Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (12 page)

“A teacher affects eternity,” Dartmouth President James Wright told the crowd. “We learned much from their lives and we benefited.

. . . Be free, good friends; be at peace.” The Rev. Gwendolyn King spoke of the questions surrounding the deaths. “Shock, bewilderment, and disbelief are among the feelings we all had as news of Susanne and Half’s deaths reached us. How could this be?” she asked. “Our hearts ache in the loss, and we have questions and seek answers that may never come.” Through cascading tears, the Zantops’ friend Herb Rowland said: “When we were with them we felt safe and taken care of. There was gentleness and grace, and both of them made time disappear on each occasion that we were with them. And I felt that I became a better person, more patient, more compassionate, more understanding, and more committed to social justice.” Several of the fourteen speakers described Half and Susanne’s professional achieve-ments, but most focused on their hearts. Verona told the story of how her purchase of the Zantops’ former home had led to a deep friendship, and how her life was shattered by her discovery of their bodies. “My

house and I stopped breathing,” she said. Yet like most of the speakers, Verona tried to find hope in the darkness. She told of new life on a plant Half and Susanne had given her. “A tiny bud from the hibiscus flower talks to me with my friends’ voice,” she said.

The celebrants stood and sang “Amazing Grace,” recited the Lord’s Prayer, and bowed their heads for the Jewish mourner’s Kaddish, spo-ken by Heschel, her voice cracking with emotion. Most dressed in somber hues, but there was one dramatic exception: Audrey McCollum. Four weeks earlier, Half and Susanne had joined Audrey and Bob McCollum for an annual holiday dinner. Audrey wore a festive outfit that had become something of a tradition: black slacks, scarlet top, and a silver snowflake pin. “I knew what Audrey would wear,” Susanne had said then, smiling. In tribute, McCollum wore the same celebratory outfit to the memorial service. “Susanne would have loved that,” her husband told her.

At the close of the service, Veronika Zantop unexpectedly stood. She was twenty-nine, tall and attractive, articulate and composed. With an oval face and kind eyes, her looks favored her father. Next to her was Mariana Zantop, twenty-seven, an international relief worker based in New York City. She was shorter than her sister, with close-cropped dark hair and a resemblance to their mother.

In a sweet, clear voice, Veronika said: “I wanted to thank you for my sister and I from the depths of our hearts for all the love and support we’ve gotten from everyone here, as well as for the love and support you gave my parents during their lives. Thank you so much.” Then the Zantop sisters became the first links in a “Circle of Light,” with each participant holding a lit candle to symbolize how Half and Susanne illuminated the lives of those who knew and loved them. Veronika and Mariana were joined by Susanne’s family, then Half’s, then Half and Susanne’s students, then Dartmouth staff members, then family friends, and on and on until it seemed nearly everyone in the chapel was included.

Unknown to the celebrants, a New Hampshire state trooper named Christopher Scott stood outside trying not to be noticed. He had been assigned to blend with the press and photograph people

entering and leaving the chapel, as well as anyone loitering nearby, in the vague hope that the killer or killers might be among them.

T
hroughout the community, speculation swirled about the killers and their motives. “I think there may be a troubled student, and (Half)

may have underestimated how troubled he was,” Audrey McCollum said. Meanwhile, her husband quietly fulfilled one of the Zantops’ last requests. Bob McCollum sent a letter to Vermont’s U.S. senators, opposing appointment of John Ashcroft to the post of attorney general, speaking on behalf of the friends whose bloody bodies continued to flash before his eyes.

With minor variations, Audrey McCollum’s sentiments about a targeted killing were echoed in conversations all over campus and throughout Hanover and Etna. “I would assume there was some connection between whoever did these crimes and the Zantops, and I don’t think there’s any reason to think there’s some person who would be a threat to the community,” said Marion Copenhaver of Etna, a former state representative whose husband was a retired Dartmouth professor. “Clearly there’s a monster out there, but he has a specific target.”

