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

Author:Mitchell Zuckoff & Dick Lehr [Zuckoff, Mitchell & Lehr, Dick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, Murder, Sociology, Social Science, Criminal investigation, General, Rural, Juvenile homicide, Criminology
ISBN: 9780060008451
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2004-08-31T05:00:00+00:00

15

On the Run

When Robert and Jim first came begging for a ride at the Sturbridge Isles truck stop, trucker Rowdy Kyle Tucker turned them down flat. But his wife and traveling partner, Nancy Lee Tucker, had other ideas. The thought of the two stranded boys gnawed at her as she picked at her dinner. Nancy told her husband she thought they might be runaways because “they looked pretty fresh, not like they’d been out on the road a long time.” The Tuckers, Alabama residents in their thirties with two young daughters, had been married for a decade. That was long enough for Rowdy to know what his wife was thinking.

“You ain’t gonna be happy until we give them boys a ride, are you?” he said.

“It’s snowing out there. Coming down hard,” Nancy answered.

“Do what you want to do.”

Nancy jumped up from the table and ran to a television lounge where she had last seen the pair. “Y’all want to go, let’s go,” she told them. A look of relief washed over the boys.

Robert told the couple his name was Sam. Jim introduced himself as Tyler. Despite Christiana’s efforts to help Robert pick a new name, he and Jim fell back on the names of two classmates: Sam Sherman and Tyler Vermette. Jim thought they sounded like “normal names” that wouldn’t attract attention.

“Sam” and “Tyler” told the Tuckers they were headed to Southern California in search of jobs on boats. The Tuckers were sympathetic to young men with wanderlust and gave them each $10 so they could buy provisions for the ride before leaving Sturbridge. Once inside the truck, a 1999 Peterbilt with green flames painted on the cab, Rowdy watched the road while Nancy kept an eye on their riders. She had the impression that “Sam”—Robert—was the kind of kid who might have gotten into a fight with his father and had taken off to prove himself. “Tyler”—Jim—gave her the impression of a follower, a nervous young man on the timid side. At one point they were whispering so intimately, their bodies so close together, she thought they might be gay. She gave them the phone number of her lesbian sister in Modesto, California, so they could look her up when they reached the coast.

When Rowdy left the cab to take care of business, Sam/Robert climbed into the driver’s seat and played around like a kid.

“How long does it take to learn to drive one of these things?” he asked Nancy.

“You have to go to school—six to eight weeks,” she answered.

Then he noticed the thirty-two gauges on the dashboard. “Do you have to watch all these gauges all the time?” he wondered.

“Yep,” Nancy said, “all of them all the time.” That cooled his ardor for trucking.

As the hours went by, the Tuckers started to think there was something shady about these two. Rowdy told his wife to zip down the dividing curtain between the back of the cab and the seats up front, so if “Sam” and “Tyler” tried to jump them, at least they’d have some warning.

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