It's hard to imagine anything bad happening in a town like Hanover. With its white picket fences and idyllic surrounding landscape, the College's isolated position generally offers a feeling of protection from the dangers of the outside world.. But for anyone who has ever read a Stephen King novel, it's easy to see how even the most picturesque places can become the backdrop for crimes so gruesome they take generations to forget.
If you were to ask the average student about their knowledge of lawlessness at Dartmouth, most have probably never even heard of such incidents. Because few alums stay in the area long after graduation, the Dartmouth community's memory is relatively short. The College's history of crime, however, is centuries long.
So while we might like to think that we attend a college with a bloodless past and live in an area free of crime, to believe so would simply be nave. The incidents are few and far between, but to ignore them would be to ignore the history of Dartmouth, and the stories of those affected by these atrocities.
The following are just three of the most notorious crimes of the last 120 years of Dartmouth history.1891: Vale of Tempe Murder
Long before the College expanded its ownership to extend past the boundaries of main campus, the Warden family made their home in Hanover. Andrew Warden owned property in town that he worked with his wife, two sons, and five daughters. As his older children began to leave home, Warden decided to hire a man named Frank Almay as a farmhand in July of 1890. Little did he know that this decision would come to haunt his family and the Hanover area for generations to come.
Upon beginning his employment with the Warden family, Almay found himself immediately captivated by the 28-year-old daughter, Christie. Christie was attractive, intelligent, and not as responsive to Almay's courting as he would have liked. He pursued her affectionately, taking her on sleigh rides, most likely on the same hills of the golf course that Dartmouth students enjoy today. However, Christie was worried by Almay's seemingly mysterious past and his reputation for having a bad temper. While she admitted to having some feelings for him, she did not want to take on the responsibility of reforming such a troubled man.
Christie's father decided against renewing Almay's contract the following year, and the heartbroken man was forced to leave Hanover and the object of his affections. Two months later, however, he returned determined to ensure that if he could not have Christie, no one would. After several failed attempts at cornering her, Almay finally came upon Christie and a few of her sisters walking down Lyme Road, near the present day location of Hanover Country Club a July evening. He grabbed the young woman roughly, pulling her away from her family and taking several shots at her sisters as they attempted to fight him off. As the other girls ran to get help, he pulled Christie into the Vale of Tempe and said, "I have come a thousand miles to see you."
Christie screamed out for help, but as her younger sister and a neighbor made their way back to the scene, they heard two gunshots. Christie had been killed pointblank and Almay was nowhere to be found. A manhunt for the murderer began until he was discovered over a month later living in a hole in the hay in the Warden's barn. He was tried and hanged in front of over 150 people the following year. Christie's body was buried in the Dartmouth College Cemetery where her memorial remains today.
The Vale of the Tempe is now owned by the College. It was incorporated into the skiway in the early 20th century when competitive ski jumping was an NCAA-regulated sport. The difficulty of the jump has been mentioned in the journals of Dartmouth Outing Club members from generations past, with several claiming to have nearly died while attempting it. Ski jumping from this hill was a major feature of Winter Carnival celebrations from 1922 until 1993 when it was finally shut down. While no students venture to the Vale of the Tempe today, the site of Christie Warden's murder remains a part of the College's property and Hanover's history over a century later. 1895: DMS Grave Robbery
In 1895, a Norwich loner named Joseph Murdock committed suicide. A thoroughly inconsequential figure in his community, the impoverished man's death would have been quickly forgotten had it not been for the actions of two Dartmouth Medical School students. A few days after Murdock's burial, his family noticed footsteps leading to and from the site of his grave. It was discovered shortly after that John Pearl Gifford and John McDonnell, both members of Dartmouth Medical School's class of 1897, had been encouraged by members of the DMS community to seize the body of the recently deceased man for use in academic dissection.