Still, just in case a murderer was among them, Dartmouth students began escorting each other around campus. “You wonder if this kind of violence has come to this little town,” said Diana Allen, the mother of a prospective student from Los Angeles. “It’s so charming here, but this is scary.” Homeowners began searching for keys to deadbolts they rarely used. Others adopted an offensive posture. Eighty-four-year-old Robert Adams Sr. had lived peacefully in his Etna farmhouse for fifty-six years with his wife, Ruth; the Zantops’ home was built on a portion of his old pastureland. Adams vowed he’d be ready if the killers were lurking in the woods. “I got a shotgun here,” Adams said, “and it holds enough shells to keep ’em away.”

Fueling the fear and speculation was the near-absence of information from authorities. The case was being investigated by more than thirty members of the Hanover Police Department and the New Hampshire State Police—some of whom strapped on snowshoes to

search the grounds around the Zantop house. But the New Hampshire attorney general’s office was the lead agency, and it kept an unusually tight rein on the release of information. (In most states, district attorneys prosecute murders, but because of New Hampshire’s small size and relatively few murders—an average of twenty-one per year in the decade before the Zantops’ deaths—homicide cases were the AG’s domain.)

During the first few days after January 27, most of the circumspect public pronouncements came directly from Attorney General Philip McLaughlin, a graduate of Boston College Law School who had spent twenty-three years as a defense lawyer before being appointed attorney general in 1997. McLaughlin was fifty-six, the easygoing son of a police officer, a Democrat in a state run by Republicans. He was a father of five whose office overflowed with family photos, with one exception: he kept on his desk a photograph of a six-year-old girl who had been raped and killed. In daily meetings with the press, the normally articulate McLaughlin found himself in the impossible position of trying to reassure the public that all was well while subtly acknowledging that authorities had no idea who killed the Zantops. Compounding that conundrum, McLaughlin refused to reveal any details of the killings, including the cause of death, a position he recognized had the dual effect of protecting his investigation while intensifying the media’s already unquenchable thirst.

As a result, McLaughlin’s answers to reporters’ questions tended toward the same shade of gray as the suits he favored. Asked if the community was at risk, the attorney general said: “We don’t know the answer to that.” On the other hand, he added: “If we have a specific, reliable reason to believe the community is at risk, we would express that because that would be our duty.” A day later, he said, “I can assure the public there is progress that is being made,” though under questioning he acknowledged he had “no idea” if the killers remained in the area or had fled. He refused to say whether a murder weapon had been found, whether one or more killers might have been involved, or whether he thought the crime was random. He said nothing of the knife sheaths.

Reporters groused about the official silence, and soon some of the Zantops’ friends joined the chorus. “The lack of information just makes things that much harder to deal with,” Richard Wright, chairman of the Dartmouth geography department, said three days after the killings. “If someone was caught or if someone was accused or charged, it would perhaps begin some kind of healing. But right now that’s not happening.”

The day after Wright’s comments were published, McLaughlin disclosed that the Zantops were stabbed to death, possibly by someone they knew well enough to let into their home. Once again, though, he tempered that remark by saying it was only a “tentative assumption” that the couple knew their attackers. McLaughlin also addressed complaints about his approach with a subtle shot across his critics’ bow: “This is a community that literally has thousands of people that are acculturated to asking detailed questions, and they feel frustrated when they don’t get answers to them. We respect that, so we are try-ing to deal with this as accurately as we can.” The attorney general also issued a public warning to the killer or killers: “The person who did this, who may well be watching this, should take no comfort in the fact that they have not yet been apprehended. Be patient; we’ll be there.”

A week after the killings, McLaughlin turned over the unenviable task of dealing with reporters to a telegenic thirty-two-year-old woman with large brown eyes, who at first glance seemed more likely to be a Noxema model than a murder prosecutor: Assistant Attorney General Kelly Ayotte. She received a less-than-warm welcome from the media when she announced that the public should be on the lookout for any-one who had recently exhibited suspicious behaviors such as absence from work, changed sleeping patterns, unnatural interest in the case, noted display of nervousness or irritability, or a change in usual con-sumption of drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes. When she finished the list, a wag in the press corps pointed out that she had just described the horde of reporters on the Zantop story. Ayotte wouldn’t bite. “Just because one or more of those characteristics are observed doesn’t mean that person was involved,” she answered dryly. That same day,

Ayotte announced that daily press conferences would be suspended until further notice. Predictably, doubts arose about police and prosecutors solving the crime. “Two weeks after the murder of two Dartmouth professors, investigators appear as stumped as they were on the day of the crime,” reported the
Boston Globe.

