The Annihilator: A Most Forgettable Man — Ep. 1 | MK Confidential

And it's been a very long time. I'm a very close friend who has been working with me for several years.

“We are a family member and my friend was the one who said, "Look, there are some portal.”

I don't need to worry about it. I'm a friend of mine. I'm a family member. I have a family member and I have a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel, a hotel. The last week in the summer, I have a chance to buy the chance to buy the kids. I'm going to buy the kids. I'm going to buy the kids. I'm going to buy the kids. I'm going to buy the kids.

“I'm going to buy the kids. I'm going to buy the kids. I'm going to buy the kids. I'm going to buy the kids.”

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

Turns his car 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-ly 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 Noel."

“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 bulbs die.”

He has knocked on the front door and got no answer. He has run 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 to promise he once 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."

Patricia 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 he 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, an officer named George Zalesnik, 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 notice 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, piped 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. 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 eight 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, pass the two curving staircases to a heavy drape, hold across the entrance to the ballroom. It is the last neck shines his flashlight through the gap in the drapes. The beam settles on a child's face. 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" printed on the lining.

Ed, Eliano 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.

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There 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.

Officers Alessnik cannot shake the sound of it. The unnerving part of the whole situation was that there was music playing in the house and it was a very classical serene, almost like he was here if you went to funeral 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.

An orchestral piece from Wagner's Twilight of the Gods. Somebody finally locates the radio in a hall closet and shuts it off.

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.

Whatever did this killed five people, then tidied up. Charlie Haller is one of the first Westfield officers into Bree's Null. Twenty 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'd 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 List. For a few hours that leaves an obvious question, is John List a sixth victim taken somewhere else? The answers know. 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 handguns that have been fired. Besides them, a long letter. John List 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 List 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 Iliano finally climbs into that house, John List 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 List. 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 Cubsgap 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-fearing 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, self-spoken, a gentleman, the kind of person you would not mind having as a next to a neighbor, and this the whole family was like that. They work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite, but what if you are looking to lose weight but are not interested in weekly injections and you don't know whether you can commit an expensive all the things, especially when you hear about some of the side effects.

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“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. It is described as a quiet soft spoken man that kind of wears a shirt and tie to mold a law. A neighbor who watched him run cubscaught events remembered him barking orders and in the neighbor's words marching the children in like little pressure soldiers. A tinhorn tyrant the man called him then in the next breath the same neighbor said that in every other way John list 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.

“Years later when his face went out on a wanted flyer and turned up in the papers people had gone to high school with John list 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 list. 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 widow 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 as 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.

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, a way beyond her years. That 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. Frederick, Fred, is 13, the baby. He is the gentle one, cherub 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 whispering a theater script at night, and two brothers who worry 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 polybearers, 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.

“Hundreds more stand outside in the cold listening to the service on loudspeakers.”

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 receives 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.

And 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 Moranka tell Bill Curtis, they never forgot it.”

We would go on vacation and periodically, we would send a postcard back to the homicide squad. While on vacation saying having a wonderful time wish you were here and sign it John List, so it was kind of a joke in the office.

Has a blunt answer for why the accountant was never caught by the people whose job it was to catch him.

He was born 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 Westfield, 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 church going, 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 in the mid-80s and she loves him. She knows Bob as a quiet religious widow who lost his first 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, a good character."

She kisses him goodbye and watches him back the forward down the driveway, off to set up their new life out east. She has no idea who is behind that wheel. The gentle church going 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.