Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (16 page)

most prized possessions, a Marvel trading card, encased in plastic, featuring a hologram image of the superhero Wolverine. Fletcher went to Robert’s house and conducted a warrantless search of Robert’s room. “I found it,” Fletcher said. “He said, ‘Yeah, I took it.’ Like no big deal.” Bigger and stronger than Robert, Fletcher decided it was time for an added dose of street justice. He informed Robert he was taking back the $20 he’d paid for Robert’s chemistry set as further penalty. Robert stood by and surrendered the money, acting nonchalant about the whole affair.

Neighbors weren’t surprised when they saw a “For Sale” sign go up on the Tulloch lawn. Diane Tulloch, for one, had been open about wanting out. “Diane once told me they just didn’t like this area at all,” Ginny Luther said. “They were kind of earthy people, I think. She said they didn’t like the fast pace of life here.”

“My mother hated it,” Robert later wrote. Robert hated Florida, too. “The kids were mean. The environment was hellish and dangerous. The adults were greasy and sleazy, and the schools were horrible. As I look back at it, I compare it with hell.” It was a time, noted Robert, when “my relationship with my parents faded.” It was also a time when Robert self-consciously began to “carve my niche as the smart, witty kid.”

Ginny Luther’s husband, Jack, wasn’t unhappy to see the Tullochs move away. “They weren’t what you’d call an asset to the neighborhood,” he said. Nearly two years would pass after their move to Vermont before they found a buyer for the house. It wasn’t until August 1994 that they returned to close out the Florida chapter of their lives. They sold the place for $88,000, which meant after four years of owning the house they suffered a $2,000 loss.

“B
eautiful Chelsea,” Robert once wrote. “My last American home.” Florida had been a mistake. It was everything Vermont was not:

palm trees, not maples; beaches, not ski slopes; flatland, not mountains; transient, not grounded. The Tullochs rented when they first came to Chelsea, but once they found buyers for their Jensen Beach home they were ready to commit to the town. Robert was in sixth

grade and it was just days before Thanksgiving 1994 when they bought a house on Main Street from a weaver named Maggie Neale. It was a two-story yellow Colonial—the kind of old Vermont house breezes find their way into—located next door to Chelsea Mills, built in the 1820s and once the busiest grist mill in town. Her kids grown, Maggie Neale no longer needed a house that had provided more than enough room for a family and her weaving business, which she operated out of a first-floor front room. In the ten years she’d lived in the house, her ex-husband, a carpenter, the same profession Mike Tulloch had pursued, made major improvements to the kitchen. He’d installed new and big-ger windows along one wall to brighten the room with natural southern light, pulled up the linoleum and put in a new wood floor, and covered the counters with two-inch-thick slabs of maple. Maggie put in a wood-burning stove. Large enough for a round table, a rocking chair, and a nook with a sitting cushion, the kitchen was the home’s main gathering place. Set in back of the house, the kitchen was also the room providing the most privacy. Maggie’s family, and the Tullochs later, mainly came and went through the kitchen by way of a back porch that was crowded with stacked wood, a gas grill, and usually a bike or two. The unpaved driveway ended there, between the porch and a small garage Maggie’s ex had converted into a carpenter’s workshop.

Diane Tulloch worried about the $93,500 price, but was taken by the rambling old house—so many rooms for the kids and even a workshop out back for her husband. In the small front yard something was always coming up—daffodils, Jacob’s ladder, Solomon’s seal, and, of course, the sweet-smelling lilacs that graced the entire village. “She loved what had been done to it and also what had not been done, because Michael was a carpenter,” Maggie said. Looking finally to sink roots, the Tullochs took out a loan for $79,475 from a West Brattleboro mortgage company. Handling the closing was a lawyer from a small firm headed up by Dan Sedon, a young attorney originally from New Jersey who mostly practiced criminal law. Sedon, like so many newcomers to the Chelsea area, had migrated to Vermont during the 1990s for more breathing room.

