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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them, Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski, Good Evening.
The true accrowd of the man who murdered his family in their New Jersey mansion and eluded a nationwide manhunt for eighteen years. Until nineteen seventy one, life was good for mild manner to accountant John List. He was vice president of a Jersey City bank and had moved his mother, wife, and three teenage children into a nineteen room home in Westfield, New Jersey. But all that changed when he lost his job. Raised by his Lutheran father to believe success meant being
a good provider, List saw himself as another failure. Straining under financial burdens, the stress of hiding his unemployment, as well as the fear that the free spirited seventies would corrupt the souls of his children, List came to a shattering conclusion. It was my belief that if you kill yourself, you won't go to heaven, Lis told Connie Chung in a television interview. So eventually I got to the point
where I felt that I could kill them. Hopefully they would go to heaven and then maybe I would have a chance to later confess my sins to God and get forgiveness. List methodically shot his entire family in their home, managing to conceal the deaths for weeks with a carefully orchestrated plan of the set. Then he vanished and started over as Robert P. Clark, chronicling lists life before and
after the Grizzly murder. Death Sentence exposes the truth about the accountant turned killer, including his revealing letter to his pastor, his years as a fugitive with a new name and a new wife, his eventual arrest, and the details of his high profile trial. Revised and updated. The book they were featuring this evening is Death Sentence, The inside story of the John List Murders, with my special guest journalist and author Joe Sharky. Welcome to the program, and thank
you very much for a Greenness interview. Joe Sharky, Hi, Dan, my pleasure. Thank you very much. First off, tell us when this book was originally published and tell our audience how you came to be in a position to write this book and want to write this book.
Originally published in nineteen ninety by Signet. I had been a an editor at the Wall Street Journal, and I lived in that part of New Jersey, not far from in the New York City suburbs, not far from Westfield, and was just fascinated by the fact that this guy had I was mostly fascinated by how he managed to disappear into thin air basically after committing this heinous crime. So I sort of I sort of just threw myself full time into kind of finding out who in the
world journalist was. And I got to say, I'm sort of an outlier on the on the consensus about why he did what he did. He uh the Connie Chung interview, which by the way, he did from she did from his prison after he'd been convicted, UH, really allowed him to spatter off about this, uh, this religious I'm gonna want to send my family to heaven, which I always thought was bologna. I think I had this guy's number in that he was he was.
He was a greedy, he.
Angry guy who the nineteen sixties in the early seventies sort of threw him into a rage about the way that his world had changed. And his daughter, who was sixteen and by all accounts a nice kid, a bright kid, who had ambitions to be in the theater. Every time Patty List came in the door, she brought the nineteen sixties in with him. And I think that really, that really triggered John List. He decided he'd been fired from
the series of jobs, good jobs. You know, he was apparently a good accountant, but nobody liked him, and eventually he wore out his welcome at every job he had, so in the job in New Jersey, he was fired, and he tried to act as if the world was against him, but he also hid the fact that he
was unemployed. He was draining his mother's bank account. His mother was he was a mama's boy, and you know, and by the end he had drained the bank account, the house was about to be foreclosed on, and I just think all these things came together and he decided to wipe his slate clean. And you know, I guess his religious I really think the religious beliefs are overstated. Although he was he was he was an evangelical religious guy.
But I think, you know, it lays a lot on religion to blame it, but to allow John List to get away with that, With that that excuse, he left. He left a note for his pastor at the crime scene. Now weirdly and I was also fascinated by this when.
He left us out his nineteen.
Room sort of dilapidated mansion in Westfield, which, by the way, is the town that Charles Adams the cartoonist used as his model for the Adams Family settings, a lovely suburban town when he got a when he left, he sort of he had planned these murders, which he executed one by one as the kids came home from school over the course of a horrible day. And then he murdered his mother, and he'd already killed his wife in the morning.
He left the house, he turned on all the lights, he turned down to thermis that he turned on the radio high to a classical music station out of New York, and then off he went.
And he disappeared.
Three weeks three and a half weeks went by, and the teenage girls friends Patty's friends in high school she was in a drama class, were increasingly frantic over the fact that she wasn't around, She wasn't going to school. Liz had left a couple of phone calls saying that the family was going out of town on a somebody
had died and they were going out of town. But after three weeks or so, it was clear that something was wrong in this house, and the kid I think there were maybe ten of them in the high school drama class, finally desperate, they knew that something was wrong at Patty's house, that she was terrified of her father. Desperate, they broke into the house one night in December of nineteen of nineteen seventy one, and they found the bodies, which was a horrible, defining experience for these kids. But
that's the weird part about this story. And I think my book Above Suspicion is the only one that has this aspect of it, that it was the kids who found the scene. You know, the bodies were lying in the ballroom of the house where it list had arranged them. The mother was dead upstairs in her apartment, her atic apartment,
and the kids didn't know what to do. They knew that they shouldn't have been in the house, so they created enough of a ruckus that neighbors called the police, and that always managed to in the trial, all was papered over the fact that it was the kids who found the crime scene, and then the cops, of course were on Were the cops uh as good responding to the scene, as some other accounts had made it, I don't think so. I think the Westfield Police Department at
that time, they came charging into the scene. The crime scene was disturbed. Too many people were there. There was the problem with the fact that the kids had found had found the bodies, The kids were in the house.
It was a bit of a mess.
So, I mean, all that you know was occurring in Westfield while John List had disappeared, he'd gone west and he ended up he went to Denver where he just sort of re emerged as a person. And it interested me because in that time, I think was probably then the last time in America that.
You could disappear without trace.
You could you could go go and find a new life, start over. Not many questions asked if he were clever and cunning, which he was, and he managed to start this new life, which also fascinated me enormously so, and he lived that new life sort of the same way he lived his old life, although without the baggage of
what he thought of the baggage of his family. For eighteen years, he married some poor woman who didn't know his background and who sort of was credulous about him, and you know, he got away with it for eighteen years. He had a pretty good life as far as he defied it for eighteen years until finally the boom got lowered on him. So that's that's by fascination with John List.
Let's talk about a little bit about John Lyst's upbringing, because you talk about this, you talk about his religiosity, and then the excuse that he had to you know, kill them so that maybe they could go to heaven. Some didn't sound like much of an excuse. It didn't make any logical sense for a guy that's very logical. But the importance, the importance of the Lutheran Church is
very important to this story. From the upbringing that John List had from his father, which was a devout evangelical Lutheran member.
