Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (11 page)

The Dartmouth
staffers knew that precious few students, faculty, or staff were reading the online newspaper or watching the TV news as midnight approached on a Saturday night. On the other hand, Dartmouth students were fanatical about checking their e-mail. Ismail turned to Hank Leukart, who had come to Robinson Hall as soon as he received Ismail’s come-quick message. Ismail told Leukart to send an e-mail to the fifteen hundred people on
The Dartmouth
’s electronic subscriber list, repeating the headline and directing them to the story on the paper’s Web site. The mass e-mail instantly connected, but it

was too successful: Within ten minutes, the site was so overwhelmed it crashed. Their big story couldn’t be read.

“Hank,” Ismail implored, “what’s going on?”

“Our Web site isn’t capable of handling this,” Leukart answered.

For fifteen anxious minutes, Leukart tried to reboot the system and restore the Web site, but nothing worked. Ismail made another decision. He knew that fifteen hundred people had received a disturbing e-mail that urged them to read
The Dartmouth
online, but
The Dartmouth
suddenly wasn’t online. The newspaper was failing its readers—the staffers’ friends and neighbors—by taunting them with an incendiary headline and directing them to a Web site that couldn’t be reached. But there was another way: the BlitzMail system, Dartmouth’s campus-wide e-mail service.

“Take the entire text of the story and send it to every student on campus,” Ismail ordered.

Leukart looked at him skeptically. Under the limits of the school’s computer system, he would have to send the story in a dozen or so separate batches, to three or four hundred students at a time, to reach the entire student body of forty-five hundred.
The Dartmouth
had done polls that way, and the circulation staff had sent friendly cam-pus-wide messages urging people to subscribe to the paper. But as far as anyone knew, no news story, much less a murder story about two professors, had ever been BlitzMailed to every Dartmouth student at once.

Leukart was skeptical. “Are you sure?” he asked.

Ismail looked at Leukart from under the bill of his Dartmouth baseball cap.

“Yes, Hank. Do it.”

Instantly word of the Zantops’ death was all over campus. Among the first places it had an impact was at Tabard House, a co-ed fraternity named for Chaucer’s inn. The Tabard’s popular “Disco Inferno” party was in full swing when the newsflash came. Social chair Candice Adams stopped the music, grabbed a microphone, and announced that two professors had died. She asked everyone at the party to say a prayer.

While partygoers were absorbing the news—some left in tears, while others resumed dancing to the disco beat—Ismail, Bubriski, Levy, and Leukart remained at work. Soon they’d be covering the attorney general’s news conference, and soon after they’d start around-the- clock updates of a story only beginning to unfold.

I
smail’s decision to send an urgent bulletin reflected an undeniable fact: The Zantops’ deaths would be major news, and the Dartmouth

campus and the communities of Hanover and Etna would experience the onslaught of attention that comes with being the latest stop on the moveable media feast known as “The Big Story.”

Much later, non-journalists would wonder why the Zantops’ murders attracted so much scrutiny, especially when so many other murders were overlooked or even ignored. In response, reporters and editors turned that question on its head: “How could this story not be huge?”

In newsrooms large and small, near and far, journalists who heard about the Zantops’ deaths instantly began doing the fuzzy calculus known as news judgment, feeding all the known elements and vaguely predictable possibilities into the information blenders that are their minds. At the
New York Times
, the three broadcast networks, CNN,
The Times of London,
the
Boston Globe, Time, Newsweek,
and
People
magazine, the
Sun Herald
of Biloxi, Mississippi,
The Scotsman
of Edinburgh, and hundreds of other print and broadcast outlets from New England to New Delhi, journalists came up with roughly the same answer. When two much-loved, middle-aged, married professors at an Ivy League school are brutally murdered in their home, with no immediate arrests or known motives, readers, viewers, and listeners want to know what happened, how it happened, and why. Especially why.

