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[00:00]
Dr. Horton Home Salesperson
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[00:29]
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[00:33]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
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[00:35]
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[01:01]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
It is the night of December 7, 1971. A drama teacher and military veteran named Ed Iliano turns his car up a long, winding driveway in Westfield, New Jersey, and puts the vehicle in park. Finally, he's making himself do the thing he's been putting off. He leaves his headlights on and pointed at the house. It is a stately Victorian mansion, 19 rooms, dark green shutters set back on more than an acre behind tall hedges. The family that lives here calls it Breeze Knoll. Night after night, Ed has driven past it on his way home, slowing at the bottom of the hill, telling himself everything's fine, but it has not looked fine for a while. The lights have been burning in every window day and night, and lately they have begun going out one by one as the bulbs die. He has knocked on the front door and gotten no answer. He has rung the bell. He even tests the door handle the lock holds, sparing him for the moment from deciding whether to enter alone. He has gone to the Westfield police twice, and both times has been sent away because Ed cannot tell them exactly what crime he believes has occurred. All he has is a feeling and a promise he once made to a frightened girl. The girl is one of his drama students. Her name is Patricia list. She is 16, she sings in the church choir, and she wants more than anything in the world, to be an actress. Days before she disappeared, sitting in Ed's parked car late at night, Patricia told him her father was going to kill her. Not rhetorically and not in some vague way, but that she and her two Younger brothers would be killed. Patricia is not a girl given to hysterics. She said it the way a person reports a fact Ed told her. No one is going to kill you. Patricia looked at him like he was a fool. It wasn't just the drama teacher to whom she had said it. She had predicted the same to a friend her own age, a girl who has never been able to shake it.
[03:16]
Interviewee or Police Official
At some point she had told me that she knew her father wanted her and her brother's dead.
[03:22]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
A neighbor has already called the Westfield police about the strange car in the driveway. Two patrolmen pull up within minutes, and after they hear Ed's concerns, one of them, an officer named George Solesnik, walks the outside of the house. On the side porch, he finds a tall ground floor window, unlocked. He and Ed push it up and climb over the sill into a dark dining room. The first thing they notice is the smell. The second thing is the music. Somewhere in the house, music is playing. It is loud and orchestral and grand. It seems to be coming from everywhere at once, piped through an intercom into every room. It is a radio tuned to a New York classical station, the way it is always is in this house, and tonight, by chance, it is playing Wagner, a composer known for his anti Semitic writings, whose opinions and music will later become a soundtrack for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It is an ominous sound. Inside, an unsettling scene. By the window stand two fish tanks. In one, the fish are dead, drifting at the surface. The second tank runs on a timer that keeps dropping food. And those fish are still alive. Ed knows this house. He leads the officer across the center hall, past the two curving staircases, to a heavy drape pulled across the entrance to the ballroom. Selesnik shines his flashlight through the gap in the drapes. The beam settles on a child's face. There are four bodies on the ballroom floor, laid out side by side, still in their winter coats. They are lying on sleeping bags. Boy Scout sleeping bags, forest green, with the words Be Prepared printed on the lining. Someone has arranged them so the edges of the bags all meet, so that from a few feet away, the four bodies together make the shape of a cross. A woman and three teenagers. One of the woman's arms has been laid across one of the boy's shoulders. Evil has been here. Ed Iliano runs to the front door and throws it open, and the rest of the officers come in from the porch. Someone finds the switch and turns on the lights. Upstairs, on the third floor, in a hallway outside a small apartment with A slice of toast still in the toaster. The officers will find the fifth body. An 84 year old woman, the grandmother of the house. Everyone who lives here is accounted for. Everyone but one. The father John list is gone. I'm Megyn Kelly and this is MK Confidential. AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts. And criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you.
[06:19]
Investigator or Expert Commentator
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[06:20]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
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[06:54]
Interviewee or Police Official
And.
[06:54]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
And if you are a victim, their team of restoration experts will spend up to $1 million restoring your title. So when's the last time you checked your title records? You can do it today. Use my promo code, meganometitlelock.com to get a free title history report. Plus a free trial of million dollar triple lock protection so you can make sure you're not already a victim. That's hometitlelock.com, promo code, Megan.
[07:21]
Investigator or Expert Commentator
Or.
[07:21]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Or use the link in the description. Westfield, New Jersey is not the kind of place this happens in. 1971, it is a town of 33,000 people. Today it has the exact same population. It is 25 miles southwest of Manhattan with grand old homes and a downtown so charming that ad agencies from the city drive out to film it as a stand in for small town America. It is a place of church suppers and Cub Scout dens, of teenagers who spend their Saturdays downtown at the Rialto movie house and the sub shop and the benches around Mindawaskin Park. The kind of town where people still leave the back door unlocked because nothing has ever happened here that would make them stop. It has 14 churches, 13 schools and 51 police officers. And it has not had a murder in eight years. Tonight, it has five in one house. Not just any house either. Breeze Knoll is a distinctly impressive home on one of Westfield's grandest streets. A 19 room Victorian with a real ballroom and a great stained glass skylight towering over it. The kind of kaleidoscope you would expect to find atop a church from the sidewalk it looks like the pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow. The steady father, the pretty wife, the well mannered children, the good street address. That is the picture Westfield has of the family inside. The police are going to unearth the reality behind that image. The police chief is a man named James Moran. He is at headquarters that evening supervising promotion tests when the call comes in from the patrolman at the scene. The officer on the line sounds panicked. Nothing like himself. He tells Moran, chief, there's been a mass murder. There are dead bodies all over the place. Moran cannot believe his ears. Westfield has not had a murder in eight years and now this man is telling him there are five. He gets in his car and drives. When he arrives, the ground floor of the mansion is already filling up with police. And Wagner still, still plays over the intercom. Officer Zalesnik cannot shake the sound of it.
[09:39]
Detective or Case Expert
The unnerving part of the whole situation was that there was music playing in the house. And it was a very classical, serene, almost like you would hear if you went to funeral power.
