The Megyn Kelly Show - The Annihilator： The Reckoning — Ep. 5 ｜ MK Confidential

00:00:00.000 order up thank you no no no oh come on this is not happening turn off the water where's the

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00:00:26.820 business. It's how we're making insurance more human. It is Thursday, June 1st, 1989. Three men

00:00:34.080 walk into a small suite of accounting offices in Richmond, Virginia. Two of the officers right off

00:00:39.560 the elevator and one up the stairs. The receptionist, Sandra Silberman, takes note.

00:00:46.140 Walk-ins do not usually arrive in threes. She hangs up the phone. One of the men flashes an

00:00:52.140 FBI badge, they are here to speak with Robert Clark. The bookkeeper who comes out to meet them

00:00:58.760 is 63, balding, bespectacled, and entirely unalarmed. The man carries himself, according

00:01:05.660 to one of the FBI men, like a schoolteacher waiting for a student to explain himself.

00:01:10.680 Special Agent Kevin August starts to question him gently. He asks the man's name, Robert Clark.

00:01:17.720 He asks Clark whether he has a scar behind his ear, though August can plainly see that he does,

00:01:24.380 and the man turns his head slightly to show it. He asks whether Clark has had an operation for a

00:01:30.280 hernia, was born in Michigan, and works as an accountant. Clark answers all three in the

00:01:36.500 affirmative. There's a pause, and then August asks the question that he has been waiting nearly 18

00:01:43.340 years for someone to ask out loud. Are you John Emile List? No, Clark answers without hesitation

00:01:52.040 and without emotion. August will think about that afterward, that an innocent man would have said,

00:01:58.700 who in the hell is John Emile List? The agents pat Clark down. He puts his arms out and leans

00:02:05.400 against the wall without a word of objection. And when it is finished, August tries once more.

00:02:11.360 I approached him and I asked him, I said, are you Mr. Clark? And he said, yes. And then I said,

00:02:19.600 are you John List? And he says, no, I'm Robert P. Clark.

00:02:23.960 Reporters would later put the man's exact words as, quote, I know who I am. I'm Robert Clark.

00:02:30.700 Clark seems to force a little indignation into his voice when he says it.

00:02:35.300 Across the room, the receptionist looks away because Bob Clark is giving her the mournful

00:02:40.840 look of a man who believes he has been betrayed. She notices red blotches breaking out across his

00:02:46.560 face. The blotches are the only thing about him that reveal his panic. I'm Megan Kelly,

00:02:53.400 and this is MK Confidential.

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00:04:13.100 A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com, promo code MKC. The agents take Robert Clark to the Henrico County Jail and

00:04:22.100 roll his inked fingers onto a card. Clark's fingerprints promptly end the mystery. The

00:04:28.160 Prints match the ones John List left on his application for a New Jersey firearms permit in Westfield on October 16th, 1971, 24 days before he shot and killed his entire family.

00:04:41.060 The mastoidectomy scar behind his right ear matches.

00:04:44.780 The hernia scars match.

00:04:46.640 Every physical marker on the FBI flyer that has been in circulation for nearly 18 years matches the man before them.

00:04:54.100 And Clark still says no.

00:04:56.460 He just absolutely denied it. It's not me. I don't know what you're talking about.

00:05:01.960 Even after he was confronted with the fact that his fingerprints were a match,

00:05:05.660 he still was like, it's not me. My name is Robert P. Clark.

00:05:09.560 In Brandermill, a housing development set back among oak and pine outside Richmond, Virginia,

00:05:15.560 a woman is learning exactly who she married.

00:05:19.500 Dolores Clark tries to see her husband in custody on the afternoon of his arrest and is turned away.

00:05:25.760 She comes back at noon the next day with the pastor of their Lutheran church, the Reverend Joseph Vogt.

00:05:32.080 And this time they are allowed inside.

00:05:34.880 Bob is being held in the isolation wing behind the frosted glass instead of bars.

