Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (8 page)

When the Almys decided to sell in 1992, they wanted the buyers to love it as much as they did. People who’d appreciate the way beams of light shone through the large windows and reflected off the hardwood floors. The way the indoors and outdoors seemed to merge. The way the peaks of Killington Mountain loomed in the distance, over the border in Vermont. The way guests felt at home as soon as they walked in.

When the “For Sale” sign went up, the Almys’ next-door neighbor, Audrey McCollum, leapt into action. She had known the Zantops for nearly a decade and had heard they were scouting around for a new home. Half and Susanne had been living close to the center of Hanover, but with their daughters off at college they were ready to indulge more rural desires. McCollum thought the Zantops would meet the Almys’ requirements and also make ideal neighbors. She arranged an introduction and soon a deal was struck: In February 1992, the Zantops paid $322,600 for the home and just over three acres of surrounding land.

Shortly before the Zantops moved in, McCollum had brief second thoughts. Susanne mentioned how eager she and Half were to trans-plant their currant bushes to their new home. McCollum grew worried—currants harbor fungus that can endanger white pines, which flourished in their neck of the woods. If the Zantops insisted on mov-ing the currant bushes, the two families might turn from Zantops and McCollums into Hatfields and McCoys. McCollum braced herself as she explained to Susanne the ecological conflict.

“We don’t want to harm the environment,” Susanne said, expressing a fundamental value she shared with Half. That was the end of that. Susanne and Half found a “foster home” for their currant bushes on property owned by friends, far from any white pines. The Zantops retained visiting rights to the shrubs, and Susanne continued to make her famous currant preserves.

To buy the Trescott Road home, the Zantops sold the house where they had raised Veronika and Mariana, on Hanover’s Woodmere Drive. The buyer was Roxana Verona, a Dartmouth professor of French and Italian who met the Zantops at the real estate closing and quickly joined their inner circle of friends. Verona would call Half whenever minor repairs were needed at the Woodmere Drive house, and Half would grab his toolbox and head over. A native of Romania, Verona would joke that Bucharest and Berlin were never as close as when she and the Zantops were together. The Zantops’ spirits came with the Woodmere Road house, Verona said, and “slowly we became one fam-ily with two houses.”

Half and Susanne filled their new home with beautiful objects in a mix of tastes and styles, some of great monetary value and some whose worth was measured by emotional attachment. Upon entering the red-tiled foyer, guests followed an Oriental rug past a large pine-framed mirror, an antique cherry Chippendale desk, and an eighteenth-century banister-back armchair, on their way into the combination living/dining room, beyond which was the greenhouse.

Once in the house, they’d find a cast-iron wood stove, a Yamaha spinet piano, huge windows, book-lined walls, and a tan leather sofa— softened by the rumps of untold numbers of visitors—along with a black-and-tan striped love seat and a pair of low, tan chairs with the look and feel of corduroy pants. A brass floor lamp threw light that danced off a nineteenth-century silver tea set. Also on display were pieces of African tribal art—some brought back from Mariana’s trips abroad—a pre-Columbian stone figure, and a pair of nineteenth-cen- tury carved wooden Foo dogs, fierce-looking creatures that are the sacred guards of Buddhist temples. The adjacent dining room held a modern, Danish-style oval table that usually was covered with Susanne’s papers, but on special occasions would be set with silver flatware alongside blue-and-white plates with a frolicking pattern of onions and flowers, made by Meissen, the famed German porcelain company.

Bibliophiles and art lovers who had inherited important works from their parents, the Zantops had a nineteenth-century German Bible and

a collection of leather-bound books from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On a wall outside the couple’s study hung the most valuable piece of property in the home: an elaborately framed, seventeenth-century still life of a claret jug and a fish plate on a table. Painted by the Dutch master Abraham van Beyeren, it was valued at

$18,000. On a low bookshelf on the other side of the living room, the Zantops displayed a kneeling nude sculpture in bronze, called
Faunesse,
by Rodin, valued at $15,000.

