The Megyn Kelly Show - August 14, 2026


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


Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

158.38

Word count

5,574

Sentence count

358

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

5

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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00:00:26.680 apply. In the third week of November 1971, a tall, bespectacled man in a coat and tie sits by the
00:00:34.400 window on a westbound train, watching the flat brown grasslands of the Great Plains slide by
00:00:40.540 for a day and a night until the land finally begins to rise toward the Rockies. The train
00:00:46.320 is taking him toward the mountains he has always wanted to see, the Colorado Mountains. He has a
00:00:51.840 suitcase, a briefcase, and just under $2,500 in his wallet. What he does not have yet is a name.
00:01:00.300 The man has left almost nothing to chance. Behind him, in the long-term lot at Kennedy Airport,
00:01:06.760 his family's Impala sits in a crowded row, and on the front seat in a small, neat stack are his
00:01:13.420 Michigan alumni card and his accountant's license, with his own name left in plain view. As the miles
00:01:20.120 slide by, he eats and thinks back over his plan, the way he might check a column of figures.
00:01:26.780 He chose Kennedy Airport on purpose. Newark is closer to his home in Westfield and a simpler
00:01:33.160 route, but Newark Airport is not where a man goes to leave the country. He wants police to find his
00:01:38.980 car at the big international airport, with the name John List sitting right there on the seat
00:01:44.840 and his passport gone from the house.
00:01:48.420 When investigators finally come looking,
00:01:50.620 he means for them to look at the departure gates,
00:01:53.100 the flights to Europe, and the ocean.
00:01:55.900 And they do.
00:01:57.400 The FBI runs down every passenger on every flight
00:02:00.640 leaving the New York airports around November 10th
00:02:03.460 and gets nothing.
00:02:05.760 He can picture the manhunt he hopes to have unleashed
00:02:08.600 on the wrong side of the world.
00:02:10.780 He's not crossing an ocean.
00:02:12.040 No, he is on a train rolling toward America's heartland, and he knows no one will look twice
00:02:19.360 at a quiet man in coach. He thought about going to Phoenix and then decided it was too hot.
00:02:26.460 He thought about San Francisco. Too many hippies. So he settled on Denver. On the 22nd of November, 0.79
00:02:34.220 13 days after he murdered his entire family, the man walks into a social security office
00:02:40.120 in the middle of Colorado. He is balding, big-eared, and courteous to the point of
00:02:45.660 disarming. He pushes his glasses up his nose as he explains apologetically that he has lost his
00:02:52.260 social security card. A clerk hands him a form. He writes down a name that is not his and a birthday
00:02:59.660 that is not his either. So the man on the form is six years younger than the man holding the pen.
00:03:05.200 he signs it Robert P. Clark. No one asks him for a birth certificate. No one asks him for anything.
00:03:13.600 A few minutes later, the clerk hands him a card with his new name, and he walks back out into
00:03:18.640 the afternoon as somebody else. In 1971, a form and a signature is all it takes to become a new
00:03:26.580 man. John Emile List is dead to the world. Years later, John would describe the shift in his mindset.
00:03:34.380 I guess as time went on, I thought less and less of family.
00:03:40.960 I suppose I was just thankful to be living a free life
00:03:44.840 and I didn't want to be incarcerated if it wasn't necessary.
00:03:51.020 Thankful to be living a free life.
00:03:53.860 That is the man three weeks after he shot his wife in their eating space,
00:03:58.180 climbed the stairs and shot his mother, 0.56
00:04:00.460 and then waited out the afternoon to kill his three children 0.90
00:04:03.140 as they came home from school one at a time. 0.95
00:04:07.280 Now he has a new name, a new age, and a clean slate, if he can keep it.
00:04:13.260 For the next 18 years, one of the most wanted fugitives in the country
00:04:17.300 will hide in plain sight by being the most forgettable man in every room.
00:04:23.660 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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00:05:30.420 code Kelly at TakeLean.com. Denver, in the winter of 1971, does not know it has a new resident
00:05:38.220 and would not care if it did. Robert P. Clark takes a room at a motel called the Deauville,
00:05:44.820 then pays cash for a small trailer. $1,500, no questions asked, and no documentation of
00:05:52.040 where he purchased it. The trailer sits in a park of transients off Interstate 70 on the western
00:05:58.540 edge of the city. Everyone here is passing through or starting over or hiding. No one
00:06:04.680 asks him his business. Now he needs work. He is a certified public accountant with more than 20
00:06:11.460 years experience, a man who once sat in a bank vice president's office. But an accountant has
00:06:17.900 a name and a history and a paper trail, and Robert Clark cannot afford to test any of those yet.
