To the Editor:
I hope the family and many friends of Half and Susanne Zantop find some sense of justice and closure in Thursday's sentencing of Robert Tulloch and James Parker. But there are two further measures possible to perfect that justice and to salvage some meaning from the loss of two wonderful people.
The first is for a member of the relevant Dartmouth faculty to undertake a professional research study that goes beneath the surface of the prosecution's brief and tries to understand what turned two apparently normal teenagers from a sheltered village into homicidal monsters. The answers may lead to the mystery of evil, the decline of the culture or elsewhere. But in explanation hopefully might lie final closure and some broadly constructive lessons to salvage from this tragedy. The effort should include extensive interviews with Parker and Tulloch, if willing.
Second, the Dartmouth community should organize its collective memory to ensure vigorous opposition before parole boards for however long it takes to guarantee that James Parker's 25-year-to-life sentence proves indeed lifelong. Offering him the possibility of eventual parole was a prosecutorial expedient, not a guarantee, much less an indication of diminished guilt. He, like Tulloch, should never be released.