Another favorite artist was the iconoclastic German painter Hans Thoma, whose 1911 self-portrait the Zantops treasured. Two other works by Thoma were nearby: an 1876 portrait of a lady with a bonnet and an 1882 portrait of an elderly woman dressed in black. The Zantops also owned a bronze nude by Tuaillon, worth $3,500. But not all the artwork was particularly valuable—their tastes were set by passion, not price. Half and Susanne owned a small, unsigned etching of a monkey painting a portrait of a donkey, titled
Ni mas, ni menos
(Neither more, nor less), worth perhaps $75.

Despite the value of their home and its objects, the Zantops focused little on money, preferring to concentrate on family, work, and friends. They gave dozens of dinner parties a year, large and small, where conversation flowed along with potent margaritas Half made from his secret recipe. Susanne filled the table with homemade cakes and German delicacies, like a soft cheese called quark, while Half might serve a salmon he had smoked himself. Discussions took place in multiple languages, about everything from world politics to academic intrigue to pop trivia. Half and Susanne had similar conversations in private, though alone with each other they spoke mainly in German.

With their next-door neighbors, the McCollums, they drank V&F Gonzalez pale dry sherry and ate goat cheese; a paˆ te of white beans, garlic, and lemon; and Smokehouse almonds. Susanne would decline the almonds at first, but with the slightest urging from Audrey McCollum she’d dive in with gusto. Other times they called each other to report backyard meadow sightings of wild turkeys, or a fox, or a doe

with her fawns, or a black bear eyeing the bird feeders the Zantops had installed and the McCollums had followed suit. One time a bear brought down one of the feeders, and Half reacted with a string of German epithets. Audrey McCollum gave Susanne tarragon from her garden, and Susanne returned the favor with strangely shaped, home-grown tomatoes from the garden she tended as relaxation therapy. “That one’s a grumpy old man,” Susanne would say. “Or maybe a troll.” Susanne and Half ’s green thumbs were more prominently on display in the lavishly filled greenhouse, where they grew exotic plants, with a special fondness for orchids.

As a salve for their hectic lives, the Zantops were always trying to squeeze in time for exercise. In winter, cross-country skis were usually resting by their front door; Susanne and Half loved to ski into the woods from their house, link up with a nearby stretch of the Appalachian Trail, and loop back home. Sometimes they’d drive five miles for a workout at the River Valley Club in nearby Lebanon. Careful of his heart, Half would work the Nautilus machines, pedal a stationary bicycle, or do strokes on a rowing machine. Susanne would swim a luxuriant breaststroke or join Half at the Nautilus stations. Sometimes she’d test herself by climbing the club’s thirty-foot artificial rock wall, but Half never did. He had climbed real mountains, and it wasn’t worth risking his heart on a fake one.

That wasn’t a concern for two young wannabe climbers from Chelsea, Vermont, who decided one day in October 2000 to test themselves on the River Valley Club’s wall. They bought one-day passes, paying $15 each, and coached and coaxed each other up the same handholds where Susanne had climbed on other days. Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker took turns at the manmade challenge, one at a time on the fiberglass rock. They were tied together, literally. As Jim climbed, Robert held a belaying rope attached to Jim like an umbilical cord; if Jim slipped, Robert would pull the rope taut to prevent him from falling. Then they would switch positions and Jim would do the same for Robert. Each time they climbed together they drew closer, gaining confidence in themselves and in one another.

P
roud of their German heritage, Susanne and Half waited more than twenty years after settling in Hanover to become naturalized United

States citizens. Half amused friends by revealing that the one question that stumped him on the citizenship test was about the significance of July Fourth. The date had somehow never registered with him.

Even before they could vote in U.S. elections, both were committed to liberal politics—contributing to Democratic candidates, joining Amnesty International, and writing letters and e-mails to press their beliefs. Prejudice disgusted them, as did big egos, and both had a highly developed sense of fairness. Both were feminists, humanists, environmentalists.

Half rarely discussed his feelings about Germany and World War II, but Susannah Heschel, a professor of Jewish studies and a close friend, recalled how kind he was toward a student of his who had lost her grandparents in the Holocaust. The young woman was struggling with the thought of being taught by a German professor. “He felt in some way very responsible, and was extremely sensitive to her and her feelings,” Heschel said. “I know some people who would respond with some defensiveness.”

