The Megyn Kelly Show - August 12, 2026


The Annihilator： The Man At The Train Station — Ep. 2 ｜ MK Confidential


Episode Stats


Length

33 minutes

Words per minute

167.22

Word count

5,569

Sentence count

363

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

11

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

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 .
00:00:00.520 Recently, our company's softball team lost the big game by one run.
00:00:04.820 Then Dale tried to console us with the quote,
00:00:07.220 winning isn't everything.
00:00:09.080 Well, Dale and I are very different.
00:00:12.760 I get early payout from Bet365.
00:00:14.700 If my team goes up big, I get paid out instantly,
00:00:17.500 even if they blow the lead later.
00:00:19.500 Sound familiar, Dale?
00:00:21.280 Thanks, Bet365.
00:00:22.940 Must be 19 or older, Ontario only.
00:00:24.440 Please play responsibly.
00:00:25.260 If you have questions or concerns about your gambling
00:00:26.700 or the gambling of someone close to you,
00:00:27.740 please go to connexontario.ca TNC Supply.
00:00:30.000 It is a hot summer night in 1971, well past two in the morning, and the desk sergeant at the
00:00:36.060 Westfield, New Jersey police station is watching over two teenage girls. Their crime is close to
00:00:41.800 nothing, staying out past midnight with cigarettes, laughing their way down a main street that had
00:00:47.120 long since gone dark. In a comfortable town like Westfield, that alone is enough to get you brought
00:00:52.140 in. So they sit and they wait, red-eyed, for someone to come and claim them. The first father
00:00:58.160 arrives rumpled and half asleep, annoyed at the police for not simply driving his daughter home.
00:01:03.620 It's an ordinary dad reaction, the kind of father anyone would recognize. The second father
00:01:09.420 is not like that. The second girl is Patricia List. When her father walks into the police
00:01:16.020 station at half past two in the morning, he is wearing a suit, a pressed suit, a clean white
00:01:22.640 shirt, a dark tie, and a faint smell of aftershave. He had been asleep. Someone called to say his
00:01:29.540 daughter was at the station, and before he drove down to get her, John List stopped to put on a
00:01:35.340 pressed coat and tie. The police chief, James Moran, hears about it the next morning, and it
00:01:40.900 sticks with him. Who gets up and puts on a suit, Moran wonders, with a white shirt and tie at 2.30
00:01:47.520 in the morning. One of his officers has an answer. Oh, I know that guy, says the officer. Lives in
00:01:53.720 the big house up on Hillside Avenue. I've seen him out there mowing his lawn in a suit and tie.
00:01:59.900 That night, driving home, John List does not say one word to his daughter. He is a man who almost
00:02:06.320 never raises his voice, but once they are inside the house in the front hall under a big amber
00:02:12.200 chandelier, something in him lets go. You are out of control. He yells at her. You are going straight
00:02:20.680 to hell and there is nothing I can do about it. Four months later, Chief James Moran will stand 0.99
00:02:27.460 in the ballroom of that same house and look down at the bodies of Patricia List and her mother and
00:02:33.680 her two brothers and her grandmother. And the first thing that will come into his head is the man in
00:02:39.400 the suit and tie at 2.30 in the morning. The guy in the suit, he thinks. That guy did this.
00:02:48.360 In this episode, we go back, way back to the beginning, to find out who that man was
00:02:52.960 and how a shy, devout accountant came to murder his entire family and to tell himself right up
00:02:59.960 to the end that he was doing the right thing. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
00:03:10.020 AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts.
00:03:16.720 And criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you.
00:03:20.480 How? It's called title fraud. Your property records are public by law. Your name, your address,
00:03:26.560 even your signature. It's all sitting in a database anyone can access. A cyber scammer
00:03:31.900 can pull your records, use AI to forge a transfer document, file it with your county,
00:03:36.660 in on paper, boom, they're the new legal owner of your property. Then they can borrow against
00:03:42.080 your equity or even sell your property long before you realize anything is even wrong.
