Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders (7 page)

The trooper climbed out of her cruiser, walked up to the two boys and asked them to tell her what happened. That’s when the lies began. The boys acted as if there was nothing accidental about the fix they’d gotten themselves into. They’d pulled onto the shoulder on purpose, one of the boys tried explaining, so he could “take a leak.”

The boys, the trooper noticed, were dressed mostly in black. The driver wore a light-colored top and black pants, the passenger a black sweatshirt, black jeans, and a black tuque.

Where are you heading? the trooper asked.

The driver hesitated before answering. “Skiing.” Whereabouts?

Hesitating again, the driver looked down at the ground. “Sugarbush.” The trooper put the boys through the paces, asking for licenses and registration. The driver scowled and acted as if she were wasting his time. But he complied, handing her a license that said he was from Chelsea, Vermont, DOB 5/24/84, 6 feet tall, 150 pounds, with brown

eyes. His name was James Parker.

By contrast, the second boy, taller than the first, was accommodat-ing, but in an exaggerated, overly solicitous way that struck the trooper as fake. To get his ID, the boy first asked her for permission to open the rear car door, and once in the back he rummaged around and found his license. It showed he was also from Chelsea, with a DOB of 5/8/83, making him a year older than his friend. Then Stohl matched the face in the picture to the boy standing before her and read the name: Robert Tulloch.

While Robert was retrieving his license, Stohl noticed two backpacks in the backseat, fully expanded and clearly full of something.

The trooper wasn’t buying the skiing story. The car had been traveling east—the opposite direction from Sugarbush Mountain Ski Area. There were two backpacks, but she couldn’t see ski apparel or ski equipment of any kind, either inside or on top of the car. What she did know was that she’d made a routine stop to assist a disabled vehicle and the driver was behaving angry in a nervous kind of way while the passenger was acting as cool as could be.

The trooper also knew the area had experienced some recent home burglaries.

Stohl’s gut told her to pursue the matter further, and ideally that’s what she would have done—put in a call for back-up and then ask the driver to consent to a car search. But at that particular moment there was little Stohl could do; she was in a hurry to a possible life-threat- ening situation while other troopers from the barracks were already tied up with other accidents and cars off the road. Stohl stayed long enough to run routine license and registration checks. But nothing came back when she punched in the names James Parker and Robert Tulloch.

In an incident report filed later, the trooper wrote, “Due to a priority call that I had to respond to and no other troopers available, I confirmed that a wrecker was responding to assist these subjects and went on my way.”

Stohl told the two teens about the wrecker and left. She did so reluctantly. She hadn’t liked the boys. They gave her a bad feeling and she felt they were up to no good. As soon as she heard their bogus ski-ing story, Stohl told herself not to turn her back on them at any time. “My suspicions of criminal activity were significant,” Stohl wrote afterward.

That was the very last line of the report she filed about her encounter with Robert and Jim.

S
ergeant Jocelyn Stohl was correct to feel creepy about the two boys dressed in black on the side of the road. The next morning, brassy as

ever, Robert and Jim headed back over Bethel Mountain Road toward the town of Rochester. But not before making several adjustments.

They switched vehicles, for one, exchanging the Audi that Jim usually drove for his mom’s green Subaru. More important, they gave up the black garb for the clothes of two ordinary high school students.

The dark attire had been part of one of their earliest ideas in the year since they had decided that the daring life was the only life for them. It was their after-hours option, in which they would jump some old man or woman as he or she arrived home at night. The student look was their new big thing, in which they’d pretend to be doing an environmental survey for school and, once inside a house, overtake the occupants. This option could happen in broad daylight, a ballsy move both liked. They valued “extreme thinking.” Robert, who had the idea, especially liked the fake survey; it seemed so cynical. He liked cynical.

The one carryover from Friday was the backpacks. Of course they needed the backpacks.

The boys had a forty-mile ride ahead of them on mostly back roads. Jim was tempted to ignore any posted limits on speed. He was a charged-up kid, drawn to going fast in any direction someone pointed him. Robert certainly knew this about Jim because the two were best friends; in their minds, maybe the all-time two best friends ever. The boys sometimes talked about how lucky they were to have found one another in the first place. It was incredible that two boys who were so like-minded had come together in a country town they both agreed was a dead end.

On this morning, though, January 20, 2001, Jim knew he’d better not challenge the road. The last thing they wanted was to attract more trouble, like with the state trooper the day before. That was too close a call. Better to put that episode behind them, treat it as a bump in the road, a comma in their stream of higher consciousness, a tiny pause in their destiny.

Robert and Jim didn’t want anything to get in their way. They headed south from Chelsea on Vermont 14, turning onto Vermont 107, then heading north on Route 12. They were back on Bethel Mountain Road, the winding, bumpy road that cut up and over a mountain ridge and led to their destination, North Hollow Road.

Robert and Jim knew about North Hollow Road from one of their reconnaissance drives in recent months, as they drove all around scouting out people and houses. They’d actually already broken into one of the houses on North Hollow, an older white Colonial-style home built close to the road. Jim had pried open a first-floor window, crawled inside, and unlocked the door for Robert. They’d stolen some mail and a map, but didn’t come away with anything useful. Money was what they needed.

It was time to put up or shut up. They were a couple of hardwork- ing students out doing a survey. They had the backpacks, the perfect props for two nerdy students. Inside the backpacks were two brand-new SOG SEAL 2000 knives. The boys had spent a lot of time researching the knives. They also had the ties and rope and other equipment they’d assembled, mostly from buying sprees at an Army-Navy store in Burlington.

