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[00:05]
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[00:31]
John List
for moi.
[00:33]
Megyn Kelly
Claude, you can talk.
[00:35]
Nancy (Pretty Litter Advertiser)
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[00:49]
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[00:55]
Nancy (Pretty Litter Advertiser)
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[01:01]
Megyn Kelly
it is Thursday, June 1, 1989. Three men walk into a small suite of accounting offices in Richmond, Virginia. Two of the officers right off the elevator and one up the stairs. The receptionist, Sandra Silberman, takes note walk. Ins do not usually arrive in threes. She hangs up the phone. One of the men flashes an FBI badge. They are here to speak with Robert Clark. The bookkeeper who comes out to meet them is 63, balding, bespectacled and entirely unalarmed. The man carries himself, according to one of the FBI men, like a schoolteacher waiting for a student to explain himself. Special Agent Kevin August starts to question him. Gently, he asks the man's name. Robert Clark. He asks, questions Clark, whether he has a scar behind his ear, though August can plainly see that he does, and the man turns his head slightly to show it. He asks whether Clark has had an operation for a hernia, was born in Michigan, and works as an accountant. Clark answers all three in the affirmative. There's a pause, and then August asks the question that he has been waiting nearly 18 years for someone to ask out loud. Are you John Emil List? No, clark answers without hesitation and without emotion. August will think about that afterward, that an innocent man would have said, who in the hell is John Emil List? The agents pat Clark down. He puts his arms out and leans against the wall without a word of objection, and when it is finished, August tries once more.
[02:43]
FBI Agent / Interviewer
I approached him and I asked him. I said, are you Mr. Clark? And he said yes. And then I said, are you John List? And he says, no, I'm Robert P. Clark.
[02:54]
Megyn Kelly
Reporters would later put the man's exact words as quote, I know who I am. I'm Robert Clark. Clark seems to force a little indignation into his voice when he says it. Across the room, the receptionist looks away because Bob Clark is giving her the mournful look of a man who believes he has been betrayed. She notices red blotches breaking out across his face. The blotches are the only thing about him that reveal his panic. I'm Megyn Kelly and this is MK Confidential. Did you know three out of four
[03:31]
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[03:37]
Megyn Kelly
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Pretty Litter / Aqua Tru / Lean Advertiser
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[03:47]
Megyn Kelly
little to remove most contaminants.
[03:49]
Pretty Litter / Aqua Tru / Lean Advertiser
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[04:00]
Megyn Kelly
chlorine, lead and more.
[04:01]
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[04:12]
Megyn Kelly
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[04:14]
Pretty Litter / Aqua Tru / Lean Advertiser
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[04:27]
Megyn Kelly
Tru is spelled T R U
[04:30]
FBI Agent / Interviewer
right
[04:31]
Pretty Litter / Aqua Tru / Lean Advertiser
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[04:49]
Megyn Kelly
The agents take Robert Clark to the Henrico County Jail and roll his inked fingers onto a card. Clark's fingerprints promptly end the mystery. The prints match the ones John List left on his application for a New Jersey firearms permit in Westfield on October 16, 1971, 24 days before he shot and killed his entire family. The mastoidectomy scar behind his right ear matches the hernia scars match. Every physical marker on the FBI flyer that has been in circulation for nearly 18 years matches the man before them. And Clark still says no.
[05:27]
John Walsh
He just absolutely denied it. It's not me. I don't know what you're talking about. Even after he was confronted with the fact that his fingerprints were a match, he still was like, it's not me. My name is Robert P. Clark.
[05:40]
Megyn Kelly
In Brandermill, a housing development set back among oak and pine outside Richmond, Virginia, a woman is learning exactly who she married. Dolores Clark tries to see her husband in custody on the afternoon of his arrest and is turned away. She comes back at noon the next day with the pastor of their Lutheran church, the Reverend Joseph Vogt. And this time they are allowed inside. Bob is being held in the isolation wing behind the frosted glass, instead of bars, the minister is allowed into his cell. Dolores has to stand at the glass and speak to her husband through a telephone. She can hear that he is crying. Vogt tells reporters outside that the prisoner looks shaken and has not slept. Then the pastor says something curious. There seems to be some relief about the man inside, he says. Whether that is reflective of the fact that John List no longer has to put up a front, he cannot say for sure. Dolores gives the press one written statement and says it will be her last word on the matter. A family friend named Wally Parsons suggests they take it to the Richmond News Leader first to get ahead of the out of town press. And when he speaks to the reporter, he adds an assurance of his own. You can be 100% absolutely sure that this lady knows absolutely nothing about anything in Bob's past. In the statement, Dolores writes, quote, this is not the man I know. The man I know is kind, loving, a devoted husband and dear friend. She describes Bob as a man of faith. And then at the end she writes, quote, I find this hard to believe. I hope somehow this is not true. And if it is, he was so stressed out that something snapped. I am devoted to him. I hope that somehow God will see us through this. Dolores does not attend her husband's trial and no reporter ever catches her visiting him in prison. She has married a widower in 1985 and never once asked to see a photograph of his first wife. He fights extradition to New Jersey from a Virginia cell as Robert Clark and loses. At the end of June, he is flown to Newark where one investigator remembers every every news outlet in the world waiting on the tarmac to watch.
[08:04]
Prosecutor / Legal Expert
There was a extremely high profile arrest and transportation.
[08:11]
John List
Coming off the plane was a little
[08:12]
Megyn Kelly
scary, as every news media in the world must have been. At Newark Airport, Robert P. Clark never surrenders. He simply stops existing in a flurry of pre trial motions that could only be filed on behalf of of the other man, John List. And nobody mentions Bob Clark again. He lets the name and the invented life behind it slip away as unceremoniously as it began on a form in a Denver Social Security office nearly two decades before. On the evening of November 7, 1989, two days before the 18th anniversary of the murders, John List is brought into a reception room at the Union County Jail and to meet the only relatives he has left. Jean Seifert. Jean, spelled with a J like blue jeans, is Helen's sister, John's sister in law. This is the first time John and Jean have seen each other since John shot his then wife Helen in the Face in 1971. Gene and her husband, also Jean, though his is with a G, have flown in from Oklahoma at the invitation of Elijah Miller, the assistant public defender assigned to represent List. Since the day of his arrest, Jean, the sister, has been determined to look John List in the face and put to him one word why she does not sleep the night before at the courthouse. She asks her husband what happens if she sees John and passes out. Her spouse promises to pick her up off the floor. John comes in at around 67 and crosses the room in the same bouncy, awkward walk Jean remembers 18 years later. She recognizes him instantly. The slightly lopsided face now heavy with jowls, the odd way he tilts his head when he stands in front of someone. He is holding a small stack of papers and does not know what to do with them, so he sets them on the table and stares at the floor. She says, how are you, John? He nods stiffly. And then Jean Seifert does something that surprises her as much as it surprises him. She steps forward and hugs the man who murdered her sister. John puts his arms around her and lays his head on her shoulder, and when he lifts it, the top of her blouse is wet. Then he sees her husband and looks mortified. The husband reaches out and the two men shake hands without a word. Then the husband, too, hugs John. That, his wife will later say, gives John the shock of his life again. He cries. They talk for more than three hours in a small, windowless room on the third floor, the kind where inmates meet their lawyers, with John's lawyer, Elijah Miller, sitting in. But it's not a reunion. The Seiferts believe in mercy, but they also believe in accountability. And Helen's sister has waited 18 years to ask her question. Why John? He looks at her without any emotion at all. Because there was no other way. It is exactly what he wrote to her in 1971. Word for word. Jean pushes. Why was there no other way? Why are they meeting in a criminal court instead of a divorce court, for God's sake? It just had to be that way, he tells her. The subject has been closed since 1971, and John List is not reopening it for her. The brother in law has memorized a list of questions and he is not gentle with them. But John does not want to discuss the crime, and John has always known how to control a conversation. So the sister tries to provoke one with a question that has haunted Westfield for 18 years. She had found a small bag of marijuana when she cleaned out their eldest daughter Patty's room, and she asks John, did he know about Patty and the drugs? John seems genuinely surprised. No, he says, there were no drugs. Jeanne tells him she thinks he's wrong, and he doesn't argue. Jean asks about the witchcraft, the Ouija boards, the whispers that followed Patty through the last autumn. John says he has never known anything about it, and he's not particularly interested. Late in the conversation, once the hard questions have run out and the tension in the small room has eased some, John List asks the Seiferts about Brenda. Brenda Taylor is his dead wife's