Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (32 page)

His wife, however, changed his outlook. When he called to say he’d be swinging by the Tullochs and would be home later, she told him: Dan, this has to do with the Zantops. The Zantops? Yes, she said, troopers were seen in the village and the rumor is that it’s connected to the murdered professors. Sedon was stunned. Like most everyone, and especially because he was a criminal lawyer, he’d been intrigued by the crime and followed it closely, mostly by reading about it online. “It was a big mystery, and so weird, a murder case with an international flavor and an Ivy League frosting,” said Sedon. “With all the hallmarks of a passion killing.” Never once did he imagine a link between the deaths and the cozy community of Chelsea.

Sedon hurried to the Tullochs’ house and right away sensed the seriousness. Trooper Mike O’Neil, along with a second trooper, told him a search warrant was in the works and that Vermont’s state police crime scene search team would arrive once it was issued. Sedon was

also given a heads-up about the police operation that was being assembled. It would be an uncommon show of force. Ordinarily one cruiser, maybe two, would be involved in a search, even in most mur-der cases. This, Sedon realized, was a full-court press, not only involving Vermont State Police, but New Hampshire troopers as well. The officers wouldn’t specify the purpose of the search—the name Zantop wouldn’t pass their lips—uttering only the police mantra of the day: “This is serious.”

But Sedon could read between the lines. The size of the unfolding police operation told him that investigators were after Robert and Jim not just because they might possess relevant information about the unsolved murders, but because they were suspects. Sedon met privately with the Tullochs to explain the pre-search lockdown and how it might take hours before the paperwork was in order and the actual search would begin.

He found the couple initially unable to grasp what he was saying. Mike said little and Diane reacted as a host, making coffee for the two troopers and tea for Sedon. Everyone had to step over the family dog, Ruby, and the two cats that wouldn’t budge from the legs of the kitchen’s wood-burning stove.

If it was going to be a while, Diane had an idea: “Let’s all watch a movie. I’ll order some pizzas.”

Diane and Mike went to the living room and put in a movie,
Air Force One,
with Harrison Ford playing the president during a terrorist hijacking. The couple sat down and invited the troopers to do the same. The troopers stayed in the kitchen, while Sedon joined them, half-incredulous. “Here she is, inviting two hulking troopers to join them to watch a movie,” Sedon said later. It was at once an awkward moment for the troopers and evidence of a huge disconnect for the Tullochs. To Diane, the interest police had in Robert was some huge misunderstanding that simply had to be straightened out. “They just had so much faith in Robert,” Sedon said.

The Tullochs were the epicenter of the same disbelief that would soon spread throughout the community. Sedon wasn’t even sure how

much Mike and Diane knew about the Zantop case. They rarely read newspapers or watched the TV news; in fact, the TV in the living room had no cable connection and was used almost exclusively with a VCR to play movies. Sedon realized they thought there was no way Robert could be involved in a murder.

At first, Sedon didn’t have the heart to shake them out of their fantasy. They watched the movie and got to the part where the hijackers seized Air Force One, when, around eight o’clock, the telephone rang. The movie was put on hold, as the troopers and Sedon were told the warrant had been approved and should be in hand at the Bethel barracks any minute. It was a wake-up call for Sedon, who now impressed upon Diane and Mike that they didn’t want to be home when the police descended. To the uninitiated, he said, a search of one’s home is disturbing. He would handle it. Finally, the weight of the moment began to take hold. “It was like watching a slow-motion train wreck,” Sedon said about seeing the Tullochs recognize the stakes.

Diane and Mike never finished watching the thriller. The drama of real life was outpacing fiction. Mike drove Diane to their daughter Becky’s house and returned. Sedon and Mike Tulloch hunkered down in the kitchen to await the search team’s arrival. Occasionally Sedon stepped out back in the cold for a cigarette. Mike Tulloch, a former smoker, broke his abstinence from tobacco and joined him.

W
hile troopers temporarily blocked what little traffic there was on Main Street to allow the forensics truck to back into the Tullochs’

driveway, Ray Keefe went to the back door, the only door the family really used. He was met by Dan Sedon. The two knew one another from “the circuit,” the name given to the commute between courthouses that lawyers and police make as part of their work. Both men were about the same age, liked one another, and had always gotten along. Keefe was a solidly built detective, medium height, his light-brown hair cut in a modified flattop. He’d been in the Major Crimes Unit six years and had worked on about fifteen homicides. Known for

his easy banter, Keefe was the picture of crisp professionalism: black dress pants, polished black Florsheims, a blue dress shirt, blue tie, and a blazer. Under the blazer he wore a .40-caliber Sig Sauer semiauto-matic.

