The Megyn Kelly Show - August 14, 2026


The Annihilator： The Reckoning — Ep. 5 ｜ MK Confidential - FINAL Episode on the John List Family Murders


Episode Stats


Length

36 minutes

Words per minute

155.62

Word count

5,623

Sentence count

368

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:27.060 It is Thursday, June 1st, 1989. Three men walk into a small suite of accounting offices in
00:00:33.940 Richmond, Virginia. Two of the officers right off the elevator and one up the stairs. The
00:00:39.520 receptionist, Sandra Silberman, takes note. Walk-ins do not usually arrive in threes.
00:00:45.940 She hangs up the phone. One of the men flashes an FBI badge. They are here to speak with Robert
00:00:52.560 Clark. The bookkeeper who comes out to meet them is 63, balding, bespectacled, and entirely
00:00:59.740 unalarmed. The man carries himself, according to one of the FBI men, like a schoolteacher,
00:01:05.060 waiting for a student to explain himself. Special agent Kevin August starts to question him,
00:01:10.980 gently. He asks the man's name, Robert Clark. He asks Clark whether he has a scar behind his ear,
00:01:18.520 though August can plainly see that he does, and the man turns his head slightly to show it.
00:01:24.400 He asks whether Clark has had an operation for a hernia, was born in Michigan, and works as an
00:01:30.780 accountant. Clark answers all three in the affirmative. There's a pause, and then August
00:01:37.300 asks the question that he has been waiting nearly 18 years for someone to ask out loud.
00:01:43.140 Are you John Emile List?
00:01:46.500 No, Clark answers without hesitation and without emotion.
00:01:51.380 August will think about that afterward, that an innocent man would have said,
00:01:55.760 who in the hell is John Emile List?
00:01:58.480 The agents pat Clark down.
00:02:00.920 He puts his arms out and leans against the wall without a word of objection.
00:02:05.280 And when it is finished, August tries once more.
00:02:08.800 I approached him and I asked him, I said, are you Mr. Clark?
00:02:13.140 and he said yes and then I said are you John List and he says no I'm Robert P Clark. Reporters
00:02:21.520 would later put the man's exact words as quote I know who I am I'm Robert Clark. Clark seems to
00:02:28.480 force a little indignation into his voice when he says it. Across the room the receptionist
00:02:34.280 looks away because Bob Clark is giving her the mournful look of a man who believes he has been
00:02:39.760 betrayed. She notices red blotches breaking out across his face. The blotches are the only thing
00:02:46.480 about him that reveal his panic. I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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00:04:13.020 promo code MKC. The agents take Robert Clark to the Henrico County Jail and roll his inked
00:04:20.100 fingers onto a card. Clark's fingerprints promptly end the mystery. The prints match the ones John
00:04:26.640 List left on his application for a New Jersey firearms permit in Westfield on October 16th,
00:04:32.380 1971, 24 days before he shot and killed his entire family. The mastoidectomy scar behind his right
00:04:40.660 ear matches. The hernia scars match. Every physical marker on the FBI flyer that has been in circulation
00:04:46.780 for nearly 18 years matches the man before them and Clark still says no. He just absolutely denied
00:04:55.480 it. It's not me. I don't know what you're talking about. Even after he was confronted with the fact
00:05:00.760 that his fingerprints were a match he still was like it's not me. My name is Robert P. Clark.
00:05:06.540 In Brandermill a housing development set back among oak and pine outside Richmond Virginia
00:05:12.200 a woman is learning exactly who she married. Dolores Clark tries to see her husband in custody
00:05:19.080 on the afternoon of his arrest and is turned away. She comes back at noon the next day with
00:05:24.900 the pastor of their Lutheran church, the Reverend Joseph Vogt, and this time they are allowed inside.
00:05:31.940 Bob is being held in the isolation wing behind the frosted glass instead of bars. The minister
00:05:38.280 is allowed into his cell. Dolores has to stand at the glass and speak to her husband through a
00:05:44.080 telephone. She can hear that he is crying. Vogt tells reporters outside that the prisoner looks
00:05:50.440 shaken and has not slept. Then the pastor says something curious. There seems to be some relief
00:05:57.960 about the man inside, he says. Whether that is reflective of the fact that John List no longer
00:06:04.000 has to put up a front, he cannot say for sure. Dolores gives the press one written statement
00:06:10.120 and says it will be her last word on the matter. A family friend named Wally Parsons suggests they
00:06:16.000 take it to the Richmond News Leader first to get ahead of the out-of-town press, and when he speaks
00:06:22.020 to the reporter, he adds an assurance of his own. You can be a hundred percent absolutely sure that
00:06:28.880 this lady knows absolutely nothing about anything in Bob's past. In the statement, Dolores writes
00:06:35.300 quote, this is not the man I know. The man I know is kind, loving, a devoted husband, and dear friend.
