17 Years Later, Town Gets Answers to Family Killings

Religion was the major force in John Emil List’s life, but if anything came second, it was probably the accountant’s reverence for detail and order.

After he shot his wife, mother and three teen-age children, he cleaned up the blood, and put the spent bullet casings in the trash. He neatly laid their bodies on sleeping bags in the once-elegant ballroom of his 19-room classical revival mansion--except for his 84-year-old mother’s, which was too heavy to drag down from her third-floor apartment.

Between killings, List visited the bank to redeem some savings bonds. He stopped mail and newspaper deliveries, turned down the thermostat, and left word with his children’s schools that the family was on an emergency trip. On the dining room table, he set out photos and books he had borrowed from a neighbor, and remembered to attach a thank-you note. He wrote apologetic goodbys to a few relatives and a five-page letter to his minister.

Then he disappeared for more than 17 years.

Now 64, List is back, and standing trial in nearby Elizabeth, N.J., having admitted killing his family in 1971. He could face multiple life sentences if convicted in the case, which is expected to go to the jury today or Wednesday.

Westfield, meanwhile, is finally getting some answers to questions that have haunted and fascinated it for almost two decades.

Some of the evidence confirms things hinted or guessed at all along. Other bits are startling. The deepest family secrets of this quiet, churchgoing accountant--his wife’s drug addiction and syphilis, the possibility that his daughter dabbled in witchcraft--are being brought forward as possible justifications for a crime more horrible than anything this affluent suburb has seen before or since.

His defense paints a picture of a man facing financial ruin. Perhaps more important, he was a man who was unable to reconcile his religious beliefs with the changing values of a turbulent era. Ultimately, List’s lawyer argued, the tormented former Sunday School teacher was driven by a twisted conviction that murder was the only way to save his family’s souls.

“For the salvation of his family, he had to act as he did,” defense attorney Elijah L. Miller Jr. insisted. “He entered hell with his eyes open.”

But while the defense has said that something in List snapped under the pressure, prosecutor Brian Gillet contended that List’s calculated methods belied any mental defect. List “closed the books, balanced out the accounts before he fled and took on a new life,” Gillet said.

FBI Pursues Tips

In its search for List, the FBI compiled a file 10 volumes thick. Authorities got tips that he had been sighted in all 50 states, Europe and South America. At one point, having found wire and posts on the List property, the FBI pursued a theory that he might be raising chickens somewhere.

Finally, however, it was not police work that brought the fugitive in, but a television re-enactment of the crime last May on the Fox television program “America’s Most Wanted”--ironically, acquaintances have said, one of List’s favorite shows.

The FBI received more than 200 calls from viewers of that episode, in which an artist created a plaster bust depicting how List would look today. One of those callers sent authorities to Richmond, Va., where they found List living under the alias Robert P. Clark.

It was a surprise for many to learn that List was living a life much like the one he had left behind--as a married man, working as an accountant, and a devoted member of the Lutheran Church.

“It was like he was saying, ‘I’m waiting to be caught,’ ” said John Wittke, a former neighbor whose grandfather had been the original owner of the List mansion. It was Wittke’s photographs that List remembered to return before fleeing.

Residents of Westfield held parties to celebrate the arrest, which established List as something of an instant legend. For a while, authorities investigated the possibility that List was also D.B. Cooper, the hijacker who disappeared from a flight over Washington state in 1971 carrying $200,000 in $20 bills.

Ex-Neighbors at Trial

Wittke has attended part of the trial, and so have others who lived in the neighborhood at the time of the murder. They have come mostly to get a glimpse of a paler, thinner, grayer List who has shown no emotion through six days of sensational testimony. Larry Rhodes, who was a 10-year-old paperboy in 1971, found it unsettling.

“I just wanted to see him. He was scary looking. He looked kind of lifeless,” Rhodes said. “If you didn’t know what the guy was in there for, you could have guessed.”

The most dramatic piece of evidence thus far produced in the trial was the letter that List wrote and left in a filing cabinet, addressed to the Rev. Eugene A. Rehwinkel, his pastor at Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. The contents of the letter had been kept secret for 18 years, but were made public when Superior Court Judge William L’E. Wertheimer ruled, over defense objections, that they were not protected by the confidentiality of the priest-penitent relationship.

“I wasn’t earning near enough to support us. Everything I tried seemed to fall to pieces,” List wrote his pastor by way of explanation.

He also described his concerns over his 16-year-old daughter Patricia’s interest in acting, and the fact that Helen, his 45-year-old wife, was not attending church. “Of course, Mother got involved, because doing what I did to my family would have been a tremendous shock to her at this age,” he wrote. “Therefore, knowing that she is also a Christian, I felt it best that she be relieved of the troubles of this world.”

Postpones Killings

List wrote that he had originally selected Nov. 1, All Saint’s Day, as “an appropriate day for them to get to heaven,” but his travel plans forced him to delay until Nov. 9.

He had shot his wife and mother, Alma, in the morning, authorities testified. Then he waited several hours for the kids to get home from school. Patricia and 13-year-old Frederick were killed with bullets to the back of the head, as their mother and grandmother had been. John Jr., 15, surprised his father by arriving home early from soccer practice, and List shot his namesake 10 times.

Afterward, List wrote: “I said some prayers for them all--from the hymn book.”

In the mid-1960s, List had moved to Westfield from Rochester, N.Y. From outward appearances, he seemed like a man who had it made. He was earning $25,000 a year as vice president and comptroller of a local bank, and bought one of the fanciest houses in this affluent town of roughly 35,000 people, which is located about 14 miles west of New York City.