Both men knew the drill. Keefe handed Sedon the warrant and the attorney lodged his objection to the police presence at the house all afternoon, and now the search.

“Duly noted,” Keefe said. “Let’s go.” Keefe entered the kitchen and had Sedon and Mike Tulloch lead him upstairs to Robert’s room. Members of the crime scene search team began unloading equipment and hauling it into the kitchen. Keefe noted the boy’s room was in the front corner of the house, a location that gave it a separate feeling from other rooms. Parts of the house, the detective observed, were in disrepair, a not uncommon condition for such an old home. Moving about, he detected a homey feel.

Stepping into the room, Keefe was struck by the ordinariness of it: the basic teenager’s room—messy and disorganized. The mattress on the floor, a chair, a stand-up closet, a bookshelf, and clothes scattered all about. Keefe thought a climbing device attached on one wall near the ceiling looked unusual for a teenager’s room. A workout buff himself, Keefe could tell it was a tool for the serious rock climber who wanted to build finger strength by hanging from different ledges protruding from the molded, three-foot-wide panel. In fact, the Tullochs had just bought the device for Robert in a bid to lift his spirits; the deep cut in his leg had made it impossible to climb at his usual gym, Petra Cliffs in Burlington, and they thought the hanging board would give him something to do.

Keefe then gave way to the five-person search team. From the Vermont State Police there were Lieutenant Tom Hanlon, supervisor of Vermont’s crime scene search team, and Garry Lawrence, a civilian technician from the state forensic lab. From the New Hampshire State Police there were Detective Sergeant James White and Troopers Bob Estabrook and Kathy Kimball. They were looking for anything and everything having to do with Robert, a search that included the laundry room off the kitchen but principally focused on his bedroom. Robert’s writings, his computer, his e-mail correspondence, his footwear and shoe boxes, especially Vasque hiking boots other than the ones he had already surrendered, his clothing, blood or trace evidence (meaning hair or fingerprints)—this was the evidentiary wish list investigators had in mind when they slipped on rubber gloves and headed upstairs. Of course, in any homicide, investigators always had the murder weapon in mind, but searches rarely yielded the actual weapons; it was more often about combing meticulously for trace evidence.

Keefe, Sedon, and Mike Tulloch stayed downstairs. Taking a cigarette break outside, Sedon saw flashes of white light exploding from Robert’s room. This was the search’s first phase, as Trooper Kathy Kimball took well over a hundred photographs to document Robert’s room. She moved through the room producing a photo gallery that included shots of the secondhand bureau, bookcase, and chairs; the
Roget’s Thesaurus
and the
National Debate Handbook
resting next to a clock radio on the bureau behind the door; the strange indentations and long lines, almost like a cat’s scratches, that marred one of the door jams; Robert’s name written on the wood in black marker; the climbing ropes and rock-climbing magazine tossed on the rolled-up extra mattress; the blemished wall where plaster was missing; the socks and underwear hanging from a metal drying rack; the bookcase where stacks of books occupied several shelves, and fourteen video and computer games, such as
Rally, Soldier of Fortune,
and
Tomb Raider II,
were stored on the bottom shelf. Kimball photographed everything.

Meanwhile, more and more reporters were assembling around the property line, and television trucks had arrived with their own lights and camera feeds. The Tulloch telephone kept ringing, and it was always another reporter, but Sedon kept answering anyway in case the caller turned out to be Robert. If Robert called, Sedon wanted the first voice the boy heard to be the family’s attorney, not that of a state police detective.

The search team had entered the house at 10:45
P
.
M
. The setup

and photography took about an hour. During this time, two new troopers arrived for the night shift of “securing” the house and the grounds, taking over from the troopers who’d been there since mid-afternoon. One was Jocelyn Stohl, the trooper who’d run into Robert and Jim on Bethel Mountain Road in the snowstorm a month earlier, on January

19. Inevitably she asked herself a question—what if ? What if she hadn’t been en route to an emergency? What if other troopers hadn’t been tied up with accidents and she’d been able to call for backup? What if she’d searched the car and learned what the boys were up to? Would murder have been averted? No matter how many times she asked herself those questions, she knew she’d never have the answers. Stohl made her way past the crowd of media and some Chelseans who’d gathered outside. She walked into the kitchen, where Keefe, Sedon, and Mike Tulloch sat. Outwardly she displayed her usual military bearing; inwardly, Stohl looked around at the house and town under siege and felt deep sadness.