00:06:25.240 So he takes one job open to a man with no past. He becomes a night cook. The kitchen is at a
00:06:32.520 holiday inn just across the interstate from his trailer near the city of Golden. Ski traffic off
00:06:38.820 the highway keeps the place busy and keeps it anonymous, a long way from downtown, which is how
00:06:44.420 he likes it. He works after dark, eggs, burgers, and coffee on the graveyard shift, the hours when
00:06:51.740 nobody looks closely at anybody. Nights suit him, fewer people. At work, Bob Clark trades the suit
00:06:59.920 and tie for a cook's apron. Those who know him later remember his neat appearance, and outside
00:07:06.040 the kitchen he continues to wear his coat and tie. There is a small, terrible coincidence folded into
00:07:12.340 those years. Every so often, a family from back east drives out to ski in Colorado and stops at
00:07:18.860 that same Holiday Inn. A family John List knows does just that. They are Helen's relatives,
00:07:27.000 her sister's family. Years later, Helen's nephew would do the math. The quiet cook on the morning
00:07:33.300 line, the one who might well have made their breakfast, was the uncle who had shot his Aunt
00:07:39.040 Helen to death at her own kitchen table. To the people in that kitchen, Bob Clark is reliable
00:07:45.240 and impossible to know. Asked where he is from, he says Pennsylvania one day and the Midwest the
00:07:51.680 next. Asked about a wife, he says she died of cancer, another time that she drank herself to
00:07:57.500 death. The lies are almost true, which is what makes them easy to carry. He is not inventing a 0.97
00:08:04.060 dead family out of nothing, he is describing his real one, the family killed by his own hand
00:08:10.100 and calling it fate. A divorced woman on the kitchen staff named Allie Bray takes an interest
00:08:16.920 in the gentlemanly cook with the mustache, a man who wears his cheap clothes well and looks to her
00:08:22.600 like someone who has had a bad break in life and could do better. One day she asks him straight out
00:08:28.760 whether there's a woman in his life. He lowers his head and says almost too quietly to hear
00:08:34.260 that there's no one. He gives her nothing more, and before long, Allie leaves the hotel for a
00:08:40.700 full-time job elsewhere, never saying goodbye. The one person Clark lets in, a little, is the man who
00:08:48.140 cleans the kitchen at night, an easygoing former cowboy named Bob Wetmore. The other cooks start
00:08:54.780 calling them the two Bobs, like Felix and Oscar, the odd couple of the graveyard shift. It is a 0.89
00:09:01.340 lukewarm friendship, two loners who do not push each other, but when Clark hears of better pay
00:09:07.360 at a country club kitchen, the two Bobs move on together. At 46, having killed the five people 0.65
00:09:14.800 who shared his name, John List finally makes a friend. Asked about those years decades later,
00:09:21.460 he does not reach for anything dramatic.
00:09:24.300 He reaches for the plainest words he has.
00:09:27.320 I just more or less existed and just go along and do what has to be done, I guess, to survive.
00:09:35.500 The psychiatrist who would study John List the longest,
00:09:38.740 the one the prosecution later put on the stand,
00:09:41.620 heard something colder underneath that word, survive.
00:09:45.820 To him, Denver was not exile.
00:09:48.900 He enjoyed his life in Denver.
00:09:50.780 It was a fresh stock for him in every sense of the word.
00:09:54.820 Remember, his problem was that he was overburdened.
00:09:57.480 He had been a failure in every way.
00:09:59.040 He saw his family as a burden, not a source of support.
00:10:02.580 They were all gone, poof.
00:10:04.520 And he was free.
00:10:06.040 Poof.
00:10:06.980 And he was free.
00:10:08.740 The sick wife, the disappointed mother, the mortgage he could not pay,
00:10:13.200 the three children whose futures he could not face,
00:10:16.100 all of it gone in a single November day.
00:10:19.620 The people of Westfield would not let go so easily.
00:10:23.820 The classmates who sat beside Patty in the drama workshop
00:10:27.100 and beside John and Fred at Roosevelt Junior High are terrified.
00:10:32.020 The man who killed their friends is on the loose and may not be finished.
