Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (22 page)

Zack had his passion for motorcycles. By the time he was fifteen, he and his dad had begun racing vintage sidecars together. By the time he was sixteen, his dad had bought him his first motorcycle. Father and son traveled to compete in races in Ontario, Nova Scotia, and Georgia. Mostly they’d head over to the New Hampshire International Speedway in Laconia. Zack brought Robert along a couple of times. Robert not only got to watch the races, but also saw that Zack and Tim Courts had a special father-son relationship. His own father, meanwhile, was more distant than ever. Mike Tulloch had discovered the fine art of making Windsor chairs; during the prior year he’d begun attending weeklong programs at the Windsor Institute in New Hampshire. The new activity that drew father and son further apart did bring father and daughter closer. Julie Tulloch had always liked hanging around Mike’s shop, and once he mastered the chair-making skills, Mike overcame his shyness to conduct a presentation for his daughter’s special education class. It proved to be a success for all

involved. Enchanted by the experience, Mike even wrote an article for a chair-making periodical in which he described a Zenlike joy that came from connecting parts of his life into a single experience. He wrote, “It is funny how things that can deeply affect and even change your life come to you. Sometimes they are right in front of you, and you do not see them until the time is right. My association with Windsor chairs contained a level of enrichment for me, for my daughter, and her classmates that I had not imagined.”

Casey, meanwhile, had for some time tasted the world beyond Chelsea in travels with his parents prior to their divorce. Not long after the student council election, he began a new romance, and was swept away with that. The Crew was not alone in enjoying these broader experiences. Anna Mulligan, Robert’s intellectual peer since grade school, also attended the Mountain School during junior year, and was making plans to spend part of her senior year in Ghana. Then there were the twins, Tess and Ivy Mix, who seemed always to go on trips to exotic places, like Jamaica.

Though most of the other boys who made up The Crew were also ahead on school credits, they spent more time on school grounds than off. “I always went to school,” said Zack. “It’s just the way I am.” In school the other boys were playing varsity sports—soccer, basketball, and baseball—while Robert and Jim were not. The demise of their group sport, Ultimate Frisbee, occurred in part because Robert and Jim weren’t regularly in school, which is where games had begun.

The Crew was getting older. Needing spending money, some got jobs. Coltere and Zack worked that summer at the Vershire Riding School. They hauled garbage, fixed fences, and painted a house while listening to a radio station that played Vitamin C’s song “Graduation” so often they heard it in their sleep. The two didn’t much like the grunt work, but steady work was steady work. Robert and Jim only occasionally worked for John Parker. “Anything that didn’t require skill,” said Jim. But the work, admitted Jim, was never “a full-time job type of thing.”

The other boys were finding ways to stay busy, Chelsea-style: sports, new schools, travel, and summer jobs. If Kip Battey hadn’t

spent winter semester at the Mountain School, he wasn’t sure what he would have done with himself. “Probably what Robert did,” Kip said, “which wasn’t a whole lot.” The Crew was peeling off in different directions, so much so that by the fall, the start of Robert’s senior and Jim’s junior year, Zack said, “This is a period when I can’t vouch for their whereabouts.”

Indeed, Robert wasn’t even enrolled in school. Jim, meanwhile, encouraged by his parents, felt he’d maxed out Chelsea’s musical offerings. “They don’t have much of a music program,” he explained. “There’s kind of like an advanced music class and we just kind of go fart around and play what kind of music you can . . . but it’s mostly younger kids, and lower level of playing too.” Jim began commuting to Spaulding High School in Barre, which was known for its music programs. Always flip, Jim admitted the school switch wasn’t solely about studying music: “There were more girls there.”

Most of The Crew—Zack, Kip, Casey, and Coltere—had their sights set on college. Robert and Jim did not. Robert glibly offered up his who-needs-college spin and enjoyed pointing out famous college dropouts. “Bill Gates never graduated from college,” he liked to say. Jim earlier had thought he might try a college-level outdoor guide program, but that idea had faded. College was stifling, not for a free spirit like him.