In the earliest stages of all such stories, a journalistic balancing act takes place, as no assigning editor wants to fall behind on what promises to be a competitive and potentially captivating story, yet at the same time feels reluctant to commit too many resources to a story that might quickly fizzle out. The lifespan of high interest, particularly for

out-of-town media, depends on whether and how quickly an arrest is made, who the alleged murderer or murderers are, and what allegedly motivated them. The more easily those answers fall into the category of the tragically banal—say, it turns out the murderer was a disturbed neighbor who had feuded with the professors over a property line—the quicker the case falls off the media’s Big Story radar screen.

As it happened, the stars were aligning to keep the Zantop murders front and center in the media’s consciousness, a circumstance that would test patience and fray nerves in a community where love of isolation holds special status.

U
nlike its peers in the Ivy League, Dartmouth wasn’t founded to educate the elites. It traces its roots to the mid-1700s, when a

Congregational minister named Eleazar Wheelock established Moor’s Charity School in Lebanon, Connecticut, to train young Native American men for missionary work.

Wheelock wanted to grow the school into a college, but he wanted to build it far from what he considered the wicked influences of urban life. Wheelock thought a school in the wilderness would keep his students “free from a thousand snares, temptations, and divertissements which were and would have been unavoidable if this seminary had continued where it was, or been fixed in any populous town in the land.” He also knew that Native Americans had been driven away from colonial centers along the Atlantic Coast, so more potential students could be found the farther inland he went.

In 1766, Wheelock dispatched to England his prized student, Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan tribe, in search of financial support. Occom received the most lucrative reception from William Legge, the second earl of Dartmouth and secretary of state for colonies under King George III. The earl of Dartmouth’s contributions earned him naming rights for the school. Occom would eventually loan his name to a campus pond, a road, and faculty housing. Wheelock’s name would be used for a street bordering the campus Green.

In December 1769, Wheelock was granted a charter from the king

establishing his college “for the education and instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes in this Land . . . and also of English Youth and any others.” It was the ninth college established in the colonies and the last under British rule. The land was provided by the royal governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth, and it fulfilled Wheelock’s every dream: a remote plateau blanketed with ancient, towering pines, flanked on the west by the Connecticut River and on the east by wooded hills that gathered like ruffles on the hem of the White Mountains. Its beauty was matched only by its inhospitality.

“Dartmouth men were compelled to be clannish when old Eleazar’s ax-wielders slashed the room for their huts and cabins out of the virgin forests of a wilderness,” wrote Wilder Quint in
The Story of Dartmouth
. “The feeling of loyalty and oneness got into the blood, and it has never gotten out.” The harsh terrain and the lack of other diver-sions framed the character of the place and contributed to an almost fanatical loyalty, some might say insularity, even as those first huts were replaced over time by fine buildings of red and whitewashed brick, organized around the five-acre Green.

Even the nineteenth-century
Alma Mater,
later edited to reflect the admission of women starting in 1972, fixates on the school’s physical qualities:

Dear old Dartmouth, give a rouse For the college on the hill!

For the Lone Pine above her, And the loyal ones who love her,

Give a rouse, give a rouse, with a will!

For the sons of old Dartmouth, For the daughters of Dartmouth.

Though ’round the girdled earth they roam, Her spell on them remains;

They have the still North in their hearts, The hill-winds in their veins,

And the granite of New Hampshire In their muscles and their brains.

The location appealed not just to potential students, but also to parents hoping to keep their college-age children from harm’s way. “The glories of ‘Dartmouth out-o’-doors’ are beginning to impress themselves far and wide, and fathers and mothers appreciate the situation of a college that has no easy access to the flash fascinations of metropolitan evil,” Quint wrote. “This ‘magnificent isolation’ is the chief glory and hope of those who rule the college.” The school’s Latin motto translates as “The voice of one crying in the wilderness.”

As years passed, Hanover became more connected to the world, helped by its location at the crossroads of interstate highways 89 and

91. A vibrant retail district emerged along Main Street, where the venerable Dartmouth Bookstore was kept company by such newcomers as the Gap and the Dirt Cowboy Café. The 2000 census counted nearly eleven thousand people in Hanover, almost 20 percent more than a decade earlier, with a college-skewed median age of twenty-two. Hanover also evolved into one of New Hampshire’s wealthiest communities, with an average home price of $365,000. And yet, it clung to the self-image of a comfy little town in an out-of-the-way place, and with that came a feeling that Dartmouth and its surroundings were protected by a granite dome from big-city troubles.

