Summer Series 2026: The List Family Murders Part 1

Welcome to Summer series twenty twenty six, The List Family Murders. In this series, we are uncovering the story behind what happened behind the doors of the infamous Westfield, New Jersey mansion. We'll be discussing John List, taking the. Lives of his whole family, his mother Alma, his wife Helen, his sixteen year old daughter Patty, his fifteen year old son John Frederick, and his thirteen year old son Frederick. Let's unpack it all and dive into the inner workings of a man who wanted to erase his whole life and start anew and for eighteen years he was able to do so. Let's go Welcome to episode one of summer series. As with all of my summer series, in order to know how we got to this point, we have to go back to the beginning. So today we're going to be digging in and discussing John List, his younger years, his life, his upbringing. I really think this introduction to John tells the full story of who he became. Let's go ahead and dive on in to this summer series. For my research for the series, I read a book called Thou Shalt Not Kill by Mary s Rusik, the true story of John List, his brutal death spree, and how America's most wanted brought him in. I do highly recommend this book. It is a very long, very detailed read, but everything I'm going to be talking about in the Summer series is taken directly. From that book. John Emma List was born on September seventeenth of nineteen twenty five in Bay City, Michigan, to his German American parents, John Frederick List and Alma Marie Barbara Florence List. Now, John Frederick and Almah were actually first cousins once removed, and initially, when researching this, I was not aware that they were related. Maybe I knew that, but then I kind of maybe forgot, So I get very confused by the lingo once removed, so I decided to look it up and explain it a little better, mostly for myself. A first cousin once removed is the child of your first cousin, or alternatively, the first cousin of your parent. The once removed indicates a one generation difference in the family tree, meaning you and this relative do not belong to the same generation. They are removed from your generation by one level. So how did all of this come to be? So we have to go back to the beginning. The List family is traced back to Bavaria into the seventeenth century. The first generation of Lists that are recorded our way back in sixteen ninety four. Generations later, John's paternal great grandfather, named Johann George List, was born in seventeen eighty four. He married a woman and they had ten children, to which they all decided to immigrate to the United States, and that's really where everything began. The family was deeply religious, and they moved to the Franken Youth area in Michigan, which was known as Michigan's Little Bavaria. This community was a very tightly knit German Lutheran community. And at this point in time, the area was. Very strict German Lutheran and only German would be spoken in the homes and the community. Overall. They worked hard to. Establish their life in Franken Youth and in eighteen eighty two, Johann's sons JF which is John Frederick and John Adam, decided to buy a piece of property that was located on Salzburg Avenue and they ended up constructing a building that consisted of a series of shops, and they very much did this because they felt that the community needed these resources. So they ended up creating a dry goods store which quickly would expand and they would end up having three general stores in town. John Frederick had also built a house. On South Winona Avenue and he moved his wife, Anna Humbanger in with him and they would go on to have a son who was named William G. List. Okay, so here is where it is really important to pay attention. So on Salisbury Avenue there was a woman who owned a hat shop and she was named Augusta List, and she was John Frederick's cousin once removed. Her sister was named Alma and she would often come from Frankenmuth to help out at the store. So Alma was a nurse, and it was very. Unusual in this time for women to actually have careers. But Alma didn't want to be what they called spinster back in the day. She wanted to have something that was her own, so that is why she went on and studied nursing. So obviously, being in this small town, John Frederick, John Adam, Augusta and Almah would all run into each other, and they were all related in some way, shape or form. At this point in time, Alma was in her late thirties and like I said, she was working as a registered nurse. So around this time, John Frederick's wife, Anne Marie got sick. She ended up having cancer, and JF very much needed help and realized that the best person to come and help him would be Alma because she had all of this nursing training, and of course she was family, so she decided that she wanted to be there to help in any way that she could. Alma was almost thirty seven years old and everyone described her as a lovely woman. She was very regal in her appearance. She had a generous and easy smile. She was very nurturing and a really really good nurse. This very much put JF at ease because he could tell that his wife, Anne Marie was in really good hands. Almah cared for Anne Marie and cooked meals for the family. She did everything she could to help JF. And he was very impressed with Almah's dedication, and he realized that they did share a lot of the same values because they both were deeply devoted to the church and the community that they lived in. In the midst of caring for Anne Marie, she also cared for JF and made sure that he was also very well taken care of. Now keep in mind that Almah was in her late thirties and JF