Summer Series 2026: The List Family Murders Part 8

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 all right, we are on part eight of Summer Series. We are in the midst of Bob Clark and the whole new wife that he has created for himself in the years following the murder of his wife, his mother, and his children. Now, the years in Colorado passed very quickly for Bob Clark. Nineteen eighty four he was elected treasurer of the church, and in his mind this seemed very much what was right up his alley, very much the next step in his life. The reverend of the church who is. Reverend Robert West was very fond of Bob because he basically was everything that everyone wanted to be. He was a model parishioner and he knew what he was doing as far as the finances and stuff. They worked very closely together and they worked very well together as well. They had a very good working relationship. Bob would monitor the money that would come into the church and he would plan a budget and would go forth with executing the budget. And Bob was described as being very thorough and precise, and he was also very willing to work with the finance committee, and they all got along really really well and had a very good working relationship. But at this point in Bob's life he was taking on a lot. He would work the eight hours at the Roberto distributing and then he would do some overtime work with hn R Block doing taxes, and then he would work to help a few people doing private accounts on the weekends, and he would also help several church members with their stocks and personal finances. But little pieces. And slivers of the old John List would eventually start to come out. So there was a individual at church that was also a fellow council member, and he was a lawyer, and he was named Bill, and he worked for a very large firm and did some litigation work in with the church as well. So he and Bob would occasionally make small talk. And there was a day that Bill had said that he had graduated from the University of Michigan, and Bob was very intrigued and spoke up about how spent some time in Michigan himself. And Bill could tell that Bob seemed very interested about Michigan and talking about Michigan, and when Bill asked him a little bit more about it, Bob basically just brushed it off and said, oh, yeah, I've passed through there a few times. Really nice place. So you could see little slivers of John List trying to pop out, and then John remembering that Bob Clark never lived in Michigan, wasn't from Michigan, knows nothing about Michigan, so he always had to kind of reel the old person trying to come out back in. So Bill very much thought there really wasn't much that he had in common with Bob. When the Michigan thing came up, he thought maybe they could relate and talk about Michigan. But it ended up being a dead end, and Bill realized that Bob was just kind of that guy that didn't really say much have much to offer to a conversation. And he realized that the woman that Bob was dating, who was named Dolores, was also very quiet and withdrawn, very very similar to Bob. So even though people. Admire Bob and go to him for all of the financial advice and they think that he has everything going for him, they also describe him as being very quiet and withdrawn, which is something that we heard about way back when when he was living in all of the different places he lived, but especially in Westfield, he didn't really want to have anything to do with the neighbors. He was very withdrawn. He was kind of that grouchy old man who would chase kids off of his lawn. This is something that has been a common theme even in his brand new life that he is now living in Colorado. Occasionally with one of his coworkers, Bob would talk about his former life, but obviously he had to do it in a way that didn't make it seem like he was actually a killer who had killed his whole family. So he would talk about being married before, but said that his wife had passed away from cancer and that he had spent all of his time in years taking care of her, and it very much took everything out of him emotionally and financially. And he would say that he was able to care for her until the end of her life. And I truly do think in some way he believes this because he's always the victim in everything. He's perpetually the victim, and with Helen being sick for the whole length of their marriage with syphilis, he was the one that did have to take care of her. He had to take care of the house, he had to take care of the children, he had to make sure that they were fed, that they were doing their homework. He was also taking care of her. So I think in his mind this rang true. He was able to kind of twist the narrative and twist the story. So when he's having these conversations with his coworkers, he's twisting it as he cared for his sick wife four years and it took everything out of him. Now in our timeline enters a woman named Wanda Flannery who was originally from Kansas City, Missouri. Wanda was in her late fifties, and she moved in to the condominiums on Peoria Street, where she met one of her new neighbors and soon to be good friends, Dolores Miller, and they became very close very quickly. Dolores was still at that point in time working at Fitzsimmon's Army Hospital and Wanda was a house cleaner, so they very much had physical jobs and they related to each other a lot in this way. Wanda had shared with Dolores that her husband was a paranoid schizophrenic and he was one hundred percent disabled. They had been married since nineteen fifty one, and obviously with his illness, they had been through a lot. Wanda had three children and six grandchildren. Dolores shared with Wanda about her divorce and how painful things were, so they very much connected and formed a unlikely friendship. For somebody like Dolores, who was normally very withdrawn and very quiet, Wanda is somebody that she felt that she could trust and she became very good friends with her. Also, if you're wondering the importance of Wanda in our story, spoiler alert, Wanda is the one that eventually will turn John List into the FBI, so pay very close attention