Summer Series 2026 The List Family Murders Part 6

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 alrighty guys, today we are getting into summer series The List Family Murders, Part six. In the last episode, we went into detail through everything that happened on November ninth of nineteen seventy one at the List family home when John List made the ultimate decision to murder his wife, his mother, and his three young children and decided from there that he was going to go on and start a new life. So we're going to pick up now with the discovery of what happened inside the Hillside Avenue home in Westfield, New Jersey, so that discovery happened almost a whole month later. On December seventh of nineteen seventy one, it was a rainy and cold day in Westfield, New Jersey. A neighbor of the Lists family who was named Missus Bennett, had kind of been noticing that the lights on all three of the floors had been NonStop for almost a month. She knew that the family was away on vacation and figured that they left the lights on so it looked like somebody was home that way. This would discourage potential burglars, but there was this kind of nagging feeling she had that there was maybe something more going on, and maybe something more than met the eye. She had noticed in the earth part of the week before that some of the lights had started to flicker and some had even started to burn out, and there was just something about it that made her feel very uneasy. She couldn't shake that feeling and decided she was going to call the information line to get the number for the Westfield Police Department. As soon as she got the number, she quickly hung up and lost her nerve and changed her mind and thought that she was just overreacting, But some of the other neighbors had also been kind of noticing that things were a little weird over at the List home, and they were suspicious about the fact that there had been no action at all at the house in about a month, and they thought that surely the List family would have been back from their vacation by now. But of course the neighbors didn't know the List very well because they had a very odd relationship with their neighbors, and John was always very standoffish with everybody and didn't want to let anybody get close to them. And nobody felt that they were close enough to the List family to act on the feelings and the concerns that they were having. But there was somebody who was very concerned, and this was a man named ed Alano, and he was Patty's drama coach, and he worked at the Westfield Recreation Group and he had grown very close to Patty and had often chatted with her, and he realized that she had great potential for acting. And he knew that she was supposed to be in North Carolina visiting relatives, but she would always stay in contact with him. She would send him. A postcard and he hadn't gotten anything from her, and she had been gone almost a month at this point, and she hadn't been to any of the rehearsals, and he was really worried about her. Ed had driven by the house several times and even at one point had old into the driveway just trying to see what was going on there. He had a friend of his check on if Patty had been at school, and sure enough, he had gotten word that they received notification that the family was going on vacation. It was that evening at nine point thirty that Ed and Barbara Sheridan, who was the assistant drama coach, got into his car and headed to four thirty one Hillside Avenue together. He had a bad feeling and he remembers conversations that he had had with Patty, and he just got the impression that Patty and her brothers were scared of their father, and there was just some feeling he had that he felt he needed to go over to the house to make sure that everything was okay. The house was dark, the house was very creepy. Ed and Barbara got out and went and knocked on the front door. There was no answer. He ended up going to one of the long windows and looked inside, and all he could s was the darkened outlines of the main hallway. They then went off the porch and went to the right side of the house and looked in the first floor window that was in the front of the home, and everything inside was completely empty. There was no furniture at all. There was nothing, so they ended up going around the back. It was at that point in time when a call came into the Westfield Police Department. That call was from a neighbor of the List family, and they said that they saw a car in the driveway and it looked like there were people maybe trying to sneak around and look into the home. Ed and Barbara continued to walk around the house trying to find an opening to look into a window, and they were able to look into part of the kitchen and they could see that there were dishes piled up next to the sink, and just looking in there, they felt like something was wrong. They got a really eerie feeling just even being there. They felt like something was off, and they decided that they were going to go ahead and get out of there as quick as possible because there was something creepy about being at this house. Patrolman Charles Holler and George Zelznik were near the high school around nine fifty five pm when they received a call from the sergeant who told them to proceed to four thirty one Hillside Avenue because there was a possible burglary at the home that had been vacant for about a month. Charles Holler had remembered that they had gotten noticed to watch that house when the family was on vacation, and that is the call that John had made right after the murders that he made to the Westfield Police Department for them to watch their home because they were going to be going to North Carolina all the while the family was dead inside of the home. At ten oh three pm, the patrol car pulled up, and at the same time Ed and Barber were making their way back towards their car to also call law enforcement. They questioned ed as to who he was and if he lived there, and he introduced himself and said he was the drama teacher at the municipal building and that he knew Patty List and was very