00:10:35.540 What if he comes back? Would they be next?
00:10:38.720 At Redeemer Lutheran, where John List taught Sunday school and Patty sang in the choir,
00:10:43.960 the congregation quietly fears the same.
00:10:47.100 Pastor Eugene Raywinkle confides in the undertaker who buried the List family, Fred Poppy.
00:10:53.400 Gee, I hope he doesn't come around with a gun on us, Fred.
00:10:57.760 For weeks after the murders, whenever the door opens during service,
00:11:01.920 churchgoers' eyes dart to see who it is.
00:11:05.380 Bree's knoll stands empty as the season turns to spring, then summer.
00:11:10.040 Teenagers dare each other up the driveway of the 19-room mansion,
00:11:14.020 where the family was put to death.
00:11:15.580 The lawn is going to seed, and the lights are finally dark. Some break into the murder house,
00:11:22.100 as it's called, and sleep on the ballroom floor, on the very spot where John List laid his family.
00:11:29.200 Neighbors start noticing candlelight moving behind the boarded-up windows on dark nights.
00:11:34.180 Odd comings and goings. Laughter out in the bushes, which some of them take for chanting.
00:11:40.980 One night in January, dozens of motorcycles come down Hillside Avenue and circle the mansion in
00:11:46.340 the dark. Souvenir hunters strip the place of anything that will come loose. The mailbox,
00:11:52.440 the house numbers, the brass knocker. Local children repeatedly visit the family's grave
00:11:57.760 in the dead of night. Then, one night in late August of 1972, not quite ten months after the
00:12:04.940 murders, the house catches fire and burns to the ground. The Union County prosecutor, Carl Ash,
00:12:12.800 studies the aftermath and calls the blaze the work of a professional arsonist. No one is ever charged
00:12:19.040 and the cause is never officially determined. The empty lot becomes the haunted lot. The fire takes
00:12:25.760 the house and does nothing at all to tamp down the story. The lot is auctioned that December,
00:12:30.820 a year after the bodies were discovered.
00:12:33.940 The new owner builds a handsome new colonial
00:12:36.100 where the doomed mansion once stood.
00:12:39.420 Even with a new house, the address,
00:12:41.700 the very ground where the horror took place,
00:12:44.400 draws attention.
00:12:45.900 For years afterward, on Halloween night,
00:12:48.700 Westfield kids walk each other down Hillside Avenue
00:12:51.420 to stand in front of 431
00:12:53.680 and dare one another to peer into the dark.
00:12:57.540 It was a real-life horror story in Westfield.
00:12:59.860 There's an entire generation of people that were afraid John List was coming for them.
00:13:04.840 He was on the run for 18 years.
00:13:06.740 He became known as the boogeyman of Westfield.
00:13:09.320 The house fire took something else with it.
00:13:11.900 Set into the ceiling over the ballroom was a great panel of stained glass.
00:13:16.800 The man who later buys the empty lot, an art collector,
00:13:20.140 takes one look at the ruins and sees a genuine signed
00:13:23.180 Lewis Comfort Tiffany stained glass window worth $100,000 in 1971.
00:13:28.580 If he is right, John List spent his last years under that ceiling, collapsing under debt,
00:13:35.600 with a fortune bolted into the roof above his head. He never even knew it was there.
00:13:41.860 As the hunt for John List continued, and with it the legend of the man who annihilated his own
00:13:47.460 family, one story draws the attention of the FBI for years. Fifteen days after the List murders,
00:13:54.440 a man who calls himself Dan Cooper hijacks an airliner over the Pacific Northwest,
00:14:01.420 takes $200,000 in ransom, and jumps out of the back of the plane into the dark with a parachute,
00:14:07.660 floating down into American myth. The plane flies on without him and comes down safely in Reno,
00:14:15.120 with the rear stairs still hanging open behind it. No one, miraculously, was injured.
00:14:21.460 Two otherwise unremarkable men vanish within two weeks of each other in the fall of 1971.
00:14:28.360 The connection is easy to see.
00:14:30.720 The hijacker's police sketch bears a passing resemblance to the missing accountant,
00:14:35.220 so naturally people wonder if John List's solution to his money troubles involves a high-altitude stick-up.
00:14:42.920 List's abandoned car at JFK Airport makes the connection easy to draw.
00:14:47.900 The FBI takes it seriously enough to show List's photograph to the witnesses who had seen the hijacker.