to her role in all of this because it is very important in the grand scheme of our story. In November of nineteen eighty five, Bob went ahead and notified the manager of the apartments he was living at, which was the Brentwood On the Park apartments, that he was officially going to be moving out, and she was upset because Bob Clark was the ideal tenant. He was amazing, he never did anything wrong. All of the people at the apartments had thick file folders full of complaints. Bob Clark didn't have Eddie. He was described as being one of the best tenants, and often it was like he didn't even live there at all. He didn't have any newspaper or magazine subscriptions, so his mailbox wasn't constantly overflowing with all of the extra mail like all of the other tenants. He was just described as the kind of person who didn't hurt anybody, didn't bother anybody, and very much just was present, did his own thing and minded his own business. So Bob turned in his thirty day notice to the apartment manager and they returned his security deposit, which was fifty six dollars and ninety three cents, And then the day came that Wanda officially got to meet this notorious man named Bob Clark. Now, initially Wanda didn't realize that Dolores had even been dating, and when she first met Bob, she thought that he seemed like a really nice guy. And at this point in time, Dolores had shared with Wanda that Bob was going to officially be moving in with her, and she also shared that they were going to be getting married. And Dolores had told Wanda that they had been together at this point for about eight years and it was officially time that they tied the knot and made. It official, and Dolores told. Wanda that they wanted to get him moved in and settled in before they went to Maryland to get married. Now, Bob being Bob. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, right, He very much judged Wanda because Wanda cleaned houses for a living, and he thought that she was uneducated and thought that between him and her, they lived such vastly different lives. And he just very much looked down upon everybody that wasn't like him. And for me, it's just so crazy that he thinks that he was so perfect given all of his faults and everything that he had that he had done in his previous life. Like you can look down on Wanda all you want for cleting houses, but at least she's consistently employed. So at this point in time, Bob Clark aka John List is sixty years old, and he knew that despite being on the run for so long, he had gotten away with it and the past hadn't caught up with him yet, and he finally thought that he was able to put everything behind him and finally get married again. So Dolores was a little bit younger than Bob Clark. Bob told everybody he was fifty seven that he was really sixty. I don't know why the three year age difference really matters, but he was lying about his age. And Wanda very. Much thought that Bob looked older than fifty seven, because Wanda was fifty seven and thought that Bob looked a heck of a lot older than she did, And she was right. Bob did look a lot older because he was older, and he was also living with a horrible secret about murdering his whole family and being a whole different person. That kind of stuff catches up with you. Wanda's intuition, though, is a ten out of ten, and I'm just going to put that out there. Dolores did have some hesitations about marrying Bob, and she would go back and forth about whether or not she wanted. To do it. Some days she was all in about marrying Bob, and then the next day she wasn't so sure. And Wanda realized very quickly just from talking to Dolores, that Dolores didn't love Bob the way that she loved her first husband. And again, this is another ongoing theme in John's life, because we know that John was never able to live up to Helen's first husband, Marvin Taylor. He heard about Marvin every single day of his marriage and was constantly compared to Marvin. In Wanda's opinion, she very much saw the situation as Dolores just being a woman who had been so deeply hurt by the infidelity of her first husband that she was willing to settle for a man that was stable and went to church and just very much flew under the radar, just like Bob Clark, and Wanda understood because she thought there might be something about Bob that just kind of made it easy. The relationship between the two of them was easy, and she thought that he did seem very nice. He was very passive, and it seemed like he would be the type of man that would be easy to control. So, although Wanda didn't necessarily agree with it, she understood why Dolores was going this route. So Dolores did decide to go through with the marriage, and Wanda helped her pick out her wedding dress and she was there alongside of her to go through the upcoming details. Of their wedding. So, once again lying about his age, he claimed that he was fifty three years old and a man named Robert P. Clark married Dolores Miller in November of nineteen eighty five, almost fourteen years to the day that he killed his mother, his wife, and his three children. Bob agreed to go to Baltimore, Maryland, where Dolores's mother lived, for a simple Lutheran ceremony that would join them together as husband and wife. She is now officially Dolores Miller Clark. Now, during the time of this wedding, Bob had to very much put out of his mind that this is the exact same area that he and Helen wed all. Those years ago. His life is just a constant mirror of another. It is so interesting how his new life mirrors his old life so much. And speaking of that, just like that, four months into their marriage, the pattern continued yet again and Bob lost his job. The company that he was working for thought that he was starting to slow down a little bit, and it just didn't seem like he was going to be able to keep up with the direction that the company was going in. Because Bob didn't want to do any work on the computer which was basically being brought into the company. He was very adamant that he do everything by hand, and obviously that was really slowing him down. So that is why they let him go. And