[09:50]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Moran, who will later say that he is no classical music expert, makes the same comparison. He remembers the music echoing through room after room. It is not until later that someone checks the radio listings and realizes what the family's classical station had been broadcasting at the exact hour the police found the bodies. An orchestral piece from Wagner's Twilight of the Gods. Somebody finally locates the radio in a hall closet and shuts it off. The chief walks into the ballroom and stands over the bodies. He sees the three of them are children. The men already inside are not rookies. Some of them have given 20 years to this quiet suburban force. And more than one of them will be unable to shake the next few minutes. For the rest of his life, the smell of decay in the icy cold rooms. The small bodies laid out behind the heavy drape across the ballroom. One of the first officers to take the call had been so sure it was a prank, he told the man on the phone to knock it off. A young assistant prosecutor named Michael Misner is called to the house that night. He will go home afterward and take his clothes off in the hallway, unwilling to carry them into his own apartment because the stench has gotten into them.
[11:07]
Investigator or Expert Commentator
The most telling thing about it was the odor. The only thing I can describe is the smell of death.
[11:14]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Here is what the police can see standing in that ballroom. Nothing about the room suggests a robbery. The house is sparsely decorated, but full of nice things. And none of it has been touched. There is no sign that a stranger forced his way in. They can see from the care that was taken that whoever did this was not in a hurry, whatever his state of mind. The scene shows planning, order and control. The bodies have been laid out, they have been covered, they have been arranged. Much of the blood has been wiped up, though a dark trail of it still runs back across the floor. Down in the kitchen, the breakfast dishes have been washed and stacked to dry. A few bananas have blackened on the counter. Whoever did this killed five people, then tidied up. Charlie Haller is one of the first Westfield officers into Breeze Knoll. Twenty years later, he talks to CBS News.
[12:13]
Officer Charlie Haller
He cleaned up a lot of the blood and had bags with bloody towels and rags. That's one thing you never forget something like that you never think would happen or you'd come upon. And it stuck with me for a long time.
[12:27]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Whoever did this is not in the house. Of the six people who live inside this mansion, five are dead. The sixth, the husband, the father, a 46 year old accountant, is nowhere to be found. His name is John Emil List. For a few hours, that leaves an obvious question. Is John List a sixth victim, taken somewhere else? The answer's no. In the first floor study, the police open a filing cabinet drawer with a label on it that reads simply guns and ammo. Inside are two handguns that have been fired. Beside them, a long letter. John List is the author. Moran reads it then and there in the study on his feet with the bodies still about him. By the time he has finished reading, he is no longer searching for a missing man. He is now searching for a killer. The man who did this is not a victim. He is not dead and he is not lost. He is a murderer who killed his wife, mother and his three children and walked out of his own house. He had also made sure to give himself time. Before he left, John List had taken a few quiet, careful steps to make sure no one would be coming looking too soon. Each was the sort of small errand a careful father might run before a family trip. Each helped buy him another quiet day. By the time Ed Iliano finally climbs into that house, John List is long gone. So who is he? This is the part of the story of which the town cannot make sense because the people think they know John List. Nothing about the man they think they know fits the carnage he left behind. He's an accountant, a certified public accountant, precise and quiet and almost invisible. He's a churchgoer, a devout Lutheran, the kind who teaches Sunday school and helps run the Cub Scout pack to which his sons belong. Parents in the congregation are glad to have him looking after their children. He's exactly the sort of steady, seemingly God fearing man any parent would choose to mentor one's son. He is unfailingly polite. He doesn't drink, he doesn't curse. He rarely raises his voice. Timothy Benford, a writer who spent years on this case interviewing nearly everyone in it, would put the paradox this way.
[14:55]
Detective or Case Expert
He was a deeply religious man, introverted, soft spoken, a gentleman, the kind of person you would not mind having as a next door neighbor. And this, the whole family was like that.
[15:06]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
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[16:09]
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[16:40]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Mostly, what people remember about John List is the coat and tie. List wore a suit the way other men wore skin. He wore one to church, to work, to the most ordinary chores of a summer Saturday. The parts of a life where no other man on the block was wearing anything of the kind. Years later, John Walsh would describe him on national television in exactly those terms.
[17:04]
Interviewee or Police Official
List is described as a quiet, soft
[17:07]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
spoken man, the kind who wears a shirt and tie to mow the lawn. A neighbor who watched him run Cub Scout events remembered him barking orders and, in the neighbor's words, marching the children in like little Prussian soldiers. A tinhorn tyrant, the man called him. Then in the next breath, the same neighbor said that in every other way, John List was a complete gentleman. The Old World kind, that is. The man Westfield knew, prim, rigid, trustworthy and utterly harmless, the last man on the block you would look at twice. He had always been this way. Years later, when his face went out on a wanted flyer and turned up in the papers, people who had gone to high school with John List would have to pull their old yearbooks down off the shelf to place him at all. He was there, in the class of 1943, an honor student, but almost no one could summon a single memory of of him. He was the boy, one classmate said, who blended into the scenery that same forgettable quality, the thing no one could ever quite put a finger on would turn out to be a great blessing to John List. His victims were not so lucky. His wife is Helen. She is 46 when John takes her life. Years earlier she had been vivacious and striking a young war widow when John married her, a woman the neighbors said was someone who liked to laugh and to dance back then. By the time of her death, that woman has all but disappeared. Helen is sick with something the family never says out loud. It's syphilis, caught years ago from her first husband, and by 1971 it has reached the late stage that goes after the brain. It causes her mind to atrophy, a little more each year and there is no cure coming. She drinks, which the doctors have warned her will only speed the disease along, and it does. She drifts in and out of lucidity. Most days she does not come downstairs at all. By the day of her death, many of the people on Hillside Avenue have not laid eyes on Helen List in a very long time. Her own children have learned to tell their friends that Mom's just resting. A dying woman upstairs in a bathrobe in one of the finest houses in Westfield, while below her the dishes get washed, the lawn gets mowed, and the family goes on looking from the street like the picture of an ordinary life. John List's mother is Alma. She's 84, and she lives at the top of the house in the third floor apartment, the one with the little kitchen where her toast is still butterless in the toaster. She put up the money that bought this mansion, and part of the deal was that she would always have A place in it she keeps mostly to the apartment's three rooms, a long way from the Michigan town where she spent nearly her whole life and knew everyone. In private letters, Alma confesses to old friends how isolated and miserable she has become in Westfield. Then There are the three children. Patricia is 16, Pat to her family, she is the aspiring actress, the one her friends describe as the girl with the flowers in her hair. In the last weeks of her life, Patricia is the understudy for the part of Blanche dubois in a community production of A Streetcar Named Desire. She memorizes not just her own lines as Blanche, but the entire play, every part which she would whisper to herself late at night after the house had gone quiet. Working through a script she is sure will take her somewhere. One of the young actors who shared a stage with Patricia Barry Cohen remembers to News 12 Connecticut exactly who she was.