00:14:54.040 They say this man is not the hijacker.
00:14:57.640 Even so, the Bureau cannot quite let it go.
00:15:00.920 John List stays on the official list of D.B. Cooper suspects until 1990.
00:15:07.620 Part of what feeds the rumor is a report that List had trained as a paratrooper in World War II.
00:15:14.320 Much like List himself, List's war record was unremarkable, a quiet posting as a medical
00:15:20.560 lab technician in Germany for the last gasp of the war.
00:15:24.800 John List did not vanish into a jungle or behind a beard.
00:15:29.340 Eventually, he puts back on the coat and tie and rebuilds, piece by piece, the same life
00:15:35.600 he had before the ballroom.
00:15:37.740 It begins with his church.
00:15:40.100 In June of 1975, Robert Clark joins St. Paul's Lutheran, an inner city parish on Grant Street
00:15:47.600 in downtown Denver. It is part of the strict Missouri Synod of his Michigan boyhood,
00:15:54.120 his mother's church, but with an important wrinkle. St. Paul's is a place where people
00:15:59.900 drift in to start over after their lives come apart, whether from drink or drugs or trouble
00:16:05.100 with the law, and its pastor does not pry into anyone's past. For a man like Robert Clark,
00:16:12.060 that is not a small gift. He becomes what he had been in New Jersey, the polite, dependable man
00:16:18.520 who never misses a Sunday. He volunteers to drive an elderly parishioner to Sunday service
00:16:24.000 every week without being asked. In tax season, he earns a little extra money preparing returns
00:16:29.960 for people who trust him with their numbers. In time, the congregation puts him on the finance
00:16:34.980 council, and then they make him treasurer. They hand the books to the accountant. He has been
00:16:41.620 here before. In his family, keeping the church's money is almost a birthright. His father was the
00:16:47.860 parish treasurer and accountant, and Alma raised her son to carry it on. Back in Michigan in the 0.75
00:16:53.740 1950s, when John List was made treasurer of his congregation, he phoned his mother, proud to tell
00:17:00.260 her he was keeping the tradition alive. This is the same John List who, holding power of attorney
00:17:06.520 over his mother's accounts years later, quietly drains more than $50,000 from her savings
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00:18:28.900 That's AquaTrue.com, A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com, promo code MKC. Slowly, he works his way off the night
00:18:37.960 cook line and back into accounting from a bookkeeper's desk at a carpet wholesaler
00:18:42.920 up to company comptroller again. But it is risky, this business of reclaiming John List's old habits.
00:18:51.340 In the spring of 1977, at a social for the single members of his church, the ghost man begins
00:18:58.500 building a second family. Her name is Dolores Miller. She is slender and soft-spoken, with
00:19:06.180 strawberry blonde hair, a refined church-going woman who has already survived one marriage that
00:19:11.740 failed her. She has no children. In Bob Clark, she sees a devout, courteous man who does not drink,
00:19:18.400 does not chase women, and seems to genuinely care about other people. In Dolores, John sees a
00:19:24.720 high-minded religious woman whose faith matches his own. They take to each other almost at once.
00:19:31.360 He tells her his first wife died of cancer. From the way he says it, Dolores can see the subject
00:19:36.640 pains him, so she lets it go and never raises it again. She never sees a photograph of that first
00:19:43.340 wife, she never thinks to ask for one. No one at the church ever does either. In November of 1985,
00:19:51.600 Bob and Dolores marry in Maryland, chosen because it is where her mother and family live so they
00:19:57.220 can meet Bob before the wedding. 34 years before, Maryland was where John List had married Helen,
00:20:03.460 too, in a Lutheran church in Baltimore County. Dolores is not a foolish woman. She's a careful 0.99
00:20:11.360 one, and she believes she has chosen well the second time. A steady Christian man who goes to
00:20:16.760 church every Sunday and raises his voice to no one. He is gentle. He is faithful in every way
00:20:23.320 she can check. Nothing in the life he shows her points back to Breeze Knoll. However, Bob Clark
00:20:30.560 has John List's same recurring problem, and it resurfaces. Bob and Dolores jointly own a modest
00:20:38.960 two-bedroom condo in Aurora, bought for about $27,000. It's the kind of small, sensible place
00:20:46.140 two careful people buy together. In the spring of 1986, five months after the wedding, Clark's
00:20:52.320 company computerizes its books and lets him go. One detail stands out. Around the time he leaves,
00:21:00.540 his personnel file also disappears from the office. Only three people can reach these records.
