Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (35 page)

How do you feel about Robert and Jim? That was the question hurled at Chelseans over and over again: Your friends are murder suspects— so how do you feel? The question made kids like Tyler Vermette sick. How do you feel? He wanted to snap right back: “How would you feel if your heart just got ripped out?”

S
horn of their aliases, searched and handcuffed, Robert and Jim were taken to the Henry County Jail, in New Castle, Indiana, some

fifty miles east of Indianapolis. As day broke, they were fingerprinted and photographed wearing zebra-striped jail uniforms. During his face-forward shot, Jim—inmate 97797—stared straight at the camera, his usual smile replaced by a tight line; Robert—inmate 97795—gazed off somewhere to his left. Both looked deflated.

The jail rarely held teenage prisoners, and Sheriff Kim Cronk was concerned about placing them with the general population of mostly small-time adult offenders. Robert was taken to a weight room, where he sat on a mattress on the floor crying, a pile of crumpled tissues at his side. When jail officer Adam Bowman came to check on him, Robert said through his tears, “I can’t believe what I have done.” Bowman, at twenty-one a virtual peer, tried to get Robert to talk instead about what

it was like in Vermont. But soon Robert’s attention turned back to his predicament: “Am I going to spend the rest of my life in jail?” Bowman said he had no idea and again changed the subject.

Jim was held in an interview room, where he buried his head under a blanket. He cried even harder than Robert, going through several boxes of tissues. Both were placed on suicide watches from the moment they entered the jail. Surveillance cameras tracked their every move.

When Cronk talked with Robert, the teen mentioned several times that he was involved in student council, as if that might somehow impress his jailer and demonstrate that he wasn’t a criminal. Tired and hungry, what Robert wanted most was a bowl of cereal and a bed roll. When Cronk checked on Jim, the young inmate asked what New Castle was like outside the jail. Cronk described the quiet little town that is home to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. It was the kind of place that under different circumstances Jim might well have visited with his basketball-loving father. The local motto: “We have what you’re looking for!”

When they heard about the arrests, John and Joan Parker made flight arrangements and called San Diego lawyer Doug Brown, John Parker’s close friend and college roommate at Ohio Wesleyan. Brown dropped everything and said he’d meet them in Indiana.

When the Parkers arrived later that day, they spent an emotional half-hour with their son. “Jimmy, we love you,” they told him. Then, on lawyers’ orders, they told him: “Before we get into anything, Jim . . . we don’t want you to talk about anything about the case.” Then they all cried and hugged.

“I want to go home,” Jim told them. “I don’t want to be, don’t want to be in jail.”

One thing they didn’t talk about was Robert. Jim never asked about him.

Major Jay Davis, commander of the Henry County Jail, said the Parkers were allowed what is known in the corrections trade as a “contact visit”—they could touch and hold Jim, rather than speak through glass—because of his tender age. As a result, Jim was in no rush to

waive extradition, knowing such privileges wouldn’t be offered as readily in New Hampshire.

After one visit with their son, John and Joan emerged looking spent and holding hands. “We’d just like to say that we love Jimmy very much,” John Parker said outside the jail. He said he and his wife also wanted “to thank the Henry County Sheriff’s Department for how they’ve handled this whole situation. Thank you.”

In the end, Jim waived extradition on Friday, February 23, four days after the arrests, at a hearing attended by his father, Brown, and Kevin Ellis, a family friend and public relations executive from Chelsea whose home John Parker had built. Joan Parker was nowhere in sight. At first, John Parker sat in the walnut courtroom pews behind his son, but then he and Ellis moved across the courtroom so they could make eye contact with the young murder suspect. Jim was spared hav-ing to wear jail garb, choosing instead navy exercise pants with yellow stripes down the legs, a black turtleneck, and new Spalding basketball

shoes.

Outside the Henry County courthouse, John Parker had only one comment: “I cannot believe that Jimmy was capable of committing this crime.”

