The Megyn Kelly Show - John List - ＂The Annihilator＂： The FULL MK Confidential Series

00:00:00.520 Recently, our company's softball team lost the big game by one run.

00:00:04.820 Then Dale tried to console us with the quote,

00:00:07.220 winning isn't everything.

00:00:09.080 Well, Dale and I are very different.

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00:00:30.000 order up thank you no no no oh come on this is not happening

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00:00:54.120 advisor can help you get the right insurance coverage to protect your business it's how

00:00:58.080 making insurance more human. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM channel 111

00:01:04.700 every weekday at New East. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show

00:01:15.380 in today's mega episode. Today we are bringing you every episode of our MK Confidential series,

00:01:21.960 the Annihilator on the horrifying killings in suburban New Jersey by family annihilator John

00:01:28.860 List. We get into the crime itself, how List was able to escape authorities and start a new life

00:01:35.160 for 18 years, and how it took John Walsh and America's most wanted to finally bring him to

00:01:42.640 justice. I love this one. You're going to love this. I had never heard of John List prior to

00:01:48.160 doing this. And it was my favorite up until we did DC Snipers. That's not my favorite. I don't

00:01:53.700 know. Maybe I just like everyone that we're working on at the moment, but you're going to

00:01:56.920 love John List. Not him, the man, the story. Enjoy. And we'll see you Monday where we begin

00:02:02.460 a new MK Confidential series, this one on Scott Peterson. See you then.

00:02:09.360 it is the night of december 7th 1971 a drama teacher and military veteran named ed iliano

00:02:18.920 turns his car up a long winding driveway in westfield new jersey and puts the vehicle in park

00:02:25.280 finally he's making himself do the thing he's been putting off he leaves his headlights on

00:02:31.840 and pointed at the house it is a stately victorian mansion 19 rooms dark green shutters

00:02:38.980 set back on more than an acre behind tall hedges.

00:02:42.820 The family that lives here calls it Breeze Knoll.

00:02:46.280 Night after night, Ed has driven past it on his way home,

00:02:49.520 slowing at the bottom of the hill, telling himself,

00:02:52.220 everything's fine, but it has not looked fine for a while.

00:02:56.960 The lights have been burning in every window, day and night,

00:03:00.900 and lately they have begun going out one by one as the bulbs die.

00:03:06.060 He has knocked on the front door and gotten no answer.

00:03:08.980 He has rung the bell. He even tests the door handle. The lock holds, sparing him for the moment

00:03:16.300 from deciding whether to enter alone. He has gone to the Westfield police twice and both times has

00:03:23.660 been sent away because Ed cannot tell them exactly what crime he believes has occurred.

00:03:30.000 All he has is a feeling and a promise he once made to a frightened girl. The girl is one of

00:03:37.060 his drama students. Her name is Patricia List. She is 16. She sings in the church choir, and she

00:03:44.660 wants more than anything in the world to be an actress. Days before she disappeared, sitting in

00:03:50.800 Ed's parked car late at night, Patricia told him her father was going to kill her. Not rhetorically

00:03:58.120 and not in some vague way, but that she and her two younger brothers would be killed. Patricia is

00:04:05.100 not a girl given to hysterics. She said it the way a person reports a fact. Ed told her no one

00:04:12.420 is going to kill you. Patricia looked at him like he was a fool. It wasn't just the drama teacher 1.00

00:04:18.180 to whom she had said it. She had predicted the same to a friend her own age, a girl who has never

00:04:24.440 been able to shake it. At some point she had told me that she knew her father wanted her and her

00:04:30.880 brother's dead. A neighbor has already called the Westfield police about the strange car in the

00:04:36.120 driveway. Two patrolmen pull up within minutes, and after they hear Ed's concerns, one of them,

00:04:42.380 an officer named George Zelesnik, walks the outside of the house. On the side porch, he finds

00:04:48.900 a tall ground floor window unlocked. He and Ed push it up and climb over the sill into a dark

00:04:55.740 dining room. The first thing they notice is the smell. The second thing is the music.

00:05:02.640 Somewhere in the house, music is playing. It is loud and orchestral and grand. It seems to be

00:05:09.820 coming from everywhere at once, piped through an intercom into every room. It is a radio tuned to

00:05:16.780 a New York classical station the way it always is in this house. And tonight, by chance, it is

00:05:22.400 playing Wagner, a composer known for his anti-Semitic writings, whose opinions and music

00:05:28.560 will later become a soundtrack for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It is an ominous sound inside an

00:05:35.360 unsettling scene. By the window stand two fish tanks. In one, the fish are dead, drifting at

00:05:42.760 the surface. The second tank runs on a timer that keeps dropping food, and those fish are still

00:05:48.700 alive. Ed knows this house. He leads the officer across the center hall, past the two curving

00:05:55.920 staircases to a heavy drape pulled across the entrance to the ballroom. Zelesnik shines his

00:06:02.920 flashlight through the gap in the drapes. The beam settles on a child's face. There are four

00:06:09.540 bodies on the ballroom floor, laid out side by side, still in their winter coats. They are lying

00:06:15.680 on sleeping bags. Boy Scout sleeping bags, forest green, with the words Be Prepared printed on the

00:06:21.880 lining. Someone has arranged them so the edges of the bags all meet, so that from a few feet away

00:06:27.980 the four bodies together make the shape of a cross. A woman and three teenagers. One of the

00:06:34.420 woman's arms has been laid across one of the boy's shoulders. Evil has been here. Ed Ileano runs to

00:06:42.640 the front door and throws it open and the rest of the officers come in from the porch. Someone finds

00:06:48.100 the switch and turns on the lights. Upstairs on the third floor in a hallway outside a small apartment

00:06:54.120 with a slice of toast still in the toaster, the officers will find the fifth body. An 84-year-old

00:07:01.660 woman, the grandmother of the house. Everyone who lives here is accounted for. Everyone but one.

00:07:10.080 The father, John List, is gone.

00:07:13.960 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

00:07:20.140 Westfield, New Jersey, is not the kind of place this happens.

00:07:24.040 In 1971, it is a town of 33,000 people.

00:07:28.000 Today, it has the exact same population.

00:07:31.420 It is 25 miles southwest of Manhattan,

00:07:33.900 with grand old homes and a downtown so charming

00:07:36.840 that ad agencies from the city drive out to film it as a stand-in for small-town America.

00:07:42.960 It is a place of church suppers and Cub Scout dens,

00:07:46.320 of teenagers who spend their Saturdays downtown at the Rialto Movie House

00:07:50.300 and the sub shop and the benches around Minda Waskin Park,

00:07:54.920 the kind of town where people still leave the back door unlocked

00:07:57.540 because nothing has ever happened here that would make them stop.

00:08:01.200 It has 14 churches, 13 schools, and 51 police officers,

00:08:06.840 and it has not had a murder in eight years. Tonight, it has five in one house.

00:08:13.680 Not just any house, either. Breeze Knoll is a distinctly impressive home on one of Westfield's

00:08:20.000 grandest streets, a 19-room Victorian with a real ballroom and a great stained glass skylight

00:08:26.560 towering over it, the kind of kaleidoscope you would expect to find atop a church.

00:08:32.500 From the sidewalk, it looks like the pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow.

00:08:36.840 The steady father, the pretty wife, the well-mannered children, the good street address.

00:08:43.100 That is the picture Westfield has of the family inside.

00:08:46.640 The police are going to unearth the reality behind that image.

00:08:51.060 The police chief is a man named James Moran.

00:08:54.180 He is at headquarters that evening supervising promotion tests

00:08:57.780 when the call comes in from the patrolman at the scene.

00:09:01.660 The officer on the line sounds panicked, nothing like himself.

00:09:06.100 He tells Moran, Chief, there's been a mass murder.

00:09:10.200 There are dead bodies all over the place.

00:09:13.960 Moran cannot believe his ears.

00:09:16.000 Westfield has not had a murder in eight years,

00:09:18.400 and now this man is telling him there are five?

00:09:21.380 He gets in his car and drives.

00:09:24.120 When he arrives, the ground floor of the mansion is already filling up with police,

00:09:27.940 and Wagner still plays over the intercom.

00:09:31.680 Officer Zalesnik cannot shake the sound of it.

00:09:35.020 The unnerving part of the whole situation was that there was music playing in the house,

00:09:40.280 and it was very classical, serene, almost like you would hear if you went to a funeral power.

00:09:46.520 Moran, who will later say that he is no classical music expert, makes the same comparison.

00:09:52.780 He remembers the music echoing through room after room.

00:09:56.840 It is not until later that someone checks the radio listings

00:09:59.880 and realizes what the family's classical station had been broadcasting

00:10:03.780 at the exact hour the police found the bodies.

00:10:07.440 An orchestral piece from Wagner's Twilight of the Gods.

00:10:12.160 Somebody finally locates the radio in a hall closet and shuts it off.

00:10:16.940 The chief walks into the ballroom and stands over the bodies.

00:10:20.580 He sees the three of them are children.

00:10:22.860 The men already inside are not rookies.

00:10:25.840 Some of them have given 20 years to this quiet suburban force

00:10:28.960 and more than one of them will be unable to shake the next few minutes for the rest of his life.

00:10:34.860 The smell of decay in the icy cold rooms,

00:10:37.920 the small bodies laid out behind the heavy drape across the ballroom.

00:10:42.000 One of the first officers to take the call had been so sure it was a prank,

00:10:46.440 he told the man on the phone to knock it off.

00:10:48.620 A young assistant prosecutor named Michael Meisner is called to the house that night.

00:10:53.940 He will go home afterward and take his clothes off in the hallway,

00:10:57.940 unwilling to carry them into his own apartment

00:11:00.060 because the stench has gotten into them.

00:11:02.560 The most telling thing about it was the odor.

00:11:06.860 The other thing that describes it is the smell of death.

00:11:10.360 Here is what the police can see standing in that ballroom.

00:11:14.320 Nothing about the room suggests a robbery.

00:11:17.320 The house is sparsely decorated but full of nice things,

00:11:20.540 and none of it has been touched.

00:11:22.680 There is no sign that a stranger forced his way in.

00:11:25.200 they can see from the care that was taken that whoever did this was not in a hurry.

00:11:30.520 Whatever his state of mind, the scene shows planning, order, and control. The bodies have

00:11:37.020 been laid out. They have been covered. They have been arranged. Much of the blood has been wiped

00:11:42.920 up, though a dark trail of it still runs back across the floor. Down in the kitchen, the

00:11:48.960 breakfast dishes have been washed and stacked to dry. A few bananas have blackened on the counter.

00:11:56.140 Whoever did this killed five people, then tidied up.

00:12:00.980 Charlie Haller is one of the first Westfield officers into Breeze Knoll.

00:12:05.780 Twenty years later, he talks to CBS News.

00:12:08.860 He cleaned up a lot of the blood and had bags with bloody towels and rags.

00:12:13.700 That's one thing you never forget, something like that.

00:12:17.220 You never think would happen or you'd come upon.

00:12:20.100 And it stuck with me for a long time.

00:12:22.480 Whoever did this is not in the house.

00:12:25.200 of the six people who live inside this mansion, five are dead. The sixth, the husband, the father,

00:12:33.260 a 46-year-old accountant is nowhere to be found. His name is John Emile List. For a few hours,

00:12:41.520 that leaves an obvious question. Is John List a sixth victim? Taken somewhere else?

00:12:47.720 The answer's no. In the first floor study, the police open a filing cabinet drawer with a label

00:12:53.800 on it that reads simply guns and ammo inside are two handguns that have been fired beside them

00:13:01.060 a long letter john list is the author moran reads it then and there in the study on his feet with

00:13:08.660 the bodies still about him by the time he has finished reading he is no longer searching for

00:13:14.640 a missing man he is now searching for a killer the man who did this is not a victim he is not

00:13:21.940 dead and he is not lost. He is a murderer who killed his wife, mother, and his three children

00:13:28.840 and walked out of his own house. He had also made sure to give himself time. Before he left, 1.00

00:13:35.940 John List had taken a few quiet, careful steps to make sure no one would be coming looking too soon.

00:13:42.700 Each was the sort of small errand a careful father might run before a family trip.

00:13:47.800 Each helped buy him another quiet day.

00:13:51.420 By the time Ed Ileano finally climbs into that house,

00:13:55.700 John List is long gone.

00:13:58.500 So who is he?

00:14:00.380 This is the part of the story of which the town cannot make sense

00:14:04.140 because the people think they know John List.

00:14:07.440 Nothing about the man they think they know fits the carnage he left behind.

00:14:12.720 He's an accountant, a certified public accountant,

00:14:16.100 precise and quiet and almost invisible.

00:14:19.140 He's a churchgoer, a devout Lutheran,

00:14:21.460 the kind who teaches Sunday school

00:14:23.020 and helps run the Cub Scout pack to which his sons belong.

00:14:26.940 Parents in the congregation are glad to have him looking after their children.

00:14:30.020 He's exactly the sort of steady, seemingly God-fearing man

00:14:33.500 any parent would choose to mentor one's son.

00:14:36.740 He is unfailingly polite.

00:14:38.800 He doesn't drink.

00:14:39.780 He doesn't curse.

00:14:40.600 He rarely raises his voice.

00:14:42.660 Timothy Benford, a writer who spent years on this case

00:14:47.040 interviewing nearly everyone in it

00:14:48.960 would put the paradox this way

00:14:50.860 He was a deeply religious man

00:14:52.680 introverted, soft-spoken, a gentleman

00:14:56.580 the kind of person you would not mind having as a next-door neighbor

00:14:59.780 and the whole family was like that

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00:15:29.580 Recently, our company's softball team lost the big game by one run.

00:15:33.880 Then Dale tried to console us with the quote, winning isn't everything.

00:15:38.220 Well, Dale and I are very different.

00:15:41.240 I get early payout from Bet365.

00:15:43.800 If my team goes up big, I get paid out instantly, even if they blow the lead later.

00:15:48.620 Sound familiar, Dale?

00:15:50.420 Thanks, Bet365.

00:15:52.040 Must be 19 or older, Ontario only.

00:15:53.580 Please play responsibly.

00:15:54.380 If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or the gambling of someone close to you,

00:15:56.900 please go to connexontario.ca, TNC Supply.

00:15:59.940 Mostly what people remember about John List is the coat and tie.

00:16:04.900 List wore a suit the way other men wore skin. 0.54

00:16:07.500 He wore one to church, to work, to the most ordinary chores of a summer Saturday, 0.52

00:16:13.760 the parts of a life where no other man on the block was wearing anything of the kind.

00:16:18.520 Years later, John Walsh would describe him on national television in exactly those terms.

00:16:24.540 List is described as a quiet, soft-spoken man, the kind who wears a shirt and tie to mow the lawn.

00:16:30.720 A neighbor who watched him run Cub Scout events remembered him barking orders,

00:16:35.240 and in the neighbor's words, marching the children in like little Prussian soldiers.

00:16:40.240 A tin horn tyrant, the man called him. Then in the next breath, the same neighbor said that in

00:16:45.480 every other way, John List was a complete gentleman, the old world kind. That is the man

00:16:51.600 Westfield knew. Prim, rigid, trustworthy, and utterly harmless. The last man on the block

00:17:00.140 you would look at twice. He had always been this way. Years later, when his face went out on a

00:17:06.380 wanted flyer and turned up in the papers, people who had gone to high school with John List would

00:17:11.100 have to pull their old yearbooks down off the shelf to place him at all. He was there, in the

00:17:17.220 class of 1943, an honor student, but almost no one could summon a single memory of him. He was the

00:17:24.460 boy, one classmate said, who blended into the scenery. That same forgettable quality, the thing

00:17:30.680 no one could ever quite put a finger on, would turn out to be a great blessing to John List.

00:17:36.940 His victims were not so lucky. His wife is Helen. She is 46 when John takes her life.

00:17:45.800 Years earlier, she had been vivacious and striking, a young war widow when John married her,

00:17:50.780 A woman the neighbor said was someone who liked to laugh and to dance back then.

00:17:56.080 By the time of her death, that woman has all but disappeared.

00:18:00.500 Helen is sick, with something the family never says out loud.

00:18:05.020 It's syphilis, caught years ago from her first husband,

00:18:08.720 and by 1971 it has reached the late stage that goes after the brain.

00:18:13.820 It causes her mind to atrophy a little more each year, and there is no cure coming.

00:18:20.000 She drinks, which the doctors have warned her will only speed the disease along, and it does.

00:18:26.040 She drifts in and out of lucidity.

00:18:28.960 Most days, she does not come downstairs at all.

00:18:32.120 By the day of her death, many of the people on Hillside Avenue have not laid eyes on Helen List in a very long time.

00:18:39.020 Her own children have learned to tell their friends that mom's just resting.

00:18:43.960 A dying woman upstairs in a bathrobe in one of the finest houses in Westfield.

00:18:49.100 while below her the dishes get washed, the lawn gets mowed, and the family goes on looking from

00:18:55.040 the street like the picture of an ordinary life. John List's mother is Alma. She's 84 and she lives

00:19:03.300 at the top of the house in the third floor apartment, the one with the little kitchen

00:19:07.200 where her toast is still butterless in the toaster. She put up the money that bought this mansion

00:19:12.560 and part of the deal was that she would always have a place in it. She keeps mostly to the

00:19:17.960 apartment's three rooms, a long way from the Michigan town where she spent nearly her whole

00:19:22.420 life and knew everyone. In private letters, Alma confesses to old friends how isolated and miserable

00:19:29.660 she has become in Westfield. Then there are the three children. Patricia is 16, pat to her family.

00:19:39.220 She is the aspiring actress, the one her friends describe as the girl with the flowers in her hair.

