The Megyn Kelly Show - August 14, 2026


The Annihilator： Bob Clark is John List — Ep. 4 ｜ MK Confidential

Hosted by
Megyn Kelly
Mentioned
John Emile List Robert P. Clark Wanda Bob Clark Frank Bender Aunt Helen Joe Walsh Richard Walter Megan Kelly Clarks Frank Marino Allie Bray Sergeant Jeffrey Hummel Joe List Good Housekeeping Righteous Carnage Eugene Raywinkle Timothy Benford Dolores Miller Michael Landon and 13 more
The Annihilator： One At A Time — Ep. 3 ｜ MK Confidential Claus von Bülow： The FULL MK Confidential Series

Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

158.38

Word count

5,574

Sentence count

356

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:26 apply. In the third week of November 1971, a tall, bespectacled man in a coat and tie sits by the
00:00:34 window on a westbound train, watching the flat brown grasslands of the Great Plains slide by
00:00:40 for a day and a night until the land finally begins to rise toward the Rockies. The train
00:00:46 is taking him toward the mountains he has always wanted to see, the Colorado Mountains. He has a
00:00:51 suitcase, a briefcase, and just under $2,500 in his wallet. What he does not have yet is a name.
00:01:00 The man has left almost nothing to chance. Behind him, in the long-term lot at Kennedy Airport,
00:01:06 his family's Impala sits in a crowded row, and on the front seat in a small, neat stack are his
00:01:13 Michigan alumni card and his accountant's license, with his own name left in plain view. As the miles
00:01:20 slide by, he eats and thinks back over his plan, the way he might check a column of figures.
00:01:26 He chose Kennedy Airport on purpose. Newark is closer to his home in Westfield and a simpler
00:01:33 route, but Newark Airport is not where a man goes to leave the country. He wants police to find his
00:01:38 car at the big international airport, with the name John List sitting right there on the seat
00:01:44 and his passport gone from the house.
00:01:48 When investigators finally come looking,
00:01:50 he means for them to look at the departure gates,
00:01:53 the flights to Europe, and the ocean.
00:01:55 And they do.
00:01:57 The FBI runs down every passenger on every flight
00:02:00 leaving the New York airports around November 10th
00:02:03 and gets nothing.
00:02:05 He can picture the manhunt he hopes to have unleashed
00:02:08 on the wrong side of the world.
00:02:10 He's not crossing an ocean.
00:02:12 No, he is on a train rolling toward America's heartland, and he knows no one will look twice
00:02:19 at a quiet man in coach. He thought about going to Phoenix and then decided it was too hot.
00:02:26 He thought about San Francisco. Too many hippies. So he settled on Denver. On the 22nd of November, 0.79
00:02:34 13 days after he murdered his entire family, the man walks into a social security office
00:02:40 in the middle of Colorado. He is balding, big-eared, and courteous to the point of
00:02:45 disarming. He pushes his glasses up his nose as he explains apologetically that he has lost his
00:02:52 social security card. A clerk hands him a form. He writes down a name that is not his and a birthday
00:02:59 that is not his either. So the man on the form is six years younger than the man holding the pen.
00:03:05 he signs it Robert P. Clark. No one asks him for a birth certificate. No one asks him for anything.
00:03:13 A few minutes later, the clerk hands him a card with his new name, and he walks back out into
00:03:18 the afternoon as somebody else. In 1971, a form and a signature is all it takes to become a new
00:03:26 man. John Emile List is dead to the world. Years later, John would describe the shift in his mindset.
00:03:34 I guess as time went on, I thought less and less of family.
00:03:40 I suppose I was just thankful to be living a free life
00:03:44 and I didn't want to be incarcerated if it wasn't necessary.
00:03:51 Thankful to be living a free life.
00:03:53 That is the man three weeks after he shot his wife in their eating space,
00:03:58 climbed the stairs and shot his mother, 0.56
00:04:00 and then waited out the afternoon to kill his three children 0.90
00:04:03 as they came home from school one at a time. 0.95
00:04:07 Now he has a new name, a new age, and a clean slate, if he can keep it.
00:04:13 For the next 18 years, one of the most wanted fugitives in the country
00:04:17 will hide in plain sight by being the most forgettable man in every room.
