85: The Dartmouth Murders and an Evil Phlebotomist

Dartmouth College professors Half Zantop and Susanne Zantop were hanging out at home, waiting for their friend to arrive for dinner, when two boys showed up at their door. The boys said they were working on a school project. Could they ask Half a few questions? Half obliged. He’d devoted his life to academics. Of course he would help 16 year old James Parker and 17 year old Robert Tulloch. But James and Rob weren’t there for a school project. In fact, there was no school project.

Then, Kristin talks about a phlebotomist named Bryan Stewart. When Bryan and Jennifer Jackson first got together, things were great. But Bryan quickly became abusive. When Jennifer left Bryan, his threats escalated. The thought of paying child support for their infant son enraged him. He promised Jennifer that their son, Brryan Jackson, wouldn’t live to the age of five. Around that same time, Bryan “joked” with coworkers that as a phlebotomist, he could inject his enemies with disease-tainted blood, and they’d never know what hit them. 

And now for a note about our process. For each episode, Kristin reads a bunch of articles, then spits them back out in her very limited vocabulary. Brandi copies and pastes from the best sources on the web. And sometimes Wikipedia. (No shade, Wikipedia. We love you.) We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the real experts who covered these cases.

In this episode, Kristin pulled from:
“Brryan Jackson: My father injected me with HIV” by Lucy Hancock, for BBC News
“A positive life: How a son survived being injected with HIV by his father,” by Justin Heckert for GQ Magazine
“Man accused of injecting H.I.V. in son,” by Jo Thomas for the New York Times
“Mother testifies that defendant hinted at son’s death,” CNN
“Brian Stewart (phlebotomist)” Wikipedia entry

In this episode, Brandi pulled from:
“The Dartmouth Murders” by Denise Noe, The Crime Library
“Hearts of Darkness” by Alex Tresniowski, People Magazine
“Dartmouth professors’ murderer to get new sentence” by Peter Schworm and John R. Ellement, The Boston Globe
“Man convicted in 2001 murders of professors asks for early release” by Elliot Zornitsky, The Dartmouth
“2001 Dartmouth College murders” wikipedia.org