concerned. They proceeded to talk to the two officers about their growing suspicions about the home. The two patrol men went up to the front door and knocked again with no answer. Ed made the suggestion that maybe they should try to break in the back and said that the lists haven't been seen in weeks and he was growing very concerned. They walked around the porch to the east side of the house and they found an unlatched window. They opened it up and crawled into the room, which was directly next to four oversized fish tanks. There was a container of fish food sitting on top, and immediately they were struck by a stale smell and the sound of super loud music. Ed climbed in the home right after the patrolman did, because he wasn't going to wait outside and wait for them to come out, so he immediately went in and immediately described the sound as what he describes as church like music playing throughout the house on the intercom. And this house is huge, so they're all kind of inside of the house walking through. It's dark. The patrolmen are calling out for anybody to respond. Barbara at this point in time, was still outside by herself, and she could see everyone inside with their flashlights looking around, and she did not want to be outside by herself because she was already creeped out enough by this house, so she also went inside of the home. They also noted that inside of the home that it was very cold in there. It was freezing, and there was no furniture to be seen, so they ended up walking through a bunch of the home. They went back through the kitchen area, into the dining room, and into the butler's pantry area. They saw crumbled newspapers on the floor of the kitchen, and there was also dark stains that they noted. Then they continued to walk through the rest of the home and Ed was struck by one of the worst smells, one that would haunt him forever. They saw that the floors in the hallway had smears of what they described as a brown like substance that was dried. It looked like dried blood. It looked like there was kind of drag marks on the floor. Patrolman Holler inspected the floor a little bit more closely, and at this point in time, they were all realizing that something terrible had happened inside of the walls of this home. Ed made his way. Into the ballroom and pulled back the heavy gray curtain that was obstructing the entrance. He could hear the church like music was even louder in here, and the odor that he had been faintly smelling as he walk through the rest of the house was very strong. As he walked into the ballroom, he saw what he first thought was mounds of clothes that were stacked up like laundry that needed to be sorted and separated. Little did he know this was the bodies of the List family, the bodies of Helen, Patty, Freddie, and Johnny. So immediately he called out for the patrolmen, and they immediately realized that this was something that they could not handle on their own, and they called for backup. They realized that there was something major going on here and they needed to check the rest of the home to see if there were any more bodies. They searched and photographed every single bedroom in the List family property, and they noticed on one of the beds, which we later will learn is Helen's room, that there was a little bit of blood on the bed, But they realized that it wasn't enough blood that would tell us that Helen was killed in that room, and they thought maybe the killer had blood on him and sat down on that bed, which is exactly what we know John List did after he killed Alma and Helen. He went and sat down on Helen's bed and then ended up changing his clothes and cleaning himself up after that, before he committed the three other murders. They went into John's room, they went into Freddy's room and eventually Patty's room, and they were all barely furnished. They didn't have many belongings in there, and the whole home was just kind of very sparse with everything. And then they went up to the third floor apartment where Alma lived, and they found Alma, who John had put into a storage closet that was off of the kitchen. He had also placed a dish towel over her face before leaving. Before they knew it, the place was swarming with police office. Missus Bennett next door had just settled in to watch TV in our room for the evening and realized that something major was going on at the List family home. Police Chief James Moran and Lieutenant Robert Bell arrived at the house and went inside, and all they heard was this really loud organ music playing throughout the house. They immediately saw the four bodies on the ballroom floor and Chief Moran asked, where is that music coming from? It was extremely extremely loud, and they had realized that the music had been coming from a record player that was in the hall closet and it had been playing through the intercom system, So it was extremely loud, and that music had been playing the whole month that those bodies had been in that house. He insisted that they turn it off and they needed to figure out what they were going to do and process this scene. They discovered the most horrific thing the fact that there were five people dead in this home. Three of them were young children. I am sure that this is one of the most horrific things that they had seen at that point in their career, and probably at the end of their careers, was the most horrific thing that they had ever seen. This was a major, major discovery that they had just made. They did everything they could to try and collect all of the evidence. They noticed that the walls and woodwork had been caked with dried blood, although it did look like there were efforts to clean them up. They also noticed that there was a bag of paper towels that were hardened with dried blood. And there were two more bags noted in the kitchen that had been cramped with paper towels and newspapers that the killer had likely used to try and clean up after themselves. And this was shocking to these police officers because Westfield was a very safe time. Things like this didn't happen in Westfield. The List family