Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (54 page)

same gallery members, that was where the similarities ended. So much had changed between Robert and Jim. Jim was no longer within the black hole of Robert’s gravitational pull. Finally, too late for the Zantops, Jim had let go of the psychic rope that had bonded him to Robert.

Jim was brought into the courtroom at 2:08
P
.
M
., long after Robert had been taken away. His hands and feet were shackled. The tail of his polo shirt was untucked in back. His face was pallid. The courtroom was filled to capacity, just as in the morning. Veronika and Mariana sat with their friends in the same seats as before. The seats that had held the Tulloch family were now filled by John and Joan Parker, along with their friends Kevin Ellis and Bob Sherman. Joan was dressed for mourning, wearing a long, black skirt and a black sweater. At the sight of their son entering the courtroom, John snaked his arm through Joan’s and grasped her hand.

Jim, shuffling toward the defense table, scanned the room until he found his parents. They made eye contact, and Jim bit his lip. Cathy Green, one of Jim’s attorneys, helped Jim get settled into the same chair at the defense table where Robert had sat.

Prosecutor Kelly Ayotte stood to address the court. Because Jim had pleaded guilty in December, she didn’t have to go through the offer of proof she’d delivered in the morning. Instead Ayotte summa-rized for the judge the plea bargain. John Parker kept his eyes on Ayotte while she spoke. Joan Parker’s eyes were fixed on her son. Ayotte told Judge Smith that Jim fully honored his part of the agreement, giving “great information in this case.”

Jim flinched when Ayotte mentioned the agreed-upon prison

sentence—twenty-five years to life—but other than that, he listened without expression as the prosecutor spoke. That changed when Veronika and Mariana approached the lectern and Veronika began to read to Jim the same statement, word for word, she’d delivered to Robert.

At that moment, the courtroom saw what a difference a boy makes. As the words reached him, Jim began rocking in his chair. He bit his lip. The first tear rolled down his cheek as Veronika explained the meaning of her father’s name in German. Cathy Green noticed Jim’s tears and handed him a tissue. Jim couldn’t raise his shackled hands, so he lowered his face to wipe his cheeks. He sat up and began taking gulps of air, trying to fight back more tears. He raised his left shoulder and wiped his eyes on his shirt.

When Veronika finished, Jim bent forward again to use the tissue.

His mother’s head was bowed.

Then it was Jim Zien’s turn. “This terrible wrong that you have done can in no way be redeemed by the right you also have done in making this plea. But I want you to know you have done a right, which is to save the Zantop family and friends a great deal more pain.” Jim leaned way back in his chair, his Adam’s apple bobbing.

“Our hearts are broken,” Zien said.

Irene Kacandes strode to the lectern, looking right at Jim. “This is about two beautiful human beings who showered love and affection on each other, their families, and on the people they came into contact with. This is about two people who loved to take walks, teach their classes, write books, go to the movies, have barbecues with their friends, talk to their daughters on the telephone, and help everyone they met—including you! This is about Half and Susanne Zantop, who loved life.”

Her voice shattered. “They loved life.”

Jim let out a quick burst of air, as though he’d been punched in the gut.

She continued. Half and Susanne’s family and friends “think about them, miss them, and cry for them every single day.”

Jim once again leaned to wipe tears on his shirt. When Kacandes was finished, Cathy Green stood. “Your Honor, with the court’s permission, Jim Parker would like to make a statement.”

Jim rocked forward and tried to stand up. But he couldn’t. He needed to compose himself. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He leaned forward again and this time managed to stand. In front of him on the table was a piece of paper with a statement he’d written out beforehand. Jim ignored it. He rocked on his feet. He took another deep breath.

Forty-seven seconds passed before he could get any words out, a pause that was filled with rocking and deep breathing. It felt more like forty-seven minutes. Jim looked across the courtroom at Veronika and Mariana. “I’m sorry,” he said finally. He took another deep breath. “There’s not much more I can say than that.”

Jim’s mouth contorted into the shape made by a baby who is about to cry. Joan raised a hand ever so slightly, as if to reach for him, and then she began to weep. John Parker reached over and held her. Robert Muh, the clerk, talking over the sobs, announced the prison term. He asked Jim, “Do you understand your sentence?”