00:06:42.960 She describes Bob as a man of faith, and then at the end she writes quote, I find this hard to
00:06:48.680 believe. I hope somehow this is not true, and if it is, he was so stressed out that something snapped.
00:06:54.940 I am devoted to him. I hope that somehow God will see us through this.
00:07:00.680 Dolores does not attend her husband's trial, and no reporter ever catches her visiting him in
00:07:06.200 prison. She has married a widower in 1985, and never once asked to see a photograph of his first
00:07:13.800 wife. He fights extradition to New Jersey from a Virginia cell as Robert Clark and loses. At the
00:07:21.940 end of June, he has flown to Newark, where one investigator remembers every news outlet in the
00:07:27.300 world waiting on the tarmac to watch. There was an extremely high-profile arrest and transportation.
00:07:37.500 Coming off the plane was a little scary, because every news media in the world must have been at
00:07:41.700 Newark Airport. Robert P. Clark never surrenders. He simply stops existing in a flurry of pre-trial
00:07:49.020 motions that could only be filed on behalf of the other man, John List. And nobody mentions Bob
00:07:55.120 Clark again. He lets the name and the invented life behind it slip away as unceremoniously as
00:08:02.100 it began, on a form in a Denver social security office nearly two decades before. On the evening
00:08:08.980 of November 7th, 1989, two days before the 18th anniversary of the murders, John List is brought
00:08:16.220 into a reception room at the Union County Jail to meet the only relatives he has left.
00:08:22.960 Jean Seifert, Jean spelled with a J like blue jeans, is Helen's sister, John's sister-in-law.
00:08:31.140 This is the first time John and Jean have seen each other since John shot his then-wife Helen
00:08:35.780 in the face in 1971. Jean and her husband, also Jean, though his is with a G, have flown in from
00:08:44.160 Oklahoma at the invitation of Elijah Miller, the assistant public defender assigned to represent
00:08:50.100 List. Since the day of his arrest, Jean, the sister, has been determined to look John List
00:08:55.980 in the face and put to him one word. Why? She does not sleep the night before. At the courthouse,
00:09:05.020 she asks her husband what happens if she sees John and passes out. Her spouse promises to pick
00:09:10.020 her up off the floor. John comes in at around 7 and crosses the room in the same bouncy, awkward
00:09:16.460 walk Jean remembers. 18 years later, she recognizes him instantly. A slightly lopsided face, now heavy
00:09:24.760 with jowls, the odd way he tilts his head when he stands in front of someone. He is holding a small
00:09:30.640 stack of papers and does not know what to do with them, so he sets them on the table and stares at
00:09:35.500 the floor. She says, how are you, John? He nods stiffly. And then Jean Seifert does something
00:09:43.500 that surprises her as much as it surprises him. She steps forward and hugs the man who murdered
00:09:50.580 her sister. John puts his arms around her and lays his head on her shoulder. And when he lifts
00:09:56.920 it, the top of her blouse is wet. Then he sees her husband and looks mortified. The husband reaches
00:10:03.460 out, and the two men shake hands without a word. Then the husband, too, hugs John. That, his wife
00:10:11.260 will later say, gives John the shock of his life. Again, he cries. They talk for more than three
00:10:18.260 hours in a small, windowless room on the third floor, the kind where inmates meet their lawyers,
00:10:23.380 with John's lawyer, Elijah Miller, sitting in. But it's not a reunion. The Seiferts believe in
00:10:29.940 mercy, but they also believe in accountability. And Helen's sister has waited 18 years to ask
00:10:35.740 her question. Why, John? He looks at her without any emotion at all. Because there was no other
00:10:43.720 way. It is exactly what he wrote to her in 1971, word for word. Gene pushes, why was there no other
00:10:52.600 way. Why are they meeting in a criminal court instead of a divorce court, for God's sake?
