Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (23 page)

There were foreign-intrigue tipsters: “It is possible that the Zantops (especially Susanne, given her anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and feminist attitudes) got involved in some way with the ‘Shining Path’ guerilla/terrorist organization,” one e-mailer wrote to Hanover Police. “It is my considered opinion that this link deserves to be looked into by your investigation team, especially your FBI backup unit, Interpol, and possibly even the CIA.”

Holocaust tipsters: “I found it interesting that Professor Zantop

was killed on the European anniversary of Holocaust Remembrance Day, and that her work was given as a reading assignment on the Holocaust.”

Simplistic tipsters: “Have you investigated the students that could have ties to the teacher, maybe an angry student?”

Racist tipsters: “There is a bigger problem here in the Upper Valley than a few people can handle. . . . We have Chinese around, too many. This has come to my attention recently.”

Geographic tipsters: “The Appalachian Trail crosses Trescott Street within roughly a quarter mile of the Zantops’ house. It is my belief that this intersection is not a coincidence, and that the murderer was traveling on the Appalachian Trail.”

Conspiracy tipsters: “The recent campus murder was plotted and committed by none other than our government, the FBI, for George

W. Bush, the payback kid, and his father, George P. Bush [
sic
]. The murderers of Professors Half Zantop and Susanne Zantop are the same group who murdered John Kennedy Jr., his wife and sister-in-law, Missouri governor Mel Carnahan, Congressman Julian Dixon, and many other people too numerous to name at this time.”

Then there were the self-proclaimed psychics. One promised that the date of the Zantops’ deaths could be realigned to reveal the killers’ dates of birth. Or, if that didn’t work, answers could be found in events in Germany in 1944. Another said the killer had used an insanity defense when charged with a previous crime. Some psychics saw a knife, one saw a dog, and—with police withholding news of the two sheaths—nearly all thought the killer acted alone. One said the Zantops had contacted her from beyond, and that they wanted their daughters to know they were in a good place and ready to “go into the light.”

Mark Mudgett, a New Hampshire State Police sergeant who supervised the investigation, pored over each of the tips, deciding which to follow and which to file.

Police also collected Half and Susanne sightings. One woman told police she saw Half driving quickly out of the Mascoma Bank in Norwich, Vermont, a day before his death. Later that day, a different

tipster said, Half inquired about romaine lettuce in the produce department of the Market Basket supermarket in Claremont. Another thought he saw the Zantops at the Ramada Inn in Lewiston, Maine, at 10 that night. A different tipster placed the Zantops at a restaurant called Molly’s Balloon, eating lunch with a younger couple on the day of the murders. Most sightings proved wrong.

Some of the tips were little more than poignant memories. A student of Half’s named Jennifer Flight told a state police sergeant that a month before the killings, three days before Christmas, Half had come to the jewelry store where she worked to have a diamond set in a pen-dant for Susanne. While there, he bought Susanne a pair of diamond earrings. Time and again, police heard about the Zantops’ quiet acts of generosity, about how much the two loved each other, and how much they were loved by others.

One tip, though, struck investigators as especially intriguing. Paul Newcity, a contractor from Canaan, New Hampshire, swore that he saw a green Volvo station wagon speed out of the Zantops’ driveway the afternoon before the murders. The car pulled out so fast it nearly hit the car Newcity was riding in, driven by his friend Jason Gilmore.

“You rich asshole!” Newcity had screamed as Gilmore swerved to avoid a crash. The forty-year-old Newcity told police the car’s driver was white, male, thin, twenty to twenty-five, clean shaven, with dark hair. He had a look that made Newcity think “punk.” Newcity only saw the car for an instant, but he thought it was a Volvo because of its rounded front end. That was a style the formerly boxy cars had adopted in recent years, which, it so happened, gave them a certain resemblance to some Subaru models. But Newcity said Volvo, and his account sent Hanover Detective Eric Bates on a lengthy search for every green Volvo around town.

Beyond the tips, investigators fattened the Zantop homicide file with hundreds of interviews, tracking down everyone from the Zantops’ large circle of friends and colleagues to their mail carrier, cleaning woman, driveway snowplow driver, UPS delivery man, and the students who received the lowest grades in their classes. They canvassed the neighborhood, dove through Dartmouth Dumpsters and

came up smelling like Ivy League garbage, tracked down Mariana Zantop’s high school boyfriend, set up roadblocks to interview drivers on Trescott Road, and chased down reports of abandoned suitcases at the Manchester, New Hampshire, airport. They collected boxes of potential evidence, filled out reams of forms. They ordered scores of forensics tests on items including a blood-and grime-stained shirt found in the trash behind the Doug’s Sunoco station and a bloody five-dollar bill passed at the Colonial Deli Mart.

The work yielded thousands of potential clues—and thousands of dead ends—as well as a handful of potential suspects. There was a Dartmouth junior from the Bronx, Pedro de los Santos, who had the bad luck of having what witnesses described as a “tense” conversation with Half in Spanish the day before the murders. A second strike against de los Santos was a scrape on the side of his face, accompanied by a bruise on his forehead. Investigators tried for a week, but couldn’t find a third strike against him. Another potential suspect who quickly fell by the wayside was a Dartmouth basketball player named Jay Jenckes, a former student of Half’s whose sometime girlfriend was disturbed by flippant comments Jenckes made about the Zantops’ deaths. Two factors in Jenckes’s favor were his enormous feet: He wore a size 20, far too large to have left the bloody footprints at the Zantop home.

Indeed, while cataloging tips and culling the list of suspects, police were poring over early reports from forensics testing. One of the most useful discoveries was that two of the bloody footprints at the scene matched a boot made by a company called Vasque Footwear. Specifically, it came from a boot with what Vasque called its Alpha out-sole, and it appeared to have been from the left boot of a men’s size 11 or 11
1
/
2
.

