John List
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Claims to fame: Devout Lutheran and Sunday school teacher deeply concerned by the moral decay of American society; fornicator; porn junkie; mass murderer
Moral apex: On November 9, 1971, John List shot to death his wife, Helen, 45; their three children, Patricia, 16, John, Jr., 15, and Frederick, 13; and his own 85-year-old mother, Alma, in their home in in Westfield, New Jersey, then disappeared for eighteen years… until a cold-case recap on “America’s Most Wanted” led to a hot tip.
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Motive: Most accounts note that List was deeply in debt; his wife was losing her mind as a result of advanced syphilis, and her addiction to both alcohol and tranquilizers was only exacerbating her mental condition; and his wife and mother could barely stand living in the same house. If John List just wanted out of a failed life, and to start anew with no strings, that’s only half the story:
To his pastor, he scrawled a five-page confession, which provided the whole story in detail of how he had done this grisly deed. He said his wife was sick and had been turning away from God. His daughter was doing the same. He had prayed for guidance, but God had not answered him. He feared that the conditions of the world would be harmful to his children’s souls as they reached adulthood. Insisting that he had taken care to ensure that their deaths were not painful, List mentioned that John had put up a fight but had not suffered long. Then List had gotten on his knees and prayed for each one.He gave detailed instructions for cremation, with services that would ensure a quick passage to heaven. He was grateful that they all had died as Christians. Then, in a postscript, he added, “Mother is in the attic. She was too heavy to move.”
. . .
He also mentioned that he originally had planned this massacre for All Saints Day, but had been delayed. Then he asked to be dropped from the congregation rolls. He felt sure that God would forgive him, since Christ had died for him along with all other sinners.
— Katherine Ramsland
Straight to Hell
Crime Library
At List’s trial in 1990, psychiatrist Sheldon I. Miller testified…
…that John E. List saw only two choices when financial and health problems burdened his family in 1971: go on welfare, or kill his wife, his three children and his mother and send their souls to heaven.… To allow his family to go on welfare, he said, would open them to ridicule, show that Mr. List did not love them and violate the teachings he received from an authoritarian father who taught him to care for and protect his family and never allow them to go on “the public dole.”
. . .
[Because the 64-year-old defendant was] the protected child of rigid, doctrinaire parents who saw value only in work and religion … Mr. List grew up without developing the skills needed to deal with problems as they arise, Dr. Miller said. He knew only two places to look, to his father’s directives and to his understanding of his Lutheran faith.
. . .
That is what he said happened to Mr. List in 1971 when he faced the loss of his job, his wife’s deteriorating physical condition and his concern about being able to protect his family from pressures that threatened their salvation. “He exploded,” Dr. Miller said.
— Joseph F. Sullivan
Slaying Suspect Saw 2 Choices, Doctor Testifies
New York Times
April 7, 1990
…List, a man of rigid religious principles, became so alarmed by the threat to the salvation of his family posed by societal changes that started in the 1960’s that he killed them “with love in his heart,” his lawyer told a jury…
The lawyer, Elijah J. Miller Jr., in his opening statement in Mr. List’s murder trial, conceded that his client shot his wife, mother and three children to death in their Westfield house in 1971, but he asked the jury to try to understand the defendant’s religious conviction that the only way to save his family from the immoral influence of “rebellion, war, drugs and fragmented families” that he saw everywhere was to kill them.
. . .
…Mr. Miller told how Mr. List felt overwhelmed by the societal changes he saw and trapped by his inability to reconcile those changes with the “moral values of the early 1900’s” to which he clung.
“Suicide was not an option and he couldn’t walk away without violating the duty taught by his father” to safeguard his family’s immortal souls, Mr. Miller said.
— Joseph F. Sullivan
Concern Over ‘Moral Values’
Led To Family Murders, Lawyer Says
New York Times
April 3, 1990
Asked why he had not just killed himself when he saw debt mounting up, he explained that suicide barred him from heaven. He had a better chance of going to heaven if he murdered his family and then sought forgiveness. In fact, he fully expected not only to see all of them in heaven but that they’d have either forgiven him or would not know about the “tragedy that had happened,” as he’d put it in his trial statement to the judge. He suspected they would all get along as before.
— Katherine Ramsland
Straight to Hell
Crime Library
What about his wife’s syphilis? Was that part of the reason he killed her? Nope. He didn’t even know she had it:
[Helen hid from him] for 18 years that she had contracted syphilis from her first husband, a soldier who was killed in action.The disease eventually ravaged her, blinding her in one eye and causing brain damage and personality changes that transformed her from an attractive young woman to an unkempt and paranoid recluse, according to the testimony.
Mrs. List had been unsuccessfully treated for syphilis at Walter Reed Army Hospital in 1947 and 1948, three years before she met Mr. List at a bowling alley in Virginia in the fall of 1951 when Mr. List was in the Army.
. . .
[Mrs. List] suggested they get married in Maryland, Dr. Miller said, because the state did not require a blood test. When their three children were born Mrs. List took medication intended to protect them from contracting her disease…
Starting in 1965, soon after they moved to Westfield from a suburb of Rochester, Mrs. List began experiencing spells in which she would black out and fall. The sight in her right eye also began to fail. She was examined on three occasions at Overlook Hospital in 1966, but never told physicians about her illness.
It was not until she went to Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in December 1968 and January 1969 when tests pointed to tertiary syphilis, which affects the brain, that she told the doctors of her disease.
