The Annihilator: The Reckoning — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential - FINAL Episode on the John List Family Murders

0:00It is Thursday, June 1st, 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.

0:44He asks the man's name, Robert Clark. He asks 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 Emile 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?

1:31The 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. 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. 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.

2:13She notices red blotches breaking out across his face. The blotches are the only thing about him that reveal his panic. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

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3:11No plumbing, no installation. Aqua True has been featured in Popular Science and named Best Countertop Water Filter by Good Housekeeping. Join 98 % of customers who say their drinking water is cleaner, safer, and healthier. Go to AquaTrue, True is spelled T-R-U, dot com right now to get 20 % off your purifier using promo code MKC for MK Confidential. AquaTrue even comes with a 30-day best tasting water guarantee. That's AquaTrue.com, A-Q-U-A-T-R-U.com, promo code MKC. 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.

3:57The 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. 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.

4:38Clark. 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.

5:20Vogt 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 a hundred percent absolutely sure that this lady knows absolutely nothing about anything in Bob's past.

6:06In 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,

6:33Delores 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 news outlet in the world waiting on the tarmac to watch. There was an extremely high-profile arrest and transportation. coming off the plane was a little 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 pretrial motions that could only be filed on behalf 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.

7:40On the evening of November 7th, 1989, two days before the 18th anniversary of the murders, John List is brought into a reception room at the Union County Jail 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. Jean 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.

8:32Why? 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 seven and crosses the room in the same bouncy, awkward walk Jean remembers. Eighteen years later, she recognizes him instantly. A 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?

9:12He 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.

9:59But 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.

10:46But 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. Jean tells him she thinks he's wrong, and he doesn't argue. Gene 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.

11:31Late 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.

12:24What 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.

13:03And 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 2nd, 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.

13:57That'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 Gillett, 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 Gillett's tone as cold, with traces of mockery. When Gillett reaches the line where List asks the pastor to pray for him, quote, whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it, Gillett stops and looks along the jury box.

14:45Today, he tells them, the government intends to do its duty. The letter is the whole prosecution. Every element the state has to prove 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. He was mild-mannered, courteous, soft-spoken, very precise and very exact. He also expressed no remorse and only superficial regret.

15:30He said essentially something that had to happen. It was unfortunate. Simmering 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. He did not have a major mental illness. There was no psychiatric legal excuse either to excuse or to mitigate. Simmering tells the jury John List believed suicide would land him in hell, so he spared himself and sent his family to heaven.

16:18Simmering concludes on the stand, quote, he wanted grace in the hereafter, but he didn't want a rest 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. They work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. But what if you are looking to lose weight but are not interested in weekly injections and you don't know whether you can commit and it's expensive, all the things, especially when you hear about some of the side effects? That's why doctors created a weight loss supplement called Lean, and the results could be remarkable.

16:58Lean says the studied ingredients in their product have been shown to lower your blood sugar, burn fat by converting it into energy, and curb your appetite and cravings so that you are not as hungry. But listen, lean is not for the casual dieter with only a few pounds to lose. The doctors at Brickhouse Nutrition created lean for frustrated dieters with 10 or more pounds to lose. You could get started with 20 % off and free rush shipping, adding lean to your healthy diet and exercise plan. Visit takelean.com. Enter the code Kelly for your discount. That's promo code Kelly at TakeLean.com. The assistant prosecutor, Eleanor Clark, tells the jury no man could use religion to justify this carnage.

17:44Well, I think no matter how religious you are, you realize that there's a little problem with this. I found this horrific. And through my tone of voice and the nature of my questions, I try to communicate this to the jurors. 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.

18:29Prosecutor 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 Reverend Edward Zaruski, 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.

19:08The jury is starting to learn about John's simmering resentments. Then Miller asks about John's religion, and Reverend Sureski 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, quote, John's problem was that he knew doctrine, but he did not know faith. I think John did not trust God, end quote. 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.

19:51What 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 Shipes, 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.

20:34Thou shalt not kill, the minister answers. Taking a life is certainly wrong. On cross-examination, the prosecution asks Scheipz 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 12th, 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.

21:17Everyone 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?

22:02By lunch the next day, the jury has reached a verdict. What turns the holdout, the foreman tells reporters 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.

22:49The 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 1st, 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. 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 Amell List will be eternally synonymous with concepts of selfishness, horror, and evil.

23:31Judge Wertheimer calls List a man without honor. He tells the courtroom that after 18 years, 5 months, and 22 days, it is time for the voices of Helen, Alma, Patricia, Frederick, and John Jr. to speak from the grave. But I thought it was appropriate that each of the victims had their own sentence. I ran consecutively, so he wasn't going to get out. 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. I remain truly sorry for the tragedy that happened in 1971.

24:17I feel that due to my mental state at the time, I was unaccountable for what happened. 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.

25:03His 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. This prison friend, Corbett, remembers List's outsized reactions. 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.

25:42And then if he had to say it a second time, he would get very agitated. Open 12, you bastard. He continues trying to manage his own story. List sits for a television interview with Connie Chung and another with A &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. John is untroubled.

26:25I think I will go to heaven. I don't know what the situation will be in heaven. Will they 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 here. 37 years on, John List is still playing God. John Walsh, who put the clay bust of John List on television and ended in 18-year manhunt, gives another take on John List's hereafter. Oh, he's not going to heaven. I know, well, I know for sure that this man is not going to heaven. He's going straight to hell, right where his ass belongs. 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 what List did to his family, later becomes the chief of police.

27:24He, of all people, might wish the worst to John List. Instead, some grace. 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. The case outgrows the man in stature almost immediately. In 1987, two years before anyone knows where John List is, a film reaches theaters called The Stepfather, about a mild, 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.

28:12I'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. 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.

29:00John'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.