00:04:23 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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00:05:38 and would not care if it did. Robert P. Clark takes a room at a motel called the Deauville,
00:05:44 then pays cash for a small trailer. $1,500, no questions asked, and no documentation of
00:05:52 where he purchased it. The trailer sits in a park of transients off Interstate 70 on the western
00:05:58 edge of the city. Everyone here is passing through or starting over or hiding. No one
00:06:04 asks him his business. Now he needs work. He is a certified public accountant with more than 20
00:06:11 years experience, a man who once sat in a bank vice president's office. But an accountant has
00:06:17 a name and a history and a paper trail, and Robert Clark cannot afford to test any of those yet.
00:06:25 So he takes one job open to a man with no past. He becomes a night cook. The kitchen is at a
00:06:32 holiday inn just across the interstate from his trailer near the city of Golden. Ski traffic off
00:06:38 the highway keeps the place busy and keeps it anonymous, a long way from downtown, which is how
00:06:44 he likes it. He works after dark, eggs, burgers, and coffee on the graveyard shift, the hours when
00:06:51 nobody looks closely at anybody. Nights suit him, fewer people. At work, Bob Clark trades the suit
00:06:59 and tie for a cook's apron. Those who know him later remember his neat appearance, and outside
00:07:06 the kitchen he continues to wear his coat and tie. There is a small, terrible coincidence folded into
00:07:12 those years. Every so often, a family from back east drives out to ski in Colorado and stops at
00:07:18 that same Holiday Inn. A family John List knows does just that. They are Helen's relatives,
00:07:27 her sister's family. Years later, Helen's nephew would do the math. The quiet cook on the morning
00:07:33 line, the one who might well have made their breakfast, was the uncle who had shot his Aunt
00:07:39 Helen to death at her own kitchen table. To the people in that kitchen, Bob Clark is reliable
00:07:45 and impossible to know. Asked where he is from, he says Pennsylvania one day and the Midwest the
00:07:51 next. Asked about a wife, he says she died of cancer, another time that she drank herself to
00:07:57 death. The lies are almost true, which is what makes them easy to carry. He is not inventing a 0.97
00:08:04 dead family out of nothing, he is describing his real one, the family killed by his own hand
00:08:10 and calling it fate. A divorced woman on the kitchen staff named Allie Bray takes an interest
00:08:16 in the gentlemanly cook with the mustache, a man who wears his cheap clothes well and looks to her
00:08:22 like someone who has had a bad break in life and could do better. One day she asks him straight out
00:08:28 whether there's a woman in his life. He lowers his head and says almost too quietly to hear
00:08:34 that there's no one. He gives her nothing more, and before long, Allie leaves the hotel for a
00:08:40 full-time job elsewhere, never saying goodbye. The one person Clark lets in, a little, is the man who
00:08:48 cleans the kitchen at night, an easygoing former cowboy named Bob Wetmore. The other cooks start
00:08:54 calling them the two Bobs, like Felix and Oscar, the odd couple of the graveyard shift. It is a 0.89
00:09:01 lukewarm friendship, two loners who do not push each other, but when Clark hears of better pay
00:09:07 at a country club kitchen, the two Bobs move on together. At 46, having killed the five people 0.65
00:09:14 who shared his name, John List finally makes a friend. Asked about those years decades later,
00:09:21 he does not reach for anything dramatic.
00:09:24 He reaches for the plainest words he has.
00:09:27 I just more or less existed and just go along and do what has to be done, I guess, to survive.
00:09:35 The psychiatrist who would study John List the longest,
00:09:38 the one the prosecution later put on the stand,
00:09:41 heard something colder underneath that word, survive.
00:09:45 To him, Denver was not exile.
00:09:48 He enjoyed his life in Denver.
00:09:50 It was a fresh stock for him in every sense of the word.
00:09:54 Remember, his problem was that he was overburdened.
00:09:57 He had been a failure in every way.
00:09:59 He saw his family as a burden, not a source of support.
00:10:02 They were all gone, poof.
00:10:04 And he was free.
00:10:06 Poof.
00:10:06 And he was free.
00:10:08 The sick wife, the disappointed mother, the mortgage he could not pay,
00:10:13 the three children whose futures he could not face,
00:10:16 all of it gone in a single November day.