was nearly sixty years old at this point in time. In nineteen twenty three, Anne Marie passed away from her illness, and once her funeral was over, Almah prepared to leave and go back home to her life. JF was very thankful for her and they said their goodbyes. She ended up going back home to Franken Youth, but Jay and Alma still thought very fondly of each other, and JAF knew that he would probably have to wait some time before he could remarry, and for whatever reason, it was pretty much just decided between the two of them that they would end up being together. And now I will say them getting together as cousins essentially was before genetic experts discouraged this type of inter family relationship. It actually was pretty common back in those days. JAFF really wanted a companion to share his home with and help him take over the duties at home, and he didn't necessarily want to have any more children, and Alma was into her late thirties by the time they got together, so he never really thought that they would end up having kids. But of course, due to being deeply religious, they decided that if God wanted them to have a child, then they would, so JF asked Almah to marry him about a year later, and Almah went back and forth on discussing things with her sister if she should or shouldn't marry JF, and basically she decided she didn't want to die a spinster and knew that JAF would take care of her financially, so she decided to go through with it and marry him. Alma very much wanted to have a child. She accepted JAF's proposal of marriage, and JAFF responded, quote, you have made me very happy, Mama end quote, and that was forever Almah's nickname, Mama m you Mma. One year after the death of Anne Marie in nineteen twenty four, JF and Almah got married. On her wedding day, Almah was thirty eight years old and JF was sixty. Now her name had always been Almah list and when she got married it was still Almah List. Ten months later, Almah's prayers of being a mother were answered. On September seventeenth of nineteen twenty five, Almah gave birth to her child, who was a son. She was almost thirty nine the time and JF was sixty one. They named the son John Emil List, and that is where it all began. John List was born at the eighteen eight South Winona Street home. This is the home that John would end up being raised in. It only had one bedroom, so John slept in the front room, which overlooked the porch and it was basically across from the living room. The room had no door, so even as John grew up and became a teenager, he had no privacy. John attended Zion Lutheran Church for church and school from grades first to eighth, and he lived a very sheltered life. The family only spoke German at home, and they did not have any luxuries. In the winter, they had to cloak themselves in warm clothing in order to save money on using the heat. This was definitely a family that did everything they could to save money in every possible. Way in order to survive. JF did not really have a whole lot to do with John and left mostly everything up to Ama, who was so happy to have a child of her own, so she did everything she could for her son. John wasn't allowed to run outside barefoot with the neighborhood kids. Instead, he always had to be dressed nicely, hair done, and knew that he was to keep his clothing neat and clean. He was expected to and enjoyed reading his Bible every single night. John was very much what you would consider a mama's boy. She did everything for him, and this is what he knew and expected. His younger cousins over the years attempted to play with him at different family events, but John was just different. He was raised to be attached to his mom's hip and by his mom's side. His hair was always done and styled, His outfit was pristine, and he didn't want to risk getting it dirty. His mom told him he needed to keep his clothes clean. Eventually, the other cousin in the family would stop asking John to play with them, and they would often say that John only did what his mother told him to do. By age thirteen, John had already adopted many of the values and beliefs that the church elders had John was raised in a very strict household. Like I said, he attended school and went to the church, and there was a lot that was preached at him at church, and then when he would come home, there was a lot that was preached at him by his mother, who preached controlled devotion to God in the Bible, and his dad preached work ethic and how important it was for him to complete an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. They also went a step. Further and preached against the sins of greed and lust, and they also preached a. Lot and focused on sin. They thought drinking a little too much, dancing and going to the theater, and driving too fast and racing horses were all sins according to them. But all of this was very normal for John. It didn't seem that this was odd stuff because this is exactly how he was raised, and he was raised by two people who very much believed all of this. For seven terms, JF acted as a treasurer of the church and he was also a member of the board of trustees at the church. So young John would often accompany his dad to these different meetings and events and was exposed. To a lot of different things. There was a particular incident in which a woman had gone to the church and was discussing with the board of trustees that she was going to be getting a divorce, and she was shunned by the board of trustees and kicked out of the church because of it. And again, this really is just a sign of the times, and I think it's very much shaping who John is and what he thinks is normal. And I do think all of this very