Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (24 page)

To him, this was mutiny at school.

Davenport summoned the key parties to her office to air it out. The tiny room was filled with contained rage. How dare they challenge him, was Robert’s attitude. He was the victim of a gross injustice. Casey and the girls—they were the enemy. It was him against the world.

But the truth was, Robert shouldn’t have been surprised by their disenchantment. Sure, he’d taken the election in the fall seriously and worked tirelessly. “He went for it,” said Davenport. No half measures, she said, but total commitment. “He even began to dress the part.” He might as well have been Chelsea’s version of Robert Redford starring in
The Candidate
. Robert climbed into the one sports jacket he owned, added a stringy tie, and then hit the campaign trail. He worked the school hallways, schmoozing and charming student voters.

“He really got into it,” said Zack Courts. “He’d go up to someone, and like a pol be real flattering to the person and say just the right thing, as if it were scripted by some Hollywood comedy writer. Something like, ‘Hey, you look great!’ Stuff like that. And he’d blab and flatter them and then say, ‘Vote for me and Casey!’ ”

It worked. Robert conned his way into office. But his closest friends—The Crew—knew Robert’s involvement was more style than substance. Jim, who that same fall was elected as the sophomore class representative, knew Robert just wanted to prove a point: that he was great. The whole campaign, Jim said later, was at best tongue-in- cheek. “Kind of a mockery of the system, I guess.” Robert was not so much interested in governance as he was in looking for a stage to strut

his stuff, show off, and win what he felt he was entitled to. Robert and his running mate may have run a hard, competitive campaign, and they really wanted to win, but, said Zack, it was basically “a joke to him and Casey.”

When the time came for the council’s real and often mundane work, Robert was mostly missing in action. “The win went to his head, I guess you could say,” Zack said. Robert was at best an indifferent and half-hearted leader. He’d be bored one moment, imperious the next, and often played to his principal audience, Jim. “They were rude,” said Matt Butryman, another council member. The moment something didn’t go Robert’s way, he recalled, Robert would “blow it off completely.” During plenary meetings for Winter Carnival, for example, Robert lobbied to include Hacky Sack as an event. “He wanted that in, but no one else did,” said Matt. “So he said things like, OK, let’s stop, the meeting is over, we’re done.”

The council sputtered. “Things never got started,” one teacher said later. “There were starts and stops and it was not a productive year.” Said Zack, “To be honest it would’ve been better if Ellen was student council president. She was more responsible.” By March the council was barely meeting, and then one day Robert, who’d missed a few days with the flu, returned to school and walked into an impeachment ambush.

In front of Davenport, both sides went at it. Robert, seething, told Casey that as vice president he could have conducted meetings in his absence. He spoke in a cutting, low tone. He took apart Ellen at one point, a performance that surprised some present because dressing down the poised and intelligent Ellen Knudsen was no easy undertaking. The other three came back with their own list of grievances—how Robert had let them down, had let the school down, by his indifference. He’d dropped the ball, they said, was unprepared and unin-spired. He didn’t seem to care. Time to go.

Even Robert’s best friend knew the others were right. Robert didn’t care what happened with the council. The thrill of winning soon wore off. Jim knew Robert’s private attitude was, “This kind of sucks. I don’t

want to do this anymore.” But facing impeachment, Robert went ballistic—mainly because the surprise action was not on his terms. It was OK if Robert chose to mock the council as idiotic and pointless, but the council had no right to hold him accountable; after all, he considered himself above reproach.

In Davenport’s office, surrounded by his accusers, Robert refused to take any responsibility for the floundering council. Instead he coun-terattacked: the others had waged a cowardly coup. Robert staked out a position as the victim of a horrible injustice. The face-off concluded after an hour with bruised feelings all around, and afterward principal Davenport ruled against an impeachment as being unnecessarily punitive and excessive.

Word of the meeting got around school, but no one seemed to know exactly what had happened. Robert, saving face and twisting facts to his advantage, gave Jim the false impression that he had quit the council. Davenport later said that wasn’t the case. Either way, the council never got back on track that year.

Further detaching himself from school, Robert put up a front, act-ing as if he didn’t care. But friends like Jim and Zack knew otherwise. Robert was incensed at the school and the council. “Sure he was hurt by this,” said Zack. “He got the most votes and then they want to impeach him? That sucks.” For Robert, another cord was cut.

