The Vanishing Act

John List was an accountant and a Sunday school teacher, and by the autumn of 1971 he was also out of work and $11,000 behind on Breeze Knoll, the nineteen-room Victorian house his family occupied in Westfield, New Jersey. He told no one. Each morning he left as though he still had somewhere to be.

On November 9, 1971, he shot his wife Helen and his mother Alma, then collected the three children one by one and killed Patricia, 16, John Frederick, 15, and Frederick, 13. He laid four of them on sleeping bags in the ballroom and left his mother upstairs where she fell. He wrote his pastor a five-page letter saying he had acted to save their souls, sent notes excusing the children from school, stopped the mail and the milk, and left religious music playing on the intercom. The bodies were not found until December 7.

List began again in Colorado as Robert P. Clark, worked as an accountant, and remarried in 1985. On May 21, 1989, America’s Most Wanted broadcast a forensic sculptor’s age-progressed bust of him. A former neighbor recognized it, and List was arrested in Richmond, Virginia, on June 1. A jury convicted him of five counts of first-degree murder on April 12, 1990, and he was given five consecutive life sentences. He died in custody on March 21, 2008, at 82.