Built around the turn of the century, it bespoke a former elegance, with two grand staircases that swept up the sides of a giant entry hall. The cavernous room that the List family called their ballroom was actually a 50-by-30-foot art gallery, crowned by a stained-glass skylight.

Neighbors found the kids friendly enough, but List kept to himself. Another resident of Hillside Avenue remembers taking a pie over to welcome the Lists when they moved in. “At the time, he told me he was not interested in making friends,” recalled the neighbor, who asked not to be identified.

But at church, List--who had grown up in the strict Lutheran community in Bay City, Mich.--was an outstanding member, chairman of the board of education and active in the youth group. “He was a quiet, gentle person,” Rev. Rehwinkel testified last week in court. “He was always at church . . . very predictable. I could tell you the pew he’d be sitting in.”

List talked of restoring the mansion to the splendor it had enjoyed in an era when it took five gardeners to tend its grounds. He borrowed old photographs from Wittke, who lived nearby in what had been a gardener’s cottage, but Wittke said it was clear that the List family could never afford such a project. In fact, the house was falling into disrepair and sparsely furnished.

Wife a Semi-Invalid

The neighbors did not see much of Helen List, who was thought to be sickly. Testimony last week revealed the nature of that illness: syphilis, which she had contracted from her first husband, a Korean War hero who had died overseas before she married List in 1951. Although the disease was not contagious after its earliest stages, it made her a semi-invalid and left her blind in one eye. She hid it from her family for years, but ultimately had to admit it as the cause of her sharply deteriorating health.

“To find his wife having a venereal disease was morally, ethically and religiously a very hard thing for him to accept,” Dr. Sheldon Miller, a psychiatrist who examined List, testified.

Dr. Henry Liss, a neurologist, testified that Helen drank four or five glasses of Scotch a day, and was addicted to tranquilizers. Despite her frailty, she dominated List and taunted him, saying if he was “half the man her first husband was, the family wouldn’t have the troubles they were having,” according to the courtroom account of the Rev. Edward Saresky, who had been the Lists’ minister in Rochester.

Her sister, Betty Jean Syfert, said that when she visited the List home for several days in 1968, Helen List ventured only once out of her bedroom, which was “very unkempt, as was she.”

The defense has also sought to introduce evidence that List’s daughter, Patricia, was practicing witchcraft, but thus far, the judge has refused to allow any of it to be presented while the jury is present.

A year after List moved to Westfield, he was fired from his dream job, as he had been from a series of earlier ones. “His degree of humiliation and embarrassment reached the point where he couldn’t tell his wife he had lost his job,” psychologist Alan M. Goldstein testified Monday. For a while, until Helen List discovered the truth, List would leave the house every morning in his suit and tie, and hide out all day at the railroad station.

He found work as an insurance salesman, but his was hardly the personality for it. He also did some independent accounting work, but did not earn much that way either. Gradually, he depleted his mother’s $200,000 savings, the last few thousand of which was withdrawn just before he fled, investigators have said.

List’s careful preparations allayed suspicion for a while, but neighbors began to notice something was strange in the house. For one thing, the lights had been left on, and the sight of the house at night got eerier as the weeks passed, and the bulbs began to burn out.

Police entering the house almost a month after the killings heard funeral church music playing from the radio. Everything was just as List had painstakingly left it.

Leaves Car at Airport

The last trace of John Emil List was his green 1963 Chevrolet Impala, found at John F. Kennedy International Airport several days after the bodies were discovered. Typically attentive to detail, List left the keys and title inside.

For a year after the killings, the house was a macabre attraction. For Wittke, who had many happy childhood memories of the mansion, it was painful. “We had a terrible time,” he said. “People came from miles and miles to stand and look. They called it ‘the murder house.’ ”

Some local teen-agers refused to baby-sit in the neighborhood. But others were drawn to it as a test of daring. Rhodes, the former paperboy, recalls sneaking into the house with his friends to play a morbid version of hide-and-seek that they called “dead man.”

“If you got caught, you had to get dragged into the ballroom,” he said.

More disturbing, neighbors say, it became a nighttime gathering place for members of what they believe was a satanic cult, which left hexagrams and other signs of their rituals in it. One neighbor recalls hearing them there one night about a year after the murders. He was calling the police, he said, when he saw an orange glow from the house.

“It burst the roof open,” the neighbor said. “A great big ball of fire came out of there surrounded by debris. It was an awful sight.”

No one was ever charged in connection with the mysterious fire that destroyed the house. Now, a large brick federal-style home sits on the site.

Meanwhile, List had manufactured a second life for himself. In the early 1970s, authorities believe he was living in a trailer park near Denver and making his living as a chef.

By 1977, he had begun to work again as an accountant. At a church social that year, he met Delores Miller, whom he married in 1985. There is no evidence that she knew of his real identity.

Eventually, however, List again encountered financial problems. He was fired from an accounting job in Denver because he could not master the firm’s new computer system. In February, 1988, he moved to Richmond to take an accounting job there. All along, he told acquaintances little about his past, except that he was from Michigan and that his first wife had died.

Shortly after his arrest last year, two small notes appeared in a Westfield cemetery, next to the List family’s headstone. “John’s been caught. June 1, 1989,” one said. The other read: “Now you can rest in peace.”

Times researcher Lisa Phillips contributed to this story.