00:10:19 The people of Westfield would not let go so easily.
00:10:23 The classmates who sat beside Patty in the drama workshop
00:10:27 and beside John and Fred at Roosevelt Junior High are terrified.
00:10:32 The man who killed their friends is on the loose and may not be finished.
00:10:35 What if he comes back? Would they be next?
00:10:38 At Redeemer Lutheran, where John List taught Sunday school and Patty sang in the choir,
00:10:43 the congregation quietly fears the same.
00:10:47 Pastor Eugene Raywinkle confides in the undertaker who buried the List family, Fred Poppy.
00:10:53 Gee, I hope he doesn't come around with a gun on us, Fred.
00:10:57 For weeks after the murders, whenever the door opens during service,
00:11:01 churchgoers' eyes dart to see who it is.
00:11:05 Bree's knoll stands empty as the season turns to spring, then summer.
00:11:10 Teenagers dare each other up the driveway of the 19-room mansion,
00:11:14 where the family was put to death.
00:11:15 The lawn is going to seed, and the lights are finally dark. Some break into the murder house,
00:11:22 as it's called, and sleep on the ballroom floor, on the very spot where John List laid his family.
00:11:29 Neighbors start noticing candlelight moving behind the boarded-up windows on dark nights.
00:11:34 Odd comings and goings. Laughter out in the bushes, which some of them take for chanting.
00:11:40 One night in January, dozens of motorcycles come down Hillside Avenue and circle the mansion in
00:11:46 the dark. Souvenir hunters strip the place of anything that will come loose. The mailbox,
00:11:52 the house numbers, the brass knocker. Local children repeatedly visit the family's grave
00:11:57 in the dead of night. Then, one night in late August of 1972, not quite ten months after the
00:12:04 murders, the house catches fire and burns to the ground. The Union County prosecutor, Carl Ash,
00:12:12 studies the aftermath and calls the blaze the work of a professional arsonist. No one is ever charged
00:12:19 and the cause is never officially determined. The empty lot becomes the haunted lot. The fire takes
00:12:25 the house and does nothing at all to tamp down the story. The lot is auctioned that December,
00:12:30 a year after the bodies were discovered.
00:12:33 The new owner builds a handsome new colonial
00:12:36 where the doomed mansion once stood.
00:12:39 Even with a new house, the address,
00:12:41 the very ground where the horror took place,
00:12:44 draws attention.
00:12:45 For years afterward, on Halloween night,
00:12:48 Westfield kids walk each other down Hillside Avenue
00:12:51 to stand in front of 431
00:12:53 and dare one another to peer into the dark.
00:12:57 It was a real-life horror story in Westfield.
00:12:59 There's an entire generation of people that were afraid John List was coming for them.
00:13:04 He was on the run for 18 years.
00:13:06 He became known as the boogeyman of Westfield.
00:13:09 The house fire took something else with it.
00:13:11 Set into the ceiling over the ballroom was a great panel of stained glass.
00:13:16 The man who later buys the empty lot, an art collector,
00:13:20 takes one look at the ruins and sees a genuine signed
00:13:23 Lewis Comfort Tiffany stained glass window worth $100,000 in 1971.
00:13:28 If he is right, John List spent his last years under that ceiling, collapsing under debt,
00:13:35 with a fortune bolted into the roof above his head. He never even knew it was there.
00:13:41 As the hunt for John List continued, and with it the legend of the man who annihilated his own
00:13:47 family, one story draws the attention of the FBI for years. Fifteen days after the List murders,
00:13:54 a man who calls himself Dan Cooper hijacks an airliner over the Pacific Northwest,
00:14:01 takes $200,000 in ransom, and jumps out of the back of the plane into the dark with a parachute,
00:14:07 floating down into American myth. The plane flies on without him and comes down safely in Reno,
00:14:15 with the rear stairs still hanging open behind it. No one, miraculously, was injured.
00:14:21 Two otherwise unremarkable men vanish within two weeks of each other in the fall of 1971.
00:14:28 The connection is easy to see.
00:14:30 The hijacker's police sketch bears a passing resemblance to the missing accountant,
00:14:35 so naturally people wonder if John List's solution to his money troubles involves a high-altitude stick-up.
