John List (murderer)

• 1. The House With Every Light On

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  John Emil List left behind a mansion in Westfield, New Jersey, that blazed with light in the autumn of 1971. Every room was lit, day and night, and yet nobody seemed to be living there. Neighbors waited and watched. Then the light bulbs began to burn out, one by one, and no one replaced them. Finally the neighbors called the police. Officers found an unlocked window leading to the basement, climbed inside, and discovered the bodies of a whole family.

  The man who had lived in that house was an accountant, a Lutheran, and a quiet commuter. He was gone, and he would stay gone for years. How does a respectable bank executive become the subject of a nationwide manhunt? What was happening behind the polished surface of his life? And how does a man with a new name and a new wife disappear so completely that the trail goes cold? The answers begin far from New Jersey, in a small Michigan city.

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• 2. Michigan To Westfield

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  John List was born on the 17th of September 1925 in Bay City, Michigan, the only child of John Frederick List and Alma Marie Barbara Florence List. His parents were German American and were first cousins once removed. Like his father, he was a devout Lutheran and taught Sunday school. He graduated from Bay City Central High School in 1943, and the same year he enlisted in the United States Army. During World War II he served as a laboratory technician. His father died in 1944.

  After his discharge in 1946, List enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He earned a bachelor's degree in business administration and a master's degree in accounting, and he was commissioned a lieutenant through ROTC. In November 1950, as the Korean War escalated, the Army recalled him. At Fort Eustis in Virginia he met Helen Morris Taylor, whose first husband, an infantry officer, had been killed in action in Korea. She lived nearby with her daughter, Brenda. The couple married in Baltimore, Maryland, on the 1st of December 1951, and the Army, recognizing his talent for numbers, assigned him to the Finance Corps.

  After his second tour ended in 1952, List worked for an accounting firm in Detroit. He then became an audit supervisor at a paper company in Kalamazoo, where his three children were born between 1955 and 1958. By 1959 he was general supervisor of the accounting department. In 1960 Brenda married and left home, and the family moved to Rochester, New York, where List took a job with Xerox and rose to director of accounting services.

  In 1965 a bank in Jersey City, New Jersey, hired him as vice president and comptroller. He moved his wife, his children, and his mother into Breeze Knoll, a 19-room Victorian mansion at 431 Hillside Avenue in Westfield. On paper, it was the peak of a steady climb. The paper did not show what Helen had carried into the marriage.

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• 3. A Hidden Collapse

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  By 1959, Helen List was an alcoholic, and she had grown steadily more unstable because of syphilis she had caught from her first husband. She never told List before the wedding. According to testimony at his trial, she pressured him into marriage by falsely claiming she was pregnant. She then insisted on marrying in Maryland, which at the time did not require the premarital syphilis test demanded in most other states.

  Her health declined for years, and she said nothing to her husband or her physicians until a thorough examination in 1969 revealed the disease. By then, the illness and heavy drinking had left her, in the words of that testimony, an unkempt and paranoid recluse. She humiliated List, often in public, and compared his sexual ability unfavorably with that of her first husband.

  A second blow came in 1971, when the Jersey City bank closed and List lost his job. He could not bear to tell his family. Each morning he dressed as usual and left on schedule. He spent his days at job interviews or at the Westfield train station, reading newspapers until it was time to go home. To avoid defaulting on the mortgage, he drew money from his mother's bank accounts. He also urged his children to find part-time work, saying it would teach them responsibility, though the real purpose was to keep the household afloat.

  At trial, a court-appointed psychiatrist testified that List had obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. In the psychiatrist's account, List saw only two ways out. He could accept welfare, or he could kill his family and send their souls to heaven. Welfare meant ridicule, and it betrayed the teachings of his authoritarian father about caring for and protecting family. List himself named two motives: crushing money trouble, and a belief that his family was drifting from the faith. He claimed that killing them would guarantee them a place in heaven. By the autumn of 1971 he had settled on the second solution.

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• 4. The Ninth Of November

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  On the 9th of November 1971, with his children still at school, List shot his wife, Helen, who was 47, in the back of the head. His weapons were a 9mm Steyr 1912 semi-automatic handgun and a Colt .22 caliber revolver that had belonged to his father. He then shot his mother, Alma, who was 84, above the left eye. When his daughter Patricia, 16, and his younger son Frederick, 13, came home from school, he shot each of them in the back of the head.

  The day continued as if nothing had happened. List made himself lunch. He drove to his bank to close his own accounts and his mother's. He then went to Westfield High School and watched his elder son, John Frederick, who was 15, play in a soccer game. Back at the house, List shot the boy repeatedly. Evidence of misfires showed that the boy had tried to defend himself.

  List laid the bodies of his wife and children on sleeping bags in the mansion's ballroom. His mother's body he left in her apartment in the attic. On the desk in his study he left a five-page letter to his pastor, claiming he had seen too much evil in the world and had killed to save his family's souls. Then he cleaned the crime scenes and removed his own face from every family photograph in the house. He tuned a radio to a religious station and lowered the temperature to preserve the bodies. Then he left. That letter would later become the center of a legal fight over whether it was a private word to a pastor.

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• 5. Silence And Fire

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  Notes sent to the children's schools and part-time employers told a simple story. The children, they said, would be visiting their ailing maternal grandmother in North Carolina for a few weeks. List also stopped the milk, the mail, and the newspapers. The family was reclusive anyway, so few people expected to see them. Helen's own mother was sick and had called off a visit to Westfield. List later said that had she come, she would have been his sixth victim. The bodies were found on the 7th of December, nearly a month after the killings.

