Summer Series 2026: The List Family Murders Part 2

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. Hey guys, welcome to Prime Time Crime. It's Kylie. We are diving in to episode two of Summer series, which is going to be a little bit of a dive into Helen Morris Taylor List's life, her upbringing, how her and John met, and the early years of their marriage, because I think going on a deep dive like this really sets the stage for what's to come in the story. Because this story is very interesting, It's more than meets the eye. So I really wanted to deep dive into both of their backgrounds, so we understand how we got where we are today. So let's go ahead and get in to episode two. Helen Morris was born on January first of nineteen twenty four in Guilford County, North Carolina, to her parents, Edward and Eva. She was one of five kids. She had brothers named Bill, Fred, Jimmy, and then she had a sister named Jean. Helen was the third born child. She was raised Baptist and grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, where her father worked at a cotton mill. From what I saw, Helen had a pretty basic and normal upbringing. Helen married Marvin Taylor in nineteen forty one when she was only sixteen years old. Marvin was twenty three. Helen had fallen head over heels for him and they got married. Now, I will say this was a long time ago. A sixteen year old marrying a twenty three year old this day and age wooden fly, but back then it wasn't super uncommon. Marvin was already in the military at the time that Helen and he married. They would go on to have a daughter named Brenda Joyce Taylor. Less than a year after they were married. Brenda was born in nineteen forty two. Helen then became pregnant a second time with a son that they named Kenneth Everett, and he was born in nineteen forty four. Unfortunately, Kenneth passed away when he was only six months old in nineteen forty five. He was Marvin's only son. Helen also had two still births, all by the time that she was twenty five years old. So looking at Helen's life and her experiences, Helen was very much the opposite of John List. She had experienced a lot of life in a short period of time, and by twenty five she had experienced a lot of joy and a lot of loss. After Marvin's death, Helen Morris Taylor moved in with her mother at a house located on Washington Avenue in Newport News, Virginia. Helen was young, a single mom to her and Marvin's daughter, Brenda, and now she was a widow, and she was trying to pick up the pieces of her life. Helen was very much struggling during the month's following Marvin's death. She was very depressed, and understandably so, she was in the midst of her grief. It took the military a whole six months to send the body of Marvin back home to Helen so she could give him the proper burial that he deserved. She'd been sitting on that grief without any type of closure for such a long time. Marvin was her first love. They were married for ten years and they had a child together. Brenda loved her dad and she was his world. Even the thought of Helen putting herself back out there just didn't sit right. But Helen's sister, Jean knew that she had to try and do something to help cheer up her sister. One evening, Jeane suggested that they go bowling. Helen reluctantly agreed to go to the local bowling alley. And this decision is one that would bring John List into her life and change the path of her life forever. So, like I said, Helen had agreed to go with Jean to this bowling alley in Newport News. John List and one of his friends named Jerry Herman, also decided this night that they were going to go bowling in Newport News as well. They were having some type of officer's bowling party, and John and Jerry decided that they were going to show up and Jerry said. Maybe we can even meet some girls. When they got there, John and Jerry met Helen and her sister Jean, and instantly Helen was kind of taken aback by Jerry. Jerry was very. Loud and social and outgoing, and he was very much a different contrast to John, who just kind of stood there awkwardly, didn't really say much, and didn't seem comfortable being in that environment at all. When Jean, Helen's sister, first met John at the Bowling Alley, she asked him for his name and he said his title, Lieutenant John List, and Jean thought that this was weird. Why the formalities, It's really not necessary. But her first impression of him was that he was odd and a little bit stand offish. He didn't really interact or speak, and he just seemed very self conscious. And all that we know about John is that he's not comfortable in social settings and being around people. He's used to being around his mom and his dad, and that is pretty much it. He's not a social guy, so him being in this bowling alley at this point in time was probably really uncomfortable for him. Jeane was very happy though, because she saw that Helen was interacting with Jerry, and it seemed like they were getting along pretty good. If anything else, this was going to be a nice distraction from how she was feeling her grief with Marvin's death and at least getting her out of the house now. Despite being very. Shy, John was taken by Helen and thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. But of course he stood