After prosecutors withdrew their opposition to the release of court documents, several pieces in the Zantop case fell into place. And in less than two weeks, someone who could be a critical witness is set to appear before the special investigative grand jury -- her scheduled appearance carrying the possibility of adding more pieces to the evidentiary puzzle.
Seventeen-year-old suspect Robert Tulloch's sometime girlfriend, Christiana Usenza, is scheduled to testify before the special investigative grand jury on April 20. Prosecutors excused her from the mid-March session to go on a previously-scheduled vacation to Mexico with her mother.
Authorities have not explicitly stated the connection between Usenza and the case. Earlier she was questioned by police about her car, a dark-colored Volvo sedan, following a statement made by a witness that said he saw a thin white male between the ages of 17 and early 20s speeding out of the Zantop driveway in a green Volvo station wagon the day before the murder.
Usenza's attorney and family friend Robert Sherman told The Boston Herald that police questioned her about her car but concluded that she was not involved. Sherman maintained that Usenza never lent her car to anyone, including Tulloch, and was not in Hanover on Jan. 26 or 27.
The witness, Paul Newcity of Canaan, N.H., recently told the Herald that the car was "a green sedan style," although his police affidavit states that Newcity described a station wagon.
In addition, investigators seized and searched a green Subaru station wagon owned by Joan Parker, 16-year-old suspect James Parker's mother, and reportedly "consistent" with Newcity's testimony. According to the recently released records, the action was taken for the purposes of conducting forensic testing on a spot of blood on the passenger-side floor mat.
Newcity told police that he didn't know if there was a passenger in the car at the time of his sighting.
The results of the forensic testing were not made public, and evidence of motive remains elusive, at least to the public, but further records have filled in some of the case's other gaps.
Prosecutors' key evidence against the Vermont teens charged with the double murder includes a bloody footprint at the crime scene from a hiking boot identical to one owned by Tulloch, a DNA match between blood found on two knives found under Tulloch's bed and the blood of Susanne Zantop, Parker's fingerprints on a knife sheath found in the Zantop's home and evidence tracing an Internet purchase by Parker of two military-style knives that police claim are the same type used in the murders.
Blood from a second person was also found on one of the two knives discovered in Tulloch's bedroom, which according to sources cited by The Boston Globe, has been matched to Half Zantop.
