The Annihilator: Bob Clark is John List — Ep. 4 | MK Confidential

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0:45Go to bioptimizers.com slash hags and use code hags for 15 % off. Every order is backed by their 365-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it with confidence. In the third week of November 1971, a tall, bespectacled man in a coat and tie sits by the window on a westbound train, watching the flat brown grasslands of the Great Plains slide by for a day and a night, until the land finally begins to rise toward the Rockies. The train is taking him toward the mountains he has always wanted to see, the Colorado mountains. He has a suitcase, a briefcase, and just under$2 ,500 in his wallet. What he does not have yet is a name.

1:29The man has left almost nothing to chance. Behind him, in the long-term lot at Kennedy Airport, his family's Impala sits in a crowded row, and on the front seat in a small, neat stack are his Michigan alumni card and his accountant's license with his own name left in plain view. As the miles slide by, he eats and thinks back over his plan, the way he might check a column of figures. He chose Kennedy Airport on purpose. Newark is closer to his home in Westfield and a simpler route, but Newark Airport is not where a man goes to leave the country. He wants police to find his car at the big international airport with the name John List sitting right there on the seat and his passport gone from the house.

2:17When investigators finally come looking, he means for them to look at the departure gates, the flights to Europe, and the ocean. And they do. The FBI runs down every passenger on every flight leaving the New York airports around November 10th and gets nothing. He can picture the manhunt he hopes to have unleashed on the wrong side of the world. He's not crossing an ocean. No, he is on a train rolling toward America's heartland, and he knows no one will look twice at a quiet man in coach. He thought about going to Phoenix and then decided it was too hot. He thought about San Francisco. Too many hippies.

2:58So he settled on Denver. On the 22nd of November, 13 days after he murdered his entire family, the man walks into a social security office in the middle of Colorado. He is balding, big-eared, and courteous to the point of disarming. He pushes his glasses up his nose as he explains apologetically that he has lost his social security card. A clerk hands him a form. He writes down a name that is not his and a birthday that is not his either. So the man on the form is six years younger than the man holding the pen. He signs it Robert P. Clark. No one asks him for a birth certificate. No one asks him for anything.

3:42A few minutes later, the clerk hands him a card with his new name, and he walks back out into the afternoon as somebody else. In 1971, a form and a signature is all it takes to become a new man. John Emil List is dead to the world. Years later, John would describe the shift in his mindset. I guess as time went on, I thought less and less of family. I suppose I was just thankful to be living a free life and I didn't want to be incarcerated if it wasn't necessary. thankful to be living a free life. That is the man three weeks after he shot his wife in their eating space, climbed the stairs and shot his mother, and then waited out the afternoon to kill his three children as they came home from school one at a time.

4:36Now he has a new name, a new age, and a clean slate, if he can keep it. For the next 18 years, one of the most wanted fugitives in the country will hide in plain sight by being the most forgettable man in every room. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

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6:22The trailer sits in a park of transients off Interstate 70 on the western edge of the city. Everyone here is passing through or starting over or hiding. No one asks him his business. Now he needs work. He is a certified public accountant with more than 20 years experience, a man who once sat in a bank vice president's office. But an accountant has a name and a history and a paper trail, and Robert Clark cannot afford to test any of those yet. So he takes one job open to a man with no past. He becomes a night cook. The kitchen is at a Holiday Inn just across the interstate from his trailer near the city of Golden.

7:07Ski traffic off the highway keeps the place busy and keeps it anonymous, a long way from downtown, which is how he likes it. He works after dark, eggs, burgers, and coffee on the graveyard shift, the hours when nobody looks closely at anybody. Nights suit him, fewer people. At work, Bob Clark trades the suit and tie for a cook's apron. Those who know him later remember his neat appearance, and outside the kitchen he continues to wear his coat and tie. There is a small, terrible coincidence folded into those years. Every so often, a family from back east drives out to ski in Colorado and stops at that same Holiday Inn.

7:49A family John List knows does just that. They are Helen's relatives, her sister's family. Years later, Helen's nephew would do the math. The quiet cook on the morning line, the one who might well have made their breakfast, was the uncle who had shot his Aunt Helen to death at her own kitchen table. To the people in that kitchen, Bob Clark is reliable and impossible to know. Asked where he is from, he says Pennsylvania one day and the Midwest the next. Asked about a wife, he says she died of cancer, another time that she drank herself to death. The lies are almost true, which is what makes them easy to carry.

8:31He is not inventing a dead family out of nothing. He is describing his real one, the family killed by his own hand, and calling it fate. A divorced woman on the kitchen staff named Allie Bray takes an interest in the gentlemanly cook with the mustache, a man who wears his cheap clothes well and looks to her like someone who has had a bad break in life and could do better. One day she asks him straight out whether there's a woman in his life. He lowers his head and says, almost too quietly to hear, that there's no one. He gives her nothing more, and before long, Allie leaves the hotel for a full-time job elsewhere, never saying goodbye.

