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.
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It is not yet dawn and John List 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 problems. 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 List ran that day, and from the flat careful account List 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 brought 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 List 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 milk
man who, by long habit, lets 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 milkman reads it and drives off. At the window of his office, John watches quietly until 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 styre 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 cult revolver that had belonged
to his father, it too, is loaded and ready. John crosses the hall, approaches 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 did me a kiss, right?”
And she said, "Well, it was that noise." At that point, I felt like a Judas having no kiss for two, and I said, "Oh, it must have been some noise out in the back." And then she got to the doorway, I tell her. In his account, she gets as far as the doorway, and 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”
shell case, you know, and some of her holes, teeth, that got broken and were out on both 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. It 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 you had shot your wife and cold blood. That's already. How could you? I was hungry. Miss...
Just the way it was.
By his own account, once the first shot was fired, there was never a moment h...
stopping. Will you determine to kill them?
“Once I'm raised a plan, yeah, then it's just like DJ, you're going, you're...”
There's no stopping until 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 incumbent upon me to kill all the children, and 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 bare 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 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 held 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. Twenty minutes, exactly. In the safe deposit box are the last of Alma's savings. From in 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.
After 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, once 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. He sees the gun come up, and he moves.
The first bullet aimed at the boy's head, 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. That was the one thing I was trying to prevent, was there really a 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 on 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.
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Aquatru even comes with a 30 day best tasting water guarantee that's Aquatru.com, AQU A, TRU.com, promo code MKC. Now John List creates the scene the police will find for a week's later. He brings the family's forest-green sleeping bags up from the basement. The boy scout bags with "Be Prepared," printed along the lining.
The one's 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, the four bodies appear to lie in the shape of a cross. When John List kneels down beside them and praise over his family, each one of them by name. In the evening, he writes out the "Why."
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 complex 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 addition of 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," too.
than I thought they could and should endure," and quote.
“Reason 3, 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 quote.
And finally, reason number 4, 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 did to my family would have
been a tremendous shock to her at this age. Therefore knowing that 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, "Turcely, 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 emotion. 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 shut 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 autopsies, 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 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 wreck 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, we were out feeling and fighting, and then we come in and have something to eat.
“That's what allowed me to eat peacefully in the room that I had filled my family.”
Then he goes down to the billiard 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 this 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 they might back off if they've heard music and thought that people were in the house, that was another reason.
“I left all the lights on, I believe, make it look like there were people there."”
Then John lists walks out the back door into a cold drizzle, slides into the family's olden Paula, and drives away from Breeze Null for the last time. He drives down through the empty business district, passed a dark movie marquee, and points the card toward New York. He crosses the bridge's out-to-canity airport, and ditches the Impala in long-term parking,
a non-descript card tucked into a crowded row. On the front seat, he sets a small neat pile, his Michigan alumni card and his accountance license, the last tidy paperwork of a man named John List, and 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, Breeze 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, and he stays gone for nearly 18 years. John List's 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 five-page confession that names the killer. What they do not have is the killer himself. The police noticed 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, its expired inspection sticker catching his eye. He runs the play 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 then 200 million people who slipped away before anyone even knew to start looking.
It is a rare and staggering crime.
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 List's 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 run down, each one, turns out to be someone else. Within weeks, the trail goes cold. John List who 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 List spends as a new man, or at least under a new name. A quiet church-going accountant, a new wife, who has no idea, whom she is married
to, and a sculptor, who will one day give authorities the face of a vanished man they are desperate to find. John List gets away with murder until a TV show changes everything.