00:19:44.320 In the last weeks of her life, Patricia is the understudy for the part of Blanche DuBois

00:19:50.100 in a community production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

00:19:54.560 She memorizes not just her own lines as Blanche, but the entire play, every part which she

00:20:00.540 would whisper to herself late at night after the house had gone quiet, working through

00:20:05.400 a script she is sure will take her somewhere.

00:20:09.200 One of the young actors who shared a stage with Patricia, Barry Cohen, remembers to News

00:20:14.100 12, Connecticut, exactly who she was. Very proud, very self-assured, and beautiful, really. Way

00:20:22.800 beyond her years. At 16, she had more spunk and more pride, and she was kind of haughty. You know,

00:20:29.520 she'd toss her hair, and she was beautiful. 15-year-old Johnny is the family's athlete.

00:20:37.240 Big for his age and hot-tempered, a soccer player. Away from his father, he is loose and animated,

00:20:42.840 a joker. Nothing like the stiff, silent man of the house. Frederick, Fred, is 13, a baby. He is the

00:20:52.240 gentle one, cherub-faced, with a slight lisp his big sister likes to tease him about. He covers

00:20:58.700 games for his school paper with the hopes of being a sports writer one day. The two boys are Boy Scouts,

00:21:04.780 which is the reason there are Boy Scout sleeping bags in the house. More than anything else,

00:21:09.320 they are each other's best friends. They are also devoted New York Mets fans. On the wall over one

00:21:15.960 of their beds taped up is a homemade banner reading, Let's Go Mets. Those are the people

00:21:22.100 inside the tidy home with the music playing, a dying wife the neighbors no longer saw,

00:21:27.920 a homesick old woman at the top of the stairs, a daughter whispering a theater script at night,

00:21:33.480 and two brothers who were each other's whole world.

00:21:37.540 They are buried out of Redeemer Lutheran,

00:21:40.960 the family's own church on a gray Saturday in December.

00:21:44.760 There are five caskets, more than three dozen pallbearers,

00:21:49.340 a great many of them teenagers,

00:21:51.900 Patricia's friends from the drama group,

00:21:54.220 the boys' friends from school,

00:21:56.700 children carrying the coffins of other children,

00:22:00.060 unable to look at one another as they do it.

00:22:03.480 Hundreds more stand outside in the cold, listening to the service on loudspeakers.

00:22:08.780 Afterward, the grandmother, Alma, is sent home to Michigan to be buried among people

00:22:13.960 she actually knew.

00:22:16.600 The manhunt for John List starts big and goes nowhere.

00:22:21.120 The murder of an entire family in a New Jersey mansion is national news, and for a while

00:22:27.160 the whole nation does pay attention.

00:22:29.820 His face goes out on FBI-wanted posters

00:22:32.160 into police stations and pharmacies across the country

00:22:35.320 describing him, among other things,

00:22:37.520 as reportedly a neat dresser.

00:22:40.180 The Bureau takes the case

00:22:41.380 because a killer who has crossed a state line

00:22:43.780 is federal business.

00:22:45.900 Detectives in Westfield build a theory

00:22:48.020 around the kind of man they believe he is,

00:22:51.040 someone so bound to his church and his routines

00:22:53.900 that sooner or later he will have to surface

00:22:57.300 at some Lutheran church in some quiet town. They settle in to wait for it. For years afterward,

00:23:05.220 every so often, on the anniversaries, the police go back to that same cemetery and sit near the

00:23:11.520 family grave in case John List cannot help himself, in case he comes back to stand over

00:23:17.920 those he killed. But John List does not come back. He does not surface at all. He's like a ghost.

00:23:26.580 Weeks pass, then months, then years, and John List simply is nowhere to be found. 0.81

00:23:33.200 The tidy house on Hillside Avenue stands empty and morose.

00:23:37.520 Less than a year later, it burns to the ground.

00:23:40.700 The great stained glass skylight and all.

00:23:43.940 Investigators never officially determine the fire's cause.

00:23:46.760 The case never closes, but it recedes.

00:23:50.320 off the front page, out of the national news, out of people's daily thoughts except the handful of

00:23:57.080 detectives who cannot let it go. Westfield tries to move on. In a filing cabinet at police

00:24:04.520 headquarters, the case of the accountant who murdered his family sits open, unsolved, year

00:24:11.580 after year after year. Detective Jeff Hummel, who takes over the cold case file years later and goes

00:24:19.420 through it page by page, sums up where the search stood. Law enforcement itself were somewhat

00:24:25.500 flummoxed because they didn't know where he was or whether he was still alive or whether he was

00:24:31.680 dead. And I took the position that you deal with evidence and facts. And since no evidence

00:24:36.960 surfaced to the contrary that he had died, I assumed he was alive. John List had just disappeared.

00:24:46.840 Inside the Homicide Squad, the years of nothing turn into a grim running joke.

00:24:52.560 No matter how cold the case got, officers like Frank Maronka tell Bill Curtis they never forgot it.

00:24:58.740 We would go on vacation and periodically we would send a postcard back to the Homicide Squad while on vacation saying,

00:25:08.120 having a wonderful time, wish you were here and sign at John List.

00:25:11.400 So it was kind of a joke in the office.

00:25:13.820 The man who would create America's Most Wanted, John Walsh, has a blunt answer for why the

00:25:19.540 accountant was never caught by the people whose job it was to catch him.

00:25:23.800 Do you think the local cops had the resources to get him?

00:25:26.960 No.

00:25:27.480 You think the mighty FBI with 6,000 FBI agents looking for him got him?

00:25:31.720 No.

00:25:32.160 I think he'd still be out there.

00:25:34.300 You think it took the public?

00:25:36.140 Now come forward with me from the murders in 1971 all the way to 1988.

00:25:41.780 It is a bright, ordinary day in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, thousands of miles away from

00:25:48.640 Westfield, New Jersey. In a quiet neighborhood, a mild, bespectacled accountant is loading cardboard

00:25:55.540 boxes into a used Ford, getting ready to drive across the country to a new job and a new life

00:26:01.500 in Richmond, Virginia. He is in his 60s now. He wears glasses and has a receding hairline,

00:26:08.820 and of course, a coat and tie. His neighbors think he is one of the most decent, albeit forgettable

00:26:15.820 men, they have ever met. His name, everyone here is quite sure, is Bob Clark. For most of two

00:26:23.620 decades, Bob Clark has been the most unremarkable man in the world. A CPA, a churchgoer, a Lutheran. 1.00

00:26:31.980 He is polite. He is punctual. He wears a coat and tie. If that is starting to sound familiar, 1.00

00:26:37.820 it should. John List built himself the same life over again, almost detail for detail,

00:26:45.920 the respectable, church-going, coat-and-tie existence he had before the ballroom. He did

00:26:52.460 not need a disguise or a new face. The old one had never been memorable in the first place.

00:26:58.980 In the doorway behind him in Colorado is his wife. Her name is Dolores. They were married a few years

00:27:06.060 back in the mid-80s and she loves him. She knows Bob as a quiet religious widower who lost his

00:27:13.640 first wife to illness. She has no idea that almost everything he has told her about his past is a lie.

00:27:22.240 Years later, after the whole country knows, Dolores will speak to CBS News of the man she married

00:27:27.860 and the only way she ever knew him. I have never known Robert to be anything but a sweet and

00:27:34.740 gentle man, a good character. She kisses him goodbye and watches him back the ford down the

00:27:40.100 driveway off to set up their new life out east. She has no idea who is behind that wheel. The

00:27:47.360 gentle church-going accountant with a symphony playing on the tape deck murdered his own mother,

00:27:53.240 his wife, and their three children in a New Jersey mansion more than 16 years ago.

00:27:59.000 He left four of their corpses lying in the ballroom and walked out.

00:28:05.000 He has been a fugitive ever since.

00:28:07.780 Bob Clark is John List, and he has gotten away with his crimes.

00:28:13.760 Next time on MK Confidential.

00:28:16.800 Before he was Bob Clark and before the ballroom,

00:28:20.620 he was a shy, devout, neatly dressed boy from a small town in Michigan

00:28:24.300 who read the Bible with his mother every night.

00:28:26.840 We go back to the beginning to find out how that boy became a man who in his last days in that house sat his three children down and asked each of them whether they would rather be buried or cremated than meticulously murdered them all.

00:28:44.340 it is a hot summer night in 1971 well past two in the morning and the desk sergeant at the

00:28:58.940 westfield new jersey police station is watching over two teenage girls their crime is close to

00:29:04.660 nothing staying out past midnight with cigarettes laughing their way down a main street that had

00:29:10.000 long since gone dark. In a comfortable town like Westfield, that alone is enough to get you brought

00:29:15.000 in. So they sit and they wait, red-eyed, for someone to come and claim them. The first father

00:29:21.020 arrives rumpled and half asleep, annoyed at the police for not simply driving his daughter home.

00:29:26.500 It's an ordinary dad reaction, the kind of father anyone would recognize. The second father is not

00:29:33.180 like that. The second girl is Patricia List. When her father walks into the police station at half

00:29:39.600 past two in the morning, he is wearing a suit, a pressed suit, a clean white shirt, a dark tie,

00:29:47.400 and a faint smell of aftershave. He had been asleep. Someone called to say his daughter was

00:29:52.820 at the station, and before he drove down to get her, John List stopped to put on a pressed coat

00:29:58.820 and tie. The police chief, James Moran, hears about it the next morning, and it sticks with him.

00:30:04.340 Who gets up and puts on a suit, Moran wonders, with a white shirt and tie at 2.30 in the morning?

00:30:11.620 One of his officers has an answer.

00:30:13.700 Oh, I know that guy, says the officer.

00:30:16.280 Lives in the big house up on Hillside Avenue.

00:30:18.860 I've seen him out there mowing his lawn in a suit and tie.

00:30:22.620 That night, driving home, John List does not say one word to his daughter.

00:30:27.820 He is a man who almost never raises his voice,

00:30:30.580 But once they are inside the house, in the front hall, under a big amber chandelier, something in him lets go.

00:30:38.800 You are out of control, he yells at her. 0.83

00:30:42.320 You are going straight to hell, and there is nothing I can do about it. 0.92

00:30:46.980 Four months later, Chief James Moran will stand in the ballroom of that same house 0.92

00:30:51.980 and look down at the bodies of Patricia List and her mother and her two brothers and her grandmother,

00:30:58.320 and the first thing that will come into his head is the man in the suit and tie at 2.30 in the

00:31:04.980 morning. The guy in the suit, he thinks. That guy did this. In this episode, we go back, way back to

00:31:13.740 the beginning, to find out who that man was and how a shy, devout accountant came to murder his

00:31:19.920 entire family and to tell himself right up to the end that he was doing the right thing. I'm Megan

00:31:27.140 Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. John Emil List comes into the world on September 17th,

00:31:37.280 1925 in Bay City, Michigan, a cold industrial town on a river near Lake Huron. He is an only

00:31:44.320 child, and from the very first day, he is the center of his mother's world. His father is old

00:31:50.380 and cold. John Frederick List is 64 when his son is born, a stern German immigrant with a dry goods

00:31:58.280 store and a booming voice, a man who deals with his son mostly through his wife and refers to him

00:32:03.560 always as the boy. His mother, Alma, is warm but controlling. Intensely religious, she is a devout

00:32:11.960 member of the strict Missouri Synod branch of the Lutheran Church, and she raises her son inside a

00:32:18.160 kind of cocoon. She reads the Bible with him every night, keeps him indoors, away from the other

00:32:23.380 children, away from the street, away from anything that might be a bad influence, afraid he could

00:32:29.040 catch a cold or get his hands dirty. A neighbor once described Alma as a queen, erect and precise,

00:32:36.580 and called little Johnny her prince. He grows up living neatly to the point of strangeness.

00:32:42.600 The family lives on the ground floor of the house, and the boy sleeps on a couch in the parlor,

00:32:46.780 a room with no door, and every single morning he has to fold away his sheets and his books

00:32:52.560 and every trace that he had ever been there. John learns to leave nothing behind. Quote,

00:32:58.180 he was the neatest little boy I ever saw, a woman who rented from the family said years later.

00:33:03.720 You never knew he was around. Another classmate put it a different way. He was there, but he just

00:33:09.380 blended into the background.

00:33:11.760 The little boy who leaves no trace.

00:33:14.560 He was good at that.

00:33:16.500 Years later, List will describe that time himself

00:33:19.080 to journalist Bill Curtis on American Justice

00:33:21.360 in a voice as flat and orderly as everything else about him.

00:33:25.520 It was a quiet childhood.

00:33:29.180 I was an only child,

00:33:31.440 so there were no brothers or sisters

00:33:33.700 to either play with or fight with.

00:33:36.640 What Alma wants from her son is order.

00:33:39.380 and respectability, and above all, faith. And for a long time, that is exactly what he gives her.

00:33:45.260 He is patriotic, and he joins the army in 1943, right out of high school. He does not see much

00:33:51.220 of the war. He trains in the swamps of Louisiana, ships off to Europe in the last months of fighting,

00:33:57.080 and is home again by 1946, having spent, all told, less than a year overseas. He comes back with a

00:34:04.220 handful of standard service medals, a couple of which he will quietly inflate over the years into

00:34:09.200 something grander, and with one souvenir he is genuinely proud of, a Steyr M 1912, an Austrian

00:34:16.660 automatic pistol he bought off of another soldier in 1944. He will not fire it again for another

00:34:23.260 27 years. While John is still in uniform, his father dies. John takes leave to go home for

00:34:30.760 the funeral, and the thing people remember about him there is that he shows no grief at all. He

00:34:36.960 holds the neighbor's new baby. He's polite. He seems, one relative said, as if nothing has

00:34:42.740 happened. Like this is all just a part of his day. After the war, he does something else his

00:34:48.340 mother Alma always wanted. He goes to the University of Michigan on the GI Bill. John

00:34:54.380 studies accounting, earns a business degree and then a master's, and becomes a certified public

00:34:59.740 accountant. Accounting suits John. It is orderly. Everything adds up or is supposed to. And he

00:35:06.940 takes a job with a prestigious firm. When the Korean War comes, he is called back as a commissioned

00:35:12.540 officer, which pleases both John and his mother, and he spends that war safely stateside in Virginia,

00:35:19.620 touring Civil War battlefields on his days off. He loves history. He loves the study of old battles.

00:35:27.480 It is now 1951. John is 26 years old, and he has never had a real girlfriend. A few forgettable

00:35:35.360 dates in college, nothing that lasted. With women, he is almost completely inexperienced. Today, 1.00

00:35:41.980 they might call him an incel or involuntarily celibate. Then, on a Saturday night in October

00:35:47.960 that same year, John goes bowling with a couple of other young officers in Newport News, Virginia,

00:35:53.660 and in the next lane is a thin, pretty young woman named Helen. Helen Taylor is a war widow.

00:36:01.700 Her first husband, a soldier named Marvin, had been killed in Korea just months before,

00:36:06.580 and she is raw with grief, out that night mostly because her sister dragged her along.

00:36:12.020 She's a little older than John, far more experienced and nothing at all like him.

00:36:17.120 Where John is timid and careful, Helen is impulsive and full of life, quick to laugh,

00:36:23.640 quick to dance, quick to spend money she does not have. John falls hard for her almost immediately.

00:36:30.980 Helen is newly widowed, deeply unsettled and drawn to John's steadiness.

00:36:35.800 Within weeks, she is telling him she's pregnant, and John, who does not seem embarrassed by

00:36:40.720 any of it, tells an army friend we have to get married.

00:36:44.360 On December 1st, 1951, less than two months after they met at that bowling alley, John

00:36:50.220 and Helen are married in a Lutheran church in Baltimore.

00:36:54.200 Helen does not come into this marriage alone.

00:36:56.960 She has a nine-year-old daughter from her first marriage, Brenda,

00:37:00.020 who at first resents the quiet, mild-mannered stranger stepping into her dead father's place,

00:37:05.340 but takes almost no time at all to change her mind.

00:37:08.440 Within a few years, John is taking her ice fishing on the frozen Saginaw River,

00:37:12.860 coaching her through her Lutheran instruction,

00:37:15.560 making pizza for the family on Saturday nights,

00:37:17.960 and Brenda is calling him Daddy.

00:37:20.480 Brenda would later say of her stepfather,

00:37:23.420 If I did something wrong, he never cut me down.

00:37:25.300 He always listened to me. He was there for me. Brenda marries at 18. By 1971, she is grown and

00:37:33.400 long gone, a married and divorced mother of five. She settled near Kalamazoo, Michigan,

00:37:39.460 and stayed in the Midwest when the rest of the List family moved east to New Jersey.

00:37:44.940 John's mother had wanted so much more for her Chani, as she called him. And from the day John

00:37:50.040 first brings his new wife home to Michigan, Alma treats Helen with a cold contempt she barely

00:37:56.060 bothers to hide. Helen, for her part, shuts out the old woman. The two most important people in 1.00

00:38:02.460 John List's life will spend the next 20 years quietly at war, and John will spend those years

00:38:08.080 standing between them, trying and failing to please them both. Shortly after the wedding,

00:38:14.300 Helen tells John she had been wrong. She was not pregnant after all. Whatever he privately thinks,

00:38:22.420 he remains in the marriage. He is married now to a beautiful woman, and that is what a respectable

00:38:27.500 man is supposed to be. Years later, a psychiatrist who evaluates John List will trace a lifetime of

00:38:34.700 quiet resentment back to this beginning. Here's Dr. Stephen Simring speaking to A&E.

00:38:40.900 He was forced to marry her because she said she was pregnant.

00:38:44.440 It turned out that she was not pregnant.

00:38:46.600 And then years later, he was resentful about his impression that she perhaps had misled him as a way of getting him to marry her.

00:38:54.060 Eventually, the children come.