daughter from her first marriage, the stepchild John helped raise from the age of nine, the one child of Helen's he did not kill, and only because she had grown up and married and moved out years before he ever bought their dream home on the Hill Breeze Knoll. He is told he has step great grandchildren now, which apparently makes him happy. Jean Seifert flies home to Oklahoma with nothing. She has never once believed he was insane, not for a minute, which leaves her with the same question she came to Richmond with, and the same unsatisfactory answer. What Brenda, John's stepchild, makes of John's capture is not on the public record. She has said almost nothing since 1971. That fall, the FBI asks to attach her name to a public appeal meant to flush out her stepfather, a daughter's plea that reads, daddy, you are all I have left. Please call me. It is bait. It's not clear whether Brenda explicitly agrees, but the FBI does put out the statement. The last thing Brenda wants is for John List to answer. By her friend's account, Brenda is petrified, certain she is the only one of the family left and that he will come to kill her and her five children. And for a long time the FBI may suspect it too, because they watch her house. The trial of John List opens in Union County Superior court on Monday, April 2, 1990. Reporters line up for hours in advance. The trial has moved to a larger courtroom, and it is still not big enough. List does not dispute that he killed his family, but pleads not guilty by reason of mental defect. His defense attorney, Elijah Miller, contends that his client was gripped by a religious obsession which led him to believe he was saving his family by taking their lives. Miller hammers the religion angle, telling the jury his client was so locked into his own religion that once the plan was in his head to spare his family from his own failures or from what he perceived as their alleged hedonism, he could not step out of it. That's the defense. Not that he didn't do it, but that List killed with love and mercy in his heart. The prosecutor is an assistant Union County DA named Brian Gillet, who, as he tells it, is the only person in the office who did not ask for this case. He opens his case by reading aloud John List's five page letter to his pastor. The one sealed in a locked drawer of the file cabinet beside John's desk next to the two fired handguns, the murder weapons. One reporter describes Gillet's tone as cold, with traces of mockery. When Gillett reaches the line where List asks the pastor to pray for him, whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it, Gillett stops and looks along the jury box. Today he tells them the government intends to do its duty. The letter is the whole prosecution, every element the state has to prove the that the killings were willful, deliberate and premeditated is signed and dated in the defendant's own hand. The forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen Simring, spends four hours with List in a jail cell with a video camera rolling and finds a man who is unfailingly pleasant about the whole affair. Years later, he describes the conversation to American justice.
[16:17]
Prosecutor / Legal Expert
He was mild mannered, courteous, soft spoken, very precise and very exact. He also expressed no remorse and only superficial regret. He said essentially something that had to happen. It was unfortunate.
[16:37]
Megyn Kelly
Simring walks the jury through what List told him hour by hour, and the courtroom listens in absolute silence. He says List did not feel guilt or sadness at the loss of his family. Nor did John kill his family out of concern for the fate of their souls. The psychiatrist says that List shifts explanations depending on his needs. And at that moment, what John List needed was an acquittal.
[17:02]
Prosecutor / Legal Expert
He did not have a major mental illness. There was no psychiatric legal excuse either to excuse or to mitigate.
[17:10]
Megyn Kelly
Simring tells the jury John List believed suicide would land him in hell, so he spared himself and sent his family to heaven. Simran concludes on the stand, quote, he wanted grace in the hereafter, but he didn't want arrest. Yet. There's religious belief and there's religious hypocrisy. I think there's a fair amount of hypocrisy here. Everybody's talking about weight loss injections because the results can be so dramatic.
[17:38]
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[17:56]
Megyn Kelly
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[17:59]
Pretty Litter / Aqua Tru / Lean Advertiser
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[18:02]
Megyn Kelly
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[18:03]
Pretty Litter / Aqua Tru / Lean Advertiser
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[18:13]
Megyn Kelly
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[18:15]
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[18:37]
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[18:57]
Megyn Kelly
The assistant prosecutor, Eleanor Clark tells the jury no man could use religion to justify this carnage.
[19:05]
Juror or Court Observer
Well, I think no matter how religious you are, you realize that there's a little problem with this. I found this horrific through my tone of voice and the nature of my questions. I try to communicate this to the jurors.
[19:19]
Megyn Kelly
Elijah Miller calls a procession of Lutheran clergymen who had known John List across four decades in Kalamazoo, in Rochester, in Westfield. He needs them to tell the jury that this was a devout man whose religious fervor swallowed him whole. Instead, one after another, the clergy who taught John List his faith take the stand and dismantle John List's theology. Pastor Louis Grother led the lists in his Kalamazoo congregation in the late 50s. Prosecutor Clark asks him whether the Lutheran Church would frown on a man who killed his daughter to save her soul. The Lutheran Church and the scriptures, the pastor says, would frown upon anybody deliberately killing anybody. Defense attorney Miller calls the Rev. Edward Zareski, the family's minister outside Rochester from the years John worked at Xerox. He paints John as a bitter failure whose theology would never support murder. He recalls that John struggled at work, telling the court that Helen once said if John were half the man her former husband was, they wouldn't have the troubles they were having. The jury is starting to learn about John's simmering resentments. Then Miller asks about John's religion, and Reverend Szareski says that John's fundamentalist theology is fundamentally Flawed sin is still sin, he tells the court. Grace is available for the sinner, but sin is never justified, and Christians know that. He testifies that John's problem was that he knew doctrine, but he did not know faith. I think John did not trust God. John List could answer catechism questions at 15 without a stumble. He taught Sunday school. He kept the books at three different churches in different parts of the country. What he could not do across 50 years was hand a single problem to God and leave it there. Not the job, not the mortgage, his wife's illness, his daughter's future. He did what he always did with figures he didn't like. He didn't give it to God. He anointed himself as God. He decided when his children's souls were safe and closed their earthly accounts on a date of his own choosing. The last of the clergymen is the Reverend Alfred Shuttle, who served as chaplain to John's youth group at the University of Michigan. He describes John as faithful and of good character. Defense attorney Miller asks him about sin. Thou shalt not kill, the minister answers. Taking a life is certainly wrong. On cross examination, the prosecution asks Shipes whether there is a greatest sin, a sin above others. And in a courtroom where a man is on trial for murdering his family allegedly because he could not bear the shame of their lowered station or their descent into perceived debauchery. The minister thinks about it for a few seconds and then quotes C.S. lewis. Pride. He says. Pride is the greatest sin. On April 12, 1990, after seven days of testimony, the jury of nine men and three women steps out of the courtroom to decide John List's fate. Everyone expects the verdict to be quick. Reporters have a betting pool going. Some predict it will take less than 60 minutes. But that's not what happens. There is a holdout on the jury, a lone person who still is not convinced about John List's state of mind. The jurors send the judge a note asking him to define willful, premeditated and deliberate. Then another note, and another. Then they ask for two packs of cigarettes. The jury deliberates for six hours the first day and then goes home to sleep on it. Could this one holdout really deadlock the case? Could the man who signed and dated a five page detailed confession and tucked it in a drawer next to the murder weapons actually go free on a hung jury? By lunch the next day, the jury has reached a verdict. What turns the holdout, the foreman tells report quarters afterward, is a single line in John List's letter. The line where List explains that he had originally planned the murders for November 1st, All Saints Day, because he thought it an appropriate day for his family to get to heaven. Then that travel arrangements delayed him. A man who reschedules is a man who deliberated. The jury declares him guilty on five counts of murder in the first degree. John List hears it stone faced, staring straight ahead, motionless. Because New Jersey had no death penalty on its books in 1971, the sentence is capped at life without parole. The irony, of course, is that John List did not actually spend his life in prison. He has gotten away with his crimes for 18 years of freedom. On May 1, 1990, Superior Court Judge William Wertheimer hands down the maximum punishment available to him. He will later reread his sentencing statement aloud for the New Jersey Media podcast covering the List case. Father wants us dead.
[24:36]
Judge William Wertheimer
His acts stand as a permanent, pathetic and profane example of the potential of man's inhumanity to man. They will not be soon or easily forgotten. And the name of John Amy List will be internally synonymous with concepts of selfishness, horror and evil.
[24:52]
Megyn Kelly