The Tullochs’ new home was across the street and a few doors down from Cora Brooks’s place. Halloween was a month gone, but next year’s treats were now only a few steps away. The foliage season was long gone, too. In southern New England, hillsides featured a salad bowl of greens as late as Halloween, but not so in Chelsea. Trees were already mostly barren; any leaves hanging on were rust-colored and brittle. The November daylight was noticeably slanted by mid-afternoon, casting long shadows on the Tullochs’ backyard. The mountain-valley weather could change quickly—a hard, morning hail storm, for example, followed by a blustery wind, some sun, or clouds and maybe a late-day sprinkle. The Tullochs moved into their home during this season of meteorological surprise and fired up the wood-burning stove in the kitchen. Right away, Diane painted the kitchen a plum color. “Quite vibrant. It looked great,” said Maggie Neale. “It was a bright and happy kitchen, a lot of good, natural light.” The family dog, Ruby, and later two cats, Ocho and Mismatch, staked out territory around the warm kitchen stove.

The family didn’t come close to having enough furniture to fill all the rooms. The television and VCR went in the front living room that had a second and prettier wood-burning stove, an oval-shaped, red-enamel parlor model. In the other front room, where Maggie Neale had weaved, the Tullochs put an upright piano, and later Mike had a workbench near the piano he used to assemble finely made wooden chairs. In a first-floor room between the kitchen and the room with the piano the Tullochs set up a Ping-Pong table. Overall, the interior of the house was a work in progress; some rooms, like the kitchen and living room, were pretty much finished, but other rooms looked as if they were in a permanent state of renovation, with exposed insulation or wooden wall sheathing. The front staircase, for example, featured hand-painted scenes on the risers of each step, one of a barn in a meadow, another of a cat seated contentedly. The unique artwork was already there when the Tullochs moved in. The front hall, meanwhile, was unpainted blue board, with sheetrock screws showing.

Upstairs, Robert took one of the front bedrooms. It was a corner room on the south end of the house that was reached by walking from

the center staircase past one front bedroom, through a hallway door and then past a bathroom. The hallway door had the effect of dividing the upstairs, so that Robert’s corner bedroom seemed to exist separately from the rest of the house. “When you entered this space it felt like a different area,” said Maggie Neale. She’d actually rented out the bedroom and for a while had even considered building a private stair-way and entrance from the outside. Robert had a mattress on the floor, just as in Florida, and eventually he kept a second mattress rolled up for when his friends slept over. In a portable closet hung some pants and shirts, a few ties, and a belt, and he used a metal rack to hang socks and underwear to dry. In one cardboard box on the floor, he kept his underwear, Tshirts, sweaters, and shorts. In another, a cardboard box that used to contain oranges, he kept a stack of comics. A bookcase held randomly arranged notebooks, folders for his writings, video games, and books.

It was his domain, sparsely decorated with a floor plant, a couple of homemade posters, and a United States flag he draped as a shade over one of the windows. Clothes were always scattered—socks and underwear on the floor, shirts, sweaters, and blue jeans piled on a chair. The unpainted walls were scarred and gouged when he got there, and the family never repaired them. In fact, Robert did his part to make it worse. “His door was a target for anything that would stick into it,” Jimmy once said. The walls were “ugly . . . they’re all falling apart.”

But overall the room suited Robert fine. He could block out the rest of the family, and the family him.

T
he K-12 Chelsea Public School sat at the top corner of South Common, a two-story white-clapboard building that faced north and

was next door to the county courthouse. The building was a hodge-podge of appendages and tacked-on additions that blended new with old. The original school structure, built in 1912, was right out of old Vermont, with its snow-white exterior, clapboard face, and rooftop cupola. Behind it, a new wing was added in the late 1970s to hold the

high school. It was the most modern-looking part of the school complex, with a single ground-floor hallway leading to the library, offices for school administrators, eight high school classrooms, and science labs.

Joining teacher DeRoss Kellogg’s sixth grade class the first day of school in 1994, Robert hustled up a narrow staircase that zigged, then zagged, and creaked with the rush of little kids, and was better suited for one-way traffic. Kellogg’s class, located in back on the second floor, overlooked the playing fields and, beyond the fields, a cemetery on a hill. To the west, the room had a view across Main Street, past roof tops to the steep, rolling West Hill, covered with trees—some birch, fir, and pine, but mostly maple.

Robert still wore the mullet haircut he’d had in Florida—it was a style he kept through most of elementary school. His nose had not yet overtaken his face, and between his delicate features and the haircut he looked girlish in school photos. Becky was a high school junior, and Julie was in seventh grade, attending school despite her learning difficulties. Julie wore bangs, too, and in some photographs she and Robert looked a lot alike. Their younger brother, Kienan, was a year behind Robert, starting fifth grade, just like Jimmy Parker. Though Robert had been around Chelsea earlier, this was the first year the two boys would take notice of one another and begin forging their friendship.