Susanne told several friends that learning about the Holocaust when she was thirteen had a profound impact on her life. “It was, I think, traumatizing that her country could have done such an appalling thing,” Audrey McCollum said. “My own sense is that shaped her professional life. What I surmised, for both, was that it contributed to a conviction that they had to convince people to pay attention to their countries. . . . They engaged others to inform themselves, take a stand, and communicate their stand to government officials.”

Still, it angered Susanne to be stereotyped because of her heritage, and friends recalled her saying in disgust: “Just because you’re German, people think you’re a Nazi!”

Susanne wept during the naming ceremony for Heschel’s first child, who was named for relatives of Heschel’s killed in the Holocaust. “I think it was a very sorrowful, sad part of their life,” said

Fred Berthold, a friend who spent five decades teaching religion at Dartmouth. “But I don’t think they allowed that to dampen their general optimistic and creative hopes for betterment.” As an associate dean of the faculty, Berthold had been involved in hiring Susanne, a choice made easy by his first and lasting impression of her as “a tremendous person and scholar.”

Yet all was not serious with the Zantops. Half sent friends wickedly funny e-mails and amused friends with his views of American life. Much as some men in New England track the Red Sox through newspaper box scores, Half gleefully followed a letter-writing battle in the local papers over whether a new bridge over the Connecticut River should be adorned with huge concrete spheres. Personally he thought them awful. Susanne loved self-deprecating humor and funny movies—Friday night was their steady “movie night.” She poked gen-tle fun at the stereotypical attributes of Germans, even as she kept her home meticulously organized. And though she was devoted to her work, friends knew they could persuade her to sneak away from conferences by proposing to go shopping for pottery or gifts from local shops.

T
hough they loved their adopted hometown of Etna, the Zantops were happiest on a remote cove in Brooksville, Maine, where they

vacationed for three weeks every summer for more than two decades. They and their daughters were fixtures at the rustic Hiram Blake Camp, a collection of fifteen wooden cottages where the Zantops spent days walking hand-in-hand, reading, or sailing their nineteen-foot Flying Scot,
Albatross,
across the waters of Penobscot Bay.

It was a place where time was dictated not by clocks but by whims and weather. They relished its remote location within a remote location: the cottages were at the end of an easy-to-miss, winding road to nowhere that looped back on itself. Susanne, Half, Veronika, and Mariana had a standing reservation from mid-July to early August in a cedar-shingled cabin named Maples with a wraparound porch overlooking the bay. Half spent days sailing, sometimes taking Susanne

on trips to a nearby island to collect gooseberries. She spent hours “tipping and tailing” the tart berries—removing their tufts and stems—then turning them into preserves to spread over breakfast toast.

They’d collect mussels for lunch, or search the island woods for chanterelles—small, flat-headed yellow mushrooms with the fragrance of apricots that Susanne would sauté into rare delicacies. One summer before his death in 1984, Half’s father joined them in Maine, and their friend Joan Blumberg was left with a vivid memory of the elder Zantop sitting quietly, painstakingly cleaning a huge basket of chanterelles. In her mind’s eye, Blumberg could see a young Mariana hanging over the side of Half’s boat, Half holding her by the ankles, as she tried to fix a problem for her captain father. She could see Veronika heading off to pick a few berries and returning with a shopping bag full. And Blumberg could see both girls happily diving into water so cold it reduced her own husband to shivering Jell-O.

Another Hiram Blake regular, Jim Zien, remembered the Zantops’ departure at the end of their visit in August 2000. “They might have been running just a little late,” Zien recalled. “Standing by the car, her summer canning complete, her perpetual knitting project one year and six inches further along, Susanne had perhaps begun to think about a conference or a paper or a course outline or a student or colleague in need of her attention. But Half had one last lesson in Maine coast geology to teach. A Swiss Army knife in his right hand, a rock in his left, and an inquisitive eight-year-old by his side, Half scratched the surface of beach treasures proffered, patiently distinguishing quartz from shale, copper from schist; quietly encouraging his young student to do the same.”

T
hough busy with work, friends, and colleagues, the Zantops devoted themselves to their daughters. That remained true even after the