there and compared himself to Jerry. Jerry, like I said, was very loud, very outgoing, very outspoken, and basically at this point, Jerry was trying to make plans with Helen for them to go out on an official date. Helen was reluctant, but she eventually agreed after realizing that Jerry seemed like a fun enough guy and it would be worth at least going out with him and giving it a shot. What's the worst that could happen. So over the next few weeks, Helen would invite Jerry over and they would go out, and often Jerry would bring John with him, which I don't really understand why he brought John with him, but to each his own. So these two plus John were consistently seeing each other, and then one night in early October, Jerry came to the mess hall looking for John. They were back at the base, and he was upset. He was panicking, and he told John, you have to help me. Ellen is coming. She's trying to surprise me. And John asked him who is Ellen, and Jerry said Ellen was his wife. So all along he is trying to hang out with Helen. He's married to a woman named Ellen, and hiding it from everybody, presenting himself as being single. John was not happy with this. And he basically told Jerry that he had no right to do that. He never told anybody that he had a wife. He was super upset that Jerry was so dishonest, not just with him, but with his wife and then also with Helen, because he was stringing her along. They were dating, so to say, and this whole time he's married. John thought that Jerry was taking advantage of Helen and also being really disrespectful to his wife. So this upset him. And I think that this is so interesting in the grand scheme of things, when we realize where we are, where the story is going, because the story is not going in a good direction. That John was so upset by this dishonesty that Jerry portrayed himself as being single when he was married. It's all really interesting when you get into the psychology behind it all, but I think it does show you that there was a point in time when John lyss did have a moral compass. Somewhere along the line he lost it, but back in these days when he had first met Helen, he had a moral compass. So what John did next is he made Jerry go to Helen's house and tell her the truth about his marriage. Now, John did tag along. Jerry broke the news to Helen, and she was understandably very upset by this news. She said that although she wasn't looking for anything serious, she doesn't like being lied to and she doesn't go out with married men, and that he shouldn't have lied to her. Helen then assumed that John had come with Jerry kind of asked protection. But John spoke up and he said that he doesn't condone what Jerry did. John told Helen that he didn't know that Jerry was married either, and that he was also upset with him. And then Jerry just kind of ended up leaving and going off on his own. Now, at this point in time, John is kind of just left in the doorway of Helen's home. Helen was upset to and honestly, this is kind of what they bonded over, was the fact that both of them had been lied to by this person that they thought they could trust. John even went on to tell Helen that he would never lie to her, and Helen was kind of standing there waiting for John to leave, but he just stood there awkwardly in the doorway because that is what John List does or did, and Helen invited him inside of the house. So at this point, John had already met Jeane, who is Helen's sister, and jean was married to a man also named Jean spelled g E n E. And when he first met John, he thought he was weird. He didn't really talk much, and he was just kind of one of those guys that just always seemed to be kind of lurking around. He was just always there, but he also wasn't very social and at this point, wait, Jeanne thought, well, at least he's not married and maybe he can at least provide a little distraction for Helen. What's the worst that could happen? John List was very smitten and taken by Helen and they started talking. He asked her about her. Late husband, how long they had been married, and John was astonished when he learned that Helen got married when she was only sixteen years old. Helen then went on to tell John about her pregnancies and how she had two still births, and how she had had a son, Kenneth, who had passed away. And in this conversation, John realized that he had led such a sheltered life compared to Helen. He was only a year older than her, and she had experienced so much life in such a short amount of time. One thing that Helen realized any time that John had asked questions about her life is he would listen so intently, and he seemed like he was true interested in everything that she was saying. He basically hung on every word that Helen said. She shared everything about her upbringing and her family, She shared about losing Marvin in the war, and this whole time John is just locked in listening to everything she said. At the same time, John is falling in love with this woman. He just can't help but be smitten by her. Helen also shared that when her and Marvin went to the military hospital to have one of their babies that was unfortunately stillborn that the staff there ended up spilling ether in her eye and she was permanently blinded in her right eye from