The Megyn Kelly Show - August 13, 2026


The Annihilator： One At A Time — Ep. 3 ｜ MK Confidential

Hosted by
Megyn Kelly
Mentioned
John List Patricia Don Jr. Helen Alma Westfield Good Housekeeping Redeemer Lutheran Eugene Raywinkle Bill Curtis Boy Scouts Carl Ash Freddy Helens Judas Patty Colt Fred
Hong's SHOCK Loss in Wisconsin, Minnesota in Play with Tafoya, and WNBA Coach WHINES, with Emily Jashinsky ｜ Ep. 1378 Lindsay Clancy Trial Day 13, Leavitt Leaving WH, Deadly Army Helicopter Crash： AM Update 8⧸14

Episode Stats


Length

32 minutes

Words per minute

160.86

Word count

5,199

Sentence count

336

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

11

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:26.420 I came back in, said a few words to Helen, and went into the front room. 0.99
00:00:33.060 Then I came around back and shot her in the head.
00:00:37.260 That is John List, the quiet accountant, the Sunday school teacher who put on a pressed coat and tie 0.78
00:00:42.980 to collect his daughter from the police station at 2.30 in the morning.
00:00:47.120 It is Tuesday, November 9th, 1971.
00:00:50.720 Before the sun goes down, John List will murder all five members of his family.
00:00:55.720 one at a time inside the house known as Breeze Knoll. 0.97
00:01:00.840 He will not panic.
00:01:02.280 He will not flee, not yet.
00:01:04.600 He will stop and make himself a sandwich.
00:01:07.220 He will drive downtown and run his errands.
00:01:10.200 He will sit down that evening to dinner in the house
00:01:12.620 where his wife, his mother, and his three children lie dead.
00:01:17.060 And afterward, he will wash the dishes and go to sleep.
00:01:20.940 This is the day itself, hour by hour,
00:01:23.540 how a careful, church-going man spends a Tuesday murdering his family and tells himself the entire
00:01:30.240 time that he is saving them. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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00:02:54.380 It is not yet dawn, and John List sits at his desk in the dark, a loaded pistol in front of him,
00:03:01.020 waiting for his wife to come down and start the coffee. He has been planning this day for weeks.
00:03:06.620 He had even settled on an earlier date and let it come and go. Now the new date is here.
00:03:12.520 I kept thinking about it for several weeks, I'm sure maybe even a month. 0.99
00:03:18.340 And my final solution was that if I would kill them, that would save them from any problems. 0.97
00:03:28.880 Investigators were later able to piece together almost everything about the hours that follow, 0.99
00:03:33.880 from the evidence inside the house, from the paper trail of the errands that List ran that day,
00:03:38.940 and from the flat, careful account List would give, years later, himself.
00:03:44.780 This is the day they reconstructed.
00:03:47.200 It begins quietly.
00:03:48.780 The porch thermometer reads 28 degrees,
00:03:51.720 and the sky is only starting to gray toward a sunrise John knows,
00:03:55.700 because he has checked, will come at 6.36.
00:04:00.040 One by one, his three children come downstairs.
00:04:03.140 Patricia, 16, the aspiring actress,
00:04:05.400 still in trouble over the night the police brought her home,
00:04:08.940 John Jr., 15, the family athlete, big for his age.
00:04:13.260 Frederick, 13, the baby of the house.
00:04:16.660 There is no real breakfast.
00:04:18.200 The kids forage for themselves in the cabinets.
00:04:21.160 Patricia opens the refrigerator looking for milk and finds none.
00:04:25.280 One by one, they gather their school things and go out into the cold,
00:04:29.940 off to their three schools the way they have on a thousand mornings before.
00:04:34.320 Their father does not sit with them.
00:04:36.080 He stands at the window of his study behind a parted curtain and watches each of them go down the long driveway.
00:04:43.780 By his own account, he gives nothing away.
00:04:46.500 I tried not to act any different than I ordinarily would, so they wouldn't be suspicious.
00:04:52.220 John List has already started clearing the way.
00:04:55.440 Days earlier, he called to stop newspaper delivery to the house.
00:04:59.240 This morning, there is a note taped to the refrigerator in his own hand for the milkman,
