Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (4 page)

The gallows didn’t stay there long. In Chelsea, it’s simple—murder is not part of the town’s experience. Until recently, most wouldn’t know if anyone from town had ever been charged with homicide. Few can place the name Rebecca Peake—and her case doesn’t really

count because she was from Randolph. Only the true old guard can come up with a lone case from local history. In 1978, a thirty-four- year-old Chelsea man was charged with manslaughter after killing his brother with a shotgun blast to the chest at the house in West Hill the two men shared with their mother. Questions arose at trial about the shooter’s mental health and his possible diminished capacity, and following deliberations a Vermont jury came back with a not-guilty verdict.

It was a case that unfolded in the local news as a new couple was just settling into Chelsea. John Parker and Joan Essery, both twenty-nine years old, had an outdoor wedding in Chelsea on September 30, 1979. Planning to raise a family, the Parkers soon went about building a home on nineteen acres on West Hill.

B
y the dawn of the twenty-first century, Chelsea was a place where, on a typical Friday night in the spring, quiet was the village’s most ear-

splitting trait. There was the burbling brook, running between the two greens, that eventually empties into the First Branch of the White River; the trilling of spring peepers breeding in vernal pools; the rattle of a pickup truck idling in front of a country store while the driver paid for a twelve-pack of Bud; the fading laughter of two boys on their bikes weaving into the dark past homes south of town; the low growl of log-ger Jack Johnson’s twenty-two-wheeler, its shiny blue-gray hood sporting the names of his four sons painted in a proud and fancy script, lumbering through the village toward home after a long day of hauling logs and pulp wood. The world might be hopping elsewhere but not in Chelsea, and the tranquility could at once be comforting and disconcerting for outsiders. More than 75 percent of Americans live in or around urban centers; Chelsea’s entire population of 1,250 could fit in a single waterfront apartment building in Boston. There are no traffic lights in Chelsea, cell phones rarely function, and the nearest highway is at least a thirty-minute drive—a town, all in all, where less is more. It’s a town embodying the extreme in the cultural concept that the world is a small place, a web where people link up to one another

within a half-dozen or so connections. The playwright John Guare popularized the idea in his play,
Six Degrees of Separation
. In Chelsea, forget about six degrees. Try two. Chelseans know one another directly or are only one step removed, a familiarity that begins in the community’s lone school. Each elementary grade at the Chelsea Public School has a single class. There are years when some grades have fewer than ten kids. Overall, the K-12 school has only about 270 students, and many of the high schoolers are not even from Chelsea but are tuition-paying students from nearby towns. By high school, many of the students have known and played with one another since they were toddlers struggling to stay on their feet. “In Chelsea we’re all woven together, whether we like it or not,” one resident said.

The pillars of the community are the old-time Chelseans whose ancestors go back for generations and who continue the farming and logging traditions. Logger and selectman Jack Johnson grew up in nearby Corinth, and his wife, Annette, grew up in Chelsea, where they met in high school. She now works in the school cafeteria. Jack’s father was a logger, as are two of his sons. “My father always logged and ever since I was five years old I helped out in the woods,” Jack Johnson said. Down the road from their house and the hundred acres they own on West Hill, the Johnsons have built the Johnson Family Sugar House for making maple syrup each March. Their youngest son, Brad, was a standout high school athlete, excelling in basketball, becoming the first player to score one thousand career points his junior year. The Johnson boys, like so many Chelsea boys, grew up logging, sugaring, camping, and hunting. “Brad was born with a basketball in one hand and a gun in the other,” his mother, Annette, said.

Yet big, albeit slow, change has come to Chelsea—trends affecting both the town’s farm-based economy and the culture. Older Chelseans talk about life on the farm. “There was always work to do,” said Chelsea native Doug Lyford. Lyford grew up on his family’s farm, became a teacher in town, and farms once again full-time at age fifty-four. When he was a boy in the 1950s, he woke to chores and after school picked up where he’d left off. Free time was an unfamiliar concept. Borrowing a term from today’s baby boomers, the farm kids of Chelsea were “overbooked.”

