The Annihilator: The Reckoning — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential

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 3's. 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, "Oh, you missed a clock," and he said, "Yes." And I said, "Are you John List?" And he says, "No, I'm Robert P. Clark." Reporters 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.”

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Clark's fingerprints promptly end the mystery. The prints match 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 scar's 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

And this time they are allowed inside.

“Bob is being held in the isolation wing behind the frosted glass instead of bars”

and 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 widow 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?”

Coming off the plane was also scary because 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 Syfort, Gene spelled with a J like Blue Jeans, 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 is with a G, have flown in from Oklahoma at the invitation of Elijah Miller, the assistant public defender assigned to represent the 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.

He teen years later, she recognizes him instantly, a slightly lopsided face, now heavy with jowls, the odd way he tilts his head when he stands 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 Syfort 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.

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.

She tells him she thinks he's wrong, and he doesn't argue. Gene asks about the witchcraft, the Ouija 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, for his null. 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 friend's 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 line up 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 of it.

That's the defense. Not that he didn't do it, but that list killed with love and mercy in 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 lists 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 as 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

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 hear after, but he didn't want arrest yet.

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That's promo code Kelly at TakeLean.com. The assistant prosecutor, Eleanor Clark, tells the jury "no man could use religion to justify this carnage."

“Well, I think you may not really just realize that there's a little problem on this.”

I found this horrific add to my tone of voice in the nature of my questions I try to communicate this to the jurors. Elijah Miller calls a procession of Lutheran clergyman who had known John List across four decades in Kalamazoo, 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. After 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.

John 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. And 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 did with figures he didn't like.

He anointed himself as God.

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 in a 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 descent into perceived debauchery.

The minister thinks about it for a few seconds and then quotes C.S. 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. 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. Turns the holdout the foreman tells 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 list hears it 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 of man's inhumanity 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 courtroom 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 was 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 uncomfortable 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. "Chess," he writes letters, his friends described 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 for murdering

Corbett remembers a dry sense of humor and an obsessiveness 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 hear what scream out, because normally it would open, you know, right on kills. And then if he had to say the second time he would get a very agitated, you know, open 12, you bastard. He continues trying to manage his own story.

List sits for a television interview with Connie Chung and another with Annie. He publishes a memoir with a co-author, a rambling, self-justifying, and remarkably self-pidying 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 God, 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 or give each other for whatever harm we had done to each other here. Every seven 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 have it. I know. Well, I know for sure that this man is not going to have it. He's going straight to hell. Right where his ask belongs."

Bernard Tracy, a 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 outgrows 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 Pelton and Michael Blake, contest 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 lights 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 the proper defense. Blake and Van Pelton 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." The panel of three judges easily upholds the conviction, they address some of the appeals claims in detail and dismiss the rest as, quote, "clearly, without merit."

Two years later, List tries one more angle, 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 2. 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 2 and remembers none of it. He cite PTSD from this experience as the root cause of his life's biggest problems is inability to hold a job, is 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 wants us dead podcast," the memoir's co-author, Goodrich, notes that Dolores quietly divorce the man she knew

as Bob Clark. She sold the house in the bender mill 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 21. 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 morgue, 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, formerly, Hellside 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. Finally is 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 Darkforce 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 Carnivali. 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, raised a particularly unsettling fear in the American psyche.

Chris Watts, Alec Murdock, John List. How does one know if there is 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.