much comes into play later in his life when he's in a position where things aren't going great personally in his marriage with his family, and he therefore takes super drastic measures to fix them. From nineteen thirty eight until nineteen forty one, there was a woman and her husband who moved into the upstairs apartment at the List family home. They were a newly young married couple and they were working on renting until they could afford a place on their own. They were neat, clean, and not noisy, so the Lists really liked them, and Alma immediately became very fond of the woman, who was named Christina. Christina recalls a specific Halloween night where she looked out of her window and saw a group of kids dressed up in their different ghost costumes, running around the neighborhood with their treat bags, going from home to home to get candy. She actually had made up some treat bags for the kids and suddenly she heard screams coming from the front lawn and that is when she looked out the window and saw JF chasing the kids away and was shouting at them in German, shaking his fist. Basically, he was the old man chasing kids off of his lawn. He didn't want them there, and he thought that Halloween was stupid, I'm sure, and probably the devil's holiday. Young John List watched all of this from his window. He was already tucked into bed, ready to fall asleep, and just thought that his dad chasing these kids off was normal. And this is going to come up later in the story because he will later become exactly who his dad was. Alma even made a comment to him at this point in time that if those kids were at home in bed where they should have been, that this never would have happened. So I am not, by any means making an excuse for John List, but when you really dig into his upbringing and the way that his life was from the very start, it makes sense as we get into the story he turned into the person in which he's going to be turning into. Throughout this summer series, Christina would find herself starting to feel sorry for John List because his parents were both very strict. They had high expectations of their son and they wouldn't let him just be a normal kid. They wouldn't let him out of their sight to go play with other kids. They expected him to be dressed to the nines at all times. But she did kind of blame it on their age, because although Alma was younger, she acted a lot older than she was, and by this point in time, JF was in his seventies. As John got. Older and went through school, he is described as peculiar. He was always dressed in dark colors, which made him appear to be a lot older than he really was. He always had a sweater that he wore over a white T shirt, and he always wore a tie put a pin in that it will come up later in the wintertime. He would wear a plane rimmed hat and gloves, and this was just kind of how he dressed and how he appeared every single day of his life. As John got. Older and his dad got older, JF was nearly eighty years old and John decided to start taking on some of the household tasks. And one of the main things that he was put in charge of was making sure that the yard of the List family home looked impeccable. He needed to rake the leaves, tend to the gardens, cut the grass, trim the hedges, and make sure that the home was freshly painted and looked good to those passing by. And this is something that he took pride in. Again, this is going to come up later in John's life as he gets older. These are habits that will go with him into his adulthood. John eventually left the church school and went to Bay City Central High School, and things kind of remained the same for him at the school. He didn't have any friends. He was very isolated and very much to himself. His mom would often meet him after school and they would walk home together, and even at this point in time, John's in high school, Alma, would accompany John to church and she would hold his hand and walk him into church. One of the. Elders of the church actually had pulled JF aside and talked to him about this situation, and JF was instantly defensive and basically said, Alma's job was to protect him, and that is exactly what she is doing, and that is exactly what she is going to keep doing. By the time John was in. High school, the town that he was living in had changed quite a bit. German was no longer the primary language spoken in the town, and there was a war going on, and a lot of the kids at his high school were talking about going to quote fight the Nazis end quote, and he could kind of feel himself wanting to join in on this. John graduated from Bay City Central High School in nineteen forty three, and many of the kids in his graduating class didn't wait for graduation to enlist. John never spoke of wanting to enlist in any type of military service, but he felt that that is what he wanted to do because he kind of wanted to get away, but he didn't want to say this to his parents, so he would talk about wanting to do it under the guise of wanting to do what was right for his country and for his German heritage. He signed up and told his parents on June fourteenth that he had joined the army. He was eighteen years old and he was about to be away from the only life he had ever known for the first time in his life. So with that, John officially joined the army, like I said, and he very much enjoyed it. He liked the fact that it was regimented. There was a lot of oversight and a lot of discipline. He was used to that. He went to Louisiana for basic training and his active army duty began on December fifteenth of nineteen forty three. JF passed away on August thirtieth of nineteen forty three, at the age of seventy nine. John, at