Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (43 page)

After breakfast, most inmates would go back to sleep, waking again at seven-thirty, when Hale rolled around the “wish cart,” containing

free supplies for inmates, including pencils, paper, soap, and shampoo. Pencil sharpeners were prohibited in maximum, so the cart carried one for on-the-spot use. Any inmate who wanted to shave would get a razor and shaving cream, both of which had to be returned to an officer within fifteen minutes.

Every morning featured one hour of exercise. Some inmates in the maximum unit adopted Robert’s approach of skipping recreation time and staying in their cells, but Jim would never miss his hour outdoors or in the jail gym. Sometimes he would do yoga. More often he would shoot baskets, extending his long arms in a graceful shot that impressed even the jaded jail officers. One time the ball got caught between the hoop and the backboard, and Jim, strong and wiry as ever, grabbed the pole and in a single fluid motion kicked his feet up to the ten-foot-high rim to knock it free. Contact basketball games were prohibited, so Jim and an inmate named Jason sometimes played the shooting contest called HORSE. Each time a player missed, he added a letter of the word, and the first one to get all five letters lost. Jim would take an early lead, but his concentration or confidence would fade, and inevitably Jason would win.

After lunch, Jim worked on his high school diploma. While Robert rejected the offer to receive schoolwork from Chelsea, Jim embraced it. He was the only inmate at Belknap working on a custom-crafted school program, engineered with heavy involvement from Joan Parker. She made sure he received his assignments, and brought his finished work to school so teachers could grade it. Jim did geometry, English, and art, using a small wooden figure as a model for drawing and water-colors.

He filled his days with reading and cards, and sometimes the shared television would be tuned to MTV, a movie, or the news. When reports about the Zantop killings came on, other inmates would get excited, but not Jim. He never spoke about the case. Hale and Panarello described his general demeanor as flat. “He’s not emotion-less, but he’s not emotional either,” Hale said. If she joked with him he might chuckle, but he would never initiate the laugh track. Hale and Panarello were surprised to hear of his Chelsea reputation for clown—

ing. “Not here,” Panarello said. Some jail officers considered Jim’s demeanor evidence of a cold-blooded streak, but Hale liked him.

Most nights, before being locked in his cell, Jim would wander to the corner of the day room, pick up the pay phone, and call home, collect, to say good-night to his parents.

S
itting in the back seat of Deputy Chad Morris’s cruiser driving down Route 25, Ranger saw his opportunity to engage in the time-honored

jailhouse tradition of trading information for leniency. When Morris mentioned the mystery of the Zantop case, Ranger pounced. He told Morris that his cellmate Robert Tulloch had confided in him about the crimes. Ranger then gave Morris three pieces of information specific enough to suggest he knew more.

First, Ranger said, Robert said the crimes were random and that he and his friend Jim Parker were originally going to “do” the Zantops’ neighbors but they weren’t home. Second, Robert said this was his first killing, and “he was a bit nervous and wanted to get a few under his belt.” Third, Ranger told the deputy something solid and verifiable that had yet to be made public: The only item taken from the house was Half Zantop’s wallet.

Keep this between us—I’m no rat, Ranger added, almost certainly knowing his request would be ignored.

Yet as days passed, it must have seemed to Ranger that Deputy Morris was inexplicably respecting his wishes. In fact, although Morris had followed the Zantop case with professional interest, he overlooked the significance of his passenger’s comments. Morris didn’t immediately realize that, in his car that day, from behind the Plexiglas-and- steel cage separating the front and back seats of the Crown Vic, Ranger had become the first person to credibly claim that Robert Tulloch had admitted to the killings and had provided an explanation of sorts as well.

On June 26, fully a week after Ranger’s revelations, Morris happened to run into Sergeant Bob Bruno of the New Hampshire State Police, a key member of the Zantop task force. Morris and Bruno were

standing in a coffee-break room at the Plymouth Police Department when the conversation with Ranger popped into Morris’s mind.

“I transported an individual who told me a few things,” he told Bruno. “For what it’s worth, you might want to check it out.”