00:03:47.940 But let me tell you about Home Title Lock. They monitor your property's title 24-7. They alert
00:03:53.960 you of any changes. And if you are a victim, their team of restoration experts will spend up to $1
00:03:59.700 million restoring your title. So when's the last time you checked your title records?
00:04:05.680 You can do it today. Use my promo code MEGAN at HomeTitleLock.com to get a free title history
00:04:12.420 report, plus a free trial of million-dollar triple lock protection so you can make sure
00:04:17.840 you're not already a victim. That's HomeTitleLock.com, promo code MEGAN, or use the link in the
00:04:23.500 description. John Emile List comes into the world on September 17, 1925 in Bay City, Michigan,
00:04:30.680 a cold industrial town on a river near Lake Huron. He is an only child and from the very first day
00:04:37.200 he is the center of his mother's world. His father is old and cold. John Frederick List is 64 when his
00:04:46.020 son is born, a stern German immigrant with a dry goods store and a booming voice. A man who deals
00:04:52.340 with his son mostly through his wife and refers to him always as the boy. His mother Alma is warm
00:04:59.440 but controlling. Intensely religious, she is a devout member of the strict Missouri Synod branch 1.00
00:05:05.720 of the Lutheran Church, and she raises her son inside a kind of cocoon. She reads the Bible with 0.64
00:05:11.800 him every night, keeps him indoors, away from the other children, away from the street, away from
00:05:16.980 anything that might be a bad influence, afraid he could catch a cold or get his hands dirty.
00:05:23.020 A neighbor once described Alma as a queen, erect and precise, and called little Johnny
00:05:28.860 her prince. He grows up living neatly to the point of strangeness. The family lives on the
00:05:34.800 ground floor of the house, and the boy sleeps on a couch in the parlor, a room with no door,
00:05:40.200 and every single morning he has to fold away his sheets and his books and every trace that he had
00:05:45.560 ever been there. John learns to leave nothing behind. Quote, he was the neatest little boy I
00:05:50.920 ever saw. A woman who rented from the family said years later, you never knew he was around.
00:05:56.880 Another classmate put it a different way.
00:05:59.140 He was there, but he just blended into the background.
00:06:02.960 The little boy who leaves no trace.
00:06:05.760 He was good at that.
00:06:07.740 Years later, List will describe that time himself to journalist Bill Curtis on American Justice
00:06:12.580 in a voice as flat and orderly as everything else about him.
00:06:16.700 It was a quiet childhood.
00:06:20.400 I was an only child.
00:06:22.020 and we were no brothers or sisters to either play with or fight with.
00:06:27.760 What Alma wants from her son is order and respectability and, above all, faith.
00:06:33.540 And for a long time, that is exactly what he gives her.
00:06:36.460 He is patriotic, and he joins the Army in 1943, right out of high school.
00:06:41.620 He does not see much of the war.
00:06:43.580 He trains in the swamps of Louisiana, ships off to Europe in the last months of fighting,
00:06:47.940 and is home again by 1946, having spent all told less than a year overseas. He comes back with a
00:06:55.420 handful of standard service metals, a couple of which he will quietly inflate over the years
00:07:00.200 into something grander, and with one souvenir he is genuinely proud of, a Steyr M 1912, an Austrian
00:07:07.880 automatic pistol he bought off of another soldier in 1944. He will not fire it again for another
00:07:14.480 27 years. While John is still in uniform, his father dies. John takes leave to go home for
00:07:21.980 the funeral, and the thing people remember about him there is that he shows no grief at all. He
00:07:28.180 holds the neighbor's new baby. He's polite. He seems, one relative said, as if nothing has
00:07:33.960 happened, like this is all just a part of his day. After the war, he does something else his
00:07:39.560 mother Alma always wanted. He goes to the University of Michigan on the GI Bill. John
00:07:45.600 studies accounting, earns a business degree and then a master's, and becomes a certified public
00:07:50.940 accountant. Accounting suits John. It is orderly, everything adds up or is supposed to, and he takes
00:07:58.380 a job with a prestigious firm. When the Korean War comes, he is called back as a commissioned
00:08:03.760 officer, which pleases both John and his mother, and he spends that war safely stateside in
00:08:10.000 Virginia, touring Civil War battlefields on his days off. He loves history. He loves the study
00:08:16.260 of old battles. It is now 1951. John is 26 years old, and he has never had a real girlfriend.
