John List, alias the Bogeyman of Westfield: The man who wiped out his entire family and then disappeared from the scene

One of the most exciting criminal cases in the state of New Jersey after the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby is the case of mass murderer John List. In 1971, he wiped out his entire family before simply disappearing from the scene. He remained undetected for a remarkable 17 years until he was recognized by his neighbor in a segment on the crime series America’s Most Wanted, which ultimately led to his arrest. But who was the man who shot his wife, three children, and mother in cold blood? John Emil List was born on September 17, 1928, in Bay City, Michigan, to John Frederick and Alma Maria Barbara List, a couple of German descent. John, the couple’s only child, was raised in a strict religious household. He and his parents were members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The family lived in a Victorian house, the upper floor of which they rented out for financial reasons. John had little privacy, as he did not have his own room and had to sleep in the living room. While his father had an extremely distant relationship with him, his mother was overly protective, watching John’s every move with eagle eyes. John’s social circle consisted largely of the church community, where he taught Sunday school. John joined the U.S. Army in 1943, serving as a laboratory technician in the infantry during World War II. A year later, John’s father died. After his military service in 1946, John studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration and his master’s degree in accounting. During his studies, his mother Alma visited him once a month. First they went out to eat, then they attended church services. They read the Bible together and then discussed the passages they had read. In the wake of the Korean War, John was called up for military service again. However, he did not have to go overseas to the front, but remained stationed in the state of Virginia, where he met and fell in love with war widow Helen Morris Taylor and her 9-year-old daughter Brenda. His mother Alma was strongly opposed to this relationship. But when Helen believed she was pregnant with John’s child, the two married on December 1, 1951, in Baltimore. The pregnancy later turned out to be a false alarm. The couple moved to California, where John worked as an accountant for the U.S. Army. After being discharged from military service, the couple moved to Detroit, where John got a job as an accountant at a prestigious company. Everything seemed perfect when their first child, a girl named Patricia, was born in 1955. The small family moved to the small town of Kalamazoo. There, John started a job as head of auditing at a paper mill. During this time, his wife Helen began to grow increasingly estranged from John. When their third son, Frederick, was born in 1958, after Patricia and John Jr., Helen began not only taking tranquilizers but also drinking. Due to her consumption of alcohol and pills, Helen was barely able to care for the children, which John now had to take over in addition to his job. The atmosphere was extremely tense, which is why their eldest daughter Brenda married and moved out in 1960 at the age of 18. But things weren’t just going badly for John in his private life, but also in his professional life. He lost his job when his company merged. But John was lucky, as he soon got a job as a department head in accounting at Xerox, which is why the family moved to Rochester. However, John was unable to hold down this position for long. He lost his job again. For the first time in his life, John was unemployed and plagued by financial worries, which led his wife to punish him with indifference. But in 1965, the tide seemed to turn when John became an auditor at the First National Bank of Jersey City. The family moved into the Victorian mansion “Breeze Knoll” in Westfield. The three-story, 19-room villa even had a ballroom with a Tiffany glass ceiling. In order to afford this dream home at 431 Hillside Avenue, John’s mother Alma had to make a down payment on the mortgage. Alma did so on the condition that she would get her own apartment in the mansion, which John agreed to. Alma got an apartment in the attic. The List family lived a very secluded life, and John stood out only because he mowed the lawn wearing a shirt and tie. Although the List family now lived in one of the most exclusive areas of Westfield, John was laid off after only one year. He simply had no talent for sales, which is why he was unable to land any new business deals. John tried to keep his renewed professional failure a secret from his family, especially his wife Helen. For six months, he left the house every morning and did not return until the evening so that he would not have to admit that he was unemployed. He spent his time at the train station, reading newspapers or books. John paid the bills from his mother’s account, to which he had access. John finally landed a job in New York State. But his salary was much lower than before, so he had to take out a second mortgage. John was in dire straits and was fired again after a year because he couldn’t convince new investors to invest in investment funds. He had earned only $5,000 in commissions in a year. In addition to his professional failure, his wife Helen made his life hell at home by constantly harassing him. In 1969, Helen was diagnosed by a doctor with incurable syphilis. The doctor advised John to put Helen in a nursing home because her brain mass was shrinking more and more. But John refused. When he had plundered almost his mother’s entire savings account, amounting to $200,000, he came up with an incredible plan. John was desperate because he seemed to be losing everything, not only materially, but also his wife and daughter Patricia seemed doomed. Both had turned away from their faith. While Helen was addicted to pills and alcohol, Patricia not only used drugs, but also dressed in a contemporary style and performed in a theater group, which John considered hellish. When 16-year-old Patricia was brought home by the police in September 1971 because she had been out alone at night smoking, it was the last straw. John hatched a plan that he considered “heavenly” and put it into action on November 9, 1971. On that day, John simply wiped out his entire family and then disappeared from the scene. He used a 9mm Steyr semi-automatic pistol and a .22 caliber Colt revolver that had once belonged to his father. First, he shot his 45-year-old wife Helen in the head in the kitchen. Then he shot his 85-year-old mother Alma directly in the face in her attic apartment. After that, he calmly ate lunch until he received a call from his daughter Patricia, who asked him to pick her up from Westfield High School because she was feeling nauseous, which John did. When they entered the house, he killed her with a shot to the back of the head. He then drove to the bank to close the accounts and withdraw the remaining $2,500. He then picked up his 13-year-old son Frederick from his part-time job and shot him in the head in the house. After that, he set off to pick up his 15-year-old son John Jr. from soccer