The Megyn Kelly Show - August 11, 2026


The Annihilator： A Most Forgettable Man — Ep. 1 ｜ MK Confidential


Episode Stats


Length

29 minutes

Words per minute

159.83

Word count

4,774

Sentence count

345

Harmful content

Toxicity

7

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:56.420 It is the night of December 7th, 1971. A drama teacher and military veteran named Ed Ileano
00:01:04.880 turns his car up a long, winding driveway in Westfield, New Jersey, and puts the vehicle in
00:01:10.920 park. Finally, he's making himself do the thing he's been putting off. He leaves his headlights
00:01:17.180 on and pointed at the house. It is a stately Victorian mansion, 19 rooms, dark green shutters,
00:01:24.900 set back on more than an acre behind tall hedges.
00:01:28.760 The family that lives here calls it Breeze Knoll.
00:01:32.220 Night after night, Ed has driven past it on his way home,
00:01:35.460 slowing at the bottom of the hill, telling himself,
00:01:38.140 everything's fine, but it has not looked fine for a while.
00:01:42.880 The lights have been burning in every window, day and night,
00:01:46.840 and lately they have begun going out one by one as the bulbs die.
00:01:52.020 He has knocked on the front door and gotten no answer.
00:01:54.900 He has rung the bell. He even tests the door handle. The lock holds, sparing him for the moment
00:02:02.240 from deciding whether to enter alone. He has gone to the Westfield police twice and both times has
00:02:09.600 been sent away because Ed cannot tell them exactly what crime he believes has occurred.
00:02:15.940 All he has is a feeling and a promise he once made to a frightened girl. The girl is one of
00:02:23.000 his drama students. Her name is Patricia List. She is 16. She sings in the church choir, and she
00:02:30.600 wants more than anything in the world to be an actress. Days before she disappeared, sitting in
00:02:36.740 Ed's parked car late at night, Patricia told him her father was going to kill her. Not rhetorically
00:02:44.040 and not in some vague way, but that she and her two younger brothers would be killed. Patricia is
00:02:51.040 not a girl given to hysterics. She said it the way a person reports a fact. Ed told her no one
00:02:58.340 is going to kill you. Patricia looked at him like he was a fool. It wasn't just the drama teacher 1.00
00:03:04.120 to whom she had said it. She had predicted the same to a friend her own age, a girl who has never
00:03:10.380 been able to shake it. At some point she had told me that she knew her father wanted her and her
00:03:16.800 brother's dead. A neighbor has already called the Westfield police about the strange car in the
00:03:22.040 driveway. Two patrolmen pull up within minutes and after they hear Ed's concerns, one of them,
00:03:28.320 an officer named George Selesnik, walks the outside of the house. On the side porch he finds
00:03:34.840 a tall ground floor window unlocked. He and Ed push it up and climb over the sill into a dark
00:03:41.660 dining room. The first thing they notice is the smell. The second thing is the music.
00:03:48.560 Somewhere in the house, music is playing. It is loud and orchestral and grand. It seems to be
00:03:55.760 coming from everywhere at once, piped through an intercom into every room. It is a radio tuned to
00:04:02.720 a New York classical station the way it always is in this house. And tonight, by chance, it is
00:04:08.340 playing Wagner, a composer known for his anti-Semitic writings, whose opinions in music
00:04:14.500 will later become a soundtrack for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It is an ominous sound inside an
00:04:21.300 unsettling scene. By the window stand two fish tanks. In one, the fish are dead, drifting at
00:04:28.700 the surface. The second tank runs on a timer that keeps dropping food, and those fish are still
00:04:34.640 alive. Ed knows this house. He leads the officer across the center hall, past the two curving
00:04:41.860 staircases, to a heavy drape pulled across the entrance to the ballroom. Zelesnik shines his
00:04:48.860 flashlight through the gap in the drapes. The beam settles on a child's face. There are four
00:04:55.480 bodies on the ballroom floor, laid out side by side, still in their winter coats. They are lying
00:05:01.600 on sleeping bags, Boy Scout sleeping bags, forest green, with the words Be Prepared printed on the