the ether. Now put a pin in that, because we're later going to find out that this is not the cause of Helen's blindness. So that is the origin story of how Helen and John came to be. John was very much in love with Helen and he also really liked her family. One thing he really liked is that they were a stark contrast from the strict upbringing that he had, and they seemed to accept him for who he was, so Helen and John began to discuss the possibility of getting married. Now, although Helen's family. Did seem that they liked John, they couldn't get past the fact that he had some odd behaviors. He was very neat, very tidy, and very ocd with every single thing that he did. It was just very abnormal. And Jane recalls a time when he was looking through the newspaper and after he was done with it, he neatly stacked it back up and laid it perfectly on the table, whereas her brothers would read a newspaper and they would thumb through it and then just throw it on the table haphazardly. She just thought, for a guy of. His age that he was extremely different than what she was used to seeing with her brothers, But all in all, he seemed to make Helen happy. Now. The other interesting thing, John didn't have much of a relationship at all with Helen's daughter Brenda. He would pay a little to no attention to her when she came in the room. She would attempt to try to talk to him and visit with him, but he was just awkward and he had never been exposed to children before, so I honestly don't think he knew what to do when a. Child was around. Kind of awkward, kind of keeping to himself, not interacting at all with Brenda. Even though he was allegedly in love with Helen and wanted seemingly to marry her, it's odd that he didn't really make much of an effort with Brenda. But despite this, Helen and John decided that they did want to get married, and generally the Morrises did support Helen and John getting married. Gene and her husband were the only ones who were a little hesitant, just because they thought it seemed so different than the relationship that Helen had had with Marvin. And they again went back to there just being something off about John. And let me tell you, they were right. I don't think they had any idea, but they were right. So in the midst of all of this marriage talk, Helen finds out that she's pregnant and she wasn't happy about it because she has had a lot of really rough pregnancies. She had a child pass away, she had two stillbirths, and she didn't feel well when she was pregnant. It just didn't agree with her. Helen of course told John right away that she was pregnant, and he said that they needed to get married. He asked her to convert to the Lutheran faith and he wanted to marry her immediately. John called his mother, Alma and shared the news with her, but of course Alma was very upset. Alma was very judging of Helen because Helen had been married for ten years, she had an eight year old daughter, she had multiple pregnancies. She just didn't think that this was the right type of woman for her baby boy John, even though he was old enough by this point to make his own decisions. She also didn't like the fact that Helen was a different religion and that was not something Alma approved of at all. So in the midst of all of this talk of the wedding and everything, Helen found out that, in fact, she wasn't pregnant after all. Once she found out that she wasn't pregnant, she thought that maybe John would not want to marry her, and she kind of went back and forth on her thoughts, but ultimately she decided that she was going to marry him because he was kind enough to her, he treated her well, and she didn't want to be alone. So she ended up marrying John List on December one of nineteen fifty one. The wedding was performed in a Lutheran church in Baltimore, Maryland. John was twenty six years old and Helen was twenty five. Alma did not attend the wedding. For the honeymoon, John and Helen and Jean and her husband Jean spent the week together in Washington, d C. Now, at this point in time, Helen's sister Jean still wasn't super sure, but her husband was starting to like John, and Helen together and thought that they made a good couple. They seemed happy. They were always holding hands, they were always kissing, and it seemed like they were both really willing to put in the work to make the marriage work. Once they finished their honeymoon, they traveled from Washington, d C. And John took Helen to Bay City to meet his mother, Alma. When Helen first met Alma, she realized how meticulous and clean Alma was. There was nothing in her home that was out of place. Everything was perfect, and in the back of her mind, she thought to herself that she hopes that John wasn't like this. Did she know that's exactly how John was. All in all, the meeting between Helen and Alma went well, but Helen realized that Alma didn't really approve of her, and she also noticed how isolated John and Alma were. They only went to church. They didn't socialize with anyone outside of the home, and that's just kind of their life, going to church and then coming home. They didn't have any social life. They didn't have any friends outside of each other. Also, when they visited Alma, they were visiting John's childhood home, the home where his room