00:05:03.760 who by long habit lets himself in the back door to check the milk order Helen always leaves.
00:05:09.160 This one says the family is going away and to hold the deliveries until further notice.
00:05:14.780 A little after 8.30, the milkman reads it and drives off.
00:05:18.580 At the window of his office, John watches quietly until the truck turns onto the street.
00:05:24.620 Then he sits with the morning newspaper, the same New York Times his neighbors are reading, over their own breakfasts, and he waits.
00:05:33.600 A few minutes later, Helen comes down.
00:05:37.600 She fills the kettle, sets it on the stove, and sits down at the kitchen table, waiting for it to boil.
00:05:44.660 She has no idea that her husband is standing across the center hall in his office with the Steyer M1912 in his hand.
00:05:53.000 It is the 9mm Austrian pistol he brought home from the war.
00:05:58.500 On the desk beside him lies a second gun, a small .22 caliber Colt revolver that had belonged to his father.
00:06:06.340 It, too, is loaded and ready.
00:06:09.980 John crosses the hall, approaches Helen from behind.
00:06:14.180 Helen appears to sense movement and begins to turn toward him.
00:06:17.860 He fires. 0.96
00:06:19.120 The first bullet hits her in the side of the face,
00:06:22.020 not the back of the head as intended,
00:06:24.080 and knocks her out of the chair.
00:06:26.300 He fires several more times,
00:06:27.900 some of the shots going into the wall,
00:06:30.360 one of them glancing off a radiator into the next room.
00:06:34.640 Then the kitchen is quiet
00:06:35.800 until the kettle begins to hiss on the stove.
00:06:39.560 Helen lies on the floor by the chair in her bathrobe
00:06:42.720 and her blood runs out across the striped linoleum.
00:06:46.980 while the sun comes in through the yellow curtains. Upstairs, John's mother has heard
00:06:51.980 the shots. John climbs the back stairs to the third floor, opens his mother's door without
00:06:58.140 knocking. Alma is in her small apartment kitchen, still in her nightgown, her white hair untidy
00:07:05.080 from sleep, a plate with butter on it in her hand, and her toast down in the toaster. She
00:07:12.120 looks at her son and asks him what the noise was downstairs. He shoots her once, in the
00:07:17.960 head, just above the left eye. Two more shots go into the wall. On the counter, her toast 0.86
00:07:25.440 pops up. In John's own telling years later with Bill Curtis on American Justice, there
00:07:31.840 is one more detail, one the evidence on site cannot confirm, a kiss.
00:07:38.120 She got over and greeted me and gave me a kiss.
00:07:43.940 And she said, what was that noise?
00:07:46.780 At that point, I felt like it was Judas having kissed her, too.
00:07:52.560 And I said, oh, it must have been some noise out in the back. 0.99
00:07:55.380 And as she got to the doorway, I killed her.
00:07:58.160 In his account, she gets as far as the doorway.
00:08:02.240 In the scene the police reconstruct, she never leaves the kitchen.
00:08:06.600 He wants to carry his mother downstairs to lay her with the others, but he cannot.
00:08:11.500 She's too heavy.
00:08:13.220 He drags her by a plastic runner into the narrow hall off of her kitchen and leaves her there.
00:08:19.340 He makes one quick pass at wiping the floor with a damp piece of newspaper, then leaves it.
00:08:25.500 It is not yet nine in the morning.
00:08:28.180 Two of the five are dead.
00:08:30.160 John List has most of his day still in front of him.
00:08:34.080 The first thing he does is clean.
00:08:37.100 Before the phone calls, before the errands,
00:08:39.460 he goes back down to the kitchen where Helen lies
00:08:41.740 and tidies up the way he has tidied up after himself his whole life.
00:08:48.420 He describes it decades later in the same even tone he used for everything else.
00:08:53.420 I was very surprised at the amount of blood that, you know, drained out.
00:08:58.520 And I think there was some shell casing, you know,
00:09:01.560 and some of her false teeth had gotten broken
00:09:08.060 and were out on both the table and on the floor.
00:09:14.040 I cleaned all that up.
00:09:16.200 Then, with two members of his family dead in the house,