obviously Bob was upset about being let go, but he also realized that he was in fact slowing down. There were often times. That he found it very difficult to concentrate when he was at work, and he was very opposed to learning anything new, and he sure as heck was not in the mood to learn any type of new computer situation. He wanted to do everything by hand and that way he would know. That it was right and it was safer. Bob went and talked to Reverend West at the pastor's office at Saint Paul's Church and he shared with him that he had been laid off again, and then he also shared with him that he was going to be working out of the house for now and he was basically just going to be doing accounting work, and Dolores was still going to be working in the commissary at Fitzsimmons. So Bob went on to explain that he was going to be doing some marketing type of stuff out of his home and it was going to be called Robert Clark Services, so he basically was going to be offering some accounting services and working out of the home. Bob then went on to tell Reverend West that he had applied at many different places and was just waiting to hear back, so everything that was going on in his life at this point was all temporary. And again this is another great example of the parallels between John's life and Bob Clark's life, because despite all of these things happening to him, the one constant in his life was that he was not able to hold down a job. Delores very much continued to not like her job, and she was starting to realize that now that Bob had lost his job, her salary wasn't enough to support both of them, and she was the one who was having to work super difficult manual labor to support her husband. And this is where the former life of Bob Clark was starting to creep in a little bit, because life was very much echoing his former life. Delores was working hard every single day doing all of the physical work that she had to do at her job, and then she would come home and complain about it. Bob would garden, he would cook dinner, and in the back of his mind, everything was kind of beginning to spiral because the same thing was happening all over again, and deep down Bob was having thoughts of his former life and how it all had ended, and if he could ever truly go there again to uproot and change his life all over. So. Over the years, a lot of phone calls had come into the Westfield Precinct with tips that possibly could lead. Them to John List. One of them was from a man named Samuel Hilts of Pleasantville, New York, and he began talking to law enforcement and said that he thought that John List was his neighbor. Another call came in from San Bernardino, California that echoed the exact same sentiments. Basically, a caller said that he knew where John List was. He said, this person had a scar behind his ear and eye. I know exactly where he is. There was also a caller that came in from Atlantic City that said that he's found John List. He's an accountant and this has to be him. The calls were honestly endless, especially around the anniversary of the murders, and all of these alleged sightings were checked out in depth by the FBI and they all ended up coming up as empty leads. The tips and sightings of John List over the years were over three hundred, although every single time law enforcement got a lead it ended up being nothing. But they were refusing to give up on the case because at this point in time, fifteen years had passed since the horrific murders in Westfield, New Jersey, and they knew that John List was hiding somewhere, and everybody that worked the case knew that someday he would in fact be apprehended. They just had to wait for their time. Chief Moran was very confident in fact, that they were going to catch him. In nineteen eighty only two of the twenty six murders committed in the county remained unsolved, so he was pretty confident that John was eventually going to mess up and he would be caught. He knew that although John was keeping a very low profile and not standing out in the crowd, one day he was going to and when he did, Chief Moran was going to be there to slap the cuffs on him and take him away. So the fifteen year anniversary of the List Family murders was coming up, and this woman named Robin Camp was on assignment. Robin had a major in journalism and television from Seton Hall University in New Jersey and grew up very familiar with the List Family murders. She ended up working for a New Jersey's suburban cable television company, and at this point in time she was twenty three years old and over the years had often thought about doing a piece about the List Family murders, but very much went back on foth on if she should go ahead and pursue it or not, because she knew that it would take up so much of her time, and interestingly enough, when I was thinking about what series I wanted to do for my summer series, I wanted something a little less long and intense, and I ended up picking The List Family Murders because I got the Thou Shall Not Kill book from my mom and thought this would be perfect. But I can attest to the fact that it did take up a lot of time, practically my whole summer reading this four hundred page book. But after Robin picked up a copy of The Westfield Leader and read a story about the fifteen year anniversary of the List Family Murders, she realized that she had found the perfect angle for her TV magazine show. So Robin would then go back through everything that she had ever seen on the case, things that she remembers from when she. Was a young girl. And this case was going on when Robin was younger, so she would often write in her diary about it. So she would go back and revisit her diary entries and remember everything that was going on around the time that John List killed his family. She also thought that she could offer the unique perspective of what it felt like to be a child around that time that the. Lists were murdered. The Westfield Police Department and the FBI were very receptive to her doing this documentary because they wanted to get the word out about John List and what he had done, because there really hadn't lately