didn't have a door, and that is where Alma list put these two newlyweds to stay in a room with no privacy and no door, and I think Helen being there probably opened her eyes to how different, truly different, their upbringings were. So by this point, John's leave from the military was over and Helen and John returned to the base in Newport News, Virginia. Then the news came that John was going to be transferred to Fort Ord in San Francisco, California, and for one reason or another, they weren't going to be able to bring Brenda with them. However, they were going to take Almah with them. Now I don't really know the reason behind them not taking Brenda with them, and Helen's family was kind of surprised that they weren't going to try to bring Brenda with them, and they thought that it didn't sound like anything that Helen would ever do. She would never have an idea to leave her child behind, and Helen's family thought it was probably more of John and Alma's idea to leave Brenda behind. But poor Brenda at this point, she's still young, she had lost her dad, and now her mom was remarried and was going to be going somewhere else, San Francisco, and was going to leave her behind, and she felt very abandoned by her mother. And John still at this point did not go out of his way to try and build a relationship with Brenda. He didn't really speak with her. And now they were going to be leaving, moving from Virginia to California and leaving her behind. But that is exactly what they did. They packed up their stuff and Alma and John and Helen moved from Newport News, Virginia to San Francisco, California. And this time in John and Helen's new marriage was not a good time of life. They were pretty newly married and Helen realized how close of a relationship that Alma and John had, and she was basically made to feel that she was in the way of them having the close mother and son relationship that they've always had. She basically felt like a third wheel in her relationship with her husband. John ended up finding out that his service tenure was ending and that he was not going to be in the army anymore, and officially April nineteenth of nineteen fifty two, he decided that he was going to go ahead and go back to Detroit and try to go back. To his old job at Ernest and Earnest. John sat Almah down and told her his plans, hoping that she wasn't going to want to come and move back with them. Now. She did decide that she was going to go back home to Bay City, and John was relieved that Alma was understanding and not judgmental, and also that she wanted to go back home. And I'm sure Helen was relieved as well because Alma had been living with them. It hadn't been a good situation and it just wasn't working. John's tour of duty ended in April of nineteen fifty two, and he and Helen went back to Virginia and they picked up Brenda before moving to Highland Park, which was five miles north of Detroit, and they rented off of a duplex house located at three four zero nine Coy Avenue. Helen, Brenda, and John settled into life. John was so happy to be back at his old job and Brenda was happy to be back surrounded by John, even though they were just getting to know each other and her mom Helen, this is the only stability this girl has had, Brenda and John would eventually go on to start getting along, and John even adopted Brenda, and Brenda was thrilled to be legally part of this new family. Now, of course, she was young and still unsure completely of John, and it did take some time for her to fully trust him and for him to win her over, but eventually that did happen. Helen would then go on to get pregnant, and she was very ill, very out of sorts, not her normal self, and it was around this time that she met her neighbors Janet and Bill. They had invited John and Helen over for a New Year's Eve drink and they knew at this point that Helen was pregnant, but Janet was kind of surprised and taken aback because when Helen showed up, she seemed like she had already been drinking, and then when she got to the party, she kept drinking more and more, and Janet was trying to tell her, you shouldn't be drinking. It's not good for the baby, and Helen was very defensive, basically saying that she knew what she was doing and to mind her own business. Basically, Janet noted that John never left Helen's side, and they were both pretty socially awkward and quiet. Now, it did turn out that prior to this party, Helen had miscarried the baby, so probably drinking to cope with all of the grief that came with how having yet another miscarriage. Janet didn't find out about the. Miscarriage until the following day when she stopped by the home and Alma was there, and Alma informed Janet that Helen had, in fact had another miscarriage. So you're gonna see a pattern with Helen. She gets pregnant, she ends up miscarrying, and then she spirals and drinks heavily, and she's depressed, and it's just kind of this toxic spiral that just keeps happening over and over and over. Helen then became pregnant again and miscarried again, so that made for her sixth loss. And knowing what we know now. Helen gets pregnant again again and again and again. She ends up having four happy, healthy children. It's crazy that this is how the first couple of years of John and Helen's