Judge Wertheimer calls List a man without honor. He tells the courtroom that after 18 years, five months and 22 days, it is time for the voices of Helen, Alma, Patricia, Frederick and John Jr. To speak from the grave.
[25:08]
Judge William Wertheimer
But I thought it was appropriate that each of the victims had their own sentence. I mean consecutively, so he wasn't going to get out.
[25:16]
Megyn Kelly
Five consecutive life terms, one after the other, and one for each member of the family, so that justice for one victim is not folded into justice for anyone else. List is offered the chance to speak. He stands and takes it.
[25:32]
John List
I remain truly sorry for the tragedy that happened in 1971. I feel that due to my mental state at the time, I was unaccountable for what happened.
[25:46]
Megyn Kelly
Truly sorry for the tragedy that happened. Passive voice. Not for what he did, just for what happened. As though he bore no responsibility, he goes into New Jersey State Prison in Trenton at 64, and he is by every account a nearly model inmate. He works in the print shop, keeping track of all the forms. He reads his Bible and holds a Lutheran service in his cell on Sundays, plays chess. He writes letters his friends describe as journal entries, logging what time he woke up, what time he napped and what he watched on television. His closest friend in confinement is George Corbett, 42 years younger, locked up for murdering a 14 year old boy. Corbett remembers a dry sense of humor and an obsessiveness that never lets up. List gets angry if anyone touches his pencils. He rations his commissary olives to two a day, so they last. He becomes petty and short tempered, a man who has scheduled his whole day down to the minute and cannot stand it when the world falls out of step. His prison friend Corbett remembers List's outsized reactions.
[26:58]
George Corbett (Prison Friend)
If the door didn't open up right away, if it took too long, he would scream out because normally it would open, you know, right on cue. And then if he had to say it a second time, he would get very agitated. Open 12, you bastard.
[27:08]
Megyn Kelly
He continues trying to manage his own story. List sits for a television interview with Connie Chung and another with A and E. He publishes a memoir with a co author, a rambling, self justifying and remarkably self pitying book. Throughout all of it he says the same things. The things he thinks mitigate his crimes. That he loved his family, that he did it to save their souls. That God has forgiven him. Never does he use the word murder. Journalist Bill Curtis asks John List how he thinks it all ends. And John is untroubled.
[27:46]
John List
I think I will go to heaven. I don't know what the situation will be in heaven. They will remember what I did to them. Certainly if we're all in heaven, I'm sure we would forgive each other for whatever harm we had done to each other.
[28:03]
Megyn Kelly
Here, 37 years on, John List is still playing God. John Walsh, who put the clay bust of John List on television and ended an 18 year manhunt, gives another take on John List's hereafter.
[28:18]
Prosecutor / Legal Expert
Oh, he's not going to heaven. I know.
[28:20]
John Walsh
Well, I know for sure that this
[28:23]
Prosecutor / Legal Expert
man is not going to heaven.
[28:25]
John Walsh
He's going straight to hell, right where his ass belongs.
[28:29]
Megyn Kelly
Bernard Tracy, the young Westfield detective who inherited the case file and lived it for 11 years. The crime scene photographs, the autopsy reports, every last detail of the what List did to his family later becomes the chief of police. He of all people might wish the worst to John List. Instead, some grace.
[28:52]
John List
It's a terrible thing what John List did. But can we be forgiven for even those sins? I hope so. And John List can go to heaven. And I hope he does.
[29:03]
Megyn Kelly
The case outgrows the man in stature almost immediately. In 1987, two years before anyone knows where John List is, a film reaches
[29:12]
Pretty Litter / Aqua Tru / Lean Advertiser
theaters called the Stepfather, about a mild,
[29:15]
Megyn Kelly
murderous family man who kills a household and reinvents himself under a new name. Six years later, in 1993, CBS makes the story directly a television movie called Judgment Day. The John List Story, with Robert Blake as the lead.
[29:33]
John Walsh
I've done what I was told to do always. But evil still surrounds me. It lives in the very heart of this house. And nothing I say, nothing I do kills it. I've done what she told me to do, and I'm losing everything.
[29:52]
Megyn Kelly
Nearly 10 years later, Robert Blake would be arrested for the murder of his own wife. John List continues to try for his freedom, not by escaping prison, but by the book. Through the courts, he appeals his conviction. In 1993. Deputy and Assistant Deputy Public defenders Joan Van Pelt and Michael Blake contest the warrantless search. On December 7, 1971, the night the Westfield police found the List family on the ballroom floor. John's initial public defender, Elijah Miller, tries to exclude all evidence the police department picked up in the search and thus much of the case against List. Judge Wertheimer shoots that down, writing that List has abandoned the home and everything in it and that in any event, the discovery of five bodies and a handwritten note in a house with the lights burning out was inevitable, if not by a concerned friend or neighbor, then eventually by police. John List's appellate team argues that Judge Wertheimer was wrong and that Miller's failure to suppress the evidence means he did not provide List with a proper defense. Blake and Van Pelt also throw a Hail Mary pass of sorts, arguing that John List's confession letter to his pastor, left in a manila folder atop his desk at Breeze Knoll for anyone to see, is a private conversation and should be protected under both the first and fifth grade amendments. Finally, they call Judge Wertheimer's consecutive five life sentences, quote, excessive. A panel of three judges easily upholds the conviction. They address some of the appeal's claims in detail and dismiss the rest as, quote, clearly without merit. List's appeal is denied. Two years later, List tries one more ptsd. He asks the court for another bite at the apple for the chance to argue to a new jury that he murdered his family due to post traumatic stress from his service in World War II. The court rejects the petition. The State of New Jersey has heard quite enough from John List. List eventually takes his PTSD case public. In 2006, he publishes the memoir Collateral Damage with the help of author Austin Goodrich. John claims that he saw 41 days of combat in World War II and remembers none of it. He cites PTSD from this experience as the root cause of his life's biggest problems, his inability to hold a job, his difficulty parenting his children, and his decision to slaughter his own family in the name of saving them. List introduces his story as a tale of woe for undiagnosed and untreated post traumatic stress disorder. He dedicates the book to his parents and, to quote all family members made victims by my sinful actions. In his memoir, List writes that his second wife, Dolores, visits him in prison. She briefly moved to Baltimore after his arrest to evade reporters and tourists looking to gander at the killer's ordinary home. Living in plain sight in 1995, List writes to a friend from prison and refers to Dolores as his bride. However, according to the team of reporters from the Father Wants Us Dead podcast, the memoir's co author Goodrich, notes that Dolores quietly divorced the man she knew as Bob Clark. She sold the house in the Brandermill neighborhood outside of Richmond and retreated from the public eye. In prison, List slowly falls apart. Diabetes, then a heart rhythm problem. High blood pressure, trouble swallowing, cataracts. He asks to be moved to the medical wing. In March 2008, he is taken to a hospital in Trenton and dies there on March 21st at 82 of complications from pneumonia. It is Good Friday. There is no family to call, no one to grieve him. John List's body lies in the Mercer county morgue, unclaimed. Under New Jersey law, the body eventually must be handed over to the New Jersey Department of Corrections and either cremated or buried. Cremated by default. Authorities have not publicly confirmed what became of John List's body, likely, at least in part to dissuade would be copycats and admirers from making pilgrimage. By the time List dies, there is no one else who wants anything to do with him. With the killer captured, convicted and now dead, the city of Westfield, New Jersey, could leave the legend of John List behind. But it does not. Though the original mansion where the Lists lived and most died, burned due to suspected arson in 1972, the new colonial home in its place is locally known as the List House. The street itself, formerly Hillside Avenue, has been renamed Breeze Knoll Drive, and the original lot has been subdivided into private residences along a cul de sac to break up the appeal to crime tourists. Families live along the street now, and this year it is the third most expensive street in town. But John List was not the last source of horrors for Westfield. In 2014, another dark force descends on the town known as as the Watcher. Anonymous letters arrive at the lovely home, threatening the family who has just purchased it, with eerie details about the house and about the children, signed only as the Watcher. The family panics and the letters eventually stop. But their author is never found. Netflix produces a series in 2022 by the same name, starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale. Westfield, it seems, will not be allowed to forget there is evil in the world. John List. The man will soon be forgotten. His crime will not be because family annihilators raise a particularly unsettling fear in the American psyche. Chris Watts. Alec Murdoch. John List. How does one know if there's a psychopath in one's midst or a person who is not who they say they are? We all think we'd know. We would not be fooled, would we? Next week, a pair of assassins terrorize the nation's Capital Region for 23 days. No one is safe as two snipers go on a killing spree. I'm Megyn Kelly. This is MK Confidential.
[36:39]
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[37:04]
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Summary6 min read

