Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (46 page)

setback, but her see-no-evil acceptance of Robert’s quick lie—that he and Jim had bought them for the harmless fun of popping street signs off poles—spared them from punishment or discovery. Without Diane Tulloch’s knowledge or credit card, they bought two more stun guns.

Although they went high-tech with their weaponry and revised their plan in the weeks after being rebuffed at the Pattis’ house, months went by with little forward motion on their criminal enterprise. Jim remained skittish after the Patti debacle. Also, Jim was broadening his horizons and spending less time in Chelsea.

I
n September 2000, at the start of his junior year, Jim transferred to Spaulding High School, twenty miles north in Barre. He was well

ahead on graduation credits in Chelsea, so he could afford a change of scenery, and his parents thought Spaulding would provide more opportunities for his musical talents. Jim had maxed out on Chelsea’s music program, and Spaulding had a strong reputation for musical offerings. Maybe he’d also make some new friends there. Jim wanted to try Spaulding for the most basic teenage reason of all: He thought he’d meet new girls. And it worked, if only briefly.

During his second week at Spaulding, he met a pretty girl named Sara Aja in music class—she played trombone and sang vocals in the jazz band. Jim developed a crush on her, and his affection was returned. Sara thought he was sweet and upbeat, funny and thoughtful, with a positive aura and a good heart. She considered him the kind of boy who would break up fights rather than start them, a well-raised young man who was polite and well-mannered. A self-described nerd, Sara liked the gentleness she saw in Jim.

Their friendship grew during the first two months of school. They went for a walk in the woods because he loved the outdoors and wanted to share it with her. They spent time together at a friend’s house. Soon Jim began opening up to her. He complained that his parents treated him like a child. He thought he could never please them. Jim told her that he dreamed of running away to Colorado to rock climb, and how he wanted to go out alone to the middle of nowhere to rough it.

Jim confided in Sara that his best friend, Robert, had forced him to jump off a cliff into water when he didn’t want to, and that he and Robert got their kicks from driving cars backwards into trees. Jim told Sara that he and Robert had robbed a house “a few years ago.” He apparently thought that telling her the breakin occurred just a few months earlier, after the Ben & Jerry’s festival, might scare her off. He also told her he regretted having done it.

Over time, Sara got the sense that Jim loved and respected Robert but was captive to him. That didn’t surprise her. It seemed consistent with something she had noticed about Jim. Sara thought Jim was hun-gry for attention and would cling to anyone who showed him some. Robert lavished attention on Jim, and Sara thought Jim would do anything for Robert in return.

Jim wanted Sara to be his girlfriend, but she had recently broken up with another boy and didn’t want to get involved so soon. By November it was clear to Jim that Sara only wanted to be friends, and they drifted apart.

If Jim thought he would be recognized for his musical genius at Spaulding, he was in for another disappointment. The music teachers considered him a modest talent who could have been quite good if he wasn’t so lazy. He could play bass guitar by ear, but he wasn’t as motivated as two other bass players at Spaulding that year. His other teachers were similarly unimpressed.

Jim’s English teacher, Martha Morris, called him an imaginative young man with a flair for acting, but someone who seemed turned off to school. He wrote his term paper on
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,
Douglas Adams’s comic work of science fiction. Jim liked it so much he checked out a sequel from the school library,
Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Another book he checked out was
On the Road,
Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat novel of two disillusioned friends who travel cross-country in search of freedom and meaning, committing petty crimes along the way.

Jim’s friends and teachers at Spaulding noticed a sudden change that came over him one day in November when Robert tagged along to school. It was “Shadow Day,” when Spaulding students were allowed

to bring friends from other schools to their classes. Sara Aja didn’t recognize the sweet and funny Jim she knew and liked. He acted different around Robert, trying to emulate his arrogant, witty friend.

Another of Jim’s friends at Spaulding, senior Michael Wheeler, also noticed that, normally talkative, Jim grew quiet and subservient around Robert. Wheeler sensed that Robert “ran the show” and looked down on Spaulding and its students. Wheeler liked Jim but considered Robert a jerk.

