Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (3 page)

phone, the same phone he had used not two hours earlier to call Diane.

Silence.

“Oh shit. The phone’s dead.”

Alarmed, he and Andy ran upstairs to try the phone in the master bedroom. Again, nothing.

“What’s going on, Dad?”

“They’ve cut the wires,” Patti told his son.

He was on full alert, trying to keep Andy calm while assessing the situation. Patti surmised that when he refused to open the door, the stranger changed tactics and wanted him to discover that the phones were dead. Maybe then Patti would go outside to check the wires on the side of the house. Even with his gun, outside in the dark Patti might be vulnerable. “If I check the phone lines,” he thought, “they’ll bushwhack me.” No matter what happened, he’d stay inside.

They ran back downstairs—Patti wanted to be there, Glock ready, if the stranger tried to bust through the door or the windows. Adrenaline pumping—half from fear and half from anger at the thought of someone hurting his son—Patti fought to keep a cool exterior to prevent Andy from panicking. They huddled on the living room floor, feeding the fire and waiting for a rock or a person to come crash-ing through the window. They had seen only one face at the door, but Patti remembered the queasy feeling of being watched. He was sure the young man at the door wasn’t alone, and he wondered how many others might be out there. All he could do was hope they had been spooked by the gun, and wait.

As minutes passed and nothing happened, Andy’s fear began giving way to exhaustion. Patti lay his son down on the sofa, covered him with a blanket, and told him everything was fine. Soon Andy was asleep. But Patti wouldn’t let down his guard.

He spent the next few hours sitting on the hard floor, gun in hand, blinking to stay awake. He didn’t dare sit on the couch or a chair because the cushiony comfort might lull him to sleep. As the silence stretched into hours, fatigue crept up on him. Patti lay down on his

back, his head toward the fireplace and his feet toward the door, so he could watch for intruders just by lifting his head.

Patti spent the rest of the night that way—staring at the door, listening to night noises, hoping for daybreak— his gun on his chest, ris-ing and falling with every breath.

2
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Chelsea

I
n a sleepy hollow five miles or so from the Pattis’ rural retreat is Chelsea, Vermont. A soccer field sits alongside Main Street. Bordering

the field to the north is a farm, to the west a footbridge that crosses a stream and, beyond the stream, sloping hills smothered in trees. Three “bleachers” near the road are, in fact, three large benches. Then there’s the south end of the field, where a large soccer “shooting board” is located. The board only recently became a permanent fixture.

The wall of wood is built from sheets of plywood, each four by six feet, nailed soundly together and then grounded firmly to withstand the hard shots of Chelsea kids. But there’s something else about this new shooting board—one of the panels had a prior use that is of particular and peculiar interest. This single slab was originally a campaign sign in a 1999 student council election at the Chelsea Public School.

Neatly hand-painted on a side hidden from public view, the sign reads:

V
OTE
F
OR

R
OBERT
& C
ASE

S
TUDENT
C
OUNCIL
’99

Robert was Robert Tulloch, candidate for student council president in the fall of his junior year. “Basically he wanted to run for school president to show everybody that he could be the school president,” his best pal, Jim Parker, said later. Indeed, Jim helped Robert campaign and persuade other students to vote for a candidate originally considered a long shot.

To guarantee that voters would take notice, Robert and his running mate, fellow junior Casey “Case” Purcell, positioned the large plywood sign right outside the school’s main entrance. To further grab voters’ attention, Robert decorated the sign with four fictitious blurbs:

“T
HEY
R
OCK
”
—Rolling Stone

“T
HEY HAVE A STYLE AND F ASHION ALL TO THEIR OWN
”
—Vogue

“T
HEY
’
RE
H
ELLU VA
C
OOL
”
—Time

“T
HEY
’
RE
L
EADERSHIP
S
KILLS ARE
U
N
-
P ARELELED
”
—Newsweek

It was a sign, replete with mistakes in spelling and grammar, displaying teen creativity and friendship. And it worked: Robert and Casey won, and their buddy Jim Parker was elected sophomore-class representative.

More than anything, the dual life of a piece of plywood—high-spirited campaign sign and later, permanently, as soccer shooting

board—captured the brio of youth and represented the very thing Chelseans proudly say their town is all about: kids and community.

D
own a few hundred yards from the soccer field is the town center, a tree-lined village featuring two town greens that Chelseans use for

picnics, a farmers’ market in the summer, an annual flea market, and high school graduation. During and after school, kids often hang out around the greens, throwing Frisbees or skateboarding. Kids also gather in warm weather to shoot hoops at an asphalt court across the street.

Main Street is a mix of old homes and small businesses. Laundry flaps from clotheslines. Tractors pulling manure spreaders chug along during planting season. People actually wave to strangers. “Just yell north, and I’ll hear you,” said one villager, directing a visitor from the North Common to her home up the street. The business sector amounts mostly to one of each—a bank, a bar named The Pines, a food market, a funeral home, a restaurant named Dixie II’s, an auto repair shop, a pizza shop, a coin laundry, a feed-and-grain store, and Will’s Store, with its wildly varied offerings: video rentals, newspapers, ice cream, beer, milk, worms and crawlers for fishing bait, and ammunition for turkey and woodchuck shooting.

