Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (48 page)

I
n January 2001, Steckler thought he knew Robert. Robert’s parents, brother, and sisters thought they knew Robert. Christiana thought she

knew Robert. The Crew thought they knew Robert. DeRoss Kellogg and John O’Brien thought they knew Robert. Chelsea, Vermont, thought it knew Robert. But Robert’s family, friends, teachers, and small community only imagined they knew him. Each of them saw pieces of the whole, and none took the warning signs he displayed seriously enough to dig deeper or clamp down on him. Even Jim, who knew him best, knew only what Robert wanted him to know, which was only as much as Robert thought Jim could handle.

The real Robert Tulloch emerges only when one carefully sifts through his public and private actions and attitudes—some seemingly inconsequential, some clear danger signals, some unknown to everyone except Jim—during the year leading up to the killings of Half and Susanne Zantop. Individually, the markers are easy to overlook or mis—

read. The complete picture appears only when the elements of Robert’s life are placed on top of one another and illuminated, like a picture divided into transparencies then stacked together and projected onto a screen.

First, though, it’s necessary to eliminate the false leads and incomplete answers.

Prosecutors and police were eager to streamline the case into a straightforward narrative they knew would appeal to a jury. Seen through that lens, it was nothing more than a house robbery in which young, money-seeking thieves killed two strangers to eliminate witnesses. Certainly that theory was bolstered by Robert and Jim’s incessant talk of needing cash to leave town and by the absence of other plausible motives—revenge or murder-for-hire, to name two. But to end the inquiry upon concluding that it was a matter of murder for money is to see only the surface, a view as mistaken as to suggest that because they look the same from the outside, a sleeping volcano is only a mountain.

Trying to raise money through crime to start new lives—grabbing mail, stealing the ATV, dreaming of robbing a bank or carjacking peo-ple, and ultimately hunting people—masked a disturbed psychology and murderous nature that had been brewing inside Robert.

Of course, he couldn’t simply share with Jim his desire to kill peo-ple; that would have made his friend and acolyte run for cover. Rather, Robert understood intuitively that he was the leader of their two-man pack, and that he could bend Jim into whatever shape he wanted as long as he brought him along slowly, playing on Jim’s love of adventure and fantasy, fueling his adolescent dreams of escaping protective parents, exploiting his craving for attention, stroking his insecure ego, and overcoming his vague doubts with seemingly watertight logic. It was a seduction of Jim to Robert’s worldview. And step by step Jim came along, a vessel waiting to be filled, blinded by what he imagined to be Robert’s brilliance reflecting off his own impressive mind.

The real question, then, is what made Robert thirsty for blood. Plenty of young men are frustrated and angry, hungry for money and certain of their own superiority, but few turn toward murder. What was

it specifically about Robert that made him want to lash out and launch himself and Jim into new lives as outlaws who would never want, need, or be able to find their way back to “sucky old Chelsea”? A path to the answer can be found in the lines Michael Tulloch wrote about himself just a month before the murders: “It is funny how things, that can deeply affect and even change your life, come to you. Sometimes they are right in front of you, and you do not see them until the time is right.” Had they only known what to look for, Robert’s parents, friends, teachers, and fellow Chelseans might have recognized that right in front of them was a near-perfect specimen of a true psychopath.

F
requently misused and widely misunderstood, the word “psychopath” requires an explanation. At least some of the confusion

comes from its overuse by laymen and the media to describe anyone who commits a horribly violent crime. Another reason is its similarity to the word “psychotic,” when in fact the two have almost nothing in common. Psychotics are out of touch with reality, subject to delusions and hallucinations. The speech and motor patterns of a psychotic are often as bizarre and disorderly as his thoughts. A psychotic who commits murder might convincingly maintain that his dog told him to do it. As a result, psychotics can be judged not responsible for the crimes they commit by reason of insanity. Christiana Usenza was correct in telling Robert he wasn’t psychotic.