Dr. Miller said that for someone with Mr. List’s moral, ethical and religious upbringing, having a venereal disease “would be a very difficult thing to deal with.”
— Joseph F. Sullivan
Slaying Suspect Saw 2 Choices, Doctor Testifies
New York Times
April 7, 1990
The effects were difficult enough. Noted Katherine Ramsland, “Helen was diagnosed with cerebral atrophy and John was advised to have her institutionalized, but he refused.”
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Where he is now: Rotting away in prison for the rest of his miserable existence. On April 12, 1990, he was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder, and sentenced to five consecutive life terms.
Random rumor: It’s been speculated repeatedly that John List is also D.B. Cooper, the hijacker of folk legend, missing since 1971. (No law-enforcement officer buys that theory now, but it was a provocative idea for a while.)
Interesting coincidence: Actor Robert Blake — who would later go on trial for the murder of his own wife — starred as John List in the excellent 1993 made-for-TV movie, Judgment Day: The John List Story (1993).
More movies: At least three other movies have been loosely based on the John List story: Scream for Help (1984), Blackout (1985), and The Stepfather (1987).
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“The strange thing about The Stepfather,” screenwriter-novelist Donald Westlake told NYScreenwriter.com, “the source of it was a real life guy, and ultimately there were three movies that all came out of the real life case. A guy in New Jersey named John List who disappeared. Part of what was weird and interesting about it was that for several weeks before he murdered his family and disappeared, he had not been going to work, he had quit his job without telling anybody and would go off everyday as though to work and at the end of the week he would take money out of his savings account and bring it home as though it were his salary.
 — Karen T. Taylor |
“So the one sentence that [writer Brian Garfield] gave me was, “Where was that guy going during those weeks? Was he setting up a new life somewhere else?” What if he has a new family and they’re beginning to irritate him. That was the source of the thing. I haven’t seen the other two movies, Scream for Help and a cable movie called Blackout which was also based on the John List story. The interesting thing is that independently the way these things were done, there was no way that either of the other two could have been influenced by my script because it was five years between my writing the script and it being produced, so the other two had already come out by the time The Stepfather came out. I didn’t see them and wasn’t influenced by them but we all gave the villain the same occupation.”
Also, Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote The Usual Suspects (1995), used List as the inspiration for the character “Keyser Söze.”
Maybe-There-Is-A-God fact: One of John List’s favorite TV programs was — you guessed it — “America’s Most Wanted.” He missed the May 21, 1989, show in which he was featured because he and his (new) wife went to a church social.
Memorable observations:
Relief — even glee — has swept through its spotless streets and colonial mansions; the current residents on the property where Mr. List’s mother, wife and three children were shot to death in November, 1971, say they are planning a party to celebrate the arrest. A few of the 32,000 residents jokingly suggested renaming the town Listfield..The Talk of Westfield;
Old Crime Held Town In Thrall
New York Times
June 7, 1989
[”Robert Clark,” List’s pseudonym for 18 years] is deeply religious and law-abiding. “If he goes into a McDonald’s for a hamburger, the man is going to bow his head and say grace to his God,” the friend said. He was also, the friend added, “a man who obeyed the speed limit.”
. . .
“One thing about Bobby,” the friend in Richmond said. “If he was the last man on earth, he still wouldn’t be alone. You understand what I’m saying? He was a religious man. A devout Christian. If he says, ‘God bless you,’ he’s not just saying it. He means it.”
(How “deeply religious”? Katherine Ramsland, author of Inside the Minds of Mass Murderers: Why They Kill and some two dozen other books, wrote: “John’s mother protected him, and brought him into her social life, which centered on the church. Since his father was a church trustee and its treasurer, Alma urged her son to follow in his footsteps. Most nights, they read the Bible together, a practice John kept up until he murdered her.”)
The List case still baffles criminologists. So many questions remain, from the big ones — “How could he do it?” — to smaller details, such as, “What happened to the family’s dog, Tinkerbelle?” The List house mysteriously burned down sometime after the murders. Along with the fire went perhaps the biggest irony of all: The glass ceiling in the empty ball room was a signed Tiffany original. That alone would likely have paid off all of John List’s debts.— Kathy Halverson
The List Murders Stun Westfield In 1971
Westfield Leader and Times
February 17, 2001
Why he’s here: Certainly not for something so piddly as mass murder — the Bible’s chock-full of mass murder, much of it condoned (Judges 4:15-16), commissioned (Numbers 31:16-18), or committed (1 Samuel 6:19) by God himself. Rather, John List wins a spot in Conservative Babylon for fornication. You see, John had to marry Helen; she was pregnant. Or so she told him. She lied. But that doesn’t erase the fact that the two had carnal knowledge of one another before marriage.
In fact, wrote Katherine Ramsland, List “seemed proud that there was some evidence that he had already been to bed with her.”
But premarital sex wasn’t his greatest exercise in hypocrisy. This man who was so concerned about the future of his family’s everlasting souls (particularly his “troublesome” daughter’s) rented a private post office box so he could receive pornography through the mail.
Now that’s some twisted thinking at work. We can’t even begin to comprehend the sort of “logic” that would lead a man to slaughter his family in order to save them from “the immoral influence of ‘rebellion, war, drugs and fragmented families,’” while clinging so tightly to the “moral values of the early 1900s.”
Shame, shame.
Suggested Bible reading for Mr. List:
Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things.And thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God?
— Romans 2:1,3
