Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (51 page)

Pausing only briefly, Jim flexed the muscles of his left arm to steady and subdue Susanne, who though small was kicking and flapping wildly. Jim raised his knife and brought it quickly under her chin. In a single, swift motion, he sliced Susanne Zantop’s throat.

Jim let go. Susanne’s body dropped, all that fight in her gone the instant the steel blade opened her up. She fell face down across the doorway to the study. Jim could hear gurgling sounds coming from her. “Dying sounds,” he realized right away. The blood pooled by Susanne’s head and began soaking her pullover sweater.

Half and Susanne were finished, but Robert was not. His most violent psychopathic urgings in full flower, Robert was overdosing on the darkness of the moment. He felt himself “going animal.” He took pleasure in the expression on Half’s face—a dumb look, Robert decided, which he thought was humorous, such a stupid look as the final

expression on such a smart man. Robert leaned down and slit Half’s throat. He was puzzled at first when Half didn’t bleed much from the fresh cut, then he realized that Half had no blood pressure left from the many other wounds. Robert then stalked over to Susanne. He took his knife and plunged it into her head. It was an experiment, Robert would later tell Jim. He wanted see if the knife would penetrate her skull. He did it again. And again. Each thrust through bone and brain made a horrible sound, Jim thought as he watched, “like jabbing a knife into a pumpkin.”

Jim had gone numb, empty of emotion. The moment Robert surprised him by reaching into the backpack for the knife, only one thought crossed his mind: This was business. He would later realize how awful that sounded, but that was how he felt. Like it or not, the time had come to complete the job they’d talked about for so long.

Two extraordinary lives were extinguished in less than ten minutes. Jim felt as if a much longer chunk of time had passed. Robert stood over Susanne once he stopped stabbing her head. Jim moved behind him and grabbed the backpack off the floor. Robert took Half’s wallet. Each clutching a knife, they ran from the study. On his way out Robert stepped in a puddle of blood, and a partial bloodstained footprint in the living room marked their departure.

The exit route from the study took them within a few steps of the Rodin sculpture, the oil painting, and other valuable art pieces. The boys, had they been more prepared, would have realized they could have gotten thousands of dollars by fencing the Zantops’ art objects. Instead they had the $340 in cash from Half’s wallet. By jumping the professor when he did, Robert had discarded their robbery plan. He’d skipped the part about subduing the victims to obtain the bank information that would get them the larger sums they were after. Jim later thought that Robert had lost it—or “clicked,” as he called it—once he saw the cash in Half’s wallet. But that couldn’t be quite right. There was more to Robert’s propulsion than the flash of cold cash; Robert had moved to get the knife before Half had even begun reaching into his back pocket for the wallet.

Afterward, Robert lied to Jim, saying he wasn’t sure why he went

off on Half when he did and ignored their planned cue about the glass of water and all the rest. The truth was that the mission he’d enlisted Jim for was never really about ATM cards, PIN numbers, and money. Robert wanted to kill somebody, and he later told Ranger so, saying he saw the slayings as a “chance to get a few under my belt.” Innocently, Half Zantop had given a psychopath a reason to commence the blood-letting, simply by doing to Robert what so many others in his life already had done: question his greatness.

J
im’s confession lasted nearly five hours and left everyone in the conference room drained. Signing off, Mudgett even got the date wrong.

“OK, we’re going to conclude at, ah, 2:30
P
.
M
. on the eighteenth of January.” It must have felt as if a month had passed; they’d covered so much ground, concluding with the murders. “I’m back on tape with a clarification,” said Mudgett seconds later. “It’s
December
18, 2001.”

Once outside the room, Jim was handcuffed and walked back to the jail.

Inside, the two prosecutors conferred briefly with Jim’s attorneys about the session and plans for future ones—a second interview would be held January 4, 2002, a third two weeks later, and finally, a brief session on March 7.

The prosecutors packed up their things and headed back to their offices in Concord. Only after they were in their car did they let down their guard. Jim Parker’s confession had taken their breath away. In all their experiences with homicide cases, Kelly Ayotte and Mike Delaney had mostly dealt with an older, more seasoned brand of defendant, career-criminal types who rarely gave straight answers, who tended to spin and tailor their responses in self-serving ways. Those interviews required careful, hard questioning from prosecutors. In contrast, Jim had been easy—guileless, frank, and straightforward, almost like a child whose parents had instructed him to tell the school principal the truth. He would make a great witness in court.

The prosecutors talked nonstop, trading highlights from the confession, discussing Jim’s demeanor, and brainstorming about the topics they wanted to follow up on. Indeed, at the next interview Ayotte had Jim open with a second run-through of the murders. And it was during a follow-up session that she posed a question she hadn’t asked the first time. It was a question she, Delaney, and police investigators had wondered about ever since the day of the murders. It was a question that got to the very heart of how the case was ultimately solved— a break without which Robert and Jim might never have been apprehended, a break that had come from a mistake Robert and Jim made that seemed so careless that investigators and psychiatrists would later wonder whether it meant that the boys, for all their talk about being badasses, had wanted to get caught. Or, if not Robert, perhaps it was Jim who had left the sheaths, consciously or subconsciously hoping that whoever found them would do what he was powerless to do on his own: break free from Robert’s grasp before the time came to kill again. “During the last interview,” Ayotte said, “you said that after you let Susanne down, you started packing up the stuff into the backpack. Do

you remember talking about that?”

“Yeah,” Jim said. “What’s the question?”

“When you were packing up the stuff, how come you didn’t take the knife sheaths?”

The question hung in the air. During hour after hour of interviews, Jim usually answered questions right away. He usually spoke in a clear voice. But this time Jim paused. This time his voice dropped. Jim knew what Kelly Ayotte was after; the sheaths were what had led Chuck West and his colleagues to Chelsea and to him and Robert.

