Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (50 page)

Ten minutes or so into the interview, as he scribbled words that were barely legible and completely irrelevant, a thought crossed Jim’s mind: Half Zantop was an all right guy. The professor had let them into his home when he was busy. He’d tolerated their clumsy attempt at a survey, and he’d even supplied them with the pen to do the interview. Their host was trying to turn the experience into a teaching moment. When Robert faltered, the professor stepped in and coached him on his interviewing technique. Offering constructive criticism of a student presentation was reflex; Half wanted to help the two high school boys do better.

The professor was smothering the boys with good will, and Jim’s thoughts turned mutinous: “We don’t need to kill this guy.” Under the circumstances, Jim figured, they might as well wrap up the interview and split. Forget the plan this time.

But as Jim was going one way, Robert was going the other. For him, Half’s critique, however well-intentioned, was a slap across the face. Though Jim heard Half’s comments as innocent suggestions, in Robert’s mind they were fighting words. And when Half finished up by telling the already coiled Robert, “You need to be more prepared,” Robert had heard more than enough. No matter how gently Half said it, to Robert it was a bitter reprise of the criticism he had silently suffered from the Hanover High School debate coach just three weeks earlier. Then, he couldn’t do anything about it but tap his foot and rush out the door when she was done. Now he could answer the insult with an attack of his own.

Half began looking for the telephone number of a friend he thought might help Robert and Jim refine their survey. As Half turned to his desk, Robert leaned forward and reached into the backpack’s main pouch.

E
leven months later, seven days before Christmas 2001, two deputies escorted Jim to a small conference room at the Belknap County

Sheriff’s Department. It was only fifty yards across a snow-covered driveway from the jail where Jim had been held since he turned seventeen in May, but the walk symbolized the huge distance Jim had traveled since being separated from Robert after their arrests. Robert may have told Christiana that Jim was “as smooth as obsidian” and would never break. But Jim had indeed cracked. And just as shattered obsidian produces sharp edges, the new Jim was about to turn dangerous to Robert.

It was a cold, snowy New Hampshire morning under a pewter sky. Jim wore the loose-fitting orange uniform of a maximum-security inmate. He was handcuffed during the walk, but the handcuffs had been removed before he entered the room. Easing himself into a high—

backed black fabric chair, Jim sat quietly at one end of the oblong table, waiting to begin his confession. Next to him on his side were two of his attorneys, Cathy Green and Phil Utter. Over Jim’s shoulder was a picture window looking out onto the red-brick façade of the county jail. The walls in the conference room were painted an industrial cream color and the carpet was a speckled brown. Jim, feeling a chill, asked that the window behind him be shut.

Seated in a matching black chair directly across the table was Kelly Ayotte, the chief prosecutor in the Zantop investigation. She wore her trademark dark pantsuit. Next to her was her colleague Mike Delaney. With them was state police Sergeant Mark Mudgett, the hulking, six-foot-plus investigator who’d interviewed Ranger.

Mudgett sat at the head of the table with Jim on his left and Kelly Ayotte on his right. In front of him was a tape recorder Mudgett had brought with him. “Today’s date is December 18, 2001,” Mudgett began. “Time according to my watch is twenty-eight minutes past ten o’clock.” He identified the others at the table, then said, “I am going to turn this conversation over to Attorney Ayotte.”

The prosecutor leaned forward, her hands on the table holding the questions she and Delaney had written beforehand.

“Could you please just tell us what your name is?” “Jim Parker.”

“And, James. Do you mind if I refer to you as James?” Jim said it was OK.

In a legal sense, Jim’s turnaround was the result of a plea bargain his attorneys and prosecutors had worked out during the previous four weeks. Before then, Jim’s attorneys hadn’t much been interested in plea negotiations. They and Jim’s parents had focused their energy throughout the year on fighting to keep Jim’s case in the juvenile sys-tem, where even if convicted of murder he’d be released at the age of twenty-one. Prosecutors had vigorously opposed the move and argued that Jim should be tried as an adult, side-by-side with Robert, where they both could face life in prison. Although New Hampshire had a death penalty, prosecutors decided early on not to seek it, in part because of the defendants’ tender ages. In early November, the prosecution’s views about trying Jim as an adult prevailed. Within days, Jim’s attorneys contacted the prosecutors about cutting a deal.

