Mass Murderer, Overextended Homeowner
(“The List Murders,” Forensic Files)
Pictures of Breeze Knoll frighten me not only because John List murdered his family there in 1971 but also because, well, think of the electric bill.
I’d hate to see the heating tab for the 19-room mansion that occupied 431 Hillside Avenue in Westfield, New Jersey. Factor in regular maintenance like painting plus the HVAC crises liable to befall a Victorian-era structure, and you’re asking for some none-too-stately financial drama.
According to a letter List left in the house along with the five bodies, he turned to homicide in part to prevent the embarrassment that losing the home would cause his family.
Way roomy. This week’s post will take a look at how List’s predicament compares with the kind of woe that affects homeowners in the new millennium — and particularly after the subprime mortgage crisis.
First, a recap of the Forensic Files episode “The List Murders” with some additional research from the internet.
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
Target
Walmart
Indie Bound
John and Helen List, both 46, lived with their three teenage children and John’s mother, Alma, in a cavernous home in the affluent Union County town.
The family attended the Redeemer Lutheran Church, where John taught Sunday school.
Too much drama. Although Helen reportedly suffered from the effects of syphilis contracted from her previous husband, the family appeared stable and high-functioning to their friends and neighbors.
What no one knew was that John, an accountant, had trouble holding onto a job. At the time of the murder, John was unemployed. He left the house every morning, pretending to go to work when he was really whiling away time reading or sleeping in the train station.
There were more problems. John felt that his popular, socially active teenagers were neglecting their spiritual needs. It especially bothered him that his eldest, 16-year-old Patricia, was interested in becoming an actress. He thought it improper in the eyes of God.
He worried that she and the rest of the family wouldn’t get into heaven.
Undiscovered jackpot? His anxiety grew with his inability to keep up with mortgage payments and other bills. He was behind by $11,000 on the house and had been secretly dipping into his mother’s accounts.
The family had bought the house for around $50,000 in 1965. It meant living above their means, and List eventually had to take out a second mortgage.
By 1971, List seemed poised for a total financial collapse and didn’t want his wife and kids to bear the shame of going on public assistance.
A couple of sources claim that the ornate house contained a skylight made of Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass valuable enough to bail List out of his financial problems. But in a pre-Antiques Roadshow world, he didn’t think to get an appraisal and try to sell the glass — if it really existed, that is.
Redefining eerie. By killing his family, he hoped to spare them shame, save their souls, and guarantee they could all spend the afterlife together. He chose not to commit suicide because he considered it a sin.
How do we know all this?
List’s five-page letter, addressed to his pastor, explained everything, including the way he murdered his family.
He waited until his wife and children arrived home one by one, crept up and shot them in the head at close range, and dragged their bodies into the ballroom. His 84-year-old mother, Alma, who lived in an upstairs apartment in the house, received a gunshot, too.
List lowered the temperature in the house, cued up some organ music on the intercom system, and told his kids’ teachers that the family had gone on a trip to North Carolina.
After cashing in his mother’s savings bonds and pocketing the money, he skipped town. He took the name Robert Clark, eventually got an accounting job, and remarried.
Bust the case. Meanwhile, back at Breeze Knoll, investigators found the bodies after neighbors summoned police because they hadn’t seen anyone enter or leave the house in a month.
The authorities couldn’t find List despite a nationally publicized manhunt led by the FBI; the fugitive had given himself too generous a head start.
Oh, and there was no internet back then.
The case turned cold until 18 years later, when then-new TV show America’s Most Wanted commissioned forensic artist Frank Bender to sculpt a bust that “aged” List. Host John Walsh, whose own son had been a murder victim, asked viewers to call in tips.
The effort was 100 percent successful.
Colorado resident Wanda Flanery contacted police about a former neighbor named Bob Clark who had recently moved away to Richmond, Virginia. He resembled the sculpture.
Spooky landmark. List’s subsequent FBI arrest at his accounting office made for scintillating news around the globe and electrified America’s Most Wanted ratings.
At the time, I remember my roommate coming home and asking, “Did you hear they caught John List?” She’d grown up in Westfield, where kids made the List property their No. 1 spooky dare long after the house mysteriously burned down in 1972.
A jury convicted John List on five counts of first-degree murder in 1990. Superior Court Judge William L’E. Wertheimer gave him life without parole.
List died in 2008, a one-of-a-kind killer who disposed of his family amid a dilemma that seems fairly prosaic in light of the last decade or so.
Internet research turned up a number of statistics that surely would have provided List with some consolation if he faced his same problems post-2000.
According to Mortgage Bankers Association data cited by the FDIC, lenders foreclose on one in every 200 U.S. homes and one child in every classroom belongs to a family in jeopardy of losing a home because of difficulty meeting mortgage payments.
A 2005 Freddie Mac-Roper poll also flagged by the FDIC concluded that “more than 6 in 10 homeowners delinquent in their mortgage payments are not aware of services that mortgage lenders can offer to individuals having trouble with their mortgage.”
