Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (45 page)

In a similar school assignment, Robert described himself with his usual self-impressed grandeur as an “incredibly smart, witty, and scheming individual.” He credited some of his development to DeRoss Kellogg, his sixth grade teacher. “After DeRoss’s class, I would completely ignore the need to perform well in school, and dedicate my life to making myself happy.” It was as close to a guiding philosophy as he would ever express, having already decided that society and school had no answers for someone of his great intellect, that self-centered manipulativeness was a trait to be admired, and that God was “a pompous, self-centered jerk.”

One of their early get-out-of-Chelsea schemes involved stealing mail from rural mailboxes in the hope they’d find credit card numbers. Fifteen or so attempts, mostly around Vershire, yielded little. Sometimes they’d take a quick look at the letters and stuff them back into their boxes. Other times they’d grab the mail from two or three houses, toss their bounty in the back seat of Jim’s Audi, and drive to Robert’s house to see what they had reeled in. Once they got a credit card number, but that didn’t prove useful. Eventually they burned all the mail they had stolen in the wood stove in Robert’s house.

In a variation on their mail-theft scheme, Robert and Jim tried to establish a false address at the abandoned home on Vershire Riding School Road they had once considered a potential clubhouse or ball—

tag venue. They cut the grass and put up a new mailbox. Then, as a test, they mailed a box filled with old Tshirts to the house. But it was returned as undeliverable—postal carriers were all locals, and everyone in the area knew the falling-down farmhouse had long been abandoned. It would have been big news around town if someone had bought it. When the Tshirts failed to arrive, Robert and Jim crossed that plan off their list.

Around the same time, they tried a few petty crimes that were more about mischief than money, self-styled tests of their criminal wills. They stole poles from a permanent tent, took a small boat down the First Branch of the White River and left it on the river bank, went joyriding in bulldozers they found at work sites in Tunbridge and South Royalton, and stole grappling hooks and pulleys from a house that had been owned by Kip Battey’s father, Ned.

A new money-raising scheme came to life one night in late May 2000, just days after they had partnered to win the raft race in the town’s spring festival. Robert and Jim were driving to the movies when they saw a four-wheel-drive, all-terrain vehicle on a trailer next to a home in Barre. A few days after Jim’s sixteenth birthday, around two in the morning, they drove Robert’s Mazda within a mile of the house and made their way through the dark. They unhinged the rear of the trailer, put the red Honda Foreman ATV into neutral and rolled it off the trailer and through an unplowed cornfield toward the Mazda. Robert had forgotten to bring ramps to make the job easier—he always seemed to forget or overlook at least one key element of the plan—so they wrestled the little vehicle through the field, off a ledge, and into the rear of Robert’s pickup.

Once back in Chelsea, they scraped off the serial numbers and touched up the paint to hide their work, then stashed the ATV under a tarp in the woods near Jim’s house. They removed the ignition and brought it to a dealer in Essex and told him they’d lost the key. When the dealer made them a new one, they replaced the ignition, shined the ATV, and placed classified ads on eBay and other Internet auction sites. One caught the eye of a man from Massachusetts who was willing to pay up to $3,500—one-third of Robert and Jim’s travel budget. Excited by the prospect, they arranged to meet him in a church parking lot. Robert handled the negotiations while Jim stayed in Robert’s pickup, slouching out of sight. The would-be buyer test-drove the knobby-tired vehicle and seemed ready to deal. Then he asked Robert about the title and registration. When Robert said he didn’t have them, the man grew angry. He couldn’t hand over that much money without a title to prove ownership. How could he know it wasn’t

stolen? The man and his money went back to Massachusetts.

They brought the ATV back to Jim’s house, but couldn’t figure out what to do next. They drove it around the woods a few times and talked about chopping it into parts and selling them piecemeal, but eventually abandoned that idea as too risky and unworkable. The ATV sat untended in the woods until December 2000, when a call came in to the Orange County Sheriff’s Office about a “suspicious vehicle” on West Hill in Chelsea. The owner got his ATV back, and no arrests were made.