00:05:40.800 The minister is allowed into his cell.

00:05:43.460 Dolores has to stand at the glass and speak to her husband through a telephone.

00:05:48.160 She can hear that he is crying.

00:05:51.060 Vogt tells reporters outside that the prisoner looks shaken and has not slept.

00:05:56.240 Then the pastor says something curious.

00:05:58.900 There seems to be some relief about the man inside, he says.

00:06:03.740 Whether that is reflective of the fact that John List no longer has to put up a front,

00:06:08.580 he cannot say for sure.

00:06:10.860 Dolores gives the press one written statement and says it will be her last word on the matter.

00:06:15.540 a family friend named Wally Parsons suggests they take it to the Richmond News Leader first

00:06:21.000 to get ahead of the out-of-town press, and when he speaks to the reporter, he adds an assurance of

00:06:27.100 his own. You can be 100% absolutely sure that this lady knows absolutely nothing about anything in

00:06:34.980 Bob's past. In the statement, Dolores writes, quote, this is not the man I know. The man I know

00:06:41.640 is kind, loving, a devoted husband, and dear friend. She describes Bob as a man of faith,

00:06:48.280 and then at the end she writes, quote, I find this hard to believe. I hope somehow this is not true,

00:06:54.380 and if it is, he was so stressed out that something snapped. I am devoted to him. I hope

00:07:00.500 that somehow God will see us through this. Dolores does not attend her husband's trial,

00:07:05.940 and no reporter ever catches her visiting him in prison.

00:07:10.420 She has married a widower in 1985

00:07:12.700 and never once asked to see a photograph of his first wife.

00:07:17.920 He fights extradition to New Jersey from a Virginia cell

00:07:21.660 as Robert Clark and loses.

00:07:24.520 At the end of June, he is flown to Newark

00:07:26.440 where one investigator remembers every news outlet in the world

00:07:30.600 waiting on the tarmac to watch.

00:07:32.700 There was an extremely high-profile arrest and transportation.

00:07:40.420 Coming off the plane was a little scary,

00:07:42.480 as every news media in the world must have been at Newark Airport.

00:07:45.840 Robert P. Clark never surrenders.

00:07:48.660 He simply stops existing in a flurry of pretrial motions

00:07:52.320 that could only be filed on behalf of the other man, John List.

00:07:56.480 And nobody mentions Bob Clark again.

00:07:59.020 He lets the name and the invented life behind it slip away as unceremoniously as it began,

00:08:06.040 on a form in a Denver social security office nearly two decades before.

00:08:11.300 On the evening of November 7th, 1989, two days before the 18th anniversary of the murders,

00:08:18.060 John List is brought into a reception room at the Union County Jail to meet the only relatives he has left.

00:08:25.860 Jean Seifert, Jean spelled with a J like blue jeans, is Helen's sister, John's sister-in-law.

00:08:34.080 This is the first time John and Jean have seen each other since John shot his then-wife Helen

00:08:38.720 in the face in 1971. Jean and her husband, also Jean, though his is with a G, have flown in from

00:08:47.100 Oklahoma at the invitation of Elijah Miller, the assistant public defender assigned to represent

00:08:52.980 List. Since the day of his arrest, Jean the sister has been determined to look John List in the face

00:08:59.680 and put to him one word. Why? She does not sleep the night before. At the courthouse, she asks her

00:09:08.520 husband what happens if she sees John and passes out. Her spouse promises to pick her up off the

00:09:13.780 floor. John comes in at around seven and crosses the room in the same bouncy, awkward walk Jean

00:09:20.000 remembers. 18 years later, she recognizes him instantly. A slightly lopsided face, now heavy

00:09:27.700 with jowls, the odd way he tilts his head when he stands in front of someone. He is holding a small

00:09:33.560 stack of papers and does not know what to do with them, so he sets them on the table and stares at