But it was a mistake to underestimate Ayotte because of her youth, her looks, or her talent for keeping information from the press. Since joining the attorney general’s office in 1998, Ayotte had prosecuted a man who had butchered a Manchester woman; a drifter who had raped and killed a girl in her bed; and a carpenter who had fatally shot a social worker on a Nashua street. When her pager first chirped with news of the Zantops’ deaths, she was completing the prosecution of a woman who had killed her disabled boyfriend. Ayotte had been involved in perhaps thirty homicide cases and had brought a third of them to trial, winning convictions every time.

A native of Nashua, New Hampshire, Ayotte was athletic and outdoorsy, a ski racer in high school and a bicycle racer as an adult. She was a political-science major and a Delta Gamma sorority sister in Penn State’s class of 1990, and while there, was elected president of the Pan Hellenic Council, which oversaw the activities of twenty-three sororities and more than two thousand women. After Penn State, Ayotte went to Villanova Law School with an eye toward environmental law. But that proved boring: “I like talking to people. There were fewer opportunities to meet people in environmental law.” On her left hand she wore an impressive diamond, an engagement ring from a for-mer Air Force pilot three years her senior who had also grown up in Nashua. He also gave her a foot-high silver bullet that stood like a tro-phy in her cluttered Concord office. The bullet came from an A-10 “Warthog” warplane her fiancé flew after leaving full-time military service and joining the Air National Guard. As the public face of a high-profile, seemingly stalled investigation, Ayotte needed all the sil-ver bullets she could get.

Ayotte’s right-hand man was another assistant attorney general, Michael Delaney. He was thirty-one, wiry as a greyhound, married to a defense lawyer, the father of two girls, a Massachusetts native whose

father was a chief probation officer and whose mother was a guidance counselor in inner-city schools. Affable but wary, Delaney was another young but experienced prosecutor. He had recently won a first-degree murder conviction in a twenty-year-old case involving the strangulation, stabbing, and attempted rape of an eighty-one-year-old woman. DNA evidence was the deciding factor.

The lack of notable public comments from McLaughlin, Ayotte, or Delaney sent reporters looking for quotable criminologists, who obliged by clucking their tongues at the New Hampshire investigators. Several said the first seventy-two hours after a murder were critical and it appeared that this case had gone cold. A few cited statistics that seemed to equate the chances of solving the Zantop murders with the likelihood that Elvis would appear at Dartmouth’s next commencement. One newspaper went through its files to find nine area murders that remained unsolved since 1982, while another quoted a criminal justice professor who suggested that solving the case might depend on “a wonderful stroke of luck.” When the FBI joined the investigation two weeks after the crime, analysts were equally divided on whether it represented investigators’ desperation or a sign that a fresh lead had been found.

The conflicting, unenlightening media reports had the combined effect of further rattling an already shaken public, leading some otherwise mature and highly civilized members of the Dartmouth community to consider vigilante justice. “For the first time, I’m having these fantasies: What if I ran into this person? I’d beat the hell out of him,” Professor James Aronson, Half’s colleague and friend, said a week after the murders. “Everyone’s getting angry and worried. What if they don’t catch this guy?”

Some people began to speculate that it was a random act, but most people who knew the Zantops doubted they would casually let a stranger into their house. “If an unknown came to the door, they would have to make a pretty good case to get in,” Susanne’s friend Margaret Robinson told police.

In the absence of hard information, reporters fought over scraps of

news they could claim as scoops. In that atmosphere came the most explosive news story of all, published in the
Boston Globe
nearly three weeks after the murders.