Legal strategy was one thing, Jim was another. From the start his parents did everything they could to reconnect with their lost boy. They hired a private therapist to see him weekly in the county jail; they made sure he earned his high school diploma from the Chelsea Public School (although Jim’s name would go unmentioned at his classmates’ graduation in June 2002); they saw to it that he kept up with his music and art; they urged him to focus his mind and spirit through yoga; they accepted his nightly collect calls; and they visited him as often as they could and encouraged friends to do the same. Over time they saw the tether tying him to Robert first loosen and then break; the Parkers began to tell close friends in Chelsea that Jim was becoming his old self again. He was ice melting.

The bargain, finalized in early December, required Jim to plead guilty to being an accomplice to second-degree murder, to cooperate fully with investigators by telling them everything they wanted to know, and to testify against Robert at trial. In return Jim would be sentenced to twenty-five years to life in state prison. Under New Hampshire law, Jim could eventually seek to have his sentence reduced by one-third, a formula which meant that, at a minimum, he would serve sixteen years and eight months.

Publicized in early December, the deal was attacked by many of the Zantops’ friends and Dartmouth colleagues, and in newspaper editorials. “He’s a demonic murderer,” Eric Manheimer, the Zantops’ close friend and trustee of their estate, told a reporter. “It’s an outrage that the system allows this young man to negotiate his way out of what should be a maximum sentence.” Audrey McCollum said, “A crime that was so atrocious and sadistic, it’s hard to come to terms with this mild a sentence.” The
Union Leader
newspaper went after Ayotte’s boss, Phil McLaughlin, condemning the plea bargain and editorializ-ing that the attorney general had been “callously insensitive.”

Prosecutors didn’t flinch. Their investigation, which included the still-undisclosed account that Ranger had gotten from Robert, showed that Robert was the ringleader. This meant that Jim was the one to

negotiate with. The terms of Jim’s deal, too, were not unheard of. In a 1997 murder case in which three men killed two teenage girls in Salem, New Hampshire, prosecutors cut a deal with one of the killers, which mirrored Jim’s. Like Jim, that killer had to testify against the others, plead guilty to second-degree murder, and spend twenty-five years to life in prison. McLaughlin, facing harsh criticism, understood that friends of the Zantops wouldn’t take a macro-judicial view and com-prehend the practical reasons for making a deal. “They live in a universe in which they have a gut reaction,” he said. “I live in a universe of what’s possible and what’s impossible.” Most important to the authorities, Veronika and Mariana Zantop endorsed the plea bargain.

Jim appeared in court on December 7 to enter his guilty plea. He was reed-thin, his hair was cropped short, and he wore a black pullover jersey, dark blue jeans, and sneakers. Eleven days later he was seated across from Kelly Ayotte in a sheriff ’s conference room dressed in his orange jailhouse jumpsuit.

Ayotte began by asking Jim general questions about where he was from, about his family and growing up in Chelsea. She asked about his interests and his friends. She asked about Robert, their friendship, and about all the time they spent together in 2000. Jim kept up eye contact as the interview moved along. Like his mother, Jim favored natural foods, which he rarely got to have in jail. Cathy Green had brought him a salad and an organic drink, which Jim ate appreciatively during a break. Occasionally Jim came across as sassy. Ayotte asked him at one point about the different musical bands he played in. “Were you focused on jazz music or a particular type of music?” Jim replied with a hint of sarcasm in his voice, “Well, in the jazz band we do jazz, and in the concert band we did classical music.”

Then Ayotte asked Jim to walk her through his and Robert’s deepening criminal behavior—stealing mail, the housebreaks, the truck in the quarry, the stolen ATV. Finally, after nearly three hours of questioning, Kelly Ayotte asked Jim Parker about early 2001 and the discovery of the professors’ house at 115 Trescott Road.

“What is it that brought you down there that morning on January 27?”

“Well,” said Jim, his voice flat and mechanical. “We were going to kill somebody and take their credit cards and get their ATM numbers.” The room’s dynamic changed abruptly. Jim stopped making eye contact with his soft-spoken inquisitor. The questions about January 27 kept coming, one after another, and eventually Jim slumped back in the cushioned chair. The two prosecutors could tell they were taking Jim to a place he was loath to revisit.

“Walk me through step by step, walking up to the door,” Ayotte said. “We had a backpack with some paper for writing stuff down,” Jim

said. “And the knives.”