Episode Summary: The Annihilator: The Reckoning — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential

Podcast: The Megyn Kelly Show (SiriusXM)
Date: August 14, 2026
Host: Megyn Kelly

Overview

In this gripping episode of MK Confidential, Megyn Kelly explores the final chapter in the case of John Emil List, the “family annihilator” who murdered his wife, mother, and three children in 1971, vanished for nearly two decades, and was finally brought to justice in 1989. The episode traces List’s double life as “Robert Clark,” the dramatic unmasking and arrest, the family and community reckoning, a landmark trial, and ultimately, List's legacy as a chilling figure in American criminal history.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Arrest of “Robert Clark”

Timestamp: 01:00–05:40

June 1, 1989: FBI agents arrive at a Richmond, VA accounting office, confronting "Robert Clark" (John List’s alias) with a series of identifying questions.
- Notable Quote:
  
  “Are you John Emil List?”
  “No,” Clark answers without hesitation and without emotion. (Megyn Kelly, 01:29)
Clark is unfazed in the moment but panic appears in physical “red blotches” on his face.
Fingerprint Match: Clark’s fingerprints confirm his true identity as John List, ending an 18-year manhunt.
Even after the reveal, List refuses to confess his true self, continuing to insist he is Robert P. Clark.
- Quote from FBI Agent:
  
  “He just absolutely denied it. It’s not me. I don’t know what you’re talking about. Even after he was confronted with the fact that his fingerprints were a match, he still was like, it’s not me.” (John Walsh, 05:27)

2. The Family’s Response and Public Fallout

Timestamp: 05:40–08:11

Dolores Clark: List’s second wife, devastated and disbelieving, gives a public statement professing her devotion but confessing her shock.
- Key Line from Dolores's Statement:
  
  “This is not the man I know. The man I know is kind, loving, a devoted husband and dear friend... I find this hard to believe. I hope somehow this is not true...” (Read by Megyn Kelly, 07:09)
Dolores never visits him again after his incarceration and eventually moves on with her life, divorcing quietly.
The media spectacle: List’s extradition to New Jersey draws huge public and press attention.

3. Reunions and Confrontations

Timestamp: 08:11–13:13

Meeting with Sister-in-law: Jean Seifert, Helen List’s sister, travels to confront John in jail.
- Emotional encounter—she hugs him, he cries; her husband hugs him too, surprising even Jean.
- Jean demands to know “Why?”
  
  “Because there was no other way.” – List’s chillingly flat response matches his original 1971 letter. (Megyn Kelly, 11:47)
Discussion Avoidance: List refuses to engage honestly about his motives or family issues, including supposed drug use or “witchcraft” rumors regarding his daughter.
Jean leaves with the same unresolved questions that have haunted her for nearly two decades.