By contrast, psychopaths seem exceedingly normal. They function efficiently in society, often extremely well, and know precisely what they are doing and why. They are often charming, witty, and charismatic. They choose to commit crimes because, in the apt phrase of Dr. Robert D. Hare, one of the foremost researchers on the subject, they are thoroughly “without conscience.” In other words, they are sane by legal standards, but lack an essential quality of humanity. As Hare puts it, “Their acts result not from a deranged mind but from a cold, calculating rationality combined with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking, feeling human beings.”

No one knows what causes psychopathy, though some studies suggest psychopaths suffer from a neurological defect that prevents them from making emotional connections. There is no evidence it results from social or environmental factors, and nurturing parents seem as likely as abusive or neglectful ones to spawn psychopaths. Put another way, sometimes a child raised with love becomes a cold-blooded killer, and, conversely, most children who suffer horrible upbringings don’t become psychopaths. That makes it extremely difficult to predict who might become a psychopath, and equally hard to see one coming before it’s too late. Another piece of bad news is that the prognosis for changing psychopaths’ thoughts and behaviors through treatment is quite poor.

By Hare’s estimation, there are at least two million psychopaths in North America, though only a fraction are potential killers. The others fit Hare’s description of psychopaths who are “social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets.” Those who do become killers are often the most brutal of all murderers, able, in Hare’s words, to “torture and mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.”

A famous literary portrait of psychopathic behaviors appeared twenty-five years before the Zantop murders.
In Cold Blood,
Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel,” told the story of two young men, Dick Hickock and Perry Smith, who murdered a successful Kansas farm family, the Clutters. The killers didn’t know their victims—they came to the farm in search of money. Smith, who thought himself “special” and felt an affinity with Thoreau, wanted to steal enough cash to travel to Mexico to search for buried treasure. Neither he nor Hickock had anything against the Clutters, who were passive and compliant, but Hickock was intent on “leaving no witnesses.” As Smith explained after killing family patriarch Herb Clutter: “I didn’t want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.”

To diagnose psychopathy, Hare and others developed a psychological checklist to distinguish it from social deviance or other mental illnesses, such as antisocial personality disorder, which is diagnosed largely on patterns of criminal behaviors. Though Robert exhibited antisocial behavior, the boundaries of that personality disorder aren’t broad enough to explain him. Psychopathy includes not just deviant behavior but particular personality traits, many of which by themselves aren’t necessarily cause for alarm. Only when a cluster of specific behavior and personality traits appear together can a person be deemed a psychopath.

A psychopath is glib and superficial, grandiose, lacking in emotional depth and empathy, devoid of remorse or guilt, deceitful and manipulative, and unable to make realistic long-term plans. “Psychopaths have a narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance, a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the center of the universe, as superior beings who are justified in living according to their own rules,” Hare wrote in what might well have been a review of one of Robert’s school assignments. On the behavior side of the checklist, psychopaths lie with impunity, refuse to accept responsibility for their actions, act impulsively, lack behavior controls, crave excitement, abhor boredom, and commit a variety of antisocial acts.

As a teenager, Robert couldn’t satisfy all the criteria for an adult diagnosis of psychopathy, particularly some of the secondary traits and behaviors. For instance, a “parasitic lifestyle” could apply to almost any teen liv-ing at home, and “promiscuous sexual behavior” isn’t easy in a community as small as Chelsea, particularly for someone without a car of his own. On the other hand, a factor used in assessing young psychopaths is their tendency to lead double lives—as in, plotting murder while outwardly seeming a normal, nonviolent teen in Chelsea, Vermont.

Overall, Robert exhibited an extraordinary number of the traits and behaviors that define the syndrome—more than enough to easily satisfy a diagnosis of psychopathy.

