John List - "The Annihilator": The FULL MK Confidential Series

Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly show and today's mega episode.

“Today we are bringing you every episode of our MK Confidential series, The Anile later,”

on the horrifying killings in suburban New Jersey by family annihilator John List. We get into the crime itself how List was able to escape authorities and start a new life for 18 years and how it took John Walsh and America's most wanted to finally bring him to justice.

I love this one. You're going to love this here. I had never heard of John List prior to doing this and

it was my favorite. Up until we did DC Snifers. That's now my favorite. I don't know. Maybe I just like everyone that we're working on at the moment, but you're going to love John List. Not him, the man. The story. Enjoy. And we'll see a Monday where we begin a new MK Confidential series. This one. Unscot Peterson. See you then.

“It is the night of December 7, 1971. A drama teacher and military veteran named Ed Eliano”

turns his car up a long winding driveway in Westfield, New Jersey and puts the vehicle in park. Finally, he's making himself do the thing he's been putting off. He leaves his headlights on and pointed at the house. It is a state-leave Victorian mansion, 19 rooms, dark green shutters, set back on more than an acre behind tall hedges. The family that lives here calls it Breeze Noll. Night after night Ed has driven past it on his way home, slowing at the bottom of the hill,

telling himself everything's fine, but it has not looked fine for a while. The lights have been burning in every window, day and night, and lately they have begun going out one by one as the bulb's die. He has knocked on the front door and gotten no answer. He has rung the bell. He even tests

“the door handle. The lock holds, sparing him for the moment from deciding whether to enter alone.”

He has gone to the Westfield police twice, and both times has been sent away, because Ed cannot tell them exactly what crime he believes has occurred. All he has is a feeling and a promise he wants made to a frightened girl. The girl is one of his drama students. Her name is Patricia List. She is 16. She sings in the church choir, and she wants more than anything in the world to be an actress. Days before she disappeared, sitting in Ed's parked car late at night. Patricia told

him her father was going to kill her, not rhetorically and not in some vague way, but that she and her two younger brothers would be killed. Patricia is not a girl given to hysterics. She said it the way a person reports, "A fact." Ed told her, "No one is going to kill you. Trisha looked at him like he was a fool." It wasn't just the drama teacher to whom she had said it. She had predicted

the same to a friend her own age, a girl who has never been able to shake it. At some point,

he had told me that she and her father wanted her and her brothers dead. A neighbor has already called the Westfield police about the strange car in the driveway. Two patrolmen pull up within minutes and after they hear Ed's concerns, one of them and officer named George Solesnik walks the outside of the house. On the side porch, he finds a tall ground floor window unlocked. He and Ed push it up and climb over the sill into a dark dining room. The first thing they noticed is the smell.

The second thing is the music. Somewhere in the house music is playing, it is loud and orchestral and grand. It seems to be coming from everywhere at once, pipeed through an intercom into every room.

It is a radio tuned to a New York classical station the way it always is in this house,

and tonight by chance it is playing Wagner, a composer known for his anti-semitic writings whose opinions and music will later become a soundtrack for Ed off Hitler and the Nazis. It is an ominous sound inside an unsettling scene. By the window stand two fish tanks. In one the fish are dead, drifting at the surface. The second tank runs on a timer that keeps dropping food and those fish are still alive. Ed knows this house. He leads the officer across the center hall,

past the two curving staircases to a heavy drape, hold across the entrance to the ballroom.

There are four bodies on the ballroom floor, laid outside by side, still in their winter coats.

“They are lying on sleeping bags, boy scouts sleeping bags, forest green, with the words "be prepared"”

print in on the lining. Someone has arranged them so the edges of the bags all meet so that from a few feet away the four bodies together make the shape of a cross. A woman and three teenagers, one of the woman's arms has been laid across one of the boy's shoulders. Evel has been here. Ed Iliano runs to the front door and throws it open and the rest of the officers come in from the

porch. Someone finds the switch and turns on the lights. Upstairs on the third floor in a hallway

outside a small apartment with a slice of toast still in the toaster. The officers will find the fifth body. An 84-year-old woman, the grandmother of the house. Everyone who lives here is accounted for. Everyone but one. The father John List is gone. I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK confidential.

“Westfield, New Jersey is not the kind of place this happens. In 1971, it is a town of 33,000 people.”

Today, it has the exact same population. It is 25 miles south west of Manhattan with grand old homes and a downtown so charming that ad agencies from the city drive out to film it as a stand-in for small town America. It is a place of church suppers and cubscapped dens

of teenagers who spend their Saturdays downtown at the Rialto movie house and the sub-shop

and the benches around Mindowask and Park. The kind of town where people still leave the back door unlocked because nothing has ever happened here that would make them stop. It has 14 churches, 13 schools, and 51 police officers and it has not had a murder in eight years. Tonight it has five in one house. Not just any house either. Breeze Noll is a distinctly impressive home on one of

“Westfield's grandest streets, a 19 room Victorian with a real ballroom and a great stained glass”

skylight towering over it. The kind of kaleidoscope you would expect to find a top of church. From the sidewalk, it looks like the pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow. The steady father, the pretty wife, the well-mannered children, the good street address. That is the picture Westfield has of the family inside. The police are going to unearth the reality behind that image. The police chief is a man named James Moran. He is at headquarters that evening supervising

promotion tests when the call comes in from the patrolman at the scene. The officer on the line sounds panicked, nothing like himself. He tells Moran chief, there's been a mass murder. There are dead bodies all over the place. Moran cannot believe his ears. Westfield has not had a murder in eight years and now this man is telling him there are five. He gets in his car and drives. When he arrives, the ground floor of the mansion is already filling up with police

and Wagner still plays over the intercom. Officer Zalesnick cannot shake the sound of it. The unnerving part of the whole situation was that it was music playing in the house and it was a very classical serene almost like you would hear if you went to fuel power. Moran, who will later say that he is no classical music expert, makes the same comparison. He remembers the music echoing through room after room.

It is not until later that someone checks the radio listings and realizes what the family's classical station had been broadcasting at the exact hour the police found the bodies and orchestral peace from Wagner's twilight of the gods.

Somebody finally locates the radio in a hall closet and shuts it off.

The chief walks into the ballroom and stands over the bodies. He sees the three of them are children. The men already inside are not rookies. Some of them have given 20 years to this quiet suburban force and more than one of them will be unable to shake the next few minutes for the rest of his life. The smell of decay in the icy cold rooms. The small bodies laid out behind the heavy drape across the ballroom. One of the first officers to take the call had been so sure it was a

prank. He told the man on the phone to knock it off. A young assistant prosecutor named Michael Meisner is called to the house that night. He will go home afterward and take his clothes off in the hallway, unwilling to carry them into his own apartment because the stench has gotten into them.

Here is what the police can see standing in that ballroom. Nothing about the room suggests a robbery.

“The house is sparsely decorated but full of nice things and none of it has been touched.”

There is no sign that a stranger forced his way in. They can see from the care that was taken that whoever did this was not in a hurry. Whatever his state of mind the scene shows planning, order, and control. The bodies have been laid out. They have been covered. They have been arranged. Much of the blood has been wiped up. Though a dark trail of it still runs back across the floor, down in the kitchen, the breakfast dishes have been washed and stacked to dry. A few bananas have

blackened on the counter. Whoever did this killed five people, then tidied up.

Charlie Haller is one of the first Westfield officers into Breeze Null. 20 years later,

he talks to CBS News. He cleaned up a lot of the blood and had bags with bloody cows and rags.

“That's one thing you never forget, something like that. You never think would happen or you come upon.”

And it stuck with me for a long time. Whoever did this is not in the house of the six people who live inside this mansion, five are dead. The sixth, the husband, the father, a 46-year-old accountant is nowhere to be found. His name is John Emil Lest. For a few hours that leaves an obvious question, is John Lest a sixth victim? Take in somewhere else? The answer's no. In the first floor study, the police opened a filing cabinet drawer with a label on it that reads simply "Guns and ammo."

Inside are two hand guns that have been fired. Beside them, a long letter. John Lest is the author. Moran reads it then and there in the study on his feet with the bodies still about him. By the time he has finished reading, he is no longer searching for a missing man. He is now searching for a killer. The man who did this is not a victim, he is not dead, and he is not lost. He is a murderer who killed his wife, mother, and his three children,

and walked out of his own house. He had also made sure to give himself time. Before he left John Lest to take in a few quiet, careful steps to make sure no one would be coming looking too soon. Each was the sort of small air and a careful father might run before a family trip,

each helped by him another quiet day. By the time Ed Eliano finally climbs into that house,

John Lest is long gone. So who is he? This is the part of the story of which the town cannot make sense. Because the people think they know John Lest. Nothing about the man they think they know, fits the carnage you left behind. He's an accountant, a certified public accountant, precise and quiet and almost invisible. He's a churchgoer, a devout Lutheran, the kind who teaches Sunday school and helps run the Cubs Gout Pack to which his sons belong.

Parents in the congregation are glad to have him looking after their children. He's exactly the sort of steady, seemingly god veering man, any parent would choose to mentor one's son. He is unfailingly polite. He doesn't drink. He doesn't curse. He rarely raises his voice. Timothy Benford, a writer who spent years on this case interviewing nearly everyone in it, would put the paradox this way. He was a deeply religious man, introverted, soft spoken

a gentleman. The kind of person you would not mind having as a next door neighbor and this the whole family

“was like that. Mostly what people remember about John Lest is the coat and tie.”

Lest wore a suit the way other men wore skin. He wore one to church to work to the most ordinary chores of a summer Saturday. The parts of a life where no other man on the block was wearing anything of the kind. Years later John Walsh would describe him on national television in exactly those terms. Lest is described as a quiet soft spoken man, the kind of wears a shirt and tie to mold a law. A neighbor who watched him run Cubs Gout events remembered him barking orders and in the neighbor's

words marching the children in like little Prussian soldiers, a tinhorn tyrant the man called him, then in the next breath the same neighbor said that in every other way John Lest was a complete gentleman, the old world kind. That is the man Westfield knew. Prim, rigid, trustworthy, and utterly

harmless. The last man on the block you would look at twice. He had always been this way.

people who had gone to high school with John Lest would have to pull their old yearbooks down

“off the shelf to place him at all. He was there in the class of 1943 and honor student,”

but almost no one could summon a single memory of him. He was the boy one classmate said who blended into the scenery. That same forgettable quality, the thing no one could ever quite put a finger on, would turn out to be a great blessing to John Lest. His victims were not so lucky. His wife is Helen. She is 46 when John takes her life. Years earlier she had been vivacious and striking. A young war would owe when John married her. A woman the neighbor said was someone who

liked to laugh and to dance back then. By the time of her death, that woman has all but disappeared.

Helen is sick with something the family never says out loud. It's syphilis caught years ago

from her first husband and by 1971 it has reached the late stage that goes after the brain.

“It causes her mind to atrophy a little more each year and there is no cure coming.”

She drinks which the doctors have warned her will only speed the disease along and it does. She drifts in and out of lucidity. Most days she does not come downstairs at all. By the day of her death many of the people on hillside Avenue have not laid eyes on Helen list in a very long time. Her own children have learned to tell their friends that moms just resting. A dying woman upstairs in a bathrobe in one of the finest houses in Westfield. While below her

the dishes get washed the lawn gets mowed and the family goes on looking from the street like the picture of an ordinary life. John lists mother is Alma. She is 84 and she lives at the top of the house in the third floor apartment. The one with a little kitchen where her toast is still butterless

“in the toaster. She put up the money that bought this mansion and part of the deal was that she would”

always have a place in it. She keeps mostly to the apartments three rooms along way from the

Michigan town where she spent nearly her whole life and knew everyone. In private letters, Alma confesses to old friends how isolated and miserable she has become in Westfield. Then there are the three children. Patricia is 16 pat to her family. She is the aspiring actress. The one her friends described as the girl with the flowers in her hair. In the last weeks of her life, Patricia is the understudy for the part of Blanche Dubois in a community

production of a street car named desire. She memorizes not just her own lines as Blanche, but the entire play, every part which she would whisper to herself late at night after the house had gone quiet. Working through a script she is sure will take her somewhere. One of the young actors who shared a stage with Patricia Barry Cohen remembers to news 12 Connecticut exactly who she was. Very proud, very self-assured and beautiful. Really,

way beyond her years. At 16, she had more sponk and more pride and she was kind of hot. You know, she'd toss her hair and she was beautiful. 15-year-old Johnny is the family's athlete. Big for his age and hot tempered, a soccer player. Away from his father, he is loose and animated, a Joker. Nothing like the stiff silent man of the house. Fredrick Fred is 13, the baby. He is the gentle one,

chair-up-faced with a slight list his big sister likes to tease him about. He covers games for his school paper with the hopes of being a sports writer one day. The two boys are Boy Scouts, which is the reason there are Boy Scouts sleeping bags in the house. More than anything else, they are each other's best friends. They are also devoted New York Metz fans. On the wall over one of their beds, taped up as a homemade banner reading. Let's go Metz.

