Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (28 page)

It was shortly before 7
P
.
M
. when Bruno, Hubbard, and Page arrived at 10 Bradshaw Crossroad. In the winter darkness, the red A-frame house radiated warmth, evoking in the troopers’ eyes a comfortable place where they could imagine making a social visit. The New Hampshire detectives emerged from their heated cars into the deep snow and pitch-black night, wearing their usual plainclothes attire of parkas over jackets and ties, accessorized with holstered guns hidden under their coats. They looked as benign as Fuller Brush salesmen, but the effect was spoiled by Page, resplendent in his full uniform complete with Smokey the Bear hat.

Bruno knocked on the door and John Parker answered. We’re

detectives, Bruno said, investigating the homicide of the Dartmouth professors over in Hanover. We’d like to talk with your son, James, about his purchase of two SOG SEAL 2000 knives. Just so you know, Bruno told the elder Parker, you’re not obligated to talk with us, and you don’t have to invite us in. It’s completely up to you.

“Come on in and have a seat over at the kitchen table,” John Parker said. He didn’t know anything about his son buying commando knives, but the Parker family had nothing to hide from the police. As they walked in, the officers noticed one other person in the house: a wiry young man sitting on a kitchen stool.

“Will you need to talk with me?” the young man asked. As he asked the question, Jim thought: “Bummer . . . I’m screwed.” Through his fear he formed a quick plan—he would answer the troopers’ questions without providing enough information for them to place him in custody. If he could avoid jail for this one night, maybe he could avoid it forever. It was a passive alternative to a plan Robert had outlined several times since the murders, in the event police came to their homes. Robert’s plan, as Jim understood it, involved “knocking one of them out . . . and maybe even killing them.” The killing part didn’t appeal to Jim, and Robert didn’t make a big issue of it. Either way, once the cop was disarmed, Robert would use the gun to hijack a car, pick up Jim, and they’d escape. If police came first to Jim’s house, Robert expected him to do the same in reverse. Now, though, with two detectives standing in his house, Jim modified the plan to exclude violence, focusing instead on avoiding arrest and getting away clean.

Bruno wasn’t sure who the young man was, but he suspected it was Jim Parker. Answering the question of whether they’d need to speak with him, Bruno said, “We might.” So Jim joined them at the table.

Before they got started, Bruno told John Parker that he didn’t have to allow them to interview his son, but the elder Parker said that would be fine. Jim voiced no objections, either. As Bruno started asking questions—why did you buy the knives, how did you use them, where are they now—a change came over the young man who had been sitting so languidly on the stool.

The veins in his neck began to throb. His Adam’s apple bobbed like

a cork in rough seas. The side of his neck pulsed so violently it reminded Bruno of the movie
Alien
—a creature seemed ready to burst through Jim Parker’s neck.

Soon, though, Jim settled his nerves and his pounding neck well enough to tell Bruno, Hubbard, and Page the story of buying the knives over the Internet from Fox Firearms to use with his friend Robert. It was the first time investigators heard the name Robert Tulloch.

In his fright, Jim couldn’t remember if his best friend’s last name was spelled Tulloch or Tolluch, so Hubbard wrote it down both ways. In response to one of Bruno’s questions, Jim said he used the e-mail name jimibruce for no special reason—it was just that Bruce was a name he liked. He explained that he and Robert bought the knives for camping and to cut branches and build forts, but they proved too cum-bersome, so they sold them.

Jim described how they drove to Burlington one day in January— he couldn’t remember exactly when—to unload the knives at the Army-Navy store. Jim said the guy behind the counter wasn’t interested, but a scruffy-looking customer in the store overheard Jim’s proposal and made an offer: $60 each. Jim said he haggled a bit on the price—he had wanted at least $130 for the pair—but took the cash because he and Robert were glad they’d recoup at least part of their money.

Bruno circled back again and again, prying out new details. Soon Jim was wavering on his description of the mystery buyer—first his hair was black and then it was brown; first he was in his early twenties and then he might have been in his thirties. Bruno thought Jim was lying, mostly about not knowing the identity of the knife buyer. Bruno also doubted Jim’s claim that he hadn’t heard about the Zantops’ murders until the detective mentioned them.