“L
et me give you somebody’s number near your area that you can talk to,” Half told Robert and Jim. He spun in his chair and fussed at

his desk looking for the friend’s number. He flipped open a regional telephone directory to the “T” section on pages 372–373, scanned the names, but couldn’t find it there, either. He turned to his Apple computer and tried an Internet telephone directory, but again no luck.

Meanwhile, behind the professor’s back, Robert had quietly removed one of the foot-long combat knives from Jim’s backpack. Making no sound, he pulled the knife from its sheath. He folded the fingers of his right hand tightly around the molded black fiberglass grip. The seven-inch stainless-steel blade with serrated teeth was pointed up.

Half remembered that the friend’s number might be on a slip of paper in his wallet. He leaned sideways and pulled the wallet from the hip pocket of his jeans. He swiveled back to face the boys as he flipped through the billfold.

Robert sprang from his chair. Lunging forward, he thrust the knife upward, burying the blade deep into the professor’s chest. Half let out a terrible scream. Together Robert and Half fell backward over the ergonomic chair and into the floor-to-ceiling bookcase to the left of the computer. A card table toppled to the floor, spilling papers everywhere. Blood poured from Half’s chest.

Robert pulled the knife out and thrust it a second time into the teacher’s warm flesh. To Robert’s mind, each blow with the knife was a deeply satisfying, well-deserved act of revenge. Half’s summary of Robert’s interviewing shortcomings had, in effect, been the latest in a yearlong string of reality checks exposing the gulf between Robert’s self-image as a higher being and the fact that he was plain old Robert of Chelsea. It was one humiliation after another, from the mouths of idiots, as far as Robert was concerned, idiots who didn’t appreciate his brilliance and insisted that his chronic slacking undermined his potential. Robert wouldn’t acknowledge that it had been lack of preparation that led to his near-impeachment from the student council presidency, and it was the reason his debate season imploded. Lack of preparation had even foiled his and Jim’s attempt to get into the Pattis’ home in Vershire and then into Franklin Sanders’s home in Rochester. The very word itself—“unprepared”—was ricocheting in his head even before Half Zantop spoke it, from the debate tournament fiasco in Chelsea.

Making no sound, Robert plunged the knife into Half’s chest again and again. Robert noticed Half’s eyes bulge out of their sockets. He slashed his victim’s face. Robert said nothing, working in a silent rage. He lorded over the fallen professor, who was dying quickly and unable to offer much of a struggle given the suddenness, the speed, and the intensity of the attack. In his frenzy, Robert missed Half and gouged the bottom shelf of the bookcase near Half’s head. Later he missed again and wounded himself above the right knee.

Jim had jumped to his feet seconds after Robert pounced on Half. He reached into the backpack, took out the second knife, and removed the sheath. The room was filled with Half ’s screams, and Jim watched the blood pool across the front of Half’s sweater. Half’s legs dangled up over the toppled ergonomic chair. The wicker wastebasket next to the desk was overturned near Half’s lower back, blood on it.

Jim was the bystander by the door, but that changed the instant Susanne Zantop ran into the study. Robert wondered later whether Susanne, hearing her husband shrieking, had rushed from the kitchen across the living room thinking Half had suffered a heart attack. But the moment she entered the study and saw the slaughter that was

under way she threw herself toward Robert and Half. She screamed in German, grasped at Robert’s leg, and reached desperately for her husband. Jim bent down and put his left arm under her shoulder, sweeping Susanne away from Robert and Half.

“Shut up,” Jim told Susanne as Robert continued stabbing her husband.

Half was on his back, lifeless; Susanne flailed away in Jim’s arms, screaming and trying to break free. The room had erupted into bloody chaos. Robert looked at Jim and locked eyes.

“Slit her throat!” he yelled.

Jim could have pulled Susanne out of the study and saved her life. Or he might have abandoned her and saved himself. But the idea of disobeying Robert never crossed Jim’s mind. He and Robert might as well have been clinging to a rock face in the midst of a sudden high-altitude crisis, bonded by their ropes, each boy’s safety completely dependent on the other. Robert’s months-long seduction had succeeded; now the debts would be repaid, the bond would be cemented. At that moment Jim saw the two of them as one, and he didn’t think twice about whether to follow Robert’s command. There was no room left in him to hear his own conscience, his mother’s voice, his father’s, or anyone else’s. All he could hear was a cry from his best friend for help.