The next day, Jim flew back east aboard a small FBI plane. “It was a good trip,” said Hanover Police Chief Nick Giaccone, who accompanied Jim on the flight. “He’s in good shape. Very cooperative and very quiet.”

Because Jim was sixteen, still a juvenile under New Hampshire law, he would spend the next three months at a juvenile detention cen-ter in Concord. When he turned seventeen in May, he’d be transferred to a county jail.

J
im followed his parents’ and lawyers’ advice and kept his mouth shut, but Robert slipped. Six hours after his arrest, dressed in a jail-

issue blue barn-jacket for warmth, Robert was led to an interview room at the Henry County Jail. Tears streamed down his face as he

sat at a wood-veneer table before Indiana-based FBI agent William Donaldson.

“It’s gonna be all right,” Donaldson said to the crying boy.

Robert pitched forward, putting his head down on the table and covering his face with his cuffed hands.

“I don’t think it’s going to be all right,” he sobbed. “We’re gonna talk about it, OK?” the FBI agent said. “How’s Jim doing?” Robert asked.

“We’ll talk about that, OK?” Donaldson said.

As his cuffs were removed by a Henry County sheriff ’s sergeant, Robert asked: “Can I get some Kleenex?” The sergeant, Elmer New, handed him a half roll of toilet paper and Robert ripped off one piece after another to wipe his tears, then squeezed the used papers into ragged balls.

“Take a deep breath for me,” Donaldson said, trying to get Robert to stop crying.

“I don’t have to worry about a lawyer or anything, do I?” Robert asked.

“We’re gonna talk about that,” the FBI agent answered. Donaldson told Robert that authorities in New Hampshire had spoken to his mother and father, and at the mention of his parents Robert again brought his hands to his face to hide his tears.

Donaldson went over a juvenile rights form that was a beginner’s version of the Miranda warning adult suspects receive. Then Donaldson asked Robert if he had any questions.

“How is Jim doing?” Robert asked a second time.

“We can talk about that. We can talk about that. He’s like you,” Donaldson said in reference to Robert’s emotional state.

“Do you think I’ll be tried as an adult?”

“You know,” the FBI agent said, “I can’t answer that, I really can’t.”

Robert began weeping again. Donaldson told him: “OK, I know it’s hard.”

As Donaldson waited for Robert to compose himself, the teen made the first of a series of statements that were vague yet incriminating, statements that would be his only recorded words of remorse— though that remorse was reserved entirely for himself and Jim.

Choking with tears, Robert said: “It was pretty easy to throw my life away. It should have been a little harder, you know? Or maybe if I should be, have been, less, ‘Oh, I know everything.’ But, you know, like a house of cards, you know, it takes, what, seventeen years to build it, and then you just blow it away. And you can never put it back up.”

Soon after, Donaldson told Robert that he would shut off the audio and video recorders to allow Robert to speak with his parents privately by phone, to discuss whether he wanted to answer questions about the case. In the meantime, Donaldson left the room and Robert got the mistaken impression that the video recorder had already been turned off. Alone in the room, thinking no one could see or hear him, Robert clasped his hands together and stared upward, like a penitent seeking absolution for mortal sins.

“Jim, I’m so sorry,” Robert wept to the ceiling. “Jim, I’m so sorry. Maybe if I’d used my brain a little more. So sorry for everything. I’m so sorry.” His throat filled with phlegm from crying and the remnants of the flu, and Robert leaned down and spit into a garbage basket. Then he slurped water from a mug on the table. “I’m so sorry, Jim,” he repeated, rocking back in his chair as Donaldson returned to the room.

Out of camera range, Sergeant Elmer New heard even more. “Robert stated he wished he had not involved John Parker’s son. Robert stated God does not like quitters,” New wrote in a detailed report. “Robert stated he could not understand how a person could get manslaughter for hitting a person with a car and it lasted only two seconds, yet it only took ten seconds to change my [Robert’s] life. Robert stated he wished he could sit down with his mother and have dinner and do as she said. . . . Robert stated that he had screwed up and it would take twenty to thirty years for he and his family to get over it.”