Of the church.
You also talk about his odd and this comes up in this book from all kinds of people, the unusual behavior of John List as a young man. Instead of playing outside, John List had other activities. So tell Us a little bit about the relationship he had with his mother and his father, which were very odd and definitely contributed to his upbringing, which was strange to the.
Making of John List. I agree the father was a task minister. Let's not blame the poor Lutherans for this.
But he grew up.
In a Lutheran evangelical environment in the Midwest, uh decidedly German uh uh oriented Lutheran evangelical sector, and that was very, very conservative. A household where he was expected to h to make himself very make himself small.
Uh.
The mother was overprotective. He Uh, he was known as a kid.
Even to somebody.
He'd be wearing gloves in you know, in in May. He didn't go outside much. And I don't mean to imply that that that he was, you know, a total nerd. I mean he he was drafted into World War Two. He served at the end of World War two in Germany. I mean he was he had been a you know, he was a World War two soldier. And when he got out, Uh, he he met.
The woman who became his wife.
And she was different from him. She was she was she was a drinker, she was lusty, she she was by all accounts, somebody you kind of enjoyed being with a party. He very much, you know, had been. It was in his makeup to just to really be against that that that kind of openness.
Uh.
But he was a mama's boy. You know, I don't know how to define that except except by John List.
He was weird.
And when he you know, don't forget he eventually ends up away from the Midwest and in a progressive, small, medium sized town in New Jersey where he stands out. I mean he mows his lawn in a suit and tie, and I mean that makes you stand out in a place like westchil.
You know.
But he was active, he was in the I think he was a he was a cub Scout leader.
Uh.
He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way because because of his religiosity in a place where you know, the town of the you know, a tound of churches. But but not like uh, overtly devout, if you know what I mean.
He was. He was in a different culture.
The kids were not. The daughter particularly was was thriving in this new environment and you know, in the New York suburbs with with a plan. Uh, she really had an idea that she'd be in the theater. She was apparently pretty good, uh, in various local plays, and he he just simmered about that. He thought that was there, there is where his really religiosity came, and he thought he thought the kid was headed for a decadent lifestyle.
The wife, at this point, it would been, had been sick for a long time.
Uh.
I think when he when he decided to murder everybody, I think the you know, the the the targets where the wife and the daughter, the others. And he actually in prison, he looked up with some uh x c I agent and he in this x c I age and his name was Austin god Rich got together well. Blist was in prison and wrote a book that they self published called Collateral Damage. And he referred to the to the kids and the wife and the family as
collateral damage. But I think he was really talking about the two sons he killed, the two teenage boys and the mother as collateral damage, because I believe firmly that he meant that it was the wife and the daughter. The emerging sexuality of the daughter in particular, I think.
Was one of the triggers.
The journalists he was sexually repressed. He was not the kind of guy you would want as a neighbor, although you know you didn't expect him to do what he did. So that was the journalist as I as I kind of saw him to this.
Damn.
I mean, it's been what's been thirty years. I'm so angry when I think of John List.
I mean, the guy just bugs me.
And particularly bugged me that he wrote that he self published this self serving book, that nobody read it. It was badly it was badly published, and it's got full of typos.
But you know, he makes.
These excuses, and then he trotted out an excuse of PTSD from World War Two. And I look carefully when I want to do the new edition of the book, I wrote a new epilogue. Particularly in the book, I look carefully at his military record and his claims to PTSD, and it really doesn't stand up. He was in a very very very slight combat situation. I just think the guy was he was just full of bocus excuses for what he did.
When you when you write about his father, though just near the beginning of the book, you talk about his father when he was a young boy, thought that Halloween was a Satanic event, and so that he was ridiculed and humiliated. I think that's really important, this humiliation in his story, and that he was humiliated and they called him trick or treat Johnny So, and then this idea that he spent time instead of playing with other boys.
He didn't just hang out with his mother. He read the Bible with his mother, discussed the Bible and read the Bible, and that continued through his life. So not to disagree with you about the religiosity being affront it's in how important it was to these murders. But seriously, his religion was. He took it very very seriously, and that created all kinds of conflict with his wife and his daughter and really didn't let him make relationships with
other people because of his staunch beliefs. Let's even go ahead, I'm sorry, let's talk about his wife though, because aggressively he realizes that no matter what he does for his wife, no matter what he tries to provide, and he really does try to provide anything that she might want, tell us the situation in terms of her in her mind, because she was a widowed woman at all, only been
widowed six months when she met John List. So, as you write in the book, what are some of the things that John found out about his wife and and about the relationship itself.
Well, you know, again we're into his uh, his his repressed and kind of angry sexuality. The wife had been married, uh to a guy, uh an their do well guy who was a soldier in Uh I think Korea. I forget yeah, Korea, I think, and uh was killed UH. And one of the one of the themes that's that's very uneasy in this story is that she evidently uh
got syphilis from from the first husband. And syphilis, you know, is something that after the first stage, you can live with, and then in the final tertiary stage, it creates uh something very close to uh sinility, and you know, the symptoms are Helen List was suffering from from advanced syphilis, which doesn't show up again until you until you're you know, in your late middle ages, which which happened to her. That that obviously was part of what was driving this
guy kind of to the brink. Uh. He was the daughter was was assuming the role of of mother, and the house she was cooking meals. He I think, you know, to his if I give him any credit for anything he did. As you say, he did try to provide for the wife. She got more and more cranky and angry.
She was difficult.
I mean, she deserving murdered because you know, she was a difficult woman and he was. I mean, I think understandably she that was a bit difficult with him. But you're right, he did. Journalists thought that he deserved to be in the upper middle class, affluent and you know, the sort of the suburban stereotype of the nineteen fifties and into the sixties. And he, you know, he did everything he could with his limited abilities and his limited social.
Ability.
He did every good everything he could do. This he's always in debt, he was always owing money, and you know, and that all sort of just came to a climax in the you know, by nineteen seventy.
He was he was just a sad case people in Westfield.
I mean, you want to go back to the father. There's a key of that, because the father was weird, you know, was a religious crank. I mean, this is what you might say, and don't forget in this enclave in the Midwest, and when you transplant that son to a pretty rested place like Westfield, New Jersey. You know, genuinely, it's the kind of town I mean, it's the time.