Throughout the semester, Jim learned it was harder to succeed outside the protective cocoon of Chelsea. The As and Bs he was used to receiving became Bs and Cs at Spaulding. Despite his belief that he possessed a superior intellect, those grades were consistent with the mediocre 1,000 Jim scored on the SAT.

As the months wore on, Jim grew less enamored of Spaulding and began making plans to return to school in Chelsea. Later, Jim would echo Robert’s attitude toward the Barre school, even denying the friendships he’d made there. “I didn’t really like . . . most of the peo-ple,” Jim said. “I thought everybody was stupid and I was getting real annoyed with that. I didn’t really like the teachers, and Chelsea is a lot nicer.”

W
hile Jim was at Spaulding, Robert spent the autumn of 2000 doing next to nothing. Only a few credits shy of graduation, he refused

to go to school and showed no inclination toward getting a job. His mother asked him about it, but he ignored her and spent his days reading and doing occasional chores at home.

During the first weeks of the fall, when the tree-studded hills around Chelsea were turning gold, red, and orange, Robert drew closer to Christiana Usenza, talking with her nightly on the phone. They talked about his dreams of spending his days rock climbing and living untouched by society’s rules, and then, conversely, of his fantasy of becoming president. Yet as much as they talked, she never felt he completely opened up to her. Something was missing in her quasi-boyfriend, though she could never quite put her finger on it.

As winter approached, Christiana enjoyed their talks less and less. She tried to focus on the Robert she considered wise and compassionate, charming and charismatic, but that Robert was little in evidence. He loved to argue and believed he could outsmart anyone, she thought, and she grew tired of the pleasure he took in testing his skills on her. Once, out of nowhere, Robert told her he was psychotic. Christiana disagreed and told him so. But she noticed that he seemed to like being in a bad mood, and those moods occurred with increasing frequency. Privately, she concluded that he had a superiority complex and maybe a touch of depression. Other times, she thought he was troubled, disturbed even, and that he needed help.

Most of their relationship was over the phone—they saw each other about once every two weeks, and Robert wouldn’t hang around when she was with other friends. With their limited contact and increasingly contentious phone talks, Christiana thought about breaking off completely from Robert, but she never went through with it.

When Jim came home from Spaulding after school, he and Robert would immediately hook up. Frequently, Cora Brooks—Robert’s neighbor and Jim’s former substitute teacher—noticed them walking by her house, alone together, lost in conversation. Once she put them to work, hiring them to move some furniture. As often as possible they’d go rock climbing, usually at their regular club, Petra Cliffs in Burlington, but once, in early October, they climbed at the River Valley Club in Hanover.

On several of their trips out of Chelsea in the fall of 2000 they flirted with resuming their lives of crime. Armed with their stun guns, they spent several afternoons lying in the woods with binoculars, scouting out houses along Bethel Mountain Road and waiting for the owners to come home. “It was ideally supposed to be dark, and then we would run around, like, the back of the car or the side of the car and . . . we would like, either stun them or, like, knock them out with something and then we would tie them up and probably drag them into the house,” Jim said. “We’d get their credit card and their ATM number and you know, tie them up and ask them for their information and then we would kill them.” Their chosen method was strangulation

because it would be a bloodless murder. Then they would bury or otherwise hide the bodies to make it appear their targets were missing persons rather than homicide victims.

One time they spent a half hour outside a house waiting for someone to come home, but the fall air chilled their bones. They began making excuses to each other about why it wouldn’t be a good day to carry out their plans. Soon the two would-be “badasses” packed it in.

As it turned out, the only person who ever felt the stun guns’ sting was Robert. The experiment began when he suggested that they test their weapons. Jim didn’t want to be the guinea pig, so Robert volunteered. Jim gripped the six-inch tall, battery-powered device, flipped the “on” switch, and touched the two metal prongs at the top to Robert’s stomach. He held it there long enough for tens of thousands of volts of electricity to course through Robert’s body, scrambling his nervous system. Aficionados of nonlethal weapons talk about stun guns’ “bite,” and Robert gained an immediate appreciation of the term. The burst of energy made his muscles fire rapidly, but randomly, depleting the sugar in his blood and converting it to lactic acid. Robert became disoriented, lost his balance, and slumped to the ground. One selling point for stun guns is that they leave no permanent damage. Soon he was himself again, so he and Jim talked about the experience and assessed whether and for how long the Stun Masters would inca-pacitate their victims.

