Half and Susanne Zantop, well-respected and hard-working professors at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, were eager to assist the two high school students from Vermont who came knocking at their door asking them to participate in an environmental survey for a class project.  Hours later a close friend walked through the Zantop’s door and into a nightmare: pools of blood, two knife sheaths, and the savaged bodies of Half and Susanne.

With little to go on except the abandoned knife sheaths, investigators slogged through dozens of tips and evidence collected at the Zantop’s house but came up with few solid leads – a disgruntled Dartmouth student? – a rival professor? – a crazed hiker from the nearby Appalachian Trail? 

Meanwhile, back in the bucolic little town of Chelsea, Vermont, the bogus survey-takers – two arrogant teenage boys with a shared delusion of superiority plus a burning desire to leave Chelsea forever – were pretty certain that they had just gotten away with murder.  In Judgment Ridge, a chilling true account of the Dartmouth Murders, authors Dick Lehr and Mitchell Zuckoff explore why these two good students from loving homes would commit the ultimate act of depravity.