You see it all the time on TV commercials because they shoot TV commercials in Westfield, as the exemplar of a small town America is right across the river from New York. Even among the you know, the Evangelical Lutherans in town, he stood out as kind of a crank.
They were, you know, they were.
The pastor was very it was close to him, but a lot of people in the congregation are like, wow, this guy is really weird.
You know, he was.
He was considered rigid and judgmental. And you know, back to the father. The father had been like nuts about Halloween some recent Halloween. The father saw Halloweens as demonic, which is you know, kind of amusing in twentieth century America. And in nineteen seventy one, the daughter had a Halloween
party in the basement of their house. And part of the trigger I think was, you know, kids came, you know, kids came dressed as hippies and as devils and as witches, and you know, this sort of in the background, in the in the darkness that watched this party and sort of took that in. I don't think it was you know, I don't think it was the precipitating event, but it was part of it. He saw the daughter as becoming
is reflecting a kind of satanic influence in society. So that was part of John list, But I don't think that that was the driving part.
I just think he was greedy.
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You also write, though, that Helen is complicated in that she wants to get married and she tells them that she's pregnant, and knowing his religious you know, religiosity, he is proud to have slept with anyone, it seems, and proud to have this pretty woman, This is an attractive woman, and wants everybody to know about it. Tell us what happens about the pregnancy.
She has.
She has a kid, and he adopts the kid. You know, there's a you know, there's a part of John Liston in that stage of his life that is not entirely wicked.
Uh.
He tries to be a good father. I think by some accounts he is. Don't forget the mother, his mother is always on the scene. The you know, the wife, I don't want to say she's a trophy.
Wife, but she's somebody. You know, he's proud of her.
But very early on the the wife becomes a source of anger to him because she's she's flirty at parties. I mean they socialize in in in Michigan, and she's she's flirty with other men. She's you know, she's kind of just a vivacious person. And he he very early on, presents that. And I think that marriage was it was marked by by his jealousy of his wife that then
eventually evolved into just anger and resentment of her. And I think that I think then, you know, once the daughter who we're now in Westfield, New Jersey, and once the daughter began emerging sexually, I just think he combined those those rages and boom.
Let's talk about the economic situation. He's a talented do what you're told accountant. At one time, he goes from a modest job to twenty five thousand dollars a year to start. Then he gets then he loses that job, and then he goes to Xerox, and by the time he gets to Westfield again, it looks like that he's
got a good job, it's got a good future. But tell us what his economic situation is many many of the times, and especially when he gets the Westfield what is he trying to keep secret concerning his financial.
Don't forget that in the nineteen fifties, you know, I say this as a as a member of the baby booming generation. But in the nineteen fifties that you know, my parents' generation, Uh, it was it was fairly easy to get a job. I mean, you know, the economy was booming, and company Xerox was, you know, a new company, and and John List benefited by that.
He was.
He was I don't want to say he was smart, because if you had to deal with him, you quickly decided, this guy's a bit thick. But he got he got fairly good jobs. He was a competent, He was competent with numbers. But step by step by step he would get a good job and and his his his bosses would decide, this guy can't adapt. He was he was unable to h you know, to change with with with with a rapidly changing economic environment in the as the fifties you know, became the sixties. I think Xerox is
a good example. He had a pretty good job at Xerox, but Xerox was becoming like a major, major company at that time, and he wasn't able to adapt, and he was he was let go when he got to New Jersey again. You know, we're talking a fairly booming economy.
In the New York area.
Banks were i mean, the houses were being built and you know, the housing market was hot, and so a bank in Jersey City he managed to get a job as a vice president. Now he wasn't a top executive. You know, bank like that has a lot of vice presidents. And eventually he just wore out as welcome. He was he's not somebody who wanted to work with and that was the end of the road for him. When he was the excuse me, no longer able to bring home
a salary. He pretended that he had a job. He would dress up in the morning, leave this dilapidated mansion and and sort of hide. He went into New York City some days and watered around Times Square and you know, went to i think visited peak shows in Times Square. And he sometimes he just sat in the railroad station.
Sometimes he sat at the bus station and read the New York Times and then came home at the end of the day, which was he was deeply embarrassed about not being a part of the you know, the the economic success all around him, and he had this you know, this this house, this weird house, nineteen room mansion. I mean it was you know, I hate to use the word mansion imprecisely, but.
You could call it that.
It was a part of an a state that had been built, you know, in the earlier part of the century, that that had fallen into disrepair. He and Helen managed to buy it thanks to the money that was the down payment available from the mother. It was cheap, but the deal was that his aging mother had to come along with them, and she lived upper in the attic apartment of the.
House you talk about. He had power of attorney over his mother's money, but she was up and near so it would make sense that her only son would take care of those kind of details in the end. But what did he use his power attorney for at that time when he was having financial problems and what did he plan to do with this these finances well, the mother had when they moved to Westfield in the late nineteen sixties, to this house that.
The mother had enabled his mother had enabled them to buy. She had two hundred thousand dollars in her savings account, which was transferred to a bank in Westfield and she
was in she was well into her eighties. Then he he had he had access to her bank account, and little by little, partly with her awareness, and then again and then later you know, without her awareness, he was draining that bank account to even when he was employed, I mean, he was draining it to uh, you know, to buy stuff, things that you know, were beyond his
ability to buy otherwise. And by the end he had he had drained that that bank account over I guess the period of three years, up to four years maybe, and it was down to a I think a couple of eighteen hundred dollars. But she then and at the last stage when he was when he was carefully planning this day of murder, he uh, he took the money out.
Of the bank and that was his that was his stake. Uh.
He emptied the bank account shortly before he murdered everybody, and that basically was his stake. He traveled cheap, I mean, to to Denver to start his new life. He didn't have much money. He uh he went by bus and everybody thought he might have floiled somewhere. He left his car att JFK Airport and then and then took a bus back into into New York City and took a bus west. He he said he always wanted to see
the mountains. And so he ends up in Denver with not much money, but he quickly finds uh he has enough money to rent a cheap trailer in a trailer park on the inn near the Interstate UH, adjacent to a holiday and where he manages after he's uh set himself up in this new environment, manages to get a job as a kitchen helper at the holiday and and eventually he's apparently a good cook, so that that is
eventually to become the assistant cook at this place. And U, you know, bit by bit by bit, John List re emerges in this new life. And that always fascinated me, like a like a photograph in a trade being developed here and here he is and it's John List. It's the guy you know, nobody found him.