00:08:25.600 A few forgettable dates in college, nothing that lasted. With women, he is almost completely
00:08:31.220 inexperienced. Today they might call him an incel or involuntarily celibate. Then on a Saturday 0.99
00:08:38.200 night in October that same year, John goes bowling with a couple of other young officers in Newport
00:08:43.960 News, Virginia. And in the next lane is a thin, pretty young woman named Helen. Helen Taylor is
00:08:51.640 a war widow. Her first husband, a soldier named Marvin, had been killed in Korea just months
00:08:56.880 before, and she is raw with grief, out that night mostly because her sister dragged her along.
00:09:03.240 She's a little older than John, far more experienced and nothing at all like him.
00:09:08.620 Where John is timid and careful, Helen is impulsive and full of life, quick to laugh,
00:09:14.560 quick to dance, quick to spend money she does not have. John falls hard for her almost immediately.
00:09:22.320 Helen is newly widowed, deeply unsettled, and drawn to John's steadiness.
00:09:27.020 Within weeks, she is telling him she's pregnant, and John, who does not seem embarrassed by
00:09:31.940 any of it, tells an army friend we have to get married.
00:09:35.240 On December 1st, 1951, less than two months after they met at that bowling alley, John
00:09:41.420 and Helen are married in a Lutheran church in Baltimore.
00:09:45.420 Helen does not come into this marriage alone.
00:09:48.180 She has a nine-year-old daughter from her first marriage, Brenda,
00:09:51.260 who at first resents the quiet, mild-mannered stranger stepping into her dead father's place,
00:09:56.560 but takes almost no time at all to change her mind.
00:09:59.660 Within a few years, John is taking her ice fishing on the frozen Saginaw River,
00:10:04.080 coaching her through her Lutheran instruction,
00:10:06.760 making pizza for the family on Saturday nights,
00:10:09.140 and Brenda is calling him Daddy.
00:10:11.720 Brenda would later say of her stepfather,
00:10:14.640 If I did something wrong, he never cut me down.
00:10:16.520 He always listened to me. He was there for me. Brenda marries at 18. By 1971, she is grown and
00:10:24.620 long gone, a married and divorced mother of five. She settled near Kalamazoo, Michigan,
00:10:30.660 and stayed in the Midwest when the rest of the List family moved east to New Jersey.
00:10:36.160 John's mother had wanted so much more for her, Chani, as she called him. And from the day John
00:10:41.260 first brings his new wife home to Michigan, Alma treats Helen with a cold contempt she barely
00:10:47.260 bothers to hide. Helen, for her part, shuts out the old woman. The two most important people in 1.00
00:10:53.680 John List's life will spend the next 20 years quietly at war, and John will spend those years
00:10:59.280 standing between them, trying and failing to please them both. Shortly after the wedding,
00:11:05.500 Helen tells John she had been wrong. She was not pregnant after all. Whatever he privately thinks,
00:11:13.660 he remains in the marriage. He is married now to a beautiful woman, and that is what a respectable
00:11:18.720 man is supposed to be. Years later, a psychiatrist who evaluates John List will trace a lifetime of
00:11:25.920 quiet resentment back to this beginning. Here's Dr. Stephen Simring speaking to A&E. He was forced
00:11:33.100 to marry her because she said she was pregnant. It turned out that she was not pregnant. And then
00:11:38.080 years later, he was resentful about his impression that she perhaps had misled him as a way of getting
00:11:43.700 him to marry her. Eventually, the children come. Patricia in 1955, John Jr., the year after that.