Those are the people inside the tidy home with the music playing. A dying wife, the neighbors no longer saw. A homesick old woman at the top of the stairs. A daughter was bring a theater script at night and two brothers who were each other's whole world. They are buried out of Redeemer Lutheran, the family's own church on a gray Saturday in December. There are five caskets, more than three dozen Paul Bears, a great many of them teenagers.

Patricia's friends from the drama group, the boys' friends from school, children carrying the coffins of other children, unable to look at one another as they do it.

Afterward, the grandmother Alma is sent home to Michigan to be buried among people. She actually knew.

“The man hunt for John List starts big and goes nowhere.”

The murder of an entire family in a New Jersey mansion is National News, and for a while the whole nation does pay attention. His face goes out on FBI wanted posters into police stations and pharmacies across the country describing him, among other things, as reportedly a neat dresser. The bureau takes the case, because a killer who has crossed a state line is federal business. Detectives in Westfield build a theory around the kind of man they believe he is.

Someone so bound to his church and his routines. That sooner or later, he will have to surface at some Lutheran church in some quiet town. They settle in to wait for it. For years afterward, every so often, on the anniversaries, the police go back to that same

“cemetery and sit near the family grave, in case John List cannot help himself, in case he comes back”

to stand over those he killed. But John List does not come back. He does not surface at all. He's like a ghost. Weeks pass, then months, then years, and John List simply is nowhere to be found. The tidy house on Hillside Avenue stands empty and morose. Less than a year later, it burns to the ground. The great stained glass skylight and all.

Investigators never officially determine the fire's cause. The case never closes, but it recedes.

Off the front page, out of the national news, out of people's daily thoughts, except the handful of detectives who cannot let it go. Westfield tries to move on. In a filing cabinet at police headquarters, the case of the accountant who murdered his family, sits open, unsolved, year after year after year. Detective Jeff Hummel, who takes over the cold case file, years later, and goes through it, page by page, sums up where the search stood.

One forcement itself were somewhat flumics because they didn't know where he was or whether he was still alive or whether he was dead. And I took the position, then you'd deal with evidence in fact. Since no evidence surface to the contrary that he had died, I assume he was alive. John List had just disappeared. Inside the homicide squad, the years of nothing, turned into a grim running joke. No matter how cold the case got, officers like Frank Moranko

tell Bill Curtis, they never forgot it. We would go on vacation and periodically,

we would send a postcard back to the homicide squad, wall on vacation saying, "Heaven't a wonderful time wish you were here in signage on list." So it was kind of a joke in the office. A man who would create America's most wanted, John Walsh, has a blunt answer for why the accountant was never caught by the people whose job it was to catch him. You think the local cops had the resources to get him? No,

“you think the mighty FBI was 6,000 FBI agents looking for him got him? No, I think he's still”

be out there. They didn't took the public. Now come forward with me from the murders in 1971, all the way to 1988. It is a bright ordinary day in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, thousands of miles away from West Field, New Jersey. In a quiet neighborhood, a mild, respectful, accountant is loading cardboard boxes into a used Ford, getting ready to drive across the country to a new job and a new life, in Richmond, Virginia. He is in his 60s now. He wears glasses and has a receding hairline and of

course, a coat and tie. His neighbors think he is one of the most decent, albeit forgettable men they have ever met. His name, everyone here is quite sure, is Bob Clark. For most of two decades, Bob Clark has been the most unremarkable man in the world. A CPA, a churchgoer, a Lutheran, he is polite, he is punctual. He wears a coat and tie. If that is starting to sound familiar, it should. John List built himself the same life over again, almost detail for detail,

the respectable churchgoing, coat and tie existence he had before the ballroom. He did not need a

disguise or a new face. The old one had never been memorable in the first place. In the doorway

behind him in Colorado is his wife. Her name is Dolores. They were married a few years back,

wife to illness. She has no idea that almost everything he has told her about his past is a lie. Years later after the whole country knows, Dolores will speak to CBS news of the man she married

“and the only way she ever knew him. "I have never known Robert to be anything but a sweet”

and gentle man of good character." She kisses him goodbye and watches him back before down the driveway off to set up their new life out east. She has no idea who is behind that wheel. The gentle churchgoing accountant with a symphony playing on the tape deck, murdered his own mother, his wife, and their three children in a New Jersey mansion more than 16 years ago. He left four of their corpses lying in the ballroom and walked out. He has been a fugitive ever since. Bob Clark is John

List and he has gotten away with his crimes. Next time on MK confidential, before he was Bob Clark and before the ballroom, he was a shy devout neatly dressed boy from a small town in Michigan who read the Bible with his mother every night. We go back to the beginning to find out how that boy

“became a man who in his last days in that house set his three children down and asked each of them”

whether they would rather be buried or cremated than meticulously murdered them all. It is a hot summer night in 1971. Well past two in the morning and the desk sergeant at the Westfield New Jersey police station is watching over two teenage girls. Their crime is close to nothing, staying out past midnight with cigarettes, laughing their way down a main street that had long since gone dark. In a comfortable town like Westfield, that alone is enough to get you brought in.

So they sit and they wait, read-eyed, for someone to come and claim them. The first father

arrives rumpled and half asleep, annoyed at the police for not simply driving his daughter home. It's an ordinary dad reaction, the kind of father anyone would recognize. The second father

“is not like that. The second girl is Patricia List. When her father walks into the police station”

at half past two in the morning, he is wearing a suit, a pressed suit, a clean white shirt, a dark tie, and a faint smell of aftershave. He had been asleep, someone called to say his daughter was at the station and before he drove down to get her John List stopped to put on a pressed coat and tie. The police chief James Moran hears about it the next morning and it sticks with him. Who gets up and puts on a suit, Moran wonders, with a white shirt and tie at 230 in the morning.

One of his officers has an answer. Oh, I know that guy, says the officer, lives in the big house up on hillside Avenue. I've seen him out there mowing his lawn in a suit and tie. That night, driving home, John List does not say one word to his daughter. He is a man who almost

never raises his voice, but once they are inside the house in the front hall, under a big

amber chandelier, something in him lets go. You are out of control. He yells at her. You are going straight to hell and there is nothing I can do about it. Four months later, Chief James Moran will stand in the ballroom of that same house and look down at the bodies of Patricia List and her mother and her two brothers and her grandmother and the first thing that will come into his head is the man in the suit and tie at 230 in the morning. The guy in the suit he thinks that guy did this.

In this episode, we go back way back to the beginning to find out who that man was and how a shy devout accountant came to murder his entire family and to tell himself right up to the end that he was doing the right thing. I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK confidential. John Emil List comes into the world on September 17, 1925 in Bay City, Michigan, a cold industrial town on River near Lake Huron. He is an only child and from the very first day,

he is the center of his mother's world. His father is old and cold. John Frederick List is 64 when his son is born, a stern German immigrant with a dry goods store and a booming voice,

a man who deals with his son mostly through his wife and refers to him always as the boy.

His mother, Alma, is warm but controlling. Intensely religious, she is a devout member of the

She reads the Bible with him every night, keeps him indoors away from the other children,

“away from the street, away from anything that might be a bad influence. Afraid he could catch a cold”

or get his hands dirty. A neighbor once described Alma as a queen, erect and precise and called little Johnny, her prince. He grows up living neatly to the point of strangeness. The family lives on the ground floor of the house and the boy sleeps on a couch in the parlor, a room with no door and every single morning he has to fold away his sheets and his books and every trace that he had ever been there. John learns to leave nothing behind. Quote, he was the neatest little boy I ever saw,

a woman who rented from the family said years later, he never knew he was around. Another

classmate put her to a different way. He was there, but he just blended into the background, the little boy who leaves no trace. He was good at that. Years later,

“list will describe that time himself to journalist Bill Curtis on American Justice in a voice”

as flat and orderly as everything else about him. There was a quiet childhood. I was a little entiled. You were no brothers with sisters to either play with or fight with. What Alma wants from her son is order and respectability and above all faith and for a long time that is exactly what he gives her. He is patriotic and he joins the army in 1943 right out of high school. He does not seem much of the war. He trains in the swamps of Louisiana, ships off to Europe in the last months

of fighting, and is home again by 1946, having spent all told less than a year overseas. He comes back with a handful of standard service medals, a couple of which he will quietly inflate over the years into something grander, and with one souvenir he is genuinely proud of, a star m1912, an Austrian automatic pistol he bought off of another soldier in 1944. He will not fire it again for another 27 years. While John is still in uniform, his father dies. John takes leave to go home

“for the funeral and the thing people remember about him there is that he shows no grief at all.”

He holds a neighbor's new baby, he's polite, he seems one relative said as if nothing has happened. Like this is all just a part of his day. After the war he does something else his mother Alma

always wanted. He goes to the University of Michigan on the GI Bill. John studies accounting,

earns a business degree, and then a master's, and becomes a certified public accountant. Accounting suits John. It is orderly. Everything adds up or is supposed to, and he takes a job with a prestigious firm. When the Korean war comes he is called back as a commissioned officer, which pleases both John and his mother, and he spends that war safely stateside in Virginia, touring civil war battlefields on his days off. He loves history.

He loves the study of old battles. It is now 1951. John is 26 years old, and he has never had a real girlfriend. A few forgettable dates in college, nothing that lasted. With women, he is almost completely inexperienced. Today they might call him an insell or involuntarily sell a bit. Then, on a Saturday night in October that same year, John goes bowling with a couple of other young officers in Newport, News, Virginia, and in the next lane is a thin, pretty young

woman named Helen. Helen Taylor is a war widow. Her first husband, a soldier named Marvin,

had been killed in Korea just months before, and she is raw with grief, out that night mostly because her sister dragged her along. She is a little older than John, far more experienced and nothing at all like him. Where John is timid and careful, Helen is impulsive and full of life, quick to laugh, quick to dance, quick to spend money she does not have. John falls hard for her almost immediately. Helen is newly widowed, deeply unsettled and drawn to

John's steadiness. Within weeks, she is telling him she's pregnant, and John who does not seem embarrassed by any of it, tells an army friend we have to get married. On December 1, 1951, less than two months after they met, at that bowling alley, John and Helen are married in a Lutheran church, in Baltimore. Helen does not come into this marriage alone. She has a nine-year-old daughter from her first marriage, Brenda, who at first resents the quiet, mild mannered,

stranger stepping into her dead father's place, but takes almost no time at all to change her mind. Within a few years, John is taking her ice fishing on the frozen Saginaw River,

and Brenda is calling him, Daddy. Brenda would later say of her stepfather, quote,

"If I did something wrong, he never cut me down. He always listened to me. He was there for me."

Brenda marries at 18. By 1971, she is grown and long gone, a married and divorced mother of five. She settled near Calamazoo, Michigan, and stayed in the Midwest when the rest of the list family moved east to New Jersey. John's mother had wanted so much more for her, Chani, as she called him, and from the day John first brings his new wife home to Michigan, Alma treats Helen with a cold contempt she barely bothers to hide. Helen, for her part,

“shuts out the old woman. The two most important people in John lists life will spend the next 20”

years quietly at war, and John will spend those years standing between them trying and failing to please them both. Shortly after the wedding, Helen tells John, she had been wrong. She was not pregnant after all. Whatever he privately thinks, he remains in the marriage. He is married now to a beautiful woman, and that is what a respectable man is supposed to be. Years later, a psychiatrist who evaluates John list will trace a lifetime of quiet resentment

back to this beginning. Here's Dr. Stephen Simring, speaking to Annie. He was forced to marry her because she said she was pregnant. It turned out that she was not pregnant, and then years later he was resentful about his impression that she perhaps had misled him as a way of getting him to marry her. Eventually, the children come, Patricia, in 1955,

“John Jr., the year after that, Frederick, two years later. On the surface for a while, the lists are”

exactly the family John always meant to have. Underneath, however, it doesn't hold.

