MONTPELIER, Vt. – Law-enforcement officials say they are concerned that witnesses might tailor their testimony about the deaths of two Dartmouth College professors if Vermont court documents on the case are released.

That is one of the reasons investigators looking into the deaths of Half and Susanne Zantop do not want public access to affidavits used to justify search warrants.

“A number of individuals who have been interviewed are maybe close to the defendants. They may have reason to protect the defendants,” New Hampshire Senior Assistant Attorney General N. William Delker told the Vermont Supreme Court on Wednesday.

“To give them a heads-up about what the police know would enable them to tailor their testimony so the grand jury isn’t getting a full and accurate picture of what is going on in the case,” Delker said.

A grand jury in New Hampshire will consider charges against Robert Tulloch, 17, and James Parker, 16. The two Chelsea teen-agers were charged with first-degree murder in the Jan. 27 stabbing deaths of the Zantops. They are being held without bail in New Hampshire.

Authorities have said little about the evidence they have collected in the case and have insisted they do not know a motive for the killings or if the suspects were connected to the victims.

A number of Vermont news organizations, including The Associated Press, are asking the Supreme Court to order the release of 10 search warrants, and the police affidavits used to get them. The documents were filed in Vermont District Court in Chelsea around the time the searches were conducted.

There was no indication when the Supreme Court might rule on the case.

The media lawyers argue that since Tulloch and Parker have been arrested and are being held without bail there is no reason to keep the documents secret.

“There is no articulation of specific need for confidentiality in this case. [It is] basically expressed as, ‘Trust us, we all know better than anybody else and we don’t really have to share any of this information,”‘ said Robert Hemley, a lawyer for the Times Argus, Rutland Herald, WCAX-TV and WPTZ-TV. “That is exactly what the last 30 years of First Amendment jurisprudence has done away with.”

Meanwhile, a New Hampshire judge has released some of the information contained in search warrants.

The New Hampshire documents outlined how some forensic evidence collected at the Hanover, N.H., home of the Zantops connected Tulloch and Parker to the killings.

But news organizations in New Hampshire are asking that state’s Supreme Court to release more information.

Lawyers for New Hampshire and Vermont said there was more information in the documents filed at the Vermont District Court in Orange County than those filed in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire authorities have asked for a 23-member investigative grand jury to meet on March 16 in Grafton County Superior Court in Haverhill, N.H.