00:09:38.420 the floor. She says, how are you, John? He nods stiffly. And then Jean Seifert does something

00:09:46.440 that surprises her as much as it surprises him. She steps forward and hugs the man who murdered

00:09:53.520 her sister. John puts his arms around her and lays his head on her shoulder, and when he lifts

00:09:59.840 it, the top of her blouse is wet. Then he sees her husband and looks mortified. The husband reaches

00:10:06.380 out, and the two men shake hands without a word. Then the husband, too, hugs John. That, his wife

00:10:14.180 will later say, gives John the shock of his life. Again, he cries. They talk for more than three

00:10:21.180 hours in a small, windowless room on the third floor, the kind where inmates meet their lawyers,

00:10:26.540 with John's lawyer, Elijah Miller, sitting in. But it's not a reunion. The Seiferts believe in

00:10:32.880 mercy, but they also believe in accountability. And Helen's sister has waited 18 years to ask

00:10:38.660 her question. Why, John? He looks at her without any emotion at all, because there was no other

00:10:46.640 way. It is exactly what he wrote to her in 1971, word for word. Jean pushes, why was there no other

00:10:55.540 way? Why are they meeting in a criminal court instead of a divorce court, for God's sake? 1.00

00:11:01.220 it just had to be that way he tells her the subject has been closed since 1971 and john

00:11:09.300 list is not reopening it for her the brother-in-law has memorized a list of questions and

00:11:15.020 he is not gentle with them but john does not want to discuss the crime and john has always known how

00:11:20.900 to control a conversation so the sister tries to provoke one with a question that has haunted

00:11:26.240 Westfield for 18 years. She had found a small bag of marijuana when she cleaned out their eldest

00:11:33.260 daughter Patty's room. And she asks John, did he know about Patty and the drugs? John seems

00:11:40.380 genuinely surprised. No, he says, there were no drugs. Jean tells him she thinks he's wrong and

00:11:47.080 he doesn't argue. Jean asks about the witchcraft, the Ouija boards, the whispers that followed Patty

00:11:54.180 through the last autumn. John says he has never known anything about it, and he's not particularly

00:12:00.200 interested. Late in the conversation, once the hard questions have run out and the tension in

00:12:06.180 the small room has eased some, John List asks the Seiferts about Brenda. Brenda Taylor is his dead

00:12:15.320 wife's daughter from her first marriage, the stepchild John helped raise from the age of nine.

00:12:21.480 the one child of Helen's he did not kill, and only because she had grown up and married and

00:12:27.740 moved out years before he ever bought their dream home on the hill, Breeze Knoll. He is told he has

00:12:35.420 step-great-grandchildren now, which apparently makes him happy. Jean Seifert flies home to

00:12:41.240 Oklahoma with nothing. She has never once believed he was insane, not for a minute, which leaves her

00:12:48.340 with the same question she came to Richmond with and the same unsatisfactory answer. What Brenda,

00:12:55.300 John's stepchild, makes of John's capture is not on the public record. She has said almost nothing

00:13:00.580 since 1971. That fall, the FBI asks to attach her name to a public appeal meant to flush out her

00:13:08.340 stepfather, a daughter's plea that reads, Daddy, you're all I have left. Please call me. It is bait.

00:13:16.800 It's not clear whether Brenda explicitly agrees, but the FBI does put out the statement.

00:13:22.380 The last thing Brenda wants is for John List to answer. By her friend's account, Brenda is

00:13:27.620 petrified, certain she is the only one of the family left and that he will come to kill her 0.67

00:13:32.620 and her five children. And for a long time, the FBI may suspect it too because they watch her

00:13:38.260 house. The trial of John List opens in Union County Superior Court on Monday, April 2nd, 1990.