Perhaps the most gruesome aspect of this notorious case of bodysnatching lies in the fact that rather than condemning the actions of their students, the Dartmouth Medical community chose to protect Gifford and McDonnell. To the members of 19th-century academia, the appalling theft of the corpse of a man too poor to afford a secure gravesite seemed justifiable in the pursuit of education. After the faculty paid the fines of both students, they were welcomed back to DMS with open arms. Gifford went on to establish his own hospital in Vermont at the age of 32. His reputation as a grave robber would fade, and his establishment would eventually grow to today be known as Gifford Medical Center in Randolph, Vermont.1991: Grad Students Slain
Born in Ethiopia in a climate of political strife, Trhas Berhe and Selamawit Tsehaye came to Dartmouth in the early '90's in an effort to obtain the kind of education that could eventually benefit the progress of their country. In June of 1991, however, the potential of the two brilliant 24-year-old women to affect positive change was lost forever when they were murdered in their College-leased apartment.
Berhe and Tsehaye were graduate students in the physics department at Dartmouth. During an interim between Spring and Summer terms, the two women were living on Summer Street during the interim when Tsehaye's fianc, Haileselassie Nega Girmay came to live with them for a few weeks. For unknown reasons, the young physics student decided to break off the relationship with Girmay, who was also in the middle of advanced graduate study at Uppsala University in Sweden.
While he may not have outwardly expressed his anger, he responded to the rejection by going to the hardware store and purchasing an ax. Girmay hid the weapon in his hostesses' apartment for two days before killing both women by striking them about the head and neck approximately a dozen times each.
A concerned neighbor heard a disturbance and called the police. When the authorities arrived, Girmay answered the door, shook the officers' hands and calmly said, "I killed them, I killed them both. I killed them both with an ax." While his lawyers would later rely on an insanity defense, Girmay was proven to be sane and was convicted of two counts first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life in prison in 1993.
While the incident was obviously tragic and highly disturbing, the Dartmouth population's shockingly indifferent response only adds to the crime's perverseness. Students were reported as being generally disinterested in the death of the two women, claiming that they were not "normal" members of the College community due to being black, foreign and graduate students, The Dartmouth reported at the time.
One undergraduate interviewed claimed to have felt less connected to the crime because it happened off campus. She seemed to have forgotten that the Summer Street apartments where the murder occurred are located within 100 yards of Leverone Field House and Hanover High School. 2001: The Zantop Murders
Perhaps the most notorious of all crimes in Dartmouth's history is also one of the most recent. Barely a decade has passed since the highly tragic murders of two beloved Dartmouth professors, Susanne and Half Zantop. The Zantops were naturalized citizens who taught in the German and earth science departments, respectively, at the College. Tragically, their reputations of kindness and warmth were repaid with a crime as gruesome as it is incomprehensible. Perhaps most shockingly, their murderers were only in high scool.
Robert Tulloch, age 17, was a debate champion and president of his high school student council. He and his best friend, James Parker, age 16, were well-liked students who maintained good grades, played sports and did not get into trouble. However, Tulloch and Parker were growing bored of their lives in small-town Vermont and wanted a taste of adventure. The two students developed a plan to collect $10,000 and move to Australia.
The initial scheme was to steal cars, but the teens quickly realized that this wouldn't be feasible without access to the vehicles' registration. A new plan was hatched to steal the ATM cards of strangers, force them to reveal their pin numbers and then kill them.
On a January evening of 2001, the two men knocked on the door of the Zantop home and were invited in. After chatting with Professor Half about his academic interests for ten minutes, the 62-year-old man reached into his wallet to get the phone number of an environmental expert that they had been discussing. Upon seeing cash in the wallet, Tulloch lunged at him, stabbing him in the neck and throat. Shortly after, when his 55-year-old wife entered the room, she too was killed with several blows that fractured her skull.
The boys made off with $340 in cash. They then headed to Barnes and Nobles to look up books on coping with the guilt associated with murder. A nationwide manhunt began shortly after, and a month later, the two men were found in Indiana attempting to hitchhike to California.
While Parker immediately cut a deal to avoid life in prison, Tulloch made history by becoming the first person in New Hampshire history to reject any defense, pleading guilty to first-degree murder. In doing so, he sealed his fate with a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole. His complete lack of emotion during the trial stood in sharp contrast to Parker's uncontrollable sobbing and apologies to the Zantops' family members.