But that time has long passed. The number of dairy farms in Chelsea—nearly two hundred a century ago—dwindled to about eleven by 1995. “We’ve changed from more of an agricultural community into more of a bedroom community,” said Lyford, “where both parents work out, and the kids are kind of latchkey kids.” To Lyford, these changes aren’t a good thing. “The way I look at kids,” he said, “is when they’re small they’re almost like dogs and horses. All three of those categories—dogs and horses and kids—they need a little direction from adults. And if they don’t get it, you know, dogs will run wild, the horses are no good, and the kids run a little wild, too.”

The 1960s brought a cultural shock that rocked old Chelsea— what locals still refer to as the “hippie invasion.” Town historian Gilman noted in 1984 that “many of the new arrivals brought a change of lifestyle with long hair, bare feet, a permissive use of drugs, and a change in sexual mores which clashed with traditional habits.” Instead of the standard fare at the annual Town Meeting—school budgets and road maintenance—Chelseans were suddenly hotly debating Vietnam or the war in El Salvador. Drawn to Chelsea during this time were peo-ple like Cora Brooks, a poet, antiwar protester, and single mother. Brooks, petite and pretty in a no-frills way, bought a beat-up old house on Main Street in 1977 and later told a magazine writer she picked Chelsea “because I wanted to see the stars clearly. I wanted to see trees and hear birds and see wildflowers and learn about elements like fire and ice and mud and fresh air.” She also wanted to end war. In 1981, Brooks and six others—the so-called Chelsea Seven—were arrested at a draft registration protest outside the post office. Trespassing charges were eventually dropped.

Drawn to Chelsea five years before Brooks was a young doctor from Chicago named Andrew Pomerantz. “I was the hippie doctor,” Pomerantz said about his arrival in 1972, long hair and all, with his wife, Jill, and their baby son. They spent their first summer camping in a tent, then bought some land and dug in. Pomerantz aspired to be

a country doctor. “We wanted a small town, and a small town away from the interstate.” Chelsea fit the bill. “I figured twenty miles was a reasonable distance to cut down on some of the schlocky tourist stuff that was beginning to grow up around Vermont.” Pomerantz became a family practitioner in the village.

“Flatlanders” like Brooks and Pomerantz brought diversity to Chelsea—cultural and socio-economic rather than ethnic. The old and new had some trouble mixing. Pomerantz found Chelsea to be “one of the last bastions of conservatism. When I first got here, the big national issue was Watergate, and a lot of people here thought Nixon was framed.” But Pomerantz found in Chelsea a town that cared, with people who, in time, looked past the ponytail and protest politics. “I found early on people could get past that fairly quickly and begin to see people for who they were and what they had to contribute.” The town’s smallness and intimacy had produced conservatism with a heart. “Primal American values—family and community,” said Pomerantz. By the late 1970s, many of the early hippies had moved on, but Cora Brooks stayed, becoming a frequent substitute teacher at the Chelsea school, a poetry teacher, and an advocate for battered women. Pomerantz and his wife stayed, too, raising three kids. Eventually he became a psychiatrist and took a job at a hospital thirty miles away in White River Junction.

Newcomers continued to trickle in, though, drawn just as Pomerantz and Brooks had been to the elbow room and slower pace of an out-of-the-way place. “Chelsea provides a life free from what I call kitsch—cheap commercial,” said David Savidge, who moved to the area in the early 1970s. “You don’t need a forty thousand-dollar SUV or an eight hundred thousand-dollar home to enjoy life here.” Savidge, his wife, Mary, and two sons live four miles outside Chelsea village, just over the line in the town of Washington. His boys go to the Chelsea school. Savidge grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and attended the private Hun School, but wanted none of that life for his sons. “Too much wealth and waste out there.”