00:09:19.560 John List does not fall apart.
00:09:22.160 He works the day like a list of errands.
00:09:24.520 He calls the insurance agency he still sells for,
00:09:27.600 timing it so the answering service picks up instead of a person
00:09:30.520 and leaves word that a family emergency is taking the lists to North Carolina where Helen's mother
00:09:36.980 is gravely ill. It is a lie, of course, and it is the cover story that will hold for weeks.
00:09:44.220 Over the coming days, he will keep feeding it. A note to each of the children's schools,
00:09:49.140 a phone call to Patricia's drama teacher to say the girl will miss the next rehearsal.
00:09:53.980 The mail, the milk, and the newspaper already stopped. Every loose thread that might draw
00:09:59.760 attention to the house is snipped off in advance he walks out into the cold and rakes the leaves
00:10:06.240 he comes back inside makes himself a sandwich and eats it at the kitchen table 30 years later
00:10:14.240 connie chung will try to get him to explain that sandwich on abc you ate lunch in the kitchen where
00:10:21.820 you had shot your wife in cold blood that's correct how could you i was hungry
00:10:26.720 it was just the way it was by his own account once the first shot was fired 0.99
00:10:36.660 there was never a moment he considered stopping were you determined to kill them once i made the
00:10:42.400 plan yeah then it's just like dj you you go in you're there's no stopping and after after you
00:10:51.600 start. The children are still at their schools, still alive. In his own mind, not one of them can
00:10:58.160 be allowed to come home and find the two women gone. I just felt that once I had started,
00:11:04.620 it was incumbent upon me to kill all of the children so that not even one of them would 1.00
00:11:11.640 remain and suffer the trauma. A little after noon, the plan hits a snag. The one thing he did not 0.99
00:11:19.940 schedule. The phone rings. It is Patricia. She has left school feeling sick and walked to Duke's
00:11:27.340 Deli, a luncheonette in town, and she wants her father to come get her. It is the smallest,
00:11:33.260 most ordinary thing, a teenage girl asking her father for a ride, and it makes her next.
00:11:40.560 So John drives in and picks up his daughter, the one he has clashed with the most. The girl who
00:11:46.980 told her friends and her drama teacher that her father means to kill her. He brings her home and
00:11:52.220 gets inside ahead of her. Patricia comes in through the back of the house, where her father is now
00:11:58.020 waiting. It's over in a moment. One shot through her left jaw at close range. The bullet ricochets
00:12:06.580 off bone and exits Patricia's left temple. John carries Patricia into the ballroom, laying her on
00:12:13.700 the bare floor still in her coat under the big stained glass skylight. There are still two boys
00:12:20.360 to come home and hours to fill before they do. So John List runs the rest of his errands. He drives
00:12:27.500 into downtown Westfield. At the drive-in window of his bank, he cashes a check for $85 on the
00:12:33.400 account he shared with Helen and enters the new balance in the checkbook, $24.14. At the post
00:12:40.660 office, he mails a letter addressed to himself with a small key sealed inside that will unlock
00:12:46.660 the desk in his study. List does not explain this move, but he does tape a note to the top of the
00:12:52.360 desk, which reads, quote, to the finder, please contact the proper authorities. The key to this
00:12:58.820 desk is in an envelope addressed to myself. The key will not surface for a month until the police
00:13:06.700 dig it out of the family's held mail. By then, the police have forced the desk and filing cabinet
00:13:12.100 open. At a second window, chosen as if he had just remembered one more errand, he files the form to
00:13:20.140 hold that mail for 30 days. On his way out, he mails the notes to the children's schools. Then
00:13:27.000 he drives back to the bank and cashes a second check, emptying the account he shared with his
00:13:32.900 mother. At the main branch, a teller walks him back to the safe deposit vault and he signs in
