Dark Passenger
By: Jessica Giaccone
Tags: Dartmouth College, Small Town America, Crime, Murder, Police

Dark Passenger

It’s been two decades since the murders, but the story will forever travel with the name Giaccone in the small city of Lebanon, New Hampshire, nestled in the valley of the Connecticut River.

My father, Brian Giaccone, remembers the night it began, when he picked up the phone and called his father, Nick Giaccone, who was the Chief of Police.

“Brian called his father’s house to chat one night and his Dad’s girlfriend at the time picked up the phone instead,” my mother, Heather Giaccone, recalls. “He asked to speak with his father, and she informed him that he had left the house to go to a scene of a double murder. Brian laughed it off and told her to stop joking around and asked again where his father went.

“His father’s girlfriend lowered her voice and said, ‘No it's true, there’s been a double murder of two Dartmouth professors in Etna. It sounds pretty bad.’ ”

My father’s reaction was what you would expect from someone who had lived in the same quiet area his whole life. He couldn’t imagine that the place where nothing ever seemed to happen would become the focus of a nation-wide manhunt.

Stepping up to the front door of Susanne and Half Zantop’s residence on a brisk January afternoon in 2001, the two teen-agers were ready to kill. James Parker, 16, and Robert Tulloch, 17, had a plan. First, they would gain access to the house using a ploy that they were two students trying to conduct an environmental survey for school. Once inside the house, they would jump their hosts and steal whatever money and credit cards they could find.

The couple were found stabbed to death a few hours later when a dinner guest arrived.

The Zontops, Susanne, 55, and Half, 62, were regarded as some of the kindest people you could ever meet. They had dedicated to their lives to education and had more than 50 years of teaching between them. There was no one that they wouldn’t reach out a hand to help. James Parker and Robert Tulloch took advantage of that kindness.

Speeding away through the woods with $340 in their pockets, the teens thought they were going to get away without a trace left behind. Parking the car off the side of the road in the woods the two cleaned their hands and knives of the Zantops’ blood. Robert Tulloch also quickly cleaned the slash he had given himself while attacking Susanne Zantop. Then they realized they had left the knife sheaths at the scene of the crime. They rushed back to the Zantop house that night, but found it was already swarmed by police and investigators. It was time to run. What followed was a whirlwind six-week investigation that shook the small New England region.

My father, who is now 53, grew up in New Hampshire in the shadow of his father, Nicholas Giaccone, who was well known as the chief of police. Coming of age with a spotlight on your family name was most times an annoyance.

“In High School I didn’t always like the media attention when a lot of the busts my dad was doing at the time were at college parties and underage drinking. I guess the best way to put it is when you’re a public figure, everything is open to the media, so I never really had a choice.”

The morning after the Zantop’s were murdered, the shadow surrounding Chief Nicholas Giaccone grew larger. All of New Hampshire and Vermont were filled with news cameras and crews looking for any lead they could get. Daily commutes to work were extended by at least thirty-minutes if you expected to make it through the police redirections and roadblocks in a timely matter. The atmosphere was one of fear and anger. Newspapers lined the street with headlines “Double Murder of Respected Dartmouth Professors” or “Hunt for Savage Killers Underway in New Hampshire.” Fear soaked into everyone. An attack even on just one person in the small town felt like an attack on all.

“Waking up the next morning the media had already been flooded with hundreds of stories about the Zantops’ death,” my father recalls. “You couldn’t look at any newspaper or website without seeing something about the murders. ”

The fear and apprehension grew with every passing hour that the suspects had not been caught.

While the small town continued to ascend into confusion and fear, the teens decided to leave town as quietly as possible. The pair settled on the idea of hitching a bus to Colorado then continuing west from there. Packing a small backpack each, Parker and Robert told their friends of the plan to go to Colorado to go rock climbing. They made it as far as St. Louis, Missouri, before they were forced to take a U-turn back to New Hampshire when the cut on Robert Tulloch’s leg began to get infected.

Back in New Hampshire, for almost a month and half they remained at home under the radar of the hundreds of police in the area. One of the first tipping points in the case for police came with the discovery that they were able to trace the sale of the two SOG knives back to a purchase made under James Parker’s name.

