Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (37 page)

farm work or stored in other people’s barns around town. The tractors were a hobby—at least that’s how he justified it to his wife, Karen, who worked as a secretary in the school office. “I guess my status around here is I got a bunch of old John Deere tractors,” Lyford said. “I had seventeen but I sold some of them. The reason is I can’t keep up with the flat tires, the dead batteries, and gummed-up carburetors. With that many, I can’t even keep track of ’em.” The cap-wearing Lyford had a barrel chest and a habit of removing his cap as he talked so he could run his thick fingers back and forth across the top of his crew cut. The retired teacher no longer had to work, of course, but he couldn’t help himself. “It’s an itch that gets under your hide, and you just have to be doing this farm work all the time.”

Lyford was also a town selectman, one of a number of town leaders who had been huddling with Pomerantz and other local experts to fashion a way to cope with the murders. The case had generated a notoriety that was unwanted and, to their eyes, unwarranted. And like nearly everyone, Lyford took it personally. “I don’t like to have these big, black headlines in the paper,” he said, “because Chelsea is not a big, black-headline-producing town.”

Now in church was a juxtaposition for all to see: Doug Lyford and Cora Brooks—the proud Vietnam War veteran and the outspoken antiwar protester. The community meeting, Pomerantz realized, could have gone much differently, dividing people further and leaving the town even more adrift. Pomerantz knew this, because he could sense that some in the crowd, particularly older Chelseans, were not comfortable with the generally positive talk about the Tullochs and Parkers. Lyford, for one, saw the world more black and white than did many of the newcomers, and at times he’d spoken frankly about changes in Chelsea that troubled him: “The town of Chelsea hasn’t changed a bit. It’s just the people in it who have changed.” Or he would say, “We’re seein’ a lot more people movin’ here that are comin’ from money, and they don’t have the same family values that a lot of the old families used to have.” He did not single out the Tullochs or Parkers by name, but, said Lyford, “Parents used to have a lot more control, and now it seems a lot of parents are letting somebody else

raise their children.” The kids of Chelsea, he’d say, “have a lot more free time than they ever had before, and I think a lot of them, instead of having to work for money, their parents just give it to them.” Lyford was all common sense: “If you go looking for trouble you’re usually going to find it.”

Pomerantz didn’t know if Lyford on this night was holding his tongue, but he certainly knew Lyford well enough to suspect what he was thinking. Pomerantz did, however, sense an undercurrent of dissent to the support for Robert and Jim. Not everyone was happy, for example, about making a “community greeting card” out of the flip chart. Having invited people to jot down messages toward the end of the meeting, Pomerantz watched as a handful in the audience got up and headed right out the door. Those departing included Pomerantz’s longtime neighbor Carol Olsen, the elected town constable. “I did not think it was appropriate to be sending them a card,” Olsen said two days later. “If anything, we should be sending the Zantops a card.” But at the meeting Olsen had kept quiet. “I knew that some were furious but kept their mouths shut,” Pomerantz said. “I attributed their silence to their own awareness at some gut level that it was not the time.”

Pomerantz was right—it wasn’t a time for rancor. Most in the room had been swept up as one. Near the three-hour mark, the number of questions had finally begun to wind down, and Pomerantz could sense the gathering had succeeded in providing a stabilizing effect. He wasn’t alone. In back, Cora Brooks was experiencing a unity she’d never before seen in town. Beforehand, Brooks wouldn’t have been surprised if the discussion had grown testy, with the principal dividing line drawn between old timers and the relative newcomers. Both the Parker and Tulloch families were lumped into the latter group, a category in which the grown-ups were often called “granola parents” and the children were “crunchy kids.” The old-time Chelseans were a conservative and proud lot. “There’s a dignity here to your longevity,” Brooks said. “Chelsea is like a deck of cards with suits and kings, queens, and jacks, and if you’re born into one of those suits you’re going to end up as the town clerk or some other town position, or run some local business, and have a really significant position in the community, a position you are not likely to get if you move to Scarsdale or North Carolina or even Burlington. So you stay. Or if you leave, you come back.” But this night those divisions were tucked away.