00:05:07.800 lining. Someone has arranged them so the edges of the bags all meet, so that from a few feet away
00:05:13.920 the four bodies together make the shape of a cross. A woman and three teenagers. One of the
00:05:20.360 woman's arms has been laid across one of the boy's shoulders. Evil has been here. Ed Ileano runs to
00:05:28.580 the front door and throws it open and the rest of the officers come in from the porch. Someone finds
00:05:34.020 the switch and turns on the lights. Upstairs on the third floor in a hallway outside a small apartment
00:05:40.060 with a slice of toast still in the toaster, the officers will find the fifth body. An 84-year-old
00:05:47.600 woman, the grandmother of the house. Everyone who lives here is accounted for. Everyone but one.
00:05:56.020 The father, John List, is gone.
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00:07:20.720 Westfield, New Jersey, is not the kind of place this happens.
00:07:24.600 In 1971, it is a town of 33,000 people.
00:07:28.560 Today, it has the exact same population.
00:07:31.560 It is 25 miles southwest of Manhattan, with grand old homes and a downtown so charming
00:07:37.380 that ad agencies from the city drive out to film it as a stand-in for small-town America.
00:07:42.980 It is a place of church suppers and Cub Scout dens, of teenagers who spend their Saturdays downtown at the Rialto Movie House and the sub shop and the benches around Minda Waskin Park.
00:07:55.260 The kind of town where people still leave the back door unlocked because nothing has ever happened here that would make them stop.
00:08:01.860 It has 14 churches, 13 schools, and 51 police officers, and it has not had a murder in eight years.
00:08:10.980 Tonight, it has five in one house.
00:08:14.400 Not just any house, either.
00:08:16.520 Breeze Knoll is a distinctly impressive home on one of Westfield's grandest streets,
00:08:21.980 a 19-room Victorian with a real ballroom and a great stained-glass skylight towering over it,
00:08:28.620 the kind of kaleidoscope you would expect to find atop a church.
00:08:33.060 From the sidewalk, it looks like the pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow.
00:08:37.720 The steady father, the pretty wife, the well-mannered children, the good street address.
00:08:43.660 That is the picture Westfield has of the family inside.
00:08:47.200 The police are going to unearth the reality behind that image.
00:08:51.640 The police chief is a man named James Moran.
00:08:54.740 He is at headquarters that evening supervising promotion tests
00:08:58.340 when the call comes in from the patrolman at the scene.
00:09:02.220 The officer on the line sounds panicked, nothing like himself.
00:09:06.640 He tells Moran, Chief, there's been a mass murder.
00:09:10.760 There are dead bodies all over the place.
00:09:14.520 Moran cannot believe his ears.
00:09:16.560 Westfield has not had a murder in eight years,
00:09:18.920 and now this man is telling him there are five?
00:09:21.940 He gets in his car and drives.
00:09:24.580 When he arrives, the ground floor of the mansion is already filling up with police,
00:09:29.060 and Wagner still plays over the intercom.
00:09:32.220 Officer Zalesnik cannot shake the sound of it.
00:09:35.560 The unnerving part of the whole situation was that there was music playing in the house
00:09:40.140 and it was a very classical, serene, almost like you would hear if you went to a funeral power.
00:09:47.120 Moran, who will later say that he is no classical music expert, makes the same comparison.
00:09:53.340 He remembers the music echoing through room after room.
00:09:57.400 It is not until later that someone checks the radio listings
00:10:00.440 and realizes what the family's classical station had been broadcasting
00:10:04.340 at the exact hour the police found the bodies.
00:10:07.980 An orchestral piece from Wagner's Twilight of the Gods.
00:10:12.720 Somebody finally locates the radio in a hall closet and shuts it off.
00:10:17.500 The chief walks into the ballroom and stands over the bodies.
00:10:21.160 He sees that three of them are children.
00:10:23.380 The men already inside are not rookies.
00:10:26.380 Some of them have given 20 years to this quiet suburban force
00:10:29.520 and more than one of them will be unable to shake the next few minutes for the rest of his life.
00:10:35.420 The smell of decay in the icy cold rooms, the small bodies laid out behind the heavy drape
