Judgment Ridge: The True Story Behind the Dartmouth Murders by Mitchell Zuckoff, Dick Lehr

ever seen on North Hollow, a brand-new house.
    Jim turned around the Subaru and headed back down the hill. Their destination was 540 North Hollow Road, where Franklin and
    Jane Sanders were still in the process of breaking in the sprawling home they had recently moved into. Sanders was sixty-five, a retired utilities-and-insurance executive from New Jersey. He and his wife had only two months earlier completed construction of the modern, post-and-beam house on eighty-five acres of meadow and woods the
    couple had purchased in 1998. The home featured a large red barn, a big basement, and twelve rooms, with an assessed value of $650,700. The house was situated on a hillside, with a mountain range in back and a commanding view in front. In any affluent metropolitan suburb, the home would be labeled a trophy house, valued at many times the rural Vermont assessment. It was certainly a house that stood out among the mostly modest ranches, log homes, and double-wide house trailers that dotted surrounding roads.
    Steering the Subaru onto the dirt driveway, the boys rode a couple hundred yards and pulled right up to the house. They noticed a dog pen alongside a garage, with access to an adjacent pen inside, so the dogs could go in or out on their own. Dogs were a potential concern, but not one to stop them at this point. Robert stepped out of the passenger side and strode toward the door. The two friends stood with their backpacks on the front steps when Franklin Sanders opened the door. They recognized at once he was an ideal target—an older man, meaning someone they could expect to subdue easily. Robert took the lead, telling Sanders they were students wanting to do an interview about the environment for school. They hoped he had some free time to help them with their project.
    But Sanders was preoccupied. He was working on the new wave pool he’d begun installing over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, when his son drove up from New Jersey to help him. The pool was an indoor aquatic-luxury item that was becoming popular with master swimmers and triathletes, or retirees with ailing hips and backs. The pools were designed to fit in sunrooms, garages, or base-ments, which is where Sanders was in the middle of putting his.
    “No,” he said, and he was curt about it.
    The teenager doing all the talking wasn’t even able to finish his presentation.
    “I’m too busy. I’m tarring my pool.” Sanders gave another reason, as well: After a lifetime in the utilities industry, where fights with environmentalists were as common as rate hikes, he had no interest in tak-ing an environmental survey.
    And then Franklin Sanders shut the door. It was that simple.
    The boys stood there, stunned. That was it! Just like that—so totally dismissed!
    The air went screaming out of their balloon.
    Why didn’t you jump him? Jim asked. It looked like the guy was home alone.
    Didn’t think of that, Robert admitted. It happened so fast. But Jim was right; he should have thought of that. Could have jumped the guy right at the door. Now it was too late.
    They returned to the car and tossed the unopened backpacks into the back seat. They found themselves driving around, wondering what the heck had gone wrong. There was second-guessing, some sniping. They sounded like an old married couple, frustrated by the missed opportunities of life. Maybe they weren’t prepared enough. The rebuff at North Hollow Road had been completely unanticipated.
    The two left Rochester and were in Bethel, near Interstate 89, when they began to emerge from their funk. They weren’t about to settle for this sort of setback, no way, not the two of them. They would just have to find new houses, and crank it up again. They reminded themselves of their calling as “Higher Beings.” And they were nearing the route that would take them back home to Chelsea—which was ironic, because the whole point of their plan was to get away from Chelsea forever. Then one of them