In the third week of November 1971, a tall, bespecticaled man in a coat and t...
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
accountants 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 airports 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
his social security office in the middle of Colorado.
He is balding, big-yared, 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 at 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 Emilist is dead to the world. Bruce later, John would describe the shift in his mindset. 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.
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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, a man who wants to sat in a bank-based president's office, but an accountant has a name and a history 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.
“His key 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 is coat and tie. There is a small, terrible coincidence folded into those years. Every so often a family from back east drives out to Skien, 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 Bre 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 along and do what has to be done, I guess, to 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, "survive" 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 a burden, 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.
back? Would they be next?
“At Redeemer Lutheran, where John List taught Sunday school and Patty sang in the choir,”
"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, when ever the door opens during service, church goes eyes dart to see who it is. Breeze Null 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. The lawn is going to seed, and the lights are finally dark. Some
break into the murder house, 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 downhillside 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 repeatedly 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 has ever charged, and the cause is never officially
determined. The empty lot becomes a 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 down Hillside Avenue to stand in front of 431 and dare one another to peer into the dark. It was a real life horror 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, Louis 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. A hijackers 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, lists 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.
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 the 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. The polite, dependable man
who never misses a Sunday. He volunteers to drive an elderly 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 and 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
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building a second family. Her name is Dolores Miller. She is Slender and softspoken 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 Lest 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 Lest's same recurring problem, and it resurfaces.
Bob and Dolores jointly owned a modest two-bedroom condo in Aurora, bought fo...
It's the kind of small, sensible place to careful people buy 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 Lest 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 car to an old neighbor, Dolores writes about it. The condo has been a big problem, and we don't know how to handle it. It is going to rob us of
“everything we own. 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 the 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.
What 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, was like a personal or front 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 Unsolve 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 Rim to 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 Prosecutor's 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.
Homicide Unit pack eight 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 the 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 Lest have become at 65? Walter traces the killer's anger down to its root. The perpetrator has a history of frustration and feeling in trapped 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 Lest, a man who killed out of retaliation and anger over his own failures, got away with it and has been living with
the threat of exposure 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 and 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, then makes one last choice out of pure psychology. He gives the face a pair of eyeglasses with frames noticeably heavier than any John Lest
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 knownlist 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 Lest 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 Lest, is accused of murdering his family 17 years ago. Robert P. Clark is one of the 22 million watching, a mild bookkeeper in Midlothian, Virginia, who likes the show enough that he encourages his own neighbor to watch it as well. And it was strange, but 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 was about me and saw the bus 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 ...
watched a clay copy of his own face turned 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 Flanary and she lived next door to the Clarks in 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 super market
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 anyone wanted to accuse. Now, Wanda's watching America's most wanted. She sees the gray head
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 called this way to American justice. It was a next-door neighbor, and when they did the report on the list murders, 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 in a classy dresser. We said, "Oh my God, that's Bob Clark." Wanda turns off the TV, retrieves a 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.