00:13:47.120 Reporters line up for hours in advance. The trial has moved to a larger courtroom, and it is still

00:13:52.320 not big enough. List does not dispute that he killed his family, but pleads not guilty by reason

00:13:57.880 of mental defect. His defense attorney, Elijah Miller, contends that his client was gripped by

00:14:04.000 a religious obsession, which led him to believe he was saving his family by taking their lives.

00:14:10.760 Miller hammers the religion angle, telling the jury his client was so locked into his own religion

00:14:16.080 that once the plan was in his head to spare his family from his own failures or from what he

00:14:23.280 perceived as their alleged hedonism, he could not step out of it. That's the defense. Not that he

00:14:30.260 didn't do it, but that List killed with love and mercy in his heart. The prosecutor is an assistant

00:14:37.980 Union County DA named Brian Gillett, who as he tells it, is the only person in the office who

00:14:44.140 did not ask for this case. He opens his case by reading aloud John List's five-page letter to his

00:14:50.840 pastor, the one sealed in a locked drawer of the file cabinet beside John's desk, next to the two

00:14:56.360 fired handguns, the murder weapons. One reporter describes Gillett's tone as cold, with traces of

00:15:02.920 mockery. When Gillett reaches the line where List asks the pastor to pray for him, quote,

00:15:08.740 whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it, Gillett stops and looks along the

00:15:14.280 jury box. Today, he tells them, the government intends to do its duty. The letter is the whole

00:15:21.160 prosecution. Every element the state has to prove, that the killings were willful, deliberate,

00:15:26.420 and premeditated, is signed and dated in the defendant's own hand. The forensic psychiatrist,

00:15:32.760 Dr. Stephen Simring, spends four hours with List in a jail cell with a video camera rolling

00:15:38.140 and finds a man who is unfailingly pleasant about the whole affair. Years later, he describes the

00:15:44.040 conversation to American justice. He was mild-mannered, courteous, soft-spoken,

00:15:52.220 very precise, and very exact. He also expressed no remorse and only superficial regret. He said

00:16:01.640 essentially something that had to happen. It was unfortunate. Simmering walks the jury through

00:16:07.900 what List told him hour by hour, and the courtroom listens in absolute silence. He says List did not

00:16:16.020 feel guilt or sadness at the loss of his family, nor did John kill his family out of concern for

00:16:21.780 the fate of their souls. The psychiatrist says that List shifts explanations depending on his

00:16:27.260 needs, and at that moment, what John List needed was an acquittal. He did not have a major mental

00:16:33.560 illness. There was no psychiatric legal excuse either to excuse or to mitigate. Simmering tells

00:16:40.780 the jury John List believed suicide would land him in hell, so he spared himself and sent his family

00:16:47.460 to heaven. Simmering concludes on the stand, quote, he wanted grace in the hereafter, but he

00:16:54.300 didn't want a rest yet. There's religious belief and there's religious hypocrisy. I think there's

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00:18:06.320 The assistant prosecutor, Eleanor Clark, tells the jury no man could use religion to justify

00:18:12.680 this carnage. Well, I think no matter how religious you are, you realize that there's a

00:18:17.880 little problem with this. I found this horrific. And through my tone of voice and the nature of

00:18:25.320 my questions, I try to communicate this to the jurors. Elijah Miller calls a procession of

00:18:30.320 Lutheran clergymen who had known John List across four decades in Kalamazoo, in Rochester,

00:18:36.780 in Westfield. He needs them to tell the jury that this was a devout man whose religious fervor

00:18:43.080 swallowed him whole. Instead, one after another, the clergy who taught John List his faith

00:18:49.180 take the stand and dismantle John List's theology. Pastor Louis Grother led the List's in his

00:18:56.760 Kalamazoo congregation in the late 50s. Prosecutor Clark asks him whether the Lutheran Church would

00:19:02.820 frown on a man who killed his daughter to save her soul. The Lutheran Church and the scriptures,

00:19:08.420 the pastor says, would frown upon anybody deliberately killing anybody. Defense attorney

00:19:14.920 Miller calls the Reverend Edward Zaruski, the family's minister outside Rochester from the

00:19:21.040 years John worked at Xerox. He paints John as a bitter failure whose theology would never support

00:19:27.720 murder. He recalls that John struggled at work, telling the court that Helen once said if John

00:19:33.740 were half the man her former husband was, they wouldn't have the troubles they were having.

