New Hampshire Resentencing Opens Parole Path for Dartmouth Killer Robert Tulloch After Supreme Court Ruling

Robert Tulloch, sentenced as a teenager to life in prison without parole for the 2001 murders of two Dartmouth College professors, is now eligible for release when he reaches age 62.

Tulloch had received an automatic life-without-parole sentence after pleading guilty to first-degree murder in the stabbing deaths of Half and Susanne Zantop in 2001.

Because Tulloch was 17 at the time of the killings, his case returned to court after a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court ruling found mandatory life sentences without parole for juvenile offenders unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

At the time of that landmark Supreme Court decision, Tulloch was among only a small number of people in New Hampshire serving that type of sentence.

Tulloch’s resentencing hearing, originally expected to take three days, lasted about an hour Monday morning in Grafton Superior Court in North Haverhill, New Hampshire. Prosecutors and the defense agreed to recommend two concurrent sentences of 45 years to life for the murders, with Tulloch receiving credit for the more than two decades he has already spent in custody since his arrest.

Under the terms of the new sentence, Tulloch is barred from contacting any members of the Zantop family, including the couple’s daughters, Veronika and Mariana Zantop. He also may not profit “in any way” from the murders, including through selling his story or any other commercial use of the case.

During the hearing, Veronika Zantop described the lasting impact her parents’ deaths had on her family. Zantop, who is a psychiatrist, asked the judge not to give Tulloch a chance at freedom.

“This wasn’t a crime of passion or retribution,” she said. “He wasn’t using substances, he wasn’t psychotic. There was just sheer depravity.” She urged that he stay in prison “for the longest possible sentence.”

Under the terms of the recommendation, Tulloch, 43, is also now eligible for parole at age 62.

“The murders of Half and Susanne Zantop were horrific crimes that caused immeasurable pain to their family, friends, students, and the Dartmouth and Upper Valley communities,” New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella said in a statement.

“While this resentencing was required by court decisions and a changed legal landscape, the State worked to ensure that the sentence imposed reflects the seriousness of these crimes, promotes accountability, protects the public, and provides meaningful protections for the Zantop family,” Formella said. “Our hearts go out to the Zantop family and all of those who knew and loved Half and Susanne Zantop.”

According to Tulloch’s friend James Parker, the teens were bored with their lives in Chelsea, Vermont, when they concocted a plan to kill strangers, steal their money and move to Australia.

For several months, Tulloch and Parker knocked on doors in New Hampshire and Vermont pretending to be conducting a survey on the environment before being let in by the Zantops. Susanne Zantop, 55, was head of Dartmouth’s German studies department and her husband, Half Zantop , 62, taught Earth sciences.

Parker, who was 16 at the time, told prosecutors Tulloch stabbed Half Zantop and then directed Parker to attack Susanne Zantop. Tulloch also stabbed her.

Fingerprints on a knife sheath and a bloody boot print linked the teens to the crime, but after being questioned by police, they fled Vermont and hitchhiked west. They were arrested at a truck stop in New Castle, Indiana. Investigators said that the pair were attempting to flee to California.

On April 5, 2022, Tulloch pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and received a then-mandatory life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Tulloch’s codefendant Parker was sentenced to 25 years to life on second-degree murder charges after pleading guilty to being Tulloch’s accomplice in Half Zantop’s murder and agreeing to testify against Tulloch. In June 2024, Park is released on parole.

“I think it’s unimaginably horrible,” Parker said during his parole hearing when asked by a board member what he thought of what he did. “I know there’s not an amount of time or things that I can do to change it, or alleviate any pain that I’ve caused.”

INC News has reached out to Tulloch’s attorneys, Richard Guerriero and Oliver Bloom, and the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office for comment.