murders were Westfield's first murders in eight years, and this was a mass murder, especially behind such a beautiful vintage Victorian home like the one that the List lived in. Ed and Barbara obviously were stunned with what had happened, and they stood in the dining room on the first floor and they noticed that there was these fish tanks inside of that room, and most of the tanks had dead fish floating inside because they hadn't been fed for about a month. But there was a tank that had some fish that were still alive in it despite having gone without food and being in a very cold environment. Barbara went over and poured some of the food into the tank, and the fish, of course lunged at the food. And I think the scene of the fish tanks is so eerie because that what is the last thing that Freddy did before he was killed. He went in the house. He took a different path than he normally would take. He went in and he fed the fish because he had forgotten to feed them the day before. And then he went back into the kitchen and went to the bathroom, and then when he came out of the bathroom, he was met by his killer. And I think that whole scene, with the fish tanks being there and Barbara reaching for the fish food to feed them, just absolutely paint such a horrific scene. They have walked into, obviously the unimaginable, and they're kind of in the middle of this crime scene and they don't. Know what to do with themselves. So Barbara reaching for the fish food to feed the fish is just something that sticks out in my mind because that's really all she could do in that moment. She was probably so distraught and she wanted to try to bring a little normalcy to these poor fish who had been starved for a month, and that is what she chose to do. So as investigators start to process. The scene, the Union County Medical Examiner arrived at the property and upon first glance, noticed that the body of John Junior looked like he had very much put up a fight. In the meantime, Doctor Canuck, who was the neighbor of the List family that John had had multiple conversations with. He was even somebody that John had confided in quite often. He was brought over to help identify the bodies. Doctor Canuck made it clear that he did not know the family very well, and the family was very private. They kept very much to themselves, and he said that this was the first time he had been inside of the home. He was able to identify the bodies, and he noted that they did seem very bloated, which to him made him realize that they had. Been there for some time. Law enforcement continued to ask who else lived at the home, and he said, the only person that wasn't there is the husband and father, John List. Doctor Canuck was very eager to leave the house and he didn't want to be there anymore. Once he realized what had happened and they were all lined up in such a methodical way, he knew that John List was likely responsible because John was a very organized person and that is something that an accountant would do. He would line the bodies up all in a row, and right from the start he suspected John List was the one behind US. Investigators behind the scenes were doing some background work on John List and there was nothing really that came back. He was described as an average citizen, his record was clean, and nothing really in his past that would suggest any involvement in anything like this. In their research, they realized that on October fourteenth of nineteen seven, he had come in to the police station and applied for a gun permit, but that he ended up not coming back to fulfill it. Then some more information came through. They found some information in John List's office, which was in the front living room, and what they found was notes taped to a filing cabinet on John List's personalized stationery, which was labeled a few words from John List, and it had his orange New Jersey work address at the top. John had made labels for each of the filing cabinet drawers which basically pointed to where everything could be found. One note said to the finder, one note said to Jean Seaffert, one note said to Mother Morris, and one note to Lydia Meyer. And then there was a letter addressed to a Reverend Ray Winkle all on John's own personalized stationery. The first letter read as follows to the finder number one, please contact the proper authorities Number two. The key to the desk is in an envelope addressed to myself. The keys to the file are in the desk, signed John List. The top drawer was labeled guns and AMMO, and they found two weapons and unused ammunition inside. There was about twenty bullets left. The guns were a nine millimeters automatic pistol and a tiny twenty two caliber American cult revolver, and those guns were immediately impounded as possible murder weapons. They also found inside of the desk a large, unsealed, unstamped Manila envelope with an open flap mark Pastor Eugene Reverend Raywinkle at Redeemer Lutheran Church. Also inside were checkbooks, bank books, tax records, insurance policies. They also found a budget book. They went through each of these. Items, and they went and read through the chilling words that had been left behind by John List. They saw copies of the notes that had been written to the children's school. This one was to the Principle of Patti's School, dated November ninth, nineteen seventy one, Westfield High School. Our daughter Patricia is a student in the eleventh grade at Westfield High School. She will be out a few days next week since we had to make an emergency trip to North Carolina. We left after school was closed, and I am sending you this letter to explain her absence. He wrote his name and his address at the bottom. There were also the same letters that were addressed to the Roosevelt Junior High School where John Junior and Freddie went to school. There was also another note to KVM real Estate office where Patty and Freddie worked, but this time he wrote the following, KVM associates, missus Dawson, Patricia and Frederick will be absent for several days as we had to make an emergency trip to North Carolina during the night. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, John List. There was also a note to John Wicky, who was the individual whose grandfather had previously owned the home, and that note was thanking him for a book that he had lent him. And there was also a note left for his boss, Bert Goldstein of State Mutual Assurance Company of America, and that letter read as follows, Hello, Bert, I am sorry that it all had to end this way, but with so little income, I just couldn't go on keeping the family together, and I didn't want them to experience poverty. I want to thank you for everything that you did for me. You treated me better than any associate I've ever dealt with, and I'm sorry that I have to repay you this way. The files are marked so that they can be turned over to you. Maybe Paul Greenberg can follow up on some of the best prospects for a quick sale. Be sure to contact Charles Jacob and Jacobson CPA. I worked with him on the Swokenen thing and that worked real good. Also, don't fail to follow up with Hervey. He may be just about ready signed. Best wishes, John. So, it's so weird to me that John commits these mass murders and then he's writing all of these letters in detail, giving his boss work advice as to what kind of accounts to follow up with and what to do next. It is so wild that he was in that frame of mind to even do this. The following is the letter that he wrote to Helen's mom, Missus morris By. Now you no doubt know what has happened to Helen and the children. I'm very sorry that it had to happen, but because of a number of reasons, I couldn't see any other solution. I just couldn't support them anymore, and I didn't want them to go into poverty. Also, at the time, I know that they were all Christians, and I couldn't be sure of that in the future as the children grew up. Pastor Raywinkel may add a few more thoughts with my sincere sympathy John E. List and this was very much alluding to the fact that he thought that Patty was on the wrong track because she wanted to be an actress and she was hanging out with people that he didn't approve of. And also Helen recently had asked to be taken off of the church directory, and I think in his mind that meant that she was no longer going to be considered a Christian and that that would not be a good thing for her, So it was better to take their lives while they were all still considered Christian. It seemed by the time that John had written notes to his mom's sister and Helen's sister, he kind of began to run out of explanations. The next letters were very brief and formal. The letter to Almah's sister, Lydia Meyer, read as follows, Miss Lydia Meyer, by now you no doubt know what happened to mother and the rest of the family. For a number of reasons, this was the only solution that I could see for the family and to save mother untold anguish over the result, I felt it best that she be relieved from this veil of tears. Please accept my sincere condolences, signed John. To Jane, who is Helen's sister, he wrote, by now you have heard of what happened to Helen and the children. I'm sorry that it had to go that way, but when I couldn't support them, I couldn't let them go on welfare, etc. Please accept my sincere sympathy, Sign John. And finally they found the five page confession letter that John had written to Reverend Ray Winkle, five handwritten pages that were torn from a standard sized yellow pad of paper with light blue lines. And this was everything that John did, outlined why he did what he did, and that is the five page letter that I read to you in the last episode. I'm also going to. Include a photo of a little bit of that handwritten letter on my Instagram and Facebook posts that will go along with this episode, because that was something that was included in the very front of the book that I am using for my main reference for this series that I'm doing, So be sure to check that out because John wrote in his handwriting everything that he did, and there was a little excerpt that I will be posting. So once law enforcement found all of this, they knew that they had to find this guy because he was an admittedly cold blooded killer. They collected twenty four shotgun shells from the List family home, so that was twenty four shots for five people. Reverend Ray Winkle was absolutely taken about by what happened. He had actually gone to the List family home five days ago and had left. His card there. Basically, he was just checking in on the family because he hadn't seen or heard from any of them, and Freddy had not been to any of his confirmation classes, and he wanted to check on them and see if they were okay. He described them as a beautiful family and that they were all devout churchgoers, all of them, of course, except for Helen, because she had been very ill but he said John and the three kids were always at church services every single Sunday, and they were always dressed very neatly. They never missed church. He described John as a leader and somebody that he trusted. John taught Sunday school at the church. So this was a tragedy that Pastor ray Winkle couldn't even fathom. Chief Moran honestly didn't want to hurt the reverence feelings when he was expressing all of this, but in the back of his mind, he knew that he didn't want to hear about what a good person John List was because he had literally murdered his whole family and now he was officially on the run. They officially had classified the case as a homicide just a couple of short hours following the discovery, and within a very short period of time, they put out a teletype alarm for John Emil List wanted in connection with a mass murder. They then decided that they were going to start calling the remaining family members to contact them and let them know what happened. Around three am, Jean and her husband woke up to the telephone ringing, and it was Reverend ray Winkle who let Gene know that Helen and the kids and Almah had all been brutally killed and that John was the person who had done it. Jean and her husband had kind of felt like something might be wrong because they had tried to contact Helen on