Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (21 page)

The Crew could also play the role of merry pranksters. Like the time around Winter Carnival 2000 when Zack, Robert, and Jim drove to Montpelier and, under the cover of darkness, scaled the Vermont State Capitol. It was as if they’d come up with a carnival event of their own. To get to the top, the boys scurried behind the building and

boosted one another atop a rear entrance. They shimmied across a nar-row, steep-sloping roof, climbed to a second, flat level, and then climbed up a final flat roof. They scampered around the gold dome to the front and took in the commanding view of the large green, the surrounding state office buildings and businesses, and the dark snow-covered mountains beyond. Lights flickered like stars. Robert and Jim returned months later on their own with a couple of golf clubs. “There’s kind of a rubber divider in one of the roofs,” Jim explained, “so we tried sticking tees in there and hitting golf balls. But that didn’t work.” The golf outing was a bust, but they didn’t mind.

“The fun part is climbing up there,” said Zack.

C
ountry boys being country boys. Cheap thrills, testing limits, and straddling boundary lines, sometimes crossing them. Robert, Jim,

Zack, and Gaelen McKee once stole some golf balls from a driving range in the nearby town of Washington, and Gaelen was stopped for speeding afterward. A month after getting in trouble for going into Casey’s house when no one was home, the boys were back doing another home entry. To Robert, Jim, Zack, and Gaelen, going into the empty house of twin sisters they knew from school felt different than the Purcells’ house. The boys had permission this time and figured it was OK.

It was late in May, just after Jim turned sixteen on May 24, 2000. Gaelen knew Tess and Ivy Mix best. He’d often been to their house in Tunbridge, just south of Chelsea. The girls lived there with their mother, Susan Dollenmaier, a successful businesswoman who sold high-quality fabrics and home furnishings through her company, Anichini. Her husband, Robin Mix, was a ponytailed glassblower whose studio inside an early-nineteenth-century brick-and-clapboard Federal-style home had been renovated by Jim’s dad, John Parker. The couple was separated.

The twins’ house was spacious—and ideal for ball tag. “Just a sweet house,” said Zack. The girls were on vacation with their mother in Jamaica and had told Gaelen he and the others could hang out in the

house. It was a no-brainer to the boys, even if using the empty house constituted an exception to a rural community’s customs. “You don’t walk into a house when nobody’s home, but you can just walk in if they are home and talk and do whatever you want,” a Chelsea teenager explained. But with the twins’ permission, the boys piled into Zack’s Porsche and headed to Tunbridge.

The house was unlocked, and the first thing the boys did was make the interior contest-ready. They rounded up fancy vases, some artwork, and breakable glass objects, and deposited them inside a first-floor bathroom. Then, let the games begin—and in the annals of ball tag this was something else, having such a roomy house all to themselves. For an hour or more they played hard and fast. They played to exhaustion, only to realize they’d worked up a raging appetite. Game over, why not cook up a meal, maybe even take in a movie? They started cooking noodles, and Zack got worried. “Dudes, I don’t know,” he said. But the others insisted all was cool: the eating, movies—the twins had okayed everything.

Robin Mix walked into the house to the smell of boiling macaroni and sauce. He and Susan had agreed he would check on the house while she and the twins were away. No one had told him about the boys and ball tag. The boys were in a downstairs room in the dark watching a movie. Gaelen went upstairs to talk to him. Gaelen was the group’s best representative; he was the only one who knew Robin, and he was the one to whom the twins gave permission. Besides, said Zack, Gaelen was “as cool as the other side of a pillow.” From downstairs, Robert, Jim, and Zack listened as Gaelen pleaded their case. They couldn’t make out the back and forth, but they did hear Robin’s final take:

“This is
not
cool.”

It was time for the boys to leave. Robin asked if they were going to eat the food they had cooked.

“We better go,” they said in unison.

Robin Mix considered notifying their parents, but then checked with Susan and learned the twins had okayed the visit. No need, then, to make an issue of it. Certainly no reason to notify police. Some of the

boys later joked about the episode, referring to it as a “B&E,” standing not for “breaking and entering” but for “breaking and eating.” It was seen as the stuff of boys, harmless errors all around. Yet for someone like Zack Courts the B&E seemed more—a learning moment. “That was a pretty stupid thing to do,” he said. For him it was a cautionary yellow light. His friends Robert and Jim brushed it off. To them, the B&E was practice for bigger and better things to come. It was more like green light: Go.