A few weeks after they stole the ATV, Jim’s thirst for speed led to the wreck of Robert’s little Mazda. Again, Robert took the blame, just as he had done when they were trespassing at the quarry. Robert told his parents that he was at the wheel when the car went too fast around a curb. Diane Tulloch strongly suspected that Jim had been driving and that Robert was lying to protect him. But Robert stuck with his lie and Diane and Mike didn’t challenge him on it. Robert’s deception paid off: Jim avoided penalties or restitution, and Robert’s only punishment was being a teenager in a rural town without wheels of his own. Jim’s silver Audi would have to serve them both.

A
side from the ever-present goal of raising money, Robert and Jim’s early criminal efforts shared one quality that was particularly impor-

tant to Jim: no physical contact. Jim wasn’t burdened by moral or religious teachings that discouraged him from breaking the Golden Rule. He just didn’t want to get hurt or get caught: “If we were trying to jump them and they, like, turned around and knocked us out, or um . . . they

recognized us, they would go to the police and, you know, give our descriptions and they would find us,” he’d say.

But as months passed and one plan failed after another, Robert grew impatient. He began using a twisted logic to persuade his malleable friend that they needed to take the next step. He had already spent months talking to Jim about how they were better and smarter than other people, and how they couldn’t be expected to conform to rules and expectations that burdened their inferiors. That groundwork laid, on June 24, 2000, Robert decided it was time to lead Jim down the path to murder.

That morning, Robert, Jim, Christiana Usenza, and some other friends headed northwest from Chelsea to the Sugarbush ski area in Warren, Vermont. Barren of snow, the resort’s Mount Ellen was trans-formed into the raucous Tenth Annual Ben & Jerry’s One World–One Heart Festival, a mini-Woodstock where everything was toned down from the original except the tie-dyed shirts. The hippie ice cream impresarios, arguably Vermont’s two most famous residents, organized the festival as an opportunity to “celebrate, learn more, listen to great music, get involved, and . . . try some new Ben & Jerry’s flavors.”

But scoops of coffee almond fudge and bands like Hootie and the Blowfish couldn’t hold Robert and Jim’s interest, so they left their companions midway through the festival. Jim drove aimlessly around back roads while Robert rode shotgun and riffed on what they should do next. An idea took shape: “Let’s break into a house and, you know, steal something.” They killed some time casing empty condos—both knew that wealthy flatlanders only used them in winter—but they didn’t break in.

As they were driving around, they noticed an elderly couple along the side of the road. Robert turned to Jim with a suggestion: We should park the car, get out, and jump them. We could use rocks to bash their heads, and then we’d take their money and run. It was the first time Robert had spoken of murder for money. Previously he had played with the idea of carjacking, but in those scenarios Robert described leaving the victims alive on the side of the road. Now he was going in for the kill.

Jim briefly considered Robert’s suggestion, but then flatly rejected it. But not because it was wrong. Rather, Jim thought it was a classic example of Robert failing to think ahead. That’s a terrible idea, Jim told Robert. “People will just catch up with us down the road, and you know, there’s a lot of people that knew we were driving back” from the Ben & Jerry’s festival. If Robert was wondering how Jim would react to the idea of murder, he had his answer. Jim was ready, as long as the crime was better planned.

Jim kept driving, heading toward home, but Robert wasn’t quite finished. They drifted around awhile and returned to their earlier talk of breaking into houses. As they wandered around, they came across Bethel Mountain Road in Rochester and noticed all the fine, secluded homes there. They found one isolated enough to catch their interest, then went around back, broke through a storm door, then knocked in a panel on the security door to unlock it from the inside. They scoured the place but the only thing worth taking was a gray Rubbermaid toolbox, so they grabbed that and put it in the Audi. They drove to another house not far away, where they pried open a window. Jim climbed in and let Robert through the door, but nothing inside caught their interest, so they left.