T
his was Robert’s arc: strong start, lousy finish, and afterward no one better point the finger of blame at him. His council presidency cer-

tainly fit this pattern, and unfolding on a parallel track at exactly the same time was an even fuller display of Robert’s modus operandi. It centered on his brief, unhappy life as a high school debater.

October in Chelsea was the time of year when the debate team was assembled. It was one of fewer than a dozen high schools in Vermont that had any sort of debate program. Vermont, or New England for that matter, is not a debate hotbed. That label belongs to the Midwest and the South, where large and intensely competitive leagues devote themselves to making annual pilgrimages to state, regional, and national tournaments. In Vermont the tradition was different—committed, to be sure, but low-key.

Given the small size of Chelsea, every October was a recruiting challenge, a small-scale hustle to coax enough students to sign up for the team. Tryouts? Not a chance in Chelsea. Organizers scooped up any kid who showed an inkling of interest.

The fall of 1999, Robert’s junior year, was no different for the two grown-ups in charge of debate—Marilyn Childs, the school’s veteran forensics coach, and John O’Brien. If anything, rounding up debaters had gotten tougher since O’Brien’s high school days—thanks to the changing school culture of accelerated course work and block scheduling. Many juniors and seniors, having piled up their academic credits, weren’t around the school much. Unable to depend on them, O’Brien had learned to focus his energy on persuading freshmen and sophomores to take a run at joining the novice debate squad.

O’Brien was naturally quite pleased, then, when Childs brought up the name of a junior during a preliminary meeting one October afternoon. “This boy Robert is interested in debate,” Childs told the young debate coach. O’Brien had no idea whom she meant, but a few days later the coach met Robert Tulloch. “He seemed bright and enthusi-astic, and anyone like that I was looking forward to working with,” said O’Brien. The nature of Chelsea debate, however, would play right into Robert’s hands. The cajoling and permissiveness required to field a squad and then maintain its viability throughout a season worked, in effect, to shift the balance of power from coach to student debater. The casual atmosphere became an ideal stage for Robert’s oversized sense of himself; for him, debate became a license to kill, verbally. Soon enough, Coach O’Brien learned that Robert didn’t come alone but as a package deal. With Jim.

O
’Brien’s personality seemed a good fit for the circumstances. In his late thirties, with curly hair, a boyish face, and easy smile that made

him seem closer in age to Robert than to the veteran teachers in the school system, O’Brien was what in sports would be called a player’s coach. Professionally he was also enjoying the afterglow of critical acclaim for a film he’d made about a seventy-seven-year-old Vermont farmer who ran for Congress. The film,
A Man with a Plan,
was a mix of fact and fiction, the story of Fred Tuttle as political neophyte taking on entrenched political power and money. The little guy wins. O’Brien, Tuttle, and the film ended up featured on the front page of the
New York Times,
an article that compared Fred’s sudden stardom to Vermont’s two established celebrities, “ice cream kings” Ben and Jerry. The film and feel-good story were also written about in
Life
magazine and received a full-page write-up in
Time
magazine. Fred became the focus of an adoring
New Yorker
cartoon.

Preparing for the 2000 season, O’Brien wasn’t sure exactly why Robert Tulloch had surfaced. It might have been because one of Robert’s friends, Kip Battey, had already joined the team. Whatever the reason, O’Brien was happy to have the junior turn up, especially because the coach was quickly impressed by Robert’s confidence and bravado. Debate, said O’Brien, was not for shrinking violets. “Debate’s a bit intimidating, but Robert didn’t seem intimidated at all by it.” Robert clearly seemed eager to take the center stage. “It helps if you are sort of cocky,” the coach said.

O’Brien began meeting weekly with his young debaters after school, usually in the school library. In high school debate, a topic is chosen each year by the National Forensics League. The so-called resolution becomes the centerpiece of every high school tournament in the United States. During a debate, one team argued the affirmative and the other side the negative. The affirmative side outlined a specific plan that would fulfill the resolution’s goal. The negative side then attacked the plan as unworkable, drawing on any evidence it could muster that the affirmative’s plan was ill-conceived. Despite what non-debaters might think, a debate wasn’t a contest in which one team sought to win over the other team or the judges to its side; rather, it was about the logic and reasoned attack one side launched to expose

weaknesses and flaws in the other’s position. In this way, the contest was less about the content of a particular plan than about the logic and evidence used in supporting or attacking it.