this point in time, was stationed in Louisiana. When he received the word that his father had passed away, he was able to leave shortly so that he could attend the funeral. When John returned back home for his short leave, he was very emotionally detached. He didn't seem upset about the death of his father at all, but he was there and able to spend some time with his family. John spent eleven months and twenty five days overseas serving as a medical technician in the army and Almah was very proud of him. She would constantly brag about John and all of his achievements and all of the things that he did. He was awarded the Combat Infantry Men's Badge, the Good Conduct Medal, and the Bronze Star for Exemplary Conduct. Almah would also tell her friends' stories about how John was captured by Germans during the combat, but they ended up releasing him because his German was so fluent that they thought that he was one of them. And this is a story that John told her. So we don't know if it is true or not, but Alma never questioned it for one minute because John was her son and she literally believed everything he said. John was discharged from the service at McCoy Base in Wisconsin on April twenty second of nineteen forty six, and instead of coming home, he decided to enroll himself at the University of Michigan and he joined the Reserve Officers Training Corps. John would be working towards a business administration degree and thought that this would help him further his education and help him get a good job for his future. Going back to his dad saying, it's important that you do an honest day's work for an honest day's money. John ended up being housed at one of the resident dormitories, which was called Wenley House, and this very much mimicked what John was used to. They were very strict and very restrictive. The space was small and not very private, which at this point in time was really all that John had ever known. From living at home with his parents and then going into the army, and now being at college. These three experiences, although very different, all very much mirrored each other and that is exactly. What John was used to. He was used to structure, he was used to not having his privacy, and he was used to things being very regimented. He was used to rules, and that is kind of where he thrived. John went ahead and joined the gamadulta society, which was a Lutheran student organization, and expressed that he had zero desire to pledge any type of fraternity or anything like that. That was very out of the realm of normal for him, and he was happy being in the Lutheran student organization. John very much kept a low profile while he was part of the Lutheran student organization, but he would always be the first to volunteer for different activities, and anytime there was something that needed to be done or they needed help with, he would volunteer and he would take everything on on his own and would always show up early. He's described as being so different than other people his age, and he was reliable. He would never let anybody down. He wasn't forgetful. He was the type of person that you could always rely on to show up and do what needed to be done and make sure that it was done right. The reverend who ran the group and his wife very much took a liking to John, and the wife especially would talk to John about how he needed to branch out a little bit because he would always spend all of his time by himself, and she told him that he needed to put himself out there and that he had a lot of gifts to show the world. And that he didn't need to be alone. And he would always say that he wasn't lonely, but she always told him, you've been at this school long enough. You need to start making friends. And he would say, I do have friends, and John would say that her and her husband were his friends. She would always encourage him that he needed to go and make his own community and even meet girls. And he was very resistant to this because he thought that there was plenty of time to meet girls and he basically just wasn't in any rush to meet a woman and settle down. One day, while John was sitting in the day room of the Michigan Union, he was reading his book and he had overheard some of the other students in the union talking about the big football game that was happening, and he decided that he wanted to go and. See what all the fuss was about. And the next Saturday, he found himself seated in a ninety eight thousand seat stadium watching this Michigan football game. He really had no idea what he was getting himself into, and he didn't really realize what a big deal football was. And this was a great time for Michigan sports because Michigan was on a winning streak. They were actually on their way to the Rose Bowl. He didn't understand what all the hype was about. He didn't understand what was going on around him, and he felt like this was all too much for him and felt like all of this effort could be used better elsewhere. And I guess at one point he had had a conversation with Alma about going to the football games, and she thought it was ridiculous and that he didn't need to be going there. But once he went, he realized that it wasn't for him, and he had this conversation with her, and she had expressed to him that she was so glad that she had a sensible son, not one that would get wrapped up in silly football. Michigan would end up winning its twenty sixth straight game and they went to California to play the University of Southern California in the Rose Bowl, and Michigan one with a final score of forty nine to zero. Everybody on campus was so excited and celebrating and would go on and on about it, and John honestly could