Guy Kills Family 'because It Was the Right Thing to Do"
1971 Family unit Killer Breaks Silence
Feb. 20, 2002 -- Thirty years ago, auditor John List methodically murdered his whole family — his mother, his wife, and their three children. He says he wanted to spare them the shame of losing their New Bailiwick of jersey mansion and to make certain they got to heaven.
At present, in his get-go-ever public comments nigh the 1971 crime, the 76-year-former sometime Sunday school teacher says he is waiting to be reunited with them in the hereafter.
"I feel when we get to heaven nosotros won't worry well-nigh these earthly things. They'll either take forgiven me or won't realize, you know, what happened," List told Downtown's Connie Chung in an interview at the New Bailiwick of jersey State Prison house in Trenton, where he is serving v life sentences. "I'm sure that if we recognize each other that we'll similar each other'southward company just as we did here, when times were improve."
Listing left a confession alphabetic character at the scene, so constabulary had trivial doubt every bit to who was responsible for the killings. Merely he fled to Colorado, causeless a new proper name and remarried, managing to elude a nationwide manhunt for xviii years. He was arrested in 1989 after a sometime neighbor recognized him from a profile on the syndicated TV show America'south Most Wanted. He was sentenced to v consecutive life prison terms.
List, who says he remains deeply religious today, acknowledges that his crimes violated one of the Ten Commandments: "Chiliad shalt not kill."
"I knew it was wrong. Equally I was doing it I knew information technology was wrong," he said.
But, during a iv-60 minutes interview, he sought to explain how worries that financial hardship would split his family and plow them away from their faith forced him to brand a tough conclusion. "I finally decided the just fashion to save them from that was to kill them," he said.
Depository financial institution Vice President and Sunday School Teacher
In 1965, when Listing and his family moved to flush Westfield, N.J., he seemed to be a model of suburban success and propriety. He was vice president and comptroller of a nearby bank, and his family unit lived in an 18-room mansion with marble fireplaces and an elegant ballroom. They attended church each week with Listing'southward mother, a strict Lutheran who lived with them.
But then his life began to crumble. He lost the depository financial institution job, and a succession of subsequent jobs. By 1971, he was notwithstanding leaving for work every morning, only — unknown to his family — he was unemployed and unable to pay the bills. He spent his days at the train station reading, napping, and wondering how to get his family unit out of their financial mess.
He says today he felt he was letting the family down. "I grew up with the idea that you should provide for your family and to do that you had to be a success in the job that you had — or you're a failure, and that was not a practiced affair to be," he said.
Finally, with the prospect of foreclosure threatening to betrayal his financial failure, Listing made his terrible decision to kill his family unit — but not himself.
"It was my conventionalities that if you kill yourself, yous won't go to heaven," he said. "Then 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 afterwards confess my sins to God and get forgiveness."
No Turning Dorsum
After making the decision, List says, at that place was no turning dorsum. "It's just like D-24-hour interval, y'all go in, there's no stopping after you commencement," he said.
After finding an old 9 mm pistol he had bought as a souvenir of World State of war II, and a .22-caliber target pistol, he purchased new ammunition and went to a shooting range for target exercise.
One night after dinner, he fifty-fifty asked his family what should be done with their bodies after they died. "I recall talking almost funerals and cremation and burials. I thought I was being real clever," he said.
On Nov. ix, 1971, after sending his children off to school, List took his ii handguns out to the car to load them, then walked into the kitchen and shot his wife from behind every bit she was drinking coffee. "I approached all of them from behind and so they wouldn't realize till the last minute what I was going to do to them," he said.
Next he went upstairs, to where his 84-twelvemonth-old mother was having breakfast, kissed her ("like Judas," he told Downtown), and shot her in the head.
Then he went downstairs, dragged his wife'southward body into the ballroom and began scrubbing up the blood so the children would not realize what was going on when they got dorsum from school.
He went to the post function to stop the family'due south post, then to the banking concern, where he cashed his mother'southward savings bonds, checking that he got the right involvement to the penny. Returning home, he fabricated several calls to explain that the family had gone to North Carolina to visit his wife'southward bilious mother, and that he was planning to follow by car.
Breaking for Lunch
And so he sabbatum down and ate dejeuner at the aforementioned table where he had shot his married woman hours earlier. "I was hungry," he told Downtown, adding with a chuckle, "that's just the way it was."
In the afternoon, he killed his children equally they came home — showtime his daughter Patty, a budding actress at xvi; then his youngest, xiii-twelvemonth-old Frederic; and finally 15-year-quondam John, his namesake and his favorite.
Dissimilar the others, John didn't go quietly, his trunk jerking equally Listing emptied both the 9 millimeter and the .22 into his son. "I don't know whether it was simply considering he was still jerking that I wanted to make sure that he didn't suffer, or that it was sort of a way of relieving tension, after having completed what I felt was my assignment for the day," List said.
He lined up the four bodies in the ballroom (he said his mother's body was too heavy to motility), put music on the internal intercom, and cleaned up meticulously.
Then he saturday down and wrote a confession letter to his pastor explaining his financial problems. "At least I'm certain that all have gone to heaven now. If things had gone on who knows if that would be the case," he wrote.
Dr. Steven Simring, a psychiatrist who examined List after his arrest years afterward, told Downtown his "sense of neatness" was the result of a compulsive personality. Simring said List showed "no show of annihilation that approached genuine remorse," adding, "He's a cold, cold man."
18 Years on the Lam
The twenty-four hours afterward the killings, List scoured the firm for family photographs, violent his image out of them and then police would have zero to utilise in Wanted posters. Then he drove to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, where he left his car every bit a false lead and took a coach into the urban center.
Westfield police did not discover the bodies until near a month later. When they entered the firm, music was withal playing on the intercom, simply List was long gone.
From New York, he had traveled overland to Denver, where he began a new life nether the name Robert P. Clark, working offset as a hotel fry cook and later as an accountant for H&R Block. He joined a local Lutheran church building and, in 1985, married a widow named Delores Clark, with whom he moved to Richmond, Va.
In 1989, America's Near Wanted featured List and a forensic sculptor's impression of how he would look and so, 18 years after the murders. List caught the tail end of the show with his wife, who did not know his past. "I was perspiring like annihilation," he remembers, but said his wife did not seem to have recognized him.
Merely back in Denver, his former neighbors did recognize him, and called police. He was arrested 11 days later, and, after a jury rejected his diminished capacity defense, convicted and sentenced. In a three-sentence argument to the court, he said he was sorry for "the tragedy that happened in 1971." He did not mention his wife, his mother, or his children.
Austin Goodrich, an ABCNEWS consultant who is writing a book with John List, contributed fabric for this report.
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=132646&page=1
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