00:13:38.540 at 1.37 in the afternoon and back out at 1.57. 20 minutes exactly. In the safe deposit box are
00:13:46.680 the last of Alma's savings. Government bonds worth a little over $2,000. The final piece of
00:13:53.300 an inheritance he's been quietly draining for years. More than $50,000 of his mother's money
00:13:59.860 moved out from under her a little at a time. He cashes the bonds. With characteristic precision,
00:14:07.800 he asks the teller to write down each bond and what it is worth, he says, for his mother's
00:14:13.220 records. His mother has been dead for five hours. At three o'clock, the youngest, Frederick,
00:14:20.040 is at his after-school job when word reaches him that his sister has gone home sick.
00:14:25.020 He telephones his father.
00:14:26.860 A secretary who overhears the call never forgets the one thing the boy says into the phone.
00:14:32.540 What happened to Patty?
00:14:34.440 His father drives down and picks him up.
00:14:37.840 Once home, Fred does not get his coat off.
00:14:40.820 He dies just inside the back door from a single shot and is carried in to lie beside his mother,
00:14:48.120 his head set so that it just barely touches hers.
00:14:52.620 That leaves only John Jr., the only one of them who gets the chance to fight and the one who
00:14:59.440 stands the best chance at it. It is so cold that afternoon that the boy's soccer practice is
00:15:05.300 canceled, so he comes home early, walking up the long driveway with his gym bag over his shoulder.
00:15:12.360 His father has to scramble into place behind the kitchen door. This time, it goes wrong.
00:15:17.980 John Jr. hears his father move behind the door. He does not walk in blind like the others. He sees
00:15:25.620 the gun come up, and he moves. The first bullet aimed at the boy's head catches him in the back
00:15:31.820 instead, because John Jr. twisted away. The next one does not kill him either. He goes down and
00:15:38.580 tries to crawl across the floor, still wearing his winter gloves, while his father fires with
00:15:43.980 Both guns now, and then John keeps firing the little .22 into his son until it clicks empty.
00:15:53.140 John Jr. does not die immediately.
00:15:56.660 By the time it's over, the boy has been shot ten times.
00:16:01.300 The other children each died from a single wound.
00:16:04.480 Later, John List will insist that sparing his children any pain was the whole point.
00:16:10.420 The body of his 15-year-old son shot again and again and again
00:16:25.360 as he crawled across the floor trying to save himself, says otherwise.
00:16:30.940 When the boy finally stops moving, his father drags him along a smear of his own blood
00:16:36.600 out of the kitchen and into the ballroom, laying him at the far end of the row, a little apart from
00:16:43.000 the rest. By late afternoon, it is finished. Five people in one house in a single day. Helen,
00:16:52.940 his wife of nearly 20 years. Alma, his mother, whose little prince he had once been. Patricia,
00:16:59.800 16, John 15, and Frederick 13. What settles over John List by his own account is not horror,
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00:18:30.980 promo code MKC. Now John List creates the scene the police will find four weeks later.
00:18:37.940 He brings the family's forest green sleeping bags up from the basement,
00:18:41.760 the Boy Scout bags with Be Prepared printed along the lining, the ones the boys carried on camping
00:18:48.900 trips as he lays his wife and three children out on the ballroom floor, side by side, the children
00:18:55.840 on their backs, still in their winter coats. He covers Helen and lays a towel over her face.
00:19:04.020 He moves her stiffening arm so that it rests across Freddy's shoulder, whether he means it
00:19:09.380 as a last gesture of protection or only as part of the arrangement, no one can say. From across
00:19:17.060 the room, the four bodies appear to lie in the shape of a cross. Then John List kneels down
00:19:22.440 beside them and prays over his family, each one of them by name. In the evening, he writes out the
00:19:31.560 Why? Five pages on a yellow legal pad addressed to Eugene Raywinkle,
00:19:38.440 the pastor of the family's own church, Redeemer Lutheran,
00:19:41.560 the man under whom he had taught Sunday school.