00:21:06.720 the company president among them, and Clark is one of them too. The man who once made John List
00:21:13.360 vanish knows how to make a file vanish with ease. They live on Dolores's salary and then on
00:21:20.640 Dolores's savings. She tells a neighbor flatly that if Bob does not start bringing in money,
00:21:26.380 she will leave him. He says little and keeps using credit cards as a substitute for money
00:21:31.620 he does not have. The Clarks give up on Colorado and try their luck elsewhere. Bob Clark answers
00:21:38.520 an out-of-state ad for an accounting job with a Richmond, Virginia firm. Early in 1988, he goes
00:21:45.340 east ahead of Dolores to get settled. This is the goodbye from the very end of the first episode.
00:21:52.640 Dolores in the doorway, watching her husband back the car down the driveway.
00:21:56.400 sure she has married a gentle widower named Bob. The widower part was true, but just a fraction of
00:22:03.620 the story. Bob finds a little brick ranch house in the suburbs of Midlothian with a plaque beside
00:22:10.160 the front door that reads, bless this house. 23 years, five murders, and 2,000 miles, and the man
00:22:18.360 has worked his way almost exactly back to where he began, only lower. The wreck of their Colorado
00:22:24.680 life follows them east. By the end of 1988, the condominium is foreclosed, and that December in
00:22:32.940 a note tucked inside a Christmas card to an old neighbor, Dolores writes about it. The condo has
00:22:39.660 been a big problem, and we don't know how to handle it. It is going to rob us of everything we own.
00:22:46.860 It is the exact sequence of events that ran John List to ruin in Westfield in 1971. The name has
00:22:54.260 changed, but the man has not. The people of Virginia see the same man Denver saw, and what
00:23:01.140 Westfield, New Jersey saw before that. An aging, fussy, humorless bookkeeper, and nothing more.
00:23:08.140 He and Dolores make friends with the couple next door, and Bob does their taxes and presses them
00:23:13.480 to fly an American flag. He even provides the flag. A co-worker notices only small, forgettable
00:23:20.280 things, that Bob Clark seems older than the age he gives, a man of 62 working to pass for 56,
00:23:28.700 that he can get strangely worked up over a dispute about paper towels or a carpool he wants no part
00:23:34.560 of. But nobody looks at a man fussing over paper towels and sees a mass murderer. There is no tell,
00:23:43.380 nothing in the small irritations that points back to the ballroom. What finally reached John List,
00:23:50.280 did not come from the FBI. It came from a television set. By the late 1980s, the John
00:23:57.800 List file is one of the oldest open murder cases in New Jersey. For some of the detectives who
00:24:03.020 carry it, it has become personal. For him to be gone for that many years and not be brought to
00:24:09.380 justice was like a personal affront to the office and to the Westfield Police Department.
00:24:15.240 Investigators try to put John List on television.
00:24:18.260 They pitch the case to the TV series Unsolved Mysteries, which passes.
00:24:22.960 They try pitching to a brand new Fox program called America's Most Wanted, hosted by a man named John Walsh.
00:24:31.400 Walsh's own young son, Adam, had been murdered, and he had turned that grief into a nationwide hunt for fugitives.
00:24:38.420 America's Most Wanted passes, too.
00:24:41.940 The John List case is nearly 18 years old,
00:24:44.780 older than almost anything the show would normally touch,
00:24:47.580 and it carries the problem that has defeated investigators for nearly two decades as well.
00:24:52.560 John Walsh would later explain the show's hesitation to American justice.
00:24:56.560 I mean, that was a real stretch to think about
00:24:59.420 doing a guy that nobody had a clue where he disappeared to,
00:25:03.660 or even remotely what he looked like.
00:25:07.060 No one knew what 18 years had done to his face.
00:25:10.000 In 1989, the newest photographs of John List are from the 1960s, a tall man in his 40s in
00:25:18.740 horn-rimmed glasses. You cannot circulate a fugitive's picture when your newest picture
00:25:23.880 is a quarter of a century old. One investigator will not let it go. A captain in the Union County
00:25:31.840 Prosecutor's Office named Frank Maronka learns that the executive producer of America's Most
00:25:37.800 wanted, is set to speak at a law enforcement conference in Wilmington, Delaware, in January
00:25:43.500 1989. Maronka and Sergeant Jeffrey Hummel of the Homicide Unit pack eight boxes of the List case
00:25:51.360 into a car and drive down for something called the Eastern Armed Robbery Conference. They check
00:25:57.920 into a hotel looking, as one of them puts it, like a pair of delivery men, and corner the producer,
00:26:03.720 Michael Linder, after his speech. Hummel describes the pivotal moment to News 12 New Jersey.