00:19:38.420 The jury is starting to learn about John's simmering resentments.

00:19:43.660 Then Miller asks about John's religion,

00:19:46.480 and Reverend Sureski says that John's fundamentalist theology is fundamentally flawed.

00:19:52.960 Sin is still sin, he tells the court.

00:19:55.540 Grace is available for the sinner, but sin is never justified, and Christians know that. 0.99

00:20:01.520 He testifies that, quote,

00:20:02.900 John's problem was that he knew doctrine, but he did not know faith.

00:20:07.660 I think John did not trust God, end quote. John List could answer catechism questions at 15 without

00:20:15.700 a stumble. He taught Sunday school. He kept the books at three different churches in different

00:20:20.800 parts of the country. What he could not do across 50 years was hand a single problem to God and

00:20:27.220 leave it there. Not the job, not the mortgage, his wife's illness, his daughter's future. He did what

00:20:34.420 he always did with figures he didn't like. He didn't give it to God. He anointed himself as

00:20:41.340 God. He decided when his children's souls were safe and closed their earthly accounts on a date

00:20:48.220 of his own choosing. The last of the clergymen is the Reverend Alfred Shipes, who served as

00:20:54.440 chaplain to John's youth group at the University of Michigan. He describes John as faithful and

00:20:59.860 of good character. Defense attorney Miller asks him about sin. Thou shalt not kill, the minister

00:21:06.120 answers. Taking a life is certainly wrong. On cross-examination, the prosecution asks Shipes

00:21:12.320 whether there is a greatest sin, a sin above others. And in a courtroom where a man is on

00:21:18.280 trial for murdering his family, allegedly because he could not bear the shame of their lowered

00:21:23.600 station or their descent into perceived debauchery. The minister thinks about it for a few seconds and

00:21:31.140 then quotes C.S. Lewis. Pride, he says, pride is the greatest sin. On April 12, 1990, after seven

00:21:40.200 days of testimony, the jury of nine men and three women steps out of the courtroom to decide John

00:21:46.000 List's fate. Everyone expects the verdict to be quick. Reporters have a betting pool going. Some

00:21:52.460 predict it will take less than 60 minutes. But that's not what happens. There is a holdout on

00:21:58.140 the jury, a lone person who still is not convinced about John List's state of mind. The jurors send

00:22:05.280 the judge a note asking him to define willful, premeditated, and deliberate. Then another note,

00:22:11.400 and another. Then they ask for two packs of cigarettes. The jury deliberates for six hours

00:22:17.740 the first day and then goes home to sleep on it. Could this one holdout really deadlock the case?

00:22:23.580 Could the man who signed and dated a five-page detailed confession and tucked it in a drawer

00:22:28.560 next to the murder weapons actually go free on a hung jury? By lunch the next day, the jury has

00:22:35.660 reached a verdict. What turns the holdout, the foreman tells reporters afterward, is a single

00:22:41.160 line in John List's letter. The line where List explains that he had originally planned the

00:22:47.140 murders for November 1st, All Saints Day, because he thought it an appropriate day for his family

00:22:53.040 to get to heaven, then that travel arrangements delayed him. A man who reschedules is a man who

00:22:59.700 deliberated. The jury declares him guilty on five counts of murder in the first degree.