00:10:59.060 It just had to be that way, he tells her. The subject has been closed since 1971,
00:11:05.840 and John List is not reopening it for her. The brother-in-law has memorized a list of questions,
00:11:11.980 and he is not gentle with them. But John does not want to discuss the crime, and John has always
00:11:17.500 known how to control a conversation. So the sister tries to provoke one, with a question
00:11:22.640 that has haunted Westfield for 18 years. She had found a small bag of marijuana when she
00:11:29.160 cleaned out their eldest daughter Patty's room. And she asks John, did he know about
00:11:34.480 Patty and the drugs? John seems genuinely surprised. No, he says, there were no drugs.
00:11:41.980 Jean tells him she thinks he's wrong, and he doesn't argue.
00:11:45.940 Jean asks about the witchcraft, the Ouija boards,
00:11:49.580 the whispers that followed Patty through the last autumn.
00:11:53.100 John says he has never known anything about it,
00:11:55.960 and he's not particularly interested.
00:11:58.820 Late in the conversation, once the hard questions have run out
00:12:01.920 and the tension in the small room has eased some,
00:12:05.640 John List asks the Seiferts about Brenda.
00:12:08.680 Brenda Taylor is his dead wife's daughter from her first marriage, the stepchild John helped
00:12:17.280 raise from the age of nine. The one child of Helen's he did not kill, and only because she
00:12:23.460 had grown up and married and moved out years before he ever bought their dream home on the
00:12:28.540 hill, Breeze Knoll. He is told he has step-great-grandchildren now, which apparently
00:12:34.940 makes him happy. Jean Seifert flies home to Oklahoma with nothing. She has never once
00:12:42.020 believed he was insane, not for a minute, which leaves her with the same question she came to
00:12:46.880 Richmond with and the same unsatisfactory answer. What Brenda, John's stepchild, makes of John's
00:12:54.020 capture is not on the public record. She has said almost nothing since 1971. That fall, the FBI
00:13:01.180 asks to attach her name to a public appeal meant to flush out her stepfather. A daughter's plea
00:13:07.420 that reads, Daddy, you're all I have left. Please call me. It is bait. It's not clear whether Brenda
00:13:15.260 explicitly agrees, but the FBI does put out the statement. The last thing Brenda wants is for John
00:13:21.360 List to answer. By her friend's account, Brenda is petrified, certain she is the only one of the
00:13:27.260 family left and that he will come to kill her and her five children. And for a long time,
00:13:32.480 the FBI may suspect it too because they watch her house. The trial of John List opens in Union
00:13:39.220 County Superior Court on Monday, April 2, 1990. Reporters line up for hours in advance. The trial
00:13:47.120 has moved to a larger courtroom and it is still not big enough. List does not dispute that he
00:13:52.300 killed his family, but pleads not guilty by reason of mental defect. His defense attorney, Elijah
00:13:58.280 Miller, contends that his client was gripped by a religious obsession, which led him to believe he
00:14:04.100 was saving his family by taking their lives. Miller hammers the religion angle, telling the
00:14:10.380 jury his client was so locked into his own religion that once the plan was in his head to
00:14:15.560 spare his family from his own failures or from what he perceived as their alleged hedonism,
00:14:22.900 he could not step out of it. That's the defense. Not that he didn't do it, but that List killed
00:14:29.820 with love and mercy in his heart. The prosecutor is an assistant Union County DA named Brian Gillett,
00:14:38.780 who, as he tells it, is the only person in the office who did not ask for this case. He opens
00:14:44.060 his case by reading aloud John List's five-page letter to his pastor, the one sealed in a locked
00:14:49.960 drawer of the file cabinet beside John's desk, next to the two fired handguns, the murder weapons.
00:14:55.940 One reporter describes Gillett's tone as cold, with traces of mockery. When Gillett reaches the
00:15:02.200 line where List asks the pastor to pray for him, quote, whether or not the government does its
00:15:07.780 duty as it sees it, Gillett stops and looks along the jury box. Today, he tells them, the government
00:15:14.600 intends to do its duty. The letter is the whole prosecution. Every element the state has to prove
00:15:21.200 that the killings were willful, deliberate, and premeditated is signed and dated in the defendant's
00:15:26.740 own hand. The forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen Simring, spends four hours with List in a jail
00:15:33.660 cell with a video camera rolling and finds a man who was unfailingly pleasant about the whole
00:15:38.640 affair. Years later, he describes the conversation to American justice. He was mild-mannered,
00:15:46.240 courteous, soft-spoken, very precise and very exact. He also expressed no remorse and only
00:15:56.260 superficial regret. He said essentially something that had to happen. It was unfortunate.