It's interesting at that time, like we alluded to or spoke of before, is that it was a time when you could get one piece of identification and from there get a driver's license and build this incredible new identity. That that's correct.
It only took one or two pieces of I D. And it was then. I don't know how it is now, but it was. I'm sure it's not true now. It was then easy enough to get a Social Security card. That was the piece of That was the piece of paper he needed. And he planned that so that he could get a Social Security card under the name of Robert Clark Uh. That that's basically what he needed. And he was he was, well, okay, here's here's where he
was smart. He was smart enough to know that step by step at that time, you could build a new identity. So you go from a social Security card to a telephone. You've got a telephone in your trailer, so you've got a telephone bill. You now have a couple of pieces of paper, and bit by bit by bit, you've you've established yourself in the West where the West was being you know, Denver was being flooded with with with people
who had moved west to find a new life. And so it wasn't unusual for a guy like John Less to show up in a place like this as Robert Clark Uh had to very carefully.
But I mean it was he wasn't a genius.
If it wasn't like he was a James Bond.
Or anything about this.
But at that time you could do it. You have a bank you have a you know, you have a uh SO security card, you have a bank account, you have a phone bill. You can really you could then re esta publish yourself as a person. Now there was of course a nationwide manhunt out for this guy, and he didn't change his identity. He wore the same glasses, the same you know, black frame classes. If you if you encountered him and you know him, you would have said,
that's John List. And I was always fascinated by this. Then when eventually, at eighteen years goes by, you know a long time, he just lives his life as he had lived it before, although in reduced circumstances he's back in the church. Why they didn't why the FBI didn't go didn't press evangelical Lutheran churches across the country about John List, like if this guy shows up quaus is
a big question. And I think it's because at the time the FBI was under tremendous criticism for its nefarious activities in against the anti war movement, and they were very reluctant, I think to become involved and you know, pressing churches to find to find a guy who they I mean, that's where you would expect he would turn up pretty quickly, is in a church like that, and he did. I mean, okay, eighteen years goes by, and he and his wife, who really has no clue.
She thinks he's a widower. She's a little.
Unhappy with him because he's a he's an annoying person. His patterns are the same, although he didn't kill her.
Uh.
He lives next door in this Denver convo condo to an old Irish lady who doesn't like him. Her name's Wanda Flannery, and Wanda is a friend with his wife, de Laura Dolores. But Wanda is not at all amenable towards Dolores's husband, Robert Clark. You know, he doesn't beat her or anything, but he you know, he's just somebody she doesn't like. She didn't try, and she has her eyes on him. She has no reason to believes, you know,
he's a murderer. But one day in nineteen eighty seven, Wanda was an avid reader of supermarket tabloids, which she read for amusement. She was kind of you know, I talked, I went out there and talked to her and she said, you know, she felt silly reading them. It wasn't like
she believed in all this stuff. But in the Weekly World News, which was then a supermarket tabloid, there was one of these articles, like you know, every so often they would run articles and whatever happened to And they write an article and whatever happened to, you know, sort of an anniversary article about the List murders and with a you know, with you know, details about the murder and a picture of course of the family and John List picture of John List in the page seventeen of
the Weekly World News, and Wanda's reading it, but you know, with casual interest. And she happens to look out her window and she sees her disliked neighbored Robert Clark taking on a trash and Wanda goes, holy moly, that looks like John liston. Then she starts to that guy looks like this guy, and she starts to compare characteristics like rigid, uh, self righteous, judgmental, et cetera, et cetera, and she she decides,
I think that's John List. So she goes over once the List goes out to the store or something and talks to the new wife, Dolores, and she's Doloris shows shows the newspaper article and says, I think this is your husband.
I think this is Bob.
And Dolores is astonished and horrified, but she pooh poohs that it's an interesting psychological moment. I think in the book where Dolores, I mean it kind of slams into this woman. Oh my god, this guy has a background here and maybe maybe you know, is this guy?
Uh?
But Das shrugs it off.
Wanda feels a little silly, goes, you know, goes back to her house and you know another.
What is it two years past? A year and a half. Anyway.
Meanwhile, back in Westfield, New Jersey, the young cops who had grown up with the John List case on their you know, on their minds uh, decide that a new TV program called America's Most Wanted They're going to take the John List case to America's Most Wanted, and they do, uh, you know, with with some energy. They try to convince America's Most Wanted to do a program on on the John List case. Now that's old, uh, And the producers.
Of America's Most Wanted are like.
Ah, that's a really old case. You know, we don't want to get involved. But the cops, to their credit, the young cops, to their credit, do push, and they finally managed to persuade America's most wanted to do to develop a program on the on the John List murders. And you know, they developed the drama as they used to I don't know if it's still on the air as they used to do. You know, they they re
enacted and they find an actor. But they also hire a forensic sculptor out of Philadelphia who works with police departments in sculpting images of the cold case, in cold cases, images of the perpetrator. And he sculpts an image a bust of John List, puts the glasses on it, and it's a reasonable facsimile of John List. Anyway, that's sort of the highlight of the program. And here's what John
List would look like today. Wanda, who's already been back in Denver, Wanda who has already been robuffed and basically told that she told me, she said, the you know, the laws made me feel like a silly old woman. Wanda is watching this program, you know, with some interest, because she's still fairly persuaded that that's John List next door. And she sees the bust and Wanda says, now that doesn't look like it's not that good of an image.
But nevertheless, there's a teeth. There's a telephone number, the phone number on the on the screen to call because there's every reward. And Wanda's daughter and UH and a son in law are with her at this at this time, watching this show, and they persuade her to make the phone call.
Uh.
Meanwhile, I forgot you know. Meanwhile, about a year before that, Robert Clark a k A. John List and his wife had moved to Virginia because he got a new job in UH in Virginia and at a small accounting for so they've moved across the country. Against Wanda calls America's Most Wanted. Hundreds of calls come in because when they do these programs, UH, the actor, the actor actor who's in the in the recreation often reminds them of somebody they know, and quite often the actors themselves get get
collared like theirs. Now just the actor of the show. But anyway, there are hundreds of calls come in. The one from Wanda, UH seems reasonable enough to check out because she's you know, she has a specific sighting that she knew the guy. The FBI checks it out, turns up at the accounting firm where List is working in mid Lothian, Virginia, a suburb of Russia of Richmond, and sure enough there's John List who denies being John List.