00:38:56.200 Patricia in 1955, John Jr. the year after that.

00:39:00.400 Frederick, two years later.

00:39:02.600 On the surface, for a while, the lists are exactly the family John always meant to have.

00:39:07.940 Underneath, however, it doesn't hold.

00:39:10.900 John List has a problem, and it is the same problem over and over in one town after another.

00:39:17.720 He is good at the narrow, tidy work of an accountant, the columns and the ledgers.

00:39:23.360 He is not good at managing people, selling himself, or reading a room.

00:39:29.120 Employers keep deciding, politely, that he is not quite what they hoped for.

00:39:34.180 So the family keeps moving, chasing the next job, each one supposed to be the fresh start.

00:39:40.200 Michigan, then Rochester, New York,

00:39:42.940 and a good run at the Xerox company,

00:39:44.800 where by 1965, John climbs to a real title,

00:39:48.740 Director of Accounting Services.

00:39:51.000 Later that same year, he is quietly told,

00:39:53.980 it's time for him to look for something else.

00:39:57.180 Rebecca Everett, host of the podcast,

00:39:59.520 Father Wants Us Dead,

00:40:01.420 says the people who worked with John List saw it too.

00:40:04.760 He was a fine accountant.

00:40:06.320 The numbers made sense to him, he could do that,

00:40:08.100 but he wasn't really good with people.

00:40:10.640 He does not tell Helen how bad it is.

00:40:13.040 He never does.

00:40:14.880 Helen, for her part, stops pretending to be impressed.

00:40:18.220 Somewhere in these years, she understands that the careful, church-going man she married

00:40:21.880 is not going to rise in the world, and she lets him feel it.

00:40:26.580 Their pastor back in Rochester remembers overhearing Helen say to John's face,

00:40:31.200 if you were half the man my first husband was, we wouldn't be having the troubles we're having.

00:40:36.160 In the fall of 1965, John moves the family to Westfield, New Jersey,

00:40:41.700 for a new job as vice president at a bank,

00:40:44.940 and he sets his heart on a house he cannot come close to affording.

00:40:49.540 It is a 19-room Victorian mansion on more than an acre,

00:40:53.880 parked on the best street in town, and it already has its own name.

00:40:58.380 A wealthy man named Whitkey had built the house decades earlier.

00:41:02.220 He added a ballroom to show off his art collection,

00:41:05.420 threw parties under a stained glass skylight and called the place Breeze Knoll. By the time the

00:41:12.460 lists come to see the house, Whitkey is long dead. His heirs have sold the property off and the grand

00:41:17.740 old estate has gone shabby. To John and Helen, though, it's a dream. To John especially, it is

00:41:24.200 about the image. What he would later admit was, quote, conspicuous consumption in the extreme.

00:41:29.640 It is a monument, proof of the man he wants the world to believe he is.

00:41:35.540 Almost as soon as they move in, a neighbor walks an apple pie over to welcome them to the neighborhood.

00:41:41.440 The man knocks, the door opens, just a crack, and John List takes the pie,

00:41:46.660 and before the man can finish telling John his name, he cuts him off.

00:41:50.920 Thank you very much, John says. We like to keep to ourselves over here.

00:41:55.260 He closes the door.

00:41:57.320 And that is the first thing the folks on Hillside Avenue ever learn about John List.

00:42:02.760 There is the matter of paying for the home.

00:42:06.340 John needs $10,000 just for the down payment, and there is only one person he knows with

00:42:10.920 that kind of money, his mother, Alma.

00:42:13.900 She agrees on one condition, that she be allowed to come and live with them.

00:42:18.880 So Alma, at 79, moves from Michigan into the small apartment on the third floor in

00:42:24.780 New Jersey where she will spend what she will call the unhappiest years of her life and where

00:42:31.380 six years after that her son will shoot her above the left eye at point-blank range. One day in the

00:42:39.240 future John List will tell a very different story to Dr. Simring appointed by the court saying that

00:42:45.420 the house had never really been his idea at all. He did not want the big house. He felt that he was

00:42:51.880 being pushed to do this by his wife and by the demands of a growing family. He made the decision

00:42:57.640 to borrow money from his mother and then invite his mother to live with him. There is one more

00:43:03.220 thing happening in that house, quietly behind the tall windows. Helen is sick and has been for years

00:43:10.020 with an illness too shameful to admit to the good people of Westfield. It started long before John

00:43:16.240 in her first marriage in Korea, where her first husband ran with the bar girls of Seoul

00:43:21.560 and brought something ugly home to Helen. For years, doctors misdiagnose it. By the time they

00:43:29.300 identify it correctly, it has reached Helen's brain. The disease is syphilis. Caught early,

00:43:35.620 it is cured by a single injection of penicillin. Untreated, however, after nearly 20 years,

00:43:41.040 It has advanced to the stage that attacks the nervous system, slowly destroying the brain tissue.

00:43:47.260 Antibiotics can still stop it, but they cannot give back what the disease has already taken.

00:43:53.360 One bright spot for the lists, Helen never gives John or her children the disease.

00:43:59.900 Syphilis can only be passed to another person in the first months after infection.

00:44:04.980 And Helen was infected in 1947, four years before John ever laid eyes on her in that bowling alley.

00:44:11.740 By the time they marry, it has gone dormant and silent, working away at Helen from the inside, dangerous to no one but her.

00:44:20.900 Helen had insisted that she and John marry in Maryland, specifically because the state did not require a blood test, which would have revealed her secret disease.

00:44:29.620 It would remain a secret for nearly two decades until a round of blood tests exposed the syphilis

00:44:35.920 in 1968. John took the revelation in stride. Helen keeps the curtains drawn. She drinks scotch,

00:44:43.480 mostly, and washes down the tranquilizers her doctors keep prescribing, a combination that

00:44:48.060 only sharpens the disorientation and paranoia the disease already brings. She loses whole afternoons.

00:44:55.200 She grows frightened of people who are not in the room.

00:44:58.240 The disease, taking her mind apart, traces back to Marvin, her first husband, the war hero,

00:45:03.860 the one man she never stopped loving and never stops throwing in John's face.

00:45:08.740 John tells no one.

00:45:10.340 He cooks the dinners, he drives the children to their lessons,

00:45:13.580 he answers the door in his coat and tie and says the family likes to keep to itself.

00:45:18.260 But the care is not free.

00:45:20.620 The hospital stays and the long recuperations put a financial squeeze on him

00:45:24.260 that he will not admit to anyone, and it is Helen's illness that first sends John quietly to the bank

00:45:30.820 to borrow against Breeze Knoll, a loan and then a second mortgage that he will not be able to repay.

00:45:38.720 Up the stairs behind him, his wife is disappearing into a disease she caught from a dead man,

00:45:44.860 and John List carries it the way he carries everything, silently and alone.

00:45:49.620 and then john list loses the bank job too one year and he is fired john doesn't tell anyone

00:45:58.800 not his wife not his mother his church instead morning after morning for the better part of six

00:46:04.740 months he does the same thing puts on a suit and a tie picks up his briefcase and his wall street

00:46:10.860 journal he kisses his family goodbye at the door backs the car down the long driveway

00:46:15.200 and drives into downtown Westfield to the train station

00:46:19.200 where his neighbors are catching the train to their jobs in the city.

00:46:23.280 He doesn't get on that train.

00:46:25.580 He finds a bench and he sits on warm days outside on cold ones inside the station.

00:46:31.800 He reads his Wall Street Journal front to back

00:46:34.320 and then he opens a book, usually a history,

00:46:37.500 the Civil War or other old battles he likes to disappear into.

00:46:41.920 He watches the trains come and go.

00:46:44.380 When enough of the day is burned off, he picks up the briefcase and drives home again as if he is

00:46:49.560 coming back from the office. But it's a lie. For six months, John List performs an entire life

00:46:55.900 he no longer has. To keep it all from collapsing, he starts taking money that is not his.

00:47:02.240 Years earlier, his mother had given him power of attorney over her bank account,

00:47:06.780 the money John's father left Alma. John sees an answer to his financial burdens.

00:47:11.900 At first, he pays it back, and then he stops.

00:47:16.020 He keeps meticulous records the entire time, neat columns of what he has taken,

00:47:20.500 and he tells himself it will be his money one day anyway.

00:47:24.020 By the time it's over, all that remains is roughly $2,000 in U.S. savings bonds.

00:47:30.460 John has drained more than $50,000 out of his elderly mother's savings, and she has no idea.

00:47:37.740 Even that is not enough.

00:47:39.960 He picks up work selling insurance from home and mutual funds, and he is not good at either.

00:47:46.000 By October of 1971, John List, Vice President, Comptroller, Certified Public Accountant,

00:47:53.000 the man in the mansion, has earned less than $5,000 for the entire year.

00:47:58.740 He has mortgaged the house three times over, each new loan taken to pay down the one before it,

00:48:05.100 and he is months behind on all three.

00:48:08.160 The only steady money coming into Breeze Knoll is the after-school job paychecks of two of his

00:48:14.140 children, 16-year-old Patty and her youngest brother, 13-year-old Fred. In every way that

00:48:21.020 a man like John List can measure himself, he is ruined. The thing to do now is not let anyone see

00:48:27.940 it. But it leaks out anyway, in small, strange ways. The neighborhood children learn to give

00:48:34.260 the List house a wide berth. Cut across his lawn or make too much noise near his hedges, and the

00:48:40.200 mild accountant in the suit has been known to scoop up a handful of gravel from his own driveway

00:48:45.020 and hurl it at them. The family down the street, the Devlins, keep a pet donkey that they've named

00:48:51.680 Eliza Doolittle after Audrey Hepburn's character in My Fair Lady. Every so often, old Eliza pulls

00:48:59.100 up her stake and goes wandering in the neighborhood. And when she wanders onto John List's lawn,

00:49:04.260 he comes out and pitches rocks at the donkey until she leaves. One of the Devlin boys puts

00:49:09.740 it clearly years later. You could see, he says, that it would not take much to make John List

00:49:14.840 just go plain crazy. This is the man the experts will spend decades trying to explain.

00:49:21.440 Dr. Simring, the psychiatrist, later tells News 12 that John List is not a monster that anyone

00:49:27.760 could have seen coming, but a rigid, resentful man whose life is collapsing faster than he can

00:49:33.880 hide the pieces. He was not a psychopath. He was not a sociopath. He was not a man without

00:49:39.120 a conscience. I think he had a lifelong of resentment, of lack of success. And I think

00:49:44.960 it got to him. There is a room under the ballroom that John insists on calling the billiard room,

00:49:51.020 though there's been no billiard table in it for years. It is where he goes to be alone

00:49:55.300 and where he keeps the things that comfort him, his Bible, his books on true crime,

00:50:00.380 A shelf full of war games, elaborate tabletop campaigns he disappears into for hours,

00:50:06.820 moving whole armies across a board.

00:50:09.580 Two of them, called Third Reich and Russian Front, he has played for years.

00:50:14.800 Whatever the game, whoever sits across the board from him, 0.77

00:50:18.220 John List takes the German side every single time. 0.91

00:50:22.540 John once took his brother-in-law down into that cellar, 0.88

00:50:26.040 pointed out the dark corners and the hidden passages,

00:50:28.160 and said almost idly,

00:50:31.000 a man could hide for six months down here

00:50:33.040 if he had food and water.

00:50:34.860 It struck his brother-in-law

00:50:36.300 as such a strange thing to say

00:50:37.920 that he repeated it to his wife that night.

00:50:41.400 On the wall on John's calendar,

00:50:44.220 there is a date in November

00:50:45.440 with a thick red circle drawn around it.

00:50:48.300 Because sometime in the summer of 1971,

00:50:51.500 alone in that basement

00:50:52.520 with his war games and his Bible and his debts,

00:50:56.320 John List begins to plan a battle of his own.

00:51:00.100 In October, he goes into the Westfield police station for the second time that year.

00:51:05.380 This time, he gets fingerprinted and applies for a permit to buy a handgun.

00:51:10.640 Home protection, he tells the cops, never can be too safe.

00:51:14.340 There is one person John List feels is drifting further from his grip.

00:51:19.160 It's his daughter.

00:51:20.660 Patricia is 16, and she wants more than anything in the world to be an actress.

00:51:25.520 she has fallen in with the drama crowd at school and in a local theater group a world of rehearsals

00:51:33.340 and older kids and late nights and to a man like her father that world is a threat to her very soul

00:51:39.920 to john list in his strict reading of his faith the stage is not a wholesome dream for a girl

00:51:46.180 but a step towards sin in the documentary tracking down john list dr simring puts a fine point on

00:51:53.920 this. Patricia has also started talking back to her father, and she no longer bothers to hide how

00:52:06.960 bored she is in church. There are things he hears about the company she keeps that frighten him more

00:52:12.540 than backtalk. Patty and her friends have taken to playing with a Ouija board, trying to reach

00:52:18.060 the spirits. There are whispers, half teenage theater and half something darker, that Patricia

00:52:25.200 has begun calling herself a witch. Her closest friends, church kids themselves, do not know what

00:52:31.820 to make of it, and it scares them. To a father who reads the Bible aloud every night and takes

00:52:37.500 every word of it literally, this is not a phase a girl grows out of. It is his daughter's very soul

00:52:44.760 sliding toward the fire while he stands and watches.

00:52:48.000 His fear runs so deep that on the night the police pick up Patty,

00:52:52.160 he turns on the girl standing next to her,

00:52:54.500 one of Patty's friends, a teenager named Rhonda Hanson he barely knows,

00:52:59.000 and says it to her face.

00:53:01.440 Patty's father was irate.

00:53:03.420 He just started carrying on yelling at Patty. 1.00

00:53:05.600 And then he said to me, you're a bitch as well as a witch. 1.00

00:53:10.460 To the friends who actually knew her, 1.00

00:53:12.100 none of it made patty anything stranger than a teenager with a hard father her friend barry

00:53:18.020 cohen later says as much in the documentary tracking down john list i think that is a normal

00:53:23.180 kid you know if you had a straight-laced father like him it was probably very restrictive and

00:53:29.020 very disapproving you tend to be rebellious not long before the end over one of those ouija boards

00:53:35.360 patricia turns to a friend and says a thing that friend will carry for the rest of her life

00:53:40.420 I have a feeling, she says, that something bad is going to happen.

00:53:45.460 She doesn't say what.

00:53:47.160 She doesn't say who.

00:53:49.800 John List comes to believe, or tells himself he does, that the only options left are all

00:53:55.920 unbearable.

00:53:57.620 Bankruptcy, welfare, his children growing up poor and worse, growing up and drifting away

00:54:04.060 from the church, losing their faith in the loud, permissive, godless world of 1971.

00:54:10.420 becoming hippies. He looks at his daughter and at his sick wife, who no longer goes to church,

00:54:16.500 and he sees two souls slipping away. A psychiatrist who would later reconstruct his thinking

00:54:23.040 reduced it to grim arithmetic. Here's Dr. Simring speaking to NewJersey.com.

00:54:29.340 His choices of a universe of choices came down to three choices. Run away, go bankrupt,

00:54:36.320 kill his family. John arrives at a cold piece of logic. If he kills them now while they are still 1.00

00:54:42.200 innocent, still obedient Christians, then their souls are safe. They go to heaven. He's not 1.00

00:54:48.980 murdering his family. He's saving them. What lets a man hold a thought like that and then act on it

00:54:55.920 is not madness. By the psychiatrist's account, it is something colder and far more ordinary,

00:55:02.660 as he tells NewJersey.com.

00:55:05.180 He meets clearly the criteria for obsessive, compulsive personality.

00:55:10.580 These are individuals who are emotionally isolated.

00:55:16.000 They're not cruel, but they're emotionally isolated.

00:55:19.140 They don't show feelings.

00:55:20.620 They don't have very much in the way of feelings.

00:55:22.820 They don't cry a whole lot.

00:55:24.440 They're not emotional.

00:55:25.800 They are very, very detail-oriented.

00:55:28.960 They rationalize things that happen.

00:55:31.460 On the night of Friday, November 5th, 1971, John List calls his three children to the kitchen table.

00:55:39.100 He is calm. He is not shouting.

00:55:41.760 He tells them he can no longer take care of them the way a father should.

00:55:45.660 And then, in the flat, practical voice of an accountant, he asks each child a question no child should ever have to answer.

00:55:55.020 When the time comes, would they rather be buried or cremated?

00:55:59.540 Buried, the children say, one by one, and then John gets up, walks out, and closes his office door behind him.

00:56:08.000 To the friends in whom Patty confides, it sounds almost like a will being drawn up,

00:56:13.880 the kind of paperwork you might expect from a man who's always worried about the numbers.

00:56:19.000 Patty knows better.

00:56:20.840 In the weeks before the end, she tells more friends the same thing. 0.99

00:56:24.320 Her father, she says, wants them all dead.

00:56:29.320 John had wanted to do it a few days earlier, on the 1st of November, All Saints Day, 0.94

00:56:34.460 a day he thought fitting for sending souls to heaven.

00:56:38.580 Something delayed him, so he settles on a new date, the one circled in red,

00:56:43.520 and he plans it the way he plans everything, down to the last hour, down to every last detail.

00:56:49.960 The morning of November 9th, 1971, comes cold and gray.

00:56:55.620 John List is awake before dawn.

00:56:58.120 He sits at his desk in the quiet house and everyone still asleep above him,

00:57:02.540 and he does the last thing a careful accountant does before he closes an account.

00:57:08.600 He opens his budget book, the ledger of everything gone wrong,

00:57:13.360 and he draws a single neat line beneath the final row of figures.

00:57:18.120 He twists his college-class ring off his finger and sets it on the desk.

