List Family Murders

Case background and investigation

John Emil List was an accountant who lived with his family at Breeze Knoll, a Victorian mansion at 431 Hillside Avenue in Westfield, New Jersey. According to ABC News, the family had moved to Westfield in 1965, and List had worked as a bank vice president and comptroller and taught Sunday school. By 1971, by his own later account, the family was facing the loss of the house.

On November 9, 1971, List shot five members of his family in the house. The victims, as listed in Wikipedia's account of the case, were his wife, Helen, 47; his mother, Alma; his daughter, Patricia, 16; and his sons, John Frederick, 15, and Frederick, 13. Most sources give Alma List's age as 84. He placed the bodies of his wife and children in the ballroom and left his mother's body on an upper floor. He also left a letter addressed to his pastor. In a 2002 interview with ABC News, he said he had acted to spare the family the shame of losing their home and in the belief that they would go to heaven, and acknowledged that he had known it was wrong.

List had taken steps that delayed discovery. According to accounts summarized by Yahoo News, he stopped the milk, newspaper and mail deliveries and told the children's schools that the family would be away visiting a sick relative. The bodies were not found until December 7, 1971, nearly a month later, after neighbors noticed that lights had been burning in the apparently empty house and police were called.

By then List had left the state. According to Wikipedia, he travelled to Michigan and then to Colorado, settling in the Denver area in early 1972 under the name Robert P. Clark. He worked again as an accountant and remarried, and later moved to Virginia.

The case was featured on the television program America's Most Wanted in May 1989. The broadcast showed a clay bust by forensic sculptor Frank Bender depicting how List might look after 18 years. A former neighbor from Denver recognized the likeness and contacted authorities, and List was arrested on June 1, 1989, at his workplace in Richmond, Virginia.

He was returned to New Jersey for trial. On April 12, 1990, a jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to five consecutive terms of life imprisonment. List died on March 21, 2008, at age 82, of complications of pneumonia at a hospital in Trenton while serving his sentence.