Hardly atypical. The poll also determined that “homeowners fail to contact their lender because they are embarrassed, don’t believe the lender can help, and/or believe it would cause them to lose their home more quickly.”
Any prospective John Lists of the new millennium surely could see that their problems were shared by countless homeowners around the U.S. and the world.
Northwestern University’s Institute for Policy Research found that during the subprime-mortgage-induced Great Recession, 8 million Americans lost their jobs and each year lenders foreclosed on 4 million homes.
Lack of faith. If List simply admitted to his family and creditors and the IRS that he was in crisis, a solution that didn’t involve homicide and pseudonyms could have been hammered out.
Perhaps if List knew back in 1971 that, 45 years in the future, an American who filed for bankruptcy protection four times would nonetheless be elected leader of the free world, he could have sucked it up, started over, and eventually made the List family great again.
That’s all for this post. Until next week, cheers. — RR
Watch the episode on YouTube or Tubi
P.S. If anyone knows what year Breeze Knoll was built, please advise.
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
Target
Walmart
Indie Bound
As always, a great & engaging read. Love your posts, RR!
Thanks much, Jean — so glad you’re enjoying the blog!
Definitely.
Many thanks, Pam!
Keep the politics out of it, dude. That was low. And you’re obviously a lib
Agree. I was going to subscribe and refer until I saw that swipe at Trump.
It’s not much of a swipe if it’s true – and it IS true that Mr T’s businesses declared bankruptcy a number of times (not him personally). Fact cannot be objected to – unless its status as fact is contested. I say this as pro-Trump, regarding the relative silence of liberals at the violence and other crime perpetrated in the name of BLM in ’20 as rank hypocrisy viz their complaints against him as his supporters re the Capitol riot. Liberals – and the US media largely composed of such – conspire to present a blatently one-sided narrative.
I actually do try to keep this blog politically neutral — we all need a break from partisanship. But pointing out that someone has had multiple bankruptcies is a statement of fact, not an insult.
… Yes, and the problem is that some facts are inconvenient to some people, or they infer from the citing of fact that one’s making a ‘swipe’ (and in this case, if the latter, it was a pretty mild one!) Of course, facts can be used selectively.
And of course both presidential candidates have strengths and weaknesses – but so polarised are the positions of even intelligent and well-informed people (it would be fair to regard a good proportion of those who work in the national media as such) that there is little no attempt to be even-handed; and defence of one being regarded as attack of the other.
(Although largely irrelevant to this blog, I regard the US media as overwhelmingly anti-Trump, simply unable to acknowledge that he achieved anything positive, which he certainly, objectively, did. One doesn’t need to like the man himself… Perhaps the strongest illustration of this is the mismatch between media mores and voters’: the overwhelmingly liberal (anti-Trump) media being vastly unrepresentative of the people as expressed in the popular vote: Biden – 51.3%; Trump – 46.9%. This is little numerical difference – even if reflecting a gulf in political difference. For conservatives, will the fact that nearly half the voters wanted Trump elicit a seemingly somewhat disconnected, arrogant liberal media to modify its stance, pausing to consider whether it adequately reflects and represents ALL the people rather than around just half or so? Breaths will not be held…
I say *largely* irrelevant because Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal are more than tangential to some of the issues of justice that we’re interested in here. FF does the ‘how they were caught’: here we follow through on how they were punished, wherein the aforementioned politics/policy’s engaged. Indeed, Trump’s rescinding the moratorium on federal execution is an example (and some need informing that he didn’t impose death – a judge and jury did – but merely removed the block to its enaction.)
I’ve done heaps of research on this property and can only seem to narrow it down to early 1900s. I’ll keep searching! Another great post and one of my all time favourite murder stories.
Jeanne, thanks for the kinds words and the research! Info about the house is hard to come by.
I believe it was 1895 or possibly 96. I have all the books written on this case but can only put my hands on the one written by Joe Sharkey – an excellent read btw! – who writes: In 1895, he bought twenty-two acres of land a few miles northeast, and built a grand Victorian house atop a gentle knoll ….. Wittke called his estate Breeze Knoll.
Still more ironic, if List had become President, he could have Xed even more people, and got paid to do it.
And been cheered for his efforts.
I just discovered this blog, and as a fellow Forensic Files fan, this intrigues me!
Anyway, Was there any word on what happened to his family that he started after getting remarried? ( I think he did remarry while on the run)?
David — glad to hear from you! The last thing I remember hearing about Delores Clark is that she finally accepted the fact that her husband was John List.
John List’s “friend” wrote a book where it mentions they divorced and she was living in poverty. It’s not a good read….full of his BS and tons of grammatical errors and misspellings.
A deeply tragic case. Of course, what List stated were his reasons/motives for the murders and what they really were (whether he was aware or not) could be different. Another way of characterising them might be to state that he was sick of his ‘mad’ wife (who some sources say was a public embarrassment to him by getting publicaly drunk and remarking on his lack of sexual prowess, etc), was indifferent to the children, had embezzled the mother’s money and needed to ‘off’ her, was losing the house, and had no job. So he simply ‘erased’ his total history to date and started – somewhat successfully – again. That he didn’t just walk out, never to return was were his psychopathy entered. You can perhaps understand why, for him, the wife and mother were killed – but the children?
