Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (42 page)

They had a sweeping view down a rolling hill to a meadow, where foxes, deer, and wild turkeys were joined by the occasional coyote or moose. Beyond the meadow was a meandering oxbow of the Connecticut River, then a line of trees that followed a bend in the river. Beyond that was another meadow, just over the state line in Vermont. The vista was a landscape painter’s New England ideal.

Despite the view and the chance to breathe fresh air, some inmates chose to stay locked inside rather than stand at the fence. After nearly two decades in the corrections business, Glenn Libby understood why. The view was torture to inmates with wanderlust, who had grown up amid forests and mountains—a shot glass of beer to a hardcore alco-holic. The effect tended to be exaggerated among inmates facing long stretches of prison time. Not long after Robert arrived at the jail, Libby noticed that he was just such an inmate. At first, Robert would spend his hour outside, pining for the woods just out of reach. But then he’d be out of sorts afterward. Soon he began holing up in his cell during recreation hours. A couple of months later, however, Robert surprised Libby by emerging again from his shell and returning for his daily hour at the edge of the great outdoors.

As Grafton County’s chief jailer, Libby made a point of noticing

things like that. When men were confined in such tight quarters, it paid to watch them closely, to know when things were even slightly out of kilter. Libby kept an especially close eye on Robert, in part because of his celebrity inmate status but also because the superintendent realized that even a small change in his routine, surroundings, or relations with fellow inmates could send him spiraling downward.

Over time, Libby formed a detailed impression of Robert: arrogant, self-centered, a manipulator who prodded and poked to test the limits of his jailers and fellow inmates. Libby saw a young man who tried to “mold people around him to suit his purposes,” someone who would coldly calculate every action to benefit himself—even more than typically scheming inmates. “He’d take in everything you said, and like a cash register he’d total it up and then formulate a question or a come-back request,” Libby said. Robert got into several full-blown fistfights, usually when he decided to pick on “some inmate who was scrawny.” That way, Libby said, he could “flex his muscle in a predatory style.”

Late afternoon in the Max Unit was spent watching television, making phone calls, reading, and playing endless games of crazy eights, hearts, and spades. Dinner arrived by 5
P
.
M
., served, like the other meals, on plastic plates filled by a corrections officer then passed through an opening in the bars. Then there were more card games, television, and letter-writing.

Robert wasn’t supposed to write to his sometime girlfriend, Christiana Usenza, because she was a potential witness at his trial, just as she had been before the grand jury that in April indicted him for murder. But he devised a plan to skirt that prohibition, enlisting the help of DeRoss Kellogg. If Kellogg received a letter with his first name spelled incorrectly on the envelope—with a lowercase
r
, “De
r
oss”—it was intended for Christiana, and Kellogg was supposed to pass those letters, unopened, to her. The scheme worked twice.

“God I miss Jim,” Robert wrote Christiana. Then, referring to Jim’s sister and mother: “Tell Di to tell Jim to remember all those talks we had. I know she probably won’t. Joan is really controlling the hell out of that situation.” In the other letter, he wrote: “Jim is like my brother. I respect and love him more than anything.”

“So many ways to commit suicide,” Robert continued. “But I can’t do that, not if Jim doesn’t want me to. He could be mad at me. I doubt it. He’s my hero, you know, him and you. Him because I have seen him. I know how he dealt with this. As smooth as obsidian.” It was a reference Half Zantop might have appreciated—comparing Jim to a dense, dark volcanic glass. But there was an apparently unintended meaning in Robert’s simile. Obsidian is indeed smooth, but when it cracks, its edges form a sharp curve that can make it a deadly weapon. “He’s amazing,” Robert wrote. “I know nothing can break him. It’s

amazing. He never broke throughout this whole deal.”

Robert himself wasn’t nearly as tight-lipped. Despite repeated warnings from his lawyers not to talk to anyone about the case, Robert thought he knew best. Ignoring his lawyers’ pleas, he befriended two older inmates, who, he seemed to think, could help and protect him if he were convicted and sent to the state prison in Concord. He seemed to enjoy bragging to them about his criminal exploits, as though he could impress them with his capacity for killing and his self-described sangfroid while carrying out a double murder. One was an inmate of American Indian heritage, whom Robert called Chief.