On a deeper level, Robert had engineered another exercise in bonding and personal debt. After the quarry incident and the Mazda misadventure, Robert had taken the hits personally and financially, or so he had claimed. By testing the stun guns on himself, he took the hit physically, and he must have known Jim wouldn’t forget it.

Another time, Robert suggested they test their appetites for violence by taking a life. Robert argued that it would be good practice, so they wouldn’t hesitate when the real time came. He had a candidate all picked out: his dog, Ruby. Jim had seen Robert hit Ruby “just because it was a stupid dog.” He thought that was a terrible thing to do, though Jim hadn’t protected Robert’s dog from the beatings. But this was where Jim drew the line. Jim could accept the idea of needing to

kill people to rid themselves of witnesses, but he saw no point to killing a dog. “The thing with killing for me is that I was doing it for the money,” Jim said. “I thought, you know, maybe we do need to get used to this, but we’re not going to practice on animals or anything like that.” Robert recognized that carrying out his plan might seriously alienate Jim, so the dog lived. Again, Robert had tested his accomplice for weaknesses and gained more insight into what he could expect from Jim.

T
o the surprise of Chelsea debate coach John O’Brien, Robert and Jim appeared at an organizational meeting in the late fall of 2000.

Although the boys were no longer in school together, O’Brien thought they seemed closer than ever. They had perfected their comedy routine by then, and were finishing each other’s sentences. O’Brien thought their persistent bonding wasn’t necessarily good for Robert, Jim, or anyone else. He concluded that they were more disruptive together than on their own.

During the introductory debate meeting, however, they threw themselves into the task. Kip Battey was there, too, and O’Brien listened as the three teens sized up possible recruits in the freshman and sophomore classes. “They were like, ‘Nooo, not her, she’s terrible. Not him, he’s an asshole.’ Or, ‘He’s a really cool guy.’ They were very opinionated.”

Seeing Robert made O’Brien realize that not only wasn’t he attending classes, he had failed in his plan to travel the world. “Oh yeah,” Robert told O’Brien. “I’m still trying to get it together.” Later, when O’Brien bumped into Robert in town, the debate coach tried to press him on the specifics and even the inspiration for wanting to explore abroad. Robert mentioned
On the Road,
but O’Brien thought he seemed only vaguely familiar with the book or wasn’t inspired by it. Rather than describe his own passion for travel, Robert preferred to knock his college-bound classmates.

O’Brien realized that beyond vague talk about Europe, beyond his bravado and brashness, Robert had no concrete plan. It disappointed

him: “Chelsea has so few sort of bright, go-getter types, so that the ones who actually could go to college or do something, like Robert, you want to see them do it.” One difference O’Brien noticed was in Robert’s appearance. He often wore a black sweater and black pants that, in O’Brien’s eyes, made him look “somewhat European or bohemian.”

O’Brien knew that if Robert had bothered to plan ahead, he not only could have devised a trip, he probably could have gotten money to help pay for it. Anna Mulligan, Robert’s teammate in debate, had used Chelsea’s new Marilyn and James Haskett Senior Project Fund to help finance a monthlong trip to Ghana. The Hasketts, who had homes in Chelsea and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where James Haskett was an emeritus professor at Harvard, had established the fund with a $10,000 gift dedicated to helping the children who lived in their adopted Vermont community.

After Robert and Jim’s cameo appearance at the debate meeting, O’Brien decided to challenge Robert to resume debating, hoping that Robert had outgrown the ugly behavior he displayed at the state debate tournament. At first Robert waved him off, repeating his line about his pending getaway to Europe. But O’Brien kept after him. A regional tournament was scheduled to be held in Chelsea after the holidays, on January 6, 2001, and O’Brien urged Robert to participate. Because of his experience, Robert could be a varsity debater. O’Brien would find someone from another school to team up with him. It would be good experience, the coach told Robert, something to keep him busy.