9:13The one person Clark lets in, a little, is the man who cleans the kitchen at night, an easygoing former cowboy named Bob Wetmore. The other cooks start calling them the two Bobs, like Felix and Oscar, the odd couple of the graveyard shift. It is a lukewarm friendship, two loners who do not push each other, but when Clark hears of better pay at a country club kitchen, the two Bobs move on together. At 46, having killed the five people who shared his name, John List finally makes a friend. Asked about those years decades later, he does not reach for anything dramatic. He reaches for the plainest words he has.

9:56I just more or less existed and just go along and do what has to be done, I guess, to just survive. The psychiatrist who would study John List the longest, the one the prosecution later put on the stand, heard something colder underneath that word, survive. To him, Denver was not exile. He enjoyed his life in Denver. It was a fresh stock for him in every sense of the word. Remember, his problem was that he was overburdened. He had been a failure in every way. He saw his family as a burden, not a source of support. They were all gone, poof. and he was free. Poof and he was free. The sick wife, the disappointed mother, the mortgage he could not pay, the three children whose futures he could not face, all of it gone in a single November day.

10:48The people of Westfield would not let go so easily. The classmates who sat beside Patty in the drama workshop and beside John and Fred at Roosevelt Junior High are terrified. The man who killed their friends is on the loose and may not be finished. What if he comes back? Would they be next? At Redeemer Lutheran, where John List taught Sunday school and Patty sang in the choir, the congregation quietly fears the same. Pastor Eugene Raywinkle confides in the undertaker who buried the List family, Fred Poppy. Gee, I hope he doesn't come around with a gun on us, Fred. For weeks after the murders, whenever the door opens during service, churchgoers' eyes dart to see who it is.

11:34Bree's knoll stands empty as the season turns to spring, then summer. Teenagers dare each other up the driveway of the 19-room mansion where the family was put to death. The lawn is going to seed, and the lights are finally dark. Some break into the murder house, as it's called, and sleep on the ballroom floor, on the very spot where John List laid his family. Neighbors start noticing candlelight moving behind the boarded-up windows on dark nights. Odd comings and goings. Laughter out in the bushes, which some of them take for chanting. One night in January, dozens of motorcycles come down Hillside Avenue and circle the mansion in the dark.

12:16Souvenir hunters strip the place of anything that will come loose. The mailbox, the house numbers, the brass knocker. Local children repeatedly visit the family's grave in the dead of night. Then, one night in late August of 1972, not quite ten months after the murders, the house catches fire and burns to the ground. The Union County prosecutor, Carl Ash, studies the aftermath and calls the blaze the work of a professional arsonist. No one is ever charged, and the cause is never officially determined. The empty lot becomes the haunted lot. The fire takes the house and does nothing at all to tamp down the story.

12:58The lot is auctioned that December, a year after the bodies were discovered. The new owner builds a handsome new colonial where the doomed mansion once stood. Even with a new house, the address, the very ground where the horror took place draws attention. For years afterward, on Halloween night, Westfield kids walk each other down Hillside Avenue to stand in front of 431 and dare one another to peer into the dark. It was a real-life horror story in Westfield. There's an entire generation of people that were afraid John List was coming for them. He was on the run for 18 years. He became known as the boogeyman of Westfield.

13:38The house fire took something else with it. Set into the ceiling over the ballroom was a great panel of stained glass. The man who later buys the empty lot, an art collector, takes one look at the ruins and sees a genuine signed Lewis Comfort Tiffany stained glass window worth$100 ,000 in 1971. If he is right, John List spent his last years under that ceiling, collapsing under debt, with a fortune bolted into the roof above his head. He never even knew it was there. As the hunt for John List continued, and with it the legend of the man who annihilated his own family, one story draws the attention of the FBI for years.

14:21Fifteen days after the List murders, a man who calls himself Dan Cooper hijacks an airliner over the Pacific Northwest, takes$200 ,000 in ransom, and jumps out of the back of the plane into the dark with a parachute, floating down into American myth. The plane flies on without him and comes down safely in Reno, with the rear stairs still hanging open behind it. No one, miraculously, was injured. Two otherwise unremarkable men vanish within two weeks of each other in the fall of 1971. The connection is easy to see. The hijacker's police sketch bears a passing resemblance to the missing accountant, so naturally people wonder if John List's solution to his money troubles involves a high-altitude stick-up.

15:12List's abandoned car at JFK Airport makes the connection easy to draw. The FBI takes it seriously enough to show List's photograph to the witnesses who had seen the hijacker. They say this man is not the hijacker. Even so, the Bureau cannot quite let it go. John List stays on the official list of D.B. Cooper suspects until 1990. Part of what feeds the rumor is a report that List had trained as a paratrooper in World War II. Much like List himself, List's war record was unremarkable. A quiet posting as a medical lab technician in Germany for the last gasp of the war. John List did not vanish into a jungle or behind a beard.