4. The Trial of John List

Timestamp: 13:13–25:16

Trial Opens: April 2, 1990. John List pleads not guilty by reason of mental defect; defense centers on “religious obsession.”
Prosecution:
- Focuses on the calculated nature of the murders and List’s five-page confession to his pastor.
  - Quote from prosecutor reading List’s letter:
    
    “Today… the government intends to do its duty.” (Megyn Kelly narrating DA Brian Gillett, 15:35)
Psychiatrist Testimony:
- Dr. Stephen Simring describes List as mild-mannered and precise, but “expressed no remorse and only superficial regret.” (16:17)
- Concludes List had no major mental illness; his explanations shift conveniently for self-interest.
  - “He wanted grace in the hereafter, but he didn’t want arrest. Yet. There’s religious belief and there’s religious hypocrisy. I think there’s a fair amount of hypocrisy here.” (Simring/Megyn Kelly, 17:10)
Clergy Testimony:
- Multiple Lutheran ministers testify that List’s religious rationale does not justify murder, and his theology was deeply flawed.
  - “He anointed himself as God. He decided when his children’s souls were safe and closed their earthly accounts on a date of his own choosing.” (Megyn Kelly, 19:01)
  - On “the greatest sin”:
    
    “Pride is the greatest sin.” – quoting C.S. Lewis (Minister, 19:36)

5. The Verdict and Sentencing

Timestamp: 20:45–25:46

Jury Deliberations: Expected to be quick, but holdout juror prolongs.
- What sways the jury: List rescheduled the murders for logistical reasons—seen as clear premeditation.
Verdict: Guilty on five counts of first-degree murder.
Sentence:
- Five consecutive life terms—one for each life taken.
- Judge Wertheimer at sentencing:
  
  “His acts stand as a permanent, pathetic and profane example of the potential of man's inhumanity to man. They will not be soon or easily forgotten.” (24:36)
List’s Final Words:
- “I remain truly sorry for the tragedy that happened in 1971. I feel that due to my mental state at the time, I was unaccountable for what happened.” (25:31)
- Megyn Kelly notes the passive phrasing—no ownership of the acts themselves.

6. Life and Death in Prison

Timestamp: 25:46–29:02

Prison Adjustment:
- List becomes a model inmate, obsessively scheduled, solitary, and often irritable.
  - Quote from prison friend George Corbett (26:57):
    
    “If the door didn’t open up right away, if it took too long, he would scream out... Open 12, you bastard.”
Media Engagement:
- TV interviews continue his narrative of religious motivation and self-pity; never uses the word “murder.”
- When asked about the afterlife:
  
  “I think I will go to heaven. I don’t know what the situation will be in heaven. ...I'm sure we would forgive each other for whatever harm we had done to each other.” (John List, 27:45)
Other Perspectives:
- John Walsh (host of America’s Most Wanted):
  
  “Oh, he’s not going to heaven... He’s going straight to hell, right where his ass belongs.” (28:17–28:24)
- Bernard Tracy (detective/chief): Shows hope for forgiveness, reflecting on the scope of grace for even the worst crimes.

7. Cultural Impact and Legacy

Timestamp: 29:02–32:11

List’s story spawns films, TV movies (e.g., The Stepfather and Judgment Day: The John List Story), and becomes a touchstone for public fascination with family annihilators.
List continues appealing his conviction, citing supposed new legal angles, mental illness, and late-in-life claims of WW2-induced PTSD—all rejected.
Memoir "Collateral Damage": List frames his actions through the lens of trauma and regret, dedicating it to “all family members made victims by my sinful actions.”
- Dolores leaves and divorces List; he dies alone in prison in 2008, his body unclaimed.
Westfield’s Enduring Shadow:
- The List family’s mansion is destroyed, but the address is still known as the List House; the street’s name is changed.
- In 2014, the town again makes headlines due to “The Watcher” letter writer, reinforcing Westfield’s unwanted association with evil.

Memorable Quotes

List’s Denial:

“I know who I am. I’m Robert Clark.” (Reported by Megyn Kelly, 02:54)
Jean Seifert’s Confrontation:

“Why?”
“Because there was no other way.” (11:47)
Psychiatric Evaluation:

“He was mild mannered, courteous... very precise and very exact. He also expressed no remorse and only superficial regret. He said essentially something that had to happen. It was unfortunate.” (Dr. Stephen Simring, 16:17)
Judge Wertheimer’s Condemnation:

“His acts stand as a permanent, pathetic and profane example of the potential of man's inhumanity to man. They will not be soon or easily forgotten.” (24:36)
John Walsh's Judgment:

“He’s going straight to hell, right where his ass belongs.” (28:24)

Timestamps for Major Segments

Arrest & Unmasking: 01:00–05:40
Family Fallout & Statement: 05:40–08:11
Confrontation with Jean Seifert: 08:11–13:13
Trial Testimony & Verdict: 13:13–25:46
Prison Life & Legacy: 25:46–29:02
Media, Memoirs, and Enduring Infamy: 29:02–end

Conclusion

This episode of MK Confidential provides an intensively researched, empathetic, and unflinching account of the John List case. Taking listeners from the tense moments of his unmasking to the legacy that lingers in Westfield, Megyn Kelly’s narration and the supporting interviews dissect how such crimes haunt not just families, but communities and culture at large. The episode asks hard questions about accountability, forgiveness, and the depths of evil—and offers no easy answers, leaving the audience to reflect on both the vulnerability of ordinary lives and the darkness harbored by those who walk among us.

Coming next episode: The D.C. Snipers.

