Friends and former colleagues of Half and Susanne Zantop lit candles and lay flowers at a garden named for the couple to honor their memory on Wednesday, 20 years to the day since the two Dartmouth College professors were murdered in their Etna home.
“It was a huge loss for many of us, as it was for many students,” said Irene Kacandes, a Dartmouth professor of German studies and comparative literature who helped organize the event on the Dartmouth campus. “They were very dear friends. They were the kind of people who sort of ran an open house. You could stop over anytime with any problem or anything you wanted to celebrate.”
“Together they were just magical people,” added Alexis Jetter, a lecturer in Dartmouth’s English department. “Those of us who remain continue to celebrate the community that they really, in many ways, started and nurtured. It was important to them that we carry it on and they made that clear.”
Half Zantop, who was 62 and a professor of earth sciences, had a lively wit and would offer a running commentary at meetings that “made it survivable,” Kacandes said.
Susanne Zantop, who was 55, served as the chairwoman of the German studies department at Dartmouth.
She was a generous and prolific colleague whose “pathbreaking” book on the cultural impacts of colonialism had just been translated into German, Kancades recalled.
The couple, who were survived by two adult daughters, were stabbed to death on Jan. 27, 2001, by two teens from Chelsea, some 35 miles away.
The prosecutor in the case, Assistant Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, said Robert Tulloch, 17, and James Parker, 16, were looking for money to try to go to Australia.
The two teens knocked on the door of the Zantops’ Trescott Road home on a Saturday morning and told them they were conducting an environmental survey for school. Half Zantop let them inside, and within about 10 minutes the pair attacked the Zantops with a military-style knife.
The two teenagers fled the Upper Valley undetected, but in a nationwide manhunt were arrested on Feb. 19, 2001, at a truck stop in Indiana.
In 2002, Tulloch pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for the killing of Half Zantop. The 37-year-old Tulloch is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
Parker pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the death of Susanne Zantop and was sentenced to 25 years to life. Parker, 36, is eligible for parole in May 2024.
Both men are being held at the New Hampshire State Prison in Concord.
Valley News photographer James M. Patterson contributed to this report.