00:57:23.940 He opens the red-covered Lutheran hymnal his church has used since 1941

00:57:28.180 and turns to a hymn called The World is Very Evil.

00:57:33.400 He reads it to himself softly, humming as his eyes follow the verse,

00:57:38.520 quote,

00:57:39.460 The world is very evil. The times are waxing late.

00:57:43.680 Be sober and keep vigil. The judge is at the gate.

00:57:47.520 Then John List goes to a file cabinet, and he takes out the Austrian pistol he brought home

00:57:54.580 from the war 27 years ago and loads it. Upstairs, a toilet flushes. The house is beginning to wake

00:58:02.580 up. Sunrise, he knows, will be at 6.36. Soon Helen will come down in her bathrobe to make

00:58:09.140 her coffee. John List sits in a study in a coat and tie with a loaded gun and waits for his wife.

00:58:17.080 John has told himself this is mercy, that he is the only one who can save them, 1.00

00:58:22.080 and that the way to save them is to kill them. 0.99

00:58:25.300 He thinks he's found the one solution to an impossible problem. 1.00

00:58:29.480 He's run the numbers, and they balance.

00:58:32.500 November 9th, 1971, the day John List carries out his plan, one member of his family at a time.

00:58:40.660 Later, he will sit down in the house where he has slaughtered them all,

00:58:44.460 have dinner alone, wash the dishes, and go to sleep. That's next time on MK Confidential.

00:58:54.060 I came back in, said a few words to Helen, and went into the front room. Then I came around

00:59:01.340 back and shot her in the head. That is John List, the quiet accountant, 0.99

00:59:07.680 the Sunday school teacher who put on a press coat and tie to collect his daughter from the

00:59:11.920 police station at 2.30 in the morning. It is Tuesday, November 9th, 1971. Before the sun goes

00:59:19.020 down, John List will murder all five members of his family, one at a time, inside the house known 0.98

00:59:26.120 as Breeze Knoll. He will not panic. He will not flee, not yet. He will stop and make himself a 0.98

00:59:33.440 sandwich. He will drive downtown and run his errands. He will sit down that evening to dinner

00:59:39.420 in the house where his wife, his mother, and his three children lie dead, and afterward he will

00:59:45.580 wash the dishes and go to sleep. This is the day itself, hour by hour, how a careful, church-going

00:59:52.920 man spends a Tuesday murdering his family and tells himself the entire time that he is saving

00:59:59.700 them. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. It is not yet dawn, and John List sits at his desk

01:00:11.320 in the dark, a loaded pistol in front of him, waiting for his wife to come down and start the

01:00:16.480 coffee. He has been planning this day for weeks. He had even settled on an earlier date and let it

01:00:23.080 come and go. Now the new date is here. I kept thinking about it for several weeks. I'm sure

01:00:29.040 maybe even a month. And my final solution was that if I would kill them, that would 1.00

01:00:37.020 save them from any problems. Investigators were later able to piece together almost everything 0.99

01:00:45.420 about the hours that follow, from the evidence inside the house, from the paper trail of the

01:00:50.540 errands that List ran that day, and from the flat, careful account List would give years later

01:00:56.620 himself. This is the day they reconstructed. It begins quietly. The porch thermometer reads

01:01:03.440 28 degrees, and the sky is only starting to gray toward a sunrise John knows,

01:01:08.980 because he has checked, will come at 6.36. One by one, his three children come downstairs.

01:01:16.440 Patricia, 16, the aspiring actress, still in trouble over the night the police brought her

01:01:21.400 home. John Jr., 15, the family athlete, big for his age. Frederick, 13, the baby of the house.

01:01:29.940 There is no real breakfast. The kids forage for themselves in the cabinets. Patricia opens the

01:01:35.300 refrigerator looking for milk and finds none. One by one, they gather their school things and

01:01:41.060 go out into the cold, off to their three schools the way they have on a thousand mornings before.

01:01:47.660 Their father does not sit with them.

01:01:50.000 He stands at the window of his study behind a parted curtain

01:01:53.580 and watches each of them go down the long driveway.

01:01:57.060 By his own account, he gives nothing away.

01:01:59.780 I tried not to act any different than I ordinarily would,

01:02:03.360 so they wouldn't be suspicious.

01:02:05.480 John List has already started clearing the way.

01:02:08.440 Days earlier, he called to stop newspaper delivery to the house.

01:02:12.520 This morning, there is a note taped to the refrigerator

01:02:14.960 in his own hand for the milkman who by long habit lets himself in the back door to check the milk

01:02:20.320 order Helen always leaves. This one says the family is going away and to hold the deliveries

01:02:26.140 until further notice. A little after 8 30 the milkman reads it and drives off. At the window

01:02:32.780 of his office John watches quietly until the truck turns onto the street. Then he sits with

01:02:39.480 the morning newspaper the same New York Times his neighbors are reading over their own breakfasts.

01:02:44.960 and he waits. A few minutes later, Helen comes down. She fills the kettle, sets it on the stove,

01:02:53.880 and sits down at the kitchen table, waiting for it to boil. She has no idea that her husband

01:02:59.900 is standing across the center hall in his office with the Steyr M1912 in his hand.

01:03:07.000 It is the 9mm Austrian pistol he brought home from the war. On the desk beside him lies a second gun,

01:03:14.020 a small .22 caliber Colt revolver that had belonged to his father. It, too, is loaded and

01:03:21.560 ready. John crosses the hall, approaches Helen from behind. Helen appears to sense movement and

01:03:29.060 begins to turn toward him. He fires. The first bullet hits her in the side of the face, not the

01:03:35.600 back of the head as intended, and knocks her out of the chair. He fires several more times,

01:03:41.180 some of the shots going into the wall, one of them glancing off a radiator into the next room.

01:03:47.960 Then the kitchen is quiet until the kettle begins to hiss on the stove. Helen lies on the floor by

01:03:54.040 the chair in her bathrobe and her blood runs out across the striped linoleum while the sun comes

01:04:01.140 in through the yellow curtains. Upstairs, John's mother has heard the shots. John climbs the

01:04:07.560 Backstairs to the third floor, opens his mother's door without knocking. Alma is in her small

01:04:14.020 apartment kitchen, still in her nightgown, her white hair untidy from sleep, a plate with butter

01:04:20.520 on it in her hand, and her toast down in the toaster. She looks at her son and asks him what

01:04:27.100 the noise was downstairs. He shoots her once, in the head, just above the left eye. Two more shots

01:04:35.040 go into the wall.

01:04:36.760 On the counter, her toast pops up.

01:04:40.680 In John's own telling years later

01:04:42.640 with Bill Curtis on American Justice,

01:04:44.740 there is one more detail,

01:04:46.780 one the evidence on site cannot confirm,

01:04:50.000 a kiss. 0.83

01:04:51.260 She got over and greeted me 0.87

01:04:53.380 and gave me a kiss.

01:04:57.080 And she said, what was that noise?

01:05:00.140 At that point, I felt like a Judas

01:05:02.020 had kissed her, too. 0.71

01:05:05.860 And I said, oh, it must have been some noise out in the back. 0.99

01:05:08.660 And then she got to the doorway, I killed her.

01:05:11.740 In his account, she gets as far as the doorway.

01:05:15.540 In the scene the police reconstruct, she never leaves the kitchen.

01:05:19.820 He wants to carry his mother downstairs to lay her with the others, but he cannot.

01:05:24.720 She's too heavy.

01:05:26.100 He drags her by a plastic runner into the narrow hall off of her kitchen and leaves her there.

01:05:32.640 He makes one quick pass at wiping the floor with a damp piece of newspaper, then leaves it.

01:05:38.780 It is not yet nine in the morning.

01:05:41.460 Two of the five are dead.

01:05:43.800 John List has most of his day still in front of him.

01:05:47.280 The first thing he does is clean.

01:05:50.060 Before the phone calls, before the errands, he goes back down to the kitchen where Helen lies and tidies up the way he has tidied up after himself his whole life.

01:06:01.720 He describes it decades later in the same even tone he used for everything else.

01:06:06.720 I was very surprised at the amount of blood that, you know, drained out.

01:06:11.820 And I think there was some shell casing and some of her false teeth had gotten broken

01:06:21.360 and were out on both the table and on the floor.

01:06:27.280 I cleaned all that up.

01:06:28.880 Then, with two members of his family dead in the house, John List does not fall apart.

01:06:35.500 He works the day like a list of errands.

01:06:38.020 He calls the insurance agency he still sells for, timing it so the answering service picks

01:06:42.700 up instead of a person and leaves word that a family emergency is taking the lists to

01:06:48.000 North Carolina, where Helen's mother is gravely ill.

01:06:52.120 It is a lie, of course, and it is the cover story that will hold for weeks.

01:06:57.500 Over the coming days, he will keep feeding it.

01:07:00.020 A note to each of the children's schools,

01:07:02.420 a phone call to Patricia's drama teacher

01:07:04.360 to say the girl will miss the next rehearsal.

01:07:07.280 The mail, the milk, and the newspaper already stopped.

01:07:11.240 Every loose thread that might draw attention to the house

01:07:14.060 is snipped off in advance.

01:07:17.040 He walks out into the cold and rakes the leaves.

01:07:19.660 He comes back inside, makes himself a sandwich,

01:07:23.060 and eats it at the kitchen table.

01:07:26.520 30 years later, Connie Chung will try to get him to explain that sandwich on ABC.

01:07:33.780 You ate lunch in the kitchen where you had shot your wife in cold blood?

01:07:37.120 That's correct.

01:07:38.220 How could you?

01:07:39.360 I was hungry.

01:07:42.560 It was just the way it was.

01:07:47.320 By his own account, once the first shot was fired, there was never a moment he considered stopping. 0.99

01:07:53.080 Were you determined to kill them?

01:07:54.480 Once I've made the plan, yeah, then it's just like D-Day. 0.99

01:07:59.120 You go in and there's no stopping after you start.

01:08:05.600 The children are still at their schools, still alive.

01:08:09.560 In his own mind, not one of them can be allowed to come home and find the two women gone. 0.97

01:08:14.560 I just felt that once I had started, it was incumbent upon me to kill all of the children 0.97

01:08:22.280 so that not even one of them would remain and suffer the trauma. 0.99

01:08:28.720 A little after noon, the plan hits a snag.

01:08:32.160 The one thing he did not schedule.

01:08:34.540 The phone rings.

01:08:35.820 It is Patricia.

01:08:37.200 She has left school feeling sick and walked to Duke's Deli, a luncheonette in town,

01:08:42.400 and she wants her father to come get her.

01:08:45.320 It is the smallest, most ordinary thing.

01:08:48.360 A teenage girl asking her father for a ride.

01:08:50.760 and it makes her next.

01:08:53.720 So John drives in and picks up his daughter,

01:08:56.820 the one he has clashed with the most.

01:08:59.660 The girl who told her friends and her drama teacher 0.91

01:09:01.780 that her father means to kill her.

01:09:04.360 He brings her home and gets inside ahead of her.

01:09:07.820 Patricia comes in through the back of the house

01:09:09.540 where her father is now waiting.

01:09:12.600 It's over in a moment.

01:09:14.740 One shot through her left jaw at close range.

01:09:19.020 The bullet ricochets off bone 1.00

01:09:20.620 and exits Patricia's left temple.

01:09:23.780 John carries Patricia into the ballroom,

01:09:26.380 laying her on the bare floor still in her coat

01:09:28.920 under the big stained glass skylight.

01:09:32.380 There are still two boys to come home

01:09:34.340 and hours to fill before they do.

01:09:37.180 So John List runs the rest of his errands.

01:09:40.160 He drives into downtown Westfield.

01:09:42.540 At the drive-in window of his bank,

01:09:44.280 he cashes a check for $85 on the account he shared with Helen

01:09:47.800 and enters the new balance in the checkbook

01:09:50.360 $24.14. At the post office he mails a letter addressed to himself with a small key sealed

01:09:58.160 inside that will unlock the desk in his study. List does not explain this move but he does tape

01:10:04.520 a note to the top of the desk which reads quote to the finder please contact the proper authorities

01:10:10.800 the key to this desk is in an envelope addressed to myself. The key will not surface for a month

01:10:18.880 until the police dig it out of the family's held mail.

01:10:22.260 By then, the police have forced the desk and filing cabinet open.

01:10:26.520 At a second window, chosen as if he had just remembered one more errand,

01:10:31.880 he files the form to hold that mail for 30 days.

01:10:35.540 On his way out, he mails the notes to the children's schools.

01:10:39.700 Then he drives back to the bank and cashes a second check,

01:10:43.640 emptying the account he shared with his mother.

01:10:47.080 At the main branch, a teller walks him back to the safe deposit vault,

01:10:50.520 and he signs in at 1.37 in the afternoon and back out at 1.57.

01:10:56.140 20 minutes exactly.

01:10:58.620 In the safe deposit box are the last of Alma's savings,

01:11:02.220 government bonds worth a little over $2,000,

01:11:05.380 the final piece of an inheritance he's been quietly draining for years.

01:11:10.740 More than $50,000 of his mother's money moved out from under her a little at a time.

01:11:17.340 He cashes the bonds.

01:11:19.060 With characteristic precision,

01:11:21.080 he asks the teller to write down each bond

01:11:23.720 and what it is worth, he says, for his mother's records.

01:11:27.960 His mother has been dead for five hours.

01:11:31.000 At three o'clock, the youngest, Frederick,

01:11:33.680 is at his after-school job when word reaches him

01:11:36.020 that his sister has gone home sick.

01:11:38.320 He telephones his father.

01:11:40.160 A secretary who overhears the call

01:11:42.140 never forgets the one thing the boy says into the phone. 0.73

01:11:45.820 What happened to Patty?

01:11:47.820 His father drives down and picks him up.

01:11:51.120 Once home, Fred does not get his coat off.

01:11:54.580 He dies just inside the back door from a single shot

01:11:57.840 and is carried in to lie beside his mother,

01:12:01.400 his head set so that it just barely touches hers.

01:12:05.860 That leaves only John Jr.,

01:12:08.440 the only one of them who gets the chance to fight

01:12:11.540 and the one who stands the best chance at it.

01:12:15.020 It is so cold that afternoon that the boy's soccer practice is canceled, so he comes home early,

01:12:21.580 walking up the long driveway with his gym bag over his shoulder.

01:12:25.600 His father has to scramble into place behind the kitchen door.

01:12:29.220 This time, it goes wrong.

01:12:32.360 John Jr. hears his father move behind the door.

01:12:36.000 He does not walk in blind like the others.

01:12:38.400 He sees the gun come up, and he moves. 0.94

01:12:41.240 The first bullet aimed at the boy's head

01:12:43.380 catches him in the back instead

01:12:45.580 because John Jr. twisted away.

01:12:48.520 The next one does not kill him either.

01:12:51.020 He goes down and tries to crawl across the floor,

01:12:53.760 still wearing his winter gloves,

01:12:55.640 while his father fires with both guns now.

01:12:58.920 And then John keeps firing the little .22

01:13:01.360 into his son until it clicks empty.

01:13:06.440 John Jr. does not die immediately.

01:13:08.940 By the time it's over, the boy has been shot ten times.

01:13:14.580 The other children each died from a single wound.

01:13:18.060 Later, John List will insist that sparing his children any pain was the whole point.

01:13:24.320 That was the one thing I was trying to prevent.

01:13:27.800 Was there feeling any wounds or suffering at the last moment?

01:13:34.100 The body of his 15-year-old son shot again and again and again

01:13:38.600 as he crawled across the floor trying to save himself, says otherwise.

01:13:44.240 When the boy finally stops moving,

01:13:46.480 his father drags him along a smear of his own blood,

01:13:50.640 out of the kitchen and into the ballroom,

01:13:53.200 laying him at the far end of the row, a little apart from the rest.

01:13:57.660 By late afternoon, it is finished.

01:14:01.500 Five people in one house in a single day.

01:14:05.380 Helen, his wife of nearly 20 years.

01:14:08.720 Alma, his mother, whose little prince he had once been.

01:14:12.700 Patricia, 16, John, 15, and Frederick, 13.

01:14:17.280 What settles over John List by his own account is not horror, but relief.

01:14:23.400 That the plan went off without interruption.

01:14:25.800 now john list creates the scene the police will find four weeks later he brings the family's

01:14:33.200 forest green sleeping bags up from the basement the boy scout bags with be prepared printed along

01:14:40.020 the lining the ones the boys carried on camping trips as he lays his wife and three children out

01:14:45.840 on the ballroom floor side by side the children on their backs still in their winter coats

01:14:53.460 He covers Helen and lays a towel over her face.

01:14:57.920 He moves her stiffening arm so that it rests across Freddy's shoulder.

01:15:02.520 Whether he means it as a last gesture of protection or only as part of the arrangement, no one can say.

01:15:10.420 From across the room, the four bodies appear to lie in the shape of a cross.

01:15:14.880 Then John List kneels down beside them and prays over his family, each one of them by name.

01:15:22.780 In the evening, he writes out the why, five pages on a yellow legal pad addressed to Eugene

01:15:30.940 Raywinkle, the pastor of the family's own church, Redeemer Lutheran, the man under whom

01:15:36.320 he had taught Sunday school.

01:15:38.200 I guess I just felt closest to him and felt that since I was a member of his congregation

01:15:44.060 that he deserved a more complete explanation.

01:15:51.060 He writes the note like a memo.

01:15:53.420 There's no anguish in it.

01:15:55.040 There's no wildness in the handwriting.

01:15:57.440 The paragraphs are orderly and neat.

01:16:00.180 Here is some of that letter.

01:16:02.260 He begins with an apology to the pastor.

01:16:04.940 Quote, I am very sorry to add this additional burden to your work, he writes.

