Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (14 page)

When they arrived they saw a New Hampshire State Police cruiser parked in the driveway. Frightened and downhearted, Jim kept driving, back to Chelsea.

They went to Robert’s house and holed up in his room for the night. Outside they could hear the hum of cars and trucks passing by on Main Street, some heading where Robert and Jim dreamed of going—anywhere but here, out to the world beyond Chelsea. With each passing vehicle, the pitch of the motor and the tires grew higher

as it approached and lower as it left town, like a train whistle across a prairie.

In the past, that had always been a comforting sound, a siren song luring them away from Chelsea forever. But now, tires on pavement made a frightful shriek. They lay awake much of the night, thinking each car they heard was a police cruiser, coming to get them.

Part II
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8
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The Crew

C
ora Brooks walked into Jimmy Parker’s fourth grade class in the fall of 1993 to begin a stretch as substitute teacher, and it was as if some-

one had declared that school would now be in perpetual recess. The dozen or so kids talked out of turn nonstop. Two boys huddling and whispering were in fact making a black-market trade—swapping a cheap cigarette lighter for a pocket knife. To top off the chaos, nine-year-old Jimmy Parker was standing on his desk, taking center stage. “He was clearly looking for attention, and he was getting it,” Brooks said.

It was a class that already had a reputation, with some teachers thinking that certain parents, including Jimmy Parker’s, went too far in encouraging “nonconformity.” The arrival of a substitute simply stirred the pot further. Substitute teachers got the once-over all the time; it went with the turf. Furthermore, the students’ rowdiness quotient was

higher still because Cora Brooks was no stranger to the kids’ kingdom. They knew Brooks well, mainly because each Halloween, trick-or- treaters counted on her to surprise them with unorthodox treats. Moving into her worn-out house on Main Street in the late 1970s, the single mother, poet, and pacifist had emerged as a Halloween heretic— eschewing candy and sweets for offerings with a deeper meaning or artistic purpose. Toothbrushes, blue ribbons, and pens were just some of the unordinary items she handed out in different years. But kids seemed to enjoy the eccentricity of Cora’s basket and began flocking to her house. She might see two hundred young visitors some Halloweens, a stunning count for the tiny hamlet.

Over time, she became best known for
Sock Monster,
a self-published and self-illustrated children’s story. The short tale, told in rhyme, was about a monster who lived by itself in a parking-lot Dumpster. The poet had sensed after moving to town that “Chelsea was a town where it may have been more honorable to cut down a tree than to read a book.”
Sock Monster
became her way to encourage kids to read, and she made the short book one of her Halloween treats: “Socks were delicious, almost nutritious. Eating a sock made hardly anyone suspicious. Some socks were yellow, some socks were green. Some were red with spots of dried ice cream.” Over the years she realized some Chelsea kids memorized some or all of the rhymes.

Jimmy Parker was one of those kids. His theatricality had caught her eye, and he became one of her favorites.

But what about classroom order, with unruly Jimmy up on his desk? Thinking quickly, the teacher decided the roomful of com-bustible kid energy presented a teaching opportunity rather than a dis-ciplinary challenge. “I’m not going to ask him to come down off that desk,” Brooks thought to herself, and she let the rowdiness run its course the rest of that day. The next morning she brought to class a children’s book,
Five Chinese Brothers,
written by Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by Kurt Wiese. Cora informed her students that they would perform the book as a play. The story, a classic tale about five brothers, each possessing a unique trait—one brother could swal-low the sea, another had a neck of iron, and so on—was one where

Jimmy could stand on the desk as part of the story. If Jimmy needed to stand on a desk to get some attention, well, then he could play the Third Chinese Brother, a character whose legs magically stretched and stretched and stretched. The funny, endearing story was infused with the simple message that everyone is special and gifted in some way. The class rehearsed and then invited the school’s new principal, Pat Davenport, to watch. The classroom exercise was a success and Cora was pleased she’d found a way to channel Jimmy’s antics artistically. The desktop routine that ordinarily might have turned out badly— “Young man, march yourself to the principal’s office!”—had instead brought positive recognition.