00:11:51.620 Frederick, two years later. On the surface, for a while, the lists are exactly the family John
00:11:57.020 always meant to have. Underneath, however, it doesn't hold. John List has a problem, and it is
00:12:04.780 the same problem over and over in one town after another. He is good at the narrow, tidy work of
00:12:11.560 an accountant, the columns and the ledgers. He is not good at managing people, selling himself,
00:12:18.480 or reading a room. Employers keep deciding politely that he is not quite what they hoped for,
00:12:24.780 So the family keeps moving, chasing the next job, each one supposed to be the fresh start.
00:12:31.400 Michigan, then Rochester, New York, and a good run at the Xerox company, where by 1965,
00:12:38.000 John climbs to a real title, Director of Accounting Services.
00:12:42.220 Later that same year, he is quietly told, it's time for him to look for something else.
00:12:48.380 Rebecca Everett, host of the podcast Father Wants Us Dead, says the people who worked
00:12:53.700 with John List, saw it too. He was a fine accountant. The numbers made sense to him. He
00:12:58.820 could do that, but he wasn't really good with people. He does not tell Helen how bad it is.
00:13:04.260 He never does. Helen, for her part, stops pretending to be impressed. Somewhere in these
00:13:10.100 years, she understands that the careful, church-going man she married is not going to rise
00:13:14.980 in the world, and she lets him feel it. Their pastor back in Rochester remembers overhearing
00:13:20.420 Helen, say to John's face, if you were half the man my first husband was, we wouldn't be having
00:13:25.420 the troubles we're having. In the fall of 1965, John moves the family to Westfield, New Jersey
00:13:32.700 for a new job as vice president at a bank, and he sets his heart on a house he cannot come close to
00:13:39.620 affording. It is a 19-room Victorian mansion on more than an acre, parked on the best street in
00:13:46.280 town, and it already has its own name. A wealthy man named Whitkey had built the house decades
00:13:52.720 earlier. He added a ballroom to show off his art collection through parties under a stained glass
00:13:59.080 skylight and called the place Breeze Knoll. By the time the lists come to see the house,
00:14:05.060 Whitkey is long dead. His heirs have sold the property off, and the grand old estate has gone
00:14:10.020 shabby. To John and Helen, though, it's a dream. To John especially, it is about the image. What
00:14:16.760 he would later admit was, quote, conspicuous consumption in the extreme. It is a monument,
00:14:22.800 proof of the man he wants the world to believe he is. Almost as soon as they move in, a neighbor
00:14:28.940 walks an apple pie over to welcome them to the neighborhood. The man knocks, the door opens,
00:14:34.580 just a crack, and John List takes the pie, and before the man can finish telling John his name,
00:14:40.760 he cuts him off. Thank you very much, John says. We like to keep to ourselves over here.
00:14:46.500 Closes the door. And that is the first thing the folks on Hillside Avenue ever learn
00:14:51.720 about John List. There is the matter of paying for the home. John needs $10,000 just for the
00:14:59.720 down payment, and there is only one person he knows with that kind of money. His mother, Alma.
00:15:04.580 She agrees on one condition, that she be allowed to come and live with them.
00:15:10.580 So Alma, at 79, moves from Michigan into the small apartment on the third floor in New Jersey,
00:15:16.760 where she will spend what she will call the unhappiest years of her life,
00:15:22.140 and where six years after that, her son will shoot her above the left eye at point-blank range.
00:15:29.460 One day in the future, John List will tell a very different story to Dr. Simring.
00:15:34.580 appointed by the court saying that the house had never really been his idea at all he did not want
00:15:41.140 the big house he felt that he was being pushed to do this by his wife and by the demands of
00:15:46.260 growing family he made the decision to borrow money from his mother and then invite his
00:15:52.020 mother to live with him there is one more thing happening in that house quietly behind the tall
00:15:57.540 windows helen is sick and has been for years with an illness too shameful to admit to the
00:16:03.940 the good people of Westfield. It started long before John in her first marriage in Korea,
00:16:09.620 where her first husband ran with the bar girls of Seoul and brought something ugly home to Helen.
00:16:16.400 For years, doctors misdiagnose it. By the time they identify it correctly, it has reached Helen's
00:16:23.200 brain. The disease is syphilis. Caught early, it is cured by a single injection of penicillin.