Anyway, there’s no rationalising the psychopathic mind – which is why the bail-out stuff that RR mentions probably wouldn’t have made a jot of difference to him or the situation. If List’s religiosity were authentic, rather than an effect of his psychopathy, he’d have appreciated that Christ on the cross was a ‘failure’ (in worldly terms), and advocated that the ‘last’ (the poor; the ‘failures) are in fact first in His Kingdom – all standard Christian teaching that List must have known (if not believed). The greatest psychopathic distortion: that his suicide would be a sin, but murder – and of children – wasn’t, of a degree excluding him from the God he claimed to seek.
I think he killed the family because his ego was such that he couldn’t handle them seeing him as a failure. Several sources in the book Righteous Carnage mentions his arrogance. The rationalization for killing them was his way of eliminating an inconvenience and his own stress. I don’t think he was a psychopath.
Sick minds only justify their inconsistent philosophy and thoughts because their logic is egocentric, and lacks logic ( logic as we “normal” people know it).
What an absolute tragedy for a family that died because of a religious zealot. In my 75 years of life, every overly religious person I have met, with a few exceptions, eventually show that they betray those around them in some form. Not to this horrific extent but nevertheless in some way that makes me uncomfortable to be around these type of people.
So true — extremism of any kind always seems to hurt some innocent people.
Ann: There’s an issue of cause and effect here. I’d argue that ‘religious zealotry’ was the EFFECT of a prior cause: mental illness. While List wouldn’t meet the legal threshold for madness, he was unquestionably deeply disturbed: mass murder as well as a later life of lies and deceit. That he appeared functional, maintaining a relationship and holding a job down, doesn’t change this. Ted Bundy did the same, and few would claim he was sane… It’s far too simplistic to explain this as zealotry!
Zealotry is a pejorative term: zealots, as ‘fanatics’, are necessarily bad. I think you mean religious extremists. I don’t think you can generalise that ‘extremely religious people’ generally betray family/friends/colleagues by any means, but of their nature they may make many feel uncomfortable. That, though, can’t be claimed to be a bad thing in itself. Sometimes we ought to be discomforted to rouse us from complacency…
The Pilgrim Fathers could be described as extremists – but they’re a fundamental part of American colonial history.
What a sorry attempt at humor using President Trump at the end. It was 4 years ago, I believe now you’ll be cheering people that threaten death on The CIC and his supporters. Any murderer is a hero to people like the writer of this post.
Not sure what you’re saying here. I don’t wish death on the CIC. But public officials who use lies to incite violence should have to answer for their words and actions.
And murderers aren’t heroes to me.
What on earth has your comment got to do with the price of fish?
List’s logic in killing his entire family to ensure they went to heaven is undeniable… if you’re a psychopathic lunatic. God is perfect. It’s people who in every single act of malfeasance, twist religion to some self-serving end.
If List thought he could just hit the delete button on the fam and waltz off *and* find redemption he may be bitterly disappointed when he finds his advocate was busy for his final court appearance and he’s going to have to act as his own defense.
By all accounts his wife was a good mother and all the children were doing just fine and on a good trajectory.
Now you come in List with your perverted religious interpretations and go hog wild. You can ask for redemption List, but the wise person doesn’t put God to the test and He just may not be too interested about being a part of your puny plan. The good news is, they *are* all in Heaven no doubt. Are you?
His wife wasn’t a good mother. If you read any of the books and anything on the Internet, it clearly says she neglected the kids.
To much rationalizing. He simply killed them to eliminate the problem and his own stress. I have to say though the wife had it coming for duping him and belittling him throughout the marriage. If it weren’t for the mother and kids, I’d feel a little sorry for him.
I don’t buy the pious excuses in List’s confession letter at face value. Although he sincerely believed in heaven and that his dead family would be “saved,” his own survival is proof of false consciousness. God would deny heaven to a suicide, but not to a mass murderer? LOL.
He wanted OUT. Out of the marriage that he despised, out of the family responsibility, out to a new life. He was cold as ice and had no real love for any of them. He was actually employed at the time of the murders, at State Mutual Life, and could have found other work. Divorce would have meant paying child support for three and possibly alimony. Was this numbers cruncher really ignorant that the Tiffany chandelier was worth close to $100K? Maybe not.
The bodies of the three children were positioned face down, usually indicating some degree of shame or discomfort. But the wife was face up (albeit with a cloth covering placed later), indicating contempt. In the 12 hours he spent in the house post murders, he probably relished seeing the deceiving, syphilitic “bitch” who ruined his life dead. All the pieties in the letter masked his real motives, both for the public and in his own mind.
I agree — he wanted a fresh start. Getting his hands on all of his mother’s money was part of the escape plan.
If he wanted out, why did not he disappear without murdering them. None of them lying face down!