01:16:10.160 I know that what I have done is wrong from all that I have been taught,

01:16:14.340 and that any reasons that I might give will not make it right.

01:16:16.900 but you are the one person that I know that, while not condoning this, will at least

01:16:21.500 partially understand why I felt that I had to do this. The reasons are numbered. One, quote,

01:16:29.440 I wasn't earning anywhere near enough to support us. Everything I tried seemed to fall to pieces.

01:16:35.120 Two, the lifestyle and shame of going on welfare was, quote, just more than I thought they could

01:16:41.720 and should endure, end quote. Reason three, quote, with Pat being so determined to get into acting,

01:16:49.040 I was also fearful as to what this might do to her continuing to be a Christian.

01:16:54.100 I'm sure it wouldn't have helped, end quote. And finally, reason number four, quote, with Helen not

01:17:02.100 going to church, I knew that this would harm the children eventually in their attendance.

01:17:06.500 I had continued to hope that she would begin to come to church soon, end quote.

01:17:11.960 But when John mentioned the possibility of Helen speaking with a church elder,

01:17:16.400 he writes that Helen, quote,

01:17:18.180 just blew up and stated that she wanted her name taken off the church rolls.

01:17:23.040 John cites the combination of these challenges as the justification for his actions.

01:17:27.680 He writes, quote,

01:17:29.080 So that is the sum of it.

01:17:31.040 If any one of these had been the condition, we might have pulled through.

01:17:34.820 but this was just too much. At least I'm certain that all have gone to heaven now. He adds,

01:17:41.180 of course, mother got involved because doing what I did to my family would have been a tremendous

01:17:45.360 shock to her at this age. Therefore, knowing that she is also a Christian, I felt it best that she

01:17:51.200 be relieved of the troubles of this world that would have hit her. After it was all over, I said

01:17:56.640 some prayers for them all from the hymn book. That was the least that I could do. He continues, quote,

01:18:02.940 I leave myself in the hand of God's justice and mercy. I don't doubt that he is able to help us,

01:18:08.540 but apparently he saw fit not to answer my prayers the way I had hoped that they would

01:18:13.760 be answered. As an aside, John writes tersely, quote, also, I'm sure many will say, how could

01:18:20.440 anyone do such a horrible thing? My only answer is it isn't easy and was only done after much

01:18:27.100 thought. Finally, John concludes his letter, quote, please remember me in your prayers. I will need

01:18:34.200 them whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it. I'm only concerned with making my

01:18:39.680 peace with God, and of this I am assured because of Christ dying even for me. He gives instructions

01:18:46.560 in the letter too, simply and without emotion. He tells his pastor where his mother should be buried

01:18:52.140 back in Michigan next to her own people and whom to contact. He mentions almost in passing

01:18:58.820 that he had wanted to do this a week earlier on the 1st of November, All Saints Day, a day he

01:19:04.560 thought fitting for sending souls to heaven and that some travel arrangements he still had to

01:19:09.440 make had held him back. He had, in other words, penciled the murders of his family onto the

01:19:14.780 calendar and then rescheduled them. The pastor is not the only person John writes that night.

01:19:21.180 There are notes to Helen's mother and to his mother's sister and to his own boss at the

01:19:26.860 insurance company. In the letter to his boss, John List, ever the diligent employee, tidily

01:19:33.060 describes his outstanding sales leads and reminds the man about a $500 debt as though the accounts

01:19:39.820 should be kept in order after he is gone. No loose ends. In the letter, he also adds a line

01:19:46.900 meant to soften what he has done. It may look cowardly, he writes, that he always shot them

01:19:53.360 from behind, but he simply could not stand for a single one of them to realize in their final

01:19:58.120 moments what was about to happen to them. It is the story he needs to be true, that none of them

01:20:05.820 saw it, that he spared them that much at least. The autopsies say otherwise. The wounds are on

01:20:14.360 the fronts and sides of their faces, not the backs of their heads. Helen took hers, turning toward

01:20:20.280 him, his mother above the left eye, looking straight at her son as he murdered her. Patricia

01:20:27.680 threw her left jaw the moment she stepped inside. Frederick, a single shot to the left temple from 1.00

01:20:34.320 the side. John Jr. took his first in the back, only because he threw himself out of the way.

01:20:41.120 When the medical examiners are finished, the record is plain.

01:20:44.540 Most of his family did see him and the gun in the last second of their lives.

01:20:50.540 They knew he was murdering them.

01:20:53.580 So even here, alone with a legal pad, John List is not telling the truth.

01:20:58.140 Not to his pastor, not to God.

01:21:01.460 Most of all, it seems, not to himself.

01:21:04.320 At the very bottom of the page after his signature comes one last line.

01:21:09.100 in the tone of a man reminding someone to water the plants, perhaps. His mother, he notes,

01:21:16.120 is in the hallway on the third floor. She was too heavy to move. John List goes back through

01:21:22.160 the house gathering up or destroying the family photographs. No one ever establishes what became

01:21:28.100 of them. Then he cooks himself dinner and eats it slowly, then washes the dishes and sets them

01:21:34.120 in the rack to dry. Asked years later how a man does that, he points to his time in the army,

01:21:41.220 a war record he tends to exaggerate. Having been in combat, you know, we were out killing and

01:21:47.460 fighting and then we'd come in and have something to eat. I think that's what allowed me to, you know,

01:21:53.420 eat peacefully in the room that I had filled my family. Then he goes down to the billiard room

01:21:59.140 in the basement directly beneath the ballroom where his family lies, and he goes to sleep.

01:22:04.720 He later says he slept well. In the morning before it is light, John closes up the house.

01:22:11.060 He turns the thermostat down to 50 degrees, cold enough, as investigators later note,

01:22:16.200 to slow the body's decay and delay the smell of it reaching the street. He switches on the lights

01:22:22.620 in every room but the ballroom, which he leaves dark. He sets the trash out by the back door,

01:22:28.120 the way a family would on any ordinary night.

01:22:31.940 He leaves the radio playing, tuned, as it always is in this house,

01:22:36.240 to WQXR, the classical station out of New York,

01:22:40.080 piped through the intercom into every room.

01:22:43.080 He has a reason for that.

01:22:44.440 I felt that if some intruder wanted to get into the house,

01:22:49.940 that they might back off if they've heard music

01:22:52.500 and thought that people were in the house.

01:22:54.760 That was another reason I left all the lights on, I believe, to make it look like there were people there.

01:23:01.220 Then John List walks out the back door into a cold drizzle, slides into the family's old Impala, and drives away from Breeze Knoll for the last time.

01:23:11.540 He drives down through the empty business district, past a dark movie marquee, and points the car toward New York.

01:23:20.000 He crosses the bridges out to Kennedy Airport and ditches the Impala in long-term parking,

01:23:25.840 a nondescript car tucked into a crowded row.

01:23:29.600 On the front seat, he sets a small neat pile, his Michigan alumni card and his accountant's

01:23:36.400 license, the last tidy paperwork of a man named John List.

01:23:41.840 Then he walks off across the lot toward the terminals.

01:23:45.620 In his own mind, he is not yet a fugitive.

01:23:48.540 He is a man taking himself somewhere to rest.

01:23:51.980 I just thought I would like to see the mountains and relax a little bit

01:23:55.900 because I had been under a lot of strain.

01:23:58.800 Behind him, back in New Jersey,

01:24:01.420 Breeze Knoll stands with every window lit against the dark of a November morning,

01:24:06.560 music drifting through its rooms,

01:24:08.860 looking for all the world like a house where a family is waking up.

01:24:13.280 By the time anyone learns otherwise, John List is gone.

01:24:17.920 and he stays gone for nearly 18 years.

01:24:22.720 John List's plan works.

01:24:25.760 For the better part of a month,

01:24:27.820 the lie does exactly what he built it to do.

01:24:31.060 Neighbors see the raked yard and the burning lights

01:24:33.460 and the family car gone,

01:24:34.960 and they assume what he wants them to assume,

01:24:37.620 that the Lists are away,

01:24:39.540 caring for a sick relative,

01:24:41.240 just as the notes claimed.

01:24:43.460 Twice, Westfield police officers come to the door

01:24:46.180 on a welfare check

01:24:47.160 and get no answer. They look the place over and leave satisfied that nothing is wrong.

01:24:53.680 When the police finally enter the house, discover the bodies, and open John's letter,

01:24:59.600 they have a signed five-page confession that names the killer. What they do not have is the

01:25:05.340 killer himself. The police notice one more thing written on that letter, the date at the top,

01:25:11.140 11-9-71. Nearly a month passes before anyone finally gets inside the mansion and finds the

01:25:19.480 family dead and decaying on the night of December 7th, 1971. John List has a four-week head start.

01:25:28.240 His passport is gone. Helens is still in the house, and investigators begin to believe

01:25:34.440 that he may have already slipped out of the country. At Kennedy Airport, a Port Authority

01:25:40.740 officer running a routine check for stolen cars in the long-term lot finally spots the family

01:25:46.260 Impala, its expired inspection sticker catching his eye. He runs the plate and it traces back

01:25:52.520 to Breeze Knoll. John's stack of identification is still sitting neatly on the front seat

01:25:57.780 exactly where he left it. The Union County Prosecutor Carl Ash will say they have more

01:26:03.580 than enough to indict, what they do not have and cannot seem to get, is the faintest idea of where

01:26:09.780 on earth John List has gone. It is a peculiar kind of nightmare for the men working the case.

01:26:16.820 They are not trying to solve a whodunit. They know who did it and how. He has even left them

01:26:22.240 his own explanation for why. They are only trying to find him, a mild, forgettable man who has had

01:26:29.440 a month to become someone else, somewhere in a country of then 200 million people, who slipped

01:26:35.360 away before anyone even knew to start looking. It is a rare and staggering crime. In 1971, a man

01:26:43.740 who wipes out his entire family in a single afternoon and then simply disappears is unheard

01:26:49.920 of. Westfield has never seen anything like it, and neither have the people hunting for the man

01:26:54.820 who did it. The FBI puts out John List's face across America on a flyer that describes a six-foot,

01:27:02.380 gray-haired, 46-year-old accountant armed and considered very dangerous. Most specifically,

01:27:08.900 the flyer describes him as a neat dresser, which is not particularly helpful to the investigation

01:27:14.040 and so fits 10,000 mild middle-aged men. The alert goes out to every state,

01:27:20.880 to police departments and post offices across the country.

01:27:24.660 Tips come back by the hundreds

01:27:26.060 with sightings from Oregon to England.

01:27:29.340 Each one must be run down.

01:27:30.860 Each one turns out to be someone else.

01:27:34.060 Within weeks, the trail goes cold.

01:27:36.520 John List, who murdered his entire family

01:27:38.900 and then slept soundly in his stately Victorian house,

01:27:43.120 has simply stepped out of the known world.

01:27:46.380 Next time on MK Confidential,

01:27:48.340 The 18 years John List spends as a new man, or at least under a new name, a quiet, church-going

01:27:56.100 accountant, a new wife who has no idea whom she is married to, and a sculptor who will one day

01:28:03.380 give authorities the face of a vanished man they are desperate to find. John List gets away with

01:28:09.620 murder until a TV show changes everything.

01:28:18.340 In the third week of November, 1971, a tall, bespectacled man in a coat and tie sits by the

01:28:25.560 window on a westbound train, watching the flat, brown grasslands of the Great Plains slide by

01:28:31.700 for a day and a night, until the land finally begins to rise toward the Rockies. The train is

01:28:37.620 taking him toward the mountains he has always wanted to see, the Colorado Mountains. He has

01:28:42.840 a suitcase, a briefcase, and just under $2,500 in his wallet. What he does not have yet is a name.

01:28:51.440 The man has left almost nothing to chance. Behind him, in the long-term lot at Kennedy Airport,

01:28:57.920 his family's Impala sits in a crowded row, and on the front seat in a small, neat stack

01:29:03.740 are his Michigan alumni card and his accountant's license, with his own name left in plain view.

01:29:10.600 As the miles slide by, he eats and thinks back over his plan, the way he might check a column

01:29:16.560 of figures. He chose Kennedy Airport on purpose. Newark is closer to his home in Westfield and a

01:29:24.080 simpler route, but Newark Airport is not where a man goes to leave the country. He wants police

01:29:29.560 to find his car at the big international airport, with the name John List sitting right there on

01:29:35.600 the seat and his passport gone from the house. When investigators finally come looking, he means

01:29:42.160 for them to look at the departure gates, the flights to Europe, and the ocean. And they do.

01:29:48.560 The FBI runs down every passenger on every flight leaving the New York airports around November 10th

01:29:54.620 and gets nothing. He can picture the manhunt he hopes to have unleashed on the wrong side of the

01:30:00.800 world. He's not crossing an ocean. No, he is on a train rolling toward America's heartland and he

01:30:08.680 knows no one will look twice at a quiet man in coach. He thought about going to Phoenix and then

01:30:15.680 decided it was too hot. He thought about San Francisco. Too many hippies. So he settled on

01:30:21.940 Denver. On the 22nd of November, 13 days after he murdered his entire family, the man walks into a

01:30:30.220 Social Security office in the middle of Colorado. He is balding, big-eared, and courteous to the

01:30:36.380 point of disarming. He pushes his glasses up his nose as he explains apologetically

01:30:41.480 that he has lost his Social Security card. A clerk hands him a form. He writes down a name

01:30:48.720 that is not his and a birthday that is not his either. So the man on the form is six years

01:30:54.420 younger than the man holding the pen. He signs it Robert P. Clark. No one asks him for a birth

01:31:01.340 certificate. No one asks him for anything. A few minutes later, the clerk hands him a card with his

01:31:07.300 new name, and he walks back out into the afternoon as somebody else. In 1971, a form and a signature

01:31:15.600 is all it takes to become a new man. John Emil List is dead to the world. Years later, John would

01:31:23.620 describe the shift in his mindset. Thankful to be living a free life. That is the man three weeks

01:31:46.220 after he shot his wife in their eating space, climbed the stairs and shot his mother, and then

01:31:51.940 waited out the afternoon to kill his three children as they came home from school, one

01:31:57.000 at a time. Now he has a new name, a new age, and a clean slate, if he can keep it. For 0.98

01:32:04.600 the next 18 years, one of the most wanted fugitives in the country will hide in plain

01:32:10.040 sight by being the most forgettable man in every room. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK

01:32:17.140 confidential. Denver, in the winter of 1971, does not know it has a new resident and would not care

01:32:27.640 if it did. Robert P. Clark takes a room at a motel called the Deauville, then pays cash for a small

01:32:34.620 trailer. $1,500, no questions asked, and no documentation of where he purchased it. The

01:32:42.100 trailer sits in a park of transients off Interstate 70 on the western edge of the city. Everyone here 1.00

01:32:48.720 is passing through or starting over or hiding. No one asks him his business. Now he needs work.

01:32:56.880 He is a certified public accountant with more than 20 years experience. A man who once sat in

01:33:02.400 a bank vice president's office. But an accountant has a name and a history and a paper trail. And

01:33:09.340 Robert Clark cannot afford to test any of those yet.

01:33:12.860 So he takes one job open to a man with no past.

01:33:17.240 He becomes a night cook.

01:33:19.540 The kitchen is at a Holiday Inn just across the interstate from his trailer,

01:33:23.700 near the city of Golden.

01:33:25.920 Ski traffic off the highway keeps the place busy and keeps it anonymous,

01:33:30.420 a long way from downtown, which is how he likes it.

01:33:33.960 He works after dark, eggs, burgers, and coffee on the graveyard shift.

01:33:38.440 the hours when nobody looks closely at anybody. Nights suit him, fewer people. At work, Bob Clark

01:33:47.120 trades the suit and tie for a cook's apron. Those who know him later remember his neat appearance,

01:33:53.460 and outside the kitchen he continues to wear his coat and tie. There is a small, terrible

01:33:58.940 coincidence folded into those years. Every so often, a family from back east drives out to

01:34:04.740 in Colorado, and stops at that same Holiday Inn. A family John List knows does just that.

01:34:12.920 They are Helen's relatives, her sister's family. Years later, Helen's nephew would do the math.

01:34:20.020 The quiet cook on the morning line, the one who might well have made their breakfast,

01:34:24.700 was the uncle who had shot his Aunt Helen to death at her own kitchen table.

01:34:30.140 To the people in that kitchen, Bob Clark is reliable and impossible to know.

01:34:35.680 Asked where he is from, he says Pennsylvania one day and the Midwest the next.

01:34:40.720 Asked about a wife, he says she died of cancer, another time that she drank herself to death.

01:34:46.480 The lies are almost true, which is what makes them easy to carry.

01:34:50.860 He is not inventing a dead family out of nothing.

01:34:53.220 he is describing his real one, the family killed by his own hand and calling it fate.

01:35:00.540 A divorced woman on the kitchen staff named Allie Bray takes an interest in the gentlemanly cook

01:35:06.100 with the mustache, a man who wears his cheap clothes well and looks to her like someone who

01:35:11.340 has had a bad break in life and could do better. One day she asks him straight out whether there's

01:35:17.580 a woman in his life. He lowers his head and says, almost too quietly to hear, that there's

01:35:23.420 no one. He gives her nothing more, and before long, Allie leaves the hotel for a full-time

01:35:29.060 job elsewhere, never saying goodbye. The one person Clark lets in, a little, is the man

01:35:35.980 who cleans the kitchen at night, an easygoing former cowboy named Bob Wetmore. The other

01:35:42.100 cooks start calling them the two bobs like felix and oscar the odd couple of the graveyard shift

01:35:48.060 it is a lukewarm friendship two loners who do not push each other but when clark hears of better

01:35:55.020 pay at a country club kitchen the two bobs move on together at 46 having killed the five people

01:36:02.780 who shared his name john list finally makes a friend asked about those years decades later

01:36:09.980 He does not reach for anything dramatic.