00:19:43.940 I guess I just felt closest to him and felt that since I was a member of his congregation,
00:19:51.260 that he deserved a more complete explanation.
00:19:57.160 He writes the note like a memo.
00:19:58.800 There's no anguish in it. There's no wildness in the handwriting. The paragraphs are orderly and
00:20:05.180 neat. Here is some of that letter. He begins with an apology to the pastor, quote, I am very sorry
00:20:12.840 to add this additional burden to your work, he writes. I know that what I have done is wrong
00:20:18.640 from all that I have been taught, and that any reasons that I might give will not make it right.
00:20:23.480 But you are the one person that I know that, while not condoning this, will at least partially
00:20:28.260 understand why I felt that I had to do this. The reasons are numbered. One, quote, I wasn't earning
00:20:36.360 anywhere near enough to support us. Everything I tried seemed to fall to pieces. Two, the lifestyle
00:20:42.900 and shame of going on welfare was, quote, just more than I thought they could and should endure,
00:20:49.500 end quote. Reason three, quote, with Pat being so determined to get into acting, I was also fearful
00:20:56.520 as to what this might do to her continuing to be a Christian,
00:21:00.080 I'm sure it wouldn't have helped, end quote.
00:21:03.340 And finally, reason number four, quote,
00:21:07.240 with Helen not going to church,
00:21:09.360 I knew that this would harm the children eventually in their attendance.
00:21:13.180 I had continued to hope that she would begin to come to church soon, end quote.
00:21:17.880 But when John mentioned the possibility of Helen speaking with a church elder,
00:21:22.500 he writes that Helen, quote,
00:21:23.660 just blew up and stated that she wanted her name taken off the church rolls.
00:21:29.140 John cites the combination of these challenges as the justification for his actions. He writes,
00:21:34.320 quote, so that is the sum of it. If any one of these had been the condition, we might have
00:21:40.460 pulled through, but this was just too much. At least I'm certain that all have gone to heaven
00:21:45.440 now. He adds, of course, mother got involved because doing what I did to my family would
00:21:50.760 have been a tremendous shock to her at this age. Therefore, knowing that she is also a Christian,
00:21:56.100 I felt it best that she be relieved of the troubles of this world that would have hit her.
00:22:01.120 After it was all over, I said some prayers for them all from the hymn book. That was the least
00:22:06.260 that I could do. He continues, quote, I leave myself in the hand of God's justice and mercy.
00:22:12.420 I don't doubt that he is able to help us, but apparently he saw fit not to answer my prayers
00:22:17.820 the way I had hoped that they would be answered. As an aside John writes tersely quote also I'm sure
00:22:24.960 many will say how could anyone do such a horrible thing? My only answer is it isn't easy and was
00:22:31.900 only done after much thought. Finally John concludes his letter quote please remember me in
00:22:38.580 your prayers I will need them whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it. I'm only
00:22:44.700 concerned with making my peace with God, and of this I am assured because of Christ dying, even
00:22:50.340 for me. He gives instructions in the letter too, simply and without emotion. He tells his pastor
00:22:56.880 where his mother should be buried, back in Michigan, next to her own people, and whom to
00:23:02.240 contact. He mentions, almost in passing, that he had wanted to do this a week earlier, on the 1st
00:23:08.200 of November, All Saints Day, a day he thought fitting for sending souls to heaven, and that
00:23:13.640 some travel arrangements he still had to make had held him back. He had, in other words, penciled
00:23:19.000 the murders of his family onto the calendar and then rescheduled them. The pastor is not the only
00:23:25.760 person John writes that night. There are notes to Helen's mother and to his mother's sister and to
00:23:31.640 his own boss at the insurance company. In the letter to his boss, John List, ever the diligent
00:23:37.540 employee, tidily describes his outstanding sales leads and reminds the man about a $500 debt as