00:10:40.780 across the ballroom. One of the first officers to take the call had been so sure it was a prank,
00:10:47.020 he told the man on the phone to knock it off. A young assistant prosecutor named Michael Meisner
00:10:52.160 is called to the house that night. He will go home afterward and take his clothes off in the hallway,
00:10:58.520 unwilling to carry them into his own apartment
00:11:00.620 because the stench has gotten into them.
00:11:03.460 The most telling thing about it was the odor.
00:11:07.320 The other thing I can describe is the smell of death.
00:11:10.880 Here is what the police can see standing in that ballroom.
00:11:14.660 Nothing about the room suggests a robbery.
00:11:17.880 The house is sparsely decorated but full of nice things,
00:11:21.180 and none of it has been touched.
00:11:23.260 There is no sign that a stranger forced his way in.
00:11:25.760 they can see from the care that was taken that whoever did this was not in a hurry.
00:11:31.020 Whatever his state of mind, the scene shows planning, order, and control. The bodies have
00:11:37.560 been laid out. They have been covered. They have been arranged. Much of the blood has been wiped
00:11:43.480 up, though a dark trail of it still runs back across the floor. Down in the kitchen, the
00:11:49.520 breakfast dishes have been washed and stacked to dry. A few bananas have blackened on the counter.
00:11:56.320 Whoever did this killed five people, then tidied up.
00:12:01.440 Charlie Haller is one of the first Westfield officers into Breeze Knoll.
00:12:06.340 20 years later, he talks to CBS News.
00:12:09.480 He cleaned up a lot of the blood and had bags with bloody towels and rags.
00:12:14.260 That's one thing you never forget, something like that you never think would happen or you'd come upon.
00:12:20.640 And it stuck with me for a long time.
00:12:23.080 Whoever did this is not in the house.
00:12:25.760 Of the six people who live inside this mansion, five are dead.
00:12:30.680 The sixth, the husband, the father, a 46-year-old accountant is nowhere to be found.
00:12:37.280 His name is John Emile List.
00:12:40.840 For a few hours, that leaves an obvious question.
00:12:44.020 Is John List a sixth victim?
00:12:46.220 Taken somewhere else?
00:12:47.980 The answer's no.
00:12:50.000 In the first floor study, the police open a filing cabinet drawer with a label on it
00:12:54.760 that reads simply, guns and ammo.
00:12:58.060 Inside are two handguns that have been fired.
00:13:00.920 Beside them, a long letter.
00:13:03.840 John List is the author.
00:13:05.960 Moran reads it then and there in the study on his feet
00:13:08.920 with the bodies still about him.
00:13:11.640 By the time he has finished reading,
00:13:13.560 he is no longer searching for a missing man.
00:13:16.480 He is now searching for a killer.
00:13:18.940 The man who did this is not a victim.
00:13:21.920 He is not dead, and he is not lost.
00:13:24.760 He is a murderer who killed his wife, mother, and his three children 0.62
00:13:29.400 and walked out of his own house. 1.00
00:13:32.340 He had also made sure to give himself time.
00:13:35.780 Before he left, John List had taken a few quiet, careful steps
00:13:39.060 to make sure no one would be coming looking too soon.
00:13:43.260 Each was the sort of small errand a careful father might run before a family trip.
00:13:48.400 Each helped buy him another quiet day.
00:13:50.840 By the time Ed Ileano finally climbs into that house, John List is long gone.
00:13:59.100 So who is he?
00:14:00.940 This is the part of the story of which the town cannot make sense,
00:14:05.080 because the people think they know John List.
00:14:07.980 Nothing about the man they think they know fits the carnage he left behind.
00:14:12.920 He's an accountant, a certified public accountant, precise and quiet and almost invisible.
00:14:19.720 He's a churchgoer, a devout Lutheran, the kind who teaches Sunday school and helps run the Cub Scout pack to which his sons belong.
00:14:27.480 Parents in the congregation are glad to have him looking after their children.
00:14:30.580 He's exactly the sort of steady, seemingly God-fearing man any parent would choose to mentor one's son.
00:14:37.300 He is unfailingly polite. He doesn't drink. He doesn't curse. He rarely raises his voice.
00:14:44.200 Timothy Benford, a writer who spent years on this case, interviewing nearly everyone in it, would put the paradox this way.