marriage was. So after this last miscarriage, Helen is not well. She is also very physically frail, and she started drinking again. She was drinking a little bit more than usual to cope with all the different losses and things that she had gone through, and the fact that Alma was always there, she was always visiting. And I think we can conclude in Layman's terms that Alma just very much stressed Helen out. So then yet again, John and Helen decided that they were going to move. They ended up renting an upstairs apartment in a two family house on Parkwood Avenue in Inkster, which was about ten miles west of Detroit. Now at this point in time, Helen was feeling a lot better. She enjoyed her new apartment and she wanted to furnish it and try to fix it up and make it her own. She stopped drinking, and in April of nineteen fifty four, Helen became pregnant again. She was very upset. She did not want. Another pregnancy because of everything that had happened in her past, But it did seem that this pregnancy was going to be viable and that at the end of the nine months she was going to have a happy, healthy baby. Now, she was very upset with John and express her frustrations because he did not want to use contraceptives, and then John had the nerve to get mad at Helen when she actually started to look pregnant and told her that there was no need to advertise it. This is just such odd behavior, especially coming from somebody that kept getting this woman pregnant and then was mad when she actually looked pregnant. Keep in mind that they would go on to have an additional three children together. On January eighth of nineteen fifty five, one week passed Helen's twenty ninth birthday, Helen gave birth to her second daughter and John's first child, a daughter named Patricia Marie. Helen was very relieved that she was able to carry the baby to term and that the baby was okay and healthy. Brenda was elated to have a sister. Unfortunately, Helen struggled a lot with some postpartum issues, and there were oftentimes that Brenda had to step in and help care for her sister. And Helen would have moments where she would feel better and she would be involved in her daughter's care, But a lot of it came down to Brenda and John. John was very involved in Patty's care. He seemed like he was a really good dad. He was very attentive and very caring. In February of nineteen fifty six, Patty was eleven months old and Helen was pregnant yet again. This was her ninth pregnancy. She was obviously very distraught. She did not want to have another baby. She cried for days and days, and she would go on to confide in her sister Gene that she didn't want this baby. And she said that John didn't believe in birth control and all he did was prey and hope that they didn't get pregnant. So here we are again, same song, different dance. She's upset about being pregnant. She also realizes that she's just not really the mothering type. She was kind of back at this point, letting John and Brenda care for Patty, and John went along with it because he didn't want to argue with Helen because she was already so upset with him for getting her pregnant. Helen became more and more isolated at this point, and she was spending a lot of time in her room. She just wasn't doing well. She had also been prescribed some mild sedatives by a doctor. So she was also taking those. She just had a lot going on between having Brenda, having Patty, being pregnant again, being upset with John. Her life was just not great. And at this point, John knew that he needed to get another job because he had this growing family and he needed to make more money. So he went on an interview for a new accounting job with the Sutherland Paper Company, which would pay him seven thousand dollars a year. But the job, unfortunately was in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and the family would have to move yet again. Helen did not want to move again since they had moved so many times since their marriage. This would be the fourth time in five years that John and Helen would be moving. The only thing good about this move is that it was further away from Bay City, which means that Almah would be visiting less often. Helen is not doing well at this point in time. She is physically very ill. She is weak. She just wanted to go back home to Newport News, Virginia. She wanted to be with her family, and that's really all that she wanted. The doctor that Helen had been seeing reached out to John and said he wanted to speak with John privately, and he said that he thought that Helen needed some type of psychological intervention because her behavior was erratic and she just wasn't acting herself. And John thought that the reason for her behavior was because of this unwanted pregnancy and that she was anxious about having another. Child, and he just kind of brushed it off. But this doctor thought. That Helen really needed neurological testing and there was something more going on underneath the surface. But nonetheless John brushed it off and basically said that's not an option. He told this doctor, we're getting ready to move. We're moving to Kalamazoo. And the doctor wrote a script for some more mild tranquilizers and sent them on their way. So John, Helen, Brenda, and Patty moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, and they bought a house on a street that was called Lover's Lane, and this time, instead of renting, they actually went the route of purchasing the home. And the home that they bought was a conventional split level home. It had enough room that they would all be kind of spread out and not be on top of one another, which is exactly what they needed at this point in life. Because there was a lot going on in the list home. There was daily arguments between John and Helen, and at this point in time, John had kind of had it with Helen's behavior, and while in the past he had been kind of passive with her, he started to push back and decided that he didn't have to take the way she was acting just because she was pregnant. John obsessively tracked every single dime that was spent. He recorded everything in a budget book, and he worked his day job, and then he worked very hard at home as well. He had detailed charts that went into everything he did regarding his yard work. He even detailed everything and cataloged everything he did in regards to his yard work, and even down to the seeds he planted. He would be sure to document that he would mow the grass in a normal way, and then he would get down on his hands and knees with the para scissors and make sure that the grass was perfectly even. Nothing inside of the house was ever good enough either. He was always obsessively cleaning and picking up after the kids, and they would make a mess and he would pick right up after them. It was very ocd of him and him and Helen were not in a good place. Helen would constantly criticize him and compare him to Marvin, who was her first husband. Brenda was also taking a lot more on at this time. She had to care a lot for her sister Patty, and she would always try to deflect the fights between John and Helen. And she was older at this point, so she was starting to spend some more time out with her friends and John did not like this. He thought she had no business going out until ten pm. And Helen just wanted her to be able to live her life and get out of the house, and even at one point told John and she needs to get out and be with her friends instead of just sitting around here praying all day, because that is what John expected, that his children would stay home and they would pray. So at this point in their marriage, they are never on the same page. They're also pregnant with their third child. On October twenty first of nineteen fifty six, Helen gave birth to a boy. They and when I say they, I mean John, decided that they were going to name this baby John Frederick. Now, Helen did not want the baby to be named John Frederick John said it was a family tradition. Helen very much pushed back on this, didn't want that to be the name of the baby. She wanted to have a say. John was adamant the baby was going to be called John Frederick, and that was that. That was the baby's name, John Frederick. So they brought John Frederick home. And at this point in time, Patty was twenty months old and she was getting into everything because she was a toddler. So when Patty was two years and ten months old and John Frederick was thirteen months old, Helen became pregnant again for the tenth time in her life. She wasn't even thirty three years old by this point in time, and she had been pregnant ten separate times. So like with every other pregnancy she had, all of Helen's physical symptoms got worse during the pregnancy, and she was demonstrating the clear signs of neurosis, and she continued on having this problem with drinking. John would often hide the liquor and then she would try to sneak the liquor, and then he would find it and he would take it away again, and then they would fight, and then everything blew up in the List Family household when they discovered that Brenda was pregnant at fifteen years old. Now, this completely ruined John because John is a very straight laced, follow the rules type of guy, and the fact that she was going to be an unwed mother was just not acceptable. Now, back in those days, this was not the norm, and in his mind, it wasn't okay. This was just as bad as getting a divorce. Another thing he did not believe in was divorce. And John used this pregnancy that Brenda had as an example to show Helen that this is exactly why she doesn't need to be out and about with her friends at all hours of the night. And for the. First time in their marriage, Helen agreed with John. They were on the same page. They didn't think that Brenda would be able to be in this relationship with the guy who had fathered this child, even though Brenda said that she was in love and wanted to marry him, and Helen pushed back saying she was only fifteen, and Brenda used the fact that Helen was only sixteen when she married Marvin fair Point. John and Helen agreed that Brenda was not going to be able to keep the baby, and the baby would be placed up for adoption, no questions asked. It's at this point in time when Helen snapped out of her funk and she decided to go talk to Brenda one on one. But she kind of used this as a time to demean John. Now Brenda and John had gotten pretty close. Brenda called John daddy. This was the individual who she thought of as her dad. She told Brenda that although John has been