00:23:06.100 John List hears it stone-faced, staring straight ahead, motionless. Because New Jersey had no

00:23:13.340 death penalty on its books in 1971, the sentence is capped at life without parole. The irony,

00:23:20.640 of course, is that John List did not actually spend his life in prison. He has gotten away

00:23:25.760 with his crimes for 18 years of freedom. On May 1st, 1990, Superior Court Judge William

00:23:33.260 Wertheimer hands down the maximum punishment available to him. He will later reread his

00:23:39.080 sentencing statement aloud for the New Jersey media podcast covering the List case, Father

00:23:44.400 Wants Us Dead. His acts stand as a permanent, pathetic, and profane example of the potential 0.94

00:23:50.040 of man's inhumanity to man. They will not be soon or easily forgotten, and the name of John

00:23:56.240 Amell List will be eternally synonymous with concepts of selfishness, horror, and evil.

00:24:02.160 Judge Wertheimer calls List a man without honor. He tells the courtroom that after 18 years,

00:24:07.720 five months and 22 days, it is time for the voices of Helen, Alma, Patricia, Frederick,

00:24:14.880 and John Jr. to speak from the grave. But I thought it was appropriate that each of the

00:24:19.980 victims had their own sentence. I ran consecutively, so he wasn't going to get out.

00:24:25.960 Five consecutive life terms, one after the other, and one for each member of the family so that

00:24:32.440 justice for one victim is not folded into justice for anyone else. List is offered the chance to

00:24:38.560 speak. He stands and takes it. I remain truly sorry for the tragedy that happened in 1971.

00:24:47.060 I feel that due to my mental state at the time, I was unaccountable for what happened.

00:24:55.240 truly sorry for the tragedy that happened. Passive voice, not for what he did, just for

00:25:03.560 what happened, as though he bore no responsibility. He goes into New Jersey State Prison in Trenton

00:25:10.280 at 64, and he is, by every account, a nearly model inmate. He works in the print shop,

00:25:17.160 keeping track of all the forms. He reads his Bible and holds a Lutheran service in his cell

00:25:22.220 on Sundays. Plays chess, he writes letters his friends describe as journal entries, blogging

00:25:27.720 what time he woke up, what time he napped, and what he watched on television. His closest friend

00:25:34.440 in confinement is George Corbett, 42 years younger, locked up for murdering a 14-year-old boy.

00:25:41.640 Corbett remembers a dry sense of humor and an obsessiveness that never lets up. List gets angry

00:25:47.780 if anyone touches his pencils.

00:25:50.020 He rations his commissary olives to two a day so they last.

00:25:54.540 He becomes petty and short-tempered,

00:25:56.780 a man who has scheduled his whole day down to the minute

00:25:59.220 and cannot stand it when the world falls out of step.

00:26:02.620 This prison friend, Corbett, remembers List's outsized reactions.

00:26:07.300 If the door didn't open up right away, if it took too long,

00:26:09.720 he would scream out because normally it would open, you know, right on cue.

00:26:12.700 And then if he had to say it a second time, he would get very agitated. 1.00

00:26:15.780 Open 12, you bastard. 1.00

00:26:17.980 He continues trying to manage his own story. 1.00

00:26:21.440 List sits for a television interview with Connie Chung and another with A&E.

00:26:26.320 He publishes a memoir with a co-author, a rambling, self-justifying, and remarkably self-pitying book.

00:26:33.900 Throughout all of it, he says the same things.

00:26:36.880 The things he thinks mitigate his crimes.

00:26:39.520 That he loved his family, that he did it to save their souls, that God has forgiven him.

00:26:45.160 Never does he use the word murder.

00:26:48.000 Journalist Bill Curtis asks John List how he thinks it all ends.

00:26:53.280 And John is untroubled.

00:26:55.420 I think I will go to heaven.

00:26:57.540 I don't know what the situation will be in heaven.

00:27:01.180 They will remember what I did to them.

00:27:05.340 Certainly, if we're all in heaven, I'm sure we would forgive each other for whatever harm we had done to each other here.

00:27:14.000 37 years on, John List is still playing God.

00:27:18.540 John Walsh, who put the clay bust of John List on television and ended in 18-year manhunt,

00:27:24.700 gives another take on John List's hereafter.