00:16:30.060 Untreated, however, after nearly 20 years, it has advanced to the stage that attacks
00:16:34.500 the nervous system, slowly destroying the brain tissue.
00:16:38.500 Antibiotics can still stop it, but they cannot give back what the disease has already taken.
00:16:44.780 One bright spot for the lists, Helen never gives John or her children the disease.
00:16:51.100 Syphilis can only be passed to another person in the first months after infection, and Helen
00:16:56.560 was infected in 1947, four years before John ever laid eyes on her in that bowling alley.
00:17:02.960 By the time they marry, it has gone dormant and silent, working away at Helen from the inside,
00:17:09.720 dangerous to no one but her. Helen had insisted that she and John marry in Maryland,
00:17:15.500 specifically because the state did not require a blood test, which would have revealed her
00:17:20.040 secret disease. It would remain a secret for nearly two decades until a round of blood tests 0.85
00:17:25.700 exposed the syphilis in 1968. John took the revelation in stride. Helen keeps the curtains
00:17:32.620 drawn. She drinks scotch, mostly, and washes down the tranquilizers her doctors keep prescribing,
00:17:38.440 a combination that only sharpens the disorientation and paranoia the disease already brings.
00:17:43.860 She loses whole afternoons. She grows frightened of people who are not in the room. The disease,
00:17:50.020 taking her mind apart, traces back to Marvin, her first husband, the war hero,
00:17:55.140 the one man she never stopped loving and never stops throwing in John's face.
00:17:59.940 John tells no one.
00:18:01.500 He cooks the dinners, he drives the children to their lessons,
00:18:04.420 he answers the door in his coat and tie and says the family likes to keep to itself.
00:18:09.880 But the care is not free.
00:18:11.820 The hospital stays and the long recuperations put a financial squeeze on him
00:18:15.500 that he will not admit to anyone.
00:18:18.080 And it is Helen's illness that first sends John quietly to the bank
00:18:22.020 to borrow against Bree's knoll.
00:18:24.400 a loan, and then a second mortgage that he will not be able to repay. Up the stairs behind him,
00:18:32.120 his wife is disappearing into a disease she caught from a dead man, and John List carries it the way
00:18:37.580 he carries everything, silently and alone. Everybody's talking about weight loss injections
00:18:43.700 because the results can be so dramatic. They work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite.
00:18:49.200 But what if you are looking to lose weight but are not interested in weekly injections and you
00:18:54.260 don't know whether you can commit and it's expensive, all the things, especially when you
00:18:59.260 hear about some of the side effects. That's why doctors created a weight loss supplement called
00:19:04.620 Lean and the results could be remarkable. Lean says the studied ingredients in their product
00:19:09.880 have been shown to lower your blood sugar, burn fat by converting it into energy and curb your
00:19:15.140 appetite and cravings so that you are not as hungry. But listen, Lean is not for the casual
00:19:20.360 dieter with only a few pounds to lose. The doctors at Brickhouse Nutrition created lean
00:19:25.600 for frustrated dieters with 10 or more pounds to lose. You could get started with 20% off and free
00:19:32.400 rush shipping, adding lean to your healthy diet and exercise plan. Visit take lean.com. Enter the
00:19:39.580 code Kelly for your discount. That's promo code Kelly at take lean.com. And then John List
00:19:45.920 loses the bank job too. One year and he is fired. John doesn't tell anyone, not his wife, not his
00:19:53.820 mother, his church. Instead, morning after morning, for the better part of six months, he does the
00:19:59.340 same thing. Puts on a suit and a tie, picks up his briefcase and his Wall Street Journal. He kisses
00:20:05.700 his family goodbye at the door, backs the car down the long driveway, and drives into downtown
00:20:10.720 Westfield to the train station where his neighbors are catching the train to their jobs in the
00:20:15.900 city. He doesn't get on that train. He finds a bench, and he sits on warm days outside on cold
00:20:23.760 ones inside the station. He reads his Wall Street Journal front to back, and then he opens a book,
00:20:29.540 usually a history, the Civil War or other old battles he likes to disappear into.