00:26:10.000 So I took him up to our hotel room and I laid the crime scene photos all across the beds.
00:26:15.160 And he began to examine the crime scene photos. And based on that, he gave a tentative approval.
00:26:22.100 The producer never forgets the photographs of the murdered family laid out across a hotel bedspread.
00:26:28.440 To run a man's story when they have no picture is a problem. The show needs a face. So they hire
00:26:36.840 a sculptor. His name is Frank Bender, a forensic artist in Philadelphia who builds faces out of
00:26:43.500 clay. Frank would later explain his process on Forensic Files. I get into the head of the person
00:26:49.540 in a sense. I want to become that person while I'm working on The Fugitive. I want to feel
00:26:54.100 like that person. I want to know everything about that person.
00:26:57.900 Bender has four weeks and no photograph worth using. What he does have is a profile. He brings
00:27:05.140 it to a corrections psychologist named Richard Walter and asks Walter an interesting hypothetical.
00:27:12.360 What kind of a man would John List have become at 65? Walter traces the killer's anger down to
00:27:19.220 its root. The perpetrator has a history of frustration and feeling entrapped by women.
00:27:28.020 Generally, women of their own age group are older or women in authority. The psychologist describes
00:27:33.780 the interior life he believes belongs to John List, a man who killed out of retaliation and
00:27:40.060 anger over his own failures, got away with it and has been living with the threat of exposure for
00:27:46.160 nearly 20 years. From that profile and the old photographs, Bender builds the head.
00:27:52.640 I had his mouth going down on the corners because of anxiety that I felt he carried with him from
00:28:00.340 committing these crimes. And Richard brought out that it wasn't guilt from killing his family,
00:28:07.800 but the anxiety of the fear of being caught. He gives it the sagging jowls of a heavy man
00:28:13.940 in his 60s, a receding hairline, gray hair, the pale skin of a man who has spent most of his life
00:28:20.780 indoors. He reproduces the little details the Westfield, New Jersey police file does have to
00:28:26.820 offer, down to the surgical scar that ran from behind the right ear to the collar line, and the
00:28:32.940 way that ear sat a little lower and closer to the skull than the other. He dresses the lower part of
00:28:38.860 the bust in a coat and tie, then makes one last choice out of pure psychology. He gives the face
00:28:46.060 a pair of eyeglasses with frames noticeably heavier than any John List has ever been known
00:28:51.760 to wear, because the profile said this man would feel the intense need to look like an authority.
00:28:58.280 When the police show the finished head to people who had actually known List in Westfield,
00:29:02.920 they're amazed. It's him, the older version of him. On the night of Sunday, May 21st, 1989,
00:29:13.080 America's Most Wanted runs its segment on the accountant who murdered his family and then
00:29:19.000 vanished. It runs about eight minutes in total. Host John Walsh walks the country through the
00:29:25.000 killings and the 18 years of silence. At the end of the John Liz story, they turn Frank Bender's
00:29:31.780 clay head slowly in front of the camera, a gray man in heavy glasses, and ask the oldest question
00:29:39.320 in this case. Do you know this man? An estimated 22 million people watch the episode.
00:29:48.080 Now tonight's first case, the oldest we've ever pursued on America's Most Wanted.
00:29:53.480 The suspect, John List, is accused of murdering his family 17 years ago. Robert P. Clark is one
00:30:00.800 of the 22 million watching, a mild bookkeeper in Midlothian, Virginia, who likes the show enough
00:30:06.940 that he encourages his own neighbor to watch it as well. And it was strange, but I thought,
00:30:12.660 I wonder if they're ever going to show my situation and do a program on me. And
00:30:20.460 I think it was within a month or two after that, they did have the show on. I saw the tail end of
00:30:27.740 but I saw that it was about me and saw the bust that they had.
00:30:33.500 I was surprised at how accurate it was.
00:30:37.080 I didn't realize that they had that technology.
00:30:40.360 By his own account, the most wanted man in America
00:30:43.120 sat in his living room in Virginia
00:30:45.200 and watched a clay copy of his own face
00:30:48.400 turn slowly on the screen, staring at him.