15:58Eventually, he puts back on the coat and tie and rebuilds, piece by piece, the same life he had before the ballroom. It begins with his church. In June of 1975, Robert Clark joins St. Paul's Lutheran, an inner-city parish on Grant Street in downtown Denver. It is part of the strict Missouri Synod of his Michigan boyhood, his mother's church, but with an important wrinkle. St. Paul's is a place where people drift in to start over after their lives come apart, whether from drink or drugs or trouble with the law, and its pastor does not pry into anyone's past. For a man like Robert Clark, that is not a small gift.

16:43He becomes what he had been in New Jersey, the polite, dependable man who never misses a Sunday. He volunteers to drive an elderly parishioner to Sunday service, every week, without being asked. In tax season, he earns a little extra money preparing returns for people who trust him with their numbers. In time, the congregation puts him on the finance council, and then they make him treasurer. They hand the books to the accountant. He has been here before. In his family, keeping the church's money is almost a birthright. His father was the parish treasurer and accountant, and Alma raised her son to carry it on.

17:21Back in Michigan in the 1950s, when John List was made treasurer of his congregation, he phoned his mother, proud to tell her he was keeping the tradition alive. This is the same John List who, holding power of attorney over his mother's accounts years later, quietly drains more than$50 ,000 from her savings before shooting her in the face. Did you know three out of four U.S. homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water? Even though contaminated water looks clear, it could put you at risk for devastating health issues like fatigue, hormone disruption, cognitive decline, and even cancer. Surprisingly, standard fridge and pitcher filters do little to remove most contaminants, and bottled water contains microplastics.

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18:54Aquatru even comes with a 30-day best tasting water guarantee. That's Aquatru.com, A-Q-U-A-T-R-U dot com, promo code MKC. If you're considering a private student loan, Earnest is a smart place to start. We offer low rates, zero fees, and flexible repayment options while covering up to 100 % of college costs. Maybe that's why U.S. News named us Best Private Student Loan Lender four years in a row. Pay for school with confidence. Check your eligibility at earnest.com slash go. Loans made by Finwise Bank, member FDIC, and are subject to credit approval. Terms apply. slowly he works his way off the night cook line and back into accounting from a bookkeeper's desk at a carpet wholesaler up to company comptroller again but it is risky this business of reclaiming john list's old habits in the spring of 1977 at a social for the single members of his church the ghost man begins building a second family.

19:57Her name is Dolores Miller. She is slender and soft-spoken, with strawberry blonde hair, a refined church-going woman who has already survived one marriage that failed her. She has no children. In Bob Clark, she sees a devout, courteous man who does not drink, does not chase women, and seems to genuinely care about other people. In Dolores, John sees a high-minded religious woman whose faith matches his own. They take to each other almost at once. He tells her his first wife died of cancer. From the way he says it, Dolores can see the subject pains him, so she lets it go and never raises it again.

20:37She never sees a photograph of that first wife. She never thinks to ask for one. No one at the church ever does either. In November of 1985, Bob and Dolores marry in Maryland, chosen because it is where her mother and family live so they can meet Bob before the wedding. 34 years before, Maryland was where John List had married Helen, too, in a Lutheran church in Baltimore County. Dolores is not a foolish woman. She's a careful one. And she believes she has chosen well the second time. A steady Christian man who goes to church every Sunday and raises his voice to no one. He is gentle. He is faithful in every way she can check.

21:20Nothing in the life he shows her points back to Breeze Knoll. However, Bob Clark has John List's same recurring problem, and it resurfaces. Bob and Dolores jointly own a modest two-bedroom condo in Aurora, bought for about$27 ,000. It's the kind of small, sensible place two careful people buy together. In the spring of 1986, five months after the wedding, Clark's company computerizes its books and lets him go. One detail stands out. Around the time he leaves, his personnel file also disappears from the office. Only three people can reach these records, the company president among them, and Clark is one of them too.

22:07The man who once made John List vanish knows how to make a file vanish with ease. They live on Dolores' salary and then on Dolores' savings. She tells a neighbor flatly that if Bob does not start bringing in money, she will leave him. He says little and keeps using credit cards as a substitute for money he does not have. The Clarks give up on Colorado and try their luck elsewhere. Bob Clark answers an out-of-state ad for an accounting job with a Richmond, Virginia firm. Early in 1988, he goes east ahead of Dolores to get settled. This is the goodbye from the very end of the first episode. Dolores in the doorway, watching her husband back the car down the driveway.