John list has a problem, and it is the same problem over and over in one town after another. He is good at the narrow tidy work of an accountant, the columns and the ledgers. He is not good at managing people, selling himself, or reading a room. Employers keep deciding, politely, that he is not quite what they hoped for, so the family keeps moving, chasing the next job each one supposed to be the fresh start. Michigan, then Rochester, New York, and a good run

at the Xerox Company, where by 1965, John climbs to a real title, director of accounting services. Later that same year, he is quietly told, "It's time for him to look for something else." Rebecca Everett, post of the podcast, "Father wants us dead," says the people who worked with John

“list saw it, too. He was a fine accountant. The number is made sense to him. He could do that,”

but he wasn't really good with people. He does not tell Helen how bad it is. He never does.

Helen, for her part, stops pretending to be impressed. Somewhere in these years, she understands that the careful church going man she married is not going to rise in the world, and she lets him feel it. Their pastor, back in Rochester, remembers overhearing Helen's say to John's face, "If you were half the man, my first husband was, we wouldn't be having the troubles we're having." In the fall of 1965, John moves the family to Westfield, New Jersey, for a new job as

vice president at a bank, and he sets his heart on a house he cannot come close to affording. It is a 19-room Victorian mansion, on more than an acre, parked on the best street in town, and it already has its own name. A wealthy man named Wittke had built the house decades earlier. He added a ballroom to show off his art collection through parties under a stained glass skylight and called the place "Breeze Noel". By the time the lists come to see the house, Wittke is long dead,

his airs have sold the property off and the grand old estate has gone shabby. To John and Helen though, it's a dream. To John especially, it is about the image, what he would later admit was "conspicuous consumption in the extreme". It is a monument proof of the man he wants the world to believe he is. Almost as soon as they move in, a neighbor walks an apple pie over to welcome them to the neighborhood. The man knocks, the door opens just to crack, and John list takes the pie and before

the man can finish telling John his name, he cuts him off. Thank you very much, John says. We like to keep to ourselves over here. He closes the door. That is the first thing the folks on hillside avenue ever learn about John list. There is the matter of paying for the home. John needs $10,000 just for the down payment and there is only one person he knows with that kind of money, his mother, Alma. She agrees on one condition that she be allowed to come and live with them.

where she will spend what she will call the unhappiest years of her life and where six years after that,

“her son will shoot her above the left eye at point blank range. One day in the future,”

John list will tell a very different story to Dr. Simring, appointed by the court,

saying that the house had never really been his idea at all. He did not want the big house,

and he felt that he was being pushed to do this by his wife and by the demands of growing family. He made a decision to borrow money from his mother and then invite his mother to live with him. There is one more thing happening in that house quietly behind the tall windows. Helen is sick and has been for years, with an illness too shameful to admit to the good people of Westfield. It started long before John in her first marriage in Korea, where her first has been

ran with the bar girls of soul and brought something ugly home to Helen. For years, doctors missed diagnosis. By the time they identify it correctly,

“it has reached Helen's brain. The disease is syphilis.”

Caught early, it is cured by a single injection of penicillin. Untreated however, after nearly 20 years, it has advanced to the stage that attacks the nervous system, slowly destroying the brain tissue. Antibiotics can still stop it, but they cannot give

back what the disease has already taken. One bright spot for the lists, Helen never gives John

or her children the disease. Syphilis can only be passed to another person in the first months after infection. And Helen was infected in 1947. Four years before John ever laid eyes on her in that bowling alley. By the time they married, it has gone dormant and silent, working away and Helen from the inside. Dangerous to no one but her. Helen had insisted that she and John married in Maryland, specifically because the state did not require a blood test,

“which would have revealed her secret disease. It would remain a secret for nearly two decades”

until around of blood tests exposed the syphilis in 1968. John took the revelation in stride. Helen keeps the curtains drawn. She drinks scotch mostly and washes down the tranquilizes her doctors keep prescribing. The combination that only sharpens the disorientation and paranoia the disease already brings. She loses whole afternoons. She grows frightened of people who are not in the room. The disease, taking her mind apart, traces back to Marvin

her first husband, the war hero. The one man she never stopped loving and never stops throwing

in John's face. John tells no one. He cooks the dinners. He drives the children to their lessons. He answers the door and his coat and tie and says the family likes to keep to itself. But the care is not free. The hospital stays in the long recuperations put a financial squeeze on him that he will not admit to anyone. And it is Helen's illness that first sends John quietly to the bank to borrow against Breeze Noll alone and then a second mortgage that he will

not be able to repay. Up the stairs behind him, his wife is disappearing into a disease she caught from a dead man and John list carries it the way he carries everything silently and alone. And then John list loses the bank job too. One year and he is fired. John doesn't tell anyone not his wife, not his mother, his church. Instead morning after morning for the better part of six months he does the same thing. Put on a suit and a tie picks up his briefcase and his Wall Street

journal. He kisses his family goodbye at the door, backs the car down the long driveway and drives into downtown Westfield to the train station where his neighbors are catching the train to their jobs in the city. He doesn't get on that train, he finds a bench and he sits on warm days outside on cold ones inside the station. He reads his Wall Street journal front to back and then he opens a book usually a history, the Civil War or other old battles he likes to disappear into. He watches

the trains come and go. When enough of the day is burned off he picks up the briefcase and drives home again as if he is coming back from the office, but it's a lie. For six months John list performs an entire life he no longer has. To keep it all from collapsing he starts taking money that is not his. Years earlier his mother had given him power of attorney over her bank account. The money John's father left Alma. John sees an answer to his financial burdens. At first he pays it back

and then he stops. He keeps meticulous records the entire time, neat columns of what he has taken

his roughly $2,000 in US savings bonds. John has drained more than $50,000 out of his elderly

“mothers savings and she has no idea. Even that is not enough. He picks up work selling insurance”

from home and mutual funds and he is not good at either. By October of 1971 John list vice president Comptroller certified public accountant the man in the mansion has earned less than $5,000 for the entire year. He has mortgage the house three times over each new loan taken to pay down the one before it and he is months behind on all three. The only steady money coming into Brie's Null is the after school job paychecks of two of his children, 16 year old Patty and her youngest brother,

13 year old Fred. In every way that a man like John list can measure himself, he is ruined. The thing to do now is not let anyone see it. But it leaks out anyway in small strange ways. The neighborhood children learn to give the list house a wide berth. Cut across his lawn or make too much noise near his hedges and the mild accountant in the suit has been known to scoop up a handful of gravel from his own driveway and hurl it at them. The family down the street,

the devils keep a pet donkey that they've named Eliza do little after Audrey Hepburn's character in my fair lady. Every so often all Eliza pulls up her stake and goes wandering in the neighborhood and when she wanders on to John lists lawn he comes out and pitches rocks at the donkey until she leaves. One of the devlin boys puts it clearly years later. You could see he says that it would not take much to make John list just go plain crazy. This is the man the experts will

spend decades trying to explain. Dr. Simring, the psychiatrist, leader tells news 12 that John

“list is not a monster that anyone could have seen coming. But a rigid resentful man whose life is”

collapsing faster than he can hide the pieces. He was not a psychopath, he was not a sociopath, he was not a man without a conscience. I think he had a lifelong of resentment, of lack of success. And I think it got to him. There is a room under the ballroom that John insists on calling the billyard room, though there's been no billyard table in it for years. It is where he goes to be alone and where he keeps the things that comfort him, his Bible, his books on true crime, a shelf full of

war games, elaborate tabletop campaigns he disappears into for hours, moving whole armies across a board.

Two of them called Third Reich and Russian Front he is played for years. Whatever the game,

whoever sits across the board from him, John list takes the German side every single time.

“John once took his brother-in-law down into that cellar, pointed out the dark corners and the hidden”

passages and said almost idly, a man could hide for six months down here if he had food and water. Its truck is brother-in-law as such a strange thing to say that he repeated it to his wife that night. On the wall on John's calendar, there is a date in November with a thick red circle drawn around it. Because sometime in the summer of 1971, alone in that basement with his war games and his Bible and his debts, John list begins to plan a battle of his own. In October, he goes into the Westfield

police station for the second time that year. This time he gets finger-printed and applies for a

permit to buy a handgun. Home protection, he tells the cops, never can be too safe.

There is one person John list feels is drifting further from his grip. It's his daughter. Patricia is 16 and she wants more than anything in the world to be an actress. She is fallen in with the drama crowd at school and in a local theater group, a world of rehearsals and older kids and late nights and to a man like her father, that world is a threat to her very soul. To John list in his strict reading of his faith, the stage is not a wholesome dream for a girl

but a step towards sin. In the documentary, tracking down John list, Dr. Simring puts a fine point on this. In his Christian fundamental way of thinking, being an actress is like two steps beyond being a prostitute. Patricia has also started talking back to her father and she no longer bothers to hide how bored she is in church. There are things he hears about the company she keeps that frightened him more than backtalk. Patty and her friends have taken to playing with a

wichy board trying to reach the spirits. There are whispers, half teenage theater and half

church kids themselves do not know what to make of it and it scares them. To a father who reads

the Bible aloud every night and takes every word of it literally, this is not a phase a girl grows out of. It is his daughter's very soul sliding toward the fire while he stands and watches. His fear runs so deep that on the night the police pick up Patty, he turns on the girl standing next to her, one of Patty's friends, a teenager named Ronda Hansen, he barely knows and says it to her face. Patty's father was irate, he just started carrying on yelling at Patty and then he said to

me, "You're a fish as well as a witch." To the friends who actually knew her, none of it made

Patty anything stranger than a teenager with a hard father. Her friend Barry Cohen later says as much

“in the documentary tracking down John List. "I think that is a normal kid." You know, if you had”

a straight-laced father like him, it was probably very restrictive and very disapproving, you tend to be rebellious. Not long before the end, over one of those wager boards, Patricia turns to a friend and says a thing that friend will carry for the rest of her life. I have a feeling she says that something bad is going to happen. She doesn't say what, she doesn't say who, John List comes to believe or tells himself he does that the only options left are all unbearable.

Bankruptcy, welfare, his children growing up poor and worse, growing up and drifting away from the church, losing their faith in the loud, permissive, godless world of 1971. Becoming hippies, he looks at his daughter and at his sick wife who no longer goes to church and he sees two

“souls slipping away. A psychiatrist who would later reconstruct his thinking, reduced it to grim”

arithmetic. Here's Dr. Simring speaking to New Jersey.com. "His choices of a universe of choices came down to three choices. Run away, go bankrupt kill his family." John arrives at a cold piece of logic. If he kills them now while they are still innocent, still obedient Christians, then their souls are safe. They go to heaven. He's not murdering his family. He's saving them. What let's a man hold a thought like that and then act on it. It's not madness.

By the psychiatrist account, it is something colder and far more ordinary as he tells New Jersey.com. "He meets clearly the criteria for obsessive, compulsive personality. These are individuals who are emotionally isolated. They're not cruel, but they're emotionally isolated. They don't show feelings. They don't have very much in the way of feelings. They don't cry a whole lot. They're not emotional. They are very, very detailed oriented. They rationalize things that happen."

On the night of Friday, November 5, 1971, John Lest calls his three children to the kitchen table. He is calm. He is not shouting. He tells them he can no longer take care of them the way a father should. Then in the flat practical voice of an accountant, he asks each child, a question no child should

“ever have to answer. When the time comes, would they rather be buried or cremated?”

Buried the children say one by one, and then John gets up, walks out, and closes his office door behind him. To the friends in whom Patty confides, it sounds almost like a will-being drawn up,

the kind of paperwork you might expect from a man who's always worried about the numbers.

Patty knows better. In the weeks before the end, she tells more friends the same thing. Her father, she says, wants them all dead. John had wanted to do it a few days earlier, on the first of November all Saints Day, a day he thought fitting for sending souls to heaven. Something delayed him, so he settles on a new date, the one circled in red, and he plans it, the way he plans everything. Down to the last hour, down to every last detail.

The morning of November 9, 1971 comes cold and gray. John Lest is awake before dawn. He sits at his desk in the quiet house and everyone still asleep above him, and he does the last thing a careful account and does before he closes an account. He opens his budget book, the ledger of everything gone wrong, and he draws a single neat line beneath the final row of figures. He twists his college-class ring office finger and sets it on the desk. He opens the red-covered

He reads it to himself, softly, humming, as his eyes follow the verse, "the world is very evil.

“The times are waxing late, be sober, and keep vigil. The judge is at the gate."”