00:30:51.900 The original admiring the workmanship.
00:30:54.720 When the segment ends, the phones light up with hundreds of calls.
00:31:00.080 People who are sure and people who are guessing.
00:31:03.300 People who have seen a gray man in heavy glasses at a gas station or a church supper.
00:31:08.240 Most of it is the ordinary noise of a country just trying to help.
00:31:11.900 The one call that matters comes from a woman who had seen the resemblance two years earlier
00:31:17.500 and let herself be talked out of it.
00:31:20.140 Her name is Wanda Flannery, and she lived next door to the Clarks in Colorado.
00:31:27.360 She and Dolores became close enough that the two women kept trading letters after the Clarks moved east.
00:31:34.360 Two years before the broadcast, Wanda had been reading a supermarket tabloid, the Weekly World News,
00:31:42.120 when she came across a story about an old New Jersey murder case.
00:31:45.560 A man named John List had killed his entire family and disappeared.
00:31:51.740 The story included a wanted photo with it.
00:31:54.980 Wanda looked at that photo and felt something inside her go cold
00:31:58.700 because it looked to her like her neighbor, Bob, married to her friend.
00:32:04.220 She carried the paper next door, set it on Dolores' kitchen table,
00:32:08.320 put her finger on the face and said it out loud,
00:32:11.140 That's Bob.
00:32:12.980 Dolores looked from the flyer to a picture of her husband and shook her head.
00:32:18.280 It does look like Bob, she said, but it's not him.
00:32:21.520 Bob is much older.
00:32:23.480 A few days later, Wanda asked Dolores what Bob had said when she showed him the picture.
00:32:29.120 Dolores hadn't shown him.
00:32:31.580 She had thrown the paper away.
00:32:33.860 The resemblance had been spotted, named, and set down on a kitchen table in Colorado
00:32:39.000 two full years before anyone acted on it. The idea is too big to believe, and Bob is the last
00:32:46.920 man anyone wanted to accuse. Now, Wanda's watching America's Most Wanted. She sees the gray head
00:32:55.100 turning slowly on the screen in its heavy glasses, and the thought she set down two years ago comes
00:33:01.420 back with certainty. The man 22 million people are being asked to find had been living down the
00:33:08.820 street from her, and she knows it. An author named Timothy Benford, who researched the List
00:33:15.000 case for his book, Righteous Carnage, later describes Wanda's wake-up call this way to
00:33:20.260 American justice. It was a next-door neighbor, and when they did the report on the List murders,
00:33:26.660 she was convinced that that was Bob Clark, the neighbor who lived next door who had just moved
00:33:32.900 with his wife to Virginia.
00:33:35.880 Wanda's daughter, Eva, and son-in-law, Randall,
00:33:39.140 are with Wanda in the living room watching the show.
00:33:42.800 Eva and Wanda later remember
00:33:44.360 putting the pieces together in real time.
00:33:46.260 And it just all started adding up gradually
00:33:49.600 that he was an accountant and a Lutheran
00:33:53.240 and that he had a scar behind his ear
00:33:56.100 and that he was well put together and a classy dresser.
00:34:01.040 We said, oh, my God, that's Bob, Bob Clark.
00:34:06.300 Wanda turns off the TV,
00:34:08.480 retrieves a letter from Dolores' new street address,
00:34:11.420 and asks her son-in-law to make the call.
00:34:14.560 She is afraid for Dolores.
00:34:16.780 Her friend is still married to the man
00:34:18.280 who so closely resembles the bust
00:34:20.120 that was just spinning on her TV,
00:34:22.600 still living in that little house in Virginia
00:34:24.500 with the blessing on the door.
00:34:27.260 Randall calls the tip line once,
00:34:28.860 asks whether there is a reward for information and hangs up in a huff. Wanda begs him to call
00:34:35.780 again and simply give the team on the other end the address on the envelope from Dolores,
00:34:41.020 the woman they suspect is now married to a family annihilator. Not long after the broadcast ends,
00:34:48.200 the tip line for America's Most Wanted takes one fateful call. A family in Colorado wants to report
00:34:54.880 that the man depicted by the clay bust,
00:34:57.600 the man who used to be John List,
00:34:59.960 is alive and well
00:35:01.320 and living under the name Robert P. Clark.
00:35:05.100 And they have his home address in Virginia.
00:35:08.800 That's next time on MK Confidential.