Read Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders Online
Authors: Dick Lehr,Mitchell Zuckoff
Though he was a skilled researcher, Half’s greatest gifts lay in teaching. It was a surprising discovery to him, as pleasantly unexpected as coming upon a vein of silver in a mine thought to have been stripped clean. Half once told a student that he loved being a field geologist, but gave it up for the classroom because it was a better fit with his family life; long stretches in the mountains and constant moves required of his earlier jobs made it impossible for him to be the father and husband he wanted to be.
“If I were not teaching, I don’t know where I would be,” Half said, his meaning both literal and figurative.
Still, at times he would wistfully tell stories of exotic cities and far-flung exploration, of shimmering deposits of gold and silver, of adventures with native guides, and of close calls with bandits. He could grip listeners with tales of mine disasters befitting an Indiana Jones movie. But if he regretted his decision to come in from the field, it never showed in his work.
Students and colleagues consistently ranked him among the top teachers in the department, and even one of the best at Dartmouth. Students praised his ability to make the most difficult subject matter understandable even to non-scientists. “Half is the best professor I’ve ever had at Dartmouth,” was a comment that appeared regularly on his student evaluations. He would ask questions that teased the correct answers from confused students. He told stories about the provenance of a rock the way a historian would weave a fabulous tale from a trove of ancient writings. And often he did it with a wry sense of humor— just because they were studying rocks didn’t mean Half’s classes had to be dull. During slide presentations on rock formations, he might slip in a shot of a mallard or students sunbathing during a field trip. Beyond the humor, there was never a question that Half was an authority on the subject: Graduate students sometimes referred to him as The Rock God. “But he wasn’t overly proud,” said former student Kristina Kleutghen. “He knew what he didn’t know and when he got things wrong.”
Field trips were the highlight of students’ time with Half because they got the best of him as both teacher and geologist. Dartmouth graduate Melanie Kay recalled a 1998 trip throughout Mexico in which Half, nearing sixty, outpaced students one-third his age. “Half was routinely the first one awake, the most eager to stay in the field until sunset, and the last one awake at night. And he never ate lunch. My fellow students and I could barely keep up. In the evenings, we would sometimes filter into Half’s hotel room for cocktails and discussion, sometimes academically related but sometimes just for fun. Then, somehow, while we were all groaning at the 6:30 wakeup, Half was already downstairs completing his leisurely breakfast,” Kay recalled. Half led the group of twenty students up a fifteen-thousand- foot volcano and down thousand-foot mine shafts, into the waves of a Mexican beach, and to a bar where he ordered a round of potent drinks called Coco Locos.
On the last night of the trip, Half took the group to a good restaurant to celebrate their journey. Kay sat next to Half, and they both smiled when the restaurant’s photographer took their picture. Half bought an eight-by-ten print and a key chain with the photo, both of which he gave to Kay. She kept the key chain, but wrote “My Prize Student” on the larger photo and gave it back to Half with a note jokingly suggesting that he hang it on his office wall. And he did. Later, Kay wished she had written “My Prize Professor,” which is what she really meant.
Some of his female students took note of his flattering beard— which over the years turned snowy white—and his “sexy German accent,” recalled Julia Henneberry, a graduate student and former teaching assistant. But Half wasn’t interested in extracurricular romance. In the quiet moments on those trips, Half would find somewhere to plug in his laptop computer and send Susanne e-mails saying how much he missed her.
What Half ’s students didn’t know was that, for all his vigor, he was hiding a serious heart problem called atrial fibrillation—a fast, uncontrolled heart rhythm that can lead to stroke—that had been diagnosed more than a decade earlier. At first he ignored the diagnosis, continuing
his jaunt through life. But in July 1998, the same year of the Mexico trip that Kay recalled so fondly, Half confided to his old friend Alex Bertulis: “About two years ago the doctors told me, ‘You better watch out.’ The heart was underperforming alarmingly, a little over 15 percent normal. . . . So now I am on a low-dosage beta-blocker and all seems well enough. Life as usual, after more than a year of the depressing feeling that it was all over. . . . The heart performance is back to lower limit of normal, and ‘Las ganas de vivir’ [the zest for life] has returned quite nicely.”
F
rom the moment she began teaching at Dartmouth, Susanne was a prolific scholar and an academic star. Starting with her book
Zeitbilder
in 1988, over the next dozen years Susanne authored or edited eight
books and made regular contributions to several scholarly journals. She was coeditor of the
Women in German Yearbook,
an annual anthol-ogy of feminist articles in German studies. She became chairwoman of Dartmouth’s German studies department in 1996 and won a five-year term, 1999–2004, as the Parents’ Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities. She was in great demand as a speaker.
A highlight of her career was her 1997 book,
Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870.
The book tied together two of her abiding interests: eighteenth and nineteenth century German history and, as she put it in the preface, “everything Latin American, from politics to literature to the many diverse cultures.” Unexpectedly, she wrote, the work also gave her an opportunity to “exorcize some of the demons I had collected along the way: the trajectory from Berlin, Germany, to the United States, and from there to South America, then Spain, and finally back to the United States, first as a student, then as the wife of an employee of U.S. mining companies, then as an academic; and the trajectory from a self-satisfied, anti-imperialist sixties radical, to a guilt-ridden, reluctant participant in
U.S. imperialism, to a critic of the culture of imperialism and my own involvement in it.” It was pure Susanne: an outpouring of thoughts and feelings, intense, self-critical, and high-minded.
