3.12.2002 00:04

Not so bucolic

The revised indictment charging that two Vermont teenagers cruised backroads for six months in search of someone to rob and murder has shaken the Green Mountain State. Is it possible that Vermont is not such a good place to raise a family after all?

A year ago, when Dartmouth College professors Half and Suzanne Zantop were found slain in their Hanover, N.H., home, neighbors wondered who could have done such a horrendous thing, and whether it could reoccur.

A few months later, when two Chelsea, Vt., teenagers were arrested and charged, the question became simply: Why? The prosecutors could provide no answer.

Now they have. Granite State prosecutors have revised the charges against the older boy, and set forth a chilling chronicle of four attempts over six months to enter a home, kill its occupants, and steal an ATM card and related passwords. It appears the Zantops were the first people the boys met who were willing to let them into their home.

Suggestions from the family of the older boy, 17 at the time of the killings, that he suffers from bipolar disorder have done little to answer the question of how something so horrific could occur in Vermont.

It is not the first time. Twenty years ago, in another case that shocked Vermont (and the nation), two teenagers in Essex murdered a youngster in a brutal attack that apparently was intended to emulate a pig slaughter they had witnessed a little time before. That tragedy led to a lowering of the age for trial for murder as an adult. This year, another teenager in Vermont pled guilty to shooting his foster mother in cold blood as she corrected school papers at her kitchen table; her teenage daughter is accused of conspiring to assist him.

Vermont is not picture-perfect. Beneath the surface of ski chalets and summer homes, alcoholism, poverty and mental illness, inadequate education and low-paying jobs can be found. Backroads can mask sociopathic tendencies for a while, but not forever.

Ron Powers of Middlebury, who has written a book about teenage crime, and whose own 16-year-old son caused an accident that left his girlfriend brain-damaged, has called for a "Marshall Plan" for Vermont's youth.

Others have said parents, teachers and friends must do a better job of recognizing aberrant, irrational behavior and then doing something about it before tragedy occurs.

As bucolic as Vermont may seem, the state can't ignore problems that confront humans everywhere. The Zantop murders are a wakeup call for Vermonters.
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