been any coverage in the media except for the one Westfield Leader article, and they knew that this would help them in their search for John. Now, when Robin went to start this project, she very much approached all of her work through doing it in the right way. She didn't want to sensationalize it, and she wanted to use her platform to inform people about what happened. But she did know that it was. Going to be a huge undertaking because this was a brutal murder, including three kids losing their lives. So she had a meeting with Chief Moran and she wrote a diary entry about what happened that day, and I'm going to read it directly to you. Now, the most gruesome photo I could stand was the blood stained paper towel stuffed into the brown paper bag. In the kitchen. You see those photos. In the newspaper in black and white, and it is certainly not as effective as when you see them in an eight x ten. Glossy in color. That was horrifying. I got as far as those pictures and the pictures of the ballroom with the bloodstains on the hardwood floors, that was about all I could take. But he was flipping through the photo albums. He stopped for some reason at one photograph and I looked at it very quickly. I don't know why, and I saw a very, very very gruesome photo and it will stay with me for the rest of my life. It was a close up of one of the victims, just rotted to the point of blackness and decay. It was something out of the Night of the Living Dead, and it was horrifying. So obviously, yes, the crime scene details and the photos were a lot, and it was a lot for her to take in. The crime scene photos are very graphic, and I have shared on here that I'm not going to be sharing any crime scene photos and I will never share photos of victims in their most vulnerable states. But looking at those photos, that's exactly how Robin felt when they were being shown to her by Chief Moran. She couldn't imagine what these poor people had gone through. But she also felt that maybe she was in too deep with this case, and it was just too much for her to try to take on, and she very much had her doubts, but she put it in her mind that she was doing this to try and help the victims and hopefully bring more attention to the case and apprehend John List, apprehend their killer, get the word out that he was still out there. So she did go very much back and forth on it, on continuing with the project, but she did continue, and she put a lot of work into this project. She sat alone in her. Apartment and waited for the program to air on the premiere night, and as she watched it, she realized how truly spooky and scary the whole story was. In the debut, there was interviews that she had conducted with the police department and different FBI personnel, and Chief Moran would go on to say that it was one of the best pieces that he had ever seen done on the List case. In March nineteen eighty seven, the program aired on a local New Jersey cable Channel three, and in the story, it asked for help apprehending the fugitive that was John List. So in the airing of this it kind of began to create new buzz around the case and a computer sketch of what John List might look like fifteen years after the murders was released. So in the sketch it shows John List, who would now be sixty one years old, with age lines, slightly sagging jowls, and gray, thinning hair. This was truly the beginning of the end for John List, aka Bob Clark as we know him. In Colorado. In early nineteen eighty seven, Wanda Flannery bought a World Weekly magazine, which was a tabloid newspaper that was often sold in supermarkets. And of course these tabloids had a lot of sensationalized headlines and stories. And when Wanda opened it up, she saw a two page spread about a murder that happened in nineteen seventy one in Westfield, New Jersey, and she found herself staring at a photo of her neighbor, John List, a photo that was sixteen years old, and then an updated computerized photo alongside of it. And when she saw the photo, she couldn't help but think that was Bob Clark. Even in the computer sketch they had him dressed in a suit and tie. She went on to read the article and it talked about him being a Lutheran and also an accountant, and it all just started to make sense to Wanda as she was reading this article. All of the pieces were very much fitting together. So she's reading this article and she looks out her window across the patio and she sees none other than Bob Clark getting out of his white Toyota with grocery bags in his arms, dressed meticulously in a suit and tie as usual. Now, although Wanda very much thought that this was the same person she was seeing, she had a very hard time reconciling the fact that this could be the same person. And she very much knew that she needed to tell Dolores that she saw this article of the tabloid and she thinks that this person could be her husband. She also knew that Dolores wasn't in the greatest of headspaces because Bob was always home because he wasn't working, and he was driving her nuts. And Dolores had shared with Wanda that if he didn't get a job, that she was going to be leaving him, and Wanda is sure that Bob overheard this conversation, and now in the back of her mind, after reading this article. She's concerned that if Bob did overhear her telling Wanda that she was going to leave him if he didn't get a job, that he. Could kill her too. If he's capable of killing his kids, his mom, and his wife, he's certainly. Capable of killing again. Wanda had also learned that they had taken out another mortgage on the condominium, and after reading this article to her, it sounded very similar to the life that John List had previously lived as well. Always in financial distress, can't hold down a job. Everything just kind of lined up to her. So she had made it up in her mind that she was going to show the newspaper to Dolores, so she did. She waited until later in the evening when she saw Bob had gotten in his car and driven away, and she went over to Dolores's home and held out the newspaper to Dolores and said, look at this, this looks just like your husband. Now. Dolores was kind of