00:14:42 List's abandoned car at JFK Airport makes the connection easy to draw.
00:14:47 The FBI takes it seriously enough to show List's photograph to the witnesses who had seen the hijacker.
00:14:54 They say this man is not the hijacker.
00:14:57 Even so, the Bureau cannot quite let it go.
00:15:00 John List stays on the official list of D.B. Cooper suspects until 1990.
00:15:07 Part of what feeds the rumor is a report that List had trained as a paratrooper in World War II.
00:15:14 Much like List himself, List's war record was unremarkable, a quiet posting as a medical
00:15:20 lab technician in Germany for the last gasp of the war.
00:15:24 John List did not vanish into a jungle or behind a beard.
00:15:29 Eventually, he puts back on the coat and tie and rebuilds, piece by piece, the same life
00:15:35 he had before the ballroom.
00:15:37 It begins with his church.
00:15:40 In June of 1975, Robert Clark joins St. Paul's Lutheran, an inner city parish on Grant Street
00:15:47 in downtown Denver. It is part of the strict Missouri Synod of his Michigan boyhood,
00:15:54 his mother's church, but with an important wrinkle. St. Paul's is a place where people
00:15:59 drift in to start over after their lives come apart, whether from drink or drugs or trouble
00:16:05 with the law, and its pastor does not pry into anyone's past. For a man like Robert Clark,
00:16:12 that is not a small gift. He becomes what he had been in New Jersey, the polite, dependable man
00:16:18 who never misses a Sunday. He volunteers to drive an elderly parishioner to Sunday service
00:16:24 every week without being asked. In tax season, he earns a little extra money preparing returns
00:16:29 for people who trust him with their numbers. In time, the congregation puts him on the finance
00:16:34 council, and then they make him treasurer. They hand the books to the accountant. He has been
00:16:41 here before. In his family, keeping the church's money is almost a birthright. His father was the
00:16:47 parish treasurer and accountant, and Alma raised her son to carry it on. Back in Michigan in the 0.75
00:16:53 1950s, when John List was made treasurer of his congregation, he phoned his mother, proud to tell
00:17:00 her he was keeping the tradition alive. This is the same John List who, holding power of attorney
00:17:06 over his mother's accounts years later, quietly drains more than $50,000 from her savings
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00:18:28 That's AquaTrue.com, A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com, promo code MKC. Slowly, he works his way off the night
00:18:37 cook line and back into accounting from a bookkeeper's desk at a carpet wholesaler
00:18:42 up to company comptroller again. But it is risky, this business of reclaiming John List's old habits.
00:18:51 In the spring of 1977, at a social for the single members of his church, the ghost man begins
00:18:58 building a second family. Her name is Dolores Miller. She is slender and soft-spoken, with
00:19:06 strawberry blonde hair, a refined church-going woman who has already survived one marriage that
00:19:11 failed her. She has no children. In Bob Clark, she sees a devout, courteous man who does not drink, 0.59
00:19:18 does not chase women, and seems to genuinely care about other people. In Dolores, John sees a
00:19:24 high-minded religious woman whose faith matches his own. They take to each other almost at once.
00:19:31 He tells her his first wife died of cancer. From the way he says it, Dolores can see the subject
00:19:36 pains him, so she lets it go and never raises it again. She never sees a photograph of that first
00:19:43 wife, she never thinks to ask for one. No one at the church ever does either. In November of 1985,
00:19:51 Bob and Dolores marry in Maryland, chosen because it is where her mother and family live so they
00:19:57 can meet Bob before the wedding. 34 years before, Maryland was where John List had married Helen,
00:20:03 too, in a Lutheran church in Baltimore County. Dolores is not a foolish woman. She's a careful 0.99
00:20:11 one, and she believes she has chosen well the second time. A steady Christian man who goes to
00:20:16 church every Sunday and raises his voice to no one. He is gentle. He is faithful in every way
00:20:23 she can check. Nothing in the life he shows her points back to Breeze Knoll. However, Bob Clark
00:20:30 has John List's same recurring problem, and it resurfaces. Bob and Dolores jointly own a modest
00:20:38 two-bedroom condo in Aurora, bought for about $27,000. It's the kind of small, sensible place
00:20:46 two careful people buy together. In the spring of 1986, five months after the wedding, Clark's
00:20:52 company computerizes its books and lets him go. One detail stands out. Around the time he leaves,
00:21:00 his personnel file also disappears from the office. Only three people can reach these records.