00:27:27.540 Oh, he's not going to heaven. I know, well, I know for sure that this man is not going to heaven.

00:27:34.600 He's going straight to hell, right where his ass belongs. 0.99

00:27:39.020 Bernard Tracy, the young Westfield detective who inherited the case file and lived it for 11 years, 0.99

00:27:45.220 the crime scene photographs, the autopsy reports, every last detail of what List did to his family,

00:27:52.760 later becomes the chief of police.

00:27:55.160 He, of all people, might wish the worst to John List.

00:27:59.840 Instead, some grace.

00:28:02.380 It's a terrible thing what John List did.

00:28:04.780 But can we be forgiven for even those sins? I hope so.

00:28:08.220 and John List can go to heaven and I hope he does. The case outgrows the man in stature

00:28:14.780 almost immediately. In 1987, two years before anyone knows where John List is, a film reaches

00:28:21.820 theaters called The Stepfather about a mild murderous family man who kills a household

00:28:27.040 and reinvents himself under a new name. Six years later in 1993, CBS makes the story directly,

00:28:35.280 a television movie called Judgment Day, the John List story, with Robert Blake as the lead.

00:28:43.020 I've done what I was told to do always, but evil still surrounds me.

00:28:49.600 It lives in the very heart of this house and nothing I say, nothing I do kills it.

00:28:55.340 I've done what she told me to do, and I'm losing everything.

00:29:00.320 nearly 10 years later robert blake would be arrested for the murder of his own wife

00:29:06.140 john list continues to try for his freedom not by escaping prison but by the book through the

00:29:13.140 courts he appeals his conviction in 1993 deputy and assistant deputy public defenders joan van

00:29:20.040 pelt and michael blake contest the warrantless search on december 7th 1971 the night the westfield

00:29:27.240 police found the List family on the ballroom floor. John's initial public defender, Elijah Miller,

00:29:33.960 tries to exclude all evidence the police department picked up in the search, and thus much of the case

00:29:39.300 against List. Judge Wertheimer shoots that down, writing that List has abandoned the home and

00:29:45.340 everything in it, and that in any event, the discovery of five bodies and a handwritten note

00:29:50.940 in a house with the lights burning out was inevitable, if not by a concerned friend or

00:29:56.100 neighbor than eventually by police. John List's appellate team argues that Judge Wertheimer was

00:30:02.780 wrong and that Miller's failure to suppress the evidence means he did not provide List with a

00:30:08.320 proper defense. Blake and Van Pelt also throw a Hail Mary pass of sorts, arguing that John List's

00:30:15.260 confession letter to his pastor, left in a manila folder atop his desk at Breeze Knoll for anyone to

00:30:21.600 see is a private conversation and should be protected under both the first and fifth

00:30:26.940 amendments. Finally, they call Judge Wertheimer's consecutive five-life sentences, quote,

00:30:32.660 excessive. A panel of three judges easily upholds the conviction. They address some of the appeal's

00:30:38.920 claims in detail and dismiss the rest as, quote, clearly without merit. List's appeal is denied.

00:30:46.180 Two years later, List tries one more angle.

00:30:49.760 PTSD.

00:30:51.240 He asks the court for another bite at the apple

00:30:53.820 for the chance to argue to a new jury

00:30:56.300 that he murdered his family due to post-traumatic stress

00:30:59.720 from his service in World War II.

00:31:02.700 The court rejects the petition.

00:31:04.660 The state of New Jersey has heard quite enough from John List.

00:31:09.000 List eventually takes his PTSD case public.

00:31:12.260 In 2006, he publishes the memoir Collateral Damage with the help of author Austin Goodrich.

00:31:19.160 John claims that he saw 41 days of combat in World War II and remembers none of it.