On the advice of his parents and lawyers, Robert declined to answer questions from the FBI agent or other investigators. But by then it was too late; he had already said plenty.

T
he next day, Robert appeared in Henry County Superior Court, handcuffed, shackled, and wearing a brown-and-black V-neck sweater,

Levi’s jeans, and Reebok running shoes. His old self returned, as he joked with jail officer Adam Bowman that he never wore those kinds of sneakers or sweater. Bowman shook his hand and wished Robert good luck.

Michael Tulloch sat stoically in the courtroom, his hat literally in his hand, as his son waived extradition and agreed to return to New Hampshire. Diane stayed home—they could only afford one round-trip airfare. Reached by telephone, she told reporters: “We love our son very much and want the press to know that he’s innocent until proven guilty.” Outside their house they posted a sign:
NO MEDIA ALLOWED
.

Robert and Jim’s paths diverged almost from the moment they were placed in separate cells in Henry County. Except for a brief view of each other through a window, there was no contact or communication, a forced separation that would remain in effect far longer than either could imagine.

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A Chelsea Embrace

F
ew were sleeping soundly in Chelsea, and that included Dr. Andy Pomerantz. He’d stood by Pat Davenport’s side at the principal’s school

assembly just hours after the arrests, and now it was his turn: He was in charge of a community meeting scheduled for three days later at the United Church of Chelsea. Welcome were townsfolk who wanted to talk about the murders, the boys’ capture in Indiana, and their community under siege. Prominent Chelseans—the educators, parents, and selectmen—all knew they were winging it, trying to confront and manage a crisis none of them had ever known before. Pomerantz was actually one who had a foot in each of the colliding worlds—Chelsea and Dartmouth.

The “hippie doctor,” the sobriquet he’d acquired soon after moving to Chelsea in 1972 with his long hair and medical degree from the University of Chicago, had for years been a general practitioner with

an office in the village. More recently, after becoming a psychiatrist, he’d taken a position with the VA Medical Center in White River Junction, as chief of mental health and behavioral sciences. In that role, he also held an appointment as assistant professor of psychiatry at Dartmouth Medical School.

The switch—from country doctor to a hospital-affiliated psychiatrist—symbolized more than a career change. It captured as well a broader change in the Chelsea mindset. Not so long ago, Chelseans, including flatlanders like Pomerantz, made only occasional journeys south to places like Hanover or West Lebanon, where in the early 1970s the region’s first shopping center was built. Trips back then were a big event. “People would pack up the family and make the adventure trip down to West Lebanon,” Pomerantz said, “and if I was going to drive down from Chelsea to Hanover I would check my oil, make sure my car was properly tuned up.”

But no matter how routine the daily commute had long since become, Pomerantz’s heart and soul remained firmly planted in his town. Indeed, tacked on the wall of his hospital office was a map Pomerantz used to show visitors why he and his family lived there: the isolation that had mostly withstood time. “I have a thirty-three mile commute every morning and twenty miles of it is a twisty, two-lane road before I reach the interstate,” he said. “Chelsea’s still pretty much out of the way.”

But the anonymity was gone. Chelsea was in the grip of a media hurricane, the focus of a nation fascinated by the killing of the Zantops. Following the school assembly on Monday, an almost immediate urgency had arisen for another meeting—this time for parents in town. The assembly seemed to help ground the kids, and afterward Pomerantz and educators realized: What about the mothers and fathers? Pomerantz, who specialized in trauma, knew that the town’s kids would be turning to parents and teachers for support and security. The ever-cool teen might be the last to acknowledge this, but Pomerantz understood: kids really do need to know that parents have their world under control. It was how kids maintained their bearings. By Tuesday, then, word went out about a meeting to be held at the