00:23:45.200 though the accounts should be kept in order after he is gone. No loose ends. In the letter, he also
00:23:52.220 adds a line meant to soften what he has done. It may look cowardly, he writes, that he always shot
00:23:59.300 them from behind, but he simply could not stand for a single one of them to realize in their final
00:24:04.220 moments what was about to happen to them. It is the story he needs to be true, that none of them
00:24:11.920 saw it, that he spared them that much at least. The autopsies say otherwise. The wounds are on
00:24:20.440 the fronts and sides of their faces, not the backs of their heads. Helen took hers, turning toward
00:24:26.380 him, his mother above the left eye, looking straight at her son as he murdered her. Patricia
00:24:33.800 through her left jaw the moment she stepped inside.
00:24:37.460 Frederick, a single shot to the left temple from the side.
00:24:41.760 John Jr. took his first in the back
00:24:43.740 only because he threw himself out of the way.
00:24:47.580 When the medical examiners are finished,
00:24:49.300 the record is plain.
00:24:50.640 Most of his family did see him
00:24:52.800 and the gun in the last second of their lives.
00:24:56.640 They knew he was murdering them.
00:24:59.640 So even here, alone with a legal pad,
00:25:02.300 John List is not telling the truth, not to his pastor, not to God, most of all it seems not to
00:25:09.000 himself. At the very bottom of the page after his signature comes one last line in the tone of a man
00:25:16.840 reminding someone to water the plants perhaps. His mother, he notes, is in the hallway on the third
00:25:23.600 floor. She was too heavy to move. John List goes back through the house gathering up or destroying
00:25:30.180 the family photographs, no one ever establishes what became of them. Then he cooks himself dinner
00:25:36.460 and eats it slowly, then washes the dishes and sets them in the rack to dry.
00:25:41.900 Asked years later how a man does that, he points to his time in the army,
00:25:47.300 a war record he tends to exaggerate. Having been in combat, you know, we were out
00:25:52.680 killing and fighting and then we'd come in and have something to eat. I think that's what allowed
00:25:58.180 me to eat peacefully in the room that I had filled my family. Then he goes down to the billiard room
00:26:05.240 in the basement directly beneath the ballroom where his family lies and he goes to sleep. He
00:26:11.040 later says he slept well. In the morning before it is light John closes up the house. He turns
00:26:17.500 the thermostat down to 50 degrees cold enough as investigators later note to slow the body's decay
00:26:23.960 and delay the smell of it reaching the street.
00:26:27.560 He switches on the lights in every room but the ballroom,
00:26:30.600 which he leaves dark.
00:26:32.400 He sets the trash out by the back door,
00:26:34.840 the way a family would on any ordinary night.
00:26:38.020 He leaves the radio playing, tuned, as it always is in this house,
00:26:41.860 to WQXR, the classical station out of New York,
00:26:46.180 piped through the intercom into every room.
00:26:49.200 He has a reason for that.
00:26:50.420 I felt that if some intruder wanted to get into the house, that they might back off if they've heard music and thought that people were in the house.
00:27:01.280 That was another reason I left all the lights on, I believe, to make it look like there were people there.
00:27:07.380 Then John List walks out the back door into a cold drizzle, slides into the family's old Impala, and drives away from Breeze Knoll for the last time.
00:27:16.940 He drives down through the empty business district, past a dark movie marquee, and points the car toward New York.
00:27:25.920 He crosses the bridges out to Kennedy Airport and ditches the Impala in long-term parking, a nondescript car tucked into a crowded row.
00:27:35.040 On the front seat, he sets a small neat pile, his Michigan alumni card and his accountant's license, the last tidy paperwork of a man named John List.
00:27:48.080 Then he walks off across the lot toward the terminals.
00:27:51.700 In his own mind, he is not yet a fugitive. He is a man taking himself somewhere to rest.