Thanksgiving and the phone just rang and rang and they got no answer. Jean had also written a couple of letters to her sister and never got a response, which was very unlike her. Her and Helen were in constant communication and were always either calling or writing each other back and forth. Jean's husband remembers the last time that he was face to face with John List, which was in May of nineteen sixty eight, before he and Jean had left for Europe. He remembers standing in John's office on the main floor of the house, where John had a lot of how to commit a murder without getting caught books, and he also remembers that John had pointed out different accounting files and basically told Jean's husband, you have no idea how easy it would be to come up with a new identity and create a new Social Security number, And then he went on to brag to Jean's husband about the the fact. That because he was an accountant. He had so many files on so many people, and it would be so easy to create a new identity, which hindsight is always twenty twenty. But looking back at that conversation had to be so haunting for Jean and her husband. When Helen's daughter Brenda was informed of what had happened, she was twenty nine years old and obviously this was the worst news ever. She collapsed when she got this news. She ended up being hospitalized because of how traumatic this was for her. The Kalamazoo Police Department put an instant guard on her to protect her because they were worried that John might try and come after her too, But that was never part of John's plan. He had already left his former identity behind and was in the process of starting anew while the world that he left behind in Westfield was literally crumbling. The next day, on when Day, December eighth of nineteen seventy one, police went through the backlog of mail that had been held at the post office for the List family, and this included junk mail. There was also some bills, and there were two letters from Helen's sister Gene that had been written several weeks earlier, Helen had never received those letters. Around town and especially in the schools, word had started spreading about the List murders, and there was, of course a lot of talk and a lot of gossip about what exactly had happened. There were rumors that the children's father had killed them with a hammer. There were rumors that the kids were into devil worshiping, and there was a lot of rumors surrounding the reason why John did what he did. Obviously, it's a very small town. Adults are going to talk, kids are going to talk, and it's so easy for things to get blown out of proportion. The school officials did keep everything that had happened very quiet. There was a protective order given for them not to expand much, and this was also the case with the neighbors that lived by the List family home. They were ordered by the Union County Prosecutor's office not to comment on the case to anyone until the investigation was complete. And this case was not just blowing up in Westfield, New Jersey, but also across the state of New Jersey and also across the United States. This was a huge, massive news story. In December of nineteen seventy one. Now. A little known personal connection for me to this story is the fact that my mom and her sisters and her family lived in Westfield for a short period of time, and during the nineteen seventy one murders, they were living in the town right next to Westfield, a town that John List had even looked at homes in before he eventually said on Westfield. And of course they have memories from around the time that the bodies were discovered and everything started to come out about what had happened. So I am going to share a little bit about just the things that I've talked with them about. So one of my first questions I asked them was if they were at all fearful that John was going to come back or potentially try and harm anybody else, And they said that the thought never even entered their mind that something like that would happen. Obviously, this was a very rare occurrence in Westfield. There hadn't been a homicide there in many, many years, but it was a big national story. My aunt remembers how she would frequently drive by that home on her way to work every single day, and I asked them if the home stood out as being creepy or weird, because it's often described as one of those type of homes that kind of had a creepy aura to it, And they said not really, because there was a lot of homes in Westfield that looked very similar, so the List family home didn't necessarily stand out in that way because there was a lot of homes that were that style as well. Now, my mom remembers that once the bodies were found and they released too the victims were she very much related to Patty because my mom was only a couple years older than Patty at that point in time, so she could very much relate to Patty being a teenager growing up in New Jersey, and like I said, only being a couple years older, she kind of resonated with Patty. I also asked. Them if they had ever seen John or saw him outside of the house or anything like that, and they don't recall ever seeing him or anything like that, because there was a lot of reports that people would see him out mowing his lawn in his suit and tie, so I was curious if they had ever seen that, which they said they did not. Now, I also asked them if they had any thoughts or feelings about what happened to John after he left, and of course from everything that was released by the Westfield Police Department and the FBI in their search for John. They said that they were very much under the impression that he had just gone off and started a new life and maybe he would be found one day, maybe he wouldn't. I also asked about the fire that happened at the List family home shortly after the murders if they thought that John is the one who came back and set that fire, and they said no, they never believed that it was him, and I personally, now knowing all that I know in researching this case, also don't believe that John is the one that set fire to the family home because he was