[20:58]
Barry Cohen (Actor/Acquaintance of Patricia)
Very proud, very self assured and beautiful, really way beyond her years. At 16, she had more and more pride and she was kind of haughty. You know, she'd toss her hair and she was. She was beautiful.
[21:14]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
15 year old Johnny is the family's athlete, big for his age and hot tempered. A soccer player away from his father. He is loose and animated, a joker. Nothing like the stiff, silent man of the house. Frederick Fred is 13, a baby. He is the gentle one, cherub faced with a slight lisp his big sister likes to tease him about. He covers games for his school paper with the hopes of being a sportswriter one day. The two boys are boy Scouts, which is the reason there are Boy Scout sleeping bags in the house. More than anything else, they are each other's best friends. They are also devoted New York Mets fans. On the wall over one of their beds, taped up is a homemade banner reading Lets go Metz. Those are the people inside the tidy home with the music playing, a dying wife the neighbors no longer saw, a homesick old woman at the top of the stairs, a daughter whispering a theater script at night, and two brothers who were each other's whole world. They are buried out of Redeemer Lutheran, the family's own church, on a gray Saturday in December. There are five caskets, more than three dozen pallbearers, a great many of them teenagers. Patricia's friends from the drama group, the boys, friends from school, children carrying the coffins of other children, unable to look at one another as they do it. Hundreds more stand outside in the cold, listening to the service on loudspeakers. Afterward, the grandmother, Alma is sent home to Michigan to be buried among people she actually knew. The manhunt for John List starts big and goes nowhere. The murder of an entire family in a New Jersey mansion is national news, and for a while, the whole nation does pay attention. His face goes out on FBI wanted posters, into police stations and pharmacies across the country, describing him, among other things, as reportedly a neat dresser. The bureau takes the case because a killer who has crossed a state line is federal business. Detectives in Westfield build a theory around the kind of man they believe he is, Someone so bound to his church and his routines that sooner or later he will have to surface at some Lutheran church in some quiet town. They settle in to wait for it for years afterward. Every so often, on the anniversaries, the police go back to that same cemetery and sit near the family grave in case John List cannot help himself, in case he comes back to stand over those he killed. But John List does not come back. He does not surface at all. He's like a ghost. Weeks pass, then months, then years, and John List simply is nowhere to be found. The tidy house on Hillside Avenue stands empty and morose. Less than a year later, it burns to the ground, the great stained glass skylight and all investigators never officially determine the fire's cause. The case never closes, but it recedes off the front page, out of the national news, out of people's daily thoughts, except a handful of detectives who cannot let it go. Westfield tries to move on. In a filing cabinet at police headquarters, the case of the accountant who murdered his family sits open unsolved, year after year after year. Detective Jeff Hummel, who takes over the cold case file years later and goes through it page by page, sums up where the search stood.
[25:04]
Investigator or Expert Commentator
Law enforcement itself were somewhat flummoxed because they didn't know where he was or whether he was still alive or whether he was dead. And I took the position that you deal with evidence and facts. And since no evidence surfaced to the contrary that he had died, I assumed he was alive. John List had just disappeared.
[25:27]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Inside the homicide squad squad, the years of nothing turn into a grim running joke. No matter how cold the case got, officers like Frank Maranca tell Bill Curtis they never forgot it.
[25:39]
Detective or Case Expert
We would go on vacation, and periodically we would send a postcard back to the homicide squad while on vacation saying, having a wonderful time. Wish you were here, and sign it John List. So it was kind of a joke in the office.
[25:54]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
The man who would create America's most wanted, John Walsh, has a blunt answer for why the accountant was never caught by the people whose job it was to catch Him?
[26:04]
Interviewee or Police Official
You think the local cops had the resources to get him? No. You think the mighty FBI, with 6,000 FBI agents looking for him, got him? No, I think he'd still be out there. I think it took the public.
[26:16]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Now come forward with me from the murders in 1971 all the way to 1988. It is a bright, ordinary day in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, thousands of miles away from Westfield, New Jersey. In a quiet neighborhood, a mild, bespectacled accountant is loading cardboard boxes into a used Ford, getting ready to drive across the country to a new job and a new life in Richmond, Virginia. He is in his 60s now. He wears glasses and has a receding hairline and, of course, a coat and tie. His neighbors think he is one of the most decent, albeit forgettable, men they have ever met. His name, everyone here is quite sure, is Bob Clark. For most of two decades, Bob Clark has been the most unremarkable man in the world. A cpa, a churchgoer, a Lutheran. He is polite. He is punctual. He wears a coat and tie. If that is starting to sound familiar, it should. John List built himself the same life over again, almost detail for detail, the respectable, churchgoing coat and tie existence he had before the ballroom. He did not need a disguise or a new face. The old one had never been memorable. The first place in the doorway behind him in Colorado is his wife. Her name is Dolores. They were married a few years back in the mid-80s, and she loves him. She knows Bob as a quiet, religious widower who lost his first wife to illness. She has no idea that almost everything he has told her about his past is a lie. Years later, after the whole country knows, Dolores will speak to CBS News of the man she married and the only way she ever knew him. I have never known Robert to be anything but a sweet and gentle man of good character. She kisses him goodbye and watches him back the Ford down the driveway off to set up their new life out east. She has no idea who is behind that wheel. The gentle, churchgoing accountant with a symphony playing laying on the tape deck, murdered his own mother, his wife and their three children in a New Jersey mansion more than 16 years ago. He left four of their corpses lying in the ballroom and walked out. He has been a fugitive ever since. Bob Clark is John List and he has gotten away with his crimes. Next time on MK Confidential. Before he was Bob Clark and before the ballroom, he was a shy, devout, neatly dressed boy from a small town in Michigan who read the Bible with his mother every night. We go back to the beginning to find out how that boy became a man who in his last days in that house, sat his three children down and asked each of them whether they would rather be buried or cremated than Matilda ridiculously murdered them all.
[29:31]
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Summary6 min read