00:14:51.400 He was a deeply religious man, introverted, soft-spoken, a gentleman, the kind of person you would not mind having as a next-door neighbor.
00:15:00.880 And the whole family was like that.
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00:16:31.900 Mostly what people remember about John List is the coat and tie.
00:16:37.000 List wore a suit the way other men wore skin.
00:16:40.360 He wore one to church, to work, to the most ordinary chores of a summer Saturday. 0.68
00:16:45.840 The parts of a life where no other man on the block was wearing anything of the kind.
00:16:50.620 Years later, John Walsh would describe him on national television in exactly those terms.
00:16:56.680 List is described as a quiet, soft-spoken man, the kind who wears a shirt and tie to mow the lawn.
00:17:02.760 A neighbor who watched him run Cub Scout events remembered him barking orders,
00:17:07.780 and in the neighbor's words, marching the children in like little Prussian soldiers.
00:17:12.280 A tin-horned tyrant, the man called him.
00:17:15.040 Then, in the next breath, the same neighbor said that in every other way,
00:17:18.500 John List was a complete gentleman, the old-world kind.
00:17:22.820 That is the man Westfield knew.
00:17:25.540 Prim, rigid, trustworthy, and utterly harmless.
00:17:30.760 The last man on the block you would look at twice.
00:17:34.140 He had always been this way.
00:17:36.280 Years later, when his face went out on a wanted flyer and turned up in the papers,
00:17:40.860 people who had gone to high school with John List would have to pull their old yearbooks down off the shelf to place him at all.
00:17:48.100 He was there in the class of 1943, an honor student,
00:17:52.100 but almost no one could summon a single memory of him.
00:17:56.060 He was the boy, one classmate said, who blended into the scenery.
00:18:00.040 That same forgettable quality, the thing no one could ever quite put a finger on,
00:18:05.400 would turn out to be a great blessing to John List.
00:18:08.900 His victims were not so lucky.
00:18:12.520 His wife is Helen.
00:18:14.220 She is 46 when John takes her life.
00:18:17.840 Years earlier, she had been vivacious and striking.
00:18:20.940 A young war widow when John married her.
00:18:23.440 A woman the neighbors said was someone who liked to laugh and to dance back then.
00:18:28.060 By the time of her death, that woman has all but disappeared.
00:18:32.560 Helen is sick, with something the family never says out loud.
00:18:37.040 It's syphilis, caught years ago from her first husband.
00:18:40.180 And by 1971, it has reached the late stage that goes after the brain.
00:18:45.140 It causes her mind to atrophy a little more each year, and there is no cure coming.
00:18:51.960 She drinks, which the doctors have warned her will only speed the disease along, and it does.
00:18:58.100 She drifts in and out of lucidity.
00:19:01.020 Most days, she does not come downstairs at all.
00:19:04.160 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.
00:19:11.540 Her own children have learned to tell their friends that mom's just resting.
00:19:16.000 A dying woman upstairs in a bathrobe in one of the finest houses in Westfield.
00:19:21.740 While below her, the dishes get washed, the lawn gets mowed,
00:19:25.480 and the family goes on looking from the street like the picture of an ordinary life.
00:19:30.860 John List's mother is Alma.
00:19:33.120 She's 84, and she lives at the top of the house in the third-floor apartment,
00:19:38.160 the one with the little kitchen where her toast is still butterless in the toaster.
00:19:42.760 She put up the money that bought this mansion,
00:19:45.140 and part of the deal was that she would always have a place in it.
00:19:48.840 She keeps mostly to the apartment's three rooms,
00:19:51.480 a long way from the Michigan town where she spent nearly her whole life and knew everyone.
00:19:56.520 In private letters, Alma confesses to old friends
00:19:59.600 how isolated and miserable she has become in Westfield.
00:20:04.740 Then there are the three children.
00:20:07.580 Patricia is 16, pat to her family.
00:20:11.340 She is the aspiring actress,
00:20:13.440 the one her friends describe as the girl with the flowers in her hair.
00:20:17.060 In the last weeks of her life,
00:20:19.000 Patricia is the understudy for the part of Blanche Dubois
00:20:22.160 in a community production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