Then John Lest goes to a file cabinet, and he takes out the Austrian pistol he brought home from the war 27 years ago, and loads it. Upstairs, a toilet flushes, the house is beginning to wake up. Sunrise he knows will be at 6.36. Soon Helen will come down in her bathrobe to make her coffee. John Lest sits in a study, in a coat and tie, with a loaded gun, and waits for his wife. John has told himself this is mercy, that he is the only one who can save them,

and that the way to save them is to kill them. He thinks he's found the one solution to an impossible

problem. He's run the numbers, and they balance. November 9, 1971, the day John Lest carries out his plan, one member of his family at a time. Later, he will sit down in the house where he has slaughtered

“them all, have dinner, alone, wash the dishes, and go to sleep. That's next time,”

an MK confidential. I came back and had a few words to Helen, and went into the front room, then I came around back and shot her in the head. That is John Lest, the quiet accountant, the Sunday school teacher who put on a press coat and tie to collect his daughter from the police station at 2.30 in the morning. It is Tuesday, November 9, 1971, before the sun goes down, John Lest will murder all five members of his family, one at a time, inside the house known as

Breeze Noll. He will not panic, he will not flee, not yet. He will stop and make himself a sandwich. He will drive downtown and run his errands. He will sit down that evening to dinner in the house where his wife, his mother, and his three children lie dead, and afterward he will wash the dishes

“and go to sleep. This is the day itself, hour by hour. How a careful, church-going man spends a”

Tuesday murdering his family and tells himself the entire time that he is saving them. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential. It is not yet dawn, and John Lest sits at his desk in the dark, a loaded pistol in front of him, waiting for his wife to come down and start the coffee. He has been planning this day for weeks. He had even settled on an earlier date and let it come and go.

Now the new date is here. I kept thinking about it for several weeks, I'm sure, maybe even a month, and my final solution was that if I would kill them, they would save them from any problem. Investigators were later able to piece together almost everything about the hours that follow, from the evidence inside the house, from the paper trail of the errands that Lest ran that day, and from the flat careful account, Lest would give years later himself. This is the day they

reconstructed. It begins quietly. The porch thermometer reads 28 degrees, and the sky is only starting to gray toward a sunrise John knows, because he has checked, will come at 636. One by one has three children come downstairs, Patricia 16, the aspiring actress, still in trouble over the night the police wrought her home. John Jr. 15, the family athlete, big for his age. Frederick 13, the baby of the house. There is no real breakfast,

the kids forage for themselves in the cabinets. Patricia opens the refrigerator looking for milk and finds none. One by one they gather their school things and go out into the cold. After their three schools, the way they have on a thousand mornings before, their father does not sit with them. He stands at the window of his study, behind a parted curtain, and watches each of them go down the long driveway. By his own account, he gives nothing away. I tried not to act any different

than I ordinarily would, and also they wouldn't be suspicious. John Lest has already started clearing the way. Days earlier, he called to stop newspaper delivery to the house. This morning, there is a note taped to the refrigerator in his own hand for the milkman, who by long

habit let himself in the back door to check the milk order Helen always leaves. This one says

the family is going away and to hold the deliveries until further notice. A little after 830

the truck turns onto the street. Then he sits with the morning newspaper the same New York times

“his neighbors are reading over their own breakfasts, and he waits. A few minutes later, Helen comes”

down. She fills the kettle, sets it on the stove, and sits down at the kitchen table, waiting for it to boil. She has no idea that her husband is standing across the center hall in his office with the styer M1912 in his hand. It is the 9mm Austrian pistol he brought home from the war.

On the desk beside him lies a second gun, a small 22 caliber coat revolver that had belonged to

his father. It too is loaded and ready. John crosses the hall. Approach his Helen from behind. Helen appears to sense movement and begins to turn toward him. He fires. The first bullet hits her in the side of the face, not the back of the head as intended, and knocks her out of the chair. He fires several more times, some of the shots going into the wall, one of them glancing off

“a radiator into the next room. Then the kitchen is quiet until the kettle begins to hiss on the”

stove. Helen lies on the floor by the chair, in her bathrobe, and her blood runs out across the striped linoleum while the sun comes in through the yellow curtains. Upstairs, John's mother

has heard the shots. John climbs the back stairs to the third floor, opens his mother's door

without knocking. Alma is in her small apartment kitchen, still in her night gown, her white hair untidy from sleep, a plate with butter on it in her hand, and her toast down in the toaster. She looks at her son and asks him what the noise was downstairs. He shoots her once in the head, just above the left eye, two more shots go into the wall, on the counter, her toast pops up. In John's own telling years later, with Bill Curtis on American Justice, there is one more detail.

One of the evidence on site cannot confirm a kiss. She's out over and you know, greeted me and he made a kiss, right? And she said, "Well, it was that noise." And at that point, I felt like a Judas having no kiss for two. And I said, "Well, it must have been some noise out in the back." And then she got to the doorway, I felt her. In his account, she gets as far as the doorway.

In the scene, the police reconstruct, she never leaves the kitchen. He wants to carry his mother

downstairs to lay her with the others, but he cannot. She's too heavy. He drags her by a plastic runner into the narrow hall off of her kitchen and leaves her there. He makes one quick pass at wiping the floor with a damp piece of newspaper, then leaves it. It is not yet nine in the morning. Two of the five are dead. John List has most of his day still in front of him. The first thing he does is clean. Before the phone calls, before the errands,

he goes back down to the kitchen where Helen lies and tidies up. The way he has tidied up after himself is all life. He describes it decades later in the same even tone he used for everything else.

“I was very surprised as a man who brought that no greened out. And I think there was some”

shelf case, you know, and some of her holds teeth that got broken and were out on both the table, then on the floor. I cleaned all that up. Then with two members of his family dead in the house, John List does not fall apart. He works the day like a list of errands. He calls the insurance agency he still sells for, timing it so the answering service picks up instead of a person and leaves word that a family emergency is taking the lists to North Carolina where Helen's mother is gravely ill.

It is a lie, of course, and it is the cover story that will hold for weeks. Over the coming days, he will keep feeding it. A note to each of the children's schools, a phone call to Patricia's drama teacher to say the girl will miss the next rehearsal. The male, the milk, and the newspaper already stopped. Every loose thread that might draw attention to the house is snipped off in advance. He walks out into the cold and rakes the leaves. He comes

back inside, makes himself a sandwich and eats it at the kitchen table. Thirty years later, Connie Chung will try to get him to explain that sandwich on ABC. Great lunch in the kitchen where

Just the way it was. By his own account, once the first shot was fired,

“there was never a moment he considered stopping. Will you determine to kill them?”

Once I've made the plan, yeah, then it's just like DJ, you go in, you're there's no stopping and after after you start. The children are still at their schools, still alive. In his own mind, not one of them can be allowed to come home and find the two women gone. I just felt that once I had started, he was in coming upon me to kill all of the children, so that not even one of them would remain and suffer the trauma. A little after noon,

the plan hits a snag. The one thing he did not schedule. The phone rings. It is Patricia. She has left school feeling sick and walked to Duke's Delhi, a luncheonette in town, and she wants her father to come get her. It is the smallest, most ordinary thing, a teenage girl

“asking her father for a ride, and it makes her next. So John drives in and picks up his daughter.”

The one he has clashed with, the most. The girl who told her friends and her drama teacher, that her father means to kill her. He brings her home and gets inside ahead of her. Patricia comes in through the back of the house, where her father is now waiting. It is over in a moment. One shot through her left jaw at close range. The bullet ricochets off bone and exits, Patricia's left temple. John carries Patricia into the ballroom, laying her on the bear floor,

still in her coat under the big stained glass skylight. There are still two boys to come home and hours to fill before they do. So John list runs the rest of his errands. He drives into downtown Westfield. At the drive-in window of his bank, he cashes a check for 85 dollars on the account he shared with Helen, and enters the new balance in the checkbook, $24 and $14. At the post office, he mails a letter addressed to himself with a small key sealed inside that will unlock the desk in

his study. List does not explain this move, but he does tape a note to the top of the desk,

“which reads, quote, "To the finder, please contact the proper authorities. The key to this desk”

is in an envelope addressed to myself." The key will not surface for a month until the police dig it out of the family's health mail. By then, the police have forced the desk and filing cabinet

open. At a second window, chosen as if he had just remembered one more errand, he files the form

to hold that mail for 30 days. On his way out, he mails the notes to the children's schools. Then he drives back to the bank and cashes a second check, emptying the account he shared with his mother. At the main branch of Teller walks him back to the safe deposit vault, and he signs in at $137 in the afternoon, and back out at $157. 20 minutes, exactly. In the safe deposit box are the last of Alma's savings. Government bonds worth a little over $2,000.

The final piece of an inheritance he's been quietly draining for years. More than $50,000 of his mother's money moved out from under her a little at a time. He cashes the bonds with characteristic precision. He asks the Teller to write down each bond and what it is worth. He says for his mother's records. His mother has been dead for five hours. At three o'clock, the youngest Frederick, is at his after school job when word reaches him that his sister has gone home sick.

He telephones his father, a secretary who overhears the call never forgets the one thing the boy

says into the phone. What happened to Patty? His father drives down and picks him up. On his home, Fred does not get his coat off. He dies just inside the back door from a single shot, and is carried in to lie beside his mother. His head set so that it just barely touches hers. That leaves only John Jr. The only one of them who gets the chance to fight and the one who stands the best chance at it. It is so cold that afternoon that the boy's soccer practice is cancelled.

So he comes home early, walking up the long driveway with his gym bag over his shoulder. His father has to scramble into place behind the kitchen door. This time, it goes wrong. John Jr. hears his father move behind the door. He does not walk in blind like the others.

catches him in the back instead, because John Jr. twisted away.

“The next one does not kill him either. He goes down and tries to crawl across the floor,”

still wearing his winter gloves, while his father fires with both guns now, and then John keeps firing the little 22 into his son until it clicks empty. John Jr. does not die immediately. By the time it's over, the boy has been shot 10 times. The other children each died from a single wound. Later Johnless will insist that sparing his children any pain was the whole point. No, it's the one thing I was tried to prevent was there

feeling he wound for suffering, not the last woman. The body of his 15-year-old son shot again and again, and again, as he crawled across the floor, trying to save himself, says otherwise.

When the boy finally stops moving, his father drags him along a smear of his own blood,

“out of the kitchen and into the ballroom, laying him at the far end of the row, a little apart from”

the rest. By late afternoon, it is finished. Five people in one house in a single day. Helen, his wife of nearly 20 years, Alma, his mother, whose little prince he had once been, Patricia 16, John 15, and Frederick 13. What settles over Johnless by his own account is not horror but relief that the plan went off without interruption. Now Johnless creates the scene the police will find for a week's later. He brings the family's

forest-greens-leeping bags up from the basement. The boy scout bags with "be prepared" printed along the lining. The ones the boy's carried on camping trips. As he lays his wife and three children out on the ballroom floor, side by side, the children on their backs, still in their winter coats.

“He covers Helen and lays a towel over her face. He moves her stiffening arms so that it rests”

across Freddy's shoulder. Whether he means it as a last gesture of protection or only as part of the arrangement, no one can say. From across the room before bodies appear to lie in the shape of a cross, then Johnless kneels down beside them and praise over his family, each one of them by name. In the evening, he writes out the Y. Five pages on a yellow legal pad, addressed to Eugene Ray Winkle, the pastor of the family's own church, Redeemer Lutheran,

the man under whom he had taught Sunday school. I guess I just felt closest to him and felt that since I was a member of his congregation, he deserved a more complete explanation. He writes the note like a memo. There's no anguish in it. There's no wildness in the handwriting. The paragraphs are orderly and neat. Here is some of that letter. He begins with an apology to the pastor, quote, "I am very sorry to add this additional burden to your work." He writes, "I know that

what I have done is wrong from all that I have been taught and that any reasons that I might give will not make it right, but you are the one person that I know that while not condoning this will at least partially understand why I felt that I had to do this." The reasons are numbered. One, quote, "I wasn't earning anywhere near enough to support us. Everything I tried seemed to fall to pieces. Two, the lifestyle and shame of going on welfare was, quote, just more than I thought they

could and should endure." Reason three, quote, "With Pat being so determined to get into acting, I was also fearful as to what this might do to her continuing to be a Christian. I'm sure it

wouldn't have helped." And finally, reason number four, quote, "With Helen not going to church,

I knew that this would harm the children eventually in their attendance. I had continued to hope that she would begin to come to church soon." And quote, "But when John mentioned the possibility of Helen speaking with a church elder, he writes the Helen quote, "Just blew up and stated that she wanted her name taken off the church roles. John cites the combination of these challenges as the justification for his actions." He writes, quote, "So that is the sum of it. If any one of these

had been the condition, we might have pulled through. But this was just too much. At least I'm certain that all have gone to heaven now." He adds, "Of course mother got involved because doing what I

she is also a Christian, I felt the best that she'd be relieved of the troubles of this world that would have hit her. After it was all over, I said some prayers for them all from the him book. That was the least that I could do." He continues, quote, "I leave myself in the hand of God's justice and mercy. I don't doubt that he is able to help us, but apparently he saw fit not to answer my prayers the way I had hoped that they would be answered. As an aside John writes,