The knives were unique enough that my grandfather was able to trace the sale back to a small retailer that had only sold two of that specific model in the past few years. Armed with a name and a weapon, the police approached Parker for questioning. Parker was very cooperative with the police and agreed to come into the department to be fingerprinted. When questioned as to why he purchased two SOG knives Parker and Tulloch both claimed it was because the two of them had been wanting to build a treehouse in the woods. It was then that police noticed the wound on Tulloch’s leg that had repeatedly been infected. Robert Tulloch said he received the cut while walking in the woods from a maple sap bucket.

The teens seemed to have solid and unwavering alibis. But the maple bucket story seemed rather implausible to police. The timeframe that the two would have been in the woods also put them far outside any season to collect maple by tapping trees.

On February 16, 2001, when the fingerprints on the sheath of the knife returned fingerprints that positively matched those of Tulloch, the police were finally able to issue an official warrant. When police arrived at Tulloch’s house they were met by only his confused parents answering the door, still convinced of their son’s innocence. Searching the perimeter of the house, Robert was nowhere to be found. His mothers’ 1987 Audi had also disappeared, and so had James Parker from his house down the road.

The police released a statement and official press release to warn the community. Police had hoped that releasing the two fugitive’s names and faces would bring some peace to the community’s restless fear. However, if anything the fear was worsened by the eerie photos of the teens. The crime in question was a double-murder committed in broad daylight at random. The last people that the community ever expected to have committed such an atrocious crime were two white-collar teenagers from a middle-class suburb and well-to-do families.

Now that the two boys were confirmed to have left the New Hampshire state-line, the police had to act quickly to disperse all the information they had on the two boys. Over the weekend the police made an appeal to a judge to be granted permission to try James Parker as an adult. Because he was sixteen at the time of the crime, the police required this permission to be able to release his name and photo to the public. A press conference was held at the town hall in Hanover with over 100 members of the press waiting for any update they could get.

“I remember turning on ABC news and seeing my father standing on the stage alongside the Attorney General and a few other high-ranking officers giving an address on the two teens,” my father recalls. “My father never really said much during the press conferences. Rather, he just sat back almost like he was always in a deep train of thought.”

The teenager’s faces were plastered on the front page of almost every paper across the country the following day. Described as tall, lanky, and considered armed and dangerous, the whole nation was told to be on the lookout for any sign of Parker and Tulloch. On February 18, the media reported that the car belonging to Tulloch’s mother was found abandoned at a truck stop in Massachusetts.

From one jurisdiction to another, police jumped across district lines collecting information and evidence from witnesses and the abandoned car.

“It seemed as though the news station crews were reporting from a different state every day,” my father recalls. “All I had to go off were the tidbits of information I would hear from my father and the news was too confusing to follow anyhow.”

More than anything my father felt overwhelmed and cornered by all the questions people in town would bombard him with. Everyone had flocked to him over the past few days attempting to pry whatever information they could out of him.

“It became very annoying rather quickly to have people assuming I was hiding details about the case from them. Even the small details that I had heard from my father I had to keep secret in the event that it compromised the investigation.”

A few days after the discovery of the abandoned car, police received a credible tip from a truck driver in Indiana who had seen two teens matching the descriptions. This led the police to a truck stop in Indiana where they were apprehended.

“One of the first phone calls I received from my father after they caught the suspects was him telling me how the FBI was sending out a private jet for him and his officers to fly to Indiana,” my father said.

The next day the news crews were broadcasting live at the airport as the giant federal jet and New Hampshire authorities took off to retrieve the boys. It was both exciting and nerve-wracking to know the two boys were coming back home.

Nicholas Giaccone descends behind James Parker as Parker is escorted back into New Hampshire

From start to finish, it took police about two months to finally capture the killers. The front page of the local paper published a photograph of Nicholas Giaccone parading off the FBI’s private jet as press waited down below to welcome them. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing the teen’s names alongside Chief Nicholas Giaccone bringing them back to be prosecuted.

Robert Tulloch was sentenced to life in prison maxed out to the year 2101 with no possibility of parole or a reduced sentence. James Parker was convicted on a lesser charge of second-degree murder with a possibility of parole in May of 2024 and a maximum life sentence to the year 2100.

Following the sentencing, Nicholas Giaccone continued his career as the police chief for his town up until he became a quadriplegic due to a hospital error following a heart attack in 2015. Brian Giaccone and his wife Heather Giaccone helped care for him in a long-term care facility until an infection took his life in December of 2017.

The Giaccone family continues to live a quiet life in New Hampshire. Nevertheless, even all these years later, the murder of these two innocent professors is a dark passenger that forever follows this small town, and this small family.