The Megyn Kelly Show

Episode: The Annihilator: A Most Forgettable Man — Ep. 1 | MK Confidential

Date: August 11, 2026

Episode Overview

This gripping launch of the "MK Confidential" investigative series, hosted by Megyn Kelly, dives into the chilling true story of John List—an outwardly unremarkable, deeply religious accountant who, in 1971, slaughtered his entire family in their Victorian Westfield, New Jersey home and vanished without a trace. Episode 1 meticulously reconstructs the events leading to the discovery of the murders, explores the secret world behind the List family’s façade, and examines how List became one of America’s most infamous fugitives—so ordinary he could seemingly disappear in plain sight.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Night of Discovery

[01:00 – 06:19]

On December 7, 1971, Ed Iliano, a drama teacher and military veteran, finally enters the eerie List mansion, "Breeze Knoll," after weeks of worry about his missing student, Patricia List.
Police join him after a neighbor reports a strange car. Officer George Selesnik and Ed enter through an unlocked window and immediately sense something’s wrong: a pervasive smell, Wagner’s orchestral music blaring on the intercom, and unsettling domestic details, such as fish tanks—one with fish floating dead and the other with its feeder still running.
They find four bodies in the ballroom, arranged on Boy Scout sleeping bags to form a cross: Helen (the wife) and her three teenage children, all still in their winter coats. Upstairs, the fifth body is alma, the 84-year-old grandmother.

Notable Quote

"[Patricia] told him her father was going to kill her. Not rhetorically and not in some vague way... she and her two younger brothers would be killed. Patricia is not a girl given to hysterics. She said it the way a person reports a fact." — Megyn Kelly [02:36]

The Crime Scene and Immediate Aftermath

[06:19 – 12:26]

Despite the carnage, the house is meticulously tidy; breakfast dishes are washed and stacked, fruit is left out, and much of the blood is wiped up.
The killer, John List, is conspicuously absent.
Police Chief James Moran and his team are shaken by the grim, orderly scene and the persistent, sinister Wagner soundtrack.
A fired handgun and a long explanatory letter from John List are found in the study, removing any doubt about List’s guilt or fate.

Notable Quotes

"The unnerving part of the whole situation was that there was music playing in the house... almost like you would hear if you went to a funeral parlor." — Detective/Case Expert [09:39]

"He cleaned up a lot of the blood and had bags with bloody towels and rags. That’s... something you never forget... it stuck with me for a long time." — Officer Charlie Haller [12:12]

The Family Behind the Facade

[12:26 – 21:14]

John List is introduced as a "precise... almost invisible" CPA, churchgoer, Sunday school teacher, and Cub Scout leader. He wore a suit and tie everywhere, blending into the scenery.
Helen List, his wife, was once lively but had become reclusive and mentally ill, suffering late-stage syphilis contracted from her first husband.
Alma (mother) was isolated, unhappy, yet the financial backbone behind Breeze Knoll.
Patricia, the daughter, was an ambitious, proud teenage actress (16); Johnny (15) was the athletic, big-hearted son; Frederick (13) was a gentle, aspiring sportswriter.
This was a family both admired and pitied—each member nuanced, tragically relatable.