Locals sometimes call the new brand of arrivals “Ivy League carpenters” or “granola types,” people who’d mostly come of age during

the time of Flower Power and now wanted small-town life for their families. From the first, Chelsea has always been just that—a family-styled town. It said so in the founding charter. It’s why John and Joan Parker built a house there two centuries later, in 1979. It’s why thirteen years after that, in 1992, another young family, Mike and Diane Tulloch and their four kids, moved to town after a brief, difficult spell in Florida. Chelsea was a place to call home.

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An

American Dream

O
n a cold, wet day in March 1976, the Zantop family trudged down the gangplank of a Polish freighter docked at the Port of Montreal. The

sea-weary family—Half, Susanne, and their daughters, four-year-old Veronika and two-year-old Mariana—had boarded the ship ten days earlier in Hamburg, in the Zantops’ native Germany. They arrived in Montreal bundled against the cold, en route to a new life in Hanover, New Hampshire, where Half had accepted a job teaching geology at Dartmouth College.

Half was thirty-seven, tall and handsome, with a close-cropped dark beard and a quiet bearing. Susanne was thirty, petite and pretty, with dark hair and a manner that was at once warm and intense. They had crossed the Atlantic in search of a safe, stable community in which to raise their daughters, who arrived looking like china dolls in sweet dresses, barely a word of English between them. The first sign

that the Zantops had chosen their destination well materialized even before they crossed into the United States. Waiting for them at the bustling Montreal dock was a Dartmouth emissary, a legendary geology professor at the Ivy League school named Richard “Dick” Stoiber.

Knowing that the Zantops would be arriving with most of their worldly possessions, Stoiber had driven to Canada in convoy with a second car, a rented station wagon driven by a graduate student named Jim Reynolds and his wife, Haidee. After a long wait for the Zantops to clear Customs, the group got some bad news—a labor dispute had idled all porters, and no handcarts were available. Soaked by an icy rain, the three male academics—Half Zantop, Dick Stoiber, and Jim Reynolds—did mules’ work, hauling twenty-two suitcases and duffel bags from the ship to the cars. The men made the wearying trek in hundred-foot increments, while Susanne, Haidee, and the bewildered little girls stood guard over the moving piles of luggage. To lighten the load, Stoiber joked that the luggage-moving team reminded him of penitents reenacting the Stations of the Cross. While the girls clung to her legs, Susanne fell into conversation with Haidee about politics, expressing her hope that Jimmy Carter would win the presidency in November.

They stuffed the bags into the Reynoldses’ car, while the Zantops piled in with Stoiber for a four-hour drive to Hanover. Almost as soon as they got under way, Veronika and Mariana were asleep in the back seat. By the time they reached Hanover, the dockside drizzle had turned into a downpour. Stoiber and Reynolds drove directly to the home of another of Half’s new colleagues, Richard Birnie, like Half, a promising young geologist who had just joined the Dartmouth earth sciences faculty. In time, Birnie would come to admire Half as the conscience of their department and a first-rate geologist, at home in a classroom but happiest in rock-strewn field. At their first meeting, Birnie greeted the Zantop family with the most down-home fare he could rustle up: grilled hamburgers and hot dogs. Veronika and Mariana were still rubbing sleep from their eyes when Stoiber brought them each a huge, juicy burger on a paper plate. He offered it with the benediction: “This, my dears, is the American dream.”

Over the next twenty-five years, the Zantop family would achieve that dream to a remarkable extent.

H
alf—pronounced
hahlf
, from the German “to help”—was the fourth of six children of a printer and a homemaker. Before his birth

and throughout his youth, Half and his family bounced back and forth between Spain and Germany, tossed on the tides of war and recession. In 1925, the German economy was in ruins after World War I, and Half’s father moved the family to Barcelona in search of work, eventually running a profitable printing and box-making factory. The Zantops remained in Spain until 1936, when upheaval caused by the