00:16:02.260 it. Simmering walks the jury through what List told him hour by hour, and the courtroom listens
00:16:09.060 in absolute silence. He says List did not feel guilt or sadness at the loss of his family,
00:16:16.280 nor did John kill his family out of concern for the fate of their souls. The psychiatrist says
00:16:21.520 that List shifts explanations depending on his needs. And at that moment, what John List needed
00:16:27.340 was an acquittal. He did not have a major mental illness. There was no psychiatric legal excuse
00:16:34.620 either to excuse or to mitigate. Simmering tells the jury John List believed suicide would land
00:16:40.700 him in hell, so he spared himself and sent his family to heaven. Simmering concludes on the
00:16:47.820 stand, quote, he wanted grace in the hereafter, but he didn't want a rest yet. There's religious
00:16:54.260 belief and there's religious hypocrisy. I think there's a fair amount of hypocrisy here. 0.86
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00:18:26.140 visit ConnexOntario.ca. Terms and conditions apply. The assistant prosecutor Eleanor Clark
00:18:31.840 tells the jury no man could use religion to justify this carnage. Well, I think no matter
00:18:38.780 how religious you are, you realize that there's a little problem with this. I found this horrific
00:18:46.580 To my tone of voice and the nature of my questions, I try to communicate this to the jurors.
00:18:51.540 Elijah Miller calls a procession of Lutheran clergymen who had known John List across four decades,
00:18:57.940 in Kalamazoo, in Rochester, in Westfield.
00:19:01.560 He needs them to tell the jury that this was a devout man whose religious fervor swallowed him whole.
00:19:08.280 Instead, one after another, the clergy who taught John List his faith
00:19:12.220 take the stand and dismantle John List's theology.
00:19:17.040 Pastor Louis Grother led the List's in his Kalamazoo congregation in the late 50s.
00:19:22.880 Prosecutor Clark asks him whether the Lutheran Church would frown on a man
00:19:26.780 who killed his daughter to save her soul.
00:19:29.700 The Lutheran Church and the scriptures, the pastor says,
00:19:32.840 would frown upon anybody deliberately killing anybody.
00:19:37.160 Defense attorney Miller calls the Reverend Edward Zaruski.
00:19:41.700 the family's minister outside Rochester from the years John worked at Xerox.
00:19:46.180 He paints John as a bitter failure whose theology would never support murder.
00:19:51.760 He recalls that John struggled at work, telling the court that Helen once said
00:19:56.240 if John were half the man her former husband was,
00:19:59.140 they wouldn't have the troubles they were having.
00:20:01.420 The jury is starting to learn about John's simmering resentments.
00:20:06.680 Then Miller asks about John's religion,
00:20:08.680 and Reverend Sureski says that John's fundamentalist theology is fundamentally flawed.
00:20:16.020 Sin is still sin, he tells the court.
00:20:18.580 Grace is available for the sinner, but sin is never justified and Christians know that.
00:20:24.220 He testifies that, quote, John's problem was that he knew doctrine, but he did not know faith. 0.87
00:20:31.320 I think John did not trust God, end quote.
00:20:35.060 John List could answer catechism questions at 15 without a stumble.
00:20:40.000 He taught Sunday school.
00:20:41.560 He kept the books at three different churches in different parts of the country.
00:20:45.400 What he could not do across 50 years was hand a single problem to God and leave it there.
00:20:51.560 Not the job, not the mortgage, his wife's illness, his daughter's future.
00:20:56.780 He did what he always did with figures he didn't like.
00:21:00.780 He didn't give it to God.
00:21:02.660 He anointed himself as God.
00:21:05.840 He decided when his children's souls were safe
00:21:08.500 and closed their earthly accounts on a date of his own choosing.
00:21:13.240 The last of the clergymen is the Reverend Alfred Shipes,
00:21:16.660 who served as chaplain to John's youth group at the University of Michigan.
00:21:20.940 He describes John as faithful and of good character.
00:21:24.360 Defense attorney Miller asks him about sin.
00:21:27.160 Thou shalt not kill, the minister answers.
00:21:30.240 Taking a life is certainly wrong.
00:21:31.980 On cross-examination, the prosecution asks Scheipz whether there is a greatest sin, a sin above others, and in a courtroom where a man is on trial for murdering his family, allegedly because he could not bear the shame of their lowered station or their descent into perceived debauchery, the minister thinks about it for a few seconds and then quotes C.S. Lewis.
00:21:56.340 Pride, he says, pride is the greatest sin.
00:21:59.500 On April 12, 1990, after seven days of testimony, the jury of nine men and three women steps out
00:22:07.440 of the courtroom to decide John List's fate. Everyone expects the verdict to be quick.
00:22:13.520 Reporters have a betting pool going. Some predict it will take less than 60 minutes,
00:22:17.460 but that's not what happens. There is a holdout on the jury, a lone person who still is not
00:22:24.220 convinced about John List's state of mind. The jurors send the judge a note asking him to define
00:22:30.760 willful, premeditated, and deliberate. Then another note, and another. Then they ask for
00:22:36.720 two packs of cigarettes. The jury deliberates for six hours the first day and then goes home
00:22:42.260 to sleep on it. Could this one holdout really deadlock the case? Could the man who signed and
00:22:47.940 dated a five-page detailed confession and tucked it in a drawer next to the murder weapons actually
00:22:53.620 go free on a hung jury? By lunch the next day, the jury has reached a verdict. What turns the
00:23:01.020 holdout, the foreman tells reporters afterward, is a single line in John List's letter. The line
00:23:07.120 where List explains that he had originally planned the murders for November 1st, All Saints Day,
00:23:13.200 because he thought it an appropriate day for his family to get to heaven, then that travel
00:23:18.100 arrangements delayed him. A man who reschedules is a man who deliberated. The jury declares him
00:23:25.420 guilty on five counts of murder in the first degree. John List hears it stone-faced, staring
00:23:31.640 straight ahead, motionless. Because New Jersey had no death penalty on its books in 1971,
00:23:39.140 the sentence is capped at life without parole. The irony, of course, is that John List did not
00:23:45.600 actually spend his life in prison, he has gotten away with his crimes for 18 years of freedom.
00:23:52.220 On May 1st, 1990, Superior Court Judge William Wertheimer hands down the maximum punishment
00:23:58.900 available to him. He will later reread his sentencing statement aloud for the New Jersey
00:24:04.560 media podcast covering the List case, Father Wants Us Dead. His acts stand as a permanent,
00:24:10.560 pathetic, and profane example of the potential of man's inhumanity to man.
00:24:15.600 They will not be soon or easily forgotten, and the name of John Amell List will be 0.91
00:24:20.240 eternally synonymous with concepts of selfishness, horror, and evil.
00:24:25.180 Judge Wertheimer calls List a man without honor.
00:24:28.740 He tells the courtroom that after 18 years, five months, and 22 days, it is time for the
00:24:33.760 voices of Helen, Alma, Patricia, Frederick, and John Jr. to speak from the grave.
00:24:40.820 But I thought it was appropriate that each of the victims had their own sentence.
00:24:44.980 I ran consecutively so he wasn't going to get out. Five consecutive life terms, one after the other
00:24:52.520 and one for each member of the family so that justice for one victim is not folded into justice
00:24:58.540 for anyone else. List is offered the chance to speak. He stands and takes it. I remain truly
00:25:06.500 sorry for the tragedy that happened in 1971. I feel that due to my mental state at the time
00:25:14.580 I was unaccountable for what happened.
00:25:18.740 Truly sorry for the tragedy that happened.
00:25:22.620 Passive voice.
00:25:24.120 Not for what he did, just for what happened, as though he bore no responsibility.
00:25:30.660 He goes into New Jersey State Prison in Trenton at 64, and he is, by every account, a nearly model inmate.
00:25:38.500 He works in the print shop, keeping track of all the forms.
00:25:42.120 He reads his Bible and holds a Lutheran service in his cell on Sundays, plays chess, he writes
00:25:47.540 letters his friends describe as journal entries, blogging what time he woke up, what time he napped,
00:25:54.080 and what he watched on television. His closest friend in confinement is George Corbett,
00:25:59.880 42 years younger, locked up for murdering a 14-year-old boy. Corbett remembers a dry sense
00:26:06.000 of humor and an obsessiveness that never lets up list gets angry if anyone touches his pencils
00:26:12.340 he rations his commissary olives to two a day so they last he becomes petty and short-tempered
00:26:19.280 a man who has scheduled his whole day down to the minute and cannot stand it when the world
00:26:23.980 falls out of step this prison friend corbett remembers lists outsized reactions if the door
00:26:30.980 didn't open up right away if it took too long he would scream out because normally it would open
00:26:34.460 you know, right on cue. And then if he had to say it a second time, he would get very agitated.
00:26:38.960 Open 12, you bastard. He continues trying to manage his own story. List sits for a television 1.00
00:26:45.780 interview with Connie Chung and another with A&E. He publishes a memoir with a co-author,
00:26:52.040 a rambling, self-justifying, and remarkably self-pitying book. Throughout all of it,
00:26:58.140 he says the same things, the things he thinks mitigate his crimes, that he loved his family,
00:27:03.660 that he did it to save their souls, that God has forgiven him.
00:27:08.100 Never does he use the word murder.
00:27:11.040 Journalist Bill Curtis asks John List how he thinks it all ends.
00:27:16.320 And John is untroubled.
00:27:18.360 I think I will go to heaven.
00:27:20.580 I don't know what the situation will be in heaven.
00:27:24.240 They will remember what I did to them.
00:27:27.620 And 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.
00:27:36.880 37 years on, John List is still playing God.
00:27:41.580 John Walsh, who put the clay bust of John List on television and ended in 18-year manhunt, gives another take on John List's hereafter.
00:27:50.660 Oh, he's not going to heaven. I know, well, I know for sure that this man is not going to heaven.
00:27:57.620 he's going straight down, right where his ass belongs. Bernard Tracy, the young Westfield 1.00
00:28:04.020 detective who inherited the case file and lived it for 11 years, the crime scene photographs,
00:28:10.240 the autopsy reports, every last detail of what List did to his family, later becomes the chief
00:28:16.860 of police. He, of all people, might wish the worst to John List. Instead, some grace.
00:28:25.140 It's a terrible thing what John List did, but can we be forgiven for even those sins? I hope so.
00:28:31.780 And John List can go to heaven, and I hope he does.
00:28:35.460 The case outgrows the man in stature almost immediately.
00:28:39.980 In 1987, two years before anyone knows where John List is, a film reaches theaters called The Stepfather,
00:28:47.080 about a mild, murderous family man who kills a household and reinvents himself under a new name.
00:28:53.760 Six years later, in 1993, CBS makes the story directly,
00:28:58.860 a television movie called Judgment Day, the John List story, with Robert Blake as the lead.
00:29:05.640 I've done what I was told to do always, but evil still surrounds me.
00:29:12.660 It lives in the very heart of this house, and nothing I say, nothing I do kills it.
00:29:16.940 i've done what she told me to do and i'm losing everything nearly 10 years later robert blake
00:29:26.580 would be arrested for the murder of his own wife john list continues to try for his freedom
00:29:32.620 not by escaping prison but by the book through the courts he appeals his conviction in 1993
00:29:39.300 deputy and assistant deputy public defenders joan van pelt and michael blake contest the
00:29:45.420 warrantless search on December 7, 1971, the night the Westfield police found the List family on the
00:29:52.220 ballroom floor. John's initial public defender, Elijah Miller, tries to exclude all evidence the
00:29:58.860 police department picked up in the search, and thus much of the case against List. Judge Wertheimer
00:30:04.780 shoots that down, writing that List has abandoned the home and everything in it, and that in any
00:30:10.620 event, the discovery of five bodies and a handwritten note in a house with the lights
00:30:15.160 burning out was inevitable, if not by a concerned friend or neighbor, then eventually by police.
00:30:22.340 John List's appellate team argues that Judge Wertheimer was wrong and that Miller's failure
00:30:27.820 to suppress the evidence means he did not provide List with a proper defense. Blake and Van Pelt
00:30:33.760 also throw a Hail Mary pass of sorts, arguing that John List's confession letter to his pastor
00:30:39.900 left in a manila folder atop his desk at Breeze Knoll for anyone to see is a private conversation
00:30:46.880 and should be protected under both the first and fifth amendments. Finally, they call Judge
00:30:52.580 Wertheimer's consecutive five life sentences, quote, excessive. A panel of three judges easily
00:30:59.080 upholds the conviction. They address some of the appeal's claims in detail and dismiss the rest as,
00:31:04.180 quote, clearly without merit, List's appeal is denied. Two years later, List tries one more
00:31:11.900 angle, PTSD. He asks the court for another bite at the apple for the chance to argue to a new jury
00:31:19.340 that he murdered his family due to post-traumatic stress from his service in World War II.
00:31:25.280 The court rejects the petition. The state of New Jersey has heard quite enough from John List.
00:31:30.960 List eventually takes his PTSD case public. In 2006, he publishes the memoir Collateral Damage
00:31:38.940 with the help of author Austin Goodrich. John claims that he saw 41 days of combat in World
00:31:44.840 War II and remembers none of it. He cites PTSD from this experience as the root cause
00:31:51.180 of his life's biggest problems, his inability to hold a job, his difficulty parenting his children,
00:31:57.540 and his decision to slaughter his own family in the name of saving them. List introduces his story
00:32:04.500 as a tale of woe for undiagnosed and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder. He dedicates the
00:32:11.340 book to his parents and to, quote, all family members made victims by my sinful actions.
00:32:18.580 In his memoir, List writes that his second wife, Dolores, visits him in prison. She briefly moved
00:32:25.340 Baltimore after his arrest to evade reporters and tourists looking to gander at the killer's
00:32:31.260 ordinary home, living in plain sight. In 1995, List writes to a friend from prison and refers
00:32:38.160 to Dolores as his bride. However, according to the team of reporters from the Father Wants Us
00:32:44.780 Dead podcast, the memoir's co-author Goodrich notes that Dolores quietly divorced the man
00:32:50.600 she knew as Bob Clark. She sold the house in the Brandermill neighborhood outside of Richmond
00:32:55.680 and retreated from the public eye. In prison, List slowly falls apart. Diabetes, then a heart
00:33:03.680 rhythm problem, high blood pressure, trouble swallowing, cataracts. He asks to be moved to
00:33:09.380 the medical wing. In March 2008, he is taken to a hospital in Trenton and dies there on March 21st
00:33:16.620 at 82 of complications from pneumonia. It is Good Friday. There is no family to call,
00:33:24.920 no one to grieve him. John List's body lies in the Mercer County morgue, unclaimed. Under New
00:33:32.680 Jersey law, the body eventually must be handed over to the New Jersey Department of Corrections
00:33:37.280 and either cremated or buried, cremated by default. Authorities have not publicly confirmed
00:33:44.320 what became of John List's body, likely, at least in part, to dissuade would-be copycats and admirers
00:33:51.380 from making pilgrimage. By the time List dies, there is no one else who wants anything to do
00:33:58.220 with him. With the killer captured, convicted, and now dead, the city of Westfield, New Jersey
00:34:05.060 could leave the legend of John List behind, but it does not. Though the original mansion where
00:34:11.880 the lists lived and most died, burned due to suspected arson in 1972, the new colonial home
00:34:20.000 in its place is locally known as the List House. The street itself, formerly Hillside Avenue,
00:34:26.720 has been renamed Breeze Knoll Drive, and the original lot has been subdivided into private
00:34:32.200 residences along a cul-de-sac to break up the appeal to crime tourists. Families live along
00:34:38.160 the street now, and this year it is the third most expensive street in town. But John List was
00:34:44.640 not the last source of horrors for Westfield. In 2014, another dark force descends on the town
00:34:51.200 known as The Watcher. Anonymous letters arrive at the lovely home, threatening the family who
00:34:58.020 has just purchased it with eerie details about the house and about the children, signed only as
00:35:04.920 The Watcher. The family panics, and the letters eventually stop, but their author is never found.
00:35:12.000 Netflix produces a series in 2022 by the same name, starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale.
00:35:19.560 Westfield, it seems, will not be allowed to forget there is evil in the world.
00:35:25.300 John List the man will soon be forgotten. His crime will not be, because family annihilators
00:35:31.480 raise a particularly unsettling fear in the American psyche.
00:35:36.600 Chris Watts, Alec Murdoch, John List.
00:35:40.840 How does one know if there's a psychopath in one's midst?
00:35:44.800 Or a person who is not who they say they are?
00:35:48.040 We all think we'd know.
00:35:50.040 We would not be fooled.
00:35:52.060 Would we?
00:35:54.160 Next week, a pair of assassins terrorize the nation's capital region.
00:35:58.860 for 23 days, no one is safe as two snipers go on a killing spree.
00:36:05.200 I'm Megan Kelly. This is MK Confidential.