Notable Quotes

"He was a deeply religious man, introverted, soft spoken, a gentleman, the kind of person you would not mind having as a next door neighbor." — Detective or Case Expert [14:55]

"At 16, she had... more pride and she was kind of haughty. You know, she’d toss her hair and she was. She was beautiful." — Barry Cohen, Patricia’s acquaintance [20:57]

The Investigation and Search

[21:14 – 26:16]

The murders rock Westfield, a town virtually untouched by violent crime. The case quickly becomes national news.
The FBI distributes wanted posters describing List as “reportedly a neat dresser.” Police theorize he’ll eventually show up at a Lutheran church—but he remains a ghost.
Investigators become frustrated and sardonic as years pass. List's forgettable persona helps him evade capture.

Notable Quotes

"Law enforcement itself were somewhat flummoxed because they didn't know where he was or whether he was still alive or whether he was dead... I assumed he was alive." — Investigator Jeff Hummel [25:03]

"We would go on vacation, and... send a postcard back to the homicide squad... ‘Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here,’ and sign it John List. So it was kind of a joke in the office." — Detective Frank Maranca [25:38]

"You think the local cops had the resources to get him? No. You think the mighty FBI... got him? No... I think it took the public." — John Walsh [26:04]

An Unremarkable Afterlife: John List as Bob Clark

[26:16 – 29:30]

In 1988, more than 16 years after the murders, List is living as Bob Clark in suburban Denver, ready to move for a new job in Virginia.
He’s again a CPA, again a Lutheran, again unremarkable; his new wife knows nothing of his past.
The episode closes by foreshadowing further investigation into List’s childhood, foreshadowing Episode 2.

Notable Quotes

"I have never known Robert to be anything but a sweet and gentle man of good character." — Dolores, John List’s second wife [28:42]

Highlighted Timestamps

[01:00] — Opening scene: Ed Iliano arrives at the List house
[03:15] — Police involvement begins
[04:30] — Discovery of the bodies; the haunting Wagner soundtrack
[09:39] — Officers describe the chilling music ("funeral parlor")
[12:12] — Officer Charlie Haller recalls the meticulous cleanup
[14:55] — Case expert on John List’s unremarkable persona
[20:57] — Barry Cohen describes Patricia List
[25:03] — Investigator Jeff Hummel discusses the cold case
[25:38] — Detectives joke about List as a fugitive
[26:04] — John Walsh on law enforcement’s failure to apprehend List
[28:42] — Dolores Clark (second wife) describes John List (as Bob Clark)
[29:25] — Foreshadowing next episode: List’s childhood

Memorable Moments and Quotes

Eerie Forecast

"[Patricia] told him her father was going to kill her... she and her two younger brothers would be killed..." — Megyn Kelly [02:36]

The Haunting Atmosphere

"Music... like you would hear if you went to a funeral parlor." — Detective/Case Expert [09:39]

John List’s Disappearing Act

"He was a deeply religious man, introverted, soft spoken, a gentleman... the kind of person you would not mind having as a next door neighbor." — Detective or Case Expert [14:55]

Black Humor Amid Despair

"Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here. — John List." — Detective Frank Maranca, describing department jokes [25:38]

Conclusion

Episode 1 of "The Annihilator" is a painstaking, atmospheric reconstruction of both an unimaginable crime and the person behind it—unassuming, ordinary, and, ultimately, vanishing. In pairing haunting firsthand memories with careful reporting, Megyn Kelly sets the stage for an unforgettable, multi-episode saga about evil hiding in plain sight.

Next episode preview:
The story rewinds to List’s childhood and formative years, probing how an introverted, god-fearing boy became a family annihilator—a "forgettable" man behind an unforgettable crime.