Despite Bruno’s skepticism, he considered it too farfetched to imagine that this teenage boy had killed the Zantops. What could his motive possibly have been? How would a kid from a nice home like this, with a supportive father sitting by his side, get mixed up in mur-der? Bruno’s questions reflected investigators’ initial belief that Jim’s

involvement was limited, at most, to supplying the knives. Bruno figured Jim was scared to death of the real killer.

“Do you know who you gave the knives to?” Bruno asked again. “Is that why you’re so nervous?”

“No, it’s just that I’m talking with police,” Jim said.

Before a stalemate bogged them down, Bruno asked if Jim would drive into town to be fingerprinted at the Orange County sheriff ’s office, to compare his prints with evidence found at the murder scene. John Parker said he had no objection. Neither did Jim.

By that time, Chuck West had arrived at the Parker house. He quickly learned from Bruno what had been said and that Jim had agreed to fingerprinting. West and the other detectives drove their cars to the sheriff ’s office while John and Jim Parker drove over separately. “You didn’t do anything, did you?” John Parker asked his son as they

sat in his truck.

“No, I haven’t done anything,” Jim answered. “Come on, Dad, I’m, I’m really scared about this whole thing. . . . This is, you know, weird.” “Just tell them the truth,” his father said. “Just tell them what you

know.”

When they arrived at the sheriff ’s office, West had Jim write out his account of the purchase and sale of the knives. The scrawled statement, complete with misspellings and curious punctuation, never names Robert, describing him only as a “friend.” It adds more suspiciously vague details of the buyer, describing his height as five-nine to six feet, and with “shortish hair, but not real short 4-6 inches maybe.” It was a description that fit nearly the entire adult male population of Vermont. The statement concluded: “The reasons we chose these knifes is because they are really tough and we like to use the best.”

After reading Jim’s account, West went to work. He sat with John and Jim Parker in a kitchenette at the sheriff ’s office. With his usual painstaking approach, West began searching for flaws, chipping away little by little. Still, after going over Jim’s story several times in several ways, West didn’t think he saw a murderer sitting in front of him. Like Bruno, West thought Jim was simply a liar, a boy scared of someone he

knew, someone he sold the knives to, someone who used them to kill Half and Susanne Zantop.

“As a detective who’s been around awhile, I can tell when I’m not being told a hundred percent truth,” West told Jim and John Parker.

“Right,” Jim said.

“And you,” West added, “you agree, Jim? You agree?”

“I, I know, it’s a . . . I don’t, I don’t like this story either,” Jim answered. “I wish I had a different one, but . . . ”

“Mmm-hmm.” “That’s it,” Jim said.

“Well, that’s all right, Jim,” West said. “I don’t want to put any pressure on you. But what I’m telling you is I don’t think you’re being truthful, a hundred percent, because I think you’re scared and I think you’re afraid what’s . . . going to unfold. So Jim, before you get too deep in a hole here . . . ”

“OK.”

“Tell us the truth,” West demanded. “What happened?” “It’s all I’ve got,” Jim said.

West kept at him, but the detective focused his efforts almost entirely on Jim’s story of the mystery knife buyer. West never asked Jim if he had ever met the Zantops. And he never asked if Jim was directly responsible for their deaths. Indeed, West never mentioned the Zantops by name. The only name he was seeking was the person he imagined to be the real killer, the person to whom Jim gave or sold the knives.

The closest West came to the question of murder was to ask John Parker where he was on January 27.

“Uh, I don’t remember,” the elder Parker said. “I was, I think, I was finishing a job up in Stratford and I was there on Sunday that weekend, but the twenty-seventh, I was either at home or, um, at this job in Stratford.”

Then West turned to Jim: “All right, so where were you on the twenty-seventh?”

Before Jim could answer, West interrupted: “I know what you’re supposed to say, ’cause you’re in . . . ”

“I know,” Jim said, “but um, we go to the movies sometimes.”

“Mmm-hmm,” West said, urging him on. “Uh, we just sit around.”

West let it drop.

With his father by his side, and the questions focused on the per-son to whom Jim supposedly provided the knives, Jim was able to hold onto the alibi he and Robert had hatched. At the end of the interview, John Parker even adopted West’s own phrasing to support his son: “I believe Jim a hundred percent.”

W
hile West was dealing with the Parkers, Bruno, Hubbard, and Page drove a few hundred yards from the sheriff ’s office to the

Tullochs’ yellow house at 313 Main Street.