“T
hese kids could be wild, but they were good,” said one Chelsea father. To most, Robert at first seemed a fairly engaged high school stu-

dent. At the start of his junior year in the fall of 1999, folks saw Robert trying to stir interest in turning an empty storefront into a teen center. The property was owned by Kip Battey’s dad, and Christiana Usenza’s mom had rented it to run Café Ole, a Tex-Mex concept that eventually failed. The storefront was along North Common, providing easy access for kids. Robert and Casey Purcell talked up the idea with the Friends of Chelsea School, a parent-teacher group. No one disliked the idea in theory, but no one ever worked out a deal. The center proposal fizzled. Then Robert and Casey surprised classmates and their teachers by prevailing in the school council election. The boys waged a colorful, spirited campaign featuring the giant plywood sign they’d painted and installed right at the school’s entrance. Jim was swept along on their coattails, winning election as a sophomore class representative. Later that fall, Robert added to his lineup of new activities: he joined the school’s debate team, run by local filmmaker John O’Brien, himself a former Chelsea debater when he was at the high school in the early 1980s, before he went off to Harvard. “Robert just came up to me and was all hot to debate,” O’Brien said about his first meeting with Robert that fall.

Most of Robert’s days were free, however, and in his few classes he and Jim were more saboteurs than scholars. “Making jokes and comments and disagreeing with the teacher,” said Jim about their general classroom approach. The two boys liked taking courses together.

“Sometimes we would make fun of other students,” Jim said. “Sometimes we would have pen-marking fights when the teacher was teaching, you know, we’d sit next to each other and try to get each other marked on our clothes.” Or Jim would showcase his flair for theater with a dramatic reading. “One of the things that I would do, is, you know, they’d pass around something that you could read and I’d read it in a funny accent, or I would read it really fast or I’d read it really slow. I’d change the words or something.” Friends said Jim reminded them of a rubber-faced comic actor with the same first name—Jim Carrey.

Aping Robert, Jim came to have a fairly high opinion of himself. Writing in the third person in a school paper, he said if he had to have a letter sewn or burnt on his chest it would be the letter I: “I for INCREDIBLE,” he wrote, “because, really, honestly, he was just one Incredible Guy. An ‘F’ also might do, for FABULOUS. But walking around with a big branded ‘F’ on his chest might get some funny looks, because it could also stand for demeaning words. Such as Failure, Fraud, Froth, and worst of all, people might think his name was Frank or something, and that would just flat out suck! Any-who, ‘I’ for INCREDIBLE worked.”

Teachers considered both boys bright, especially Robert, whose voracious reading habits always impressed. For example, during mid-dle school he read his way through novelist Russell Banks’s complete body of work. In high school, his appetite for the written word took him to reading Friedrich Nietzsche on his own. Of particular interest was the German philosopher’s exploration of nihilism—the existential notions that God is dead, that no absolute moral values exist, and that life itself has no intrinsic meaning. “Every belief, every considering something true is necessarily false, because there is simply no true world,” Nietzsche wrote in the 1880s in his notebooks. Nietsche also wrote: “He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Robert was gazing into the abyss.

Robert was clearly the more academic of the two. He acknowledged in school being impressed with a number of historical figures,

but only in terms of inflating his own self-image. He told one teacher he admired Thomas Jefferson as a genius, but then could not resist including the comment that Jefferson’s intelligence paled in compari-son to what he called his own “divine intellect.” His teacher thought his hubris was amusing.

Papers Robert wrote were usually heavy on opinion, short on evidence, with a racy style. Robert was not afraid to say pretty much anything. In an outline for an essay about the United States’ entry into World War II, he wrote, “War sucks. We should have stopped Germany earlier, but late is better than never. We should learn from our mistakes. America has a responsibility to the rest of the world. Isolationism is neglect.”