22:53Sure, she has married a gentle widower named Bob. The widower part was true, but just a fraction of the story. Bob finds a little brick ranch house in the suburbs of Midlothian with a plaque beside the front door that reads, Bless this house. 23 years, 5 murders, and 2 ,000 miles, and the man has worked his way almost exactly back to where he began, only lower. The wreck of their Colorado life follows them east. By the end of 1988, the condominium is foreclosed, and that December in a note tucked inside a Christmas card to an old neighbor, Dolores writes about it. The condo has been a big problem and we don't know how to handle it.

23:39It is going to rob us of everything we own. It is the exact sequence of events that ran John List to ruin in Westfield in 1971. The name has changed, but the man has not. The people of Virginia see the same man Denver saw and what Westfield, New Jersey saw before that. An aging, fussy, humorless bookkeeper and nothing more. He and Dolores make friends with the couple next door and Bob does their taxes and presses them to fly an American flag. He even provides the flag. A coworker notices only small, forgettable things. That Bob Clark seems older than the age he gives, a man of 62 working to pass for 56, that he can get strangely worked up over a dispute about paper towels or a carpool he wants no part of.

24:31But nobody looks at a man fussing over paper towels and sees a mass murderer. There is no tell, nothing in the small irritations that points back to the ballroom. What finally reached John List did not come from the FBI. It came from a television set. By the late 1980s, the John List file is one of the oldest open murder cases in New Jersey. For some of the detectives who carry it, it has become personal. For him to be gone for that many years and not be brought to justice was like a personal affront to the office and to the Westfield Police Department. Investigators try to put John List on television.

25:14They pitch the case to the TV series Unsolved Mysteries, which passes. They try pitching to a brand new Fox program called America's Most Wanted, hosted by a man named John Walsh. Walsh's own young son, Adam, had been murdered, and he had turned that grief into a nationwide hunt for fugitives. America's Most Wanted passes too. The John List case is nearly 18 years old, older than almost anything the show would normally touch, and it carries the problem that has defeated investigators for nearly two decades as well. John Walsh would later explain the show's hesitation to American justice. I mean, that was a real stretch to think about doing a guy that nobody had a clue where he disappeared to or even remotely what he looked like.

26:03No one knew what 18 years had done to his face. In 1989, the newest photographs of John List are from the 1960s, a tall man in his 40s in horn-rimmed glasses. You cannot circulate a fugitive's picture when your newest picture is a quarter of a century old. One investigator will not let it go. A captain in the Union County Prosecutor's Office named Frank Maronka learns that the executive producer of America's Most Wanted is set to speak at a law enforcement conference in Wilmington, Delaware in January 1989. Maronka and Sergeant Jeffrey Hummel of the Homicide Unit pack eight boxes of the List case into a car and drive down for something called the Eastern Armed Robbery Conference.

26:53They check into a hotel looking, as one of them puts it, like a pair of delivery men, and corner the producer Michael Linder, after his speech. Hummel describes the pivotal moment to News 12 New Jersey. So I took him up to our hotel room and I laid the crime scene photos all across the beds. And he began to examine the crime scene photos. And based on that, he gave a tentative approval. The producer never forgets the photographs of the murdered family laid out across a hotel bedspread. To run a man's story when they have no picture is a problem. The show needs a face. So they hire a sculptor. His name is Frank Bender, a forensic artist in Philadelphia who builds faces out of clay.

27:40Frank would later explain his process on forensic files. I get into the head of the person in a sense. I want to become that person while I'm working on the fugitive. I want to feel like that person. I want to know everything about that person. Fender has four weeks and no photograph worth using. What he does have is a profile. He brings it to a correction psychologist named Richard Walter and asks Walter an interesting hypothetical. What kind of a man would John List have become at 65? Walter traces the killer's anger down to its root. The perpetrator has a history of frustration and feeling entrapped by women.

28:24Generally, women of their own age group are older or women in authority. The psychologist describes the interior life he believes belongs to John List, a man who killed out of retaliation and anger over his own failures, got away with it and has been living with the threat of exposure for nearly 20 years. From that profile and the old photographs, Bender builds the head. I had his mouth going down on the corners because of anxiety that I felt he carried with him from committing these crimes. And Richard brought out that it wasn't guilt from killing his family, but the anxiety of the fear of being caught.

29:07He gives it the sagging jowls of a heavy man in his 60s, a receding hairline, gray hair, the pale skin of a man who has spent most of his life indoors. He reproduces the little details the Westfield, New Jersey police file does have to offer, down to the surgical scar that ran from behind the right ear to the collar line, and the way that ear sat a little lower and closer to the skull than the other. He dresses the lower part of the bust in a coat and tie, then makes one last choice out of pure psychology. He gives the face a pair of eyeglasses with frames noticeably heavier than any John List has ever been known to wear, because the profile said this man would feel the intense need to look like an authority.