Entering the classroom, Robert found the desks and chairs lined up in rows, and the walls decorated with standard fare—posters of current events and education-boosting rhymes and sayings. He also saw his new teacher’s devotion to the Boston Red Sox. Displayed prominently on an inside wall was a poster of slugger Jim Rice, a picture Kellogg had hung early in both his and the left fielder’s careers in the late 1970s. Low-slung bookcases lined one side of the room, full of well-worn and well-read paperback books, including such novels as Ray Bradbury’s
Something Wicked This Way Comes,
an allegorical tale of good and evil, truth and deception. The book tells the story of two teenage boys, James Nightshade and William Halloway, forced to confront dark forces and themselves when a mysterious carnival rolls into their Midwestern town.

Robert also found a teacher who couldn’t wait to have him in his class. Every year Kellogg and the fifth grade teacher swapped teaching math and science, so Kellogg had met Robert the year before when he taught math to fifth graders. Kellogg, a soft-spoken, slightly built man with a sparse handlebar mustache, felt an immediate connection: “I somehow knew we were kindred spirits almost the first day.” He liked Robert’s sense of humor. Teasing one another came easily. From the very first, Kellogg discovered Robert was a student “who grasps concepts quickly and easily.”

“I looked forward all year to having him in sixth grade,” Kellogg said.

Robert enjoyed Kellogg as well. “Sixth grade, the year of my awakening,” he would write in a high school essay. “DeRoss Kellogg, one of the best teachers I will ever know, taught me to be independent in school. In his class I learned to distinguish myself and became a separate and confident individual. He encouraged each student to exercise their creativity and individuality with creative projects such as skits, short stories, presentations, and the like. We could do whatever we wanted, it felt free, and this was back when I was still interested in school.”

It turned out that Robert and a handful of sixth grade classmates were an unusually bright group, the kind that comes along every once in a while for no apparent reason, a seemingly chance constellation. “It’s almost like a UFO went over . . . and there was this small group that was way better, way more interested in academics than the average class,” said Paul Callens, a high school math and physics teacher. Robert’s pal, Kip Battey, red-haired and freckle-faced, was one of the sixth grade go-getters, as were Anna Mulligan, Billy Funk, Emily Dumont, and Torry Hook. The class became one of Kellogg’s favorites, with Robert one of the teacher’s all-time prized students. The kids had a snap to them, an electricity that made teaching satisfying. It led Kellogg to ponder new ways to challenge Robert and his peers. He ran his ideas past school administrators and, with their support, began accelerating their course work, particularly in mathematics. They did

so well that the next year Robert and the others skipped pre-algebra, the usual track for seventh graders. “The idea was let’s see how they do,” said Kip. “So we went in with the eighth graders and took regular algebra.” The course was a year long, and when Robert and Kip finished seventh grade, they had earned the first of three math credits necessary for high school graduation. Pushing the students seemed a good idea in the short term. Possible long-term consequences could wait for another day.

F
or the Tullochs, Chelsea proved to be a better fit all around. Mike had his workshop out back. He printed up business cards—“Michael

W. Tulloch, Finish Carpenter, Cabinets,” it read in green print with a green border—and began picking up work. A loner, he strongly preferred working by himself. Over the years he did a few jobs for a carpenter-contractor in town with a much bigger and more lucrative business, John Parker, although the two men never became more than acquaintances. Mike Tulloch once said he “almost had no contact” with John Parker, “even though we’re in a similar business. We very rarely have crossed paths.” Mike didn’t know Joan Parker at all. His wife knew Joan Parker a little from the food co-op both families belonged to.

Diane, mostly a stay-at-home mom, branched out and began tak-ing nursing courses. Chelseans had a hard time getting to know the reclusive man of the house, but found Diane a kind person who seemed a natural for nursing. Licensed by the state of Vermont in July 1995, Diane began practicing her caretaking skills—and also providing the family with a much-needed steady income—as a visiting nurse with an office in Randolph, just west of Chelsea. The family also was comforted by the community’s response to Julie, who was prone to outbursts and sudden mood shifts. Not only was Julie included in regular classes during elementary and middle school, the whole Chelsea feel was supportive. Julie was someone people looked after, not looked at cross-eyed, as in Jensen Beach. Sure, she tended to roam, but if she