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Transcript35 lines

[00:00]
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Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
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[01:01]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
It is the night of December 7, 1971. A drama teacher and military veteran named Ed Iliano turns his car up a long, winding driveway in Westfield, New Jersey, and puts the vehicle in park. Finally, he's making himself do the thing he's been putting off. He leaves his headlights on and pointed at the house. It is a stately Victorian mansion, 19 rooms, dark green shutters set back on more than an acre behind tall hedges. The family that lives here calls it Breeze Knoll. Night after night, Ed has driven past it on his way home, slowing at the bottom of the hill, telling himself everything's fine, but it has not looked fine for a while. The lights have been burning in every window day and night, and lately they have begun going out one by one as the bulbs die. He has knocked on the front door and gotten no answer. He has rung the bell. He even tests the door handle the lock holds, sparing him for the moment from deciding whether to enter alone. He has gone to the Westfield police twice, and both times has been sent away because Ed cannot tell them exactly what crime he believes has occurred. All he has is a feeling and a promise he once made to a frightened girl. The girl is one of his drama students. Her name is Patricia list. She is 16, she sings in the church choir, and she wants more than anything in the world, to be an actress. Days before she disappeared, sitting in Ed's parked car late at night, Patricia told him her father was going to kill her. Not rhetorically and not in some vague way, but that she and her two Younger brothers would be killed. Patricia is not a girl given to hysterics. She said it the way a person reports a fact Ed told her. No one is going to kill you. Patricia looked at him like he was a fool. It wasn't just the drama teacher to whom she had said it. She had predicted the same to a friend her own age, a girl who has never been able to shake it.
[03:16]
Interviewee or Police Official
At some point she had told me that she knew her father wanted her and her brother's dead.
[03:22]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
A neighbor has already called the Westfield police about the strange car in the driveway. Two patrolmen pull up within minutes, and after they hear Ed's concerns, one of them, an officer named George Solesnik, walks the outside of the house. On the side porch, he finds a tall ground floor window, unlocked. He and Ed push it up and climb over the sill into a dark dining room. The first thing they notice is the smell. The second thing is the music. Somewhere in the house, music is playing. It is loud and orchestral and grand. It seems to be coming from everywhere at once, piped through an intercom into every room. It is a radio tuned to a New York classical station, the way it is always is in this house, and tonight, by chance, it is playing Wagner, a composer known for his anti Semitic writings, whose opinions and music will later become a soundtrack for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It is an ominous sound. Inside, an unsettling scene. By the window stand two fish tanks. In one, the fish are dead, drifting at the surface. The second tank runs on a timer that keeps dropping food. And those fish are still alive. Ed knows this house. He leads the officer across the center hall, past the two curving staircases, to a heavy drape pulled across the entrance to the ballroom. Selesnik shines his flashlight through the gap in the drapes. The beam settles on a child's face. There are four bodies on the ballroom floor, laid out side by side, still in their winter coats. They are lying on sleeping bags. Boy Scout sleeping bags, forest green, with the words Be Prepared printed on the lining. Someone has arranged them so the edges of the bags all meet, so that from a few feet away, the four bodies together make the shape of a cross. A woman and three teenagers. One of the woman's arms has been laid across one of the boy's shoulders. Evil has been here. Ed Iliano runs to the front door and throws it open, and the rest of the officers come in from the porch. Someone finds the switch and turns on the lights. Upstairs, on the third floor, in a hallway outside a small apartment with A slice of toast still in the toaster. The officers will find the fifth body. An 84 year old woman, the grandmother of the house. Everyone who lives here is accounted for. Everyone but one. The father John list is gone. I'm Megyn Kelly and this is MK Confidential. AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts. And criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you.
[06:19]
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[06:20]
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[06:54]
Interviewee or Police Official
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[06:54]
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[07:21]
Investigator or Expert Commentator
Or.
[07:21]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Or use the link in the description. Westfield, New Jersey is not the kind of place this happens in. 1971, it is a town of 33,000 people. Today it has the exact same population. It is 25 miles southwest of Manhattan with grand old homes and a downtown so charming that ad agencies from the city drive out to film it as a stand in for small town America. It is a place of church suppers and Cub Scout dens, of teenagers who spend their Saturdays downtown at the Rialto movie house and the sub shop and the benches around Mindawaskin Park. The kind of town where people still leave the back door unlocked because nothing has ever happened here that would make them stop. It has 14 churches, 13 schools and 51 police officers. And it has not had a murder in eight years. Tonight, it has five in one house. Not just any house either. Breeze Knoll is a distinctly impressive home on one of Westfield's grandest streets. A 19 room Victorian with a real ballroom and a great stained glass skylight towering over it. The kind of kaleidoscope you would expect to find atop a church from the sidewalk it looks like the pot of gold at the end of the American rainbow. The steady father, the pretty wife, the well mannered children, the good street address. That is the picture Westfield has of the family inside. The police are going to unearth the reality behind that image. The police chief is a man named James Moran. He is at headquarters that evening supervising promotion tests when the call comes in from the patrolman at the scene. The officer on the line sounds panicked. Nothing like himself. He tells Moran, chief, there's been a mass murder. There are dead bodies all over the place. Moran cannot believe his ears. Westfield has not had a murder in eight years and now this man is telling him there are five. He gets in his car and drives. When he arrives, the ground floor of the mansion is already filling up with police. And Wagner still, still plays over the intercom. Officer Zalesnik cannot shake the sound of it.
[09:39]
Detective or Case Expert
The unnerving part of the whole situation was that there was music playing in the house. And it was a very classical, serene, almost like you would hear if you went to funeral power.