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[00:31]
John List
for moi.
[00:33]
Megyn Kelly
Claude, you can talk.
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[01:01]
Megyn Kelly
it is Thursday, June 1, 1989. Three men walk into a small suite of accounting offices in Richmond, Virginia. Two of the officers right off the elevator and one up the stairs. The receptionist, Sandra Silberman, takes note walk. Ins do not usually arrive in threes. She hangs up the phone. One of the men flashes an FBI badge. They are here to speak with Robert Clark. The bookkeeper who comes out to meet them is 63, balding, bespectacled and entirely unalarmed. The man carries himself, according to one of the FBI men, like a schoolteacher waiting for a student to explain himself. Special Agent Kevin August starts to question him. Gently, he asks the man's name. Robert Clark. He asks, questions Clark, whether he has a scar behind his ear, though August can plainly see that he does, and the man turns his head slightly to show it. He asks whether Clark has had an operation for a hernia, was born in Michigan, and works as an accountant. Clark answers all three in the affirmative. There's a pause, and then August asks the question that he has been waiting nearly 18 years for someone to ask out loud. Are you John Emil List? No, clark answers without hesitation and without emotion. August will think about that afterward, that an innocent man would have said, who in the hell is John Emil List? The agents pat Clark down. He puts his arms out and leans against the wall without a word of objection, and when it is finished, August tries once more.
[02:43]
FBI Agent / Interviewer
I approached him and I asked him. I said, are you Mr. Clark? And he said yes. And then I said, are you John List? And he says, no, I'm Robert P. Clark.
[02:54]
Megyn Kelly
Reporters would later put the man's exact words as quote, I know who I am. I'm Robert Clark. Clark seems to force a little indignation into his voice when he says it. Across the room, the receptionist looks away because Bob Clark is giving her the mournful look of a man who believes he has been betrayed. She notices red blotches breaking out across his face. The blotches are the only thing about him that reveal his panic. I'm Megyn Kelly and this is MK Confidential. Did you know three out of four
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[04:49]
Megyn Kelly
The agents take Robert Clark to the Henrico County Jail and roll his inked fingers onto a card. Clark's fingerprints promptly end the mystery. The prints match the ones John List left on his application for a New Jersey firearms permit in Westfield on October 16, 1971, 24 days before he shot and killed his entire family. The mastoidectomy scar behind his right ear matches the hernia scars match. Every physical marker on the FBI flyer that has been in circulation for nearly 18 years matches the man before them. And Clark still says no.
[05:27]
John Walsh
He just absolutely denied it. It's not me. I don't know what you're talking about. Even after he was confronted with the fact that his fingerprints were a match, he still was like, it's not me. My name is Robert P. Clark.
[05:40]
Megyn Kelly
In Brandermill, a housing development set back among oak and pine outside Richmond, Virginia, a woman is learning exactly who she married. Dolores Clark tries to see her husband in custody on the afternoon of his arrest and is turned away. She comes back at noon the next day with the pastor of their Lutheran church, the Reverend Joseph Vogt. And this time they are allowed inside. Bob is being held in the isolation wing behind the frosted glass, instead of bars, the minister is allowed into his cell. Dolores has to stand at the glass and speak to her husband through a telephone. She can hear that he is crying. Vogt tells reporters outside that the prisoner looks shaken and has not slept. Then the pastor says something curious. There seems to be some relief about the man inside, he says. Whether that is reflective of the fact that John List no longer has to put up a front, he cannot say for sure. Dolores gives the press one written statement and says it will be her last word on the matter. A family friend named Wally Parsons suggests they take it to the Richmond News Leader first to get ahead of the out of town press. And when he speaks to the reporter, he adds an assurance of his own. You can be 100% absolutely sure that this lady knows absolutely nothing about anything in Bob's past. In the statement, Dolores writes, quote, this is not the man I know. The man I know is kind, loving, a devoted husband and dear friend. She describes Bob as a man of faith. And then at the end she writes, quote, I find this hard to believe. I hope somehow this is not true. And if it is, he was so stressed out that something snapped. I am devoted to him. I hope that somehow God will see us through this. Dolores does not attend her husband's trial and no reporter ever catches her visiting him in prison. She has married a widower in 1985 and never once asked to see a photograph of his first wife. He fights extradition to New Jersey from a Virginia cell as Robert Clark and loses. At the end of June, he is flown to Newark where one investigator remembers every every news outlet in the world waiting on the tarmac to watch.
[08:04]
Prosecutor / Legal Expert
There was a extremely high profile arrest and transportation.
[08:11]
John List
Coming off the plane was a little
[08:12]
Megyn Kelly
scary, as every news media in the world must have been. At Newark Airport, Robert P. Clark never surrenders. He simply stops existing in a flurry of pre trial motions that could only be filed on behalf of of the other man, John List. And nobody mentions Bob Clark again. He lets the name and the invented life behind it slip away as unceremoniously as it began on a form in a Denver Social Security office nearly two decades before. On the evening of November 7, 1989, two days before the 18th anniversary of the murders, John List is brought into a reception room at the Union County Jail and to meet the only relatives he has left. Jean Seifert. Jean, spelled with a J like blue jeans, is Helen's sister, John's sister in law. This is the first time John and Jean have seen each other since John shot his then wife Helen in the Face in 1971. Gene and her husband, also Jean, though his is with a G, have flown in from Oklahoma at the invitation of Elijah Miller, the assistant public defender assigned to represent List. Since the day of his arrest, Jean, the sister, has been determined to look John List in the face and put to him one word why she does not sleep the night before at the courthouse. She asks her husband what happens if she sees John and passes out. Her spouse promises to pick her up off the floor. John comes in at around 67 and crosses the room in the same bouncy, awkward walk Jean remembers 18 years later. She recognizes him instantly. The slightly lopsided face now heavy with jowls, the odd way he tilts his head when he stands in front of someone. He is holding a small stack of papers and does not know what to do with them, so he sets them on the table and stares at the floor. She says, how are you, John? He nods stiffly. And then Jean Seifert does something that surprises her as much as it surprises him. She steps forward and hugs the man who murdered her sister. John puts his arms around her and lays his head on her shoulder, and when he lifts it, the top of her blouse is wet. Then he sees her husband and looks mortified. The husband reaches out and the two men shake hands without a word. Then the husband, too, hugs John. That, his wife will later say, gives John the shock of his life again. He cries. They talk for more than three hours in a small, windowless room on the third floor, the kind where inmates meet their lawyers, with John's lawyer, Elijah Miller, sitting in. But it's not a reunion. The Seiferts believe in mercy, but they also believe in accountability. And Helen's sister has waited 18 years to ask her question. Why John? He looks at her without any emotion at all. Because there was no other way. It is exactly what he wrote to her in 1971. Word for word. Jean pushes. Why was there no other way? Why are they meeting in a criminal court instead of a divorce court, for God's sake? It just had to be that way, he tells her. The subject has been closed since 1971, and John List is not reopening it for her. The brother in law has memorized a list of questions and he is not gentle with them. But John does not want to discuss the crime, and John has always known how to control a conversation. So the sister tries to provoke one with a question that has haunted Westfield for 18 years. She had found a small bag of marijuana when she cleaned out their eldest daughter Patty's room, and she asks John, did he know about Patty and the drugs? John seems genuinely surprised. No, he says, there were no drugs. Jeanne tells him she thinks he's wrong, and he doesn't argue. Jean asks about the witchcraft, the Ouija boards, the whispers that followed Patty through the last autumn. John says he has never known anything about it, and he's not particularly interested. Late in the conversation, once the hard questions have run out and the tension in the small room has eased some, John List asks the Seiferts about Brenda. Brenda Taylor is his dead wife's daughter from her first marriage, the stepchild John helped raise from the age of nine, the one child of Helen's he did not kill, and only because she had grown up and married and moved out years before he ever bought their dream home on the Hill Breeze Knoll. He is told he has step great grandchildren now, which apparently makes him happy. Jean Seifert flies home to Oklahoma with nothing. She has never once believed he was insane, not for a minute, which leaves her with the same question she came to Richmond