He wrote with similar verve about Thomas Jefferson, Adolf Hitler, Dalton Trumbo’s
Johnny Got His Gun,
Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Great Gatsby.
Robert despised
Gatsby,
calling the novel “one of the worst books ever.” He told his teacher, “The trauma I suffered due to that book will never be repaired.” His commentary was slick and way over the top. Only after reading about the Jazz Age did Robert begin “to forget the burn marks I had subjected myself to, trying to take my mind off the pain of that terrible, terrible Gatsby book. It was terrible! I can not express how absolutely horrible that book was. I have never seen such an impossibly boring, and drudgingly narrated, piece of crap!”

Henry David Thoreau was another matter. “Thoreau rocks!” Robert wrote in a paper. “He was an intellectual god, his ideas I completely identify with (here is where I get to brag).” But admiration was filtered through his own prism. “We’re two peas in a pod, him and I.” Robert saw Thoreau as caring only about his own interests. “Society means nothing to him,” he wrote, “only that it brainwashes others before they truly learn anything. Of course he is probably a bit smarter than me, just a bit (hehe).” In yet another paper, Robert weighed in on the value of studying the mind. “Psychology is the way to higher learning (you can quote me when I am famous).”

It was a philosophy Jim came to embrace. The two friends decided they were beyond the reach of society. They thought of themselves as

“Higher Beings.” They found they practically thought the same thoughts—or at least that was how it seemed to Jim after he absorbed Robert’s nihilistic view of life. Both, for example, decided school was useless and boring and that most teachers were idiots. Robert once wrote school was mostly about “human stupidity.” Their peers were “little pinheads” who wasted time in classes with “idiotic readings and making worthless points.” It was up to them, the two boys decided, to find their own purpose when faced with this “whole heap load of ignorance in the world.” They had to find a way out of the life they’d known so far.

For all his literacy, however, Robert’s grades were unremarkable, with a high school average of between B-minus and B. Even so, Jim bragged that he and Robert would sometimes pull off academic magic. “When we wanted to, we would make really good reports,” he said. Jim was particularly impressed with his pal’s approach. “He would write a lot of his school papers that morning or before class and then hand it in and get a pretty good grade.”

Robert was the first to admit he was intentionally disruptive, writing as much in self-evaluations required by some of his teachers. “During lectures I tried to think of intelligent questions, and I tried very hard to make snappy comments at inappropriate times,” he wrote about one class. The teacher wrote back, “Robert, I really do appreciate your humorous wit.” But then she added, “P.S.: as a teacher, your snappy comments can sometimes be difficult.” Generally speaking, Robert was quite pleased with himself. He was opinionated, self-assured, never tongue-tied, always a charmer. Evaluating his “responsibility” in one course, he wrote: “Well hey, I finished all my stuff, except one set of little notes, and that doesn’t matter!” Evaluating his effort, he wrote: “I had tons of that!” Yet another teacher told Robert she knew it was hard for him “not to rant, but give it a try!” She further urged, “Don’t forget that goal!!! (Try modesty, attempting to be humble, patience with others, open mindedness.)”

Midway through junior year it was no surprise Robert had little connection to school. In Chelsea’s small world Robert and Jim had become part-time students. “Usually I didn’t need to come to school,”

said Jim. “I think I only had one main class a day, which was chemistry, so I didn’t have to go to school very long. . . . I could leave and me and Robert would like go to his house and eat or just talk or go rock climbing or something.” Things were changing for them in Chelsea.

M
ore and more it was just Robert and Jim. Once part of a crew made up of at least four other Chelsea boys—and often more—by

June 2000 it was pretty much Robert and Jim on their own. The change was subtle, not the sort that registered much on the social Richter scale in Chelsea’s teen world. The boys of The Crew were, after all, still good friends. There hadn’t been any big falling out of long-lasting proportion. They still did stuff together—ball tag at the twins’ house, for instance—if less so. It was more a natural selection: Zack, Coltere, Kip, and Casey were branching out.

Coltere and Kip had gone off and spent a semester boarding at the rigorous and prestigious Mountain School in Vershire. For four months the two Chelsea boys had roomed, studied, and worked on the school’s organic farm with students from all over the world.