When Chief was sentenced to three-and-half to seven years in another prison instead of Concord, Robert was incensed. He imagined he possessed the means and the power to control the New Hampshire corrections system while making his family rich in the process, and he expressed that grandiosity in a letter to someone close to Chief.

“Chief and I were going to write a book, and make millions,” Robert wrote. “Since two Dartmouth professors died, everyone who knew them or lived in New Hampshire or who likes this kind of thing will buy it. And Chief is just the man to write it. I believe you would end up with some 30 million (dollars).” That idea was foiled, Robert explained, when Chief wasn’t sent to Concord. But Robert had a plan to fix that.

“I would plead guilty in exchange for Chief getting out in like 4-6 months. Or earlier. That way, we can immediately write the book in those months. He could set me up in Concord. And get out, find a publisher, work out the legal stuff, and make the money. This 3
1
/2
to 7

really fucked our plans, but I am not going to let that stop us. I know pleading guilty for a life sentence sounds crazy. But I think I am fucked anyway. And if they will make a deal Chief gets out. I get to spend a few months with him. And then our families get rich. Also, if I plead guilty it might help my friend’s case. . . . Burn this letter after you read it. Don’t communicate with my mother, all this is too sensitive.”

Despite Robert’s warnings, authorities got hold of the self-incrimi- nating letter, and his farfetched plan fizzled.

In addition to Chief, Robert also befriended a biker with a history of passing bad checks, who went by the handle “Ranger”—the same man who would later find himself in the back seat of Chad Morris’s cruiser.

Lights out at the Grafton County Jail came at eleven o’clock. Some nights, the quiet was broken by the flapping wings of bats followed by yells from inmates.

S
ixty miles south, at the modern Belknap County Jail in Laconia, Jim lay on his back on a bench in a living room–sized common area out-

side his private cell. His long legs hung over the end of the bench, so Jim positioned a chair to support the overflow of his sock-clad feet. He chose his position carefully: rays of natural light filtered down on him through a milky-glass skylight directly overhead. It looked as though he was modeling a passage in the paperback book he was reading,
The Snow Leopard,
Peter Matthiessen’s 1978 story of an arduous search for the elusive big cat. “All other creatures look down toward the earth,” Matthiessen wrote, “but man was given a face so that he might turn his eyes toward the stars and gaze upon the sky.”

Now and then, the former class clown looked up from his prone position to see who was walking past the shatterproof glass that enclosed the common room. If the visitors lingered awhile, watching him, he might raise his arm and offer a cocky wave. Then he’d get up, casually toss a black sweatshirt over his shoulder, and walk into his cell, for privacy.

Taking a break from the book, Jim might fill out a commissary

form. The jail supplied Ivory soap for free, but Jim preferred Dial, so he’d pay seventy-five cents for a bar. He didn’t like the unlined paper given to inmates, so he paid a dollar for a stack of lined paper. He and Robert shared a distaste for junk food, so for a snack he’d order pret-zels for twenty-five cents and a PowerAde drink, Jagged Ice flavor, for seventy-five cents. The cost would be deducted from the commissary account regularly replenished by his parents.

For three months after he was brought back from Indiana, Jim was confined to New Hampshire’s juvenile detention center in Concord, a facility with the feel of a strict boarding school. Teens held there ate their meals in a cafeteria setting, and their days were filled with classes and homework. Visiting hours were held three afternoons a week, and when those visits began or ended with hugs, the officers paid no mind. “If there’s some demonstration of affection, we’re not going to say ‘Knock it off,’ ” said Philip Nadeau, who supervised the detention cen-ter. “We realize these are youngsters we’re dealing with. They’ve made some bad decisions, but they still need some support. And the best people to give it to them is their parents.”

When Jim turned seventeen in May, he was brought to the Belknap County Jail, in the Lakes Region of central New Hampshire. There was never any consideration of bringing him to Grafton County Jail, where he and Robert would have a chance to work on a new alibi. Jim’s move from a juvenile center to an adult jail forced him to adapt to greater confinement, but Belknap wasn’t nearly as tough as Grafton.

The Belknap jail was a two-story, almost windowless building made from red cinder-block with a blue-tile stripe, something an unimaginative child might design from Lego blocks. A small portion of the jail dated to the 1800s, but a renovation and addition that opened in June 1989 made Belknap one of the state’s most modern correctional facilities. Most strikingly, there were few bars. Cells were enclosed by cin-der block and picture window–sized panes of unbreakable glass, through which corrections officers watched inmates as though they were exhibits in a museum.