practice. But this time, John didn’t pull the trigger quickly enough in the doorway. A struggle ensued between father and son. Later, 10 bullets were found in John Jr.’s body. He placed the bodies of his children and his wife in the ballroom. He put them in Boy Scout sleeping bags and covered their faces, while leaving his mother’s body in a closet in the attic with a dishcloth over her mouth. John then made himself dinner and went to sleep in the billiard room, which was right next to the ballroom. The next morning, he turned on the lights in every room, tuned the radio to a religious station, turned on the air conditioning, and defaced his face in all the family photos before leaving the house forever. The bodies were not discovered until four weeks later. This was because John had sent letters to the children’s school saying that they would be spending a few weeks with their seriously ill grandmother in North Carolina. He had also stopped the delivery of milk, newspapers, and mail. But after Patricia’s theater teacher, Ed Illiano, had not heard from his student for weeks, he drove to the List mansion again. He had already driven to the List mansion a few weeks earlier because Patricia had told him that if her father sent him a letter saying that she could not attend theater class due to a trip, he should call the police. When Ed Illiano received such a letter, he drove to the List family mansion. When he saw the lights on, he drove home again, as everything seemed fine. But Ed Illiano was concerned about Patricia’s weeks-long disappearance without a sign of life, so he drove to the List family mansion again. When he met List’s neighbor there, who was also concerned, they finally alerted the police on December 7, 1971. The police were able to gain access to the villa through an unlocked window, but what they discovered there resembled a scene from a horror movie. They found a total of five bodies, which were already being devoured by maggots. In addition to the bodies and the two murder weapons, the police also found a letter in the house addressed to Pastor Eugene Rehwinkel, whose parish the List family belonged to. In this letter, John explained that he had killed his family to save them from the many evils in this world and thus protect their souls from the devil. This confirmed that John was the murderer of his family. But after the rampage against his family, there was no trace of John. Only his blue Chevrolet was found in a long-term parking lot at Kennedy International Airport in New York City. But there was no information about a flight booked in his name from there. The FBI took over the investigation, which initially assumed that John might have fled abroad due to the absence of his passport. It quickly came to light that John was so deeply in debt that his bank had already initiated foreclosure proceedings on the villa. The FBI monitored the List family’s funeral in the hope that John would show up, but he did not. He seemed to have vanished into thin air. Nine months after the massacre, on August 30, 1972, the Breeze Knoll mansion burned down. The cause was clearly arson. Years passed until May 21, 1989, when the case was featured on the American crime series America’s Most Wanted. Sculptor and photographer Frank Bender had used existing photos to create a bust depicting John as an older person. John’s former neighbor, Wanda Flannery, recognized John. Her son called the phone number shown on the screen and gave the new address of the Clarks, as John now called himself, in Virginia. On June 1, 1989, John was arrested by the police at his workplace in an accounting firm in Richmond. The police agreed to extradite him to the state of New Jersey, even though, unlike in Virginia, the crime was still very much on the minds of the population. At the time of his arrest, John was 63 years old and consistently denied being the wanted John Emil List. Only after the police took his fingerprints, which proved that Robert P. Clark was indeed John Emil List, did he finally admit this on February 13, 1990. The FBI also suspected John of being the mysterious D.B. Cooper, who had hijacked a plane in 1972 and escaped with a ransom. However, John vehemently denied this. During the interrogation, the whole truth about his life after the horrific massacre finally came to light. After John parked his car at the airport on November 10, 1971, he took the train from New York to Michigan. From there, he continued his journey to Denver, where he rented a trailer. From then on, he called himself Robert P. Clark. He obtained a new social security number, which enabled him to identify himself to authorities and companies. He got a job as a cook in a hotel. He then moved to the community of The Pinery, where he landed a job as an accountant and manager. In 1975, he became a member of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Denver. A year later, he applied for a driver’s license and bought a car, which he used to transport church members to important appointments, which is why he was appointed to the church council of the parish. In the parish, he met Delores Miller, a divorcee, whom he married in 1985. But soon after, John not only lost his job again, he was also asked to resign as a Sunday school teacher because the children’s parents had complained about his excessive strictness. John started his own business as a financial advisor, but he was not very successful. His marriage began to falter and he found a sympathetic ear in his neighbor Wanda Flannery. When she read an article in the World Weekly News in February 1987 about a man named List who had killed his family and disappeared, she immediately suspected, based on the description of the man, that her neighbor Robert Clark might in fact be John List. Wanda shared her suspicion with John’s wife Delores. She advised her to confront John, but Wanda lacked the courage to do so, and the couple eventually moved to Richmond because of John’s new job, until Wanda recognized him again while watching the crime series America’s Most Wanted, which changed John’s life forever. On April 12, 1990, after seven days, John Emil List was found guilty of five counts of murder by the court. He received five life sentences without the option of parole. John appealed the verdict, arguing that the court had not taken into account the post-traumatic stress disorder he claimed to have suffered as a result of his military service in World War II and the Korean War. He also objected to the use of a letter to his pastor as evidence, arguing that this was not lawful due to the confidentiality of the pastor-client relationship. Both arguments were rejected. In 2002, John gave an interview to television journalist Connie Chung for the ABC program “Downtown.” In it, he showed no remorse for his actions. He was certain that his family had forgiven him and that they would meet again someday in heaven. When asked why he had not committed suicide, John explained that it was a sin. John Emil List, alias Robert P. Clark, died on March 21, 2008, at the age of 82, from complications of pneumonia while in prison at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton. He went down in criminal history as the Bogeyman of Westfield.