Re: 1/25/02 - The Dartmouth: Reports allege Tulloch went on a 'thrill kill'
Friday, January 25, 2002
Reports allege Tulloch went on a 'thrill kill'
by Tara Kyle, The Dartmouth Staff
In a conversation with a fellow inmate, Robert Tulloch allegedly described the slayings of Half and Susanne Zantop as a "thrill kill," according to a report in yesterday's Boston Herald.
An anonymous source inside Grafton County Jail in Haverhill, N.H., reportedly revealed that Tulloch and James Parker gained entry to the Zantop home by posing as Dartmouth students working on an environmental studies research project.
After Half Zantop invited the teenagers in, the source claims that Tulloch turned and slit his throat after an unspecified amount of time.
The crime, initially intended as a robbery, "kind of turned into a thrill kill," the source said in the Herald report.
The source went on to explain that Susanne Zantop left the kitchen, where she had been making sandwiches, after the first murder. Tulloch and Parker then turned on her, with Parker delivering the fatal wound.
State prosecutors failed to present a motive in the Zantop murders until last December, when attempted robbery was offered as the principal cause.
No connection has yet been established to explain why Tulloch and Parker would drive to the Zantops' home -- nearly 50 miles from Tulloch and Parker's own residences in Chelsea, Vt.
Senior assistant New Hampshire attorney general Kelly Ayotte and the superintendent of Grafton County Jail could not be reached for comment.
"I'm not going to comment on any of the facts outside the courtroom," Richard Guerriero, Tulloch's attorney, told The Herald.
Some friends of the Zantops' have questioned the robbery explanation, pointing to the details of the crime.
"It's not a robbery because nothing was taken," Dr. Eric Manheimer, a medical director at New York's Bellevue Hospital, told The Boston Herald.
"Why would you take these kinds of knives on a robbery?" he added, in reference to the weapons Tulloch and Parker had ordered online weeks before the murders.
The report follows Tulloch's arraignment on a second set of first degree murder charges last Wednesday.
The new charges carry the same punishment of mandatory life imprisonment without parole as the original set -- which categorized the crimes as premeditated and deliberate -- but are distinguished in their description of the act as committed in the course of an armed robbery.
Tulloch is expected to plead innocent by means of insanity on both sets of charges.
When Tulloch's case goes to trial on April 22, Parker will be expected to testify against him as part of a plea bargain agreement, before receiving his own sentence as an accomplice in the second degree murder of Susanne Zantop.
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