a very intelligent guy. He plotted and planned and did everything so meticulously. I don't think he would have risked coming back only to set fire to thing that was already being targeted by so many vandals and local teenagers and stuff. So I truly don't believe that he had anything to do with setting the fire to his home. So those are just some inside a little tidbits to some people that were actually around in the area that these murders happened, and kind of the reaction of locals and what their thoughts and feelings were, because I do know that the town in general was very, very on edge because of all of this, and the fact that this could happen in such a nice, little prominent town such as Westfield, New Jersey. I'm sure it was shocking to everybody that surrounded Westfield and then the surrounding towns of New Jersey. On December sixth of nineteen seventy one, John Lists missing car, which was a nineteen sixty three blue Chevy Impalla, was found, and it was discovered at the Kennedy International Airport in the long term parking area. The parking voucher on the windshield had November tenth on it, and it had been sitting there vacant since then, but unusually, nobody had paid any attention to it. Normally, if a car sat there unclaimed with a month old tag on it, somebody would have said something. But for some reason, this car just kind of blended in. So law enforcement proceeded to impound the car, and they brought it back to Westfield, and they proceeded to a photograph and search the car and it was very clear at this point in time that not only had John Lists left behind the car, but he also left behind his identity. Inside of the car there was a University of Michigan ID card and Alumni Association card, an American Forestry card, and two New Jersey State Board accounting IDs that were dated twelve thirty one in nineteen sixty nine and twelve thirty one nineteen seventy nine. They scoured the flight records to see if anybody named John List had taken a flight, and there was no record of one. But they also knew that it was entirely possible that John leaving his car at the airport was just a ruse, and he could have either taken a bus or a taxi from the airport and gone elsewhere. The FBI soon ended up taking over the case, and a federal warrant was issued in NewYork charging John Emil List with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution, and they also laid out five murder indictments as well. The police department held a conference in Noork and members of the Westfield Police Department and Union County Prosecutor's Office and the FBI answered just about any questions they could from the media, and they received a lot of questions. There was a lot of people wanting to know what a exactly was going on. The only thing that they really held close to their chest was the confessional letter that John had written to Reverend Ray Winkle. They didn't want this information to be out there in public because it contained obviously a lot of information. They answered questions of what weapons were used in the murders and where John list had obtained the guns. They talked about the contents of the safety deposit box that John had gone and accessed that day of the murders. They talked about which bank he accessed it at, and from the outside looking in, it very much seemed like these murders were financially motivated because John was in a lot of financial trouble and he had no money left. His expenses had been piling up for months and months and months. His house was falling apart around him, and he just simply. Saw no other way out. Obviously, the deaths in Westfield had taken the media by storm, and the remainder of the family was in the midst of trying to plan a funeral for five people, and the media kept coming to the funeral home to ask if there was going to be a visitation or awake, and they were all just trying to get as much information as they could. They were in the process of trying to sort out how they were going to get Alma to Michigan, because her wishes were to be buried in Michigan, so they had to get her from Westfield to Michigan. The bodies were all prepared at Gray Funeral Home, and the funeral home only owned one herse at that point in time, so it took five round trips and an hour and a half to get all of the victims from the funeral home to the church. The chief of police, Chief Moran, was in attendance that day of the funeral and he very much wanted to go there because he wanted to keep a close eye on those who were in attendance, as you never know if possibly John was going to try and show up to see the spectacle of everything. One thing Chief Morian noticed was that Brenda, Helen's oldest daughter showed up to the funeral, and he couldn't help but notice that she arrived in a station wagon that looked like it had most of her belongings in it. Even to himself, he thought that maybe she was even possibly living in her car. On the Lift side of the family, there wasn't very many people in attendance. Mister and missus Fred List, who was John's nephew, who was a son of John's older half brother, attended the funeral, but that was really it from the List side of things. Following the funeral, they proceeded to the cemetery, which was going to be Fairview Cemetery on North broad Street, and as they arrived at the cemetery, it was lined with hundreds of people. The police basically had to help control the crowd. It was truly insane how many people showed up to see the List family reached their final resting spot. And it was very much a huge spectacle. Everybody that could was coming out to watch this happen. And just like with the funeral and the burial, Westfield itself became very much a spectacle. The home became very much a spectacle, and people would often drive by four thirty one Hillside Avenue, they would get out of their car, they would stop, they would take pictures. People even went. As far as to tear off some of the siding from the home and take it as a souvenir. Teenagers would often approach the house and make an attempt to break in, and this was just something that was happening