Robert Tulloch and James Parker murdered Half and Susanne Zantop during the last in a string of robbery attempts stretching back to July 2000, says a grand jury indictment released yesterday.
Tulloch and Parker approached a house in Vershire, Vt., on or about July 19, 2000 with the intent to kill the residents after obtaining PIN numbers for their ATM cards, according to the indictment. It says that this attempt, and three subsequent attempts, failed when the teenagers could not gain entry to the home.
The fifth attempt succeeded when Half Zantop let Tulloch and Parker into the professors' home after the teenagers claimed they were conducting an environmental survey for a school project, according to the indictment.
Grafton County Superior Court released the indictment documents yesterday morning, charging Tulloch, 18, with conspiracy to commit murder -- a separate charge from the pre-existing first-degree murder indictment. Tulloch's lawyers have said that he will use an insanity defense at trial, slated to begin on April 22.
The new charge is not likely to warrant a separate trial. "The State will seek to consolidate the new indictment with the pending first-degree murder charges," New Hampshire Attorney General Philip T. McLaughlin said in a release.
"Obviously, this is a troubling development," said College Director of Public Affairs Laurel Stavis. She said that the administration's role now is "to help the community heal."
The release of the indictment documents marks the first time that the prosecution has offered the public detailed evidence that the murders were premeditated. It also offers a far more thorough documentation of the suspects' activities on the day of the killings than was previously available.
The indictment does not describe the killings of the Zantops, but it does offer new details of Tulloch and Parker's activities that day.
Half Zantop brought the two teenagers into his study to answer the questions on their phony environmental survey, the indictment says.
It also says that after the murder, Tulloch and Parker retreated into the woods to wash blood off the murder weapons and a floor mat from the car.
The suspects stole Half Zantop's wallet, the indictment says, and burned it along with some bloody clothes.
This new information likely comes as a result of Parker's recent plea agreement, in which he pled guilty to accomplice to second-degree murder and agreed to provide the prosecution with "a complete and truthful account of the circumstances" surrounding the murder of the Zantops.
The indictment documents also present details of the four robbery attempts previously unknown to the public.
They say that Tulloch initiated the first attempt in Vershire, Vt., by misrepresenting that his car had broken down nearby and asking to use the resident's telephone -- while James Parker hid out of sight. The resident did not allow Tulloch to enter the home, the indictment says.
The pair had cut the telephone wires to the house prior to their approach, the indictment says.
Vershire is a tiny hamlet just a few miles from Parker and Tulloch's native Chelsea. The road on which the teens were allegedly denied entry -- Goose Green Road -- is similar to Etna's Trescott Road, home of the Zantops, with sparse houses separated by woods. There are only eight houses along the remote 1.4-mile-long strip of pavement.
Denise Thurston, a resident of nearby Corinth, Vt., told The Dartmouth that there had been talk around town about a similar incident approximately one and a half years ago. The indictment alleges the attempted robbery took place in July of 2000.
Thurston said that a person requesting entry to an area home because of a broken-down car was turned away since the resident, an elderly woman, was home alone.
Robert Childs, the property assessor in Chelsea, Vt., the nearby hometown of Tulloch and Parker, also said he had heard of such an incident.
A second robbery attempt, according to the indictment, did not occur until about Jan. 19, 2001, when Tulloch and Parker were turned away from a house in Rochester, Vt., after claiming that they were conducting an environmental survey.
Tulloch and Parker tried to execute a similar plan twice more in the next eight days, the indictment says. It says that shortly before the suspects went to the Zantops' home at 115 Trescott Road, they knocked on the front door of a residence "in close proximity" to that address, leaving when nobody answered.
That house was almost certainly the residence of the Zantops' neighbors, Bob and Audrey McCollum. The state attorney general's office contacted Audrey yesterday morning, she said. "They described the house, and I think that it was very obvious to us that this had to be the house," she said.
"We went off for the morning skiing, so we were away from the house till around one o'clock" on the day of the murders, she said.
In all five instances, the intent was to murder the residents after stealing PINs to access ATM cards, the indictment says.
John Teti, Ithan Peltan, Rachel Osterman, Devin Foxall, Charles Gardner, Tara Kyle, Cynthia O'Brien and Ryan Samuels contributed to this report.