“Yes,” Jim said.

Jim was led away. Before he was gone, he stopped in the doorway and turned his body fully to face his parents. He took one long, last look.

T
he Parker family and friends left the courtroom first. Veronika and Mariana hung back and were greeted warmly by Ayotte, Mike Delaney,

Phil McLaughlin, and other investigators. “Thank you very much,” Veronika told Ayotte. Mariana hugged the prosecutor.

Outside, television and radio reporters scrambled to go live with reports about the day’s events. Print reporters used pay phones or, if they could catch a signal, cell phones to call their editors. Then they rushed around trying to mop up posthearing comments.

Everyone was talking about the sharply contrasting portraits of Robert and Jim on display. News accounts all stressed the difference.

“Tulloch, reversing his initial plea of insanity, was steely,” wrote the
Los Angeles Times.
“Parker shuddered with sobs.”

“Parker wept during his hearing,” wrote the
Boston Globe.
“Tulloch, presenting the image of an ironclad killer, locked eyes with the sisters.” The newspaper juxtaposed photos of the boys on its front page, having captured Robert smirking and Jim looking forlorn.

“Tulloch appeared stone-faced and unremorseful,” wrote
The Dartmouth.
“Parker, by contrast, was barely able to hold back his tears.” Dartmouth’s student newspaper had no fewer than six reporters working the conclusion of the murder case that had terrorized the college community for months. Yet around Hanover, it seemed almost anticlimactic.

“I don’t take any comfort or relief from this. I’m just glad it’s behind us,” said Dartmouth President James Wright. “I want to think about their lives, what they did, what they meant to this community. That is the more positive, inspiring thing to do.”

Chelseans by and large were also trying to move on, even if many remained haunted that two of their own turned out to be killers. “They in no way projected as monstrous children,” Principal Pat Davenport said. But it wasn’t as if the town had found peace of mind. Davenport felt a chill when she walked into the school library the day after the hearings and saw the
Burlington Free Press.
Someone had drawn targets on the foreheads of Robert and Jim in the front-page photographs of the boys.

F
ollowing Jim’s sentencing, the various players in the fifteen-month- long drama began peeling off. The Tullochs were the first to leave.

Public defenders Richard Guerriero and Barbara Keshen didn’t stick around, either. Their expert psychiatrist never got to take the stand for Robert, but in a matter of weeks Dorothy Otnow Lewis would be testifying in a murder case in Chicago for a serial killer named Andrew Urdiales. She found him to be a paranoid schizophrenic and legally insane when he killed two young women. He was convicted anyway and sentenced to death.

Before Veronika and Mariana drove away with their friends,

Veronika gave investigators a half-smile. Several waved back.

Soon the prosecutors and investigators lined up for a press conference staged on the embankment along the courthouse’s rear entrance. “Justice has been served in this case,” Ayotte said, standing before a dozen or so microphones as the television cameras rolled. Behind her stood nearly twenty officials who’d worked on the case, including her boss, Phil McLaughlin, and her co-prosecutor, Mike Delaney, as well as investigators Chuck West, Frank Moran, and Bob Bruno. Hanover Police Chief Nick Giaccone was there, as was Major Barry Hunter of the New Hampshire State Police along with Sergeant Jim White and troopers Russ Hubbard and Kathy Kimball. Vermont State Police Detective Sergeant Ray Keefe had come, too. “These are the true heroes,” Ayotte said.

The Tullochs were gone, but John and Joan Parker made their way to the microphones. They held hands. Their faces were clenched. John spoke first. “Joan and I, we’d like to say to Half and Susanne Zantop’s family and friends, Veronika and Mariana and everybody, we’re very, very sorry.” His voice was plaintive, the words spoken to a chorus of clicking sounds made by the motor drives on news photographers’ cameras.

Then it was Joan’s turn. She was tearful, her voice shaky. “We hope that in time those hurt by these acts will be able to find peace in their hearts, and forgiveness.”

The couple wouldn’t take any questions. They turned and walked down to the driveway to their car. Minutes later they cruised past the gaggle of reporters, headed home to Chelsea. The Parkers were in the family’s green Subaru. The same green Subaru Jim and Robert had driven the day they killed the Zantops. The car with bloodstains on the floor mat in front. The car was cleaned and the case was officially over, but the bloodstains would never go away. They would haunt the Parkers, the Tullochs, the Zantops, and two small New England communities to the end of their days.

