Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (5 page)

Spanish Civil War sent them back to their homeland.

Half was born two years later, on April 24, 1938, in Eckernforde, in far northwestern Germany, a port city on the Baltic Sea that was home to the German U-boat school. Half spent his infancy in a country ruled by Adolph Hitler, a Germany where Jews had been stripped of their rights by the Nuremberg Race Laws. German troops occupied the Rhineland, and just a month before Half’s birth, Germany announced the Anschluss, or union, with Austria. Germany would soon invade Poland.

With the Spanish Civil War ending and Germany leading the world toward war, the Zantops returned to Barcelona when Half was one. Three years later, in 1942, the family came home to Eckernforde, to live for the next six years on a relative’s farm. In 1948, the family went yet again to Barcelona, where Half spent his teenage years attending a German school. His older brother, Wolf, remembered Half as a young man who wasn’t blessed with special gifts in the classroom or on the playing field, but who excelled through effort and determination. “He was a normal young man, not the fastest, not the smartest, but he would work harder,” Wolf Zantop said.

Half returned to Germany for college, receiving a geology degree from Karl Ludwigs-Universitate in Freiburg in 1960. Rootless, his life divided between Germany and Spain, he went even farther afield, earning another geology degree in 1961 from Washington State

University. He felt out of place at first in America, so he hung out at the Cosmopolitan Club, an organization for foreign students. There he met Alex Bertulis, a native of Lithuania and architecture student who would become a lifelong friend. They debated international affairs, and soon they realized they shared a passion for mountain climbing. As a boy, Half had climbed in the Pyrenees with his father, developing a love for the sport and taut, powerful muscles on his rangy frame. Together, Half and Alex spent several years in the early 1960s challenging themselves on some of the toughest mountain ranges in North America.

They climbed Canada’s spectacular Bugaboos, North America’s answer to the French Alps, and they mastered the toothy, glacier-marked Picket Range in Washington state. Whenever possible they chose the hardest routes, some never climbed before. On a ten-day, late-summer climb in 1963, they made what was believed to be the first complete traverse of the Pickets. Along the way they climbed the aptly named Mount Fury, Mount Challenger, and Mount Terror, mak-ing a harrowing, first-ever descent of Terror’s forbidding north face. They were six thousand feet up when they had to rappel down two thousand feet of vertical rock—weaving their way through a fault that divides the mountain’s twin summits. Exhausted from the effort, they slept that night hanging by ropes pinned to the rock.

On another trip, in the Cascades of Washington state, they climbed a sleeping volcano called Mount Adams and watched as loose rocks tumbled down the mountain perilously close to them. At the end of a day of arduous climbing, they bivouacked on a small ledge and enjoyed a magnificent mountain sunset. The next morning they woke early to reach the summit at nearly thirteen thousand feet. Several of their exploits were recorded in the bible of the sport, the
American Alpine Journal.

Half’s climbing days came to an abrupt end—nearly along with his life—on a trip to Yosemite National Park in 1965. By then, Half was enrolled at Stanford University in California, pursuing his Ph.D. and a young German woman he had met there named Susanne Korsukewitz. Half was leading the way up majestic Echo Peak when he lost his

grip on the granite wall. In the argot of climbers, Half “peeled off.” Grabbing air instead of mountain, he fell backward, his head narrowly missing a ledge. Though he avoided a potentially fatal head injury, Half’s leg hit the rock, shattering his ankle. Bertulis held fast to the rope that connected them and slowly lowered Half to safety. He fashioned crutches for Half from the branches of Ponderosa pines and carried Half’s pack along with his own. Half hobbled back to their car, frightened, exhausted, and grimacing with pain. It was the end of his days as a serious climber. The friendship endured, but mountains were left to their memories.