O
n February 14, eighteen days after the murders, Chuck West was fifty-six pages into the SOG sales report when something caught his

eye. A Massachusetts company called Fox Firearms had bought 124

SEAL 2000 knives, a number that dwarfed the orders placed by nearly all other dealers.

West called the Massachusetts State Police for an assist, and received a callback at 4
P
.
M
. from Detective Scott Berna. West asked Berna to interview James Fox, who ran Fox Firearms out of his home in the shoreline town of Scituate, Massachusetts, a half-hour south of Boston. Berna set immediately to work, calling Fox to set up a five o’clock meeting that night.

Fox was happy to cooperate, telling Berna that he had received his SEAL 2000s in June 2000, and had already sold eighty-four, all via the Internet. Fox printed out a computerized list of his customers, which Berna faxed to West along with a report on the interview.

The next morning, February 15, West looked over Berna’s reports. Fox had sold the eighty-four knives to eighty-three customers; one per-son had bought two SEAL 2000s. The details of that purchase intrigued West almost enough to get him excited: there was proximity to the Zantop murders in terms of both timing and location. The buyer had ordered the knives less than four weeks before the killings, and he lived just thirty miles from Hanover, in Chelsea, Vermont. His name was Jim Parker, and he went by the computer screen name jimibruce. West called Fox to see what else he could learn. Fox didn’t know much, but he was pretty sure he still had the e-mails from Parker arranging the sale. While Fox searched for the e-mails, West began making calls, spreading news of the find and ordering a criminal background check on Parker. Two other troopers, Sergeant Robert Bruno and Trooper Russell Hubbard, drove to Chelsea to check out Parker’s house. They found no one home, so they waited there. Late that afternoon, Fox faxed West printouts of the e-mails.

“I would like to purchase 2 of your seal 2000 knives,” read the first, dated January 1. Jim, using the e-mail address
[email protected],
offered $180 for the pair, plus shipping and handling. He signed off, “thank you, Jim.” By the next day, the deal was set, and Jim sent another e-mail requesting two-day shipping to his address: 10 Bradshaw Crossroads, Chelsea, Vermont 05038.

Five days later, on January 7, he sent Fox a third e-mail: “could you notify me when you receive the money order and when you send out the knives? thank you. Jim.” Four days later, January 11, came a fourth and final e-mail, with impatience seeping into the tone: “i would like to know if you have received the money order yet, and if you have sent the knives. i sent the money order last week thursday. thanks. Jim.”

West looked over the e-mails and began worrying about his fellow troopers, Bruno and Hubbard. This was a brutal double homicide, apparently committed by two people. Who knows what they might find, what trouble they might face. West grabbed his coat. He was going to Chelsea.

12
‌

You’re Just a German

W
hile their friends were thinking about college, Robert and Jim turned inward and toward each other. They devoted Y2K to reinventing

themselves, each serving as the other’s Dr. Frankenstein, working the other’s clay. The plots they concocted and refined to escape Chelsea may have, at first, seemed like the fantastic, bizarre brainstorms of a couple of frustrated teens trapped by their stations in life. For someone like Jim the crazy ideas about cross-country flight and discovering immortality probably felt like good theater. He was, after all, the erstwhile Third Chinese Brother whose legs stretched magically in a fourth grade skit that won him the attention he always craved. For him, the role-playing would take him out of himself and Chelsea, and the changing storylines became rehearsals in a made-up drama that passed the time with a snap, crackle, and pop. Jim was the willing actor, and Robert was the director pushing to turn fiction into reality.

Family and friends, even in tiny Chelsea, mostly missed the pitch-black shadow making its way across the boys’ souls. One reason was that Robert and Jim were so good at hiding what they did, for the most part keeping their internal journey a secret. Then there was the intimacy of a small place like Chelsea; its zoom lens may have actually worked against detecting the boys’ descent. Just as it often takes a visiting aunt to recognize what a parent has overlooked—a sudden growth spurt in one of the kids—the town’s familiarity with Robert and Jim may have hindered notice that the boys were vanishing before their eyes.

Even so, the boys had their public moments. Taken alone, none may have been cause for a five-alarm fire response. But in hindsight, the public outbursts clearly indicated trouble. Particularly for Robert: In March 2000, two back-to-back public humiliations fueled his smoldering anger and propelled his spiraling disaffection.

R
obert was apoplectic that day in March when he plunked himself down in one of the chairs around the conference table in Pat

Davenport’s office. The school principal’s quarters were windowless and claustrophobic. Besides Robert, seated at the table were Davenport, guidance counselor Steve Kamen, and students Ellen Knudsen, Lucy Johnson, and Casey Purcell, a member of The Crew and Robert’s old pal.

Old pal? Hardly, figured Robert. He was pissed at all three students, but especially Casey.
VOTE FOR ROBERT
&
CASE
read the campaign sign he and Casey had used in pulling off their upset in the fall to become student council president and vice president.

Now Casey had joined the two girls in a bid to oust him from his presidency. There already was bad blood between Robert and Ellen; in winning office, Robert had defeated Ellen, the odds-on favorite. She was a serious student, bound for Middlebury College, who’d been on the council since seventh grade. Losing hadn’t come easy for her, and Robert wasn’t surprised by her role in a coup d’état. But Casey?

Fed up with his leadership style—actually, a lack of leadership— the other three students on the council’s Executive Committee had decided to impeach Robert. Later on, some teachers speculated that the students’ choice of such an unusual remedy was influenced by national affairs: the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Whatever the move’s origin, nothing like this had ever happened at Chelsea Public School. Once the idea got around, a few teachers chose to view it as democracy in action. But Robert was not one to appreciate its educational value, not when he was the target.