He's Robert P. Clark, but you know it's Clark's John List, and they haul him back to New Jersey, where the jig is now, and of course it becomes a major news story. John List at last has been found after eighteen years. He denied it and denied it and denied it, had a public defender, and then at at the trial, I think that his claim with post traumatic stress disorder
was was basically discounted. At the time, he's convicted bom five murders and he's sent to prison for the rest of his life and he dies in prison.
Uh.
After establishing this friendship with his crazy at the I C I A x C I A agent, he dies in prison. And two that's an a.
It's interesting too you talk. You read about that he kept his name Robert Clark to the new friends that he had established in his new life and and wrote all kinds of letters like he was in a fairly good mood. And it kept in contact wish people their happy birthday on that that special day. Yeah, very interesting too. What Dolores does. Does Dolores stick by.
Her husband Delaorus after the after he's uh, after his arrested.
During during the well, during after the rest and during the trial.
Well, I mean I.
Was so I felt so bad for Dolores.
Uh.
I went to visit her after he got arrested in uh uh you know, in this suburban community in Virginia. Uh, And I you know, she answered the door. She didn't want to talk, but she just looked like she looked like a trapped She just looked trapped and destroyed. And my heart went out to her, and I thought, well, you know, okay, Delores, Uh, I know, you don't want to talk. She kept insisting publicly that that that she didn't know that you know that this guy was Robert B.
Clark and John List.
She was she was distraught. I think she was destroyed by this because she was kind of another innocent victim of this this clown.
Uh.
Was she unaware?
Yeah?
I mean, should she have been more aware? But she was, you know, she was a lonely woman, a divorce a who John List.
Uh.
I think they met, as I recall it, at a church function in Denver. He was, he was you know, he was the best offer she was going to get, and she she married him, and uh, you know, I just felt profoundly sorry for for Dolores. I just thought, you know, she was just a bias and another more collateral damage in his term. She eventually just faded.
Away, you know.
She h She publicly stuck with him for I think it was only a few weeks and then Dolores just faded out of the picture. To her credit, she didn't do any like media, and I kind of like respected her for that.
Mm hmm.
She was just just, you know, a sad, sad.
Corollaria. The John the John List case.
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We haven't mentioned the stepdaughter after all of this, Brenda, Yeah, what were a lot of information? Crucial information came from her about her father's behavior and explained a lot of things. Tell our audience a little bit about Brenda after all of this.
Brenda, the helen List's daughter, who John you know, charitably adopted and he was by any account, he was a decent father to her and for a long time to his other to his actual biological children until he until he murdered them. Brenda, who I think it's dead now, sort of spun off. She wasn't part of After a while, Brenda went off on her own and she lived.
You know.
The big question is after the murders, the journalists contact Brenda.
I think I think.
I made a case that he did. I talked to Brenda. Uh, you know, another another victim, Brenda, you know, another bystander in this because Brenda wasn't wasn't part of this milia at the time.
Uh.
And she you know, she provided a lot of information about John, list about you know, you try to build this guy's character as as as you apparently are. I'm fascinated by what made this guy, What does his makeup? Because it's a complicated person. It's not just a raving.
Murderer.
He there were there was textured this to this character. And she, you know, she had she had good memories of him, I think birthday parties, and I think he took her to you know, she she had a fairly good memory of him as a father. Of course, she knew nothing about about the murders until children that she read in the paper. Helen had a sister in Oklahoma who I think reached out I talked to when I
was Oklahoma, talked to the sister as well. Uh. The sister also it had been around when when when John married Helen. I think he first tried to woo the sister uh and uh, and then went and then you know, went with Helen instead when the sister didn't didn't didn't respond. She was kind of, I thought, weirdly uh sympathetic towards John. I thought, you know, I spent some time with her, and she was a bit disapproving of her sister and a bit more uh you know, warmly supposed to her.
John Wish fascinated me kind of a lot, because I thought, how can you be at this? You know, it was well known, you know, the murders had occurred.
He'd been caught.
When I talked to her, and though she was oddly sympathetic toward him, she she thought she understood why why he went, why he went off the deep end.
You know.
She just added, you try when you when you write a book like this, to try to you try. You know, you're you're confined to what the actual facts in front of you are and what you could find out. And I thought, okay, well I'm gonna you know, she's in the book. I think she's she's at the the end before before the new epilogue that I wrote in twenty seventeen. She's at the at the cemetery in New Jersey. She was the one, uh, the sister was the one responsible
for picking up the pieces at the house. It's you know, after the murder, and she's she's kind of she's kind of missed algic about John. And I thought, okay, what for for what it's worth, here she is, you know, I pressed her and pressed her and pressed her about it, and she just, uh, what what you what?
What? What she is is what you get in in the book.
It's interesting too that the reader believes that that she wants and she does want. She says, she wants to know why she wants to confront John List in prison. So she goes with her husband, Jean, And this is Helen's sister, so you think that they would be filled with this. She would be outraged at this, this man, and yet the first thing they do she does is hug him, and there's talk of forgiveness and again understanding there on friendly terms. Very very very surprising to.
Me, you know, And uh, it would have been a better ending to the book if she had been in a rage and confronted him.
But you know, you.
Know true mc campodi and in cold blood sort of cooked up the ending his book and it was like, oh, that's the perfect ending, but he kind of cooked that up, and you know, I was I was left with this is who she was, this is what she did. They had kind of a poignant meeting in you know, in prison, and I know John List had done that to my sister. I wouldn't I wouldn't have forgiven him, but she did. Uh, So very have it complicated. When an evil man, in
my opinion thoughly evil. If you want to have definition of evil, I think John Lyst is your boy.
