service and a $1,200 fine. Jim knew that was enough to put a huge dent in the Tulloch family’s precarious

finances. He couldn’t help but feel indebted for the cost he thought Robert had borne for them both.

In fact, Robert had lied to his best friend. There was no community service, no fine—Chief Stevens simply issued a verbal notice of trespass and seized the gas can. At Stevens’s insistence, Diane and Michael Tulloch accompanied Robert to the station and gave a statement about what little they knew. Diane later said they expected the authorities to order Robert to attend a juvenile corrections program known as a diversion. “They said they would call back and they never called us back,” Diane said. She called to check on the status of the case and was told to keep waiting, but still no one called. “I thought it would have been a good lesson to go through diversion. Maybe, maybe somebody should have called us back on that.”

Implied in Diane’s wish for official action were two unmistakable points about the Tulloch style of parenting. First, Diane was looking to pass the buck, blaming Barre authorities for failing to take action against her son. Second, it was an acknowledgment that Robert would have ignored any punishment she and Mike tried to hand down. As Jim put it, Robert “didn’t listen to them.”

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oyriding was fun, but it wouldn’t get them out of Chelsea. Unknown to the friends who would later describe them to reporters as law-

abiding kids, by the late spring of 2000 Robert and Jim had become single-minded about remaking themselves as criminals.

“We started thinking about illegal activities and we couldn’t really share that with other people, because we didn’t want to have, like, too many people in our circle of crime,” Jim would say. “Eventually we decided to do illegal stuff and so we always felt like we should be working on that and not fooling around and playing and stuff. So we didn’t do a lot with our other friends.” On two occasions when Robert and Jim did reunite with The Crew in the spring of 2000, they had their breaking-and-eating episodes at the homes of their friends Casey Purcell and Ivy and Tess Mix.

Around that same time, Jim began expressing his solidarity with Robert in his schoolwork. In an autobiographical essay, Jim mentioned how he partnered with Robert in sledding, building forts, playing on the river, “and many, many other activities I can not begin to talk about.” The essay continued in the third person: “They were both extreme people. Both fed off each other. Robert was very knowledgeable but lacked a distinct view of everything, his life seemed dull. Jim’s intellect greatly increased and continues to. Robert has found himself and is very pleased. Robert is a wonderful surprise to the project. And I am pleased to announce that Robert Tolluch [
sic
] will be added to the assignment. The two will complete the mission together.” He didn’t elaborate for the teacher on the nature of that mission.