Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (41 page)

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Jailhouse Snitch

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week after the Dartmouth and Chelsea graduation ceremonies, two men chatted in a brown Ford Crown Victoria driving south along

New Hampshire’s Route 25. The driver was a young sheriff ’s deputy with a .40-caliber Glock on his hip. His backseat passenger was a handcuffed inmate from the Grafton County Jail. They were headed to another New Hampshire county, where the inmate faced charges of forgery and passing bad checks.

As they drove along the two-lane blacktop, the inmate whiled away the time by talking about how he ended up in jail—it was an intricate tale, complete with a motorcycle crash, a coma, and some romantic entanglements along the way. The story ended with him spending his days in maximum security, confined to a cell near one of the teenagers charged with killing the Dartmouth professors.

“That case is a shame,” Deputy Chad Morris told his passenger.

The evidence against them looks solid, Morris said, but everyone’s still trying to figure out why they did it.

The inmate, a man known to some as “Ranger,” thought about that for a minute. It was an opening he’d been waiting for.

F
our months earlier, upon his return from Indiana, Robert was driven through the winding roads of Grafton County in northwest New

Hampshire to the county seat of North Haverhill. The Zantops’ town of Etna was at the southern tip of the county, an hour away and a world removed.

While Etna basks in the intellectual light of Dartmouth, remote North Haverhill does the county’s dirty work. Its dominant institution is the fourteen-hundred-acre county complex, which includes the courthouse, a nursing home, the jail, a dairy farm where minimum-security inmates provide the labor, and hundreds of acres of meadows and timber land. The only link between the communities is the main road through North Haverhill: Dartmouth College Highway.

Robert entered the jail through a side entrance, via a steel door that clanked noisily shut behind him. He was led to a closet-sized booking room to be photographed and fingerprinted, after which he sat in a hard chair as a corrections officer raced through a series of questions designed to assess the security risk of each new inmate. In Robert’s case, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: Anyone awaiting trial for murder would automatically be held in maximum security, the “Max Unit.”

Just a short walk from the booking area, the Max Unit looked like the set of an old prison film. It was a nineteenth-century maze of steel and stone that had absorbed the sour odors and stale breath of untold misfits and miscreants. The unit—home on any given day to about one-third of the jail’s ninety inmates—was divided into four rectangular boxes called tiers. Each of the four tiers had the feel of a bus station’s overcrowded men’s room, a jam of sweaty flesh under dim artificial lights, a place with a numbing gravitational pull to the lowest common

denominator. The rules of survival were simple and essential: keep your head down, don’t make enemies, and don’t stand out. Smarter and more experienced inmates knew a fourth rule: trust no one.

Two sides of each tier were enclosed by steel bars layered with endless coats of industrial gray paint, and the other two sides were solid stone. Each tier had four closely packed cells, with one or two inmates in each. Each cell was no more than six feet wide and eight feet deep. Inside were bunk beds and a toilet at the far end—in full view of any corrections officer or inmate walking past. Outside the cells was a hallway called a catwalk. At three feet wide and thirty feet long, the catwalk was the tier’s only common area, a narrow passage where inmates could congregate, though never comfortably.

Just outside the bars at one end of the catwalk was a shelf with a small television set, its controls reachable if one snaked an arm through the bars. MTV and Jerry Springer were the usual fare. The TV was shared by all the men on a tier, but the catwalk was only wide enough for a single plastic chair, so inmates crowded around, body to body in orange Max Unit uniforms, or sat lined up behind one another like riders on a bicycle built for eight. Even that pleasure was limited: an infraction by any one inmate on the tier—drawing a caricature of a corrections officer on the wall, for instance—might result in the shared punishment of a week without television. At the other end of the catwalk was a phone inmates used to make collect calls to anyone who’d accept them at a dollar a minute, or to receive incoming calls from their lawyers. Next to the phone was a small shower with a flimsy plastic curtain.

Before Robert’s arrival, prosecutors and jail officials worked out a plan. They planted an undercover officer in his cell, hoping that a teenage inmate new to life behind bars might slip and say something incriminating. The officer—who had spent time with Robert earlier in the day in a holding cell at the Grafton County Sheriff’s Office—was equipped with a hidden tape recorder, but he couldn’t get it to work. It didn’t matter; Robert revealed nothing. They talked about who would get the top bunk and what kind of pizza they liked. Robert’s

most telling comment was that “nobody should have to live in a place like this.” When the undercover officer said his name was Jim, Robert looked away and said only, “I have a friend named Jim.”

Some inmates in the Max Unit taped pictures to their cell walls, and Robert and some others kept GE radios purchased for $45 each from the jail commissary. Luckier ones had radios “willed” to them by former cellmates who had been freed or sent on to the state prison in Concord. The commissary also offered a range of junk food, necessities, and semi-luxuries, including $15.99 box fans for the jail’s unbearable summer heat, shower shoes for $2, Pert shampoo for $3.25, and greeting cards—“Thinking of You” was a popular choice—for $1.50. There was an inevitable breakdown of haves and have-nots in the jail—the haves had someone on the outside to replenish their commissary accounts.