00:20:35.280 He watches the trains come and go. When enough of the day is burned off, he picks up the briefcase
00:20:41.020 and drives home again as if he is coming back from the office, but it's a lie. For six months,
00:20:47.580 John List performs an entire life he no longer has. To keep it all from collapsing, he starts
00:20:53.660 taking money that is not his. Years earlier, his mother had given him power of attorney over her
00:20:59.140 bank account, the money John's father left Alma. John sees an answer to his financial burdens.
00:21:05.500 At first, he pays it back, and then he stops.
00:21:09.640 He keeps meticulous records the entire time, neat columns of what he has taken,
00:21:14.120 and he tells himself it will be his money one day anyway.
00:21:17.640 By the time it's over, all that remains is roughly $2,000 in U.S. savings bonds.
00:21:24.060 John has drained more than $50,000 out of his elderly mother's savings, and she has no idea.
00:21:31.360 Even that is not enough.
00:21:32.800 He picks up work selling insurance from home and mutual funds, and he is not good at either.
00:21:40.160 By October of 1971, John List, vice president, comptroller, certified public accountant,
00:21:46.600 the man in the mansion, has earned less than $5,000 for the entire year.
00:21:52.360 He has mortgaged the house three times over, each new loan taken to pay down the one before it,
00:21:58.660 and he is months behind on all three.
00:22:01.760 The only steady money coming into Breeze Knoll is the after-school job paychecks of two of his
00:22:07.760 children, 16-year-old Patty and her youngest brother, 13-year-old Fred. In every way that
00:22:14.640 a man like John List can measure himself, he is ruined. The thing to do now is not let anyone see
00:22:21.560 it. But it leaks out anyway, in small, strange ways. The neighborhood children learn to give
00:22:27.880 the List house a wide berth. Cut across his lawn or make too much noise near his hedges, and the
00:22:33.820 mild accountant in the suit has been known to scoop up a handful of gravel from his own driveway
00:22:38.620 and hurl it at them. The family down the street, the Devlins, keep a pet donkey that they've named
00:22:45.280 Eliza Doolittle after Audrey Hepburn's character in My Fair Lady. Every so often, old Eliza pulls
00:22:52.700 up her stake and goes wandering in the neighborhood, and when she wanders onto John List's lawn,
00:22:57.880 he comes out and pitches rocks at the donkey until she leaves. One of the Devlin boys puts
00:23:03.360 it clearly years later. You could see, he says, that it would not take much to make John List
00:23:08.460 just go plain crazy. This is the man the experts will spend decades trying to explain.
00:23:15.040 Dr. Simring, the psychiatrist, later tells News 12 that John List is not a monster that anyone
00:23:21.380 could have seen coming, but a rigid, resentful man whose life is collapsing faster than he can
00:23:27.480 hide the pieces. He was not a psychopath. He was not a sociopath. He was not a man without
00:23:32.740 a conscience. I think he had a lifelong of resentment, of lack of success. And I think
00:23:38.580 it got to him. There is a room under the ballroom that John insists on calling the billiard
00:23:43.740 room, though there's been no billiard table in it for years. It is where he goes to be
00:23:48.560 alone and where he keeps the things that comfort him. His Bible, his books on true crime, a
00:23:54.740 shelf full of war games, elaborate tabletop campaigns he disappears into for hours, moving
00:24:00.740 whole armies across a board. Two of them, called Third Reich and Russian Front, he has played for
00:24:07.160 years. Whatever the game, whoever sits across the board from him, John List takes the German side 0.94
00:24:13.700 every single time. John once took his brother-in-law down into that cellar, pointed out the 0.94
00:24:20.200 dark corners and the hidden passages and said almost idly, a man could hide for six months
00:24:26.080 down here if he had food and water. It struck his brother-in-law as such a strange thing to say
00:24:31.540 that he repeated it to his wife that night. On the wall on John's calendar, there is a date in
00:24:38.700 November with a thick red circle drawn around it. Because sometime in the summer of 1971,
00:24:44.400 alone in that basement with his war games and his Bible and his debts, John List begins to plan
00:24:51.280 a battle of his own. In October, he goes into the Westfield police station for the second time that
00:24:57.840 year. This time he gets fingerprinted and applies for a permit to buy a handgun. Home protection,
00:25:05.120 he tells the cops, never can be too safe. There is one person John List feels is drifting further
00:25:11.300 from his grip. It's his daughter. Patricia is 16, and she wants more than anything in the world
00:25:18.020 to be an actress. She has fallen in with the drama crowd. At school and in a local theater group,
00:25:25.380 a world of rehearsals and older kids and late nights, and to a man like her father,
00:25:30.680 that world is a threat to her very soul. To John List in his strict reading of his faith,
00:25:37.600 The stage is not a wholesome dream for a girl, but a step towards sin.