00:21:06 the company president among them, and Clark is one of them too. The man who once made John List
00:21:13 vanish knows how to make a file vanish with ease. They live on Dolores's salary and then on
00:21:20 Dolores's savings. She tells a neighbor flatly that if Bob does not start bringing in money,
00:21:26 she will leave him. He says little and keeps using credit cards as a substitute for money
00:21:31 he does not have. The Clarks give up on Colorado and try their luck elsewhere. Bob Clark answers
00:21:38 an out-of-state ad for an accounting job with a Richmond, Virginia firm. Early in 1988, he goes
00:21:45 east ahead of Dolores to get settled. This is the goodbye from the very end of the first episode.
00:21:52 Dolores in the doorway, watching her husband back the car down the driveway.
00:21:56 sure she has married a gentle widower named Bob. The widower part was true, but just a fraction of
00:22:03 the story. Bob finds a little brick ranch house in the suburbs of Midlothian with a plaque beside
00:22:10 the front door that reads, bless this house. 23 years, five murders, and 2,000 miles, and the man
00:22:18 has worked his way almost exactly back to where he began, only lower. The wreck of their Colorado
00:22:24 life follows them east. By the end of 1988, the condominium is foreclosed, and that December in
00:22:32 a note tucked inside a Christmas card to an old neighbor, Dolores writes about it. The condo has
00:22:39 been a big problem, and we don't know how to handle it. It is going to rob us of everything we own.
00:22:46 It is the exact sequence of events that ran John List to ruin in Westfield in 1971. The name has
00:22:54 changed, but the man has not. The people of Virginia see the same man Denver saw, and what
00:23:01 Westfield, New Jersey saw before that. An aging, fussy, humorless bookkeeper, and nothing more.
00:23:08 He and Dolores make friends with the couple next door, and Bob does their taxes and presses them
00:23:13 to fly an American flag. He even provides the flag. A co-worker notices only small, forgettable
00:23:20 things, that Bob Clark seems older than the age he gives, a man of 62 working to pass for 56,
00:23:28 that he can get strangely worked up over a dispute about paper towels or a carpool he wants no part
00:23:34 of. But nobody looks at a man fussing over paper towels and sees a mass murderer. There is no tell,
00:23:43 nothing in the small irritations that points back to the ballroom. What finally reached John List,
00:23:50 did not come from the FBI. It came from a television set. By the late 1980s, the John
00:23:57 List file is one of the oldest open murder cases in New Jersey. For some of the detectives who
00:24:03 carry it, it has become personal. For him to be gone for that many years and not be brought to
00:24:09 justice was like a personal affront to the office and to the Westfield Police Department.
00:24:15 Investigators try to put John List on television.
00:24:18 They pitch the case to the TV series Unsolved Mysteries, which passes.
00:24:22 They try pitching to a brand new Fox program called America's Most Wanted, hosted by a man named John Walsh.
00:24:31 Walsh's own young son, Adam, had been murdered, and he had turned that grief into a nationwide hunt for fugitives.
00:24:38 America's Most Wanted passes, too.
00:24:41 The John List case is nearly 18 years old,
00:24:44 older than almost anything the show would normally touch,
00:24:47 and it carries the problem that has defeated investigators for nearly two decades as well.
00:24:52 John Walsh would later explain the show's hesitation to American justice.
00:24:56 I mean, that was a real stretch to think about
00:24:59 doing a guy that nobody had a clue where he disappeared to,
00:25:03 or even remotely what he looked like.
00:25:07 No one knew what 18 years had done to his face.