in her life for a long time, he was not her real father and isn't half the man that her father Marvin was. And honestly, it's so clear when I'm reading this book that I'm reading for my research that Helen just hated John, And it's so wild to me that they stayed together for such a long time and kept having children. So keep in mind Helen and Brenda are pregnant at the same time. Helen, of course, had a really difficult time with her pregnancy, but Brenda's pregnancy was pretty smooth. When Brenda's child was born, this baby was immediately placed up for adoption, and she never even got the chance to see the baby or let the baby's father know that this baby existed. Helen gave birth to another child on August twenty sixth of nineteen fifty eight, and it was another boy, and John named him Frederick Michael. They would go on to call this child Freddie. So they had Freddie. They had Patty who was three years old in eight months, and they had John who was twenty two months old, and they had Brenda. They obviously had their hands full with these kids, and they also hated each other. Brenda would often find herself in the middle of John and Helen, and she would often side with John because Helen was always self medicating and always drinking. Different people at church had attempted to help Helen come out of Rochelle and be a little bit more involved in social events and with the church, but she did I didn't have a desire to do any of these things. John was always. After her to speak to the pastors at the church and speak to the different people. And the congregation, and she always refused. And it's interesting because a lot of people that surrounded Helen and John thought that John was very much the kind of person who did everything he could to try to make Helen happy and make sure that the family was taken care of, and he was kind of the passive one, whereas Helen was the mean one who was always degrading him and really wanted. Nothing to do with him. Anytime they went to church as a family, he made sure that they were all dressed to the nines and that they had everything that they could possibly want. From the outside looking in, everybody thought that John was an amazing family man, and Helen was just this woman who was so mean to her husband and severely mentally ill and honestly reading this book, Helen was not nice to John. She didn't like him. I don't think she wanted to be married to him. There was one night in particular that she was in the kitchen with John. Her and John were sitting at the kitchen table. Brenda was making spaghetti on the stove, and John was trying to read a book. He was ignoring Helen, and Helen was sitting there at the table and kept poking at John, picking on him, telling him that he needed to get a more manly haircut. And after ongoing picking and poking and prodding, John got mad and he stood up and flipped the kitchen table over. Helen basically said, I'm not cleaning this up, and then stormed off. So this is the kind of turmoil that these kids were living in, especially Brenda. She's old enough to know what's going on and old enough to realize that this is not a normal situation. So the next day after this incident happened, John woke up and the left side of his face was paralyzed. He had trouble. Speaking because of it, and in his mind he thought that he had had a stroke, but the doctor ended up telling him that it was nerve related and all in all, it took three months before this issue subsided and went back to normal. This incident did frighten Helen a little bit, and she agreed to go and visit with the reverend at church and talk about what was going on in her life. Although Helen did agree and actually did go to church and talk to the reverend, she was very standoffish and realized that the people that she was talking to were all people that John was close with and they would always stick up and be on John's side no matter what, so she didn't really open up or express what was going on in her life. At this point in time, John pushed for a promotion at the Sutherland Paper Corporation and when Freddie was five months old. John got promoted to a management position and with this new promotion he was going to be making ninety three hundred dollars a year. He was really excited about this, very enthused. Was sharing the information with Helen, but she did not really care and made some off landish comment about, oh, maybe we'll be able to buy new rugs. And again, everybody that's arounded Helen and John their different neighbors that they had realized that John was the main caregiver and provider. He was the one who was always out playing with the kids. He was the one taking them outside, and Helen just kind of sat and watched and didn't really interact. Much with her kids. But she also didn't look well. She was physically very frail, and she was very pale, and she was just described as a standoff, wish parent. I think a big part of this is she was depressed, but she was also sick, which we're going to get into in a little bit. And when it came to Helen communicating with her neighbors, she really didn't. John was always the one that would say hi to the neighbors and communicate with them. They described him as being kind and they also noticed that John was the one who really did