What we haven't talked about, and this is the most vivid and disturbing part of the book, and a very disturbing book as it is, But the actual murders in the planning and the letter to the to his reverend, to his reverend, and so what exactly? And again this is crucial because if the defense, if his defense was successful in having that letter suppressed, that confessional letter to his reverend. But tell us just a little bit of the Again, they said this is premeditated. It showed vast
evidence of that. Tell us about the key and the letters and the things that he did in preparation, and the actual murders. What he did. And then post murder, you say that the bodies were look like they were formed into the form of a cross. So tell us what he writes to the reverend and what does he do and the actual murders of his own family, his own children, and his wife and his mother.
Okay, we're now at November. Let's go to October of nineteen seventy one. The daughter is very much in his sights because, as I said, she brings the nineteen sixties and early nineteen seventies through the door every time she comes home. He's facing destitution. He decides to do this horrible, horrible deed. He plans, He puts things into into place, He makes sure that his uh, that his gun is working. He I think at this time is when he started
to get his new Social Security identity. As I recall, he decides that he's going to do it on All Souls Day, which is November one or two, whatever that was in that year, and for some reason he has to not deal with any doesn't. A week later, he one of the weird things is that and I got this from the kids and from his drama UH, from Patty's drama coach, who was deeply involved in this.
UH.
He tells Patty and the two boys that they're gonna die around this period of time. And they know this guy well enough to think, oh boy, you know, they're terrified because they think he needs it. I mean, you could tell you can tell it, I'm going to kill you. And it's one thing, but when you sit your kids down and say you're going to die, and I'm you know, I'm going to be the instrument of your death. That you know, that's something that boys on a child's mind.
And the girl who's now sixteen tells people, you know, she seeks counsel with her drama teacher. The drama club teacher, a guy named ed Iliano who was close to her and I think perhaps too close to her. He was, you know, I think that theme is in the book. I developed that as much as I could. I don't think he ever molested this kid, but he was too
close to enough. Yeah, it's a factor. So she's by the time, by the time Halloween nineteen seventy one comes around, she's resigned to the fact that her father's going to kill her. The Halloween party in her house is kind of her last hurrah with with the kids, and it's a gate it's a it's a happy occasion. But he's in the background watching, and he by now is a murderer. He definitely has become a guy planning to murder his family. He uh, you know, he makes his plans he uh
on the day of the murder. That it's a cold November day, I think sleeps he he gets up in the morning us as usual, makes He's now planning to spend the day murdering his family. He makes his coffee, sits at the kitchen table. Helen comes down in her bathrobe, and he says to him, what where is the You know he always reads the paper in the morning. You know, didn't the paper company, he said, I He says, I stopped it.
And then while.
She's making coffee, he gets his gun and he you know, he approaches her and boom, he kills her.
Uh.
Then the day, the day of horror has started. At this point, it's early in the morning. Still he goes bounds upstairs. I mean it's a you know, a big place, and the mother's attic, the mother's apartment is in the top part of the house. He bounds up there and the mother, you know, answers her doors. She's up having breakfast, and you know that she still has a thick German accent, and she's like, Johnny, what was the what was that noise?
And he says it's it was a back the car, backfiring probably, And as she turns to go back into her apartment, boom, he murders her. He shoots her in the head. He then, I mean we know this from reconstructor. Obviously, you know he didn't tell me this.
Uh. He then uh.
Watches her with some fascinations as she lies bleeding out on the you know, on the at the entrance to her apartment. Uh. He decides she's too happy to move downstairs, so he leaves her there. He then goes down and moves his wife, Helen, who's dead on the kitchen floor. He drags her into this ballroom. And it's an actual ballroom.
In this old house.
It's empty now, has no furniture set, the broken down kitty pool table. You know, I think a chair, but it's basically it's got a big fireplace.
It's empty.
It's a you know, it's a it's a vestige of what that house used to be. He puts Helen in front of the fireplace on a had They had boy scout sleeping banks, so he uses one of those to drag her and to leave her in front of the fireplace. He then lifts her her nightgown up so that she's exposed from the waist down, leaves her dead there, goes back calmly to his day. It's now whatever. It is nine o'clock in the morning, you know, early in the morning.
Still the kids are at school. Uh, you know, they're about they're going about their normal day. But these kids are distraught, particularly the girl. She's you know, she's just in Ah, she's terrified. She comes home from school early because I think she didn't feel I'm trying to. I'm trying to.
She wasn't feeling. Yeah, she wasn't feeling.
Well, so she wasn't feeling She comes home early. I've set his plans a bit because he expects her. Two hours later. She comes in the door in her winter coat, comes into the into the back door, into the kitchen, and he's lying. He's standing there with his gun and will almost no notice whatsoever he bowed me. He shoots her in the head. She's dead, and he drags her into the ballroom, Uh perpendicular, leaves her body perpendicular to her mother.
Uh.
And then each of them. Yet we now have two more uh children to account for. One. One by one they come home.
Uh.
The youngest one comes home, same thing, into the kitchen, there's John list in wait. Boom, he executes that one. The older kid is a bit of a fighter. The the older kid not a fighter. I mean, the older kid is not as easy to push around as the younger kid. He comes home, he spots the the father waiting for him with the gun, and he fights. He resists, and this triggers John gun List into a wild rage. He shoots this kid multiple times and then he fires the gun. Why you know, I'm trying to think how
many bullets he had, but he fires widely. That the gun has a recoil and uh, into the a couple of bullets into the into the wall. That kid's dead, he says to that kid. And and this is in his confession letter. He says, you would you know, uh uh. He tells his pastor in his confession letter that he would have died more peaceful if.
He hadn't fought. But he fought.
But he thought that this kid went to went to heaven and didn't suffer, you know, which is the bass. Of course, the kids suffered. He drives him in and now we got three but four bodies in the ballroom, and we have them arranged in kind of a you know, a kind of across. The mother's at the top, she's the crossbar and the three teenage children are are are are you know, arranged below the mother. He's now done his his his deeds.
He's now killed them all the mother.
His mother is upstairs, too heavy to drag down the steps and arrange in the ballroom. His his attitude toward his mother was that he he'd killed her in order to prevent her anguish from seeing what what what else he had done, which struck me.
As as just ludicrous. Yeah. He now he now has the full day. I mean, he's got most of the afternoon left.
He he's us down at the kitchen table.
He has his lunch.
Uh, he'd had his lunch.
Uh.
He sits at the kitchen table in this now empty house.
With you know, with with.