00:25:10 In 1989, the newest photographs of John List are from the 1960s, a tall man in his 40s in
00:25:18 horn-rimmed glasses. You cannot circulate a fugitive's picture when your newest picture
00:25:23 is a quarter of a century old. One investigator will not let it go. A captain in the Union County
00:25:31 Prosecutor's Office named Frank Maronka learns that the executive producer of America's Most
00:25:37 wanted, is set to speak at a law enforcement conference in Wilmington, Delaware, in January
00:25:43 1989. Maronka and Sergeant Jeffrey Hummel of the Homicide Unit pack eight boxes of the List case
00:25:51 into a car and drive down for something called the Eastern Armed Robbery Conference. They check
00:25:57 into a hotel looking, as one of them puts it, like a pair of delivery men, and corner the producer,
00:26:03 Michael Linder, after his speech. Hummel describes the pivotal moment to News 12 New Jersey.
00:26:10 So I took him up to our hotel room and I laid the crime scene photos all across the beds.
00:26:15 And he began to examine the crime scene photos. And based on that, he gave a tentative approval.
00:26:22 The producer never forgets the photographs of the murdered family laid out across a hotel bedspread.
00:26:28 To run a man's story when they have no picture is a problem. The show needs a face. So they hire
00:26:36 a sculptor. His name is Frank Bender, a forensic artist in Philadelphia who builds faces out of
00:26:43 clay. Frank would later explain his process on Forensic Files. I get into the head of the person
00:26:49 in a sense. I want to become that person while I'm working on The Fugitive. I want to feel
00:26:54 like that person. I want to know everything about that person.
00:26:57 Bender has four weeks and no photograph worth using. What he does have is a profile. He brings
00:27:05 it to a corrections psychologist named Richard Walter and asks Walter an interesting hypothetical.
00:27:12 What kind of a man would John List have become at 65? Walter traces the killer's anger down to
00:27:19 its root. The perpetrator has a history of frustration and feeling entrapped by women.
00:27:28 Generally, women of their own age group are older or women in authority. The psychologist describes
00:27:33 the interior life he believes belongs to John List, a man who killed out of retaliation and
00:27:40 anger over his own failures, got away with it and has been living with the threat of exposure for
00:27:46 nearly 20 years. From that profile and the old photographs, Bender builds the head.
00:27:52 I had his mouth going down on the corners because of anxiety that I felt he carried with him from
00:28:00 committing these crimes. And Richard brought out that it wasn't guilt from killing his family,
00:28:07 but the anxiety of the fear of being caught. He gives it the sagging jowls of a heavy man
00:28:13 in his 60s, a receding hairline, gray hair, the pale skin of a man who has spent most of his life
00:28:20 indoors. He reproduces the little details the Westfield, New Jersey police file does have to
00:28:26 offer, down to the surgical scar that ran from behind the right ear to the collar line, and the
00:28:32 way that ear sat a little lower and closer to the skull than the other. He dresses the lower part of
00:28:38 the bust in a coat and tie, then makes one last choice out of pure psychology. He gives the face
00:28:46 a pair of eyeglasses with frames noticeably heavier than any John List has ever been known
00:28:51 to wear, because the profile said this man would feel the intense need to look like an authority.
00:28:58 When the police show the finished head to people who had actually known List in Westfield,
00:29:02 they're amazed. It's him, the older version of him. On the night of Sunday, May 21st, 1989,
00:29:13 America's Most Wanted runs its segment on the accountant who murdered his family and then
00:29:19 vanished. It runs about eight minutes in total. Host John Walsh walks the country through the
00:29:25 killings and the 18 years of silence. At the end of the John Liz story, they turn Frank Bender's
00:29:31 clay head slowly in front of the camera, a gray man in heavy glasses, and ask the oldest question
00:29:39 in this case. Do you know this man? An estimated 22 million people watch the episode.
00:29:48 Now tonight's first case, the oldest we've ever pursued on America's Most Wanted.
00:29:53 The suspect, John List, is accused of murdering his family 17 years ago. Robert P. Clark is one
00:30:00 of the 22 million watching, a mild bookkeeper in Midlothian, Virginia, who likes the show enough
00:30:06 that he encourages his own neighbor to watch it as well. And it was strange, but I thought,
00:30:12 I wonder if they're ever going to show my situation and do a program on me. And
00:30:20 I think it was within a month or two after that, they did have the show on. I saw the tail end of
00:30:27 but I saw that it was about me and saw the bust that they had.
00:30:33 I was surprised at how accurate it was.
00:30:37 I didn't realize that they had that technology.