00:25:42.200 In the documentary Tracking Down John List, Dr. Simring puts a fine point on this. 0.62
00:25:48.300 In his Christian fundamental way of thinking, being an actress is like two steps beyond being a prostitute.
00:25:55.620 Patricia has also started talking back to her father, and she no longer bothers to hide how bored she is in church.
00:26:02.420 There are things he hears about the company she keeps that frighten him more than backtalk.
00:26:07.720 Patty and her friends have taken to playing with a Ouija board, trying to reach the spirits.
00:26:13.400 There are whispers, half teenage theater and half something darker, that Patricia has begun
00:26:19.360 calling herself a witch. Her closest friends, church kids themselves, do not know what to make
00:26:25.720 of it, and it scares them. To a father who reads the Bible aloud every night and takes every word
00:26:31.760 of it literally. This is not a phase a girl grows out of. It is his daughter's very soul sliding
00:26:38.740 toward the fire while he stands and watches. His fear runs so deep that on the night the police
00:26:44.360 pick up Patty, he turns on the girl standing next to her, one of Patty's friends, a teenager named
00:26:50.300 Rhonda Hanson he barely knows, and says it to her face. Patty's father was irate. He just started
00:26:57.720 carrying on yelling at Patty. And then he said to me, you're a bitch as well as a witch. 1.00
00:27:04.040 To the friends who actually knew her, none of it made Patty anything stranger than a teenager 1.00
00:27:09.100 with a hard father. Her friend, Barry Cohen, later says as much in the documentary Tracking
00:27:14.360 Down John List. I think that is a normal kid. You know, if you had a straight-laced father like him
00:27:20.300 who was probably very restrictive and very disapproving, you tend to be rebellious.
00:27:25.520 Not long before the end, over one of those Ouija boards, Patricia turns to a friend and says a
00:27:31.280 thing that friend will carry for the rest of her life. I have a feeling, she says, that something
00:27:37.100 bad is going to happen. She doesn't say what. She doesn't say who. John List comes to believe, or
00:27:45.200 tells himself he does, that the only options left are all unbearable. Bankruptcy, welfare,
00:27:52.880 his children growing up poor and worse, growing up and drifting away from the church,
00:27:58.880 losing their faith in the loud, permissive, godless world of 1971. Becoming hippies. He
00:28:06.220 looks at his daughter and at his sick wife who no longer goes to church, and he sees two souls
00:28:11.780 slipping away. A psychiatrist who would later reconstruct his thinking reduced it to grim
00:28:18.400 arithmetic. Here's Dr. Simring speaking to NewJersey.com. His choices of a universe of
00:28:25.280 choices came down to three choices. Run away, go bankrupt, kill his family. John arrives at a cold 1.00
00:28:32.240 piece of logic. If he kills them now while they are still innocent, still obedient Christians, 0.99
00:28:39.040 then their souls are safe. They go to heaven. He's not murdering his family. He's saving them. 1.00
00:28:46.240 What lets a man hold a thought like that and then act on it is not madness.
00:28:51.620 By the psychiatrist's account, it is something colder and far more ordinary, as he tells NewJersey.com.