"Turtly, quote, "Also I'm sure many will say how could anyone do such a horrible thing. My only answer

is it isn't easy and was only done after much thought." Finally, John concludes his letter, quote,

“"Please remember me in your prayers. I will need them whether or not the government does its duty”

as it sees it. I'm only concerned with making my peace with God, and of this I am assured because of Christ dying, even for me." He gives instructions in the letter, too, simply and without a motion. He tells his pastor where his mother should be buried back in Michigan, next to her own people, and whom to contact. He mentions almost in passing that he had wanted to do this a week earlier, on the first of November all Saints Day, a day he thought fitting for sending souls to heaven,

and that some travel arrangements he still had to make had held him back. He had, in other words, penciled the murders of his family onto the calendar, and then rescheduled them. The pastor is not the only person John writes that night. There are notes to Helen's mother, and to his mother's

“sister, and to his own boss at the insurance company. In the letter to his boss, John list,”

ever the diligent employee, tightly describes his outstanding sales leads, and reminds the man about a $500 debt, as though the accounts should be kept in order after he is gone. No loose ends. In the letter, he also adds a line meant to soften what he has done. It may look cowardly,

he writes, that he always shot them from behind, but he simply could not stand for a single one of

them to realize in their final moments what was about to happen to them. It is the story he needs to be true, that none of them saw it, that he spared them that much, at least. The autopsy's say otherwise. The wounds are on the fronts and sides of their faces, not the backs of their heads. Helen took hers, turning toward him. His mother above the left eye, looking straight at her son, as he murdered her. Patricia threw her left jaw at the moment she stepped inside,

Frederick, a single shot to the left temple from the side. John Jr. took his first in the back, only because he threw himself out of the way. When the medical examiners are finished, the record is plain, most of his family did see him, and the gun, in the last second of their lives. They knew he was murdering them. So even here alone with a legal pad, John List is not telling the truth, not to his pastor, not to God, most of all it seems not to himself. At the very bottom of the page,

after his signature, comes one last line. In the tone of a man reminding someone to, water the plants, perhaps. His mother, he notes, is in the hallway on the third floor. She was too heavy to move. John List goes back through the house gathering up or destroying the family photographs, no one ever establishes what became of them. Then he cooks himself dinner, and eats it slowly, then washes the dishes and sets them in the rack to dry. Asked years later, how a man does that,

he points to his time in the army. A war record he tends to exaggerate. Having been combat, no, we were out feeling and fighting and then we come in and have something to eat. I mean,

“that's what allowed me to, you know, eat peacefully in the room that I had filled my family.”

Then he goes down to the billyard room in the basement directly beneath the ballroom where his family lies, and he goes to sleep. He later says, he slept well. In the morning before it is light, John closes up the house. He turns the thermostat down to 50 degrees, cold enough as investigators later note to slow the bodies decay and delay the smell of it, reaching the street. He switches on the lights in every room but the ballroom, which he leaves dark. He sets the trash out by the

back door. The way a family would on any ordinary night. He leaves the radio playing tuned as it always

is in this house. To WQXR, the classical station out of New York, hyped through the intercom into every room. He has a reason for that. I felt that if some intruder wanted to get into the house

That was another reason I left all the lights on. I believe make it look like there were people there.

“Then John list walks out the back door into a cold drizzle, slides into the family's old impala”

and drives away from Brie's Null for the last time. He drives down through the empty business district, passed a dark movie marquee, and points the car toward New York. He crosses the bridge's out-to-canity airport and ditches the impala in long-term parking, a non-descript car tucked into a crowded row. On the front seat, he sets a small neat pile. His Michigan alumni card and his accountants license, the last tidy paperwork of a man named John list. Then he walks

off across the lot toward the terminals. In his own mind, he is not yet a fugitive. He is a man taking himself somewhere to rest. I just thought I would like to see the mountains and relax a little bit, because I had been under a lot of strain. Behind him, back in New Jersey, Brie's Null stands

“with every window lit against the dark of a November morning, music drifting through its rooms,”

looking for all the world like a house where a family is waking up. By the time anyone learns otherwise, John list is gone. He stays gone for nearly 18 years. John lists plan, works. For the better part of a month, the lie does exactly what he built it to do. Neighbors see the raked yard and the burning lights and the family car gone, and they assume what he wants them to assume that the lists are away, caring for a sick relative just as the notes claimed.

Twice, Westfield police officers come to the door on a welfare check and get no answer.

They look the place over and leave satisfied that nothing is wrong. When the police finally enter

the house, discover the bodies, and open John's letter, they have a signed 5-page confession

“that names the killer. What they do not have is the killer himself. The police notice one more thing”

written on that letter, the date at the top, 119-71. Nearly a month passes before anyone finally gets inside the mansion and finds the family, dead and decaying on the night of December 7, 1971. John list has a four-week head start. His passport is gone. Helen's is still in the house, and investigators begin to believe that he may have already slipped out of the country. At Kennedy Airport, a port authority officer running a routine check for stolen cars in the

long-term lot finally spots the family in Pala. It's expired inspection sticker catching his eye.

He runs the plate and it traces back to Breeze-Nol. John's stack of identification is still sitting neatly on the front seat, exactly where he left it. The Union County Prosecutor Carl Ash will say they have more than enough to indict what they do not have and cannot seem to get. Is the faintest idea of where on earth John list has gone? It is a peculiar kind of nightmare for the men working the case. They are not trying to solve a who-done-it. They know who did it,

and how. He has even left them his own explanation for why. They are only trying to find him, a mild, forgettable man who has had a month to become someone else, somewhere in a country of than 200 million people who slipped away before anyone even knew to start looking. It is a rare and staggering crime. In 1971, a man who wipes out his entire family in a single afternoon,

and then simply disappears is unheard of. Westfield has never seen anything like it,

and neither have the people hunting for the man who did it. The FBI puts out John lists face across America on a flyer that describes a six-foot gray-haired 46-year-old accountant, armed and considered very dangerous. Most specifically, the flyer describes him as a neat dresser, which is not particularly helpful to the investigation, and so fits 10,000 mild middle-aged men. The alert goes out to every state, to police departments and post offices across the country. Tips come back by the hundreds,

with sightings from Oregon to England. Each one must be rundown, each one, turns out to be someone else. Within weeks, the trail goes cold. John lists to murdered his entire family, and then slept soundly in his stately Victorian house, has simply stepped out of the known world. Next time, on MK confidential, the 18 years John lists spends as a new man, or at least under a new

and a sculptor, who will one day give authorities the face of a vanished man they are desperate to find.

“John lists gets away with murder, until a TV show changes everything.”

In the third week of November 1971, a tall, bespectacled man in a coat and tie sits by the window on a westbound train, watching the flat brown grasslands of the Great Plains slide by for a day and a night, until the land finally begins to rise toward the Rockies. The train is taking him toward the

mountains he is always wanted to see, the Colorado Mountains. He has a suitcase, a briefcase,

and just under $2,500 in his wallet. What he does not have yet is a name. The man has left almost nothing to chance. Behind him, in the long-term lot at Kennedy Airport, his family's impala sits in a crowded row, and on the front seat in a small, neat stack, or his Michigan alumni card and his accountant's license, with his own name left in plain view.

“As the miles slide by, he eats and thinks back over his plan, the way he might check”

a column of figures. He chose Kennedy Airport on purpose. Newark is closer to his home in Westfield and a simpler route, but Newark Airport is not where a man goes to leave the country. He wants police to find his car at the big international airport, with the name John List sitting right there on the seat and his passport gone from the house.

When investigators finally come looking, he means for them to look at the departure gates,

the flights to Europe, and the ocean, and they do. The FBI runs down every passenger on every flight leaving the New York airport around November 10th and gets nothing. He can picture the manhunt he hopes to have unleashed on the wrong side of the world.

“He's not crossing an ocean. No, he is on a train rolling toward America's heartland,”

and he knows no one will look twice at a quiet man in coach. He thought about going to Phoenix, and then decided it was too hot. He thought about San Francisco,

too many hippies, so he settled on Denver. On the 22nd of November, 13 days after he murdered his

entire family, the man walks into a social security office in the middle of Colorado. He is balding, big-eared, and courteous to the point of disarming. He pushes his glasses up his nose as he explains apologetically that he has lost his social security card, a clerk hands him a form. He writes down a name that is not his, and a birthday that is not his either, so the man on the form is six years younger than the man holding the pen. He signs it Robert P. Clark.

No one asks him for a birth certificate. No one asks him for anything. A few minutes later, the clerk hands him a card with his new name, and he walks back out into the afternoon as somebody else. In 1971, a form and a signature is all it takes to become a new man. John Emil List is dead to the world. Years later, John would describe the shift in his mindset. I guess that's time when I thought he was less than less of family. I thought I was just

thankful to be living a free life, and I didn't want to be incarcerated if it wasn't necessary. Thankful to be living a free life. That is the man three weeks after he shot his wife in their eating space, climb the stairs and shot his mother, and then waited out the afternoon to kill his three children as they came home from school one at a time. Now he has a new name, a new age, and a clean slate if you can keep it. For the next 18 years, one of the most wanted fugitives in the

country will hide in plain sight by being the most forgettable man in every room. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. Denver, in the winter of 1971, does not know it has a new resident, and would not care if it did. Robert P. Clark takes a room at a motel called the Duvil, then pays cash for a small trailer. $1,500, no questions asked, and no documentation of where he purchased it. The trailer sits in a park of Transience off Interstate 70 on the western edge of the city.

Everyone here is passing through or starting over or hiding, no one asks him his business. Now he needs work. He is a certified public accountant with more than 20 years experience,

and a paper trail, and Robert Clark cannot afford to test any of those yet.

So he takes one job, open to a man with no past. He becomes a night cook. The kitchen is at a holiday in just across the interstate from his trailer near the city of golden, ski traffic off the highway keeps the place busy and keeps it anonymous, a long way from downtown, which is how he likes it. He works after dark, eggs, burgers, and coffee on the graveyard shift. The hours when nobody looks closely at anybody.

Nights suit him, fewer people. At work, Bob Clark trades the suit and tie for a cook's apron.

“Those who know him later remember his neat appearance and outside the kitchen he continues to wear”

his coat and tie. There is a small, terrible coincidence folded into those years.

Every so often a family from back east drives out to skiing Colorado and stops at that same holiday in. A family John List knows does just that. They are Helen's relatives, her sister's family. Years later Helen's nephew would do the math. The quiet cook on the morning line, the one who might well have made their breakfast was the uncle who had shot his aunt Helen to death at her own kitchen table. To the people in that kitchen, Bob Clark is reliable and impossible to know.

Asked where he is from, he says Pennsylvania one day and the Midwest the next. Asked about a wife, he says she died of cancer, another time that she drank herself to death.

“The lies are almost true, which is what makes them easy to carry. He is not inventing a dead family”

out of nothing. He is describing his real one, the family killed by his own hand, and calling it fate. A divorced woman on the kitchen staff named Ali Bray takes an interest in the gentlemanly cook with the mustache, a man who wears his cheap clothes well and looks to her like someone who has had a bad break in life and could do better. One day she asks him straight out whether there is a woman in his life. He lowers his head and says almost too quietly to hear

that there is no one. He gives her nothing more and before long Ali leaves the hotel for a full-time

job elsewhere, never saying goodbye. The one person Clark lets in, a little, is the man who cleans

the kitchen at night, an easy-going former cowboy named Bob Wetmore. The other cooks start calling them the two bobs, like Felix and Oscar, the odd couple of the graveyard shift. It is a lukewarm friendship, two loners who do not push each other, but when Clark hears of better pay at a country-club kitchen, the two bobs move on together. At 46, having killed the five people who shared his name, John List finally makes a friend. Asked about those years decades later,

he does not reach for anything dramatic. He reaches for the plainest words he has. I just more as existed and just go on and do what has to be done, I guess, to just survive. The psychiatrist who would study John List the longest, the one the prosecution later put on the stand, heard something colder underneath that word, survived. To him, Denver was not exile. Enjoyed his life in Denver. It was a fresh stock for him in every sense of the word. Remember,

his problem was that he was overburdened. He had been a failure in every way, so his family is aburdened, not a source of support. They were all gone, poof, and he was free. Poof, and he was free. The sick wife, the disappointed mother, the mortgage he could not pay, the three children whose futures he could not face, all of it gone, in a single November day. The people of Westfield would not let go so easily. The classmates who sat beside Patty, in the drama workshop,

and beside John and Fred at Roosevelt Junior High, are terrified. The man who killed their

“friends is on the loose and may not be finished. What if he comes back? Would they be next?”