T
hat was brown-eyed Jimmy Parker—child actor and showman. Oddly enough, he reflected the community’s long tradition in the arts

and theater. Jimmy was a Chelsea Player, a kid with the quick smile that stretched across his round face. In yearbook after yearbook, Jimmy’s grin measured the widest of all the elementary school kids.

Jimmy lived with his family in the house his parents had built up on West Hill. John and Joan Parker were a no-frills couple who slept in a shack while constructing a straightforward, wooden, red A-frame at the intersection of two dirt roads, Bradshaw Crossroad and Hook Road. Down a bit from the house, the shack was later put to use as a shop and office for John Parker’s contracting business. With nineteen acres, the Parkers had plenty of elbow room. The property bordered an ancient cemetery, the Wills Cemetery, where about thirty-five of Chelsea’s earliest settlers from the 1780s were buried.

Though outsiders, both Parkers established themselves in town. Especially John Parker. He became a community organizer, the boss of a house-building business, J. Parker Custom Construction, a JV basketball coach, and a rugged rebounder in the weekend games the men’s basketball league played in the school gym. Joining the town’s recreation committee, John Parker eventually became chairman and was the prime force in converting a few acres of farmland south of the village into new playing fields and a playground. His passion for basketball ran the gamut—from coaching to playing to collecting memorabilia. From a Web site he created, and by traveling to sport and card shows, the elder Parker traded and dealt in basketball collectibles. “This guy is a pillar of the community, a salt-of-the-earth type,” friend Kevin Ellis said about the trim but solidly-built six-footer whose worn, toughened fingertips gave away his profession.

“He’s a bit of an artist in the way he looks at things,” Doug Brown, a college roommate, said about his friend’s success as a Vermont contractor. Brown said John Parker did meticulous work yet had a relaxed manner about him. “He’s not anal-retentive, not the kind of guy who won’t wear a shirt if it has a wrinkle.”

John Parker grew up in upstate New York, attended a small liberal arts college, Ohio-Wesleyan, and then headed west to San Diego, where he met Joan Essery in the mid-1970s. “They fit together right away,” said Brown, who also settled in San Diego, where he became a criminal defense attorney.

Joan Essery Parker was a vegetarian jock with that California feeling—a San Diego native and, for a time, a nationally ranked racquetball player who continued to compete regularly after motherhood and worked as an instructor at courts in Barre, Vermont, and elsewhere. Rarely seen wearing makeup, preferring a country-casual look, Joan mostly wore her brown hair simply, straight down to her shoulders.

The Parkers—just like the Pomerantzes, David Savidge, Kevin Ellis, or any number of other outsiders—set their sights on Chelsea as an ideal canvas to paint their family’s life, safely removed from the world’s woes, be it the nuclear reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979 or the bombing of New York’s World Trade Center in 1993 or the violent crime rate that rose quickly throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.

“San Diego was too much of a big city for them,” said Brown. “Both had small-town interests.” While visiting friends in Vermont, the cou-ple was smitten by Chelsea’s family orientation. “John and Joan were effectively pacifists,” said Brown. “Not in a dogmatic sense, but they were not hunters, and there were no firearms in the house.” They

hoped to raise children “to be interested in the world, to have strong family values, and to be kind and decent to other people.”

The Parkers’ first child was Diana, born in 1981. Popular in high school, Diana was serious about art, a passion reflected in the bold and colorful artwork decorating her upstairs room. Diana was salutatorian of the 1999 class at Chelsea Public School and headed off to an art college in Chicago after graduation. Growing up, brother and sister were never particularly close. “They pick on each other a lot,” John Parker once said. Jimmy considered his older sister selfish and a general nuisance. But he also felt that enduring what he called her “unre-lenting harassment” made him stronger mentally. Writing in the third person about himself in a school essay, Jimmy said he eventually “learned to ignore her, and went on with his life and left his ignorant ‘sister’ behind.”