In his later years, Half would stare out the windows of airplanes when he flew over mountain ranges and think wistfully of his youthful exploits. In 1994, almost three decades after their last climb, Half wrote Bertulis to express how deeply the fall had affected him. In a let-ter consoling Bertulis on the death of his wife, Half wrote: “Last night it struck me that some of my fondest memories and most challenging feats of my life have been fully your doing. The traverse of the Picket Range and the wild-goose chase to climbing areas in the Canadian Rockies, the Tetons, and Wind Rivers, and finally the Sierra Nevada, after we were snowed out of other possibilities. You saved my head when I fell on Echo Peak, and I suppose the broken ankle and meeting Susanne finally forced me to finish my long-overdue Ph.D. and embark on my professional career.”

S
usanne Liselotte Marianna Korsukewitz was born August 12, 1945, in Kissingen, in southern Germany. Hitler was dead by his own hand;

Germany had surrendered three months earlier. Atomic bombs had been dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki just days before Susanne’s birth.

Susanne—pronounced
soo-ZAHN-uh
—was the eldest of three children, two girls and a boy, in a comfortable, middle-class home run by a father who managed a brick factory, and a mother who was a homemaker. The family spent the postwar years outside Frankfurt, in

a rural community dotted with medieval castles and small farms that grew wheat and potatoes and kept pigs, chickens, and cows.

Susanne’s mother, Marianne Korsukewitz, was enchanted by the darling, gifted daughter who was a fixture at the top of her class. The word she used most often to describe her eldest child was “wonderful.” When pressed for more details, she would add, “always happy, always good.” Susanne skipped several grades in school “because she was too great in her classes,” her mother said with deep pride and a thick German accent.

When she wasn’t studying, Susanne mastered Mozart and Beethoven on piano, swam the breaststroke, played badminton, kept cats as pets, wrote fanciful stories, and devoured every book she could get her hands on, with a particular interest in history. She had a gift for languages even as a young girl, recalled her brother Thomas, a gas-troenterologist.

In 1967, Susanne received the German equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in political science from the Free University of Berlin, and then set her sights on America and a master’s degree, also in political science. She was accepted at Stanford University on a scholarship.

Though Susanne and Half were both multilingual, expatriate German students, from the very first they were a study in contrasts. Half had grown to his full height of six feet and a lean 150 pounds. He was private and deliberate, a man who climbed a mountain, took a test, or faced a problem with the same patient approach, moving with confidence and care toward the summit. Sometimes progress was slow, and sometimes there were setbacks, but by refusing to quit he always made progress. Later in life, when a love for sailing replaced mountaineering, Half would reveal the same steadiness, maintaining an even keel through life’s squalls.

If Half was rock solid, Susanne was quicksilver. A little more than five feet tall, she was a gregarious sprite, a crackling bundle of controlled energy. Passionate, engaging, engaged. She dressed simply, in pants or a straight skirt—“professor chic,” her friends said. She wore her brown hair cropped short, with rarely even a drop of makeup on

her animated face. She radiated warmth, from her eyes behind wire-rimmed reading glasses to a broad smile that accented her cheek-bones. She had a memorable laugh. Yet she could be high-strung and impatient, especially with intellectual laziness or lapses that offended her moral and ethical codes. More often, her impatience was directed at herself. She rushed toward challenges, moving mountains if need be rather than picking her way through crags and crevasses.

Susanne received her master’s degree from Stanford in 1968, and the next year Half earned his Ph.D. By then they were a steady cou-ple, destined for marriage. Half took a job as a geologist for the mining industry, working for the Kennecott Corp. and Bethlehem Steel. They lived together in Argentina, and in 1970 they were married at the foot of the Andes Mountains, in Mendoza, Argentina. Susanne’s family thought Half was a wonderful man and together they made a beautiful couple. Half’s family was equally happy with the union of two such different yet kindred spirits.

After Argentina the Zantops spent a year in Colombia, where Susanne became pregnant. Then Half accepted a job in Spain, so the family returned to Europe. Susanne gave birth prematurely, while in Germany, and spent several months there with the daughter they named Veronika before joining Half in Spain, where they spent the next five years. Half continued his work as a mining geologist and Susanne gave birth to their second daughter, Mariana. Susanne taught German and literature at a college in Santiago de Compostela, a city in far northwest Spain where, legend has it, the remains of the apostle Saint James were found and where more Catholics make pilgrimages than anywhere except Rome. Their proximity to the shrine did nothing to incite reli-giosity; both Zantops considered themselves atheists.