constantly. After the murders, it became a place where everyone wanted to see everything, and everyone wanted to catch a glimpse inside. And there were a lot of rumors still swirling about double worshiping and other weird stuff that Nestleie, in my opinion, I think got blown way out of proportion. But considering the time it was nineteen seventy one, it does make a lot of sense. And there was a lot of rumors of the reason that John did what he did was because his kids worshiped the devil, which again I think got blown way out of proportion. Patty had one book that was given to her by her father about the devil, and then she had a book about witchcraft, and she was sixteen years old. She was coming into her own she was trying to take in things from the world that she had not been familiar with. So I think that's part of the reason why it got really blown out of proportion. In January of nineteen seventy two, Helen's sister, Jean, went through all of the family's belongings and she came across a song that Patty had written, and in reading the lyrics of the song, Jean realized how lonely Patty was. And it was clear from this song how much Patty just wanted to be a normal girl and live her life. And I truly think in this story, it's so easy to get lost in the sensationalism of it all because we haven't even gotten into the next eighteen years of the story, where John goes on to have a whole different life and completely leave behind his prior life. But Helen, Patty, Johnny, Freddy, and Alma they were all very much victims here. And we know that Helen wasn't. Perfect and she did have her flaws, but she was also very ill for most of her married life to John, and I don't really think that she ever had a chance. Everything that surrounded her, unfortunately, just was not great from the start. And I think it's really important to remember the victims in this story because they are really the ones that matter. And I feel horrible for the kids Alma. I mean, I know that she might have been very strict with John in his bringing in everything, but still she did not deserve what happened to her at the end of her life. After everything had started to slow down in the media, the search for John List had not slowed down. On December ninth of nineteen seventy one, they placed John List on the FBI's most Wanted List. They printed thousands of copies of the FBI poster wanted Bulletin, which they planned to circulate to every post office for display and to every law enforcement agency, police department, and sheriff's office across all fifty states. I am going to be posting the wanted bulletin as well in my Instagram and Facebook pages that are going to be associated with this episode, so please go check those out. As they started to sift through the evidence, they realized that it could be entirely possible that John had been planning this for a long time, and more than just a couple of months. They thought that he could possibly have been planning this four years because everything he did was very well thought out and very methodically planned. They thought that maybe John had taken his own life, but that was soon disputed by other people because. They didn't think that John was the type. Of person who would do that after a mass type of murder, so they fully thought that he was on the run. They decided that they were going to hone in their search on New Jersey, New York State, and they were also going to cover Michigan, North Carolina, and Arizona because John had family members that lived in these places and they thought that that was the best place that they start. Now, they did have John's fingerprints on file from his time in the army, so they ended up running them through a comprehensive check so this way, if John was apprehended for anything else, they would immediately fingerprint him and they would be able to match him. They also had samples of his handwriting from the five page letter that he wrote to Reverend Ray Winkle. And they had a whole file of the ballistics of the guns. They also had a lot of other items that John had left behind. He had all of the confession letters, the letters that he had written to family, the guns, the other files and items that he left behind in his filing cabinet that was in his office. He had left behind a lot of evidence. On December seventeenth of nineteen seventy one, Union County Prosecutor Carl Ash went before a Union County grand jury, and this was to seek five murder indictments against John List, charging him with the murders of his family members. The grand jury went ahead and went through with the indictment and indicted him on charges of having murdered with premeditation. He had plotted and planned the murders of his wife, his mom, and his three kids. And at this point, looking for John was like looking for a needle in a haystack. There was a lot of things that were so different back in nineteen seventy one, and they we had no idea if John was even still in the United States, and they suspected that he possibly could have left the country and gone elsewhere. And given the fact that John was so methodical and planned out with the murders, they thought that this was also likely the case with his escape. Almost nine months after the List's family was murdered, at four thirty one Hillside Avenue, shortly after three am, the List family home was set ablaze. The List's families neighbors were basically woken up with their rooms illuminated due to fire and smoke in the air, and it wasn't really a surprise for the neighbors that this had happened, because the home had been vandalized so many times before, and like I said earlier, it had become a spectacle. People were always at that house. Everybody wanted to stop and look at the house, and there was a lot of teenagers that would often try to break in, So this was something that I think they were almost expecting to happen. The fire department was alerted and there was again a lot of people basically just standing on the street watching this house burn down. The fire department had such a hard time getting up Hillside Avenue because of the amount of spectators