anything at all with the kids. At this point in time, Alma John's mom was seventy two years old and she would often visit Helen, John and the kids frequently. Now at this point in time, Brenda's been adopted into this family. But despite that, all the other kids called Alma grandma, and Alma insisted that Brenda call her mother list even after all of this time. That's wild to me. Honestly, the only person I really feel bad for in all of this is these kids, because they're the ones who are suffering because the adults that surround them can't figure it out, they can't get it together, and they're just really odd towards each other. Helen got worse and worse, and at this point she had completely abandoned going to church altogether. And John was under all this pressure because he had been promoted at work. He was working extra hard. And there was one day where he was in the office there was another one of his coworkers there and he got this phone call from Helen. She said it was an emergency, and the emergency. Was that the baby had used the bathroom in the baby Stiper and she wanted no part of cleaning it up, and John had to explain this to his coworker that he had to go home to change the baby stiper because she would leave the baby in the soil diaper all day if he didn't go home and change it, and that is actually absurd. So John had a lot on his shoulders this particular day. He had to race home, leave work, change the baby's diaper and explained to his coworker what was going on. Anytime that John was able to get Helen to come out of the house and be social, it would always turn into a session where Helen was bashing John to other people and degrading him, and John just stood there and let her talk to him and about him like that. In nineteen sixty, Brenda was seventeen years old at this point and decided that she wanted to run away with her boyfriend, the same guy who was the child's father, and they wanted to get married, but they were only seventeen, and they attempted to get married, but they were basically sent back home because they were underage. John and Helen again agreed they were too young to get married. They wanted Brenda to finish her schooling and to be able to have a future for herself. But poor Brenda, she's about to turn eighteen, so she knows when she turns eighteen that she is going to go get married and she is going to create a life for herself. That isn't the craziness that she has grown up in, because when you think about it, she has known nothing but bickering parents her entire life. Her dad passed. Away and then her mom married John and they've literally been fighting ever since. In nineteen sixty one, things at Sutherland Paper Company were not going well for John and he basically was fired and he didn't know what to do with himself. He had been at that job for such a long time. He had recently taken a promotion, but they made a decision to let him go because he wasn't really handling the managerial aspects of his job well and they didn't think that he was able to delegate to people effectively. Now, when he was fired, he was very upset by this. He had never been fired before. He didn't know what to do and he felt shame telling this to Helen, So instead of telling her, he went the route of looking for another job before he even shared anything with her, And pay attention to this because this is going to be a running theme in John List's life. He has a very difficult time holding down jobs, and he also has a really difficult time letting people know that he has failed and been fired. This is going to be a running theme throughout the story. So he puts in a ton of different applications. He is applying to every job that comes his way, and on July fourteenth of nineteen sixty one, John was hired as a general supervisor of accounting with the company in Rochester, New York that was called Xerox Corporation. At this point in time, Xerox was not a thing. It was a very small, new type of corporation, and John was taking a risk in a gamble by going to work for them, not knowing what the future was going to hold for copy machines. So this is where we're going to end today's episode in July of nineteen sixty one. In the next episode, we're going to continue to go through the List's family timeline, eventually getting to the point where they moved to Westfield, New Jersey, which is their final move. If you haven't noticed, yet there are two things about the List family that are certain. They're going to have a lot of children despite all of Helen's health issues, and they are going to continuously move around a lot. So we're going to start the next episode with a move to none other than Rochester, New York for John's new job. So catch me next week for Summer Series Part three, where we are going to get into all of that. We have a long way to go. I did want to be very detailed about everything that happened. The book does such a good job at laying everything out, because I think it's important to understanding how we got to where this man completely wipes out his whole family. This was obviously something that had been burning and brewing for years. So we are going to. Get into all of that in the next episode. I will see you guys next week for that, and I hope you have a great week ahead. Bye.