00:20:26.480 She memorizes not just her own lines as Blanche,
00:20:29.180 but the entire play, every part,
00:20:32.180 which she would whisper to herself late at night
00:20:34.320 after the house had gone quiet,
00:20:36.260 working through a script she is sure will take her somewhere.
00:20:41.260 One of the young actors who shared a stage with Patricia, Barry Cohen,
00:20:45.400 remembers to News 12 Connecticut exactly who she was.
00:20:49.540 Very proud, very self-assured, and beautiful, really.
00:20:54.520 Way beyond her years.
00:20:56.320 At 16, she had more spunk and more pride,
00:20:59.840 and she was kind of haughty.
00:21:01.520 She'd toss her hair, and she was beautiful.
00:21:06.260 15-year-old Johnny is the family's athlete, big for his age and hot-tempered, a soccer player.
00:21:12.520 Away from his father, he is loose and animated, a joker, nothing like the stiff, silent man of
00:21:18.800 the house. Frederick, Fred, is 13, a baby. He is the gentle one, cherub-faced, with a slight lisp
00:21:27.540 his big sister likes to tease him about. He covers games for his school paper with the hopes of being
00:21:32.780 a sports writer one day. The two boys are Boy Scouts, which is the reason there are Boy Scout
00:21:38.380 sleeping bags in the house. More than anything else, they are each other's best friends. They
00:21:44.000 are also devoted New York Mets fans, on the wall over one of their beds taped up as a homemade
00:21:49.980 banner reading, Let's Go Mets. Those are the people inside the tidy home with the music playing,
00:21:57.080 a dying wife the neighbors no longer saw, a homesick old woman at the top of the stairs,
00:22:02.780 a daughter whispering a theater script at night,
00:22:05.840 and two brothers who were each other's whole world.
00:22:09.560 They are buried out of Redeemer Lutheran,
00:22:12.940 the family's own church, on a gray Saturday in December.
00:22:16.800 There are five caskets, more than three dozen pallbearers,
00:22:21.380 a great many of them teenagers,
00:22:23.940 Patricia's friends from the drama group,
00:22:26.260 the boys' friends from school,
00:22:28.380 children carrying the coffins of other children,
00:22:32.380 unable to look at one another as they do it.
00:22:35.620 Hundreds more stand outside in the cold,
00:22:37.960 listening to the service on loudspeakers.
00:22:40.820 Afterward, the grandmother, Alma, is sent home to Michigan
00:22:44.140 to be buried among people she actually knew.
00:22:48.420 The manhunt for John List starts big and goes nowhere.
00:22:53.720 The murder of an entire family in a New Jersey mansion
00:22:56.680 is national news,
00:22:58.600 and for a while the whole nation does pay attention.
00:23:01.620 His face goes out on FBI-wanted posters into police stations and pharmacies across the country
00:23:07.360 describing him, among other things, as reportedly a neat dresser. The Bureau takes the case because
00:23:14.020 a killer who has crossed a state line is federal business. Detectives in Westfield build a theory
00:23:20.080 around the kind of man they believe he is, someone so bound to his church and his routines
00:23:25.960 that sooner or later he will have to surface at some Lutheran church in some quiet town.
00:23:33.200 They settle in to wait for it.
00:23:35.780 For years afterward, every so often, on the anniversaries,
00:23:39.380 the police go back to that same cemetery and sit near the family grave
00:23:44.320 in case John List cannot help himself,
00:23:47.800 in case he comes back to stand over those he killed.
00:23:51.460 But John List does not come back.
00:23:53.620 He does not surface at all. He's like a ghost. Weeks pass, then months, then years, and John
00:24:02.160 List simply is nowhere to be found. The tidy house on Hillside Avenue stands empty and morose. 0.73
00:24:09.560 Less than a year later, it burns to the ground. The great stained glass skylight and all.
00:24:15.980 Investigators never officially determine the fire's cause. The case never closes,
00:24:20.940 but it recedes. Off the front page, out of the national news, out of people's daily thoughts,
00:24:27.760 except the handful of detectives who cannot let it go. Westfield tries to move on. In a filing
00:24:35.480 cabinet at police headquarters, the case of the accountant who murdered his family sits open,
00:24:42.160 unsolved, year after year after year. Detective Jeff Hummel, who takes over the cold case file