She was easier-going when it came to the book’s final acknowledg-ments: “As I was working . . . I became keenly aware of how wonderfully supportive and nurturing even the much-maligned nuclear family can be. This book is therefore dedicated to them: to my mother, Marianne, whose unshaking faith in my ability to finish projects energized me throughout my life; to my father, Joachim, whose enthusiasm for cannibals and Amazons translated into many visits to libraries and much epistolary exchange on the subject matter; to my daughters, Veronika and Mariana, who bore with me through thick and thin, with leniency, love, and good humor; and to Half, in more than one sense my better half.” She was known for making puns in three languages— English, German, and Spanish—so word play based on her husband’s name was too tempting to resist.
And yet, because she wasn’t a native English speaker, there were occasional linguistic miscues. Commenting on a colleague who ran herself ragged, Susanne observed, “She’s a real busybody.” Though more comfortable with English than Susanne, Half was susceptible to some of the same flubs. A pet peeve of his friend Dick Stoiber was the way Half would say “All by sudden,” instead of the colloquial “All of a sudden.”
In addition to her own scholarship, Susanne was a mentor, collab-orator, and friend to a wide circle of other academics. But sometimes her willingness to help came at a price. “She really wanted to get the most out of life, so she was trying to pack the most things in,” said Irene Kacandes, a close friend and member of the German studies department. “The downside is that you tend to feel a little stressed.” Sometimes that stress showed itself on the roads around Hanover. “She drove like a bat out of hell!” recalled Bruce Duncan, another member of the German studies faculty. In fact, she became notorious—and picked up a few tickets—for speeding along the curved and hilly roads in her sporty red Volkswagen Jetta, usually leaving Half their practical but less nimble 1999 silver Subaru Legacy wagon.
Her frantic pace reflected Susanne’s own perfectionism, friends said, as well as her tendency to take on huge loads of work. Some friends saw it as a sign of insecurity, others as evidence of her commitment to leading as full a life as possible. “She sometimes reminded me of a bouncing tennis ball, so energetic and always in motion,” said her friend Margaret Robinson, academic assistant in the German department. “She could talk a mile a minute. When she got passionate, sometimes you had to ask her to slow down.” Robinson also saw that side of Susanne’s personality in her tennis game: aggressive and hard-hitting, though sometimes erratic.
Susanne was likely to be a professor students remembered long after leaving Dartmouth. They knew she was tough, and that she would push them, but always with compassion. One day several years after she had taken a class with Susanne, Dartmouth graduate Aarathi Sambasivan found herself thinking of Susanne when she visited The Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side of New York City. The mem-ory was triggered by an exhibit on Morocco: “I found myself looking at the artifacts on display—the paintings, the clothes, the jewelry, the literature—and understanding the various connections between all these things and the reflections of a culture’s beliefs in all of these things. These are all things I learned to do in her class. . . . Susanne had a way of inspiring her students. She made her class incredibly fun. She was a devoted teacher, one of the few that I would say ‘taught’ in what I consider the true sense of the word.”
When Susanne was leading semester-long programs in Berlin, Half would fly over and spend several weeks with her. They would often stay in a two-bedroom apartment in the center of Berlin that Susanne’s parents had given them. When they weren’t using it themselves, they rented it out for six hundred fifty dollars a month.
C
lose friends saw the differences between Half and Susanne as dovetail complements. “Their mutual devotion was based on the
respect they held for each other’s ways of being—she for Half’s methodical, exacting attention to detail, for his calm and thoughtful-ness, his ingenuity and expertise; he for Susanne’s tireless energy, critical and quick mind, her strong opinions, her intensity and passion for her work,” friends Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer once wrote.
“What they had in common was their endless generosity, the openness of their home, their commitment to social justice, and the high standards they set for themselves.” Hirsch and Spitzer, married Dartmouth professors, were among the Zantops’ closest friends. They called Susanne and Half “the nucleus at the center of the atom, holding us and so many friends, students, and colleagues within their orbit.”
And yet, despite all they had achieved, Half and Susanne questioned whether they had done enough. “In the face of their remarkable accomplishments as scholars and teachers, there was always an anxious questioning—‘Could I do better?’ ” said their friend and neighbor Audrey McCollum, a psychotherapist. “Susanne finished a book [
Colonial Fantasies
] and had a real dread that her colleagues would find it inadequate—a great deal of dread.” In fact,
Colonial Fantasies
won an Outstanding Book Award from the German Studies Association. McCollum saw some of the same doubts in Half. “Half told me one day that before almost every lecture he gave, he would feel very, very nervous as to whether he’d be challenged or criticized.”
Audrey McCollum and her husband, Bob, a retired dean at the Dartmouth Medical School, lived next door to the Zantops. Their homes were about four miles from the Dartmouth campus in Etna, on a street called Trescott Road.
Why Didn’t You Jump Him?
V
ermont State Police Sergeant Jocelyn Stohl was driving her cruiser toward a priority call when she came upon a car stuck in the snow
next to the notoriously curving and narrow Bethel Mountain Road. It was 2:55 on a Friday afternoon, which for January 19, 2001,
meant it was practically twilight. Everything was gray—the sky, the road, and the woods. After snowing steadily, the sky seemed pressed down, the world closed in. The plows had come through, but the road was still a slushy, hazardous mess.
Even though Stohl was en route to a “possible despondent/suicidal subject’’ in the next town of Rochester, she knew to stop for the disabled vehicle. The trooper slowed her cruiser and pulled over just past the car to offer assistance.
Two teenage boys were standing outside the car, which Stohl noticed was a 1987 silver Audi with Vermont plates. Even before she
spoke with them, the sixteen-year veteran trooper was reading the tire tracks in the snow to piece together what had happened. The driver had hit an ice patch and tried to straighten out with a quick back-and- forth of the wheel, she surmised, but then overcompensated, losing control and making matters worse. After a zig and a zag, the car traveled across the center line and onto the opposite shoulder, coming to a rest facing oncoming traffic.