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

life.”
    As for Half, there was only one dream he had yet to fulfill: becoming a pilot. But perhaps retirement—along with what he described as his renewed “zest for life”—would allow him to achieve that, too. Until then, the present was defined by their demanding careers and their circle of family and friends. All those threads came together in the first weeks of January 2001.

    T o celebrate the New Year, the Zantops hosted a party at their home that included their two closest friends, Dr. Eric Manheimer and his
    wife, Diana Taylor. The couple spent the night at the home on Trescott Road, and then pulled out of the driveway the next morning with Mariana Zantop in their car, to drive her back home to New York City. In the weeks that followed, there were papers to write, speeches to prepare, classes to teach, and conferences to organize. All the while Susanne was talking regularly on the phone to her brother in Germany, planning a party to celebrate their father’s eighty-fifth birthday in April. She even made a quick trip to Berlin, to speak at a conference. She also had been in Berlin a month earlier, to haunt film archives for a
    new project she was undertaking on German colonialism.
    On Wednesday, January 24, Susanne received an e-mail from her friend Susannah Heschel, who was struggling with an article she was writing on American Jewish political thought. Heschel was nine
    months pregnant, which added to her discomfort. Though Jewish politics wasn’t Susanne’s area of expertise, she urged Heschel to drop by so they could talk about the paper over a pot of coffee. Heschel knew that Susanne wouldn’t sugarcoat her thoughts—she always told Heschel when a lecture was good and when it wasn’t, and Heschel loved that about her. They talked for more than an hour about the paper, and Susanne suggested a few books that might help. Then Susanne told Heschel about giving birth to Veronika and Mariana. In the midst of their conversation, Half phoned from his Dartmouth office, asking whether he should come home to share a cheese sand-wich. Heschel was warmed by Half’s desire to grab lunch with his wife of thirty years. Feeling better than she had in days, she went home and phoned her husband, James Aronson, a colleague of Half’s in the earth sciences department. “I’m so happy,” she told him. “I just can’t believe how lucky I am to have her as a friend and colleague. I’ve known smart people, but never anyone who is so smart and so helpful.” She went to the computer and dove into work, energized by her visit with Susanne. But the talk proved almost too invigorating: Heschel went into labor, giving birth to a girl the next day.
    After Susanne’s talk with Heschel, she, Half, and Roxana Verona went to Hanover’s Nugget Theater to see the martial-arts love story, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Afterward, Half and Susanne walked from the theater hand in hand.
    On Friday, January 26, the Zantops went as usual to their Dartmouth offices. Susanne’s was in stately Dartmouth Hall, built as a replacement for the oldest building on campus, which burned in 1904. Her office was filled with books, but its most striking feature was a giant umbrella plant, a species that can grow up to forty feet tall in the wild and seemed intent on doing the same under Susanne’s care. A short walk up College Street, Half’s office in the modern Sherman Fairchild Physical Sciences Center was, like him, more sedate, filled with rocks and microscopes.
    Susanne spent the morning handling some administrative tasks and talking on the phone with Gerald Kleinfeld, executive director of the German Studies Review and a professor at Arizona State University.
    She was chipper when she chatted with fellow German studies professor Bruce Duncan in the morning, but grumpy in the afternoon when she saw Margaret Robinson, the German department’s academic assistant. Susanne groused to Robinson that she was en route to her second committee