“I thought it was confining and held you back,” he said, adopting Robert’s view.

J
ohn and Joan Parker noticed the two boys were spending all their time together, and were comfortable with the ironclad friendship. “I

actually liked Robert,” said John Parker, finding his son’s best friend to be a “conscientious” kid with “a sense of humor.”

Diane and Mike Tulloch were not as sanguine. “Jimmy always would eat us out of house and home and I got tired of having him for dinner every night,” said Diane. She eventually ended up complaining to Joan Parker. “I don’t really like to confront people, so it took a while, a real long time before I told Joan, you know, ‘Could you pick up your

son before dinner?’ ” Robert argued with his mother about Jim, wanting to know what the big problem was if he hung out while the Tullochs ate supper. But Diane said, “I hate to have somebody in the house if we’re going to eat and they’re not going to eat.” Moreover, there were times Robert and Jim wrestled nonstop, a quasi WWF smackdown, as they slammed one another around the house. Diane Tulloch would have to yell at them to either cut it out or Jim would have to leave. “They’d be rough sometimes and break things,” she said. “It was a stressor always having Jimmy there.” Mike Tulloch was even less generous about Jim. “I just never took a liking to Jimmy, on a personal level,” he said. “I think it was a personality clash.” He found Jim’s behavior “over the top. Loud—he was usually, if he was in the house, you knew it.” Robert knew full well his father’s feelings about his best friend—a rare area of communication between father and son. “Whatever my feelings were about Jim were totally known to Robert,” Mike Tulloch said. “Communication with teenagers can be a hard thing for anybody, but . . . that was one thing that Robert knew about.” His parents’ position had no impact on Robert; if anything, he was in their face with Jim as his best friend, as if the friendship itself was in part an act of rebellion. Mike made it clear to Robert that one characteristic of the deepening bond he disliked most was that Robert and Jim operated as such an “exclusive team.”

But that’s exactly what Robert and Jim had become. “At that point, me and Robert had gotten really close,” said Jim. If anything, this was an understatement. The two mostly hung out alone together in Robert’s room. Or they went rock climbing together. Or they used their new paintball guns in the woods—having, as Casey Purcell once said, “gotten wicked into paintball” that spring and summer. Or they drove around for hours on end. Jim, once he’d turned sixteen in May, had use of the silver Audi his sister Diana drove before she went to college in Chicago. The car was unreliable at best, often in the shop for repairs, but it was Jim’s to use and use it he did. Tooling around in Vershire that spring he and Robert had come across an abandoned house. It was off Goose Green Road, on a road leading to the Vershire Riding School, not far from the closed Judgment Ridge ski area. The white-clapboard

house with black shutters was low-slung, surrounded by acres of uncut high weeds. Above the front door hung a gold-painted wooden eagle. Inside the boys found broken windows and a wide-plank wood floor that tilted and rocked underfoot. Doors hung at odd angles off their hinges. Dust coated a beat-up couch, an armchair, and the old rugs lying about. Brown wallpaper peeled off the first-floor walls. Empty beer bottles littered the attic, along with a Mitch Miller album and a few paperback books, including
Crime Without Punishment
by John McClellan, published in 1962. The house was a complete dump, but the boys staked their claim. Forget the failed teen center in Ned Battey’s storefront on North Common; this was better, their own clubhouse and theirs alone.

“We tried to make it look nice,” said Jim.

They were inseparable. Drive and talk, climb and talk, and talk some more. The two increasingly parroted one another’s ideas. “We were always thinking all the time,” Jim said. “Like too much thinking.” Whether the subject matter was college or Chelsea, it didn’t matter. The conclusion was always the same: it wasn’t good enough for intellectual giants like them. Sometimes their shared ideas got weird. For instance, after much discussion, they concluded Hitler was “very cunning” and for that alone, they decided simplistically, Hitler should be admired.