with, and the same unsatisfactory answer. What Brenda, John's stepchild, makes of John's capture is not on the public record. She has said almost nothing since 1971. That fall, the FBI asks to attach her name to a public appeal meant to flush out her stepfather, a daughter's plea that reads, daddy, you are all I have left. Please call me. It is bait. It's not clear whether Brenda explicitly agrees, but the FBI does put out the statement. The last thing Brenda wants is for John List to answer. By her friend's account, Brenda is petrified, certain she is the only one of the family left and that he will come to kill her and her five children. And for a long time the FBI may suspect it too, because they watch her house. The trial of John List opens in Union County Superior court on Monday, April 2, 1990. Reporters line up for hours in advance. The trial has moved to a larger courtroom, and it is still not big enough. List does not dispute that he killed his family, but pleads not guilty by reason of mental defect. His defense attorney, Elijah Miller, contends that his client was gripped by a religious obsession which led him to believe he was saving his family by taking their lives. Miller hammers the religion angle, telling the jury his client was so locked into his own religion that once the plan was in his head to spare his family from his own failures or from what he perceived as their alleged hedonism, he could not step out of it. That's the defense. Not that he didn't do it, but that List killed with love and mercy in his heart. The prosecutor is an assistant Union County DA named Brian Gillet, who, as he tells it, is the only person in the office who did not ask for this case. He opens his case by reading aloud John List's five page letter to his pastor. The one sealed in a locked drawer of the file cabinet beside John's desk next to the two fired handguns, the murder weapons. One reporter describes Gillet's tone as cold, with traces of mockery. When Gillett reaches the line where List asks the pastor to pray for him, whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it, Gillett stops and looks along the jury box. Today he tells them the government intends to do its duty. The letter is the whole prosecution, every element the state has to prove the that the killings were willful, deliberate and premeditated is signed and dated in the defendant's own hand. The forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen Simring, spends four hours with List in a jail cell with a video camera rolling and finds a man who is unfailingly pleasant about the whole affair. Years later, he describes the conversation to American justice.
[16:17]
Prosecutor / Legal Expert
He was mild mannered, courteous, soft spoken, very precise and very exact. He also expressed no remorse and only superficial regret. He said essentially something that had to happen. It was unfortunate.
[16:37]
Megyn Kelly
Simring walks the jury through what List told him hour by hour, and the courtroom listens in absolute silence. He says List did not feel guilt or sadness at the loss of his family. Nor did John kill his family out of concern for the fate of their souls. The psychiatrist says that List shifts explanations depending on his needs. And at that moment, what John List needed was an acquittal.
[17:02]
Prosecutor / Legal Expert
He did not have a major mental illness. There was no psychiatric legal excuse either to excuse or to mitigate.
[17:10]
Megyn Kelly
Simring tells the jury John List believed suicide would land him in hell, so he spared himself and sent his family to heaven. Simran concludes on the stand, quote, he wanted grace in the hereafter, but he didn't want arrest. Yet. There's religious belief and there's religious hypocrisy. I think there's a fair amount of hypocrisy here. Everybody's talking about weight loss injections because the results can be so dramatic.
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[18:57]
Megyn Kelly
The assistant prosecutor, Eleanor Clark tells the jury no man could use religion to justify this carnage.
[19:05]
Juror or Court Observer
Well, I think no matter how religious you are, you realize that there's a little problem with this. I found this horrific through my tone of voice and the nature of my questions. I try to communicate this to the jurors.
[19:19]
Megyn Kelly
Elijah Miller calls a procession of Lutheran clergymen who had known John List across four decades in Kalamazoo, in Rochester, in Westfield. He needs them to tell the jury that this was a devout man whose religious fervor swallowed him whole. Instead, one after another, the clergy who taught John List his faith take the stand and dismantle John List's theology. Pastor Louis Grother led the lists in his Kalamazoo congregation in the late 50s. Prosecutor Clark asks him whether the Lutheran Church would frown on a man who killed his daughter to save her soul. The Lutheran Church and the scriptures, the pastor says, would frown upon anybody deliberately killing anybody. Defense attorney Miller calls the Rev. Edward Zareski, the family's minister outside Rochester from the years John worked at Xerox. He paints John as a bitter failure whose theology would never support murder. He recalls that John struggled at work, telling the court that Helen once said if John were half the man her former husband was, they wouldn't have the troubles they were having. The jury is starting to learn about John's simmering resentments. Then Miller asks about John's religion, and Reverend Szareski says that John's fundamentalist theology is fundamentally Flawed sin is still sin, he tells the court. Grace is available for the sinner, but sin is never justified, and Christians know that. He testifies that John's problem was that he knew doctrine, but he did not know faith. I think John did not trust God. John List could answer catechism questions at 15 without a stumble. He taught Sunday school. He kept the books at three different churches in different parts of the country. What he could not do across 50 years was hand a single problem to God and leave it there. Not the job, not the mortgage, his wife's illness, his daughter's future. He did what he always did with figures he didn't like. He didn't give it to God. He anointed himself as God. He decided when his children's souls were safe and closed their earthly accounts on a date of his own choosing. The last of the clergymen is the Reverend Alfred Shuttle, who served as chaplain to John's youth group at the University of Michigan. He describes John as faithful and of good character. Defense attorney Miller asks him about sin. Thou shalt not kill, the minister answers. Taking a life is certainly wrong. On cross examination, the prosecution asks Shipes whether there is a greatest sin, a sin above others. And in a courtroom where a man is on trial for murdering his family allegedly because he could not bear the shame of their lowered station or their descent into perceived debauchery. The minister thinks about it for a few seconds and then quotes C.S. lewis. Pride. He says. Pride is the greatest sin. On April 12, 1990, after seven days of testimony, the jury of nine men and three women steps out of the courtroom to decide John List's fate. Everyone expects the verdict to be quick. Reporters have a betting pool going. Some predict it will take less than 60 minutes. But that's not what happens. There is a holdout on the jury, a lone person who still is not convinced about John List's state of mind. The jurors send the judge a note asking him to define willful, premeditated and deliberate. Then another note, and another. Then they ask for two packs of cigarettes. The jury deliberates for six hours the first day and then goes home to sleep on it. Could this one holdout really deadlock the case? Could the man who signed and dated a five page detailed confession and tucked it in a drawer next to the murder weapons actually go free on a hung jury? By lunch the next day, the jury has reached a verdict. What turns the holdout, the foreman tells report quarters afterward, is a single line in John List's letter. The line where List explains that he had originally planned the murders for November 1st, All Saints Day, because he thought it an appropriate day for his family to get to heaven. Then that travel arrangements delayed him. A man who reschedules is a man who deliberated. The jury declares him guilty on five counts of murder in the first degree. John List hears it stone faced, staring straight ahead, motionless. Because New Jersey had no death penalty on its books in 1971, the sentence is capped at life without parole. The irony, of course, is that John List did not actually spend his life in prison. He has gotten away with his crimes for 18 years of freedom. On May 1, 1990, Superior Court Judge William Wertheimer hands down the maximum punishment available to him. He will later reread his sentencing statement aloud for the New Jersey Media podcast covering the List case. Father wants us dead.
[24:36]
Judge William Wertheimer
His acts stand as a permanent, pathetic and profane example of the potential of man's inhumanity to man. They will not be soon or easily forgotten. And the name of John Amy List will be internally synonymous with concepts of selfishness, horror and evil.
[24:52]
Megyn Kelly
Judge Wertheimer calls List a man without honor. He tells the courtroom that after 18 years, five months and 22 days, it is time for the voices of Helen, Alma, Patricia, Frederick and John Jr. To speak from the grave.
[25:08]
Judge William Wertheimer
But I thought it was appropriate that each of the victims had their own sentence. I mean consecutively, so he wasn't going to get out.
[25:16]
Megyn Kelly
Five consecutive life terms, one after the other, and one for each member of the family, so that justice for one victim is not folded into justice for anyone else. List is offered the chance to speak. He stands and takes it.