  Westfield had recorded few violent crimes since 1963, and the case brought it national attention. It was described as one of the most notorious felonies in New Jersey since the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. A nationwide manhunt began, and police chased hundreds of leads without result. List had destroyed every reliable photograph of himself. The family's green 1963 Chevrolet Impala sedan turned up parked at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City, but police found no sign that he had boarded a plane.

  Alma's body was flown to Frankenmuth, Michigan, and buried at the Saint Lorenz Lutheran Cemetery. Helen and her three children were buried at Fairview Cemetery in Westfield. Breeze Knoll stood empty until August 1972, nine months after the murders, when fire destroyed it. Officials ruled the blaze arson, but no suspect was ever identified. The ballroom's stained glass skylight, rumored to be a signed Tiffany worth at least $100,000 at the time, burned with it. A new house was built on the site in 1974.

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• 6. Bob Clark Of Denver

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  The FBI later learned that List had traveled by train in 1971, first from New Jersey to Michigan and then on to Colorado. He settled in Denver in early 1972 and found an accounting job under the name Robert Peter "Bob" Clark. The name belonged to one of his college classmates, though the real Bob Clark later said he had never known List.

  From 1979 to 1986, List served as comptroller of a paper box manufacturer outside Denver. He joined a Lutheran congregation and ran a car pool for church members who had no transportation. At a religious gathering he met Delores Miller, an Army PX clerk, and they married in 1985. In February 1988 the couple moved into a house on Sagewood Trace, in the Brandermill community of Midlothian, Virginia. There, still calling himself Bob Clark, List went back to accounting at a small firm named Maddrea, Joyner, Kirkham & Woody.

  In 1972, investigators floated a surprising idea: that List might be D. B. Cooper, the air pirate. His disappearance came two weeks before the hijacking, he matched several points of the hijacker's description, and one argument held that "a fugitive accused of mass murder has nothing to lose." FBI investigators questioned List after his capture, and he denied any link. His name still surfaces in Cooper articles and documentaries. No direct evidence ties him to the case, and the FBI no longer regards him as a suspect. The quiet life in Midlothian would end at his workplace.

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• 7. Capture And Verdict

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  In May 1989, the Fox program America's Most Wanted, then in its first year on the air, told the story of the Westfield murders. The segment showed an age-progressed clay bust sculpted by forensic artist Frank Bender, and it proved to resemble List's actual face closely. On the 1st of June, less than two weeks after the broadcast, police arrested List at the Richmond accounting firm where he worked. A former Denver neighbor had recognized the description and alerted authorities.

  List kept insisting on his alias for months, even after his extradition to Union County, New Jersey. Eventually the evidence left no room for doubt. A fingerprint matched his military records, and evidence from the crime scene pointed to him as well. On the 16th of February 1990, he confessed his true identity.

  On the 12th of April 1990, a jury convicted List of five counts of first degree murder. At sentencing he told the court: "I feel that because of my mental state at the time, I was unaccountable for what happened. I ask all affected by this for their forgiveness, understanding and prayer." The judge was not moved. "John Emil List is without remorse and without honor," he said, and he named each victim: Helen, Alma, Patricia, Frederick and John F. List. The sentence was five consecutive life terms, the maximum allowed at the time, leaving List ineligible for parole for nearly 125 years.

  List appealed on two grounds. He argued that post-traumatic stress disorder from his military service had impaired his judgment. He also argued that his letter to the pastor was a confidential communication and should not have been admitted as evidence. A federal appeals court rejected both claims.

  In time, he expressed some regret. "I wish I had never done what I did," he told Connie Chung in 2002. "I've regretted my action and prayed for forgiveness ever since." Asked why he had not taken his own life if he felt so overwhelmed, he answered that suicide would have kept him out of heaven, where he hoped to see his family again.

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• 8. Afterlife Of A Case

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  List died of complications from pneumonia on the 21st of March 2008, at the age of 82, while imprisoned at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey. The New Jersey Star-Ledger, reporting his death, called him "The Boogeyman of Westfield."

  That same year, John Walsh, host of America's Most Wanted, donated Frank Bender's age-progressed bust to a forensic science exhibition at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, D.C. The collection was later moved to the Alcatraz East Crime Museum in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

  The case has inspired a long list of screen versions. Law & Order dramatized it in the season 6 episode "Savior," and Law & Order: Criminal Intent did so in the season 8 episode "Family Values." The 1987 film The Stepfather, and its 2009 remake, drew on the story, as did the character Keyser Söze in the 1995 film The Usual Suspects. In the 1993 film Judgment Day: The John List Story, Robert Blake played List. Documentary and true-crime series followed. A 1996 episode of Forensic Files covered the murders. A 2003 episode of the A&E series American Justice featured an interview with List himself. The Investigation Discovery series Your Worst Nightmare presented the case in the episode "Murder House," which premiered on the 18th of November 2015. The film A Killer Next Door, based on the events leading to his capture, arrived in July 2020. In 2022, NJ Advance Media released a podcast serial called Father Wants Us Dead.

  Also in 2022, Netflix released The Watcher, a seven-part fictional miniseries based on a real article. Its character John Graff, played by Joe Mantello, borrows heavily from List. Graff is an accountant and a Lutheran churchgoer, and he lives with his mother. He also leaves music playing in the house and arranges an alibi so the bodies lie undiscovered for weeks.

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