[09:50]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Moran, who will later say that he is no classical music expert, makes the same comparison. He remembers the music echoing through room after room. It is not until later that someone checks the radio listings and realizes what the family's classical station had been broadcasting at the exact hour the police found the bodies. An orchestral piece from Wagner's Twilight of the Gods. Somebody finally locates the radio in a hall closet and shuts it off. The chief walks into the ballroom and stands over the bodies. He sees the three of them are children. The men already inside are not rookies. Some of them have given 20 years to this quiet suburban force. And more than one of them will be unable to shake the next few minutes. For the rest of his life, the smell of decay in the icy cold rooms. The small bodies laid out behind the heavy drape across the ballroom. One of the first officers to take the call had been so sure it was a prank, he told the man on the phone to knock it off. A young assistant prosecutor named Michael Misner is called to the house that night. He will go home afterward and take his clothes off in the hallway, unwilling to carry them into his own apartment because the stench has gotten into them.
[11:07]
Investigator or Expert Commentator
The most telling thing about it was the odor. The only thing I can describe is the smell of death.
[11:14]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Here is what the police can see standing in that ballroom. Nothing about the room suggests a robbery. The house is sparsely decorated, but full of nice things. And none of it has been touched. There is no sign that a stranger forced his way in. They can see from the care that was taken that whoever did this was not in a hurry, whatever his state of mind. The scene shows planning, order and control. The bodies have been laid out, they have been covered, they have been arranged. Much of the blood has been wiped up, though a dark trail of it still runs back across the floor. Down in the kitchen, the breakfast dishes have been washed and stacked to dry. A few bananas have blackened on the counter. Whoever did this killed five people, then tidied up. Charlie Haller is one of the first Westfield officers into Breeze Knoll. Twenty years later, he talks to CBS News.
[12:13]
Officer Charlie Haller
He cleaned up a lot of the blood and had bags with bloody towels and rags. That's one thing you never forget something like that you never think would happen or you'd come upon. And it stuck with me for a long time.
[12:27]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Whoever did this is not in the house. Of the six people who live inside this mansion, five are dead. The sixth, the husband, the father, a 46 year old accountant, is nowhere to be found. His name is John Emil List. For a few hours, that leaves an obvious question. Is John List a sixth victim, taken somewhere else? The answer's no. In the first floor study, the police open a filing cabinet drawer with a label on it that reads simply guns and ammo. Inside are two handguns that have been fired. Beside them, a long letter. John List is the author. Moran reads it then and there in the study on his feet with the bodies still about him. By the time he has finished reading, he is no longer searching for a missing man. He is now searching for a killer. The man who did this is not a victim. He is not dead and he is not lost. He is a murderer who killed his wife, mother and his three children and walked out of his own house. He had also made sure to give himself time. Before he left, John List had taken a few quiet, careful steps to make sure no one would be coming looking too soon. Each was the sort of small errand a careful father might run before a family trip. Each helped buy him another quiet day. By the time Ed Iliano finally climbs into that house, John List is long gone. So who is he? This is the part of the story of which the town cannot make sense because the people think they know John List. Nothing about the man they think they know fits the carnage he left behind. He's an accountant, a certified public accountant, precise and quiet and almost invisible. He's a churchgoer, a devout Lutheran, the kind who teaches Sunday school and helps run the Cub Scout pack to which his sons belong. Parents in the congregation are glad to have him looking after their children. He's exactly the sort of steady, seemingly God fearing man any parent would choose to mentor one's son. He is unfailingly polite. He doesn't drink, he doesn't curse. He rarely raises his voice. Timothy Benford, a writer who spent years on this case interviewing nearly everyone in it, would put the paradox this way.
[14:55]
Detective or Case Expert
He was a deeply religious man, introverted, soft spoken, a gentleman, the kind of person you would not mind having as a next door neighbor. And this, the whole family was like that.
[15:06]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
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[16:09]
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[16:40]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Mostly, what people remember about John List is the coat and tie. List wore a suit the way other men wore skin. He wore one to church, to work, to the most ordinary chores of a summer Saturday. The parts of a life where no other man on the block was wearing anything of the kind. Years later, John Walsh would describe him on national television in exactly those terms.
[17:04]
Interviewee or Police Official
List is described as a quiet, soft
[17:07]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
spoken man, the kind who wears a shirt and tie to mow the lawn. A neighbor who watched him run Cub Scout events remembered him barking orders and, in the neighbor's words, marching the children in like little Prussian soldiers. A tinhorn tyrant, the man called him. Then in the next breath, the same neighbor said that in every other way, John List was a complete gentleman. The Old World kind, that is. The man Westfield knew, prim, rigid, trustworthy and utterly harmless, the last man on the block you would look at twice. He had always been this way. Years later, when his face went out on a wanted flyer and turned up in the papers, people who had gone to high school with John List would have to pull their old yearbooks down off the shelf to place him at all. He was there, in the class of 1943, an honor student, but almost no one could summon a single memory of of him. He was the boy, one classmate said, who blended into the scenery that same forgettable quality, the thing no one could ever quite put a finger on would turn out to be a great blessing to John List. His victims were not so lucky. His wife is Helen. She is 46 when John takes her life. Years earlier she had been vivacious and striking a young war widow when John married her, a woman the neighbors said was someone who liked to laugh and to dance back then. By the time of her death, that woman has all but disappeared. Helen is sick with something the family never says out loud. It's syphilis, caught years ago from her first husband, and by 1971 it has reached the late stage that goes after the brain. It causes her mind to atrophy, a little more each year and there is no cure coming. She drinks, which the doctors have warned her will only speed the disease along, and it does. She drifts in and out of lucidity. Most days she does not come downstairs at all. By the day of her death, many of the people on Hillside Avenue have not laid eyes on Helen List in a very long time. Her own children have learned to tell their friends that Mom's just resting. A dying woman upstairs in a bathrobe in one of the finest houses in Westfield, while below her the dishes get washed, the lawn gets mowed, and the family goes on looking from the street like the picture of an ordinary life. John List's mother is Alma. She's 84, and she lives at the top of the house in the third floor apartment, the one with the little kitchen where her toast is still butterless in the toaster. She put up the money that bought this mansion, and part of the deal was that she would always have A place in it she keeps mostly to the apartment's three rooms, a long way from the Michigan town where she spent nearly her whole life and knew everyone. In private letters, Alma confesses to old friends how isolated and miserable she has become in Westfield. Then There are the three children. Patricia is 16, Pat to her family, she is the aspiring actress, the one her friends describe as the girl with the flowers in her hair. In the last weeks of her life, Patricia is the understudy for the part of Blanche dubois in a community production of A Streetcar Named Desire. She memorizes not just her own lines as Blanche, but the entire play, every part which she would whisper to herself late at night after the house had gone quiet. Working through a script she is sure will take her somewhere. One of the young actors who shared a stage with Patricia Barry Cohen remembers to News 12 Connecticut exactly who she was.