With five dead people uh in it. Uh, he composes. He calls the kids schools one by one, and you know, he basically, this is mister list and Patricia won't be in classes for a while because my wife's mother in uh in South Carolina, I think it was, is ill and is dying, and the kids will be out of school. All the kids were good, good students, So there's no alarm set up in the in the schools. Each one
of the school. He calls each one of the kids schools and leaves a similar message that they'll be out of school for a while. Uh, and no particular alarms because we're you know, we're approaching the holiday season now and these are.
All good kids.
Patty is a uh, you know, an a student, and everybody he knows that Patty's reliable. I mean, they make evidently there there's some assurance that Patty will be able to get her her homework assignments.
Uh. So he does that. He then composes a.
Letter to his pastor, who was also his confessor at the Lutheran Evangelical church in Westfield where he where he has you know, established himself and his family, and where Helen has has refused to attend. She's dropped out of the church, part of the participating anger at her. And in the letter, it's a long letter, handritten letter in
which he makes this to me. It was just I was furious when I when I finally read this letter after he was caught about I couldn't I couldn't, you know, support my family in a way that I thought I was was appropriate. And uh and Helen, Uh, his wife, Helen was no longer going to church and uh, and Patricia was involved in the theater and uh, you know, I forget the exact wording of the letter, but she was she was headed for if I'm overstating this, but
she was headed for damnation. And he thought that the boys would follow. And uh and and mother upstairs, the poor mother, Uh, we had she had to go because he didn't want to observe her unduly.
About about this.
And I thought this guy is just a piece of work. When I finally read this, and it was this, this whole catching, this whole thing, and this religiosity of I know that I've sent them to heaven, and I know what I did was wrong, but I.
Expect that at some point God will forgive me.
You know, yours truly, John Johnny listen. He leaves the letter UH on the kitchen table so it can be found.
Uh. You know what when the uh, when the bodies are found.
He has no idea. I don't think that it's gonna take almost a month for these bodies to be found.
But one of the things he does.
Is uh, uh it's cold. It's remember, and it's a cold it's a cold day, it's a cold month. He turns the thermostat down you know, to and turns it off.
I guess.
Uh, he leaves all the lights in in in the in rooms in the house. On Uh he Uh, he's already stopped the newspaper. He stopped the milk delivery. This is back in the days when when milk was delivery in the house. Uh and uh, off you go, and you know, he packs his bag, spends the night in the house with these bodies, you know, in his in his bedroom. The next morning, comes down, makes himself a nice breakfast, and off he goes into the into the
mists and he disappears. But he had he really doesn't have any He thinks that the the bodies will be found fairly shortly. He has no idea that almost a month will go by.
And I don't know.
Once he's out in Denver, as he sort of re emerges as as a new as as this new in this new identity fairly quickly. Uh, you know, he's looking at the papers. He figures that the uh you know, this is when you know, a local newspaper like the Denver the Denver papers had a lot of international news in him as well. And he, you know, he looks and He looks at it and he doesn't see any any indication that that that this, uh, these bodies have been found in in New Jersey. He's just amazed at that.
And in the meantime, I mean.
Here, here's where it got I think it got harry in town. Because almost a month, let's say, three weeks have gone by. Uh, the kids, Patty's drama club friends and her teacher, her drama club director at Illiano are getting really sort of antsy and about well, wait a minute, this is too long. There's something weird about here, and you know they're they're starting to you know, put together some idea. It's almost like incredible for them to think
that something awful had happened. Uh. And there's there's pressure on among the kids. There's peer pressure. We got to go up to the house and see what see what's going on here. Neighbors are and some of the other accounts have made I think too much of this, are noticing that some of the lights are burning out, you know, in the.
Rooms of the house. That that makes it.
Kind of spookier than than the house was spooky enough. I'm not sure that that was all that important, although it was occurring after you know, three weeks occasionally a bubble burn burnout. Ah. Here's here's where this is where I got deeply into this and where it struck me as weird, as even more weird, and.
Nobody else had this.
Uh. I think the cops had to discount this because it would have been a problem at the trial. Eventually, the drama club teacher, who was very close to Patty, who's guilty, I think about his closeness to her, although I really don't. I spent a lot of time pressing him on it. I took him, I took him over and over and over these accounts on you know, multiple occasions. Did you ever touch or know? But it was clear
he was obsessed with this girl. I think that was part of what was driving the strange decision by these kids and him to go to the house one night. We're now into December of nineteen seventy one. And first they looked around, they looked, you know, they checked the doors and looked in.
The windows.
And found that the back door there was some access to through a back door. Uh, with the drama club, by his account and by some of the kids accounts, with him kind of leading the way, they go into the house and it's like, okay, everything, you know, it's like they've they've gone on vacation or their way. But then they go into the ballroom and there's, you know, there's an issue of it's still cold, so the bodies haven't decomposed the way they might have been expected to.
But there's you know, there's there's.
An odor and now there's a mist. And I think that the most horrifying scene of the murders themselves is when these kids in their their high school, when their drama club teacher walk into the ballroom and they're the bodies uh in it, you know, it's it's it's at night, it's dim that they can clearly see that the bodies are there. They're of course horrified. They don't know what to do because they're now they've breaked. They're they're guilty
of breaking and entering. So they managed to create enough commotion they go back outside and they now have this horrible secret. They managed to create enough commotion that the neighbors, who are already the neighbors are worried what the heck's going on over there, that the neighbors.
Called the cops.
The cops show up, we now have a crime scene. And in my opinion, and here's where I depart from the accounts in which the Westfield Police are given a lot of credit for cracking this case. The crime scene is a mess. The cops are, there are reporters who are in the house, and so every protocol of how to secure a crime scene is not followed. So the crime scenes kind of polluted. No big problem, because we
know who did it. He left his confession letter. But the problem with you know, once you go to trial, everybody knows Johnalists did it. I mean, the jury knows he did it. I got a confession letter. But it's a problem to you know, to account for this messed up crime scene. First of all, the kids found the bodies, and uh, I think I understand. I talked to the you know, the district attorney at the time, and I understood, you know, why they kind of did what they did.
None of this stuff came up at the trial. The drama club teacher was and he was a very nervous guy, and he was guilty of his What he thought of was what he knew was his closeness to this girl.
He made too much of it. I think.
On the stand. He seemed to be an unreliable witness, and they basically told him, okay, fine, you're we can see that you're not. You're not the good witness, and coffee went. So then every got brought up at the trial. He had a public defender.
