John List | b. 1925
From the annual Times Magazine “The Lives They Lived” issue:
Wanted
By ELIZABETH McCRACKEN
The lives of the missing begin, “Last seen.” The loved, the important, the engaged by the world: they disappear in an instant. We watch them go. They wander off the security-camera recording, stumble out of the bar drunk. They turn from the tarmac or the dock to the gangway and wave goodbye. They leave on purpose or in all innocence; they know they’re in danger; they don’t; they vanish willingly. There they go, as it turns out forever.
The invisible take longer to disappear.
Every death may be, as they say, like a light going out, but it took actual light bulbs burning out in the fall of 1971 before anyone noticed something had happened to the List family. Summoned by neighbors, the Westfield, N.J., police broke into Breeze Knolls, the Lists’ 19-room ramshackle Victorian, to find it cold as, well, a tomb, with organ music playing in every room over the intercom system. Four bodies lay out on sleeping bags beneath the stained-glass skylight of the ballroom: Helen List and her teenage children Patricia, Fred and John Jr. Mrs. List’s mother-in-law, Alma, had been stuck in a storage area in her attic apartment. The women and Fred List had each been shot in the head once, but John List Jr., who was 15, had been shot at least 10 times. The bodies had been there a month or more.
No mystery as to who had done it. John List Sr., husband, father, son, accountant, devout Lutheran, had announced that they were going on a family trip, had stopped the paper and milk deliveries and then killed his family. He confessed everything in a letter he left in his study for his pastor (with the postscript: “Mother is in the hallway in the attic. She was too heavy to move.”). For a C.P.A., John List turned out to have been terrible with money and worse at holding onto jobs. He owed $11,000 on his mortgage. He’d been skimming from his mother’s bank accounts. He could hear from Breeze Knolls’ many distant rooms the rumblings of foreclosure and bankruptcy, even welfare, and he mistook them for the footsteps of something much worse.
“At last I’m certain that all have gone to heaven now,” he wrote. “If things had gone on, who knows if that would be the case.”
He sent his family to a better place by killing them, but that meant he himself could not follow. At least not straightaway. In order to join them, he said, he would have to repent. In order to repent, he would have to live.
John List disappeared. He ripped his face out of every family photo in the house so the police would have nothing to go on, and by the time they found the bodies, he had been gone a month. His car was found parked at Kennedy Airport, though there was no record of his taking a flight anywhere. A year later, Breeze Knolls was destroyed by arson. It was rumored that the stained-glass skylight that had hung over the bodies was signed Louis Comfort Tiffany and worth at least $100,000, enough to have kept shadows from the front door — as long as those shadows were outside the house.
Nowadays the world is so small that it’s hard to find a place to hide forever. Re-enactments, Amber Alerts, Internet bulletins, GPS devices, cellphone records, 24-hour news: people will look for you. You will be found. Back then it seemed the universe had plenty of hidden pockets you could slip into. For instance: In November 1971, after the Westfield murders but before their discovery, a man on a plane to Seattle slipped a note to a flight attendant: he had a bomb. He demanded that $200,000 and four parachutes meet him at the airport. The plane landed, the ransom was collected, the plane took off again and the hijacker — known as D. B. Cooper, certainly not his real name — lowered the aft stairs midflight and jumped out.
He disappeared, too. In December, after the bodies were found in Westfield, some people noticed that John List fit the description of D. B. Cooper. That would have been a neat trick, to be among the missing twice.
Years, as they say on TV reality re-enactment shows, passed. John List had been missing nearly two decades. “Unsolved Mysteries” didn’t want the case — too old, too cold — but in 1989 “America’s Most Wanted” took an interest in the Westfield murders. Age-progression photographs were still new in the late 1980s (in 1987, the F.B.I. produced a few of List using new computer software), but “A.M.W.” went further: it commissioned a life-size bust of what John List might look like, 18 years on. The artist, Frank Bender, considered List’s habits, his failings. He included the surgical scar behind one ear. He kept the oversize horn-rimmed glasses. The result appeared on the show in May 1989. There he was, decapitated by art and television: portrait of a murderer.
Portrait, it turned out, of Robert Clark, a quiet, churchgoing, worried-about-money, married accountant who had trouble keeping a job, now living in a suburb of Richmond, Va.
But before John List reappeared in the form of Robert Clark, he reappeared blinkingly in other forms across the country. The Westfield Police received 300 calls after the broadcast, sightings of John List. The missing reappear like that, a familiar face in a grocery store or at a highway rest stop, a garrulous stranger in a bar whose face only later rings a faint bell. The missing (even reliably, heartbreakingly dead pop stars like Elvis and Jim Morrison) keep appearing so that they can keep disappearing. I saw him. I talked to her. Even, I married him. After seeing the bust on TV, a woman in New Orleans turned in her 63-year-old husband with such conviction that the F.B.I. flew down to meet the man, who shared some biographical details with John List, but not his fingerprints. (Was it a sincere rat-out, or revenge? A happy marriage poisoned by doubt? What happened to them afterward, she afraid he might murder her in her sleep, he that she’d send him to jail for no reason?)
The call that counted came from a woman in Denver, a former neighbor of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Clark, who had since moved to Brandermill, Va. Mr. Clark had the glasses. He had the scar. He had the fingerprints.
Now it was Robert Clark’s turn to disappear, from his quiet neighborhood, his Lutheran church, his unsuspecting second wife. At first the man clung to the name, insisting that he was not John List, but he was taken back to New Jersey anyhow, convicted of five counts of murder and sentenced in 1990 to five life terms. Eventually he admitted who he was: John List, a corporeal fact, not Robert Clark, never D. B. Cooper, both of whom were gone forever. He was adamant: he killed his family to ensure their places in heaven. When he saw them there, they would have already forgiven him.
John List outlived the family he killed by 37 years. Those people inclined to believe he went anywhere at all afterward surely have no doubt which way he went.