01:36:12.280 He reaches for the plainest words he has.

01:36:15.080 I just more or less existed and just go along and do what has to be done, I guess, to survive.

01:36:23.100 The psychiatrist who would study John List the longest, the one the prosecution later put on the stand,

01:36:29.580 heard something colder underneath that word, survive.

01:36:34.100 To him, Denver was not exile.

01:36:37.440 He enjoyed his life in Denver.

01:36:38.760 It was a fresh stock for him in every sense of the word.

01:36:42.800 Remember, his problem was that he was overburdened.

01:36:45.460 He had been a failure in every way.

01:36:47.020 He saw his family as a burden, not a source of support.

01:36:50.560 They were all gone, poof.

01:36:52.380 And he was free.

01:36:54.020 Poof.

01:36:54.960 And he was free.

01:36:56.720 The sick wife, the disappointed mother, the mortgage he could not pay,

01:37:01.220 the three children whose futures he could not face, all of it gone in a single November day.

01:37:07.600 The people of Westfield would not let go so easily.

01:37:11.780 The classmates who sat beside Patty in the drama workshop

01:37:15.080 and beside John and Fred at Roosevelt Junior High are terrified.

01:37:19.960 The man who killed their friends is on the loose and may not be finished.

01:37:23.520 What if he comes back? Would they be next?

01:37:26.700 At Redeemer Lutheran, where John List taught Sunday school and Patty sang in the choir,

01:37:31.940 the congregation quietly fears the same.

01:37:35.080 Pastor Eugene Raywinkle confides in the undertaker who buried the List family, Fred Poppy.

01:37:41.380 Gee, I hope he doesn't come around with a gun on us, Fred.

01:37:45.740 For weeks after the murders, whenever the door opens during service,

01:37:49.880 churchgoers' eyes dart to see who it is.

01:37:53.360 Breeze Knoll stands empty as the season turns to spring and summer.

01:37:58.020 Teenagers dare each other up the driveway of the 19-room mansion where the family was put to death.

01:38:03.560 The lawn is going to seed, and the lights are finally dark. Some break into the murder house,

01:38:10.080 as it's called, and sleep on the ballroom floor, on the very spot where John List laid his family.

01:38:17.180 Neighbors start noticing candlelight moving behind the boarded-up windows on dark nights.

01:38:22.160 Odd comings and goings. Laughter out in the bushes, which some of them take for chanting.

01:38:28.960 One night in January, dozens of motorcycles come down Hillside Avenue and circle the mansion in

01:38:34.320 the dark. Souvenir hunters strip the place of anything that will come loose. The mailbox,

01:38:40.420 the house numbers, the brass knocker. Local children repeatedly visit the family's grave

01:38:45.740 in the dead of night. Then one night in late August of 1972, not quite 10 months after the

01:38:52.920 murders, the house catches fire and burns to the ground. The Union County prosecutor, Carl Ash,

01:39:00.780 studies the aftermath and calls the blaze the work of a professional arsonist. No one is ever charged

01:39:07.020 and the cause is never officially determined. The empty lot becomes the haunted lot. The fire

01:39:13.440 takes the house and does nothing at all to tamp down the story. The lot is auctioned that December,

01:39:18.800 a year after the bodies were discovered.

01:39:21.920 The new owner builds a handsome new colonial

01:39:24.080 where the doomed mansion once stood.

01:39:27.400 Even with a new house, the address,

01:39:29.680 the very ground where the horror took place,

01:39:32.380 draws attention.

01:39:33.880 For years afterward, on Halloween night,

01:39:36.680 Westfield kids walk each other down Hillside Avenue

01:39:39.400 to stand in front of 431

01:39:41.660 and dare one another to peer into the dark.

01:39:45.500 It was a real-life horror story in Westfield.

01:39:47.840 There's an entire generation of people that were afraid John List was coming for them.

01:39:52.820 He was on the run for 18 years.

01:39:54.720 He became known as the boogeyman of Westfield.

01:39:57.300 The house fire took something else with it.

01:39:59.880 Set into the ceiling over the ballroom was a great panel of stained glass.

01:40:04.780 The man who later buys the empty lot, an art collector,

01:40:08.160 takes one look at the ruins and sees a genuine signed

01:40:11.160 Lewis Comfort Tiffany stained glass window worth $100,000 in 1971.

01:40:16.560 If he is right, John List spent his last years under that ceiling, collapsing under debt,

01:40:23.580 with a fortune bolted into the roof above his head. He never even knew it was there.

01:40:29.840 As the hunt for John List continued, and with it the legend of the man who annihilated his own

01:40:35.440 family, one story draws the attention of the FBI for years. Fifteen days after the List murders,

01:40:42.420 a man who calls himself Dan Cooper hijacks an airliner over the Pacific Northwest,

01:40:49.400 takes $200,000 in ransom, and jumps out of the back of the plane into the dark with a parachute,

01:40:55.640 floating down into American myth. The plane flies on without him and comes down safely in Reno,

01:41:03.100 with the rear stairs still hanging open behind it. No one, miraculously, was injured.

01:41:09.440 Two otherwise unremarkable men vanish within two weeks of each other in the fall of 1971.

01:41:16.340 The connection is easy to see.

01:41:18.700 The hijacker's police sketch bears a passing resemblance to the missing accountant,

01:41:23.200 so naturally people wonder if John List's solution to his money troubles involves a high-altitude stick-up.

01:41:30.900 List's abandoned car at JFK Airport makes the connection easy to draw.

01:41:35.880 The FBI takes it seriously enough to show List's photograph to the witnesses who had seen the hijacker.

01:41:42.100 They say this man is not the hijacker.

01:41:45.620 Even so, the Bureau cannot quite let it go.

01:41:48.900 John List stays on the official list of D.B. Cooper suspects until 1990.

01:41:55.600 Part of what feeds the rumor is a report that List had trained as a paratrooper in World War II.

01:42:02.300 Much like List himself, List's war record was unremarkable, a quiet posting as a medical lab

01:42:08.860 technician in Germany for the last gasp of the war. John List did not vanish into a jungle or

01:42:15.580 behind a beard. Eventually, he puts back on the coat and tie and rebuilds, piece by piece,

01:42:22.140 the same life he had before the ballroom. It begins with his church. In June of 1975,

01:42:30.060 Robert Clark joins St. Paul's Lutheran, an inner-city parish on Grant Street in downtown

01:42:36.300 Denver. It is part of the strict Missouri Synod of his Michigan boyhood, his mother's church,

01:42:43.220 but with an important wrinkle. St. Paul's is a place where people drift in to start over after

01:42:49.540 their lives come apart, whether from drink or drugs or trouble with the law, and its pastor

01:42:55.000 does not pry into anyone's past. For a man like Robert Clark, that is not a small gift.

01:43:02.120 He becomes what he had been in New Jersey, the polite, dependable man who never misses a Sunday.

01:43:08.520 He volunteers to drive an elderly parishioner to Sunday service, every week, without being asked.

01:43:15.000 In tax season, he earns a little extra money preparing returns for people who trust him

01:43:18.980 with their numbers. In time, the congregation puts him on the finance council, and then they

01:43:24.380 make him treasurer. They hand the books to the accountant. He has been here before. In his

01:43:31.340 family, keeping the church's money is almost a birthright. His father was the parish treasurer

01:43:36.540 and accountant, and Alma raised her son to carry it on. Back in Michigan in the 1950s, when John

01:43:42.980 List was made treasurer of his congregation, he phoned his mother, proud to tell her he was keeping

01:43:49.020 the tradition alive. This is the same John List who, holding power of attorney over his mother's

01:43:55.360 accounts years later, quietly drains more than $50,000 from her savings before shooting her in

01:44:02.620 the face. Slowly, he works his way off the night cook line and back into accounting from a bookkeeper's

01:44:10.260 desk at a carpet wholesaler up to company comptroller again. But it is risky, this business

01:44:17.120 of reclaiming John List's old habits. In the spring of 1977, at a social for the single

01:44:24.600 members of his church, the ghost man begins building a second family. Her name is Dolores

01:44:31.380 Miller. She is slender and soft-spoken, with strawberry blonde hair, a refined church-going

01:44:38.200 woman who has already survived one marriage that failed her. She has no children. In Bob Clark,

01:44:44.220 she sees a devout, courteous man who does not drink, does not chase women, and seems to genuinely

01:44:50.240 care about other people. In Dolores, John sees a high-minded religious woman whose faith matches

01:44:56.340 his own. They take to each other almost at once. He tells her his first wife died of cancer.

01:45:03.120 From the way he says it, Dolores can see the subject pains him, so she lets it go and never

01:45:08.340 raises it again. She never sees a photograph of that first wife. She never thinks to ask for one.

01:45:15.240 No one at the church ever does either. In November of 1985, Bob and Dolores marry in Maryland,

01:45:22.980 chosen because it is where her mother and family live so they can meet Bob before the wedding.

01:45:28.260 34 years before, Maryland was where John List had married Helen, too, in a Lutheran church

01:45:34.440 in Baltimore County. Dolores is not a foolish woman. She's a careful one, and she believes 0.99

01:45:41.660 she has chosen well the second time. A steady Christian man who goes to church every Sunday

01:45:46.460 and raises his voice to no one. He is gentle. He is faithful in every way she can check.

01:45:53.680 Nothing in the life he shows her points back to Breeze Knoll. However, Bob Clark has John List's

01:46:00.900 same recurring problem, and it resurfaces. Bob and Dolores jointly own a modest two-bedroom

01:46:08.640 condo in Aurora, bought for about $27,000. It's the kind of small, sensible place two

01:46:15.220 careful people buy together. In the spring of 1986, five months after the wedding,

01:46:20.880 Clark's company computerizes its books and lets him go. One detail stands out. Around the time

01:46:28.480 he leaves, his personnel file also disappears from the office. Only three people can reach

01:46:34.800 these records, the company president among them, and Clark is one of them too. The man who once

01:46:41.400 made John List vanish knows how to make a file vanish with ease. They live on Dolores's salary

01:46:48.160 and then on Dolores's savings. She tells a neighbor flatly that if Bob does not start

01:46:53.900 bringing in money, she will leave him. He says little and keeps using credit cards as a substitute

01:47:00.020 for money he does not have. The Clarks give up on Colorado and try their luck elsewhere. Bob Clark

01:47:07.020 answers an out-of-state ad for an accounting job with a Richmond, Virginia firm. Early in 1988,

01:47:13.840 he goes east ahead of Dolores to get settled. This is the goodbye from the very end of the first

01:47:20.240 episode. Dolores in the doorway, watching her husband back the car down the driveway.

01:47:26.060 Sure, she has married a gentle widower named Bob. The widower part was true, but just a fraction of

01:47:32.520 the story. Bob finds a little brick ranch house in the suburbs of Midlothian with a plaque beside

01:47:39.040 the front door that reads, bless this house. 23 years, five murders, and 2,000 miles, and the man

01:47:47.240 has worked his way almost exactly back to where he began, only lower. The wreck of their Colorado

01:47:53.600 life follows them east. By the end of 1988, the condominium is foreclosed and that December in a

01:48:02.000 note tucked inside a Christmas card to an old neighbor, Dolores writes about it. The condo has

01:48:08.560 been a big problem and we don't know how to handle it. It is going to rob us of everything we own.

01:48:14.820 It is the exact sequence of events that ran John List to ruin in Westfield in 1971.

01:48:22.580 The name has changed, but the man has not.

01:48:26.300 The people of Virginia see the same man Denver saw, and what Westfield, New Jersey saw before that.

01:48:32.560 An aging, fussy, humorless bookkeeper, and nothing more.

01:48:37.040 He and Dolores make friends with the couple next door, and Bob does their taxes and presses them to fly an American flag.

01:48:44.560 He even provides the flag.

01:48:46.700 A co-worker notices only small, forgettable things.

01:48:50.220 That Bob Clark seems older than the age he gives,

01:48:53.740 a man of 62 working to pass for 56,

01:48:57.580 that he can get strangely worked up over a dispute about paper towels

01:49:01.400 or a carpool he wants no part of.

01:49:04.040 But nobody looks at a man fussing over paper towels and sees a mass murderer.

01:49:10.460 There is no tell.

01:49:12.360 Nothing in the small irritations that points back to the ballroom.

01:49:16.740 What finally reached John List did not come from the FBI.

01:49:21.720 It came from a television set.

01:49:24.520 By the late 1980s, the John List file is one of the oldest open murder cases in New Jersey.

01:49:30.680 For some of the detectives who carry it, it has become personal.

01:49:34.900 For him to be gone for that many years and not be brought to justice

01:49:38.600 was like a personal affront to the office

01:49:41.700 and to the Westfield Police Department.

01:49:44.120 Investigators try to put John List on television.

01:49:47.120 They pitch the case to the TV series

01:49:48.900 Unsolved Mysteries, which passes.

01:49:51.860 They try pitching to a brand new Fox program

01:49:54.220 called America's Most Wanted,

01:49:57.040 hosted by a man named John Walsh.

01:50:00.300 Walsh's own young son, Adam, had been murdered,

01:50:03.220 and he had turned that grief

01:50:04.560 into a nationwide hunt for fugitives.

01:50:07.300 America's Most Wanted passes, too.

01:50:10.820 The John List case is nearly 18 years old,

01:50:13.660 older than almost anything the show would normally touch,

01:50:16.460 and it carries the problem that has defeated investigators for nearly two decades as well.

01:50:21.440 John Walsh would later explain the show's hesitation to American justice.

01:50:25.460 I mean, that was a real stretch to think about

01:50:28.300 doing a guy that nobody had a clue where he disappeared to,

01:50:32.520 or even remotely what he looked like.

01:50:35.560 No one knew what 18 years had done to his face.

01:50:39.820 In 1989, the newest photographs of John List are from the 1960s,

01:50:45.680 a tall man in his 40s in horn-rimmed glasses.

01:50:49.540 You cannot circulate a fugitive's picture when your newest picture is a quarter of a century old.

01:50:55.540 One investigator will not let it go.

01:50:58.420 A captain in the Union County Prosecutor's Office named Frank Maronka

01:51:03.780 learns that the executive producer of America's Most Wanted is set to speak at a law enforcement

01:51:09.360 conference in Wilmington, Delaware, in January 1989. Maronka and Sergeant Jeffrey Hummel of the

01:51:16.440 homicide unit pack eight boxes of the list case into a car and drive down for something called

01:51:23.160 the Eastern Armed Robbery Conference. They check into a hotel looking, as one of them puts it,

01:51:29.100 like a pair of delivery men, and corner the producer, Michael Linder, after his speech.

01:51:35.240 Hummel describes the pivotal moment to News 12, New Jersey.

01:51:38.800 So I took him up to our hotel room and I laid the crime scene photos all across the beds.

01:51:43.860 And he began to examine the crime scene photos.

01:51:47.340 And based on that, he gave a tentative approval.

01:51:51.040 The producer never forgets the photographs of the murdered family laid out across a hotel bedspread.

01:51:57.320 To run a man's story when they have no picture is a problem. The show needs a face. So they hire

01:52:05.720 a sculptor. His name is Frank Bender, a forensic artist in Philadelphia who builds faces out of

01:52:12.380 clay. Frank would later explain his process on Forensic Files. I get into the head of the person

01:52:18.440 in a sense. I want to become that person while I'm working on The Fugitive. I want to feel

01:52:23.000 like that person. I want to know everything about that person.

01:52:26.800 Bender has four weeks and no photograph worth using. What he does have is a profile. He brings

01:52:34.020 it to a corrections psychologist named Richard Walter and asks Walter an interesting hypothetical.

01:52:41.240 What kind of a man would John List have become at 65? Walter traces the killer's anger down to

01:52:48.120 its root. The perpetrator has a history of frustration and feeling entrapped by women.

01:52:56.920 Generally, women of their own age group are older or women in authority. The psychologist describes

01:53:02.660 the interior life he believes belongs to John List, a man who killed out of retaliation and

01:53:08.920 anger over his own failures, got away with it and has been living with the threat of exposure for

01:53:15.040 nearly 20 years. From that profile and the old photographs, Bender builds the head.

01:53:21.520 I had his mouth going down on the corners because of anxiety that I felt he carried with him from

01:53:29.220 committing these crimes. And Richard brought out that it wasn't guilt from killing his family,

01:53:36.660 but the anxiety or the fear of being caught. He gives it the sagging jowls of a heavy man

01:53:42.820 in his 60s, a receding hairline, gray hair, the pale skin of a man who has spent most of his life

01:53:49.660 indoors. He reproduces the little details the Westfield, New Jersey police file does have to

01:53:55.700 offer, down to the surgical scar that ran from behind the right ear to the collar line, and the

01:54:01.820 way that ear sat a little lower and closer to the skull than the other. He dresses the lower part of

01:54:07.740 the bust in a coat and tie, then makes one last choice out of pure psychology. He gives the face

01:54:14.960 a pair of eyeglasses with frames noticeably heavier than any John List has ever been known

01:54:20.640 to wear, because the profile said this man would feel the intense need to look like an authority.

01:54:27.180 When the police show the finished head to people who had actually known List in Westfield,

01:54:31.800 they're amazed. It's him, the older version of him. On the night of Sunday, May 21st, 1989,

01:54:41.980 America's Most Wanted runs its segment on the accountant who murdered his family and then

01:54:47.880 vanished. It runs about eight minutes in total. Host John Walsh walks the country through the

01:54:53.900 killings and the 18 years of silence. At the end of the John Liz story, they turn Frank Bender's

01:55:00.660 clay head slowly in front of the camera, a gray man in heavy glasses, and ask the oldest question

01:55:08.200 in this case, do you know this man? An estimated 22 million people watch the episode.

