Andy (21:46)
The point where financially things are starting to crash and burn, right? He's running through the savings. He's really kind of tapped his mother for as much as he could. And also about this time, Patty, who was the oldest, she was 16. She had gotten very involved with the drama club at Westfield High School. And John was not particularly pleased with this because he, you know, this is 1970, 71. And like most teenagers at that time, she and her friends would smoke pot and hang out and, you know, this was the theater which was like, you know, and so he became very concerned about the moral path that Patty seemed to be going on, right? And he was a Very. He had gone to church every week with the family, right in Westfield. And it was a Missouri Synod church, you know, and he was treasurer there and all this kind of stuff. He started to become more and more desperate. And then at one point, he came to the realization that with the way things were going, this was going to be financial ruin. They would lose the house. They would have to go on public assistance, which was unheard of for him, and that who knows what was going to happen with Patty, because with where she was heading. And so he made the conscious decision that in order to save his family from all of this, he would kill them. From the moment that he made that decision all the way through the murders themselves, he was not emotionally vested in it at all. He saw it as a military operation that needed to be carried out. And so now what do I have to do to carry it out? And so he began planning. And amongst the things he did was he obtained Social Security cards in a number of different names. He took packages and sent them to different post offices across the country. And then he knew that he needed weapons, so he applied for a gun permit, but it was taking too long. So he remembered that he had two pistols in the house stored. One he had bought in World War II from a GI. The other belonged to his father. So he rummaged through and found them. Well, of course, the only ammunition he had was, you know, 40 years old or whatever it was. So he went to a local sporting goods store, which was a place called Ray's Sports Shop, that used to be on Route 22 in North Plainfield. And I knew it well because I used to go there myself, you know, to buy things. And he bought his. Bought the ammunition. And they also had a gun range attached to the store. And so he test fired the weapons in the gun range to make sure they were in working order. And now that all the pieces were kind of put together, he decided that the date would be November 9, 1971. And so on the morning of November 9, he got the kids off to school. Helen was in the kitchen having some breakfast. He came up behind her and shot her in the back of the head. She, of course, fell dead on the floor. He put her on a sleeping bag and dragged her body to the ballroom, went back to the kitchen, cleaned everything up, cleaned up all the blood, etc. Then he went upstairs to the third floor, and his mother was in her little kitchenette, and he shot and killed her. And she fell dead there. Later on, we would learn that he did not move her to the ballroom because according to him, she was too heavy to move. So he left her on the floor up there. So now we flash, he goes downstairs, he makes himself some lunch. He sits down at the very table where he killed his wife a few hours earlier, eats his lunch, cleans up after that. And now it's getting close to, you know, the end of the school day. So Pat had a part time job with Fred, they had a part time job downtown, but she wasn't feeling well, so she had called and said that she wasn't going to be going to work. So John went, picked her up. When they got back to the house, the back entrance to the house, went into the laundry room, and from the laundry room to the kitchen. So he followed her in. When she got into the kitchen, he shot her in the back of the head. She fell dead. He put her on a sleeping bag, took her to the ballroom and cleaned up. A little while later he went and he picked Fred up from the after school job where Fred had gone. And the same basic routine, he followed Fred in, shot him once in the back of the head, put his body in the ballroom and cleaned up. Then later on, John was at a soccer game. And so he went and picked John up at the soccer game. And same process, except that when he shot John, John fell to the floor, but his body was moving, it was almost like it was twitching. And. And you know, of course we don't know whether, whether he was actually dead. And it was a, you know, body reaction, we don't know. But it very much concerned John because John. The one thing John wanted to make sure of was that none of the people he was killing suffered. He was very intent on that. And so he emptied the other pistol into his son's body to make sure he was dead again, dragged him to the ballroom, put him there, and then cleaned up afterwards. Then he went to his study and he wrote several letters to his minister, to the chief of police, to Helen's sister and a couple of other relatives. And he confessed to the killings. The letter is particularly to his path, very clear. You know, he, he confessed and why he did them. He put the envelopes, he sealed the envelopes, he put them there, he took the two pistols and he put them on the floor next to the desk. And people have somewhat said, well, you know, why did he do that? And his logic was he wanted the know that he was not armed when they would, would