They were going to get into one of the houses on North Hollow Road and be sitting around the table doing their fake survey and Robert would give the code that was a call to action. Forget about the scare with the trooper on Bethel Mountain Road. It was a glorious new day and the first day of the rest of their lives. They could taste it.

The boys made it over Bethel Mountain Road and, less than a mile from where they’d had the close encounter with Sergeant Stohl, they turned onto North Hollow Road. Fresh snow covered the meadows. Jim drove about a half-mile up the dirt road and buzzed by a house set hard against the road. They were thinking maybe this was one they should hit. But on quick inspection, they realized the house didn’t hold a candle to the bigger one they’d passed, the biggest one they’d ever seen on North Hollow, a brand-new house.

Jim turned around the Subaru and headed back down the hill. Their destination was 540 North Hollow Road, where Franklin and

Jane Sanders were still in the process of breaking in the sprawling home they had recently moved into. Sanders was sixty-five, a retired utilities-and-insurance executive from New Jersey. He and his wife had only two months earlier completed construction of the modern, post-and-beam house on eighty-five acres of meadow and woods the

couple had purchased in 1998. The home featured a large red barn, a big basement, and twelve rooms, with an assessed value of $650,700. The house was situated on a hillside, with a mountain range in back and a commanding view in front. In any affluent metropolitan suburb, the home would be labeled a trophy house, valued at many times the rural Vermont assessment. It was certainly a house that stood out among the mostly modest ranches, log homes, and double-wide house trailers that dotted surrounding roads.

Steering the Subaru onto the dirt driveway, the boys rode a couple hundred yards and pulled right up to the house. They noticed a dog pen alongside a garage, with access to an adjacent pen inside, so the dogs could go in or out on their own. Dogs were a potential concern, but not one to stop them at this point. Robert stepped out of the passenger side and strode toward the door. The two friends stood with their backpacks on the front steps when Franklin Sanders opened the door. They recognized at once he was an ideal target—an older man, meaning someone they could expect to subdue easily. Robert took the lead, telling Sanders they were students wanting to do an interview about the environment for school. They hoped he had some free time to help them with their project.

But Sanders was preoccupied. He was working on the new wave pool he’d begun installing over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, when his son drove up from New Jersey to help him. The pool was an indoor aquatic-luxury item that was becoming popular with master swimmers and triathletes, or retirees with ailing hips and backs. The pools were designed to fit in sunrooms, garages, or base-ments, which is where Sanders was in the middle of putting his.

“No,” he said, and he was curt about it.

The teenager doing all the talking wasn’t even able to finish his presentation.

“I’m too busy. I’m tarring my pool.” Sanders gave another reason, as well: After a lifetime in the utilities industry, where fights with environmentalists were as common as rate hikes, he had no interest in tak-ing an environmental survey.

And then Franklin Sanders shut the door. It was that simple.

The boys stood there, stunned. That was it! Just like that—so totally dismissed!

The air went screaming out of their balloon.

Why didn’t you jump him? Jim asked. It looked like the guy was home alone.

Didn’t think of that, Robert admitted. It happened so fast. But Jim was right; he should have thought of that. Could have jumped the guy right at the door. Now it was too late.

They returned to the car and tossed the unopened backpacks into the back seat. They found themselves driving around, wondering what the heck had gone wrong. There was second-guessing, some sniping. They sounded like an old married couple, frustrated by the missed opportunities of life. Maybe they weren’t prepared enough. The rebuff at North Hollow Road had been completely unanticipated.

The two left Rochester and were in Bethel, near Interstate 89, when they began to emerge from their funk. They weren’t about to settle for this sort of setback, no way, not the two of them. They would just have to find new houses, and crank it up again. They reminded themselves of their calling as “Higher Beings.” And they were nearing the route that would take them back home to Chelsea—which was ironic, because the whole point of their plan was to get away from Chelsea forever. Then one of them mentioned Hanover.

Hanover?

People in Hanover have a lot of money.

Hanover, New Hampshire—a great idea, and not only because Hanover did have a lot more money than most of the places they’d scouted. It was a great idea because no one would ever connect them to Hanover. They hated the college town and the conformist preppies who populated it. They almost never went there—the whole atmosphere was a turnoff, an insult to their self-images as brilliant adventurers and rugged individualists. None of their parents had business

there, either, so there was no connection whatsoever. Best of all, Robert had some unfinished business from an angry brush with a debate team from Hanover High School.

So instead of heading back to Chelsea, they drove south on I-89.

Their mood picked up. Hanover was brilliant. Things might work out after all.

5
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Trescott Road

I
t was easy to miss the house at 115 Trescott Road, situated in a small valley and hidden behind brush and trees and a low fieldstone wall.

The house was barely visible from the heavily traveled street that connected Hanover to its bedroom suburb of Etna. But that’s what the Zantops had been looking for: a respite from their busy lives, a place where they could feel swaddled by surrounding forests yet comfortable enough to entertain their many friends and colleagues.

Built in 1985 by Thomas Almy, a renowned Dartmouth Medical School professor, and his wife, Katharine, the two-story, 3,200-square- foot home had classic lines and a modern flair. Outside, the Almys sheathed it in vertical, blue-gray wood siding and topped it with a sloping roof covered by sheets of light-blue tin that made snow more likely to slide than stick. A fifty-yard gravel driveway curved in front of the house and led to an attached two-car garage. Circling the house was a

swath of grass from which sprouted bushes, ferns, hostas, and an old-fashioned drying rack. Clothes hung there soaked in the fresh scents of the nearby woods. Inside were three bedrooms and a 600-square- foot living/dining room with an open kitchen, and just off the main room was an attached greenhouse.