Robert found one such person in an unlikely place: the Glencliff Home for the Elderly, a state-funded retirement home a few miles from the jail that cared for old people with mental illnesses or developmental disabilities. To the surprise of her friends and colleagues, the home’s superintendent, Sandra Knapp, began writing to Robert and then visiting him. Soon the middle-aged woman who looked like a schoolmarm became his most frequent visitor, regularly standing by on visiting days in case none of his family or friends showed up. She sent him books by the dozen and regularly deposited $10 or $20 in his commissary account. One time, Mike Tulloch was about to leave some money for his son, but when he saw Knapp he pocketed his wallet, knowing she would give Robert all he needed. Knapp refused to discuss what drew her to Robert, but once told reporters she considered him “a wonderful young man.” Knapp’s employees were so disturbed by that comment they bought an ad in a local newspaper. “Our hearts go out to the true victims of this tragedy and we find such statements deeply offensive,” they wrote. To Glenn Libby, the jail’s superintendent, Knapp was a compassionate woman being used by a manipulative killer. “Robert at times made it clear he’s got her on a string,” said Libby, whose wife worked for Knapp at the nursing home.

Personal visits for maximum-security inmates at Grafton were

allowed just one hour a week, on Saturday mornings, with no physical contact permitted. At most, two adults and two children could visit at one time. In addition to Sandra Knapp, Robert’s sixth grade teacher DeRoss Kellogg came regularly. On different visits he brought a friend; Robert’s brother, Kienan; his debate partner, Kip Battey; the Chelsea school librarian; and a member of The Crew. Once Kellogg arrived with Mike Tulloch, and Robert’s face fell.

The jail visits took a toll on Kellogg, leaving him worn out and wasted. His blood pressure rose. He compared his heartache to “los-ing a loved one, day after day, with no end in sight.” Late in the spring, when Kellogg said he wouldn’t be able to visit as often, Robert urged him to at least keep writing. “You said you would send letters now and then,” Robert wrote. “Tell you what. I’ll mail you like one letter, or maybe two every week, if you keep sending letters all the time. . . . You know my life isn’t very good.”

As months passed, Kellogg saw changes in his former star pupil. Robert’s letters grew shorter and the writing became more jagged, the ideas disjointed. He began calling Kellogg and talking for hours on end. The bills mounted for the Chelsea schoolteacher, but he knew there were few other people who would accept the collect calls.

Kellogg tried to hold on to his carefully constructed image of Robert as a decent, thoughtful young man, fixating on a story Robert told him about asking the corrections officers to place an inmate with a mental disability in his cell to prevent other inmates from abusing him. But Libby told a different version of the story. Robert was the primary abuser, Libby said, at one point crushing the cellmate’s glasses and flushing them down the toilet for the sport of it. Libby thought Robert fit the profile of a serial killer, and that only his capture prevented more deaths.

Though Kellogg considered himself crucial to Robert and seemed to bask in the attention he received as Robert’s media-friendly defender, Kellogg soon became an irritation to Robert’s lawyers. The low point came when Kellogg tried to recruit celebrity lawyer Gerry Spence to the legal team, an unsuccessful attempt that alienated Robert’s public defenders, Richard Guerriero and Barbara Keshen.

A friend of Kellogg’s sent Robert books on t’ai chi and Zen philosophy. The young inmate also grew enchanted with Ayn Rand, whose philosophy was built on “the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.” Robert read
The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
a history of Scotland, Thor Heyerdahl’s adventure classic
Kon-Tiki,
and the novel
Cold Mountain,
about a Confederate army deserter’s journey home. He didn’t like the ending, because the hero died after his long trek.

At Robert’s request, Kellogg sent him
Something Wicked This Way Comes
by Ray Bradbury. Investigators had found cassettes for an audio version of the same book when they searched Joan Parker’s green Subaru—the car Robert and Jim drove to the Zantops’ house. One lyri-cal passage that Robert would have read describes the characters’ symbiotic relationship: “There they go, Jim running slower to stay with Will, Will running faster to stay with Jim. Jim breaking two windows in a haunted house because Will’s along, Will breaking one window instead of none, because Jim’s watching. God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of the other.”

A typical day in the Max Unit started with lights on at five in the morning. A corrections officer would yell, “Chow’s on the way” and the caged men would grunt in recognition or stay silent in their bunks. Breakfast was optional, so only a few inmates would rouse themselves from the thin, lumpy pads that passed for mattresses. Breakfast arrived by six o’clock, most often eggs, bacon, and soggy toast, prepared at the county nursing home next door to the jail and wheeled on carts through an underground tunnel. There was a time when inmates left their cells and marched through the tunnel to a secure dining room at the nursing home, but that ended with a hostage-taking incident in 1995 led by a former New York City policeman awaiting trial on charges of dismembering his wife.

Robert and the other Max Unit inmates filled the rest of their mornings by hanging out on their bunks, playing cards, making phone

calls, reading, and maybe taking a trip to the small collection of books that passed for the jail library. Inmates awaiting trial might have calls or visits from their lawyers, but many slept through the morning altogether, awakening for lunch at eleven, only to go back to sleep and snooze through the afternoon.

The big event of the day came in the afternoon, when all Max Unit inmates were allowed one hour outside their tiers. They decided collectively, with majority rule, whether to spend the hour in an inside recreation room or an outdoor yard. Indoors featured a foosball table, a Ping-Pong table, two treadmills, and a Stairmaster. But the group usually elected to go outside, to a small yard shaped like a lopsided pentagon. Three of the sides were the walls of the jail and the other two were tall fences topped with barbed wire. There was a basketball hoop with a shredded net, but most of the inmates spent the hour lined up along the fence, their fingers entwined in the chain links.