00:24:50.300 years later and goes through it page by page, sums up where the search stood.
00:24:55.660 Law enforcement itself were somewhat flummoxed because they didn't know where he was or whether
00:25:01.460 he was still alive or whether he was dead. And I took the position that you deal with evidence and
00:25:07.520 facts. And since no evidence surfaced to the contrary that he had died, I assumed he was
00:25:14.700 alive. John List had just disappeared. Inside the homicide squad, the years of nothing turn
00:25:22.500 into a grim running joke. No matter how cold the case got, officers like Frank Maronka tell Bill
00:25:28.800 Curtis they never forgot it. We would go on vacation and periodically we would send a postcard
00:25:35.360 back to the homicide squad while on vacation saying, having a wonderful time, wish you were
00:25:41.640 here and sign at John List. So it was kind of a joke in the office. The man who would create
00:25:47.280 America's Most Wanted, John Walsh, has a blunt answer for why the accountant was never caught
00:25:53.240 by the people whose job it was to catch him. You think the local cops had the resources to get him?
00:25:58.760 No. You think the mighty FBI with 6,000 FBI agents looking for him got him?
00:26:03.760 No. I think he'd still be out there. I think it took the public.
00:26:07.820 Now come forward with me from the murders in 1971 all the way to 1988. It is a bright,
00:26:15.360 ordinary day in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, thousands of miles away from Westfield, New Jersey.
00:26:22.460 In a quiet neighborhood, a mild, bespectacled accountant is loading cardboard boxes into a used
00:26:28.900 Ford, getting ready to drive across the country to a new job and a new life in Richmond, Virginia.
00:26:35.080 He is in his 60s now. He wears glasses and has a receding hairline and, of course, a coat and tie.
00:26:44.320 His neighbors think he is one of the most decent, albeit forgettable, men they have ever met.
00:26:49.900 His name, everyone here is quite sure, is Bob Clark.
00:26:54.620 For most of two decades, Bob Clark has been the most unremarkable man in the world. 0.98
00:27:00.220 A CPA, a churchgoer, a Lutheran. 1.00
00:27:04.040 He is polite, he is punctual. 1.00
00:27:06.440 He wears a coat and tie.
00:27:08.220 If that is starting to sound familiar, it should.
00:27:11.920 John List built himself the same life over again,
00:27:15.840 almost detail for detail,
00:27:17.520 the respectable, churchgoing, coat and tie existence
00:27:20.820 he had before the ballroom.
00:27:24.260 He did not need a disguise or a new face.
00:27:27.360 The old one had never been memorable.
00:27:29.380 in the first place. In the doorway behind him in Colorado is his wife. Her name is Dolores.
00:27:36.920 They were married a few years back, in the mid-80s, and she loves him. She knows Bob as a
00:27:42.980 quiet religious widower who lost his first wife to illness. She has no idea that almost everything
00:27:49.960 he has told her about his past is a lie. Years later, after the whole country knows,
00:27:57.100 Dolores will speak to CBS News of the man she married
00:27:59.900 and the only way she ever knew him.
00:28:02.960 I have never known Robert to be anything but a sweet and gentle man of good character.
00:28:08.960 She kisses him goodbye and watches him back the Ford down the driveway
00:28:12.500 off to set up their new life out east.
00:28:15.300 She has no idea who is behind that wheel.
00:28:18.720 The gentle, church-going accountant with a symphony playing on the tape deck
00:28:23.220 murdered his own mother, his wife, and their three children in a New Jersey mansion more
00:28:29.620 than 16 years ago. He left four of their corpses lying in the ballroom and walked out. He has been
00:28:37.440 a fugitive ever since. Bob Clark is John List, and he has gotten away with his crimes.
00:28:45.740 Next time on MK Confidential. Before he was Bob Clark and before the ballroom,
00:28:52.720 He was a shy, devout, neatly dressed boy from a small town in Michigan
00:28:56.340 who read the Bible with his mother every night.
00:28:59.540 We go back to the beginning to find out how that boy became a man
00:29:03.600 who in his last days in that house sat his three children down
00:29:08.500 and asked each of them whether they would rather be buried or cremated 0.87
00:29:13.140 than meticulously murdered them all. 0.99
00:29:22.180 Thank you. 0.99