As much as Half loved being a field geologist, the pull of the academic world was strong. As a teacher, he could spend more time with his wife and daughters. From 1975 through 1976, he was a research fellow in ore microscopy at the University of Heidelberg. Then Dick Stoiber recruited him to Dartmouth, and the Zantop family boarded the Polish freighter to begin their new lives in Hanover.

W
hen they arrived at Dartmouth, Half poured himself into work as a junior faculty member in the school’s earth sciences department.

He specialized in work that melded the study of geology, economics, and political science, the interplay of which was critical to the pursuit of valuable ore deposits. During those first years in Hanover, Susanne’s focus was on their daughters—Jim Reynolds’s lasting mem-ory at the Montreal dock was of Susanne protecting the girls from the cold and rain. But her ambition and energy soon drove her to seek a second master’s degree, in comparative literature, from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, a two-hour drive from their home.

Wherever she went, Susanne enlarged the couple’s circle of friends. In the autumn of 1978, Alan Fair was an exchange student at UMass taking a class in German philosophy when he first came into contact with what he called the “inordinate intellect” of a young woman with a German accent. He saw her again soon after at a reading group and was impressed anew by her analytical skills. Much later, Fair would call Susanne “that rare creature, an intellectual with warmth and humanity. Not for her the aloofness of the Brahmin, but rather the friendliness of the comrade who seeks to make the world a better place through the virtues of friendliness and compassion.”

Christmas came a few months after Fair met Susanne. Fair and his wife were hunkered down far from family in their small university apartment. On the morning of Christmas Eve, there was a knock at their door. Susanne made the hundred-mile drive to Amherst to insist that Fair and his wife come to Hanover. The Fairs spent Christmas Eve in the Zantops’ home, talking art and politics and warmed by fine food, well-chosen wine, and the Zantop family’s embrace. The Fairs ended up spending five memorable days with Half, Susanne, Veronika, and Mariana. “We all agreed that while we were Europeans, we felt a special affinity with Americans and America, and they had found a place that they could call home,” Fair recalled. More than two decades later, Fair loved looking at the photos they had taken that Christmas morning, when they were young and happy together.

A
s the Zantop girls moved impressively through the Hanover public schools, Susanne continued her education, receiving a Ph.D. in com-

parative literature from Harvard University in 1984. Susanne’s return to school meant Half had to take more responsibility at home, and he relished the opportunity to spend time nurturing their daughters. Friends were impressed by how the couple sought to be equal partners in all respects—in their family lives as well as their intellectual and professional pursuits.

Susanne had already been teaching at Dartmouth for two years when she received her doctorate. With Ph.D. in hand, she jumped on the fast track to becoming a professor of German and comparative literature. By 1988, she had published her first book,
Zeitbilder: Geschichtsschreibung und Literatur bei Heinrich Heine und Mariano Jose de Larra,
an academic examination of Heine, a romantic, human-istic German poet on whom Susanne had written her dissertation, and Larra, a melancholy, suicidal Spanish satirist.

The same year, Half coauthored the book
International Mineral Economics
. For much of his career, he focused on the economic and environmental impact of mining. He studied the geology of man-ganese and iron deposits, sulfide deposits, and precious metal deposits. He explored the silver mines of Fresnillo and Guanajuato in Mexico, the Aguilar base metal deposit in Argentina, and volcanic activity in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and elsewhere. Volcanoes were a particular interest, and by coincidence he and Susanne eventually found a home in Etna, a village of Hanover that by some accounts was named for the frequently erupting volcano in Sicily.

His coauthor, Werner Gocht, was repeatedly impressed by Half’s devotion to the environment. “Mining is a dirty business. Half was always interested in finding ways to minimize the harm of mining,” Gocht said. On a visit to a coal mining area in Germany, Gocht recalled, Half focused almost entirely on reforestation plans. “Geologists are interested in investigating rocks, but he was also a man who knew the plants and the animals, who saw nature as a whole.” If

someone was looking for a conversation about the environment, Half was always ready to take part.