“What types of things?” Bruno asked.

When Morris told him, Bruno instantly grasped the significance. At that point, neither Robert nor Jim had shown any willingness to cut a deal, and investigators were stumped and frustrated after four fruitless months of searching for a motive or a link between the Zantops and their killers. Bruno told Morris to write up a report as quickly as possible, and Bruno wrote his own report as well, documenting Morris’s comments.

Three days later, Ranger was ushered from jail to the nearby Grafton County Sheriff ’s Office for a meeting with two New Hampshire state troopers: Mark Mudgett, the sergeant supervising the day-to-day investigation, and Trooper First Class Todd Landry.

“OK, listen,” Mudgett told Ranger. “You’ve obviously had desire to talk to the police about the conversation you had with Mr. Tulloch, and that’s why we’ve asked to meet you here today. . . . Do you remember what he told you?”

“He told me that him and James Parker had murdered the Zantops,” Ranger said. “He told me that it was just random. There was no connection between himself and the Zantops. That he went to other houses prior to theirs and when he got there he gained entry to the house by giving the pretense of an environmental survey thing.”

“Can I interject?” Mudgett said. “Yeah,” Ranger said.

“This environmental study that you speak about, was this done in preparation for a, some sort of course, or school course, or anything like that?”

“Yeah,” Ranger said. “That’s just what he used, cause he figured he looked like a college kid and around the town of Hanover, or whatever, people wouldn’t suspect that as being odd. That it would be a story that he could use to get in.”

“Had he been to any other residences, did he tell you?”

“He had been to, he had tried to gain entry into two different residences, one in Rochester, Vermont, and one, the Zantops’ neighbors was the other one,” Ranger answered. Without knowing it, Ranger was referring to the homes of Franklin Sanders in Rochester and Bob and Audrey McCollum in Etna. Sanders had told Robert and Jim he was too busy tarring his pool to do a survey, and the McCollums were skiing with their daughter and son-in-law when the killers had come knocking.

“OK. Did he want to go into a home that was, someone was home at?” Mudgett asked.

“Yes,” Ranger said. “And why was that?”

“Because,” Ranger answered, “he wanted to kill somebody while he was there.”

“OK,” Mudgett said. “Any other reason why he wanted to go into a house?”

“He wanted a robbery, he wanted to get money or whatever he could get, but he said that after they had killed the Zantops that he kind of panicked and that he didn’t search through the house or anything like that.”

Ranger then gave an account of what happened inside the Zantop house on January 27, providing details that hadn’t been made public. Ranger’s information fit the crime scene with such precision it was impossible to imagine it had come from anyone other than one of the killers.

“OK,” Mudgett said afterward. “Let me ask you this . . . and you’ve been very, very cooperative, and I appreciate that. Did he indicate to you whether they had been saving money or trying to get money for any particular reason, or anything like that?”

“He didn’t say anything as to why they were trying to get money or anything like that. He said that, ah, he had wished that he had more money to take off with when they took off, but he didn’t tell me the reason,” Ranger said. “Because I asked him, I says, ah, ‘So, what was this, just another random act of violence in America?’ or something like that. And he goes, ‘Basically.’ ”

“Did he ever indicate to you that he had ever met the Zantops before?” Mudgett asked.

“He said he never laid eyes on them before, that he knew of, you know.”

“Did he ever tell you as to why he was in that particular area? He and James Parker?”

“He figured that the Dartmouth College area would be well-to-do folks and that he wouldn’t have any trouble gaining entry into a house,” Ranger said.

“OK. And again, it was because he was going to do this environmental study and that’s . . . ”

“That,” Ranger interrupted, “was his cover story to get into the house.”

After providing more background information, Ranger described how Robert explained his relationship with Jim.

