A New Book on the Zantops

The latest issue of The New Yorker has a short blurb on a new book about the Half and Susanne Zantop murders in January 2002. The book — Judgment Ridge — is written by Mitchell Zuckoff and Dick Lehr, two Boston Globe reporters who covered the story (perhaps even relying on The Dartmouth Review for breaking details). The blurb reads as follows:

Half and Susanne Zantop, popular professors at Dartmouth College, were murdered in their home in New Hampshire. Clever detective work linked knife sheaths found at the scene to a pair of teenagers, Robert Tulloch and Jim Parker, who lived in an isolated Vermont town thirty miles away. Confronted by police, the boys fled; eventually, they were tracked down in Indiana. Parker, the sidekick, struck a plea bargain that may free him in sixteen years, but Tulloch pleaded guilty and received a sentence of life without parole. Zuckoff and Lehr, who covered the case for the Boston Globe, examine in fascinating detail the ordinariness of the boys’ grudges — typical high-school controversies about the student council and the debate team — and how, in Tulloch’s twisted mind, the idea of random killing became an obsession.

Interesting stuff. I have to register my chagrin at the horrible title, however. It’s a real-life tragic story of murder — not an after-school special. What were they thinking?