The last time murder had touched Dartmouth was a decade earlier, in June 1991, when an Ethiopian man, Haileselassi Girmay, hacked to death two twenty-four-year-old Ethiopian graduate students, Selamawit Tsehaye and Trhas Berhe. Girmay, a geology teacher who had been working in Sweden, had been visiting the women and became enraged by Tsehaye’s refusal to marry him. Girmay used an insanity defense at his 1993 trial, but jurors rejected it and found him guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Juror Richard Ryerson said the jury found Girmay sane “right off the bat.” “Crazy?” scoffed Ryerson. “That could be a defense for anyone. You have to look at the evidence and ask yourself if he knew right from wrong.” Girmay’s insanity plea was fatally undermined by his purchase of an ax several days before the murders and his decision to hide it in the apartment beforehand.

Before the Girmay case, Hanover had gone four decades without a

homicide. In 1950, a freshman football team member named Raymond J. Cirrotta was attacked by a group of upperclassmen for the offense of wearing a varsity sweater. He sustained head injuries and died several hours later. One senior, Thomas Doxsee, pleaded no contest in the beating. Amid reports that the investigation had been bungled, Doxsee was fined $500 and received a one-year suspended sentence.

Hanover’s only other murder of the twentieth century also involved Dartmouth. In 1920, Theta Delta Chi fraternity brother Henry Maroney thought he had found a way around Prohibition—stealing a quart of whisky from a bootlegger named Robert Meads. Meads reacted according to the bootlegger handbook, pulling out a pistol and trying repeatedly to shoot Maroney. He succeeded on his fourth try, in Maroney’s fraternity bedroom. The killing was ruled manslaughter and Meads received a twenty-year prison term.

Unrequited love could explain Girmay’s actions. A lethal mix of alcohol and testosterone could explain Cirrotta’s death. Maroney’s murder could be attributed to rotgut revenge and Roaring Twenties gangsterism. There was no real mystery to any of them. On top of that, none of the victims was widely known on campus, and no one feared that urban ills had begun invading Dartmouth’s snow-and pine-insulated world. After the Girmay ax murders, for instance, then-police chief Kurt F. Schimke said the shockwaves the crime sent around town were proof that “Hanover
is
the idyllic, Ivy League community that it is said to be.”

A
s news spread of Half and Susanne’s deaths, so did a veil of sor-row. The killers had chosen a couple who had spent a quarter-century

cementing deep friendships around the campus and the world. “I could say Susanne was my best friend, but I know twelve other people would say the same thing,” said Susannah Heschel, the Jewish studies professor whom Susanne had comforted three days before the murders. Phil Pochoda, associate director of the University Press of New England and a good friend of the Zantops, wondered: “How can they

be the only two people that fate would obliterate? The thought that we would go on without them is now inconceivable.”

A week after the murders, grief found an outlet and a salve at a memorial service inside the pink granite walls of Dartmouth’s Rollins Chapel. Its Romanesque design, with a landmark peak-roofed tower, distinguished it from the stolid brick of most other historic Dartmouth buildings. It was built in 1885 with a $30,000 gift from a wealthy Dartmouth alum, Edward Ashton Rollins, a Philadelphia banker who had known his share of loss: He dedicated the chapel to the memory of his father, his mother, and his wife.

As more than seven hundred celebrants filed into the chapel to the soothing notes of a Bach organ chorale, each received a program with a blissful photo of the couple on its cover. In it, Half and Susanne stand together before a rock monolith, both of them wearing wide-brimmed sun hats and short-sleeved, loose-fitting shirts. Half’s hat is set back on his head at a jaunty angle. They look lovingly at each other. Half’s right hand reaches out, and Susanne holds it with both of hers. Her lips are pressed together, as if poised for a kiss.