The Town Hall and library share a nineteenth-century, red-brick building located next to the North Common, and on the library’s shelves are the few books that tell the story of this quintessential New England town, including
A History of Chelsea, Vermont,
compiled by

W. Sydney Gilman and a committee from the Chelsea Historical Society.

Farming and family were the twin pillars upon which the community was founded in the eighteenth century. The original charter of 1781 explicitly says as much—both were conditions for moving to the area. The charter required that settlers, most of whom were of English descent and came from lower New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, “shall plant & cultivate Five acres of Land and build a

house at least Eighteen feet square on the Floor, or have one Family Settled on each respective share or right of Land in said Township, with the Term of Four Years.” For the next two centuries, farming defined life in Chelsea, a community where change has always come as slowly as a soft breeze. In 1840, the population peaked at 1,959 residents. By the year 2000 it was about 700 fewer. Many of the outdoor activities and social traditions established throughout the 1800s are the same ones practiced two centuries later—the fishing, hunting, snowshoeing, skiing, and ice skating, along with the minstrel shows and tree-plantings. It’s the essence of country life found in just about any small New England town. One distinguishing characteristic of Chelsea is its long affinity for the dramatic arts. Sydney Gilman, the late local historian, noted, “A sense of drama has been inherent in Chelsea’s history.” Town Hall was itself once called The Opera House, and community drama clubs, with names like The Chelsea Dramatic Company or, later, The Chelsea Players, always seemed at work on one production or another.

N
ot far from Chelsea are greater concentrations of upcountry wealth—to the west in Stowe, Vermont, for example, or to the south

in Hanover, New Hampshire, home to Dartmouth College. For all its bucolic trappings, Chelsea is the seat of one of Vermont’s more hard-scrabble counties. Per capita income in Orange County in 1999 was

$21,164, the tenth lowest of the state’s fourteen counties. Real estate still sells relatively cheap—thirty acres of Chelsea woodland was on the market in 2002 for $33,900. A four-bedroom, 1926 Dutch Colonial on ten acres of land near the village was listed at the reduced price of $159,900. The town does not have its own police department and pays about $4,500 to the county sheriff ’s office for law enforcement—mostly to handle accidents, speeding, and drunken driving.

The core of the town has always been rock-ribbed conservative. In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush carried Chelsea with 350 votes to Al Gore’s 272. Hanover, in contrast, went for Gore by a three-to-one margin—3,391 votes to Bush’s 1,541. Another reminder

of Chelsea’s conservative mindset was the big sign in block letters hanging from a house overlooking the North Common:
TAKE BACK VERMONT
, the slogan used by those opposed to the state law recogniz-ing the vows of same-sex couples.

While many other Vermont villages have turned into ultra-quaint destinations for skiers and tourists, Chelsea has not. Fewer than five miles of the town’s seventy miles of roads are paved; instead, dirt and gravel roads zigzag through West Hill, where most Chelseans live, and some of those roads are impassable during the winter months and the mud season that follows. The town may cover thirty-seven square miles, but seventy percent is thickly forested. In a way, Chelsea has always lived in a cocoon, a by-product of geography and location. When the era of highway construction began in the 1950s, the region’s two major routes—Interstates 91 and 89—came no closer than twenty-five miles to Chelsea. For the longest time the world was out there, and starting in the late 1970s, photographers and writers began showing up to document Chelsea’s rustic, lived-in feel and seemingly unchanged ways. As part of a
New England Monthly
article in 1985, more than half the town turned out to pose for a photographer in front of the white Greek Revival courthouse. Thirteen years earlier, in
Vermont Life
, a similarly themed story featured a photo album of Chelsea’s farms, meadows, the village, and local kids playing soccer and basketball. Nearly identical photographs could be taken today.

Both photo spreads featured the two town greens, North and South Common. In truth, the rectangular swatches of grass seem unremarkable to anyone familiar with the parks or large commons in cities like Boston or Montpelier, Vermont’s capital. But context is everything, and what makes Chelsea’s greens special is the fact that none of the neighboring communities have anything like them. Places like Vershire, Thetford, and West Fairleigh possess comparatively meager town centers, with town offices, libraries, post offices, and homes built practically on the curb of a main road. There’s no bona fide common area at which to dally, just a state road cutting into and out of town. Chelsea’s two greens are therefore a rarity, a twin treasure, its own Boston Common—and a draw over the years for townsfolk from other towns.

Years ago, the South Common was also the site of a whipping post and a set of stocks. The first county jail was built in 1796 on a site where today’s brick jail sits, and the first courthouse atop South Common was built in the early 1800s. Crimes throughout the county are adjudicated in Chelsea. But then, as now, the criminal court docket has never been a crowded affair. Throughout the town’s history, the crime log has featured the kind of petty offenses that occur anywhere—vandalism, thefts, and breakins. Just as in any rural place suffering through long winters, Chelsea has also coped with crimes often hidden from public view, like domestic abuse. By the same token, just as in most of Vermont, there is nowhere near as much crime as cities see.

The most notorious incident took place in the early nineteenth century involving Rebecca Peake, who was not actually from Chelsea but lived in Randolph, the next town to the west. In the summer of 1835, Peake was charged with poisoning her husband with arsenic. The murder case was that era’s headline-grabbing, high-profile story. The court record described Peake’s conduct this way: “Not having the fear of God before her eyes, but being moved and instigated by the Devil, and of her malice aforethought,” she killed her husband, Ephraim, on August 12, 1835. The December trial drew so many spectators that the proceedings were moved out of the courthouse and into the Congregational Church at North Common. Following Peake’s conviction, gallows were built at South Common, and February 12, 1836, was set as the day Rebecca Peake “would be hanged by the neck until she is dead.” Despite a major snowstorm that Friday morning, curiosity seekers filled the South Common to watch a civics lesson in capital punishment. But the hanging never happened. Peake had stock-piled opium a local doctor had provided to help her sleep, and she slipped the hangman’s noose by committing suicide. “Woman Cheated Gallows,” read one newspaper headline.