At Redeemer Lutheran, where John List taught Sunday school and Patty sang in the choir, the congregation quietly fears the same. Pastor Eugene Ray Winkle confides in the undertaker who buried the list family, Fred Poppy. Gee, I hope he doesn't come around with a gun on us, Fred. For weeks after the murders, whenever the door opens during service, churchgoer's eyes dart to see who it is. Breeze Noll stands empty as the season turns to spring and summer.

Teenagers dare each other up the driveway of the 19 room mansion, where the family was put to death.

as it's called, and sleep on the ballroom floor, on the very spot where John List laid his family.

“Neighbors start noticing candlelight moving behind the boarded up windows on dark nights, odd”

comings and goings, laughter out in the bushes, which some of them take for chanting. One night in January, dozens of motorcycles come downhill side Avenue, and circle the mansion in the dark. Souvenier Hunters stripped the place of anything that will come loose. The mailbox, the house numbers, the brass knuckle, local children repeated the visit the family's grave in the dead of night. Then one night in late August of 1972, not quite ten months after the murders,

the house catches fire and burns to the ground. The Union County Prosecutor Carl Ash studies the aftermath and calls the blaze the work of a professional arsonist.

No one is ever charged, and the cause is never officially determined. The empty lot becomes

“the haunted lot. The fire takes the house and does nothing at all to tamp down the story. The”

lot is auctioned that December, a year after the bodies were discovered. The new owner builds a handsome new colonial, where the doomed mansion once stood. Even with a new house, the address, the very ground where the horror took place, draws attention. For years afterward, on Halloween night, Westfield kids walk each other downhill side Avenue to stand in front of 431 and dare one another to peer into the dark. It was a real life hard story in Westfield. There's an entire

generation of people that were afraid John List was coming for them. He was on the run for 18 years. He became known as the boogie man of Westfield. The house fire took something else with it. Set into the ceiling over the ballroom was a great panel of stained glass. The man who later buys the empty lot and art collector takes one look at the ruins and sees a genuine signed, Lewis Comfort Tiffany stained glass window, worth $100,000 in 1971. If he is right, John List

spent his last years under that ceiling, collapsing under debt with a fortune bolted into the roof

above his head. He never even knew it was there. As the hunt for John List continued and with

it, the legend of the man who annihilated his own family. One story draws the attention of the FBI for years. 15 days after the list murders, a man who calls himself Dan Cooper, hijacks and airliner over the Pacific Northwest takes $200,000 in ransom and jumps out of the back of the plane into the dark with a parachute floating down into American myth. The plane flies on without him and comes down safely in Reno with the rear stairs still hanging

open behind it. No one miraculously was injured. Two otherwise unremarkable men vanish within two weeks of each other in the fall of 1971. The connection is easy to see. The hijacker's police catch bears a passing resemblance to the missing accountant, so naturally people wonder if John List's solution to his money troubles involves a high-altitude stick-up. List's abandoned car at JFK airport makes the connection easy to draw. The FBI takes it seriously enough to show

lists photograph to the witnesses who had seen the hijacker. They say this man is not the hijacker, even so the Bureau cannot quite let it go. John List stays on the official list of DB Cooper suspects until 1990. Part of what feeds the rumor is a report that List had trained as a paratrooper in World War II. Much like List himself, List's war record was unremarkable, a quiet posting as a medical lab technician in Germany for the

last gas of the war. John List did not vanish into a jungle or behind a beard. Eventually he puts back on the coat and tie and rebuilds piece by piece the same life he had before the ballroom. It begins with his church. In June of 1975, Robert Clark joins St. Paul's Lutheran, an inner city parish on Grand Street in downtown Denver. It is part of the strict Missouri

“Senate of his Michigan boyhood. His mother's church, but with an important wrinkle. St. Paul's”

is a place where people drift in to start over after their lives come apart, whether from drink or drugs or trouble with a law, and its pastor does not pry into anyone's past. For a man like Robert Clark, that is not a small gift. He becomes what he had been in New Jersey.

parishioner to Sunday service. Every week, without being asked. In tax season, he earns a little

“extra money preparing returns for people who trust him with their numbers. In time, the congregation”

puts him on the finance council, and then they make him treasurer. They hand the books to the accountant. He has been here before. In his family, keeping the church's money is almost a birthright. His father was the parish treasurer and accountant, an Alma raised her son to carry it on. Back in Michigan in the 1950s, when John List was made treasurer of his congregation, he phoned his mother, proud to tell her he was keeping the tradition alive.

This is the same John List, who, holding power of attorney over his mother's accounts years later, quietly drains more than $50,000 from her savings before shooting her in the face. Slowly, he works his way off the nightcook line and back into accounting from a bookkeeper's

“desk at a carpet wholesaler up to company controller again. But it is risky. This business”

of reclaiming John List's old habits. In the spring of 1977 at a social for the single members of his church, the ghost man begins building a second family. Her name is Dolores Miller. She is slender and soft-spoken, with strawberry blonde hair. A refined church-going woman who has already survived one marriage that failed her. She has no children. In Bob Clark, she sees a devout, courteous man, who does not drink, does not chase women, and seems to genuinely care about

other people. In Dolores, John sees a high-minded religious woman whose faith matches his own. They take to each other almost at once. He tells her his first wife died of cancer. From the way

he says it, Dolores can see the subject pains him, so she lets it go and never raises it again.

“She never sees a photograph of that first wife. She never thinks to ask for one.”

No one at the church ever does either. In November of 1985, Bob and Dolores marry in Maryland. Chosen because it is where her mother and family live, so they can meet Bob before the wedding. 34 years before, Maryland was where John List had married Helen, too, in a Lutheran church in Baltimore County. Dolores is not a foolish woman. She's a careful one, and she believes she has chosen well the second time. A steady Christian man who goes to church every Sunday and raises his voice

to no one. He is gentle. He is faithful in every way she can check. Nothing in the life he shows her, points back to Breeze Noel. However, Bob Clark has John List's same recurring problem, and it resurfaces. Bob and Dolores jointly own a modest, two-bedroom condo in Aurora, bought for about $27,000. It's the kind of small, sensible place to careful people by together. In the spring of 1986, five months after the wedding, Clark's company computerizes its books

and lets him go. One detail stands out. Around the time he leaves, his personnel file also disappears from the office. Only three people can reach these records, the company president, among them, and Clark is one of them, too. The man who once made John List vanish knows how to make a file vanish with ease. They live on Dolores' salary, and then on Dolores' savings. She tells a neighbor flatly that if Bob does not start bringing in money, she will leave him.

He says little and keeps using credit cards as a substitute for money he does not have. The Clarks give up on Colorado and try their luck elsewhere. Bob Clark answers an out-of-state ad for an accounting job with a Richmond Virginia firm. Early in 1988, he goes east ahead of Dolores

to get settled. This is the goodbye from the very end of the first episode. Dolores in the doorway,

watching her husband back the car down the driveway, sure she has married a gentle widow, named Bob. The widow or part was true, but just a fraction of the story. Bob finds a little brick ranch house in the suburbs of Midlothian, with a plaque beside the front door that reads, "Bless this house." 23 years, five murders and 2,000 miles, and the man has worked his way almost exactly back to where he began, only lower. The wreck of their Colorado

life follows them east. By the end of 1988, the condominium is foreclosed, and that December in a note tucked inside a Christmas card to an old neighbor, Dolores writes about it. The condo

It is the exact sequence of events that ran John List to ruin in Westfield in 1971. The name has

“changed, but the man has not. The people of Virginia see the same man Denver saw, and what Westfield”

New Jersey saw before that. An aging, fussy, humorless bookkeeper, and nothing more. He and Dolores make friends with a couple next door, and Bob does their taxes, and presses them to fly an American flag. He even provides the flag. A coworker notices only small, forgettable things. That Bob Clark seems older than the age he gives, a man of 62 working to pass for 56, that he can get strangely worked up over a dispute about paper towels, or a carpool he wants no part of. But nobody looks

at a man fussing over paper towels, and sees a mass murderer. There is no tell. Nothing in the

small irritations. That points back to the ballroom. But finally reached John List. Did not come from

the FBI. It came from a television set. By the late 1980s, the John List file is one of the oldest

“open murder cases in New Jersey. For some of the detectives who carry it, it has become personal.”

For him to be gone for that many years, and that he broke the justice. It was like a personal affront to the office, and to the Westfield Police Department. Investigators tried to put John List on television. They pitched the case to the TV series Unsolved Mysteries, which passes. They tried pitching to a brand new Fox program called America's Most Wanted, hosted by a man named John Walsh. Walsh's own young son Adam had been murdered,

and he had turned that grief into a nationwide hunt for fugitives. America's most wanted, passes too. The John List case is nearly 18 years old, older than almost anything the show would normally touch, and it carries the problem that has defeated investigators for nearly two decades

“as well. John Walsh would later explain the show's hesitation to American justice.”

I mean, that was a real stretch to think about doing a guy that nobody had a clue where he disappeared to, or even remotely what he looked like. No one knew what 18 years had done to his face. In 1989, the newest photographs of John List are from the 1960s, a tall man in his 40s in horn rimmed glasses. You cannot circulate a fugitive's picture when your newest picture is a quarter of a century old. One investigator will not let it go. A captain in the Union County Prosecutors

Office named Frank Maranka, learns that the executive producer of America's Most Wanted is set to speak at a law enforcement conference in Wilmington, Delaware, in January 1989. Maranka and Sergeant Jeffrey Hummel of the Homicide Unit pack 8 boxes of the List case into a car and drive down for something called the eastern armed robbery conference. They check into a hotel looking as one of them puts it, like a pair of delivery men, and corner the producer Michael Linder

after his speech. Hummel describes the pivotal moment to News 12, New Jersey. So I took him up to our hotel room and I laid the crime scene photos all across the beds. And he began to examine the crime scene photos and based on that he gave a ton of approval.

The producer never forgets the photographs of the murdered family, laid out across a hotel bed

spread. To run a man's story when they have no picture is a problem. The show needs a face. So they hire a sculpture. His name is Frank Bender, a forensic artist in Philadelphia, who builds faces out of clay. Frank would later explain his process on forensic files. I get into the head of the person in a sense. I want to become that person while I'm working on the fugitive. I want to feel like that person. I want to know everything about that person.

Bender has four weeks and no photograph worth using. What he does have is a profile. He brings it to a corrections psychologist named Richard Walter, an asks Walter and interesting hypothetical. What kind of a man would John List have become at 65? Walter traces the killer's anger down to its root. The perpetrator has a history of frustration and feeling entrapped by women. Generally women of their own age group are older or women in the authority. The psychologist

describes the interior life he believes belongs to John List, a man who killed out of retaliation

for nearly 20 years. From that profile and the old photographs, Bender builds the head.

“I had his mouth going down on the corners because of anxiety that I felt he carried with him”

from committing these crimes. Richard brought out that it wasn't guilt from killing his family, but the anxiety of the fear of being caught. He gives it the sagging jowls of a heavy man in his 60s, a receding hairline, gray hair, the pale skin of a man who has spent most of his life indoors. He reproduces the little details the Westfield New Jersey police filed does have to offer down to the surgical scar that ran from behind the right ear to the collar line and the way that ear

sat a little lower and closer to the skull than the other. He dresses the lower part of the bust

in a coat and tie that makes one last choice out of pure psychology. He gives the face a pair of eyeglasses with frames noticeably heavier than any John List has ever been known to wear, because the profile said this man would feel the intense need to look like an authority. When the police show the finished head to people who had actually known List in Westfield, they're amazed. It's him, the older version of him. On the night of Sunday, May 21st, 1989, America's most wanted

runs its segment on the accountant who murdered his family and then vanished. It runs about eight minutes in total, post John Walsh walks the country through the killings and the 18 years of silence, at the end of the John List story, they turn Frank Bender's clay head slowly in front of the camera,

“a gray man in heavy glasses and ask the oldest question in this case. Do you know this man?”

An estimated 22 million people watch the episode. Now tonight's first case,

the oldest we've ever pursued on America's most wanted. The suspect, John List, is accused of murdering his family 17 years ago. Robert P. Clark is one of the 22 million watching, a mild bookkeeper in mid-Lothian Virginia, who likes the show enough that he encourages his own neighbor to watch it as well. And it was strange, but I thought I wonder if they're ever going to show my situation and do a program on me. And I think it was within a month or two after that,

they did have the show on. I saw the tail end of it. I saw that it was about me and it saw the bust that they had. I was surprised at how accurate it was. It didn't realize that they had that technology.