shocked and asked what he had done, and Wanda explained to her that it said in the article that he murdered his whole family, So obviously, Dolores was very taken aback by this and didn't really know what to think about it, but as she was reading the article, Dolores ultimately rejected the comparison and said that it was absolutely impossible that that was Bob. She looked at the photos. And thought there was no way that Bob would ever do something like that. Wanda urged her to keep the paper and ask Bob about it and basically see what his reaction was. About a week later, Wanda asked Dolores if she ever showed Bob the newspaper, and Dolores said that she had gone ahead and threw it away in the trash because it was just ridiculous to think that that was Bob. There is no way that he would ever be involved in anything like that. But for whatever reason, there was something about it that very much bothered Wanda, and it just stayed with her. But she didn't want to keep pushing anything on Dolores because she knew that Dolores was going through a lot, working as hard as she did, having to financially hold down the house. But Wanda did keep it in the back of her mind, and she even went out and bought another copy of the magazine. So once Wanda realized that the possibility that Bob could be John. She was very cautious around him, and everything that Bob did started to raise suspicion for her. She realized that looking back, Bob never talked about his family or his past life. She could never remember him mentioning where he was from where he came from. And as much as she didn't want to believe that Bob was the same person, she had her suspicions and she was very concerned about Dolores and her safety. She knew they were having financial trouble and she worried that the same thing was going to happen to Dolores that happened to Helen, Alma and the children. Unfortunately, shortly thereafter, Wanda had a heart attack, and all the things and suspicions that she had about Bob Clark being John lyss kind of went into the background of her life. Bob and Dolores were actually the ones who took her to the general hospital with her heart attack, and she ended up having to have a heart bypass operation, so she was really sick. Shortly thereafter, Bob answered a newspaper ad in a local Denver paper that was placed by an employment agency in Richmond, Virginia, and Bob thought that this might be a good move for him and Dolores. It might be good to finally get away from Denver. He answered, they'll ad in late December of nineteen eighty seven. Bob then flew to Richmond at his own expense and interviewed with the Richmond Professional Placement Agency. Bob said that he very much wanted to work in a more vibrant economy and said that Denver was economically depressed. At that time. Bob said that he was willing to relocate, and that his wife had relatives in Maryland and that she would like to be a lot closer to them and living in Virginia would be just that. They told him that all they had at the moment was entry level positions, but Bob said he was okay with this. They ended up putting him in touch with an accounting firm that was called the Accounting Firm of Madeira, Joyner, Kirkham and Woody in Richmond, Virginia. The firm was located on the second floor of a two story brick building in a little shopping mall that faced a large J. C. Penny department store. Now Bob knew that he had to do something in order to secure this position, so he shaved six years off of his age. He told mister Joyner that he had a BA degree in accounting and a master's degree in finance from the University of Michigan. With the tax season coming up, they realized that they needed somebody, so he said that he would be willing to come out right away and that his wife would lay join once he had gotten settled in in Virginia. Bob was told that the job was for an entry level staff accountant, and Bob said he was okay with this. He accepted the staff consultant job at a salary of twenty four thousand dollars. But let's flash back to twenty two years earlier when John List accepted a position with the First National Bank in Jersey City at a salary of twenty five thousand dollars. So twenty two years later, after murdering his whole family, leaving Westfield, going to Denver, creating a whole new identity, and living this whole new life, he's making one thousand dollars less than when he first made his family move to Westfield, New Jersey. Now Dolores was very happy about the offer of employment in Virginia, and she was excited about moving because she was tired of the dry heat in Colorado and she very much missed living on the East where she was from. Wanda at this point was still in the hospital recovering from her illness, and Dolores had reached out to tell her that they were going to be moving to Virginia, and Wanda was kind of taken aback by this. She thought that maybe Dolores had told Bob about the newspaper article and that they were leaving so that way he wasn't going. To be apprehended. And Wanda did try very hard to talk herself out of thinking that Bob Clark and John List were the same person, but it didn't really make a lot of sense to her that all of a sudden, after months and months of searching for a job, that he finally found something and it was going to be something that took him away from being her neighbor, and it also was going to take them away from Colorado. So Bob and Dolores up and moved to Virginia. As usual, everything centered around Bob and his work, his wife and his garden and his church. Bob presented himself as it's a very average man who blended into society. So in the next part of this series, we are going to be getting into Bob Clark's life in Virginia where the walls start to close in on him, and we're going to get into everything from his new job, his new coworkers, and Bob's favorite show, America's Most Wanted, which would ultimately lead to him being captured. I will see you guys next week for part nine of Summer series twenty twenty six, The List Family Murders. We are finally closing in on John List being apprehended. I will see you guys then, have a great week and stay safe By