And that had ultimately led them here.

Jim’s voice was barely audible when he finally spoke: “Forgot about them.”

21
‌

Hope and Hopelessness

“C
an you read?” Superior Court Judge Peter W. Smith asked. “Yes, I can.”

The judge was looking down from his bench at Robert Tulloch inside Courtroom 3 of the Grafton County Superior Court, and Robert was staring right back. Robert made a face that suggested he considered the judge’s literacy question odd and insulting. Traces of a smirk creased his mouth: Of course he could read.

“Is this your signature?” Judge Smith continued. The judge held in his hands the legal paperwork notifying the court that Robert was changing his plea to guilty. The black-robed, gray-haired jurist sat comfortably behind the bench while Robert, shackled, stood stiffly at the defense table, flanked by his two public defenders, Richard Guerriero and Barbara Keshen.

“Yes, it is,” Robert said. His voice was firm and self-assured. He wore gray slacks and a white, collared shirt that he’d buttoned to the top. He sported a new, short, choppy haircut—a prison buzz-cut. Robert had asked his jailers for scissors the day before—he knew they were forbidden, but wasn’t he always pushing the envelope?—and he was given electric clippers. One of his cellmates, clearly inexperienced in hair care, had done a rough and uneven job.

I
t was April 4, 2002, in North Haverhill, New Hampshire, and the Zantop murder case was unexpectedly reaching a legal climax. For

months the public had eagerly followed news accounts of Robert’s upcoming first-degree murder trial, scheduled for late April and featuring Jim Parker as the government’s star witness. Prosecutors and defense attorneys had been working frantically to get ready for a trial expected to last at least a month.

Suddenly, Robert folded, deciding early in March to plead guilty to killing the Zantops. The news, when it broke later that month, shocked and surprised; it was the courtroom equivalent of boxer Roberto Duran’s famous “No Mas!” fight, when out of the blue, during the eighth round of a title bout, the Panamanian champion threw up his hands and quit. Robert’s decision meant there would be no trial, but he still needed to make his admission in open court. For the sake of convenience and legal symmetry, court officials scheduled Jim’s sentencing hearing for the same date.

And so, the stage was set for a remarkable day—a final congrega-tion of nearly everyone connected to a case that had been followed from coast to coast. It would be a finale divided into two acts, Robert in the morning and Jim in the afternoon. The once-inseparable friends would be closer to each other than they had been since their separation in Indiana fourteen months earlier, and at different times they would occupy the same holding cell and the same chair in the same courtroom. In keeping with their usual pattern, Jim would be following in Robert’s footsteps. But on this day they wouldn’t get even the briefest glimpse of each other.

T
he media began pulling into tiny North Haverhill and filling up the few area motels the night before the hearing. As dawn broke, seven

satellite television trucks were lined up like tanks in formation in the courthouse parking lot. Spring was officially two weeks old, but it hadn’t arrived in northern New Hampshire. The morning opened to a mix of sun and occasional flurries. Reporters’ words formed clouds as they sipped coffee in the thirty-degree chill. They mingled and gossiped at the top of the driveway that sloped down to the courthouse’s back entrance, where officials would bring Robert and later Jim. To capture their arrivals, fifteen TV cameras on tripods lined the grassy embankment bordering the driveway. Still photographers were moving around, bobbing and feinting with competitors to position themselves for just the right shot.

More newspaper and radio reporters milled around inside, filling the lobby adjacent to Judge Smith’s courtroom. A majority came from newspapers in New Hampshire and Vermont, Boston and other New England cities, but there also were reporters from
Associated Press,
the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post,
the
Los Angeles Times, People
magazine, and, of course,
The Dartmouth.
In all, about three dozen news organizations were on hand. Moving about, too, were “bookers” from network newsmagazine shows who’d been lobbying anyone and everyone close to the Parker and Tulloch families to get the parents to sit for an exclusive interview with one of their celebrity correspondents. Their efforts weren’t paying off.

Inside Courtroom 3, even with extra folding chairs, the supply of seats couldn’t meet demand. At Robert’s hearing, seats were reserved for the Zantop and the Tulloch families and their supporters, as well as key investigators. After that, twenty-three seats remained for the news media, and eleven were left for the general public. Clerks held a lottery to see which reporters got inside. The losing journalists hustled out to monitor the proceedings from the TV trucks that were getting a live feed from the single television camera Judge Smith had reluctantly allowed inside the courtroom.

No one around the courthouse, or North Haverhill for that matter, had ever seen a media invasion like this. To prepare for the day, court administrators had picked the brains of their colleagues in Rockingham County, who had endured the crush of media a dozen years earlier dur-ing the sensational case of Pamela Smart, the schoolteacher who convinced her teen lover and his friends to kill her husband. Ordinarily, only a few security guards staffed the Grafton County courthouse; for the big day that was about to unfold, fifteen guards were stationed throughout the building.

Veronika and Mariana Zantop arrived with friends in two cars, driving right past the reporters and down the driveway to the rear entrance. The Tulloch family and Robert’s two public defenders arrived a few minutes later, also in two cars, and they used the rear entrance, too. They were all inside by 8:30
A
.
M
.

Soon word spread that Robert was coming. A brown sheriff ’s cruiser could be seen making its way slowly across the parking lot and toward the back entrance. This time officials allowed photographers and reporters to move in closer—down the driveway and into a long line that formed just outside the drop-off bays. Two deputy sheriffs were in the front seat of the cruiser. Robert sat in the left rear passenger seat. The cruiser began to brake as it curled past the gauntlet of photographers and into the bay. Robert’s eyes scanned the row of journalists, absent any expression.