The topic chosen for the 2000 season was about federal efforts to improve academic performance in high schools: “Resolved: That the federal government should establish an education policy to significantly increase academic achievement in secondary schools in the United States.”

For most teams, preparation meant devoting weeks to researching the issue, using the Internet, libraries, or both. Student debaters would have two goals in mind. First, they wanted to come up with an “affirmative plan” about how to upgrade high school education. Second, they wanted to figure out how to rebut the plans opposing teams devised. Teams often created evidentiary files, filling out index cards with data, and they’d arrive at a tournament lugging the material in boxes called “tubs” or “oxes.”

Not so the Chelsea squad, which had more the feel of a club than a hard-driving team. But that was OK; the laid-back coach’s expectations were modest. He was glad to have another team going, however ragtag. The weekly meetings became more like bull sessions than research grinds. The debaters would discuss generally the ideas opposing teams might concoct to improve secondary education, and O’Brien would outline tactics to attack those plans during a competition. In Chelsea there was no deep research.

In fact, best illustrating the softness of the Chelsea program was the fact that the coach—not the debaters—came up with the idea Chelsea would use as its affirmative argument. It was a fanciful claim that students’ academic performance would improve with better classroom lighting. And not only did O’Brien come up with the novel idea, he even wrote the text for the students to read during a debate.

This suited Robert fine; he made it clear to O’Brien and the oth-ers on the team that he wasn’t interested in real work. “Robert never really would do any research,” the coach said. “He wasn’t a hard work-er.” But Robert was supremely self-assured. “To him it was more fun if you were just a big B.S.-er talking off the top of your head.”

Just as the season got under way, O’Brien also noticed that tagging along behind Robert to the weekly meetings was Jim Parker. The sessions became even less productive and more rambunctious. “Jimmy was both very funny and a clown and disruptive,” said O’Brien. “We were in the library having a practice, and Jimmy and some other peo-ple would come in and just hang out there. I’d say like after five minutes of joking around, I’d be like, ‘OK, we have to get back to debating,’ and Jim wouldn’t leave, and he and Robert would sort of spar and egg each other on.” Maybe another coach on another team in another town would have come down hard on Robert and Jim. O’Brien would later concede, “Robert could be distracting and a smartass during practice.” But no one in Chelsea ever really pushed back when it came to Robert and Jim, and the boys became accustomed to doing things their way. Moreover, playing hardball not only didn’t fit O’Brien’s warm style; having even one kid quit might sink the team.

The loose dynamic favored Robert, giving him a sense of being in charge.

H
igh school debaters describe how during competition they get “high from talking.” The contest can become a verbal high-wire act

involving embarrassing spills and soaring thrills. Debaters talk about becoming engrossed in the moment, the debate equivalent of what athletes call playing in the zone—a perfect state of focus.

Robert experienced that high. He and Kip won all three rounds in the team’s first tournament, held in Chelsea on January 8, 2000, against a half-dozen other schools. Robert even led all debaters on total “speaker points.” O’Brien noticed how much Robert enjoyed the verbal jousting.

It’s said that high school kids are drawn to debate because they get off on arguing—a brand of mental warfare where wit and quick tongue are the weapons of choice. Debaters might go into the contest acting mannerly and shake hands. They might dress in jackets and ties and blouses and skirts. But behind the decorum is an intense competition. Rivals end up talking trash, dissing one another, and becoming single-minded in wanting the verbal kill. It’s teen combat featuring sharp tongues, tongue lashings, and an opportunity for adolescents—already in a life phase marked by testing limits—to explore wild ideas in the confines of an organized activity. Teen debaters, noted sociologist Gary Alan Fine, are often “determining how far they can trespass intellectually.” In his study of the culture of high school debate, Fine quoted one coach describing the strategy she wanted her high school debaters to adopt during their turn at cross-examination. “You want to nail somebody to the cross in a nice, pleasant manner,” the coach said, sounding like a Mafia boss explaining how to set up a hit by sweet-talking the target. Crudeness only provided the opposition a chance for a come-back. “If you stick in the knife, you don’t want to leave it in because they can pull it out and survive,” the coach said. “You want to turn it, but in a nice, polite fashion.”