01:55:16.980 Now tonight's first case, the oldest we've ever pursued on America's Most Wanted.

01:55:22.380 The suspect, John List, is accused of murdering his family 17 years ago.

01:55:27.900 Robert P. Clark is one of the 22 million watching,

01:55:31.720 a mild bookkeeper in Midlothian, Virginia,

01:55:34.480 who likes the show enough that he encourages his own neighbor to watch it as well.

01:55:39.080 And it was strange, but I thought,

01:55:41.640 I wonder if they're ever going to show my situation and do a program on me.

01:55:49.080 And I think it was within a month or two after that, they did have the show on.

01:55:55.080 I saw the tail end of it. I saw that it was about me, and I saw the bust that they had.

01:56:02.340 I was surprised at how accurate it was. I didn't realize that they had that technology.

01:56:09.280 By his own account, the most wanted man in America sat in his living room in Virginia

01:56:14.080 and watched a clay copy of his own face turn slowly on the screen, staring at him.

01:56:21.120 The original admiring the workmanship.

01:56:24.440 When the segment ends, the phones light up with hundreds of calls.

01:56:28.980 People who are sure and people who are guessing.

01:56:32.180 People who have seen a gray man in heavy glasses at a gas station or a church supper.

01:56:37.140 Most of it is the ordinary noise of a country just trying to help.

01:56:40.780 The one call that matters comes from a woman who had seen the resemblance two years earlier

01:56:46.400 and let herself be talked out of it.

01:56:49.020 Her name is Wanda Flannery, and she lived next door to the Clarks in Colorado. 0.67

01:56:56.260 She and Dolores became close enough that the two women kept trading letters after the Clarks moved east.

01:57:03.260 Two years before the broadcast, Wanda had been reading a supermarket tabloid, the Weekly World News,

01:57:11.000 when she came across a story about an old New Jersey murder case.

01:57:14.460 a man named John List had killed his entire family and disappeared. The story included a

01:57:21.800 wanted photo with it. Wanda looked at that photo and felt something inside her go cold

01:57:27.580 because it looked to her like her neighbor, Bob, married to her friend. She carried the paper next

01:57:34.280 door, set it on Dolores' kitchen table, put her finger on the face and said it out loud,

01:57:40.300 That's Bob.

01:57:41.860 Dolores looked from the flyer to a picture of her husband and shook her head.

01:57:47.160 It does look like Bob, she said, but it's not him.

01:57:50.420 Bob is much older.

01:57:52.340 A few days later, Wanda asked Dolores what Bob had said when she showed him the picture.

01:57:58.000 Dolores hadn't shown him.

01:58:00.460 She had thrown the paper away.

01:58:02.740 The resemblance had been spotted, named, and set down on a kitchen table in Colorado

01:58:07.900 two full years before anyone acted on it. The idea is too big to believe, and Bob is the last

01:58:15.800 man anyone wanted to accuse. Now, Wanda's watching America's Most Wanted. She sees the gray head

01:58:23.980 turning slowly on the screen in its heavy glasses, and the thought she set down two years ago comes

01:58:30.300 back with certainty. The man 22 million people are being asked to find had been living down the

01:58:37.700 street from her, and she knows it. An author named Timothy Benford, who researched the List

01:58:43.880 case for his book, Righteous Carnage, later describes Wanda's wake-up call this way to

01:58:49.160 American justice. It was a next-door neighbor, and when they did the report on the List murders,

01:58:55.540 she was convinced that that was Bob Clark, the neighbor who lived next door who had just moved

01:59:01.780 with his wife to Virginia. Wanda's daughter, Eva, and son-in-law, Randall, are with Wanda

01:59:08.820 in the living room watching the show. Eva and Wanda later remember putting the pieces together

01:59:14.320 in real time. And it just all started adding up gradually, that he was an accountant and a

01:59:21.720 Lutheran and that he had a scar behind his ear and that he was well put together and a classy

01:59:29.240 dresser we said oh my god that's that's bob and bob clark wanda turns off the tv retrieves a letter

01:59:37.960 from dolores's new street address and asks her son-in-law to make the call she is afraid for

01:59:44.360 dolores her friend is still married to the man who so closely resembles the bust that was just

01:59:49.560 spinning on her tv still living in that little house in virginia with the blessing on the door

01:59:55.960 Randall calls the tip line once, asks whether there is a reward for information, and hangs up

02:00:02.200 in a huff. Wanda begs him to call again and simply give the team on the other end the address on the

02:00:08.260 envelope from Dolores, the woman they suspect is now married to a family annihilator. Not long

02:00:15.360 after the broadcast ends, the tip line for America's Most Wanted takes one fateful call.

02:00:20.740 A family in Colorado wants to report that the man depicted by the clay bust, the man who used

02:00:27.300 to be John List, is alive and well and living under the name Robert P. Clark. And they have

02:00:34.960 his home address in Virginia. That's next time on MK Confidential.

02:00:40.480 it is thursday june 1st 1989 three men walk into a small suite of accounting offices in richmond

02:00:52.700 virginia two of the officers right off the elevator and one up the stairs the receptionist

02:00:58.660 sandra silberman takes note walk-ins do not usually arrive in threes she hangs up the phone

02:01:06.400 One of the men flashes an FBI badge.

02:01:09.100 They are here to speak with Robert Clark.

02:01:12.100 The bookkeeper who comes out to meet them is 63, balding, bespectacled, and entirely unalarmed.

02:01:19.860 The man carries himself, according to one of the FBI men, like a schoolteacher, waiting for a student to explain himself.

02:01:26.240 Special Agent Kevin August starts to question him, gently.

02:01:30.360 He asks the man's name, Robert Clark.

02:01:33.200 He asks Clark whether he has a scar behind his ear, though August can plainly see that he does,

02:01:39.880 and the man turns his head slightly to show it. He asks whether Clark has had an operation for a

02:01:45.780 hernia, was born in Michigan, and works as an accountant. Clark answers all three in the

02:01:52.000 affirmative. There's a pause, and then August asks the question that he has been waiting nearly 18

02:01:58.840 years for someone to ask out loud. Are you John Emile List? No, Clark answers without hesitation

02:02:07.540 and without emotion. August will think about that afterward, that an innocent man would have said,

02:02:14.180 who in the hell is John Emile List? The agents pat Clark down. He puts his arms out and leans

02:02:20.900 against the wall without a word of objection. And when it is finished, August tries once more.

02:02:26.860 I approached him and I asked him, I said, are you Mr. Clark?

02:02:31.760 And he said, yes.

02:02:33.620 And then I said, are you John List?

02:02:36.740 And he says, no, I'm Robert P. Clark.

02:02:39.460 Reporters would later put the man's exact words as, quote, I know who I am.

02:02:44.220 I'm Robert Clark.

02:02:46.100 Clark seems to force a little indignation into his voice when he says it.

02:02:50.980 Across the room, the receptionist looks away because Bob Clark is giving her the mournful

02:02:56.340 look of a man who believes he has been betrayed. She notices red blotches breaking out across his

02:03:02.060 face. The blotches are the only thing about him that reveal his panic. I'm Megan Kelly,

02:03:09.300 and this is MK Confidential.

02:03:10.620 the agents take robert clark to the henrico county jail and roll his inked fingers onto a card

02:03:20.540 clark's fingerprints promptly end the mystery the prints match the ones john list left on his

02:03:26.720 application for a new jersey firearms permit in westfield on october 16th 1971 24 days before he

02:03:34.480 shot and killed his entire family. The mastoidectomy scar behind his right ear matches.

02:03:41.040 The hernia scars match. Every physical marker on the FBI flyer that has been in circulation for

02:03:46.220 nearly 18 years matches the man before them. And Clark still says no. He just absolutely denied it.

02:03:54.880 It's not me. I don't know what you're talking about. Even after he was confronted with the

02:03:59.780 fact that his fingerprints were a match. He still was like, it's not me. My name is Robert P. Clark.

02:04:05.840 In Brandermill, a housing development set back among oak and pine outside Richmond, Virginia,

02:04:11.860 a woman is learning exactly who she married. Dolores Clark tries to see her husband in custody

02:04:18.260 on the afternoon of his arrest and is turned away. She comes back at noon the next day with

02:04:24.100 the pastor of their Lutheran church, the Reverend Joseph Vogt, and this time they are allowed inside.

02:04:31.140 Bob is being held in the isolation wing behind the frosted glass instead of bars. The minister

02:04:37.480 is allowed into his cell. Dolores has to stand at the glass and speak to her husband through a

02:04:43.280 telephone. She can hear that he is crying. Vogt tells reporters outside that the prisoner looks

02:04:49.640 shaken and has not slept. Then the pastor says something curious. There seems to be some relief

02:04:57.160 about the man inside, he says. Whether that is reflective of the fact that John List no longer

02:05:03.200 has to put up a front, he cannot say for sure. Dolores gives the press one written statement

02:05:09.300 and says it will be her last word on the matter. A family friend named Wally Parsons suggests they

02:05:15.200 take it to the Richmond news leader first to get ahead of the out-of-town press, and when he speaks

02:05:21.220 to the reporter, he adds an assurance of his own. You can be 100% absolutely sure that this lady

02:05:28.480 knows absolutely nothing about anything in Bob's past. In the statement, Dolores writes, quote,

02:05:35.300 this is not the man I know. The man I know is kind, loving, a devoted husband, and dear friend.

02:05:42.160 She describes Bob as a man of faith, and then at the end she writes, quote,

02:05:46.720 I find this hard to believe. I hope somehow this is not true, and if it is, he was so stressed out

02:05:53.220 that something snapped. I am devoted to him. I hope that somehow God will see us through this.

02:05:59.880 Dolores does not attend her husband's trial, and no reporter ever catches her visiting him in prison.

02:06:06.640 She has married a widower in 1985 and never once asked to see a photograph of his first wife.

02:06:14.400 He fights extradition to New Jersey from a Virginia cell as Robert Clark and loses.

02:06:20.780 At the end of June, he is flown to Newark,

02:06:22.720 where one investigator remembers every news outlet in the world waiting on the tarmac to watch.

02:06:29.940 There was an extremely high-profile arrest and transportation.

02:06:36.620 Coming off the plane was a little scary,

02:06:38.740 as every news media in the world must have been at Newark Airport.

02:06:42.100 Robert P. Clark never surrenders.

02:06:44.860 He simply stops existing in a flurry of pretrial motions

02:06:48.600 that could only be filed on behalf of the other man, John List.

02:06:52.940 And nobody mentions Bob Clark again.

02:06:56.040 He lets the name and the invented life behind it

02:06:58.560 slip away as unceremoniously as it began,

02:07:01.780 on a form in a Denver social security office nearly two decades before.

02:07:07.680 On the evening of November 7th, 1989, two days before the 18th anniversary of the murders,

02:07:14.360 John List is brought into a reception room at the Union County Jail to meet the only relatives he has left.

02:07:22.140 Jean Seifert, Jean spelled with a J like blue jeans, is Helen's sister, John's sister-in-law.

02:07:30.440 This is the first time John and Jean have seen each other since John shot his then-wife Helen in the face in 1971.

02:07:37.880 Jean and her husband, also Jean, though his is with a G, have flown in from Oklahoma at the invitation of Elijah Miller, the assistant public defender assigned to represent List.

02:07:50.240 Since the day of his arrest, Jean, the sister, has been determined to look John List in the face and put to him one word.

02:07:59.000 Why?

02:08:00.480 She does not sleep the night before.

02:08:03.100 At the courthouse, she asks her husband what happens if she sees John and passes out.

02:08:07.880 Her spouse promises to pick her up off the floor.

02:08:10.940 John comes in at around seven and crosses the room in the same bouncy, awkward walk

02:08:16.040 Jean remembers.

02:08:17.740 Eighteen years later, she recognizes him instantly.

02:08:21.120 A slightly lopsided face, now heavy with jowls.

02:08:25.320 The odd way he tilts his head when he stands in front of someone.

02:08:28.960 He is holding a small stack of papers and does not know what to do with them,

02:08:32.620 so he sets them on the table and stares at the floor.

02:08:36.280 She says, how are you, John?

02:08:38.580 He nods stiffly.

02:08:41.020 And then Jean Seifert does something that surprises her as much as it surprises him.

02:08:46.280 She steps forward and hugs the man who murdered her sister.

02:08:51.800 John puts his arms around her and lays his head on her shoulder,

02:08:55.060 and when he lifts it, the top of her blouse is wet.

02:08:58.200 Then he sees her husband and looks mortified.

02:09:01.440 The husband reaches out, and the two men shake hands without a word.

02:09:06.640 Then the husband, too, hugs John.

02:09:09.620 That, his wife will later say, gives John the shock of his life.

02:09:13.480 Again, he cries.

02:09:16.240 They talk for more than three hours in a small, windowless room on the third floor,

02:09:20.840 the kind where inmates meet their lawyers, with John's lawyer, Elijah Miller, sitting in.

02:09:25.580 But it's not a reunion.

02:09:28.080 The Seiferts believe in mercy, but they also believe in accountability.

02:09:32.280 And Helen's sister has waited 18 years to ask her question.

02:09:36.460 Why, John?

02:09:38.280 He looks at her without any emotion at all.

02:09:41.520 Because there was no other way.

02:09:44.200 It is exactly what he wrote to her in 1971, word for word.

02:09:49.800 Jean pushes, why was there no other way? 0.91

02:09:52.840 Why are they meeting in a criminal court instead of a divorce court, for God's sake?

02:09:58.260 It just had to be that way, he tells her.

02:10:01.660 The subject has been closed since 1971, and John List is not reopening it for her.

02:10:08.400 The brother-in-law has memorized a list of questions, and he is not gentle with them.

02:10:12.840 But John does not want to discuss the crime, and John has always known how to control a conversation.

02:10:18.280 So the sister tries to provoke one with a question that has haunted Westfield for 18 years

02:10:24.320 She had found a small bag of marijuana when she cleaned out their eldest daughter patty's room

02:10:30.780 And she asks john did he know about patty and the drugs?

02:10:36.220 John seems genuinely surprised

02:10:37.760 No, he says there were no drugs

02:10:40.380 Jean tells him she thinks he's wrong and he doesn't argue

02:10:45.160 Gene asks about the witchcraft, the Ouija boards, the whispers that followed Patty through the last

02:10:51.120 autumn. John says he has never known anything about it, and he's not particularly interested.

02:10:57.960 Late in the conversation, once the hard questions have run out and the tension in the small room

02:11:03.060 has eased some, John List asks the Seiferts about Brenda. Brenda Taylor is his dead wife's

02:11:12.140 daughter from her first marriage, the stepchild John helped raise from the age of nine. The one

02:11:18.900 child of Helen's he did not kill, and only because she had grown up and married and moved out years

02:11:25.120 before he ever bought their dream home on the hill, Breeze Knoll. He is told he has step-great-grandchildren

02:11:33.220 now, which apparently makes him happy. Jean Seifert flies home to Oklahoma with nothing.

02:11:40.480 She has never once believed he was insane, not for a minute, which leaves her with the

02:11:44.940 same question she came to Richmond with, and the same unsatisfactory answer.

02:11:50.740 What Brenda, John's stepchild, makes of John's capture is not on the public record.

02:11:55.660 She has said almost nothing since 1971.

02:11:58.840 That fall, the FBI asks to attach her name to a public appeal meant to flush out her

02:12:04.600 stepfather. A daughter's plea that reads, Daddy, you're all I have left. Please call me. It is

02:12:11.840 bait. It's not clear whether Brenda explicitly agrees, but the FBI does put out the statement.

02:12:18.640 The last thing Brenda wants is for John List to answer. By her friend's account, Brenda is

02:12:23.880 petrified, certain she is the only one of the family left and that he will come to kill her 0.67

02:12:28.900 and her five children. And for a long time, the FBI may suspect it too, because they watch her

02:12:34.540 house. The trial of John List opens in Union County Superior Court on Monday, April 2nd, 1990.

02:12:43.300 Reporters line up for hours in advance. The trial has moved to a larger courtroom,

02:12:47.840 and it is still not big enough. List does not dispute that he killed his family, but pleads

02:12:52.880 not guilty by reason of mental defect. His defense attorney, Elijah Miller, contends that his client

02:12:59.440 was gripped by a religious obsession, which led him to believe he was saving his family by taking

02:13:05.480 their lives. Miller hammers the religion angle, telling the jury his client was so locked into

02:13:11.400 his own religion that once the plan was in his head to spare his family from his own failures

02:13:18.140 or from what he perceived as their alleged hedonism, he could not step out of it.

02:13:24.520 That's the defense.

02:13:26.020 Not that he didn't do it, but that List killed with love and mercy in his heart.

02:13:32.040 The prosecutor is an assistant Union County DA named Brian Gillett,

02:13:37.680 who, as he tells it, is the only person in the office who did not ask for this case.

02:13:42.800 He opens his case by reading aloud John List's five-page letter to his pastor,

02:13:47.500 the one sealed in a locked drawer of the file cabinet beside John's desk next to the two

02:13:52.640 fired handguns, the murder weapons. One reporter describes Gillett's tone as cold with traces of

02:13:59.200 mockery. When Gillett reaches the line where List asks the pastor to pray for him, quote,

02:14:05.260 whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it, Gillett stops and looks along the jury

02:14:10.760 box. Today, he tells them, the government intends to do its duty. The letter is the whole prosecution.

02:14:18.780 Every element the state has to prove that the killings were willful, deliberate, and premeditated

02:14:23.480 is signed and dated in the defendant's own hand. The forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen Simring,

02:14:30.960 spends four hours with List in a jail cell with a video camera rolling and finds a man who is

02:14:36.060 unfailingly pleasant about the whole affair. Years later, he describes the conversation to

02:14:41.160 American justice. He was mild-mannered, courteous, soft-spoken, very precise and very exact.