The exclamation point on Brooks’s sense of harmony came when she found herself standing next to Doug Lyford as they were filing out of the church at the meeting’s end. The two Chelseans had quarreled in the past, mostly over issues related to Lyford’s role as a town selectman. A recent dust-up had erupted over the town’s “ditch project” to alleviate minor seasonal flooding in a brook that ran behind town hall and property along the east side of Main Street. Lyford called Brooks to notify her that engineers would be walking in her backyard on Main Street as part of a survey of land affected by the project. Lyford considered it a courtesy call, but the selectman ran headlong into the “question authority” ethos of a veteran protester. Brooks told Lyford in no uncertain terms the surveyors weren’t allowed on her land. The conversation soured quickly and Brooks ended the matter by hanging up the phone.

In church, Brooks became conscious of Lyford’s presence by her side, and then she felt Lyford’s hand touch her arm. Their eyes met. “We may not agree about much,” he told her. “Maybe not about anything. But I do know if I was in trouble, you’d be there.” It was, to Brooks, a communal moment that defined Chelsea.

“There was this shared grief,” she said. “People are really individuals here and don’t expect to agree about a lot of things, and it wasn’t so much that people agreed at the meeting as they allowed themselves to feel together the devastating news—that these boys were in police custody and if they did it or were innocent, no way it wasn’t a tragedy, no matter what you thought.”

Said Lyford, “Two people can be madder ’n hell at each other today, and an issue comes up and they can be side by side working on it. That’s always been true about Chelsea. It’s everybody’s family in this town.”

Exiting into the cold and the bright lights cast by the big-city television trucks, most people put their heads down and waved off the reporters and television crews that emerged from the shadows. Sedon

and his wife hurried off to their car, the packed snow squeaking underfoot. Yet a few locals made themselves available to the media. “My heart goes out to the two Zantop children,” said Doug Lyford, whose remarks appeared in a
New York Times
story about the meeting. “These are our children. . . . I think a lot of us feel maybe we have failed a lit-tle bit. Maybe we weren’t keeping enough control.”

Cars pulled out into the snow-covered streets and into the night. Most people headed home, but some pulled into The Pines’ parking lot alongside a row of snowmobiles. Inside the town’s only bar the kitchen was humming. A TV was tuned to the hit show
Survivor.

“It’s possible that two of Chelsea’s children have done something terrible,” Pomerantz said. “Sometimes people do very bad things. It doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with our community.” For weeks to come, Pomerantz would remain mystified at the nation’s interest in his tiny town in the midst of news about a Japanese trawler accidentally sunk by an American submarine, President Clinton’s tra-vails, and the capture of an FBI counterintelligence expert who became a double agent. He told his journal: “Submarine, Clinton, spy scandal, and still we are the news.”

T
wo bulletin boards—one outside Chelsea Town Hall and a larger “Town Talk” board outside Will’s Store—were centrally located for

notices that might interest residents. Posters might announce an upcoming performance at the school, a request for information about some unsolved act of vandalism, such as a small fire set on the handicap ramp leading into Town Hall, or such seasonal activities as the annual Cabin Fever Dance, the spring road rally, or the summertime farmers’ market held weekly on the North Common. By early March a new flyer appeared outside Town Hall headlined “Chelsea Community Cares.” Below the headline was a photograph of the quintessential New England village.

The text read: “We are community members interested in offering support to the families of James Parker and Robert Tulloch during this difficult time. Please help us by contributing funds to offset the financial burdens related to food, lodging, and travel expenses, telephone bills, and lost wages. (This is not intended as a defense fund).” Donations could be made to either or both families, and a post office box was listed.

The issue of a legal defense had been put to rest at the community meeting, but the idea of a family expense fund took hold almost immediately. Key organizers included schoolteacher DeRoss Kellogg, who’d expressed his devotion to Robert and had begun visiting him in jail, and dairy farmer Ron Allen, who was a close friend of John and Joan Parker.