E
pilogue
‌

I
n September 2002, more than two years after Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker came to Andrew and Diane Patti’s vacation home bent on mur-

der, another unexpected visitor arrived at the house on Goose Green Road. This time the Pattis let him in.

John Parker made the five-mile drive from his Chelsea home in his wife’s green Subaru. He parked the car in the driveway, unfurled his long frame, and made his way toward the front porch. He strode silently past the bush where his son had hidden while Robert tried to worm his way into the house with his story about a broken-down car. The Pattis first met John Parker when he installed a storm door and did other work on their house in the weeks after that strange incident in July 2000. After Jim’s arrest, Diane wrote John a letter to say her thoughts and prayers were with him and his wife. John had stopped by

not long after that, in the summer of 2001, to thank her.

“How’s your son doing?” Diane asked then.

“As good as a child could in that situation,” he told her.

But that was before the Pattis learned how close Andrew and Andy had come to being killed. Although Andrew Patti recognized Robert’s photograph in the paper as the face he saw through the window, only much later did the Pattis learn the full details—the graves dug nearby, the hunting knife in Robert’s boot, Jim waiting to pounce.

The Pattis had never met Joan Parker, and they wouldn’t have known what to say to her if they were introduced. But they knew and liked John Parker—they considered him a friendly neighbor and their local contractor, and it bothered them that he hadn’t sought them out since the complete facts about that night became public.

Now, five months after his son was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison, John was standing at their front door. Diane greeted him warmly and invited him inside. She saw the pain etched on his face. Andrew came down from upstairs and sent Andy outside. John Parker settled into a wing chair in the living room, Andrew took a chair opposite him, and Diane sat on the couch, the same couch where Andrew and Andy had been reading a story the night Robert came knocking.

John explained that he had driven past the Pattis’ house several times, intending to stop, but only now had he worked up the nerve.

“I’m here today asking you to accept my apology for what happened to you that night,” John said.

“Absolutely,” Andrew Patti said. “Accepted.”

“We don’t hold you responsible for that,” Diane said.

“I hope someday my son might be able to come here and do what I’m doing,” John added.

The Pattis said nothing. It was too far in the future to think about.

I
n Hanover, classes continued, snow turned to mud, and Dartmouth kept churning out Ivy League graduates. The murders were no longer

daily news in
The Dartmouth,
but the paper maintained a “Zantop Tragedy Archive.” Half and Susanne’s lives remained woven into the fabric of the College on a Hill.

Their unfinished works were completed by friends and colleagues, scholarship funds were raised in their names, gifts were donated in their memories, journals were dedicated to them, and academic conferences were held in their honor. More than two years after her death, Susanne’s name remained on the computerized German department faculty list, though clicking on the link led not to a list of classes she’d be teaching but to information about the murders.

Perhaps most appropriate of all, a yellowwood tree was planted as a memorial to the Zantops behind Dartmouth Hall. The tree was placed close to a cluster of residence halls, so there would always be students around, just as Susanne and Half would have wanted.

“I think something like this is not put behind easily or ever. It will endure,” said Dartmouth President James Wright. “We’ve all come to recognize there are some pretty awful things that can happen in places where one least expects it. It demonstrates that no place is as isolated from evil as it thinks it is.”

For a while, the Zantops’ daughters considered razing the house on Trescott Road. But they abandoned that plan and instead sold it to a young family. Not long after, a swing set appeared in the yard and the house came back to life.

I
n the wider world, the Zantops’ deaths became enmeshed in debates about “youth violence.” That use-worn phrase was often enhanced by

the word “epidemic” to suggest that a virulent form of mayhem was being passed hand to hand or mouth to mouth by previously docile American teens. Some commentators cited the Zantop killings and the Columbine High School massacre in the same breath to suggest that murderous impulses were spreading unchecked from inner cities to restful suburbs and rural retreats. One writer, citing the Zantop murders as Exhibit A, sounded the warning that “an apocalyptic nihilism is taking root in this nation’s children.”