[25:32]
John List
I remain truly sorry for the tragedy that happened in 1971. I feel that due to my mental state at the time, I was unaccountable for what happened.
[25:46]
Megyn Kelly
Truly sorry for the tragedy that happened. Passive voice. Not for what he did, just for what happened. As though he bore no responsibility, he goes into New Jersey State Prison in Trenton at 64, and he is by every account a nearly model inmate. He works in the print shop, keeping track of all the forms. He reads his Bible and holds a Lutheran service in his cell on Sundays, plays chess. He writes letters his friends describe as journal entries, logging what time he woke up, what time he napped and what he watched on television. His closest friend in confinement is George Corbett, 42 years younger, locked up for murdering a 14 year old boy. Corbett remembers a dry sense of humor and an obsessiveness that never lets up. List gets angry if anyone touches his pencils. He rations his commissary olives to two a day, so they last. He becomes petty and short tempered, a man who has scheduled his whole day down to the minute and cannot stand it when the world falls out of step. His prison friend Corbett remembers List's outsized reactions.
[26:58]
George Corbett (Prison Friend)
If the door didn't open up right away, if it took too long, he would scream out because normally it would open, you know, right on cue. And then if he had to say it a second time, he would get very agitated. Open 12, you bastard.
[27:08]
Megyn Kelly
He continues trying to manage his own story. List sits for a television interview with Connie Chung and another with A and E. He publishes a memoir with a co author, a rambling, self justifying and remarkably self pitying book. Throughout all of it he says the same things. The things he thinks mitigate his crimes. That he loved his family, that he did it to save their souls. That God has forgiven him. Never does he use the word murder. Journalist Bill Curtis asks John List how he thinks it all ends. And John is untroubled.
[27:46]
John List
I think I will go to heaven. I don't know what the situation will be in heaven. They will remember what I did to them. Certainly if we're all in heaven, I'm sure we would forgive each other for whatever harm we had done to each other.
[28:03]
Megyn Kelly
Here, 37 years on, John List is still playing God. John Walsh, who put the clay bust of John List on television and ended an 18 year manhunt, gives another take on John List's hereafter.
[28:18]
Prosecutor / Legal Expert
Oh, he's not going to heaven. I know.
[28:20]
John Walsh
Well, I know for sure that this
[28:23]
Prosecutor / Legal Expert
man is not going to heaven.
[28:25]
John Walsh
He's going straight to hell, right where his ass belongs.
[28:29]
Megyn Kelly
Bernard Tracy, the young Westfield detective who inherited the case file and lived it for 11 years. The crime scene photographs, the autopsy reports, every last detail of the what List did to his family later becomes the chief of police. He of all people might wish the worst to John List. Instead, some grace.
[28:52]
John List
It's a terrible thing what John List did. But can we be forgiven for even those sins? I hope so. And John List can go to heaven. And I hope he does.
[29:03]
Megyn Kelly
The case outgrows the man in stature almost immediately. In 1987, two years before anyone knows where John List is, a film reaches
[29:12]
Pretty Litter / Aqua Tru / Lean Advertiser
theaters called the Stepfather, about a mild,
[29:15]
Megyn Kelly
murderous family man who kills a household and reinvents himself under a new name. Six years later, in 1993, CBS makes the story directly a television movie called Judgment Day. The John List Story, with Robert Blake as the lead.
[29:33]
John Walsh
I've done what I was told to do always. But evil still surrounds me. It lives in the very heart of this house. And nothing I say, nothing I do kills it. I've done what she told me to do, and I'm losing everything.
[29:52]
Megyn Kelly
Nearly 10 years later, Robert Blake would be arrested for the murder of his own wife. John List continues to try for his freedom, not by escaping prison, but by the book. Through the courts, he appeals his conviction. In 1993. Deputy and Assistant Deputy Public defenders Joan Van Pelt and Michael Blake contest the warrantless search. On December 7, 1971, the night the Westfield police found the List family on the ballroom floor. John's initial public defender, Elijah Miller, tries to exclude all evidence the police department picked up in the search and thus much of the case against List. Judge Wertheimer shoots that down, writing that List has abandoned the home and everything in it and that in any event, the discovery of five bodies and a handwritten note in a house with the lights burning out was inevitable, if not by a concerned friend or neighbor, then eventually by police. John List's appellate team argues that Judge Wertheimer was wrong and that Miller's failure to suppress the evidence means he did not provide List with a proper defense. Blake and Van Pelt also throw a Hail Mary pass of sorts, arguing that John List's confession letter to his pastor, left in a manila folder atop his desk at Breeze Knoll for anyone to see, is a private conversation and should be protected under both the first and fifth grade amendments. Finally, they call Judge Wertheimer's consecutive five life sentences, quote, excessive. A panel of three judges easily upholds the conviction. They address some of the appeal's claims in detail and dismiss the rest as, quote, clearly without merit. List's appeal is denied. Two years later, List tries one more ptsd. He asks the court for another bite at the apple for the chance to argue to a new jury that he murdered his family due to post traumatic stress from his service in World War II. The court rejects the petition. The State of New Jersey has heard quite enough from John List. List eventually takes his PTSD case public. In 2006, he publishes the memoir Collateral Damage with the help of author Austin Goodrich. John claims that he saw 41 days of combat in World War II and remembers none of it. He cites PTSD from this experience as the root cause of his life's biggest problems, his inability to hold a job, his difficulty parenting his children, and his decision to slaughter his own family in the name of saving them. List introduces his story as a tale of woe for undiagnosed and untreated post traumatic stress disorder. He dedicates the book to his parents and, to quote all family members made victims by my sinful actions. In his memoir, List writes that his second wife, Dolores, visits him in prison. She briefly moved to Baltimore after his arrest to evade reporters and tourists looking to gander at the killer's ordinary home. Living in plain sight in 1995, List writes to a friend from prison and refers to Dolores as his bride. However, according to the team of reporters from the Father Wants Us Dead podcast, the memoir's co author Goodrich, notes that Dolores quietly divorced the man she knew as Bob Clark. She sold the house in the Brandermill neighborhood outside of Richmond and retreated from the public eye. In prison, List slowly falls apart. Diabetes, then a heart rhythm problem. High blood pressure, trouble swallowing, cataracts. He asks to be moved to the medical wing. In March 2008, he is taken to a hospital in Trenton and dies there on March 21st at 82 of complications from pneumonia. It is Good Friday. There is no family to call, no one to grieve him. John List's body lies in the Mercer county morgue, unclaimed. Under New Jersey law, the body eventually must be handed over to the New Jersey Department of Corrections and either cremated or buried. Cremated by default. Authorities have not publicly confirmed what became of John List's body, likely, at least in part to dissuade would be copycats and admirers from making pilgrimage. By the time List dies, there is no one else who wants anything to do with him. With the killer captured, convicted and now dead, the city of Westfield, New Jersey, could leave the legend of John List behind. But it does not. Though the original mansion where the Lists lived and most died, burned due to suspected arson in 1972, the new colonial home in its place is locally known as the List House. The street itself, formerly Hillside Avenue, has been renamed Breeze Knoll Drive, and the original lot has been subdivided into private residences along a cul de sac to break up the appeal to crime tourists. Families live along the street now, and this year it is the third most expensive street in town. But John List was not the last source of horrors for Westfield. In 2014, another dark force descends on the town known as as the Watcher. Anonymous letters arrive at the lovely home, threatening the family who has just purchased it, with eerie details about the house and about the children, signed only as the Watcher. The family panics and the letters eventually stop. But their author is never found. Netflix produces a series in 2022 by the same name, starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale. Westfield, it seems, will not be allowed to forget there is evil in the world. John List. The man will soon be forgotten. His crime will not be because family annihilators raise a particularly unsettling fear in the American psyche. Chris Watts. Alec Murdoch. John List. How does one know if there's a psychopath in one's midst or a person who is not who they say they are? We all think we'd know. We would not be fooled, would we? Next week, a pair of assassins terrorize the nation's Capital Region for 23 days. No one is safe as two snipers go on a killing spree. I'm Megyn Kelly. This is MK Confidential.
[36:39]
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[37:04]
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