With the weekend arrests of Robert Tulloch and James Parker, who will be charged with the alleged murders of Suzanne and Half Zantop, public focus has shifted from searching for the murderers to understanding the crime.
Throughout the extradition hearings in Indiana and Tulloch's subsequent arraignment in Lebanon, investigators remained tight-lipped about the possible motive for the double homicide.
Though College President James Wright said in a BlitzMail message to the Dartmouth community that the two teens had no apparent connection to the College, a random act of violence does not seem to be the likely explanation for the murders.
Murder victims of juvenile offenders are more than twice as likely to be acquaintances than strangers, according to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.
Most adolescent crimes are impulsive acts, said Michael Mello, a professor at Vermont Law School and former defense counsel for serial killer Ted Bundy and the "Unabomber," Ted Kazcynski.
"[An adolescent's] life is passionate and [consists of] extreme emotional responses to people in certain situations," especially people they are close with, Mello said.
"Adolescents are immature; they cannot think things through. And when they kill," Mello said, "they kill for impulsive reasons."
When asked whether the Zantop murders matched up with any contemporary trends in juvenile murder, Mello replied that "it is hard to generalize ... it seems to me that there is a huge piece of the of this puzzle missing and that piece is what on earth led these two kids into the house."
Materials still not public include Feb. 15 interviews police conducted with Tulloch and Parker, details of the crime scene and evidence police took from the scene.
According to Mello, the media has been very quick to convict Tulloch and Parker.
"My concern is that now [the law enforcement officials] are so publicly committed to these two guys being the Zantop killers that they're not going to see other evidence that may come to their attention ... that is how innocent people end up being committed to life, to death," Mello said repeatedly in his interview with The Dartmouth.
Mello said that it is important at the outset of an investigation to give law enforcement officials the benefit of the doubt.
"But that benefit of the doubt ended for me about a week ago and I really think they were becoming defensive about their cluelessness," he said. "There is an air of desperation that makes me very squeamish."
While the public continues trying to comprehend the case, the legal proceedings against the two suspects continue.
And, it is becoming more and more obvious that the cases against Parker and Tulloch will be very different from one another.
Former Chief of the New Hampshire Attorney General's Homicide Unit John Kacavas told the Associated Press that prosecutors typically try to drive a wedge between codefendants charged in high-profile teen crimes.
According to the OJJDP, this has become very common practice since the proportion of multiple-offender murders involving juveniles has witnessed a huge increase form the 1980s to the 1990s.
In most cases, the defendant who decides to cooperate typically is the one who is able to show that he is less culpable. If either Tulloch or Parker can show that, the pressure will mount from their families and defense counsels to try to strike a deal
"If there are weaknesses in the case, in the evidence, then there could be some bargaining room," Government Professor Lynn Mather said.
Also, Parker is still a legal juvenile under New Hampshire law.
Now that he has returned to New Hampshire, Parker's first stop will be juvenile court, where a decision would be made at the outset about whether or not to try him as an adult.
Nationally, an increasing number of teenagers are being tried in adult courts.
All of the states have provisions for trying certain juveniles as adults and from 1992 through 1997, 44 states and the District of Columbia passed laws making this easier.
The transfer is often grounded in such criteria as the juvenile's offense history, previous dispositions, public safety and what is considered to be in the best interests of the child.
The most severe court decision for Tulloch and Parker could very well be life imprisonment without parole.
The overwhelming majority of American jurisdictions, including New Hampshire, allow life without parole for offenders younger than 16.
