Robert Tulloch's decision to plead guilty yesterday provided a jarringly quick conclusion to a 14-month ordeal that began with the loss of Half and Susanne Zantop last January. It was fitting that Tulloch and accomplice James Parker left the stage with one final surprise in a case that was defined by its bizarre twists.
The story, according to the national news outlets that latched on to the murders, was the small town in shock.
The story was Chelsea, the bucolic Vermont village that inexplicably spawned two killers. Cameras rolled as the teenagers' neighbors shook their heads and described the Tulloch and Parker they had known -- good students, clean-cut boys. Not murderers.
The story was Hanover, the college town where few locked their doors. When it was revealed that Half Zantop's hospitality toward strangers led to his death, the irony was too much to ignore. Glossy covers on drugstore paperbacks spelled it out for us: the murderers hadn't just killed two beloved professors. The ideal of a small New England town was dead, too.
But those that live here know that small-town values aren't outmoded or nave -- rather, those values gave us the resiliency to cope with this tragedy.
As news of the Zantops' death spread, the people of Hanover and Dartmouth instinctively began healing wounds, opening doors to each other instead of locking them in fear.
In Chelsea, where it would have been easy to point fingers after the manhunt for Tulloch and Parker, residents instead collected money at local shops to support the teenagers' parents.
Hanover and Chelsea were traumatized in different ways, but a fundamental sense of fellowship strengthened both communities and allowed them to survive. So don't believe the stories -- in spite of great loss, the small town lives on.