be coming after him. So he thought if he left the guns, they would say, oh, okay, he's not Armed. Of course they didn't, because how would they know? So then after that he, he made dinner and sat down in the kitchen and ate dinner and then he went upstairs and went to bed and he slept. Before he left the house, he be, he had sent letters to stop the mail, stop the milk, that type of thing. He had also contacted the schools and said that Helen's sister in North Carolina was very ill and so the family was going there so the kids would not be in school for a while. He contacted their part time job. So he kind of covered the bases on a lot of fronts. Before he left, he had turned on most of the light, a lot of the lights in the home. He had turned the temperature down in the ballroom and the house had an intercom system. So he had put on this sort of church organ music to play throughout the house. Yes, right. And then he got in his car and he drove to Kennedy Airport into long term parking and he parked up on the upper deck. He took a bus from Kennedy Airport to New York City and in New York City he got on a train to Philadelphia and then a train to Detroit. And then he took a bus to Jackson, Missouri and then a bus to Fort Wayne, Indiana. Out in your neck of the woods. And it was actually in Fort Wayne that he had shipped a lot of these boxes to. So he went to the post office and picked those up and what have you. And then he went to a place called Galesburg, Illinois, or Gaysburg, I don't know how it's pronounced. And then finally a train to Denver, which is where he had decided to settle. So he settled in Denver. By this time he had decided to adopt one of the names that he had Social Security cards for, and that was Robert P. Clark. And you know, people go, well, how did he come up with that name? And about the only connection I can find is that the church in Westfield that he attended was on Clark Street. And so I have a feeling that quite possibly simply because he knew that name, because he walked by that street sign many times in a week, that may be where Clark came from. Robert P. I don't know. But he settled in Denver. He got a job at an IHOP as a cook of all things. But that didn't even last long because they, they realized that he was really no short order cook, although he could cook, he wasn't a shorter and he couldn't keep a with the pace. So they let him go from that. Then he went to a little restaurant attached to a hotel and he worked there. And that Actually turned out to be successful for him because he was primarily a dishwasher and a busboy and that. But he was perfectly happy with that. And eventually they actually made him what we would call a sous chef, although I don't know if in a little restaurant they use that term, but, you know, and he saved up enough money so that he could rent an apartment, and he was kind of starting this new life. And of course, he wanted to get back to church because it was still very important to him. But he decided he shouldn't go to a Missouri Synod church because if there was anywhere they might be networking throughout the country to find him, it could be that. So he went to an ELCA church. And as John said, they were not nearly as radical as I had been taught that they were, because, you know, and they had a singles group. And so he started going, and he met this woman named Dolores, and her name was Dolores Miller. They got married in 1985, and they were living in Denver, and he was working. And then, almost out of the blue, someone he had known years before contacted somebody, and they placed an ad in the paper that they were looking for an accountant at this firm in Virginia. Now, the friend that he knew didn't know this was John List, and he didn't work at the accounting firm. It was only through a series of events that this ad ended up reaching John. John contacted them, and they hired him. So he and Dolores moved from Denver to Virginia, and this would be his last life as a free man, so to speak. The police chief in Westfield started badgering John Welsh and the America's Most Wanted producers to do an episode on John List. And of course, at first, they're like, look, this is 18 years old. You know, nobody even knows what he looks like. You know, John had ripped his picture out of everything in the house before he left. So there was. He left no photos of himself. They did find one that had been in the newspaper when he got hired in Jersey City, and that was what was circulated. That's all anybody knew. So, as you may know, America's Most Wanted hired a forensic sculptor who created this bust of what John would look like at that time. And they did the episode. Well, a former neighbor in Denver who was a little bit of a busy buddy herself, you know, she liked to know everything, you know. You know, saw it and knew that Bob Clark and Dolores had moved to Virginia, and she called America's Most Wanted with the tip. And that was the beginning of sort of the end, as far as that goes. They tracked him down they went to the accounting firm where he was working, arrested him. He denied that he was John List. He maintained he was Robert P. Clark. And it was only after they got fingerprints sent from New Jersey that matched his that he finally fessed up to who he was. He came back, they extradited him, brought him back to New Jersey, put him on trial in Union county, and he was convicted of five counts of murder and given five life sentences. And then he was sent to the state prison in Trenton, New Jersey.
