 |
 |
|
|
|
|||
|
|||
 |
|||
From honor roll to murderers' row
COM writing profs uncover answers to shocking Dartmouth slayings
By Brian Fitzgerald
|
|
|
Dick Lehr (left) and Mitchell Zuckoff, visiting COM professors of journalism, were finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for their work at the Boston Globe. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky |
|
|
|
“Let me in. Can I use your phone?” said the stranger gruffly.
It was a little after 10 on a summer night at Andrew Patti's summer house in Vermont. Patti, a native New Yorker, may be a lot more streetwise than the average Vermonter, but he is not an unfriendly man. In fact, soon after his family moved into their getaway home in Veshire, he helped stranded motorists on two occasions, towing a stalled SUV to a man's house, and letting a young woman phone a local garage from his living room.
But this time Patti had a bad feeling about the person at his door. In Dick Lehr's and Mitchell Zuckoff's book Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (HarperCollins), the visiting College of Communication professors describe the loud, insistent knock, the intense eyes peering through the door's small window, and the youth's “hot breath leaving vapor clouds on the glass.” He said he had car trouble, but Patti wasn't buying the story. Maybe it was the family dog barking minutes earlier, apparently at something it heard outside, or possibly Patti's sense as he was reading that someone was watching him through a corner of the window where the shade didn't fit quite right.
“No,” said Patti.
“C'mon, let me use your phone.”
The incident, which begins the book, took place six months before two Dartmouth College professors were killed in their home. But Patti had the advantage of being armed with a handgun, along with the resolve not to open the door, fearing a city-style “push-in” robbery attempt. His wife was back in Long Island, but his 11-year-old son was with him. Patti told him to move away from the windows.
“Though Patti sensed danger, it was even worse than he knew,” write Lehr and Zuckoff. “Patti was unaware that the stranger had brought along two deadly weapons. One was an old but sharp hunting knife tucked in his military boot. The other was his best friend. While the stranger knocked at the door, the friend — also a teenager, a year younger than the young man at the door — crouched in a bush around the side of the house. He was dressed all in black, his face covered with a ski mask that revealed his close-set eyes. The friend also had a hunting knife in his boot, and around his waist he wore a utility belt with pouches filled with duct tape, a jackknife, and plastic ties that could bind a person hand and foot.”
Patti showed the stranger his gun. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” he replied. “I just want to use your phone.” Patti instead offered to call a local garage. But when he picked up the phone, it was dead. So was the phone upstairs. Before knocking, the two teens had cut the phone line. Hours earlier, they had dug a pit five feet long and three feet deep down the road —a grave meant for Patti and his young son?
When nothing happened in the next few minutes, Patti and Andy Jr. eventually calmed down. The boy went to sleep on the couch, but Patti spent the night on the hard floor, staring at the door, waiting for the potential home invaders to try again. They didn't.
Robert Tulloch, 17, and his 16-year-old friend, James Parker, never returned to the Patti house, but on January 27, 2001, they managed to con their way into the Hanover, N.H., home of Half and Suzanne Zantop, ostensibly seeking an interview with the Dartmouth professors on a high school environmental project. Hanover was a short drive from the teens' hometown across the Vermont border, and they theorized that people in the community not only had a lot of money, but also would be receptive to student “surveyors.”
They were right. “They couldn't have picked a better house,” says Zuckoff. “Half Zantop was an earth scientist, and he and Suzanne had spent their entire lives opening their door to students.”
Tulloch and Parker hacked the couple to death and made off with $340 as part of a plan to escape their “boring” small town of Chelsea, Vt., and live as self-proclaimed “badasses” in Australia.
“At first, there were no suspects, and few clues,” says Lehr. “People asked, ‘Why were these two well-liked and respected professors killed?' It seemed so pointless. They were the least likely victims of such a crime. But four weeks after the murder, the probe took investigators across the Connecticut River, 30 miles north into Chelsea.” After being interviewed by detectives, Tulloch and Parker quickly fled, leading police on a three-day manhunt that ended at a truck stop in Illinois.
In Judgment Ridge, Lehr and Zuckoff probe beyond the teens' confessed motivations for the crime, and their book is more than a retelling of the drama that played out in newspapers across the country. Veteran reporters and finalists for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for their work at the Boston Globe, they get the story behind the story, reporting subtle changes in the two boys over the previous year. They talked to friends, teachers, prosecutors, and police detectives, and interview by interview it becomes clear how two seemingly normal honor roll students came to commit murder.
“Delving into this was almost like peeling an onion,” says Lehr. “A year before the murder the boys began to change, but the changes went largely unnoticed by others as they were happening, much the same way that it sometimes takes an aunt to notice that your own kid has grown four inches.”
Zuckoff says that Parker, the “follower” in this warped friendship, killed because he was under Tulloch's control, psychologically --Tulloch gave him the attention he craved. As for Tulloch, a psychiatrist hired by his public defenders concluded that he suffers from bipolar disorder, which is characterized by episodes of mania and depression. “He had no conscience,” says Zuckoff. “This wasn't a robbery that turned into a murder. He wanted to get a couple of victims under his belt.” If they hadn't been apprehended, he says, Tulloch surely would have kept killing until he was caught: “Jim Tulloch was a serial killer in the making.”
The book is unsettling not only for its portrayal of what can happen to two average-appearing teenagers with too much time on their hands, but also for the sheer randomness of the murders. Anyone could have been their victims. Indeed, the day of the murder, Tulloch and Parker had first approached a man in Rochester, N.H., who was too busy working on his pool to help them with their “survey.” Then they knocked on the door of the Zantops' neighbors, but they weren't home. A couple of weeks before the brutal crime, they had prowled around another house in Hanover, running up the driveway and ducking behind trees. But they left. “Basically,” Tulloch said, “we chickened out.”
And of course, six months before the carnage at the Zantop house, Andrew Patti and his son escaped a violent scene in their home because of an armed father's suspicions. He had a gut feeling that the disabled car story was phony, and he was correct. “He decided that this was no time to be neighborly,” write Lehr and Zuckoff. Unfortunately for the Zantops, who lived in a college town and were approached by the murderous duo in the middle of the day, they were the perfect targets.
“To Robert and Jim's surprise,” write Lehr and Zuckoff, “it came out that Half Zantop was an earth sciences professor at Dartmouth. Jim didn't make much of the coincidence, but Robert got it right away. He understood that this was why he and Jim had gained a foothold in the house. They'd concocted a ruse to do a survey about the environment and were interviewing a professor in the field. How lucky was that?”
On April 5, 2002, Tulloch was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Parker received a sentence of 25 years to life.
16
January 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations