31: The List Family Murders - Square Mile of Murder

This week we’re telling you the story of the List Family Murders and John List, the family annihilator who spent 18 years evading justice. The biggest break in the case came thanks to legendary forensic sculptor Frank Bender and America’s Most Wanted. Let’s get into it.

On December 7th 1971 police entered the basement of the List Family’s home in Westfield, New Jersey, a Victorian Mansion called Breeze Knoll. The family were known to be reclusive but their neighbours hadn’t seen them for almost a month, and there didn’t seem to be any activity at the house, despite the fact that the lights were on throughout the house all day and all night. One by one, the lights began to burn out, and the house slowly descended into darkness, and it was then that the neighbours decided to call the police.

But on their first visit, despite there being no answer from the family, and no signs of life at all, the police decided that there was nothing untoward going on and left. But then that evening one of the List children’s teachers visited the house, the children hadn’t attended school for a month and despite a note from their father John List saying they were going on an extended vacation, teachers were beginning to worry about the family.

And it was this teacher who convinced the police to enter through the unlocked window in the basement.

Police moved through the house until they got to the ballroom, because this is a big ass mansion, and there they found the bodies of four members of the List Family:

46 year old Helen List, her daughter Patricia aged 16, and sons John the third, aged 15, and Frederick, 13. A full search of the house revealed the body of 85 year old Alma List, Helen’s mother-in-law and the children’s grandmother in the attic.

The one person missing from the scene was 46 year old John List Jnr, husband of Helen, son of Alma, and father of Patricia, John and Frederick.

But who was John List, what had led to the tragic deaths of his entire family, and where was he now?

John was a devout Lutheran just like his father and also taught Sunday School. At the age of 18 he enlisted in the US Army and served as a lab tech during the second world war. Following his discharge in 1946 List attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where he achieved a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and a Masters in Accounting. He also became a second lieutenant in the Reserve Officers Training Corp. In 1950 he was called up for active duty in Korea.

At Fort Eustis, Virginia, List met Helen Morris Taylor, who lived nearby with her daughter Brenda. Helen was widowed after her husband was killed in action in Korea, and in December 1951 the couple were married in Baltimore. But the couple only married because Helen told John that she was pregnant.

But it turned out that Helen wasn’t pregnant, leaving John feeling tricked, but he wasn’t about to break his marriage vows and file for divorce. Shortly after the wedding the family moved to California and List was reassigned to the US Army’s Finance Corp, before completing another tour of duty in Korea.

In 1952 the family moved to Detroit where List worked for an accountancy firm, before moving to Kalamazoo in Central Michigan. The family settled in Kalamazoo for a number of years and it was here that Patricia, John the Third and Frederick were all born.
In 1960, Helen’s daughter Brenda married and moved out of the family home, the rest of the List family moved to Rochester, New York when John took a job with Xerox where he would eventually become the director of accountancy.

In 1965 List took the job of Vice President at a bank in Jersey City, and moved the family to the ‘burbs, and the Victorian mansion Breeze Knoll where they would live until that fateful autumn of 1971.

Along with the bodies of the five List family members, authorities found a note addressed to John’s Pastor at the local Lutheran church, but we’ll come back to the note later, so put a pin in it.

A manhunt began for John Emil List.
Westfield, New Jersey was considered a very safe place to live and raise a family, very few violent crimes had been recorded in the decade before the family murders. So the annihilation of an entire family was pretty big news and the story made the front page across the United States. In fact, the List Family murder was considered the most notorious crime in New Jersey since the kidnapping of the Lindburgh Baby in 1932.
But despite the attention the case received, and the hundreds of leads police investigated, there was no sign of John List.

The bodies of Helen List and her three children were buried at the Fairview, Westfield cemetery and Alma List was repatriated to Frankenmuth in Michigan where she was buried at the Saint Lorenz Lutheran Cemetery.

Breeze Knoll remained empty for the next nine months until it was burned in an arson fire in August 1972. The building was almost completely destroyed, including the ballroom’s stained glass skylight which was rumoured to be a signed Tiffany original worth $100,000 at the time, which is about $639,755.56 or £479,179.92 today. The arson remains unsolved and a new house was built on the site in 1974.

Two days after the bodies were discovered List’s car was found parked 35 miles away at JFK airport in Queens, the date on the parking ticket was November 10 but there was no evidence that he ever even entered the airport building never mind got on a plane.

And that is where, despite the FBI and local law enforcement’s best efforts, the trail went cold, for 18 years.

In 1989 the cold case team and America’s Most Wanted hired forensic artist Frank Bender to create a bust of how he believed John List would have aged, and in May of that year it was shown on America’s Most Wanted. Usually at the end of the show they would show a photo of the wanted fugitive, but the problem with that was that the most recent photo of John List was taken years before the murders, so they didn’t even have a photo from the time of the murders as List had destroyed all the family photos he was in.

Frank Bender created the age progression bust from clay, and based it upon photographs and opinions from psychologists. These psychologists theorised that List would wear the same kind of horn-rimmed glasses he had worn when he was younger, to remind him of his success before his whole entire life went to shit.

The episode of America’s Most Wanted was watched by an audience of 22 million people on May 21 1989, and the tips came pouring in, just as they had following the media circus in 1971.

It turned out that forensic artist Frank Bender was really fucking good at his job, and the age progressed clay bust was a dead ringer for the now 63 year old John List. In the Forensic Files episode on this case Frank Bender talks about creating the bust and how he worked with psychologists to try and get a better idea of how John List would have aged, because it’s not as simple as adding a few lines and wrinkles. How would his crimes have weighed on his conscience, and how would that manifest physically in his appearance? He researched how a scar that List had behind his ear would have aged, and he studied photos of List’s parents to try and get a sense of genetic aging.

Amongst the hundreds of tips that came in following the broadcast was one from a woman in Denver, Colorado, named Wanda Flannery who claimed that the bust looked just like her former neighbour Robert Clark, she also said that he was an accountant and regularly attended the local Lutheran church. Wanda had been watching the programme with her daughter and the pair were shocked at just how much the bust looked like their former neighbour.

Authorities tracked down Robert Clark to Midlothian, Virginia, in the suburbs of state capital Richmond, and interviewed his wife Delores.

Delores, an Army PX Clerk, had met Robert Clark at a church gathering while living in Colorado where Clark/List had lived from 1979-1988, and the couple had married in 1985. Delores was also a close friend of their neighbour Wanda Flannery, and it was Wanda who had told the authorities about the couple moving to Virginia.

In 1988 the couple had moved to the suburbs of Richmond, Virginia, when Clark/List took a new accountancy job using the name Robert ‘Bob’ Clark since the name had worked for him in Colorado. It was later discovered that John List had attended college with a man named Robert Clark and used the name to ensure there was a paper trail as far as qualifications went. Although the real Robert Clark would later say he had no knowledge of who John List was.

On June 1, 1989, less than two weeks after the episode of America’s Most Wanted aired, police in Richmond arrested Clark/List at his place of work. List stuck by his new alias Robert Clark for several months, even after he was extradited to New Jersey.

However, in late 1989 List was faced with the irrefutable proof that he was John List as his fingerprints matched those held on file by the US Army for John List who had served two tours in Korea and worked in the Finance Corps. Not only this, but they also matched the prints on a firearm permit that John List had filed just one month before the murders.

But still he didn’t crack, he held out that he was Robert Clark for a few more months.

That was until February 12 1990, when he finally confessed to being the John Emil List who had been on the run for more than 18 years. And finally the truth about what had happened that fateful day in November 1971 came out. So let’s go back to the beginning.

It turned out that in early 1971 John List had lost his job at the bank, but rather than admit to this and find a new job, he pretended all was well, and he kept leaving for work every day, parking his car at the train station and then taking the train a couple of stops so everyone thought he had gone to work. He would spend all day sitting in the station reading newspapers and then return home as usual. Unsurprisingly, this charade didn’t pay the bills and he began skimming money from his mother’s bank accounts. List had also bought a second property a few years earlier, although we’re not sure if this was like a summer house or a rental property, but either way, he couldn’t afford the upkeep on both properties. That summer his children took summer jobs to help keep the family afloat, but John List spiralled into tens of thousands of dollars of debt.

As well as refusing to get another job like a normal responsible adult, John List also refused to seek any kind of help or welfare from the state. He did this because he believed the family would never be able to recover from the shame and embarrassment of claiming welfare. He also said that claiming welfare would go against the principles of self sufficiency that had been instilled in him from a young age by his father and that he hated the idea of his late father being ashamed of him. Although he said nothing about what his father would have thought about his murdering his entire family rather than find a new job.

The family had clearly been living far beyond their means for quite a while and List also claimed that living a working class life or living off of welfare until he found himself a new job would drive his children away from the church into a life of sin and poverty. He was also disgusted with his daughter Patricia’s aspirations of becoming an actress, as he viewed the profession as sinful and immoral.
So in the mind of John Emil List there was only one solution to his problems.

That morning on November 9, 1971 John List left the house as normal, dropping off his kids at school, he then returned home where his wife was sitting in the kitchen sipping her morning coffee. He shot her in the back of the head, execution style, with no warning. He rolled her body onto a sleeping bag and dragged her from the kitchen into the ballroom. He then went up to the self contained apartment on the third floor – or second floor to our British listeners. His mother Alma had lived in this self-contained flat for a number of years, and List walked into the apartment and shot her in the head.

Now remember the letter he wrote to his pastor that we mentioned earlier? Well in this letter List wrote that he had planned to move his mother’s body to the ballroom with the rest of the family but she was too heavy and he couldn’t carry her down two sets of stairs.

After murdering his wife and mother, John List made himself a sandwich, and just chilled in the house writing a couple of letters like there weren’t two corpses in the house with him.

List wrote letters to his children’s schools and various extracurricular activities, and to the bosses at their weekend jobs. In these letters he said that the children would be absent for a few weeks as the family were going on an extended vacation to North Carolina to visit Helen’s mother who he claimed was terminally ill. He drove to the post office to mail the letters, he then closed his and his mother’s bank accounts, withdrawing all the money. He also cancelled their milk and newspaper deliveries.

List then went back home to wait for his children to return.

Patricia was the first to return home from school, and John shot her in the back of the head and then placed her on top of a sleeping bag and dragged her into the ballroom, laying her next to her mother. Son Frederick was the next to return home and List shot him in the back of the head just as he had with Helen, Alma and Patricia. He then made himself another meal before leaving the house to watch his son John play a football game (American football).

After John’s football game they drove home, and once inside the house John shot his son, but young John put up a fight and suffered multiple gunshot wounds, eventually dying from a shot to the chest. His body was described as being riddled with bullets.

List went around the house, cleaning up the crime scene and tidying the house. Then he wrote the letter to his pastor as he believed his pastor would be the only one to understand why he had murdered his entire family rather than be poor or sell the house and downsize.

He then cut his face out of every photo he could find in the house basically to try and make it more difficult for law enforcement to track him down, and because the family were fairly reclusive outside of the church, there weren’t many photos of him elsewhere either.

Next he turned the radio to his favourite Christian station and set up a tannoy/intercom system to blast the station throughout his house, and then he went to bed.

The next morning he got up as usual and left the house, abandoned his car at JFK and then took a train out west, eventually settling in Denver, Colorado.

As we said earlier, the mansion Breeze Knoll burned down the year after the murders and an original signed Tiffany skylight was discovered, or at least what was left of it. This skylight alone, if it had been properly removed and sold, would have been enough to get the family out of their financial troubles and hold them over until List found a new job.

During List’s 18 years on the run the FBI had two lines of thought about what became of John List, they believed that either he had gone on the run, assumed a new identity and was now off living his best, debt-free life. The second was that he had taken his own life, likely somewhere remote and his body was as yet undiscovered. But List claimed that the reason why he didn’t kill himself was because if he did he wouldn’t go to heaven and therefore he would never be reunited with his family. For some reason he didn’t see his murdering five people, his own mother, wife and children, as any kind of barrier to a pleasant afterlife.
His second wife Delores had no idea of John List’s crimes, he had told her that he was a widower, but that his first wife had died from cancer, and the couple divorced following his arrest.

On April 12 1990 List was found guilty of five counts of murder was sentenced to five life terms without parole, to be served consecutively, which at the time was the most severe punishment in the state of New Jersey.

List filed numerous appeals, in one he claimed that he suffered PTSD following his military service in Korea and that had impaired his judgement. Another claimed that the letter to his pastor which was essentially a confession was private correspondence and therefore should not have been admissible as evidence.
All of his appeals were rejected by a federal appeals court.
He did eventually express some regret for the murders saying “I’ve regretted my action and prayed for forgiveness ever since.”

List served almost 18 years in the New Jersey State Prison, and on March 21 2008 he died following complications from Pneumonia whilst in prison custody at the St Francis Medical Centre in Trenton, New Jersey. He was 82 years old.