[20:58]
Barry Cohen (Actor/Acquaintance of Patricia)
Very proud, very self assured and beautiful, really way beyond her years. At 16, she had more and more pride and she was kind of haughty. You know, she'd toss her hair and she was. She was beautiful.
[21:14]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
15 year old Johnny is the family's athlete, big for his age and hot tempered. A soccer player away from his father. He is loose and animated, a joker. Nothing like the stiff, silent man of the house. Frederick Fred is 13, a baby. He is the gentle one, cherub faced with a slight lisp his big sister likes to tease him about. He covers games for his school paper with the hopes of being a sportswriter one day. The two boys are boy Scouts, which is the reason there are Boy Scout sleeping bags in the house. More than anything else, they are each other's best friends. They are also devoted New York Mets fans. On the wall over one of their beds, taped up is a homemade banner reading Lets go Metz. Those are the people inside the tidy home with the music playing, a dying wife the neighbors no longer saw, a homesick old woman at the top of the stairs, a daughter whispering a theater script at night, and two brothers who were each other's whole world. They are buried out of Redeemer Lutheran, the family's own church, on a gray Saturday in December. There are five caskets, more than three dozen pallbearers, a great many of them teenagers. Patricia's friends from the drama group, the boys, friends from school, children carrying the coffins of other children, unable to look at one another as they do it. Hundreds more stand outside in the cold, listening to the service on loudspeakers. Afterward, the grandmother, Alma is sent home to Michigan to be buried among people she actually knew. The manhunt for John List starts big and goes nowhere. The murder of an entire family in a New Jersey mansion is national news, and for a while, the whole nation does pay attention. His face goes out on FBI wanted posters, into police stations and pharmacies across the country, describing him, among other things, as reportedly a neat dresser. The bureau takes the case because a killer who has crossed a state line is federal business. Detectives in Westfield build a theory around the kind of man they believe he is, Someone so bound to his church and his routines that sooner or later he will have to surface at some Lutheran church in some quiet town. They settle in to wait for it for years afterward. Every so often, on the anniversaries, the police go back to that same cemetery and sit near the family grave in case John List cannot help himself, in case he comes back to stand over those he killed. But John List does not come back. He does not surface at all. He's like a ghost. Weeks pass, then months, then years, and John List simply is nowhere to be found. The tidy house on Hillside Avenue stands empty and morose. Less than a year later, it burns to the ground, the great stained glass skylight and all investigators never officially determine the fire's cause. The case never closes, but it recedes off the front page, out of the national news, out of people's daily thoughts, except a handful of detectives who cannot let it go. Westfield tries to move on. In a filing cabinet at police headquarters, the case of the accountant who murdered his family sits open unsolved, year after year after year. Detective Jeff Hummel, who takes over the cold case file years later and goes through it page by page, sums up where the search stood.
[25:04]
Investigator or Expert Commentator
Law enforcement itself were somewhat flummoxed because they didn't know where he was or whether he was still alive or whether he was dead. And I took the position that you deal with evidence and facts. And since no evidence surfaced to the contrary that he had died, I assumed he was alive. John List had just disappeared.
[25:27]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Inside the homicide squad squad, the years of nothing turn into a grim running joke. No matter how cold the case got, officers like Frank Maranca tell Bill Curtis they never forgot it.
[25:39]
Detective or Case Expert
We would go on vacation, and periodically we would send a postcard back to the homicide squad while on vacation saying, having a wonderful time. Wish you were here, and sign it John List. So it was kind of a joke in the office.
[25:54]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
The man who would create America's most wanted, John Walsh, has a blunt answer for why the accountant was never caught by the people whose job it was to catch Him?
[26:04]
Interviewee or Police Official
You think the local cops had the resources to get him? No. You think the mighty FBI, with 6,000 FBI agents looking for him, got him? No, I think he'd still be out there. I think it took the public.
[26:16]
Narrator (Megyn Kelly)
Now come forward with me from the murders in 1971 all the way to 1988. It is a bright, ordinary day in the suburbs of Denver, Colorado, thousands of miles away from Westfield, New Jersey. In a quiet neighborhood, a mild, bespectacled accountant is loading cardboard boxes into a used Ford, getting ready to drive across the country to a new job and a new life in Richmond, Virginia. He is in his 60s now. He wears glasses and has a receding hairline and, of course, a coat and tie. His neighbors think he is one of the most decent, albeit forgettable, men they have ever met. His name, everyone here is quite sure, is Bob Clark. For most of two decades, Bob Clark has been the most unremarkable man in the world. A cpa, a churchgoer, a Lutheran. He is polite. He is punctual. He wears a coat and tie. If that is starting to sound familiar, it should. John List built himself the same life over again, almost detail for detail, the respectable, churchgoing coat and tie existence he had before the ballroom. He did not need a disguise or a new face. The old one had never been memorable. The first place in the doorway behind him in Colorado is his wife. Her name is Dolores. They were married a few years back in the mid-80s, and she loves him. She knows Bob as a quiet, religious widower who lost his first wife to illness. She has no idea that almost everything he has told her about his past is a lie. Years later, after the whole country knows, Dolores will speak to CBS News of the man she married and the only way she ever knew him. I have never known Robert to be anything but a sweet and gentle man of good character. She kisses him goodbye and watches him back the Ford down the driveway off to set up their new life out east. She has no idea who is behind that wheel. The gentle, churchgoing accountant with a symphony playing laying on the tape deck, murdered his own mother, his wife and their three children in a New Jersey mansion more than 16 years ago. He left four of their corpses lying in the ballroom and walked out. He has been a fugitive ever since. Bob Clark is John List and he has gotten away with his crimes. Next time on MK Confidential. Before he was Bob Clark and before the ballroom, he was a shy, devout, neatly dressed boy from a small town in Michigan who read the Bible with his mother every night. We go back to the beginning to find out how that boy became a man who in his last days in that house, sat his three children down and asked each of them whether they would rather be buried or cremated than Matilda ridiculously murdered them all.
[29:31]
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