“Sounds like he was not a very good guy,” Jim said, “but I mean we agreed that he was a pretty smart guy and was really good at manipulating people, and we had a certain amount of respect of him for that. But there was nothing against the Jews.”

Together they were developing a knack for turnings things inside out. The other boys, they decided, weren’t leaving them behind with college, motorcycle racing, girlfriends, or jobs. In the world according to Robert and Jim,
they
were leaving The Crew. “We started excluding people a lot more,” Jim said. The Crew, it turned out, was no longer up to snuff. “Because they just weren’t much to talk to. We considered them really immature or below our level.” Robert and Jim were sounding like the worker about to be fired who tells the boss, You can’t fire me, I quit.

It wasn’t just The Crew, either. The rest of Chelsea was suddenly beneath them. “We were smarter than everybody else,” Jim said. “People didn’t see things the way that we did. We thought, you know, what everybody was doing was silly. Like going to school and like wasting half your life with education that you’re not going to even use.” Even though he’d always liked his parents and felt their support, Jim was growing impatient with his mother’s “incessant worrying,” once writing that he was hoping he could “endure it for just a little longer.” The partners were determined to devise their own itinerary. “We basically just wanted to get out of Chelsea and start something else on our own.” They had gotten into their discontented heads the inflated notion they were something special and, working together, they would

come up with an escape plan.

Kip Battey and Coltere Savidge could go off to the Mountain School, Zack Courts on his racing trips with his dad. Robert and Jim, creative geniuses that they were, would find a different way out.

Different destinations altogether. First, though, they needed some money.

11
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Dead Ends and College Dumpsters

D
ay after day, Detective Chuck West plugged away at the list of knife dealers. To speed his search, he obtained a subpoena requiring SOG

Specialty Knives to produce a list of all sales accounts, worldwide. While waiting for that list, West focused on nearby knife shops, going down his list of dealers one by one—Peregrine Outfitters, the Edge Company, Burton Snowboard, The Fly Rod Shop, Trapper John’s Knives and Swords. There were some tantalizing possibilities that would require follow-up, but nothing approaching a clean hit.

West also focused on Internet knife dealers. First, though, he had to familiarize himself with the World Wide Web. More comfortable outdoors than in front of a computer, West had only tried going online a month earlier. West’s boss, Major Hunter, said dryly: “His assignment wasn’t necessarily based on his computer expertise.” West turned himself into a Web surfer, breezing through sites including Absolute

Knives, Knife Outlet, Knives Express, Knife Center of the Internet, Chesapeake Knife and Tool, and Merlo’s Cutlery. Again there were some possibilities. Knives Express had sold two SEAL 2000s to a per-son in Madison, Connecticut, a week apart in July 2000. West added it to his growing list. Another Web knife dealer, Shoptimax, had sold two SEAL 2000s to someone in Canada less than four weeks before the murders. “Investigation continues,” West wrote at the bottom of the Shoptimax report. The Wholesale Hunter sold two to a Missouri business, and two more to someone in Arkansas. The list grew longer. Some of the companies West contacted refused to cooperate without a subpoena, so West obliged by getting one.

On February 12, SOG produced a somewhat narrowed-down list of the individuals, companies, distributors, military accounts, and foreign accounts where it shipped SEAL 2000s. It was a sixty-nine-page report, with 297 separate listings, accounting for 4,929 knives. West had been working on the case for seventeen days, and the task seemed to keep growing larger rather than smaller.

To stay focused and relieve the tedium, West leafed through the SOG accounts like a salesman looking for hot prospects.

A
s days passed without a solution to the case, police found themselves plowing through a blizzard of suggestions and potential suspects

that arrived via letters, phone calls, e-mails, and face-to-face interviews. The tips ranged from tantalizing to bizarre, with every category in between. And yet, given the lack of leads, a surprising number were deemed worthy of follow-up.