“By his own account, the most wanted man in America sat in his living room in Virginia and watched”

a clay copy of his own face turns slowly on the screen staring at him, the original, admiring the workmanship. When the segment ends, the phones light up with hundreds of calls, people who are sure, and people who are guessing. People who have seen a gray man in heavy glasses at a gas station or a church supper. Most of it is the ordinary noise of a country just trying to help. The one call that matters comes from a woman who had seen the resemblance two years

earlier and let herself be talked out of it. Her name is Wanda Flannery, and she lived next door to the Clarkson Colorado. She and Dolores became close enough that the two women kept trading letters after the Clarks moved east. Two years before the broadcast, Wanda had been reading a supermarket tabloid the weekly world news. When she came across a story about an old New Jersey murder case, a man named John List had killed his entire family and disappeared. The story included a wanted photo

with it. Wanda looked at that photo and felt something inside her go cold because it looked to her like her neighbor Bob married to her friend. She carried the paper next door, set it on Dolores's kitchen table, put her finger on the face and set it out loud. That's Bob. Dolores looked from the flyer to a picture of her husband and shook her head. It does look like Bob, she said, but it's not him. Bob is much older. A few days later, Wanda asked Dolores what Bob had said

when she showed him the picture. Dolores hadn't shown him. She had thrown the paper away. The resemblance had been spotted, named and set down on a kitchen table in Colorado two full years before anyone acted on it. The idea is too big to believe, and Bob is the last man

turning slowly on the screen in its heavy glasses and the thought she set down two years ago comes

back with certainty. The man 22 million people are being asked to find had been living down the street

from her and she knows it. An author named Timothy Benford, who researched the list case for his book righteous carnage, later describes Wanda's wake-up call this way to American justice. It was a next-door neighbor, and when they did the report on the list-morties, she was convinced that that was Bob Clark, the neighbor who lived next door, who had just moved with his wife to Virginia. Wanda's daughter Eva and son-in-law Randall are with Wanda

“in the living room watching the show. Eva and Wanda later remember putting the pieces together”

in real time. And it just all started adding up gradually that he was an accountant and a

Lutheran and that he had a scar behind his ear and that he was well put together and a classy dresser. We said, "Oh my God, that's Bob." In Bob Clark. Wanda turns off the TV, retrieves the letter from Dolores' new street address and asks her son-in-law to make the call. She is afraid for Dolores. Her friend is still married to the man who so closely resembles the bust that was just spinning on her TV, still living in that little house in Virginia with the blessing on the door.

Randall calls the tipline once, asks whether there is a reward for information and hangs up in a

half. Wanda begs him to call again and simply give the team on the other end the address on

“the envelope from Dolores. The woman they suspect is now married to a family a nile leader.”

Not long after the broadcast ends, the tipline for America's most wanted takes one fateful call. A family in Colorado wants to report that the man depicted by the clay bust, the man who used to be John List is alive and well and living under the name Robert P. Clark and they have his home address in Virginia. That's next time on MK confidential. It is Thursday June 1, 1989. Three men walk into a small suite of accounting offices in

Richmond, Virginia, two of the officers right off the elevator and one up the stairs. The receptionist, Sandra Silberman, takes note, walkins do not usually arrive in threes. She hangs up the phone. One of the men flashes an FBI badge. They are here to speak with Robert Clark. The bookkeeper who comes out to meet them is 63, balding, bespectacle, and entirely unalarmed. The man carries himself according to one of the FBI men

like a school teacher, waiting for a student to explain himself. Special agent Kevin August starts to question him gently. He asks the man's name. Robert Clark. He asks Clark whether he has a scar behind his ear, though August can plainly see that he does, and the man turns his head slightly to show it. He asks whether Clark has had an operation for a hernia was born in Michigan and works as an

accountant. Clark answers all three in the affirmative. There's a pause and then August asks the question that he has been waiting nearly 18 years for someone to ask out loud. Are you John Emil List? No. Clark answers without hesitation and without emotion. August will think about that afterward that an innocent man would have said, "Who in the hell is John Emil List?" The agent's pat Clark down. He puts his arms out and leans against the wall without a word of

objection. And when it is finished, August tries once more. I approached him and I asked him, I said, "Are you Mr. Clark?" And he said, "Yes." And then I said, "Are you John List?" And he says, "No, I'm Robert P. Clark." Reporter's would later put the man's exact words as "I know who I am. I'm Robert Clark." Clark seems to force a little indignation into his voice when he says it. Across the room, the receptionist looks away because Bob Clark is giving her the

mournful look of a man who believes he has been betrayed. She notices red blotches breaking out

“across his face. The blotches are the only thing about him that reveal his panic. I'm Megan Kelly”

and this is MK Confidential. The agents take Robert Clark to the Henrico County jail and

A Prince matched the one's John List left on his application for a New Jersey Firearms

“permit in Westfield on October 16, 1971, 24 days before he shot and killed his entire family.”

The mastodectomy scar behind his right ear matches the hernious scars match. Every physical marker on the FBI flyer that has been in circulation for nearly 18 years matches the man before them. And Clark still says, "No." He just absolutely delighted. It's not me. I don't know what you're talking about. Even after he was confronted with the fact that his fingerprints were a match. He still was like, "It's not me, my name is Robert P. Clark."

In Brandermell, a housing development set back among Oak and Pine outside Richmond, Virginia, a woman is learning exactly who she married. Dolores Clark tries to see her husband in custody on the afternoon of his arrest and is turned away. She comes back at noon the next day with the

“pastor of their Lutheran Church, the Reverend Joseph Vote. And this time they are allowed inside.”

Bob is being held in the isolation wing behind the frosted glass instead of bars. The minister is allowed into his cell. Dolores has to stand at the glass and speak to her husband through a telephone. She can hear that he is crying. Vote tells reporters outside that the prisoner looks shaken and has not slept. Then the pastor says something curious. There seems to be some relief about the man inside. He says, "Whether that is reflective of the fact that John

list no longer has to put up a front, he cannot say for sure." Dolores gives the press one written statement and says it will be her last word on the matter. A family friend named Wally Parsons

suggests they take it to the Richmond News leader first to get ahead of the out of town press.

And when he speaks to the reporter he adds an assurance of his own. You can be a hundred percent absolutely sure that this lady knows absolutely nothing about anything in Bob's past. In the statement Dolores writes, quote, "This is not the man I know. The man I know is kind, loving, a devoted husband and dear friend." She describes Bob as a man of faith and then at the end she writes, quote, "I find this hard to believe. I hope somehow this is not true and if it is,

he was so stressed out that something snapped. I am devoted to him. I hope that somehow God will see us through this." Dolores does not attend her husband's trial and no reporter ever catches

her visiting him in prison. She has married a widower in 1985 and never once asked to see a photograph

of his first wife. He fights extradition to New Jersey from a Virginia cell as Robert Clark and loses. At the end of June he is flown to Newark where one investigator remembers every news

“outlet in the world waiting on the tarmac to watch. Or was he extremely high profile arrest?”

And transportation. Killing off the blame was all scary. As every news media in the world must have been at Newark Airport. Robert P. Clark never surrenders. He simply stops existing. In a flurry of pretrial motions that could only be filed on behalf of the other man, John List, and nobody mentions Bob Clark again. He lets the name and the invented life behind it, slip away as unceremoniously as it began. On a form in a Denver Social Security office nearly

two decades before. On the evening of November 7, 1989, two days before the 18th anniversary of the murders, John List is brought into a reception room at the Union County Jail to meet the only relatives he has left. Gene Ciphered. Gene spelled with a J like Blue Gene's. Is Helen's

sister. John's sister in law. This is the first time John and Gene have seen each other since John's

shot his then-wife Helen in the face in 1971. Gene and her husband, also Gene, though his as with a G, have flown in from Oklahoma at the invitation of Elijah Miller, the assistant public defender assigned to represent List. Since the day of his arrest, Gene the sister has been determined to look John List in the face and put to him one word. Why? She does not sleep the night before. At the courthouse, she asks her husband what happens if she sees John and passes out,

her spouse promises to pick her up off the floor. John comes in at around 7 and crosses the room in the same bouncy awkward walk Gene remembers. 18 years later, she recognizes him instantly.

in front of someone. He is holding a small stack of papers and does not know what to do with them.

“So he sets them on the table and stares at the floor. She says, "How are you John?"”

He nods stiffly. And then Gene Ciphered does something that surprises her as much as it surprises him. She steps forward and hugs the man who murdered her sister. John puts his arms around her and lays his head on her shoulder. And when he lifts it, the top of her blouse is wet. Then he sees her husband and looks mortified. The husband reaches out and the two men shake hands without a word. Then the husband, too, hugs John. That his wife will later say gives John

the shock of his life. Again, he cries. They talk for more than three hours in a small,

windowless room on the third floor. The kind where inmates meet their lawyers with John's

lawyer Elijah Miller sitting in. But it's not a reunion. The Ciphered's believe in mercy but

“they also believe in accountability and Helen's sister has waited 18 years to ask her question.”

Why, John? He looks at her without any emotion at all because there was no other way. It is exactly what he wrote to her in 1971, word for word. Gene pushes, "Why was there no other way? Why are they meeting in a criminal court instead of a divorce court for God's sake?" It just had to be that way. He tells her. The subject has been closed since 1971, and John list is not reopening it for her. The brother-in-law has memorized a list of questions and

he is not gentle with them. But John does not want to discuss the crime and John has always

known how to control a conversation. So the sister tries to provoke one, with a question that has haunted Westfield for 18 years. She had found a small bag of marijuana when she cleaned out

“their eldest daughter Patty's room. And she asks John, did he know about Patty and the drugs?”

John seems genuinely surprised. No, he says there were no drugs. Gene tells him she thinks he's wrong and he doesn't argue. Gene asks about the witchcraft, the wija boards, the whispers that followed Patty through the last autumn. John says he has never known anything about it, and he's not particularly interested. Late in the conversation once the hard questions have run out, and the tension in the small room has eased some. John list asks the ciphers about Brenda.

Brenda Taylor is his dead wife's daughter from her first marriage. The stepchild, John helped raise from the age of nine. The one child of Helen's, he did not kill. And only because she had grown up and married and moved out years before he ever bought their dream home on the hill. Breeze Noll. He is told, he has step, great grandchildren now, which apparently makes him happy.

Gene's ciphers flies home to Oklahoma with nothing. She has never once believed he wasn't

sane, not for a minute, which leaves her with the same question she came to Richmond with, and the same unsatisfactory answer. What Brenda, John's stepchild, makes of John's capture is not on the public record. She has said almost nothing since 1971. That fall, the FBI asks to attach her name to a public appeal meant to flush out her stepfather. A daughter's plea that reads, "Daddy, you're all I have left. Please call me. It is bait. It's not clear whether Brenda

explicitly agrees but the FBI does put out the statement. The last thing Brenda wants is for John List to answer. By her friends account, Brenda is petrified. Certain she is the only one of the family left and that, he will come to kill her and her five children. And for a long time, the FBI may suspect it too because they watch her house. The trial of John List opens in Union County Superior Court on Monday, April 2, 1990. reporters lineup for hours in advance. The trial is

moved to a larger courtroom and it is still not big enough. List does not dispute that he killed his family but pleads not guilty by reason of mental defect. His defense attorney, Elijah Miller, contends that his client was gripped by a religious obsession which led him to believe he was saving his family by taking their lives. Miller hammers the religion angle telling the jury his client was so locked into his own religion that once the plan was in his head to spare his family

from his own failures or from what he perceived as their alleged hedonism, he could not step out

his heart. The prosecutor is an assistant Union County DA named Brian Gillett who, as he tells it,

“is the only person in the office who did not ask for this case. He opens his case by reading”

aloud John List's five-page letter to his pastor, the one sealed in a locked drawer of the file cabinet beside John's desk next to the two fired handguns, the murder weapons. One reporter describes Gillett's tone is cold, with traces of mockery. When Gillett reaches the line where List asks the pastor to pray for him, "Whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it," Gillett stops and looks along the jury box. Today he tells them the government

intends to do its duty. The letter is the whole prosecution. Every element the state has to prove that the killings were willful, deliberate and premeditated, is signed and dated in the defendant's own hand. The forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen Simring, spends four hours with List in a jail cell with a video camera rolling, and finds a man who was unfailingly pleasant about the whole affair. Years later, he describes the conversation to American justice. He was mild-mannered,

courteous, soft-spoken, very precise and very exact. He also expressed no remorse and only superficial regret. He said, essentially, something that had to happen, it was unfortunate. Simring walks the jury through what List told him hour by hour, and the courtroom listens in absolute silence. He says, "List did not feel guilt or sadness at the loss of his family, nor did John kill his family out of concern for the fate of their souls. The psychiatrist

says that List shifts explanations depending on his needs, and at that moment what John List needed was an acquittal." He did not have a major medialness. There was no psychiatric, legal excuse either to excuse or to mitigate. Simring tells the jury John List believed suicide would land him in hell, so he spared himself and sent his family to heaven. Simring concludes on the stand, quote, "He wanted grace in the hereafter, but he didn't want arrest yet. There's

“religious belief and there's religious hypocrisy. I think there's a fair amount of hypocrisy here."”