From that moment on, Robert reinterpreted the events of that day—stressing how easy it would have been to rob and kill the elderly couple, versus how fruitless it had been to break into empty homes— into a case for robbery-murder. They could get whatever cash their targets had, as well as ATM card numbers that would allow them to get even more, and then kill to protect themselves from witnesses. He also told Jim it would be important for them to establish themselves as killers before they headed out on the road, Jim said, “because we were gonna be sort of ‘badasses,’ you know, when we left.” During their endless conversations, Robert had spoken of admiring Hitler for his intelligence, cunning, and mastery of tactics, particularly his ability to manipulate people, while glossing over the morality of murder. Now, in his own small, self-absorbed, narcissistic way, Robert was manipulat-ing Jim.

Jim was skeptical about the “badasses” part of the plan, though he

did consider it a valid point at the time. Mostly, he focused on the fantasy aspect, “getting the money and going to a different country, you know. Kind of having fun.”

“We could steal things from people and it turned into, you know, killing people,” Jim would say. “And as long as we were able to kill peo-ple and we . . . got good at stealing things, stealing cars, you know, we could hijack people’s boats and we wouldn’t really have to, you know, be digging for money everywhere and we could just go wherever we want and then, you know, become these really cool people. And one of our main goals was to find some way to live forever, like just check out all the myths in Egypt or something, we weren’t really sure. . . . We wanted to just, like, go to an island with spears and, you know, live there and we would be able to, you know, learn how to hunt really well.”

Once Robert had Jim hooked, all that remained was a plot to carry it out.

The first idea was jumping someone on the street. They tried to think of a place where they could find a potential victim alone, out of view of anyone else, so no one could come running to aid the target. That concern led them to settle on a crucial element of their plan: What better place to find people alone than at their homes? All they needed to do was find a secluded house, then figure out a way to ambush the owners, take their money, and kill them.

Three and a half weeks later, in July 2000, Robert and Jim drove the Audi to the abandoned house on Vershire Riding School Road they had used for their failed mail-fraud scheme. Using two of John Parker’s shovels, they dug a grave for the bodies they expected to dispose of later that night. They suited up in the commando clothes they had bought from Army-Navy stores and grabbed a backpack Jim had borrowed from his mother and filled with duct tape and rope. They slid old hunting knives into their black military boots and hiked through the woods to Goose Green Road.

They had driven by Andrew and Diane Patti’s cedar-shingled house countless times—it was just a few miles from Chelsea. They had cased the house on earlier visits, once breaking a window in a shed out back

to see what was inside. This time they had come to do more than look. Robert would use a car-broke-down-can-I-use-your-phone plan, and once inside, they’d tie up whomever they found there, demand their credit and ATM cards, and then kill them. They’d wrap the bodies in plastic bags and then haul them up the road to the grave they had dug. Shortly after ten that night, Robert used a wire cutter to snip the phone lines to the house, then Jim pulled a knit ski mask over his face. He crouched in the bushes while Robert went to the door. But the plan went awry when Andrew Patti didn’t buy Robert’s story and flashed his

gun. The boys scurried home, defeated, but only for the moment.

I
n the warm summer weeks that followed, Robert resumed plotting while Jim wallowed in discouragement and fear. He was anxious, trou-

bled that the man in the house had seen Robert’s face, and worried that he might have been seen, too.

While they regrouped, they threw themselves into their deepening passion for rock climbing—testing themselves against harder routes, encouraging and trusting one another—and kept busy with routine events and family celebrations. For Jim, there was an eightieth birthday party for his maternal grandmother, Hannah Essery, at her home in San Diego. “They put on a play for me and he acted in it,” Essery said later. “It was
Cinderella.
He was the prince. He was a marvelous prince and I can’t believe that prince would do anything wrong.” A few days later, Robert attended the wedding of his sister Becky and Charles Johnson, one of Jack and Annette Johnsons’ boys, at the home of the groom.

But beneath the happy surface of birthday parties and weddings, Robert kept pressing for their big score. First, he supplemented their criminal toolkit. He lied to his mother about needing rock-climbing shoes and used her credit card to order two Stun Master stun guns on the Internet. Jim liked the idea of stun guns, because it would lower the risk that their victims might fight back. Second, Robert abandoned the broken-down-car ruse and adopted a stun-gun-surprise plan.

Diane Tulloch’s discovery and confiscation of the stun guns was a