“I asked him, I says, ‘Is this your idea or was this his?’ And he says, ‘Nah, it was kind of a mutual decision, but I kind of said the way things went and kind of run the show.’ ”

Mudgett went back over some details, but by then he had everything he needed—a bounty of information that would focus the investigation, potentially squeeze a confession from one or both killers, or be used to devastating effect at their trials. One hundred fifty-three days after Half and Susanne Zantop were killed, police and prosecutors for the first time knew that they were chosen for death randomly, how their killers tricked their way into the house on Trescott Road, and how the murders took place. On the surface, they also had a motive—robbery—but the way it added up, that was window dressing. The real motive seemed to be murder for its own sake. As Ranger put it, “He wanted to kill somebody while he was there.”

Yet, as much as Ranger added to detectives’ understanding of the crime, he couldn’t explain why Robert was so intent on committing a random murder in the guise of a robbery, or how he had convinced Jim that this was the best way to fulfill their dreams of escaping Chelsea forever. Those answers would have to wait.

A
fter sharing all he knew about the murders, Ranger added a bonus: Robert was plotting to escape from the Grafton County Jail.

Ranger described a plot Robert hatched in which someone would leave a handgun buried just outside the recreation yard fence. He would snake his arm through, dig it out, threaten, kill, or overpower a corrections officer, and force his way to freedom. That plan was flawed by the fact that Robert didn’t know anyone who was willing to be a gun-burying accomplice. Anyone but Jim, that is, and he was in no position to help at the moment. As an alternative, Robert thought he would somehow make a wrench to loosen the bolts attaching the fence to its posts, then pull the fence back and run for the tree line in the meadow below. Either of those plans would explain why Robert had suddenly resumed spending his recreation hours outside—he was searching for weak spots in recreation yard security.

“Or, he’s going to try to do it from court,” Ranger told Mudgett. “I know one time when he went to court he took a piece of paper and stuck it in the waistband of his pants, and he was thinking that he was going to pick his way out of the handcuffs.” But Ranger scoffed at that idea, saying he doubted Robert could pull it off.

Some of Robert’s extravagantly imagined plans seemed cut from the pages of a comic book and bordered on laugh-out-loud funny. That is, if he wasn’t so serious about carrying them out. “I gotta get out of here,” he told Ranger, “because when they’re transporting Jim to court I want to be able to get him somewhere along the route. . . . I’ll kill the two officers that are transporting him.”

Then he and Jim could disappear into Canada and live as outlaws, robbing banks and changing their appearances to avoid detection. Robert said his first change would be a nose job.

When Glenn Libby got wind of the breakout fantasies, Robert’s life at the Grafton County Jail became even grimmer. He wore shackles whenever he was taken outside the Max Unit for recreation or other activities. His incoming and outgoing mail was logged and screened. His visiting hours were moved into a more secure part of the jail. No longer could he sit in the same room with his visitors; now they spoke through a small window of unbreakable glass. Libby also took general precautions, including reinforcing the recreation yard fence and adding more razor wire at the top.

Security around Robert got even tighter after his mother asked one of the officers how far it was from the jail to the Connecticut River. Libby didn’t know if it was idle conversation, and he never had any evidence that Diane Tulloch knew of Robert’s escape plans. But Libby knew that Diane rarely spoke with the officers, and for her to suddenly ask that question “raised our antennae all the more.” After that, two officers were assigned to all Robert’s family visits.

J
ust before the interview with Ranger ended, Mudgett placed on the record a series of statements to clarify the terms under which Ranger

had provided the information. The sergeant knew that lawyers for Robert and Jim might say Ranger had made up the entire story under pressure from authorities or in exchange for a deal to reduce or drop the charges against him. Mudgett said the only thing he would do for Ranger was tell the attorney general’s office about his cooperation.

“So when you leave here, you understand that I . . . made no promises to you, no offers of reward, nor was I ever trying to employ you into acting as an agent on behalf of the police,” Mudgett said.

“Right.”

“You understand that? . . . So by speaking here today, are you speaking on your own free will?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not expecting any rewards out of this?” “Nothing,” Ranger said.

“You’re doing it for what specific reason?” Mudgett asked.

“I don’t think it’s right what he did,” Ranger answered. “I . . . I . . . I think that what he did was pretty sick, actually. . . . If it was somebody in my family [he killed], I would probably be the one facing the murder trial, you know?”

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