00:28:58.360 He meets clearly the criteria for obsessive, compulsive personality.
00:29:04.180 These are individuals who are emotionally isolated.
00:29:09.600 They're not cruel, but they're emotionally isolated.
00:29:12.760 They don't show feelings.
00:29:14.120 They don't have very much in the way of feelings.
00:29:16.420 They don't cry a whole lot.
00:29:18.020 They're not emotional.
00:29:19.420 They are very, very detail-oriented.
00:29:22.600 They rationalize things that happen.
00:29:25.460 On the night of Friday, November 5th, 1971,
00:29:29.240 John List calls his three children to the kitchen table.
00:29:32.700 He is calm.
00:29:33.760 He is not shouting.
00:29:35.360 He tells them he can no longer take care of them the way a father should.
00:29:39.280 Then, in the flat, practical voice of an accountant,
00:29:42.060 he asks each child a question no child should ever have to answer. When the time comes,
00:29:50.040 would they rather be buried or cremated? Buried, the children say, one by one,
00:29:56.040 and then John gets up, walks out, and closes his office door behind him.
00:30:01.580 To the friends in whom Patty confides, it sounds almost like a will being drawn up,
00:30:07.220 the kind of paperwork you might expect from a man who's always worried about the numbers.
00:30:12.060 Patty knows better. In the weeks before the end, she tells more friends the same thing.
00:30:18.520 Her father, she says, wants them all dead. John had wanted to do it a few days earlier, 0.60
00:30:25.240 on the 1st of November, All Saints Day, a day he thought fitting for sending souls to heaven.
00:30:32.180 Something delayed him, so he settles on a new date, the one circled in red, and he plans it
00:30:38.020 the way he plans everything, down to the last hour, down to every last detail.
00:30:43.560 The morning of November 9th, 1971, comes cold and gray. John List is awake before dawn. He sits at
00:30:52.440 his desk in the quiet house and everyone still asleep above him, and he does the last thing a
00:30:58.260 careful accountant does before he closes an account. He opens his budget book, The Ledger
00:31:04.980 of everything gone wrong, and he draws a single neat line beneath the final row of figures.
00:31:11.740 He twists his college-class ring off his finger and sets it on the desk. He opens the red-covered
00:31:18.940 Lutheran hymnal his church has used since 1941 and turns to a hymn called The World is Very Evil.
00:31:26.560 He reads it to himself softly, humming as his eyes follow the verse, quote,
00:31:32.360 the world is very evil the times are waxing late be sober and keep vigil the judge is at the gate
00:31:41.160 then john list goes to a file cabinet and he takes out the austrian pistol he brought home
00:31:48.180 from the war 27 years ago and loads it upstairs a toilet flushes the house is beginning to wake up
00:31:57.280 Sunrise, he knows, will be at 6.36.
00:32:00.300 Soon Helen will come down in her bathrobe to make her coffee.
00:32:04.060 John List sits in a study, in a coat and tie, with a loaded gun, and waits for his wife.
00:32:11.040 John has told himself this is mercy, that he is the only one who can save them, 0.99
00:32:15.660 and that the way to save them is to kill them. 0.99
00:32:18.560 He thinks he's found the one solution to an impossible problem. 1.00
00:32:23.180 He's run the numbers, and they balance.
00:32:26.120 November 9th, 1971, the day John List carries out his plan, one member of his family at a time.
00:32:34.280 Later, he will sit down in the house where he has slaughtered them all, have dinner, alone, wash the dishes, and go to sleep.
00:32:43.060 That's next time on MK Confidential.
00:32:48.320 Expedia. Hey you. What you doing?
00:32:51.060 scrolling doom scrolling looking at other people's vacations miami san diego cancun okay what about
00:33:00.480 you what places will you go expedia is the one place you go to go places your trip can earn
00:33:06.220 rewards which you can use towards your next eligible stay soon people will be doom scrolling
00:33:10.660 you you'll be that friend's friend but with rewards what are you waiting for expedia the
00:33:16.180 one place you go to go places. Terms apply.