00:31:24.880 He cites PTSD from this experience as the root cause of his life's biggest problems,

00:31:30.160 his inability to hold a job, his difficulty parenting his children,

00:31:35.000 and his decision to slaughter his own family in the name of saving them.

00:31:40.160 List introduces his story as a tale of woe for undiagnosed and untreated post-traumatic stress

00:31:46.400 disorder. He dedicates the book to his parents and to, quote, all family members made victims

00:31:52.940 by my sinful actions. In his memoir, List writes that his second wife, Dolores, visits him in prison.

00:32:01.020 She briefly moved to Baltimore after his arrest to evade reporters and tourists looking to gander

00:32:07.440 at the killer's ordinary home, living in plain sight. In 1995, List writes to a friend from

00:32:14.180 prison and refers to Dolores as his bride. However, according to the team of reporters

00:32:20.180 from the Father Wants Us Dead podcast, the memoir's co-author Goodrich notes that Dolores

00:32:26.060 quietly divorced the man she knew as Bob Clark. She sold the house in the Brandermill neighborhood

00:32:31.700 outside of Richmond and retreated from the public eye. In prison, List slowly falls apart.

00:32:39.180 Diabetes, then a heart rhythm problem, high blood pressure, trouble swallowing, cataracts.

00:32:44.800 He asks to be moved to the medical wing. In March 2008, he is taken to a hospital in Trenton

00:32:50.760 and dies there on March 21st at 82 of complications from pneumonia. It is Good Friday.

00:32:58.700 There is no family to call, no one to grieve him. John List's body lies in the Mercer County

00:33:06.840 morgue, unclaimed. Under New Jersey law, the body eventually must be handed over to the New Jersey

00:33:13.200 Department of Corrections and either cremated or buried, cremated by default. Authorities have not

00:33:20.340 publicly confirmed what became of John List's body, likely, at least in part, to dissuade

00:33:26.140 would-be copycats and admirers from making pilgrimage. By the time List dies, there is

00:33:32.280 no one else who wants anything to do with him. With the killer captured, convicted, and now dead,

00:33:39.960 the city of Westfield, New Jersey could leave the legend of John List behind, but it does not.

00:33:47.140 Though the original mansion where the Lists lived and most died burned due to suspected arson in

00:33:54.240 1972, the new colonial home in its place is locally known as the List House. The street

00:34:00.960 itself, formerly Hillside Avenue, has been renamed Breeze Knoll Drive, and the original lot has been

00:34:07.740 subdivided into private residences along a cul-de-sac to break up the appeal to crime

00:34:12.940 tourists. Families live along the street now, and this year it is the third most expensive street

00:34:18.920 in town. But John List was not the last source of horrors for Westfield. In 2014, another dark

00:34:26.540 force descends on the town known as The Watcher. Anonymous letters arrive at the lovely home,

00:34:33.980 threatening the family who has just purchased it with eerie details about the house and about the

00:34:39.960 children, signed only as The Watcher. The family panics, and the letters eventually stop, but their

00:34:46.700 author is never found. Netflix produces a series in 2022 by the same name, starring Naomi Watts and

00:34:54.680 Bobby Cannavale. Westfield, it seems, will not be allowed to forget there is evil in the world.

00:35:02.280 John List the man will soon be forgotten. His crime will not be, because family annihilators

00:35:08.440 raise a particularly unsettling fear in the American psyche. Chris Watts, Alec Murdoch,

00:35:15.760 John List. How does one know if there's a psychopath in one's midst? Or a person who is not

00:35:23.280 who they say they are? We all think we'd know. We would not be fooled. Would we?

00:35:31.080 Next week, a pair of assassins terrorize the nation's capital region. For 23 days,

00:35:38.060 no one is safe as two snipers go on a killing spree. I'm Megan Kelly. This is MK Confidential.

00:35:45.760 You

The Megyn Kelly Show - August 14, 2026

The Annihilator： The Reckoning — Ep. 5 ｜ MK Confidential

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