not care less. John still struggled very much with making friends, and anytime he attempted to put himself out there and talk to people, he realized that everybody was just different than him, and he looked down upon them because they were into things like drinking and partying and that just wasn't his cup of tea. During John's senior year in nineteen forty nine, he decided to pledge to a fraternity and he rationalized this by telling himself that the Delta Signa fraternity was not really a social fraternity, but more of a professional one because there were a lot of the business administrative majors that were in this fraternity. So he joined this fraternity, and he would often find himself at events that he normally wouldn't be involved in or even invited to, and he found himself being social, which was odd for him. He even let himself go on a few dates that were arranged to attend these different functions. John graduated from the University of Michigan in June of nineteen fifty and Alma was so proud of him. He was the first member of the family to graduate from college. But with this joy, she was also very worried because he wasn't going to be returning home to Bay City. On November fourth, John was set to begin his active duty once again in the army because America was in the midst of another war. Before he ended up going back into active duty military, he had taken an internship at a place called Ernest and Earnest, which was a major organized national accounting firm in Detroit. When he had applied for the position They. Had asked what some of his hobbies are were, and John didn't know if he had hobbies, but he put down that he enjoyed going to plays and listening to classical music. John would earn two hundred and twenty five dollars a week at this job, which honestly, for back in the day, was pretty good money. I would imagine. John would end up being stationed at various military bases around the country. One of them was in Indiana, and at this base he continued his education. The Army ended up paying for it and he was able to attend the Fort Harrison Finance School. As all of this was going on, there was about to be a big turn of events that would change John's life forever. Things are about to start intersecting. There was a soldier named Marvin Taylor who was killed in action in Korea. This was the same month that John began his finance school at Fort Harrison. John would then end up being transferred to Virginia in nineteen fifty one because his background qualified him for the transportation school there, which taught twelve separate courses in aviation, truck, rail, and water transportation, and John would study the fundamentals of the army's payment and accounting systems, so this was something that he was very interested in. He was one of two hundred and thirty three lieutenants that were stationed in Virginia and one of oneenty twenty eight graduates. The same a month that John List officially graduated from this program in Virginia was the same month that the soldier who I said earlier named Marvin Taylor, was officially transported back to the States from Korea. This was a whole six months after he was killed in action, and this is where Marvin Taylor's life and John Lyst's life are about to intersect and change the course of John's life forever. But we are going to save all of that for the next episode in the Summer series. I decided for this series, I'm going to be doing shorter episodes only because I'm trying not to overwhelm myself with all of the research that goes in to a summer series, especially the List family, because there is a lot of information I'm going to be covering. So I'm going to be breaking it down into shorter episodes thirty to forty five minutes each, and we're just going to really take it one step at a time because this story is a lot and it is very involved, and I am just going to do the best I can with it. So there might be a couple of episodes that are a little bit longer, especially as we get more into the series, but the very beginning of the series, the episodes are going to be shorter. I do not know how many episodes it's going to be. I am taking it one step at a time, but I did want to really focus on each character here, starting with John, his upbringing, his family, and then we're going to dive into Helen her upbringing, how her and John met and came to be, and essentially how their life evolved into what happened, because I really think for the List family, from the outside looking in, there was always some quirks and. Oddness to the family. A lot of people will. Say that they felt that John was a very odd individual, and that is a common theme throughout John's entire life, and I think it's important realizing how he was raised and who he was raised by, and then who he evolved into as an adult, and then having a bunch of children and then kind of projecting some of the same thoughts and feelings that his parents projected onto him onto his kids, and it's just a really interesting in my opinion, there's some interesting psychology behind everything that happened and how everything came to be. So we're gonna break it down one step at a time. Next episode, we're talking about Helen and her and John's relationship and the early years of their marriage. So we are gonna call that good for episode one. I will see you guys next week for a brand new Summer series episode and we are going to work our way through the series together. I hope you guys have a great week coming up. This should be publishing on Sunday, so thank you for joining me and I will see you on Thursday for a brand new Unsolved case and next Sunday for Part two of Summer Series twenty twenty six. Bye guys,