The assistant prosecutor, Eleanor Clark, tells the jury, "No man could use religion to justify this carnage." Well, I think, no matter how religious you are, you realize that there's a little problem with this. I found this horrific. For my tone of voice in the nature of my questions, I tried to communicate this to the jurors. Elijah Miller calls a procession of Lutheran clergyman who had known John List across four decades in Talamazoo, in Rochester, in Westfield.

He needs them to tell the jury that this was a devout man whose religious fervor swallowed him whole. Instead, one after another, the clergy who taught John List his faith, take the stand and dismantle John List's theology. Pastor Lewis Grother led the lists in his Kalamazoo congregation in the late '50s. Prosecutor Clark asks him whether the Lutheran church would frown on a man who killed his daughter to save her soul. The Lutheran Church and the

scriptures, the pastor says, would frown upon anybody deliberately killing anybody. Defense Attorney Miller calls the Reverend Edward Zarreski. The family's minister outside Rochester from the years John worked at Xerox. He paints John as a bitter failure whose theology

would never support murder. He recalls that John struggled at work telling the court that Helen

once said if John were half the man her former husband was, they wouldn't have the troubles they were having. The jury is starting to learn about John's simmering resentments. Then Miller asks about John's religion and Reverend Zarreski says that John's fundamentalist theology is fundamentally flawed. Sin is still sin, he tells the court. Grace is available for the sinner, but sin is never justified and Christians know that. He testifies that quote,

“John's problem was that he knew doctrine but he did not know faith. I think John did not trust”

God and quote. John list could answer Catechism questions at 15 without a stumble. He taught Sunday school. He kept the books at three different churches in different parts of the country. What he could not do across 50 years was hand a single problem to God and leave it there.

Not the job, not the mortgage, his wife's illness, his daughter's future. He did what he always

He decided when his children's souls were safe and closed their earthly accounts on a date of his own

choosing. The last of the clergyman is the Reverend Alfred Shipes who served as chaplain to John's youth group at the University of Michigan. He describes John as faithful and of good character, defense attorney Miller asks him about sin. Thou shalt not kill the minister answers,

“taking a life is certainly wrong. Uncross examination the prosecution asks Shipes,”

whether there is a greatest sin, a sin above others. And an courtroom where a man is on trial for murdering his family allegedly because he could not bear the shame of their lowered station or their dissent into perceived debauchery. The minister thinks about it for a few seconds and then quotes CS Lewis. "Pride" he says. "Pride is the greatest sin." On April 12, 1990, after seven days of testimony, the jury of nine men and three women steps out of the courtroom

to decide John lists fate. Everyone expects the verdict to be quick. Reporters have a bedding pool going, some predict it will take less than 60 minutes, but that's not what happens. There is a holdout on the jury. A lone person who still is not convinced about John lists state of mind. The jurors send the judge a note asking him to define willful, premeditated and deliberate. Then another note, and another, then they ask for two packs of cigarettes. The jury

deliberates for six hours the first day and then goes home to sleep on it. Could this one holdout

really deadlock the case? Could the man who signed and dated a five-page detailed confession

“and tucked it in a drawer next to the murder weapons? Actually go free on a hung jury?”

By lunch the next day, the jury has reached a verdict. What turns the holdout the form entails reporters afterward is a single line in John lists letter. The line where list explains that he had originally planned the murders for November 1st, all Saints Day, because he thought it an appropriate day for his family to get the heaven. Then that travel arrangements delayed him. A man who reschedules is a man who deliberated. The jury declares him

guilty on five counts of murder in the first degree. John lists here as it's stone-faced,

staring straight ahead, motionless. Because New Jersey had no death penalty on its books in 1971, the sentence is "capped" at life without parole. The irony of course is that John

“list did not actually spend his life in prison. He has gotten away with his crimes for 18 years”

of freedom. On May 1st, 1990, Superior Court Judge William Ortheimer hands down the maximum punishment available to him. He will later reread his sentencing statement aloud for the New Jersey Media Podcast covering the list case, "Father wants us dead." His act stand is a permanent pathetic and profane example of the potential demands in humanity to man. They will not be soon or easily forgotten, and the name of John ain't the list will be eternally synonymous with concepts

of selfishness, horror, and evil. Judge Ortheimer calls list a man without honor. He tells the court room that after 18 years, five months and 22 days, it is time for the voices of Helen, Alma, Patricia, Frederick, and John Jr. to speak from the grave. But I thought it was appropriate that each of the victims had their own sentence. I'm ran consecutively, so he wasn't going to get out. Five consecutive life terms, one after the other, and one for each member of the family,

so that justice for one victim is not folded into justice for anyone else. List is offered the chance to speak. He stands, and takes it. "I mean, truly, sorry for the tragedy that happened in 1971. I feel that due to my mental state at the time, I was unaccountable for what happened." Truly sorry for the tragedy that happened. Passive voice. Not for what he did. Just for what happened, as though he bore no responsibility.

He goes into New Jersey State Prison in Trenton at 64, and he is by every account, a nearly model inmate. He works in the print shop keeping track of all the forms. He reads his Bible and holds a Lutheran service in his cell on Sundays. Place chess. He writes letters. His friends describe as journal entries, logging, what time he woke up, what time he napped, and what he watched on television. His closest friend in confinement is George Corbett. 42 years younger locked up

that never lets up. List gets angry if anyone touches his pencils. He rations his commissary

“olives to two a day, so they last. He becomes petty and short-tempered. A man who is scheduled”

his whole day down to the minute and cannot stand it when the world falls out of step. This prison friend, Corbett remembers lists, outsized reactions. "If the door didn't open up right away, if it took too long to you with scream out, because normally you would open, you know, right on kills, and then if he had to say the second time he would get a very agitated and he opened 12 you faster." He continues trying to manage his own story. List sits for a television

interview with Connie Chun and another with Annie. He publishes a memoir with a co-author, a rambling, self-justifying, and remarkably self-pitting book. Throughout all of it, he says the same things. The things he thinks mitigate his crimes that he loved his family, that he did it to save

their souls that God has forgiven him. Never does he use the word murder. Journalist Bill Curtis

“asks John List how he thinks it all ends. John is untrubbled. "I think John, I will call it a heaven.”

I don't know what situation will be in heaven will there. They will remember what I did to them. Certainly, before all in heaven, I'm sure we would forgive each other for whatever harm we had done to each other here." 37 years on, John List is still playing God. John Walsh, who put the clay bust of John List on television and ended in 18-year manhunt, gives another take on John List's year after. "Oh, he's not going to heaven. I know,

well, I know for sure that this man is not going to heaven. He's going straight to hell. Right where his ass belongs." Bernard Tracy, the young Westfield detective who inherited the case file, and lived it for 11 years, the crime scene photographs the autopsy reports.

“Every last detail of what List did to his family later becomes the chief of police.”

He of all people might wish the worst to John List. Instead, some grace. "It's a terrible thing with John List. But can we be forgiven for even those sins I also? And John List can go to heaven. And I hope he does." The case outflows the man in stature almost immediately. In 1987, two years before anyone knows where John List is, a film reaches theaters called The Stepfather, about a mild murderous family man who kills a household and reinvent himself

under a new name. Six years later in 1993, CBS makes the story directly, a television movie called Judgement Day, the John List story, with Robert Blake as the lead. "I've done what I was told to

do always, but evil still surrounds me. It lives in the very heart of this house and nothing I say

nothing I do kills it. I've done what she told me to do. And I'm losing everything." Nearly 10 years later, Robert Blake would be arrested for the murder of his own wife. John List continues to try for his freedom, not by escaping prison, but by the book, through the courts. He appeals his conviction in 1993, deputy and assistant deputy public defenders Joan Van Pelt and Michael Blake, contested the warrantless search on December 7, 1971,

the night the Westfield police found the list family on the ballroom floor. John's initial public defender, Elijah Miller, tries to exclude all evidence the police department picked up in the search, and thus, much of the case against List. Judge Wartheimer shoots that down, writing that list has abandoned the home and everything in it. And that in any event the discovery of five bodies and a handwritten note in a house with the light burning out was inevitable,

if not by a concerned friend or neighbor, then eventually by police. John List's appellate team argues that Judge Wartheimer was wrong, and that Miller's failure to suppress the evidence means he did not provide list with a proper defense. Blake and Van Pelt also throw a Hail Mary Pass of sorts, arguing that John List's confession letter to his pastor left in a Manila folder a top his desk at Breeze Noll for anyone to see is a private conversation

and should be protected under both the first and fifth amendments. Finally, they call Judge Wartheimer's consecutive five life sentences, quote, "accessive." A panel of three judges easily upholds the conviction, they address some of the appeals claims in detail and dismiss the rest as, quote, "clearly

"PTSD." He asks the court for another bite at the apple for the chance to argue to a new jury

“that he murdered his family due to post-traumatic stress from his service in World War II.”

The court rejects the petition, the state of New Jersey has heard quite enough from John List. List eventually takes his PTSD case public. In 2006, he publishes the memoir "Collateral Damage" with the help of author, Austin Goodrich. John claims that he saw 41 days of combat in World War II and remembers none of it. He cites PTSD from this experience as the root cause of his life's biggest problems, his inability to hold a job, his difficulty parenting, his children,

and his decision to slaughter his own family in the name of saving them. List introduces

his story as a tale of woe for undiagnosed and untreated post-traumatic stress disorder. He dedicates the book to his parents and to, quote, "All family members made victims by my sinful actions."

“In his memoir, List writes that his second wife Dolores visits him in prison.”

She briefly moved to Baltimore after his arrest to evade reporters and tourists looking to gander at the killer's ordinary home, living in plain sight. In 1995, List writes to a friend from prison and refers to Dolores as his bride. However, according to the team of reporters from the father once as dead podcast, the memoir's co-author Goodrich notes that Dolores quietly divorced the man she knew as Bob Clark. She sold the house in the Brandermille neighborhood

outside of Richmond and retreated from the public eye. In prison, List slowly falls apart. Diabetes, then a heart rhythm problem, high blood pressure, trouble swallowing, cataracts, he asks to be moved to the medical wing. In March 2008, he has taken to a hospital in

“Trenton and dies there on March 21st at 82 of complications from pneumonia. It is Good Friday.”

There is no family to call, no one to grieve him. John List's body lies in the Mercer County Morg, unclaimed. Under New Jersey law, the body eventually must be handed over to the New Jersey Department of Corrections and either cremated or buried cremated by default. Authorities have not publicly confirmed what became of John List's body, likely at least in part, to dissuade would be copycats and admirers from making pilgrimage.

By the time List dies, there is no one else who wants anything to do with him. With the killer captured, convicted, and now dead, the city of Westfield, New Jersey could leave the legend of John List behind. But it does not. Though the original mansion where the lists lived and most died, burned due to suspected arson in 1972, the new colonial home in its place is locally known as the List House.

The street itself, formally, Hillside Avenue, has been renamed Breeze Noll Drive, and the original lot has been subdivided into private residences along a cul-de-sac to break up the appeal to crime tourists. Families live along the street now, and this year it is the third most expensive street in town. But John List was not the last source of horrors for Westfield. In 2014, another dark forest

descends on the town known as The Watcher. Anonymous letters arrive at the lovely home, threatening the family who has just purchased it with eerie details about the house, and about the children, signed only as The Watcher. The family panics, and the letters

eventually stop, but their author is never found. Netflix produces a series in 2022 by the same name,

starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Conavali. Westfield, it seems, will not be allowed to forget there is evil in the world. John List, the man, will soon be forgotten. His crime will not be, because family annihilators raise a particularly unsettling fear in the American psyche. Chris Watts, Alec Murdock, John List. How does one know if there's a psychopath in one's midst, or a person who is not who they say they are? We all think we'd know. We would not be fooled.

Would we? Next week, a pair of assassins terrorized the nation's capital region for 23 days, no one is safe as two snipers go on a killing spree. I'm Megan Kelly. This is MK confidential.