‘Judgment Ridge:The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders’ by Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff was published by Harper Collins in 2003. COURTESY PHOTO

Judgment Ridge:The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders
By Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff
Published by Harper Collins 2003
Pages 389 Price $25.95

This book is well very written by two journalists, Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff. It is a true story and record of events which happened in New Hampshire and Vermont, near the geographic location of Judgment Ridge between the towns of Vershire and Chelsea New Hampshire. It deals with physical violence.The book reads like a  fictional drama but it is a true story of the senseless killings in two separate stories that reflect our nations epidemic of violence.

The first story deals with the tragic murder of four people killed in a shooting spree on August 20, 1997 in New Hampshire and Vermont. The victims included two New Hampshire state troopers, a judge and newspaper editor, who were killed by Carl Drega, an angry man who hated authority figures.

Police trooper, Scott Phillips sought Carl Drega’s vehicle for a  simple traffic violation and was shot as he approached the car. His back up, policeman Leslie Lord, came in a second cruiser  and was shot and killed too.Then Drega jumped into a police car and took off at high speed. In Drega’s rage he killed two policemen, a judge, a lawyer and a newspaper editor. What causes people to lose their sense of right and wrong?

The second story in the book focuses on the Dartmouth Murders in 2001. Two teenage boys, James Parker and Robert Tulloch decided to kill two Dartmouth College professors in cold blood.Both stories in the book deal with physical violence.

In 2001, Robert Tulloch, the leader, plunged a knife many times into Professor Half Zantop, and got life in prison without parole. His friend James Parker, who followed his orders, slit Professor Susanne Zantop’s throat. He got 25 years with possibility of parole because he turned evidence against Tulloch. (“Half” is part of Professor Zantop’s name. In German it means “to help.”)

Why were the two professors savagely killed ?  No one knows. Both boys were still in high school. They were not Dartmouth students. Previously, they had roamed around the community looking for money and breaking into different affluent looking homes. They came to the Zantops’ door posing as students doing a school survey.

They both admitted guilt.The question is whether they  should have been tried and punished as adults or children under the law. They were 16 and 17. In 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Miller Vs. Alabama, that mandatory sentencing to life imprisonment without parole of persons who committed a crime as juveniles was unconstitutional.The murders were committed in 2001.Can the law be retroactive? James Parker, who was 16 years old, was charged with second degree murder. His case went up for an appeal to have a shorter time span than 25 years this year, April  30, 2019. However, the request for appeal was withdrawn. He will be eligible for parole in 2024. Can you bring back a life?

What causes violence in human beings is my question. What caused Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Parkland?

Is it our culture which is lacking in guidance and care of the next generation? Are we a culture connected to cell phones, but not to the real feelings of human beings?  Do we know what is going on in the minds of our children? Is all the violence in our culture today our fault, or is it that we have become insensitive to violence?

This book also  explores biological and neurological causes of violence. However it is not a mental health manual or  a psychology text book. Its subject focuses on unnecessary killings.

The book does state, ”Frequently misused and widely misunderstood words are psychopath and psychotic. “A psychotic  might commit murder and say his dog told him to do it or he heard voices telling him to do it. A psychopath appears convincingly charming and knows exactly what is going on in reality, but does not have a  conscience.Their actions do not come from a deranged mind but a cold and calculating mind with a chilling inability to treat others as thinking feeling human beings.”

The above paragraph about the psychology of violence is an oversimplification on a complex issue. However, the book does suggest that violence may have something to do with a biologically and neurologically impaired balance of reasoning as well as the inability to sustain great stress.

When reading this book one has to mourn for all the innocent people who were killed in senseless acts of violence.

In my opinion human freedom and creativity are what is important in life. In order to have human freedom you have to follow laws of a civilized society. You cannot murder people. What were these boys thinking? Where was their moral compass? Was it in their stars and their fate, or in the environment and the way they were brought up, or lost in their biology?

This book does not  answer questions about why people become violent, but it  does give us a better understanding of what happens to people when they feel desperate. It does give us tremendous respect for the law and the police who protect it and therefore us. Most of all this book is a record of people who lost their lives protecting us. They will not be forgotten. It is a sad but thought- provoking book which gives respect for police who take their lives in their hands every day protecting us and a commentary on violence in today’s society.

***

E.B. White On Democracy
Introduction by Jon Meacham
Edited Essays by Martha White
Published by Harper Collins 2019
Pages 203 Price  $24.99

Here is a slip of a book that brings a powerful impact. Its elegant prose and selected poetry offer mature insight, bringing American history alive.  It contains essays by E.B White edited by his granddaughter, Martha White. Jon Meacham, in the wonderful introduction, says,” White lived and wrote  through several of the most contentious hours in our history: The Great Depression, World War II, McCarthyite Red Scare, the Cold War, and the Civil Rights Movement. White is that rarest of figures, a writer whose ordinary run of work is so extraordinary that it repays our attention decades after his death.”

E.B.White  was born in 1899 and died in 1985. Most of us remember him for his wonderful children’s books,“Stuart Little,”
”Charlotte’s Web,” and the “Trumpet of the Swan.”

However E. B. White was an essayist, poet, and author for  adults. Over the years he wrote twenty books. He began his career writing for the  New Yorker Magazine in 1927.

White fought against zealot behavior and rigid judgmental attitudes in America. He was a great patriot but did not support the right of the movie industry to blacklist the “Hollywood Ten” and any others who refused to answer the Un- American Activities Committee of 1947. White wrote in an essay to the New York Tribune:

“I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears so much as your editorial Thanksgiving Day suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs.”

The wisdom that White reflected in 1947 is timeless and could be a lesson for all of us in America in 2019. Reading White’s opinions from many decades ago on the investigation of communists rings a bell on the super patriotism of some politicians today.

In a letter to the Bangor Daily News, Nov. 5, 1979, White wrote:

“Labels are labels and they always turn up around election time. I’d like to remind the newspaper that quite recently Vice President Agnew made a most peculiar suggestion. He suggested that certain members of the newspaper be scrutinized by government personnel. Agnew’s suggestion, casting the shadow of government interference over the press, is the most radical suggestion I have heard advanced by a public figure in my entire life, and I am 71.”

One wonders what E.B. White would say if he heard the current President Donald J. Trump call many newspapers, who do not agree with him, including the New York Times, examples of fake news.

White’s essay on the meaning of Democracy in 1943 states: “Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right, more than half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea that hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words have not gone bad. It is the mustard on a hot dog and the cream in rationed coffee.”

For me E.B. White’s style of writing and his mature independent views makes him a timeless literary king in a land that does not have an aristocracy, the land of the creative spirit.

If you are interested in reading examples of fine writing in thoughtful historic essays which have timeless insight and values, be sure  to pick up  the book “E.B. White On Democracy.” I recommend it highly.

— Pat Davidson Reef is a graduate of Emerson College in Boston. She received her Masters Degree at the University of Southern Maine. She taught English and Art History at Catherine McAuley High for many years. She now teaches at the University of Southern Maine in Portland in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Classic Films. She recently wrote a children’s book,”Dahlov Ipcar Artist,” and has now completed another children’s book “Bernard Langlais Revisited.”