They tried to.
You know, they did what they could. I think, but the guy is guilty. Is clear, he's guilty. Uh So he's convicted five five counts of where there was no death penalty in New Jersey, and he's convicted of five counts of the first Gray murder.
He goes, it's interesting too. The ed Iliano, the drama teacher. You write this very dramatic scene where he gets a phone call and and Patty's telling him, listen, my father is going to kill me. And he says, well, what do you mean by that, you know? And she says no. He said he's going to kill me. He's going to kill my brothers, Like, are you stupid? This is what he's going to do. And his wife was there, and
he knew he was over. He was frightnizing where he shouldn't be as a teacher, and so he said, listen, I've got a busy schedule, which must have again must have had.
A lot. He was an intense guy, very neurotic, but you know, really a good a drama club.
Teacher for these kids.
I mean they adored him, and he was I think they were doing they had done Little Abner as a as a musical. Uh and and John thought John saw that he was at that performance and he was like horrified because the daughter played the bombastic babe in Little Abner in a bathings and he thought that was just scandalous. And he saw that and he was Ileana was developing.
Tennessee.
Williams played street Carnage.
Desire that Patty was going to be in.
Yeah, he's consumed with guilt. And she had told him like, my father's going to kill me. And he basically had everybody. All parents say that about their kids. It's part of what the makeup of that Iliano. After this event, horrible event occurred, and I must have talked to him twenty spent twenty different times with him. We'd meet in a bar in Jersey City and he would just pour his heart at about this. And the thing I really wanted to get at was ed, you know, how close were
you to this girl? And he was obsessed with her. He was, you know, but he was sexually repressed enough himself that he didn't There was nothing physical he did. Maybe it would have become that, but I don't think he was a molester. He was just inappropriate about it. And you know, I made that clear to him that, you know, I was going to present him as he as I could, and I suppose that comes out clearly in the book, but you know, I was again restricted by what by the facts I could I could I
could gather. He was very upfront with me.
It's yeah, you you the two real heroic characters in there, like we had mentioned, was Wanda Flannery, but also the person that pushed and pushed for Frank Maryanka, and he basically got a rebuff from America's Most Wanted. They said, well,
we're not really interested. He went to extraordinary levels. His friend had said, listen, I'm going to a conference and the guy, the producer of America's Most Wanted is going to be speaking there, and so Americana said, I'm going with you, and he brought all the files and then they he says, well, we approached him. He says, we collared him, We made sure that he got this information. They took him up into hotel room and he presented all the details and he said, wow, that's a fascinating story.
It's not so new, because that's the excuse they gave before. It was too old the case. So without Frank, Americana, without Wanda, and America's Most Wanted once again comes to the rescue, America's Most Wanted, incredible program. Yeah, things going.
It turned out too much, much differently because this was a dreurnal this you know, this is now eighteen years later, so this wasn't the cops, uh who were who responded to the murder. So this is a new generation of cops who lived with this. I mean they're they're local kids who became cops. And you know this this story was everybody, everybody in Westfield knew this story. And they were all kinds of rumors that you know, the devil worship, et cetera. You know, the kind of bs that that
comes up in an event like this. But uh, you know, those cops eighteen years later made a real effort because they were just determined to uh to try to crack this case, that that that had cold case. And they they did press America's most wanted. They got rebuffed, and the guy uh Melanca, uh, you know, makes an extraordinary effort to uh to basically to pitch this this case to America's most wanted. And you know, I don't mean to in any way diminish the importance of America's most
wanted in these events. I just kind of don't agree that you mentioned in a conjunction with Maranca the cop Wanda, the old Irish lady next to her in Denver. That's an interesting combination. I wish they had met, because those were the two they basically they cracked the case. But Wanda was the first one on his case. And you know, Mirca didn't know Wanda and wanted didn't know him.
I think she.
I don't think she had anything to do with it after she dropped the dime on the top. But you're right, that's a If this were a novel, I would those were those are characters I would have drawn out a lot more if I'd had the freedom of of fiction rather than nonfiction.
Yeah, that's incredible. And also when you write in the end you say that he died in prison, but nobody came to claim the body and then you write one word at the end.
Yeah, well, I quote the old line that you're only supposed to say good about the dead. That in two thousand and eight, John Lisz died of a heart attack whatever it was, and the last line is good. That's sort of all I felt. I really, I really saw no. I had no sympathy, and I thought there was nothing tragic about him. I just we're best rid of that horrible, evil, murderous man.
Yeah, there's no no redeeming new qualities to him. He could. He certainly had the religiosity this I would say, toxic religiosity that he grew up with. But his decision to end these people's lives for a person that was intelligent, you know, of the nonsensical reasoning for what he did, and then justiz as you're right when his own father died,
which was important to him. He seemed to have no feelings and obviously a psychopath like this could go and have a new life, reinvent himself, have a new life. Very few people ever talked to asked him, Hey, what about your past? He said, well, my wife died various reasons. But when they said about his children, he just had to not talk about it, but he wasn't racked with guilt. He rebuilt his life and didn't look back. Fortunately, some people.
So wanted flattery spot at him. Absolutely, I was so bothered wanted. She was gracious when I went out to see her Denver, and she just felt she couldn't quite comprehend everything that the things that she had said in motion. She sat there, as I recall, in her house was the the kitten on her on her lap, and just sort of uh talked and talked and talked. That I grew up in an Irish American culture and my mother was an old Irish lady who you couldn't get anything
past her. If she if she thought you were up to something, she was on you. And that Wanda kind of reminded me of her in that sense.
Yeah, tenacious for sure, certainly suspicious.
Yes.
I want to thank you very much Joe Pleasure for coming on and talking about death sentence, the inside story of the John List murders. For those that might want to look at other work that you have and if there a website or a Facebook page for this, or could they just go to Amazon and see other.
Work of yours.
Amazon will do it my name Joe Sharky, but Joe Sharky dot com, Joe s A j R.
K e Y dot com.
Uh, has you know that on my other books, including above Suspicion, which is a book that was made into a movie staring Amelia Clark that will be released next next year, twenty twenty twenty.
Very very interesting that. Yep, congratulations, Thank you very much, Joe Sharky. Pleasure, have a great night.
All right, you too, all right, goodbye,