00:27:57.620 I just thought I would like to see the mountains and relax a little bit because I had been under a lot of strain.
00:28:04.360 Behind him, back in New Jersey, Breeze Knoll stands with every window lit against the dark
00:28:10.980 of a November morning, music drifting through its rooms, looking for all the world like a house
00:28:17.020 where a family is waking up. By the time anyone learns otherwise, John List is gone. He stays gone
00:28:25.360 for nearly 18 years. John List's plan works. For the better part of a month, the lie does
00:28:34.660 exactly what he built it to do. Neighbors see the raked yard and the burning lights and the
00:28:39.840 family car gone, and they assume what he wants them to assume, that the lists are away,
00:28:45.640 caring for a sick relative, just as the notes claimed. Twice, Westfield police officers come
00:28:51.860 to the door on a welfare check and get no answer. They look the place over and leave satisfied that
00:28:58.180 nothing is wrong. When the police finally enter the house, discover the bodies, and open John's
00:29:04.440 letter, they have a signed five-page confession that names the killer. What they do not have is
00:29:11.240 the killer himself. The police notice one more thing written on that letter, the date at the top,
00:29:17.240 11-9-71. Nearly a month passes before anyone finally gets inside the mansion and finds the
00:29:25.580 family dead and decaying on the night of December 7th, 1971. John List has a four-week head start.
00:29:34.880 His passport is gone. Helens is still in the house and investigators begin to believe
00:29:40.540 that he may have already slipped out of the country. At Kennedy Airport, a Port Authority
00:29:46.840 officer running a routine check for stolen cars in the long-term lot finally spots the family
00:29:52.360 Impala, its expired inspection sticker catching his eye. He runs the plate and it traces back
00:29:58.600 to Breeze Knoll. John's stack of identification is still sitting neatly on the front seat
00:30:03.880 exactly where he left it. The Union County prosecutor, Carl Ashe, will say they have
00:30:09.260 more than enough to indict. What they do not have and cannot seem to get is the faintest idea of
00:30:15.580 where on earth John List has gone. It is a peculiar kind of nightmare for the men working
00:30:21.840 the case. They are not trying to solve a whodunit. They know who did it and how. He has even left
00:30:28.160 them his own explanation for why. They are only trying to find him, a mild, forgettable man who
00:30:34.980 has had a month to become someone else, somewhere in a country of then 200 million people, who
00:30:41.160 slipped away before anyone even knew to start looking. It is a rare and staggering crime.
00:30:48.220 In 1971, a man who wipes out his entire family in a single afternoon and then simply disappears
00:30:54.900 is unheard of. Westfield has never seen anything like it, and neither have the people hunting for
00:31:00.560 the man who did it. The FBI puts out John List's face across America on a flyer that describes a
00:31:07.440 six-foot, gray-haired, 46-year-old accountant, armed and considered very dangerous. Most
00:31:14.360 specifically, the flyer describes him as a neat dresser, which is not particularly helpful to the
00:31:19.560 investigation, and so fits 10,000 mild middle-aged men. The alert goes out to every state, to police
00:31:27.820 departments and post offices across the country. Tips come back by the hundreds, with sightings
00:31:33.180 from Oregon to England. Each one must be run down. Each one turns out to be someone else.
00:31:40.140 Within weeks, the trail goes cold. John List, who murdered his entire family and then slept
00:31:46.100 soundly in his stately Victorian house, has simply stepped out of the known world.
00:31:52.460 Next time on MK Confidential, the 18 years John List spends as a new man, or at least under a new
00:32:00.100 name, a quiet, church-going accountant, a new wife who has no idea whom she is married to,
00:32:07.320 and a sculptor who will one day give authorities the face of a vanished man
00:32:12.000 they are desperate to find. John List gets away with murder until a TV show changes everything.