They arrived just after 8
P
.
M
. and explained to Mike and Diane Tulloch that they had just spoken with Jim Parker about the purchase of two SOG SEAL 2000 knives. Now they’d like to speak with Robert. The Tullochs, who’d been watching a movie on their VCR in the living room, invited the detectives to take a seat at the kitchen table while Diane went upstairs to rouse Robert, who was fighting the flu.

Robert came downstairs with the pillow-haired look of someone fresh from sleep. While Diane made Robert a cup of tea, Bruno started firing questions at him. Bruno and Hubbard were struck by how different he seemed from Jim Parker. At seventeen, Robert was only a year older, but he struck Bruno as far more articulate, better educated, thoughtful even. Robert was cool, calm, and collected. No alien creatures were trying to escape from his neck. Bruno found it much easier to talk with Robert, mostly because he wasn’t as tightly wound as Jim. When Bruno began the interview by saying Robert didn’t have to speak with them, Robert answered confidently: “I’ll talk to you.”

Robert repeated Jim’s story of buying the knives from Fox Firearms, deciding after they arrived that they were too big, and then selling them a week or so later at the Army-Navy store. He couldn’t place the dates exactly, he said. Robert also couldn’t describe the buyer because Jim had handled the sale. He echoed Jim’s line about keeping the knife purchases secret from his parents because they wouldn’t have approved.

It was the first Diane and Mike heard about SOG SEAL 2000s. When Diane learned they had ordered the knives over the Internet, her thoughts rushed back a few months to a similar incident, what she called “another one of their stupid things.” Robert had said he needed climbing shoes, so she let him use her credit card to order a pair—if he agreed to pay half. Instead of shoes, Robert ordered two Stun Master stun guns, handheld, high-voltage devices whose primary use was to temporarily immobilize people. The box came addressed to Diane, and when she ripped it open she was shocked to find the weapons. When Robert came home, Diane confronted him for lying to her about the shoes and for buying such strange and troubling items. Robert answered her accusations with yet another lie, calculated on the spot to minimize the damage. He admitted ordering the Stun Masters, but told his mother they were for innocent mischief. He said he and Jim heard they could use stun guns to pop street signs off their posts—a harmless teen prank. In fact, Robert already had a stop sign affixed to his bedroom door. Diane thought it was a lame excuse, but she allowed herself to believe him. She didn’t probe further. Her anger at his lie about the climbing shoes and her doubts about his street sign story carried next to no consequences. She sent the stun guns back to the seller, and when no refund came she made Robert and Jim reimburse her.

Diane didn’t mention the stun guns to the troopers sitting in her house asking her son about his Internet purchase of two commando knives.

Robert volunteered to Bruno that he and Jim were rock climbers, and when Bruno asked if they had done much climbing lately, Robert told the detective about the deep cut on his leg. Bruno asked how it happened, and Robert said he climbed over a snow bank “to take a leak” and cut it on a maple-tree spigot. It was the lie he had told most often during the past three weeks.

Despite the link from Robert and Jim to the knives, and despite Robert’s cut, Bruno—like West—still couldn’t see these boys as the Zantops’ murderers.

Just as he had done with Jim, Bruno asked Robert if he would vol-untarily allow the detectives to fingerprint him. Robert agreed. Then

Bruno asked something else: “We’d like to look at your footwear.” It was a question they hadn’t asked Jim—it was suggested by Sergeant Russ Conte, another New Hampshire State Police detective, when Bruno called him from the sheriff ’s office to discuss what Jim had told them.

Mike Tulloch, who had been sitting quietly, piped up: “Do you want to look at them or do you want to take them?”

“At this point in time I just want to look at them,” Bruno answered. Robert went upstairs and returned with two pairs of shoes. He plopped them on the kitchen table—a pair of Nike sneakers and a pair

of hiking boots.

“What make of shoes are those?” Hubbard asked. “Vasque,” Robert answered.

It was the same make of shoe that had left the bloody footprint in the Zantop house.

Bruno took Mike and Diane into the next room, to quietly tell them that a Vasque footprint had been found at the murder scene. He didn’t say it, but Bruno knew that fact, plus the link between Robert and Jim and the knives, plus the cut on Robert’s leg, might be adding up to something. Mike recognized as much on his own.