The superficial charm he poured on his fellow students to win election as student council president, followed by his impeachable lack of interest once he got the job. The calculating callousness of suggesting that he and Jim kill his dog. The ease and frequency with which he lied to his mother, his girlfriend, his best friend, the police. The grandiosity, arrogance, and narcissism of his self-description as a “higher being” and an “intellectual giant” who was “born in the same manner as Jesus or Moses.” The glibness he showed during school classes and debate competitions despite being wholly unprepared, as well as his inability to recognize his flagrant violation or modulate his anger at the state debate tournament. The crafty manipulation of Jim to ensure he would have the assistance and audience he desired. The risk-taking behavior of his
Thelma and Louise
plan at the quarry. The morally bankrupt way he insisted to the Barre police chief that he had done nothing wrong—the keys were in the truck, so why not drive it? The impulsivity and depravity of his suggestion that they crush the skulls of the old couple near the Ben & Jerry’s festival. The escalating pattern of crimes to feed his urges for boredom-breaking thrills. The lack of remorse for the Zantops’ deaths, contrasted with the blubber-ing regret he expressed solely for himself and Jim after their arrests in Indiana.

Psychopaths have what Hare called “an uncanny ability to spot and use ‘nurturant’ women. . . . Many such women are in the helping professions—nursing, social work, counseling—and tend to look for the goodness of others while overlooking or minimizing their faults.” It is difficult to imagine a better definition of Robert’s jailhouse friendship with nursing home administrator Sandra Knapp. Moreover, Hare notes, “Psychopaths feel their abilities will enable them to become anything they want to be.” Robert’s musings about becoming president or ruling the world fit nicely. His criminal seduction of Jim was aided by the tendency of psychopaths to exploit “people’s need to find a purpose in their lives.” The psychopath’s “lack of sustained interest in education” perfectly fit his comments about college.

The contrast between Robert’s cool demeanor and Jim’s neck-throbbing fear on the night Sergeant Bob Bruno first questioned each of them clearly fit the profile; psychopaths tend to “lack the physio-logical responses normally associated with fear.” Also, the psychopathic “indifference to the welfare of children” came through in

Robert’s willingness to kill young Andy Patti or anyone of any age who happened to be in a house they targeted. Even his warped interpretation of Thoreau—they were “two peas in a pod,” Robert thought—fit the psychopath’s desire to live outside society’s rules and expectations, as did his belief that such conventions were unreasonable limits on his exalted self-interest.

His repeated murder attempts even after Andrew Patti waved a gun at him were consistent as well. Jim considered the Patti confrontation a warning that this wasn’t such a good idea, but Robert returned almost immediately to criminal fantasies. “The psychopath,” Hare says, “carries out his evaluations of a situation—what he will get out of it and at what cost—without the usual anxieties, doubts, and concerns about being humiliated, causing pain, sabotaging future plans, in short, the infinite possibilities that people of conscience consider when deliberating possible actions.” Even the purchase of the SOG knives—an apparent act of forward thinking, albeit destructive in nature—can be seen as evidence of a psychopath’s poor planning. The unique nature of the knives, and their purchase so close in time and proximity to the murders, sent investigators rushing to Chelsea.

A key expression of his psychopathy was Robert’s reliance on crime to raise money to leave Chelsea when working a steady job or tapping into the town’s new Haskett fund would have been far more fruitful, not to mention legal. “Just as the great white shark is a natural killing machine, psychopaths naturally slip into the role of criminal,” Hare writes. “Their readiness to take advantage of any situation that arises, combined with their lack of the internal controls we know as conscience, creates a potent formula for crime.”

On the surface, Robert’s affection toward Jim might seem to undermine a claim for psychopathy—human predators are notoriously unfazed by such niceties as loyalty. But Robert’s apparent devotion to Jim might be better seen as an extension of his own narcissism. Like the Greek half-god Narcissus for whom narcissism was named, Robert looked into the reflecting pool that was Jim and became enchanted with himself. As one researcher explained, true feelings for another

person would prevent someone from twisting his best friend into a killer just so he wouldn’t have to go it alone. Indeed, a youth version of the psychopathy checklist modifies the criterion of parasitic lifestyle to take into account cases where someone uses other people to fulfill his needs. The tearful apology he made to Jim at the Indiana sheriff ’s office might as well be seen as Robert crying for himself.