02:14:51.940 He also expressed no remorse and only superficial regret. He said essentially

02:14:58.500 something that had to happen. It was unfortunate. Simmering walks the jury through what List told

02:15:05.300 him hour by hour, and the courtroom listens in absolute silence. He says List did not feel guilt

02:15:12.900 or sadness at the loss of his family, nor did John kill his family out of concern for the fate of

02:15:18.500 their souls. The psychiatrist says that List shifts explanations depending on his needs,

02:15:23.920 and at that moment, what John List needed was an acquittal. He did not have a major mental illness.

02:15:30.240 There was no psychiatric legal excuse either to excuse or to mitigate.

02:15:36.480 Simmering tells the jury John List believed suicide would land him in hell,

02:15:41.060 so he spared himself and sent his family to heaven.

02:15:45.560 Simmering concludes on the stand, quote,

02:15:48.220 He wanted grace in the hereafter, but he didn't want a rest yet.

02:15:52.720 There's religious belief and there's religious hypocrisy. 0.90

02:15:56.160 I think there's a fair amount of hypocrisy here.

02:15:59.760 The assistant prosecutor, Eleanor Clark, tells the jury no man could use religion to justify this carnage.

02:16:07.620 Well, I think no matter how religious you are, you realize that there's a little problem with this.

02:16:13.980 I found this horrific.

02:16:17.080 And for my tone of voice and the nature of my questions, I try to communicate this to the jurors.

02:16:22.020 Elijah Miller calls a procession of Lutheran clergymen who had known John List across four

02:16:27.340 decades in Kalamazoo, in Rochester, in Westfield. He needs them to tell the jury that this was a

02:16:34.020 devout man whose religious fervor swallowed him whole. Instead, one after another, the clergy who

02:16:41.100 taught John List his faith take the stand and dismantle John List's theology. Pastor Louis

02:16:48.020 Grother led the lists in his Kalamazoo congregation in the late 50s. Prosecutor Clark asks him whether

02:16:54.960 the Lutheran Church would frown on a man who killed his daughter to save her soul. The Lutheran Church

02:17:00.960 and the scriptures, the pastor says, would frown upon anybody deliberately killing anybody.

02:17:07.580 Defense attorney Miller calls the Reverend Edward Zaruski, the family's minister outside Rochester

02:17:14.080 from the years John worked at Xerox.

02:17:16.600 He paints John as a bitter failure

02:17:18.580 whose theology would never support murder.

02:17:22.160 He recalls that John struggled at work,

02:17:24.640 telling the court that Helen once said

02:17:26.640 if John were half the man her former husband was,

02:17:29.520 they wouldn't have the troubles they were having.

02:17:31.720 The jury is starting to learn

02:17:33.660 about John's simmering resentments.

02:17:37.100 Then Miller asks about John's religion,

02:17:39.920 and Reverend Cereski says

02:17:41.420 that John's fundamentalist theology

02:17:43.380 is fundamentally flawed. Sin is still sin, he tells the court. Grace is available for the sinner,

02:17:51.280 but sin is never justified, and Christians know that. He testifies that, quote, John's problem 0.99

02:17:57.520 was that he knew doctrine, but he did not know faith. I think John did not trust God, end quote.

02:18:05.740 John List could answer catechism questions at 15 without a stumble. He taught Sunday school. He

02:18:12.060 kept the books at three different churches in different parts of the country. What he could

02:18:16.240 not do across 50 years was hand a single problem to God and leave it there. Not the job, not the

02:18:23.460 mortgage, his wife's illness, his daughter's future. He did what he always did with figures

02:18:29.680 he didn't like. He didn't give it to God. He anointed himself as God. He decided when his

02:18:37.420 children's souls were safe and closed their earthly accounts on a date of his own choosing.

02:18:43.640 The last of the clergymen is the Reverend Alfred Shipes, who served as chaplain to John's youth

02:18:49.060 group at the University of Michigan. He describes John as faithful and of good character. Defense

02:18:55.020 attorney Miller asks him about sin. Thou shalt not kill, the minister answers. Taking a life is

02:19:01.440 certainly wrong. On cross-examination, the prosecution asks Shipes whether there is a

02:19:07.040 greatest sin, a sin above others. And in a courtroom where a man is on trial for murdering

02:19:12.580 his family, allegedly because he could not bear the shame of their lowered station or their descent

02:19:19.040 into perceived debauchery, the minister thinks about it for a few seconds and then quotes C.S.

02:19:25.720 Lewis. Pride, he says, pride is the greatest sin. On April 12th, 1990, after seven days of testimony,

02:19:34.480 the jury of nine men and three women steps out of the courtroom to decide John List's fate.

02:19:41.300 Everyone expects the verdict to be quick. Reporters have a betting pool going. Some

02:19:45.900 predict it will take less than 60 minutes. But that's not what happens. There is a holdout

02:19:51.100 on the jury. A lone person who still is not convinced about John List's state of mind.

02:19:58.100 The jurors send the judge a note asking him to define willful, premeditated, and deliberate.

02:20:03.940 Then another note, and another. Then they ask for two packs of cigarettes. The jury deliberates for

02:20:10.560 six hours the first day and then goes home to sleep on it. Could this one holdout really

02:20:15.300 deadlock the case? Could the man who signed and dated a five-page detailed confession and tucked

02:20:21.380 it in a drawer next to the murder weapons actually go free on a hung jury? By lunch the next day,

02:20:27.980 the jury has reached a verdict. What turns the holdout, the foreman tells reporters afterward,

02:20:33.940 is a single line in John List's letter. The line where List explains that he had originally planned

02:20:40.380 the murders for November 1st, All Saints Day, because he thought it an appropriate day for his

02:20:46.160 family to get to heaven. Then that travel arrangements delayed him. A man who reschedules

02:20:51.960 is a man who deliberated. The jury declares him guilty on five counts of murder in the first

02:20:58.380 degree. John List hears it stone-faced, staring straight ahead, motionless. Because New Jersey

02:21:06.280 he had no death penalty on its books in 1971, the sentence is capped at life without parole.

02:21:12.980 The irony, of course, is that John List did not actually spend his life in prison. He has gotten

02:21:18.940 away with his crimes for 18 years of freedom. On May 1st, 1990, Superior Court Judge William

02:21:26.700 Wertheimer hands down the maximum punishment available to him. He will later reread his

02:21:32.520 sentencing statement aloud for the New Jersey media podcast covering the List case, Father

02:21:37.840 Wants Us Dead. His acts stand as a permanent, pathetic, and profane example of the potential 0.94

02:21:43.460 of man's inhumanity to man. They will not be soon or easily forgotten, and the name of John

02:21:49.680 Amell List will be eternally synonymous with concepts of selfishness, horror, and evil.

02:21:55.580 Judge Wertheimer calls List a man without honor. He tells the courtroom that after 18 years,

02:22:01.160 five months and 22 days it is time for the voices of helen alma patricia frederick and john jr to

02:22:09.320 speak from the grave but i thought it was appropriate that each of the victims had their

02:22:14.760 own sentence i ran consecutively so he wasn't going to get out five consecutive life terms

02:22:21.560 one after the other and one for each member of the family so that justice for one victim

02:22:27.320 is not folded into justice for anyone else.

02:22:30.600 List is offered the chance to speak.

02:22:32.800 He stands and takes it.

02:22:35.120 I remain truly sorry for the tragedy that happened in 1971.

02:22:40.500 I feel that due to my mental state at the time,

02:22:45.560 I was unaccountable for what happened.

02:22:49.480 Truly sorry for the tragedy that happened.

02:22:53.020 Passive voice.

02:22:54.420 Not for what he did, just for what happened, as though he bore no responsibility.

02:23:01.000 He goes into New Jersey State Prison in Trenton at 64, and he is, by every account, a nearly model inmate.

02:23:08.980 He works in the print shop, keeping track of all the forms.

02:23:12.460 He reads his Bible and holds a Lutheran service in his cell on Sundays.

02:23:16.700 Plays chess, he writes letters his friends describe as journal entries,

02:23:20.540 blogging what time he woke up, what time he napped, and what he watched on television.

02:23:26.980 His closest friend in confinement is George Corbett, 42 years younger, locked up for murdering

02:23:32.860 a 14-year-old boy. Corbett remembers a dry sense of humor and an obsessiveness that never lets up.

02:23:40.460 List gets angry if anyone touches his pencils. He rations his commissary olives to two a day

02:23:46.420 so they last. He becomes petty and short-tempered, a man who has scheduled his whole day down to the

02:23:52.480 minute and cannot stand it when the world falls out of step. This prison friend, Corbett,

02:23:57.720 remembers List's outsized reactions. If the door didn't open up right away, if it took too long,

02:24:03.160 he would scream out because normally it would open, you know, right on cue. And then if he

02:24:07.040 had to say it a second time, he would get very agitated. Open 12, you bastard. He continues 1.00

02:24:11.980 is trying to manage his own story. List sits for a television interview with Connie Chung

02:24:17.600 and another with A&E. He publishes a memoir with a co-author, a rambling, self-justifying,

02:24:24.280 and remarkably self-pitying book. Throughout all of it, he says the same things, the things he

02:24:30.860 thinks mitigate his crimes, that he loved his family, that he did it to save their souls,

02:24:36.040 that God has forgiven him.

02:24:38.580 Never does he use the word murder.

02:24:41.440 Journalist Bill Curtis asks John List

02:24:43.800 how he thinks it all ends.

02:24:46.700 And John is untroubled.

02:24:48.780 I think I will go to heaven.

02:24:50.980 I don't know what the situation will be in heaven.

02:24:54.620 Will they remember what I did to them?

02:24:58.660 Certainly, if we're all in heaven,

02:25:01.120 I'm sure we would forgive each other

02:25:03.160 for whatever harm we had done to each other here.

02:25:07.280 37 years on, John List is still playing God.

02:25:11.960 John Walsh, who put the clay bust of John List on television

02:25:15.340 and ended in 18-year manhunt,

02:25:18.120 gives another take on John List's hereafter.

02:25:21.340 Oh, he's not going to heaven.

02:25:22.620 I know, well, I know for sure

02:25:25.440 that this man is not going to heaven.

02:25:28.020 He's going straight to hell, 1.00

02:25:29.700 right where his ass belongs. 1.00

02:25:32.480 Bernard Tracy, the young Westfield detective who inherited the case file and lived it for 11 years, 0.99

02:25:39.180 the crime scene photographs, the autopsy reports,

02:25:42.700 every last detail of what List did to his family, later becomes the chief of police.

02:25:48.580 He, of all people, might wish the worst to John List.

02:25:53.300 Instead, some grace.

02:25:55.600 It's a terrible thing what John List did.

02:25:58.220 But can we be forgiven for even those sins? I hope so.

02:26:01.640 and John List can go to heaven and I hope he does. The case outgrows the man in stature

02:26:08.220 almost immediately. In 1987, two years before anyone knows where John List is, a film reaches

02:26:15.260 theaters called The Stepfather about a mild, murderous family man who kills a household

02:26:20.480 and reinvents himself under a new name. Six years later, in 1993, CBS makes the story directly,

02:26:28.720 a television movie called Judgment Day, the John List story, with Robert Blake as the lead.

02:26:36.460 I've done what I was told to do always, but evil still surrounds me.

02:26:43.320 It lives in the very heart of this house, and nothing I say, nothing I do kills it.

02:26:48.800 I've done what she told me to do, and I'm losing everything.

02:26:54.600 Nearly 10 years later, Robert Blake would be arrested for the murder of his own wife.

02:27:00.920 John List continues to try for his freedom, not by escaping prison, but by the book, through the courts.

02:27:07.620 He appeals his conviction in 1993.

02:27:10.620 Deputy and Assistant Deputy Public Defenders Joan Van Pelt and Michael Blake contest the warrantless search on December 7, 1971,

02:27:19.080 the night the Westfield police found the List family on the ballroom floor.

02:27:24.540 John's initial public defender, Elijah Miller, tries to exclude all evidence the police department

02:27:29.940 picked up in the search, and thus much of the case against List. Judge Wertheimer shoots that

02:27:35.900 down, writing that List has abandoned the home and everything in it, and that in any event,

02:27:41.360 the discovery of five bodies and a handwritten note in a house with the lights burning out

02:27:46.140 was inevitable, if not by a concerned friend or neighbor, then eventually by police.

02:27:52.740 John List's appellate team argues that Judge Wertheimer was wrong and that Miller's failure

02:27:58.200 to suppress the evidence means he did not provide List with a proper defense.

02:28:03.240 Blake and Van Pelt also throw a Hail Mary pass of sorts, arguing that John List's confession

02:28:09.120 letter to his pastor, left in a manila folder atop his desk at Breeze Knoll for anyone to see,

02:28:15.900 is a private conversation and should be protected under both the First and Fifth Amendments.

02:28:21.740 Finally, they call Judge Wertheimer's consecutive five-life sentences, quote, excessive.

02:28:27.440 A panel of three judges easily upholds the conviction.

02:28:31.020 They address some of the appeal's claims in detail and dismiss the rest as, quote,

02:28:35.200 clearly without merit.

02:28:37.000 List's appeal is denied.

02:28:39.220 Two years later, List tries one more angle.

02:28:43.200 PTSD.

02:28:44.840 He asks the court for another bite at the apple for the chance to argue to a new jury

02:28:49.740 that he murdered his family due to post-traumatic stress from his service in World War II.

02:28:56.120 The court rejects the petition. The state of New Jersey has heard quite enough from John List.

02:29:02.440 List eventually takes his PTSD case public. In 2006, he publishes the memoir Collateral Damage

02:29:09.320 with the help of author Austin Goodrich. John claims that he saw 41 days of combat in World

02:29:15.240 War II and remembers none of it. He cites PTSD from this experience as the root cause of his

02:29:22.240 life's biggest problems, his inability to hold a job, his difficulty parenting his children,

02:29:28.320 and his decision to slaughter his own family in the name of saving them. List introduces his story

02:29:34.900 as a tale of woe for undiagnosed and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder. He dedicates the

02:29:41.740 book to his parents and to, quote, all family members made victims by my sinful actions.

02:29:48.800 In his memoir, List writes that his second wife, Dolores, visits him in prison. She briefly moved

02:29:55.740 to Baltimore after his arrest to evade reporters and tourists looking to gander at the killer's

02:30:01.660 ordinary home, living in plain sight. In 1995, List writes to a friend from prison and refers

02:30:08.560 to Dolores as his bride. However, according to the team of reporters from the Father Wants Us

02:30:15.180 Dead podcast, the memoir's co-author Goodrich notes that Dolores quietly divorced the man

02:30:21.000 she knew as Bob Clark. She sold the house in the Brandermill neighborhood outside of Richmond

02:30:26.080 and retreated from the public eye. In prison, List slowly falls apart. Diabetes, then a heart

02:30:34.080 rhythm problem, high blood pressure, trouble swallowing, cataracts, he asks to be moved to

02:30:39.760 the medical wing. In March 2008, he is taken to a hospital in Trenton and dies there on March 21st

02:30:47.000 at 82 of complications from pneumonia. It is Good Friday. There is no family to call,

02:30:55.420 no one to grieve him. John List's body lies in the Mercer County morgue, unclaimed. Under New

02:31:03.060 Jersey law, the body eventually must be handed over to the New Jersey Department of Corrections

02:31:07.680 and either cremated or buried, cremated by default. Authorities have not publicly confirmed

02:31:14.720 what became of John List's body, likely, at least in part, to dissuade would-be copycats and

02:31:21.040 admirers from making pilgrimage. By the time List dies, there is no one else who wants anything to

02:31:28.440 do with him. With the killer captured, convicted, and now dead, the city of Westfield, New Jersey

02:31:35.460 could leave the legend of John List behind, but it does not. Though the original mansion where

02:31:42.280 the Lists lived and most died burned due to suspected arson in 1972, the new colonial home

02:31:50.400 in its place is locally known as the List House. The street itself, formerly Hillside Avenue,

02:31:56.640 has been renamed Breeze Knoll Drive, and the original lot has been subdivided into private

02:32:02.600 residences along a cul-de-sac to break up the appeal to crime tourists. Families live along

02:32:08.560 the street now, and this year it is the third most expensive street in town. But John List was

02:32:15.040 not the last source of horrors for Westfield. In 2014, another dark force descends on the town

02:32:21.580 known as The Watcher. Anonymous letters arrive at the lovely home, threatening the family who

02:32:28.420 has just purchased it with eerie details about the house and about the children, signed only as

02:32:35.300 The Watcher. The family panics, and the letters eventually stop, but their author is never found.

02:32:42.380 Netflix produces a series in 2022 by the same name, starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale.

02:32:49.880 Westfield, it seems, will not be allowed to forget there is evil in the world.

02:32:55.720 John List the man will soon be forgotten.

02:32:58.440 His crime will not be, because family annihilators raise a particularly unsettling fear in the American psyche.

02:33:07.000 Chris Watts, Alec Murdoch, John List.

02:33:11.260 How does one know if there's a psychopath in one's midst?

02:33:15.180 Or a person who is not who they say they are?

02:33:18.460 We all think we'd know.

02:33:20.660 We would not be fooled.

02:33:22.740 Would we?

02:33:24.560 Next week, a pair of assassins terrorize the nation's capital region.

02:33:29.820 For 23 days, no one is safe as two snipers go on a killing spree.

02:33:35.600 I'm Megan Kelly.

02:33:37.020 This is MK Confidential.

The Megyn Kelly Show - August 29, 2026

John List - ＂The Annihilator＂： The FULL MK Confidential Series

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