Like Robert, Jim was automatically classified a maximum-security inmate and issued an orange uniform. That made him a rarity at

Belknap, where Superintendent Joseph Panarello could usually count his high-risk inmates on one hand with a couple fingers left over. Most of the sixty or so inmates at the Belknap jail on any given day were there for petty crimes or domestic offenses, and about half were kept in a minimum-security dorm, where they could pay off their debts to society by working on the county farm, shoveling snow in winter, rak-ing leaves in fall, and sweeping mud off sidewalks the rest of the year. After his booking and intake interviews, Jim was brought to the “B Unit,” just a few steps from the jail’s high-tech central station with banks of surveillance monitors. Jim was assigned to B2, an eight-by- ten cell with a single bed, a stainless-steel sink-and-toilet unit, and an unbreakable mirror. It was one of four single-inmate cells in the pod that opened onto the triangular-shaped, four-hundred-square-foot common area called a “day room.” The room had a blue pay phone, a television, and a metal picnic table bolted to a gray-painted concrete slab floor. There also were two plastic chairs—one of which Jim used as his footrest—which technically didn’t belong in the maximum-security pod. “We let them have the chairs to be nice,” said corrections officer Jan Hale, a fifteen-year veteran. That sentiment was foreign to

the officers guarding Robert in the Max Unit in Grafton.

The walls of the day room were bare, except for a hand-lettered sign that B Unit inmates would tape to the front window when they wanted to sleep. It read: “Could you please dim the lights.”

Maximum-security inmates at Belknap were allowed visitors twice a week, an hour each on Tuesdays and Saturdays—twice the time allowed at Grafton. In addition, Joan and John Parker paid for a therapist to visit Jim weekly to help him adjust to life in jail. Besides the counselor, Jim’s parents were his most frequent guests. Joan sometimes brought books about yoga, and Jim soon became devoted to it, spending three or more hours a day in various meditative poses.

One visiting day, Jim’s good friend Coltere Savidge came with the Parker family’s friend Kevin Ellis. Jim quizzed Coltere on town gossip—mostly who was dating whom—and caught up on news about friends at college. Afterward, Jim told his father he liked having Coltere there; some of his other friends were awkward, but Coltere

was at ease, able to keep the conversation alive. Yet Coltere felt strange afterward. There he was with his old friend, talking about what they always talked about, but they were separated by bulletproof glass. Coltere noticed something else, too: Jim seemed older, more sober, less the prankster.

The only break in the Belknap visiting routine came at Christmas time, when Panarello set aside December 20 for maximum-security inmates to have up to five visitors at a time over a three-hour period. Jim drew a Chelsea crowd including his father, Coltere, and Susan Dollenmaier and her twin daughters, Ivy and Tess Mix. Dollenmaier’s home had been the target of one of The Crew’s breaking-and-eating exploits, but all had been forgiven. Jim hadn’t spoken face-to-face with a girl his age in months, and suddenly two were in close proximity. He ignored the rest of the group and focused on Ivy and Tess.

There was no special Christmas visit for Robert at Grafton. There, the only holiday treat was a pizza dinner.

Though the conditions were softer than at Grafton, Jim’s daily schedule wasn’t much different. At five-thirty every morning, corrections officer Jan Hale radioed the jail’s main control room and asked that B Unit cells—she called them “rooms”—be unlocked. Hale flipped on the light and called out, “Get up for breakfast!” Sometimes there’d be only one other inmate in the unit, and sometimes Jim was alone, though at times there were as many as four, one per “room.” Those were the times a rousing Monopoly tournament would get under way.

One of Jim’s frequent unit mates was a fight-prone young man awaiting sentencing on an assault charge. He was an inmate who, in the words of one corrections officer, had “taken on some of the toughest we’ve had.” But to the surprise of their jailers, he and Jim got along well. Jan Hale said Jim—she always called him James—was a model inmate, quiet and cooperative. Unlike most inmates, he never seemed to harden. The closest he came were a couple times when his usual “schoolboy look” would suddenly be replaced by an “angry flash.” Yet that would leave as quickly as it came.