It was after midnight when the actual search finally got under way, and Keefe left the kitchen and climbed the stairs toward Robert’s room. Intending just to check on things, he right away heard the search team talking. He sensed a buzz, an energy in the air. Despite the sexy drama of cop shows like
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,
a search team usually kept its head down and plodded along. But as he went to look inside, Keefe overheard chatter in Robert’s room. Jim White, one of the New Hampshire investigators, saw Keefe coming and greeted him with huge news: “We’ve got knives!”

Keefe was taken aback. But he wanted to know more, because everyone in Vermont seemed to own knives of one sort or another. What kind of knives? Keefe wanted to know. What kind of knives?

Just moments before, Garry Lawrence, wearing rubber gloves, had been drawn to a cardboard Florida Citrus box on the floor near a wastebasket. It was in one corner of Robert’s room, nearly obscured by the bureau with the clock radio that was behind the door. Jim White and Bob Estabrook were inspecting other parts of the room. Tom Hanlon and Kathy Kimball were downstairs, taking photographs of the

laundry room. The box was closed, and several writing notebooks and pads rested on top. Lawrence moved the notebooks, putting them atop the wastebasket. He opened the flaps of the box. Inside he saw a deep stack of Marvel comic books. But that’s not what caught his eye. Resting on top of the comic books were two bundles made of duct tape wrapped around cloth—a mitten for one, a sock for the other—mak-ing them look like foot-long mummies. They were makeshift sheaths, and protruding from each was a black, molded handle of a SOG SEAL 2000 combat knife.

The technician had struck forensics gold. If the sheaths left at the Zantops’ house were the glass slippers of the investigation, Lawrence had found the feet on which they fit. Laboratory testing would be necessary, including DNA analysis of what appeared to be bloodstains, but Keefe and the others began to think they’d caught a big break.

“You don’t often get the murder weapons,” Keefe said in an extreme understatement.

A long day suddenly accelerated into higher gear. Keefe, White, and the others went back downstairs to notify Hanlon of the find, and Kathy Kimball hustled upstairs to photograph the box and its contents. Sedon noticed the flurry of activity. He saw the investigators had a bounce in their step, a lift to their expressions, an energy that had replaced the flat look and bearing typical of the monotony of a painstaking search. It was the last thing a defense attorney wanted to

see. He stopped Keefe.

“Why is everyone so happy?”

Keefe paused. He liked Sedon but wasn’t about to reveal the discovery of such pivotal evidence. “Well,” Keefe said, “I’ll tell you this— I wish this was my case.”

Sedon got the point. Right then he knew they’d found something vital in Robert’s room. Maybe it was blood. Maybe it was a weapon. Whatever it was, Sedon knew they’d seized evidence that tied Robert Tulloch to the Zantops.

Together, the two knives became ITEM ONE in the search team’s inventory of evidence seized. By 1:30
A
.
M
., Hanlon and Lawrence had

carefully marked and packaged the knives and brought them outside to the forensics truck. By three o’clock Saturday morning, February 17, the knives were secure in the state police crime lab located in Waterbury, Vermont, where testing could begin.

It was the search team’s first and best find. The search was suspended for the night and resumed again by eleven o’clock Saturday morning. During the thirty-three total hours of police occupation, lasting until just before midnight Saturday, searchers methodically examined Robert’s room and the laundry room near the kitchen. They made hand-drawn sketches of the house’s floor plan, took photographs, and logged every item they seized as possibly having some evidentiary value. It was an excruciatingly slow process. Each item was placed in a bag, and the line of bags in a first-floor room got longer and longer. During all this time, a parallel search was under way of Jim’s room at his house on West Hill. In the end, searchers seized more than two hundred items from the boys, including their computers, notebooks, writings, Band-Aids and Ace bandages, a book about Hitler titled
Der Fuehrer,
blue jeans, shirts, and socks. Throughout Saturday, investigators came and went, and Saturday night the two key prosecutors, Kelly Ayotte and Mike Delaney, made a cameo appearance at the Tulloch house.