https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRjZ9YhtTyQ
On November 9, 1971, John Emil List methodically murdered his entire immediate family, using his own 9mm Steyr 1912 semi-automatic handgun and his father’s Colt .22 caliber revolver. While his children were at school he shot his wife Helen, 46, in the back of the head, and then his mother Alma, 84, above the left eye.
As his daughter Patricia, 16, and younger son Frederick, 13, arrived home from school, he shot each of them in the back of the head. After making himself lunch, List drove to his bank to close his own and his mother’s bank accounts, and then to Westfield High School to watch his elder son John Jr., 15, play in a soccer game. He drove the boy home, then shot him repeatedly in the chest and face.
List placed the bodies of his wife and children on sleeping bags in the mansion’s ballroom. He left his mother’s body in her apartment in the attic. In a five-page letter to his pastor, found on the desk in his study, he wrote that he saw too much evil in the world, and he had killed his family to save their souls. He then cleaned the various crime scenes, carefully cut his own picture out of every family photograph in the house, tuned a radio to a religious station, and departed.
The murders were not discovered until December 7, nearly a month later, due in part to the family’s reclusiveness and refusal to socialize, and in part to notes sent by List to the children’s schools and part-time jobs stating that the family would be visiting Helen’s mother in North Carolina for several weeks. He also stopped milk, mail and newspaper deliveries.[10] Neighbors noticed that all of the mansion’s lights were illuminated day and night, with no apparent activity within. Finally, as the lights began burning out one by one, they called police.
The case became the most notorious crime in New Jersey history since the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh Baby. A nationwide manhunt was launched. Police investigated hundreds of leads without success. All reliable photographs of List had been destroyed.[11] The family car was found parked at Kennedy Airport, but there was no evidence that he had boarded a flight.
Alma was flown to Frankenmuth, Michigan, and interred at the Saint Lorenz Lutheran Cemetery. Helen and her three children were buried at Fairview Cemetery in Westfield.
Eighteen years later, on May 21, 1989, the murders were recounted on the television program America’s Most Wanted, which at the time had been on the air less than a year. The broadcast featured an age-progressed clay bust, sculpted by forensic artist Frank Bender, which turned out to bear a close resemblance to List’s actual appearance. List was located and arrested in Virginia less than two weeks after the episode was broadcast.