that were watching this home burn. The fire was very large and very difficult to control. The house was old and the wood inside of the house was very dry. The hardwood that was inside the home really burned very quickly. Once everything got going with the fire, they realized that whatever had happened with this fire, that it was very much intentionally set. Somebody had poured flammable liquid all around the house and had set it ablaze. A lot of people at the time had suspected that John had secretly returned to Westfield and burned it down himself. But then again there was also rumors that it was kids who burned it down, or just people that really wanted just some notoriety and decided that they were going to burn it down. The guy who had been handling the list family estate as well as the cleaning out and fixing up of the home was kind of surprised that this happened because, in his opinion, he thought that the house was pretty secure and he had no idea how people were able to access it. He always make sure that he had locked it up accordingly and that there was not any easy ways to get in, But then there would also be times he would go over and he knew that there had been people that had been inside because there was different things. There was like old mattresses inside, like people had been squatting there. There was random. Messages on the wall, so obviously he might have thought it was secure, but people were figuring out a way to get inside of this house. So this was a huge loss because the guy who was the executor of the estate and everything was hoping that once he was able to fix the house up a little bit, he would be able to sell it and that he would be able to use that money to help pay for the five funerals that had been paid for pretty much out of his pocket because there was no money left over in this estate. The home, unfortunately, was a total loss. Almost two hundred people watched as a structure could no longer contain itself with the consuming flames. The two upper stories crashed through the ballroom floor, which brought the entire interior and everything from Almah's third floor apartment, all the bedrooms, and the ballroom itself down during the roof collapse, the center hall was completely gutted. Once the fire had been completely put out and everything had settled down, police Chief Jim Moran called the guy who was overseeing the estate and told him that since the house was now burned down, it needed to be demolished, and he didn't know what to do because he didn't have the money to demolish it because all of the money was held up inside of that house. And of course, rumors continued to circulate about who burned the house down. There was even speculation that some of the neighbors conspired together to burn the house down because they were tired of it being such a landmark where people would come and drive by and loiter and try to break in, but that was never proven to be true, And I personally don't think that that's true because the people that surrounded the List family were pretty well to do families. They obviously had been through a lot with this family of five being murdered right across the way from them, and I personally don't think that they would have done anything to draw more attention to themselves, But that is just my opinion. Also, as much as I would think that burning down the house is something John would do, I don't think he would have risked coming back to do that. I truly do think that the moment he left Westfield that day, he left that entire life and all of the memories of it behind. In the next episode, we're going to be getting into John's life following the murders, what he did, everything that he went through in order to become this whole new person, and just knowing that part of the story, That's why I don't think he had anything to do with the arson of the home. Three weeks later, on September nineteenth of nineteen seventy two, the house was demolished. Of course, this demolition brought on a lot of onlookers who watched as a wrecking ball went through the remainder of the property. From there, the land went to auction, and there was a big bidding war over this property because it was in a very very nice neighborhood. It was a prime location, and given everything that had happened there, I'm sure there were a lot of people who wanted the property just to be able to say that they had John Lists property. So the land ended up going for thirty six thousand, one hundred dollars, and the home where all of this treachery took place at four thirty one Hillside Avenue was no more present day. There is a new home that is built there, and I'm going to be posting those pictures of the new home as well on my Instagram. What it looked like then, what it looks like now. It has been a while, but I have driven by that home before and it is a really, really nice neighborhood. It is still very well to do, very ritzy, very expensive, and the home that sits there now is very much a beautiful home. So that is where we are going to end episode six. This episode was all about the discovery of the bodies of the five victims, the initial part of the investigation, and in the next episode we're getting into John's new life, which I'm going to go ahead and let you know we are no longer going to be calling him John, because his name is going to be Bob Clark, and he is going to take on a whole new identity, starting in Denver and ending in Virginia where he was ultimately caught. We are going to be getting into all of that in the coming episodes. I honestly don't know how many more parts this is going to be. I am just slowly working my way through the book and getting to the point where he is finally apprehended, because we still have a lot to catch up on. We are talking eighteen years on the run under a different identity. This man started in entirely new life. He got married, he had a new job, he had new friends. It is going to be a wild ride. So I will see you guys next week for part seven in Summer Series twenty twenty six, The List Family Murders have a great week ahead, and I will see you then. By