00:30:40 By his own account, the most wanted man in America
00:30:43 sat in his living room in Virginia
00:30:45 and watched a clay copy of his own face
00:30:48 turn slowly on the screen, staring at him.
00:30:51 The original admiring the workmanship.
00:30:54 When the segment ends, the phones light up with hundreds of calls.
00:31:00 People who are sure and people who are guessing.
00:31:03 People who have seen a gray man in heavy glasses at a gas station or a church supper.
00:31:08 Most of it is the ordinary noise of a country just trying to help.
00:31:11 The one call that matters comes from a woman who had seen the resemblance two years earlier
00:31:17 and let herself be talked out of it.
00:31:20 Her name is Wanda Flannery, and she lived next door to the Clarks in Colorado. 0.67
00:31:27 She and Dolores became close enough that the two women kept trading letters after the Clarks moved east.
00:31:34 Two years before the broadcast, Wanda had been reading a supermarket tabloid, the Weekly World News,
00:31:42 when she came across a story about an old New Jersey murder case.
00:31:45 A man named John List had killed his entire family and disappeared.
00:31:51 The story included a wanted photo with it.
00:31:54 Wanda looked at that photo and felt something inside her go cold
00:31:58 because it looked to her like her neighbor, Bob, married to her friend.
00:32:04 She carried the paper next door, set it on Dolores' kitchen table,
00:32:08 put her finger on the face and said it out loud,
00:32:11 That's Bob.
00:32:12 Dolores looked from the flyer to a picture of her husband and shook her head.
00:32:18 It does look like Bob, she said, but it's not him.
00:32:21 Bob is much older.
00:32:23 A few days later, Wanda asked Dolores what Bob had said when she showed him the picture.
00:32:29 Dolores hadn't shown him.
00:32:31 She had thrown the paper away.
00:32:33 The resemblance had been spotted, named, and set down on a kitchen table in Colorado
00:32:39 two full years before anyone acted on it. The idea is too big to believe, and Bob is the last
00:32:46 man anyone wanted to accuse. Now, Wanda's watching America's Most Wanted. She sees the gray head
00:32:55 turning slowly on the screen in its heavy glasses, and the thought she set down two years ago comes
00:33:01 back with certainty. The man 22 million people are being asked to find had been living down the
00:33:08 street from her, and she knows it. An author named Timothy Benford, who researched the List
00:33:15 case for his book, Righteous Carnage, later describes Wanda's wake-up call this way to
00:33:20 American justice. It was a next-door neighbor, and when they did the report on the List murders,
00:33:26 she was convinced that that was Bob Clark, the neighbor who lived next door who had just moved
00:33:32 with his wife to Virginia.
00:33:35 Wanda's daughter, Eva, and son-in-law, Randall,
00:33:39 are with Wanda in the living room watching the show.
00:33:42 Eva and Wanda later remember
00:33:44 putting the pieces together in real time.
00:33:46 And it just all started adding up gradually
00:33:49 that he was an accountant and a Lutheran
00:33:53 and that he had a scar behind his ear
00:33:56 and that he was well put together and a classy dresser.
00:34:01 We said, oh, my God, that's Bob, Bob Clark.
00:34:06 Wanda turns off the TV,
00:34:08 retrieves a letter from Dolores' new street address,
00:34:11 and asks her son-in-law to make the call.
00:34:14 She is afraid for Dolores.
00:34:16 Her friend is still married to the man
00:34:18 who so closely resembles the bust
00:34:20 that was just spinning on her TV,
00:34:22 still living in that little house in Virginia
00:34:24 with the blessing on the door.
00:34:27 Randall calls the tip line once,
00:34:28 asks whether there is a reward for information and hangs up in a huff. Wanda begs him to call
00:34:35 again and simply give the team on the other end the address on the envelope from Dolores,
00:34:41 the woman they suspect is now married to a family annihilator. Not long after the broadcast ends,
00:34:48 the tip line for America's Most Wanted takes one fateful call. A family in Colorado wants to report
00:34:54 that the man depicted by the clay bust,
00:34:57 the man who used to be John List,
00:34:59 is alive and well
00:35:01 and living under the name Robert P. Clark.
00:35:05 And they have his home address in Virginia.
00:35:08 That's next time on MK Confidential.