The Dartmouth Review: January 29, 2001

The Dartmouth Review

Editorial: A Time of Loss and Mourning

State Police Investigate Zantop Murder
by Andrew Grossman
Hanover, struck by a false spring, was quiet Monday morning, January 29, as students, faculty, and staff of Dartmouth College expressed shock over and mourned the loss of Susanne and Half Zantop, both professors at the school. The Zantops were found dead in their Etna, NH, home early Saturday night, January 27. The state Attorney General's Office, working in conjunction with the New Hampshire State Police and the Hanover Police Department, is conducting a homicide investigation into the deaths. The investigation is in the hands of New Hampshire Senior Assistant Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, who commands a team of thirty-five investigators from the three agencies.

Dartmouth Mourns Professors
by J. Lawrence Scholer
Dartmouth's tranquil idyll was visibly disturbed as the school reopened Monday. Community members were still adjusting to the news that Professors Susanne and Half Zantop were killed Saturday in their home at 115 Trescott Road in Etna, NH--just three miles from campus. The double murder is the first homicide in the Hanover area since 1991. Students first learned of the tragedy Saturday night, when local NBC affiliate WMUR and other stations broadcast news of the murder in their 11:00 p.m. report. At 12:14 a.m. Sunday morning, The Dartmouth newspaper sent an email to the campus stating that the Zantops were dead, possibly murdered.

Susanne Zantop: "Unfailingly Gentle"
by Stella Baer
Susanne Zantop was born in Kissingen, Germany on August 12, 1945. She immigrated to the United States in the 1960s, and first came to Dartmouth in the late winter of 1976 with her two daughters, Veronika and Mariana. Before coming to Dartmouth, she studied Political Science in Berlin and then at Stanford, where she received her first master's degree and met her husband, Half Zantop. She went on to study Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts, where she received her second master's degree. Susanne then received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University in 1986. She also taught in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Half Zantop: "He Was One I Admired"
by Darren Thomas
"There are a lot of professors whom I respect, but Half was one whom I admired," says Timothy Lesle, a senior at Dartmouth College, with a comment that is representative of the community's feelings toward the late Half Zantop. Faculty, administrators, and students alike have expressed their fondness for the professor of Earth Science, for his dedication, both in and out of the classroom. Half Zantop was born in Germany in 1938 but was raised in Barcelona, Spain, where his father ran a box-making factory. From early in his life, Zantop maintained fluency in German, Spanish, and English. He received his degree in Geology from Freiburg University in Germany, and immigrated to the United States in the 1960s to attend Stanford University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1969.

Dartmouth's Last Murder
by Ryan Gorsche
With the murders of Half and Susanne Zantop, students, faculty, and residents are bewildered; how could such an atrocity happen in a community considered as safe and protected as Hanover? Now is not the first time, however, that the Dartmouth community has lost members to homicide. In the summer of 1991, Hanover witnessed the brutal ax murder of two 24-year-old female graduate students at Dartmouth.

Halfway Heaven: A Personal Odyssey
by Kristina Hagström
On May 28, 1995 Sinedu Tadesse, an Ethiopian student at Harvard, murdered her roommate Trang Ho. Sinedu stabbed Trang forty-five times in the arms, neck and chest, and then proceeded to hang herself with a noose that she had prepared in advance. Trang was asleep in her bed, unable to defend herself. The crime was widely publicized. The New Yorker magazine commissioned Melanie Thernstrom to write an article about it. Thernstrom had met Sinedu once; Sinedu had applied to take a creative writing course Thernstrom taught at Harvard, but been rejected. Thernstrom's article eventually became a book. The book is selling. Is it the "juicy story" that Sinedu promised The Harvard Crimson in an anonymous note with a picture of herself that is attracting readers? Or is it Harvard itself that sparks people's curiosity?

It's Not Such a Small College Anymore by John Carty
Chan's Conservative Master Plan by Scott Meacham

Ouch! by Stella Baer
The Case of Pinochet by Jeffrey Hart

by Gordon Haff

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win great triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

—Theodore Roosevelt