Generally, Allen retrieved the money sent to the post office box and deposited it in a joint bank account in the families’ names, from which the Tullochs and Parkers could withdraw funds as needed. Kellogg and his wife would then write thank-you notes after getting a list of donors’ names from Allen. Most donations, said Kellogg, “included very nice notes saying how they had compassion for the families.” By late April—about two months after the fund was set up—Kellogg said donations exceeded $10,000. He said nearly half of the roughly 120 donors were from Chelsea or surrounding towns and most of the remaining contributions came from around New England. “We had several donors from Hanover, a couple of them even went to the trouble to let us know that they worked for Dartmouth College—yeah, try to figure that one out,” Kellogg wrote in an e-mail about the fund. “We’ve had several donations from the Boston area, a couple of large donations from New York City, a couple of donations from California (Joan Parker’s relatives?), and one from a U.S. ambassador who happened to be at a conference in Portsmouth and took the time to drive up to Chelsea to personally give me a check.” To reporters, Kellogg mentioned a donation that came from a woman living in Washington, D.C., who had read about the murders. “She had a couple of sons herself who were near that age,” he said. The fund’s existence brought the veteran teacher a rush of media attention. “I’ve had offers to appear on
Good Morning America
etc.
ad nauseam,” he told an acquaintance with barely concealed pride.

Not everyone was supportive. Two men began arguing one day

about the stack of flyers on the counter of the village food store—one favored the fund as the right thing to do, the other complained it was all wrong. Neither man would back down, and the pair nearly came to blows, but the store owner quickly stepped in and insisted they leave. The story of the near-fight spread around town and ended up in local newspapers.

Both Ron Allen and DeRoss Kellogg bumped into a fair share of criticism. “I’ve heard a few people ask, ‘Why are you raising money for murderers?’ ” said Allen. Put on the defensive, the two men stressed that the fund wasn’t for the boys’ legal costs but for their families’ expenses. “I know people are upset with it,” said Kellogg. “But I know they haven’t held it against me in any way. We’ve agreed to disagree.”

P
omerantz played the role of facilitator at two more community meetings. Each time fewer people came. There was a meeting in early

March at the church, but this time the few dozen who showed up gathered in a room downstairs instead of the main sanctuary. Outside only a single TV truck stood watch. Just two newspaper reporters appeared to see if the meeting would generate news. The main topic, again, was parenting and parental angst. “Wondering how we know if our kids could kill someone,” Pomerantz wrote in his journal. Again, there was an outpouring of community guilt, which Pomerantz fielded by employing a line that was becoming a mantra of sorts: “Chelsea didn’t kill the Zantops.” Some talked about “parenting workshops,” but nothing definite was planned. Overall, Pomerantz sensed a town in grief. “Loss of innocence,” he noted. Feeling increasingly like he truly was a therapist treating a community, Pomerantz explored the subtext of hard feelings he’d detected at the first meeting. He encouraged peo-ple to discuss their feelings and, he said later, “there was an open expression of positives and negatives about the town, the school, and the children.”

Pomerantz wondered if the third meeting, in early April, was needed. “Will anyone show up for this one?” Pomerantz asked his journal. He was convinced the first meeting had been a necessity. But he

was wary about overdoing it. “In my mind I was mostly wondering if we needed more meetings or if it was time to drop out,” he said later. “The worst thing about shrinks is that we often don’t know when to stop.”

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alking regularly to people around town, Pomerantz found that, “The people closest to the Parkers and Tullochs were, as might be expected,

upset, and probably stayed that way.” Beyond that circle, however, he found Chelseans who had gotten on with their day-to-day lives. “Confronted by trauma, most people do just fine eventually,” Pomerantz wrote. “It seemed that wherever I went people had moved on to other things. More worried about sugaring season and stuff like that.” Progress hardly came in a straight line, however. More like stut-ter steps. The student play scheduled for a March performance at Chelsea Public School was cancelled abruptly in late February. The one-act play, titled
Juvie,
included scenes of teenage violence and murder—the kind of tough and challenging subject matter from which art is drawn. But the drama now seemed too close to Chelsea’s reality. Even so, the decision to deep-six the show didn’t come easily— after all this was Chelsea, where dramatic arts were as rooted as the oldest oaks in town. Pat Davenport, the school principal, found herself walking a high-wire act—at once trying to keep kids busy and as close to a regular schedule as possible, but also coping with the extraordinary impact of the two classmates’ arrests for murder. Davenport knew a dramatic production would ordinarily provide an antidote of sorts for students, an escape from the pain they felt in their everyday lives. “When they were in character at least they weren’t themselves in Chelsea right now,” said Davenport, a former English teacher. But this play, she decided, was too much. “It is a good play,” she said, but “a raw topic.” Some students were upset with her, but the principal held firm: