I was watching A&E last night.. American Justice, I think it was.. and they were doing the show about John List. What a nutcase. What caught my attention was that they said that List had granted them a rare interview, so I wanted to see what he had to say.
The guy is in his 70's I think, and he's still chilling. He told what he did, without so much as a tear in his old eyes. Like he was telling the story of something someone else did, something that didn't even touch him.
He was very religious, so thought that if he killed his wife, his 3 kids and his mother, they'd get to heaven. He figures now, that he is going to heaven too, because he's forgiven, and in heaven they forgive everything.
He made up his mind to do it, and the day of the killing, he said (very matter of fact and clinically) he got up, went downstairs, talked a bit to his wife, Helen, and his children - trying to be as normal as possible so they didn't get suspicious.. then the kids went off to school, and he walked outside and around the house, in the back way and blew his wife's brains out from behind her.
He said he dragged her body into the ballroom and cleaned up the mess, he even talked about how her false teeth hit the floor and table, just so.. cooly, like someone normal would tell you they spilled their morning coffee...and had to clean it up before work.
Then, he said, he went up to the attic apartment of his mother, and talked to her a minute, she asked what that noise was, he told her he didn't know, that he'd came to see about her, and then he kissed her cheek, feeling like Judas and he shot her to death.
I listened to him, not believing this guy could not only do this, but now, talk about it like it was nothing.
He said he left her there where she died because she was too heavy to drag downstairs to the ballroom.
Then, he said he went downstairs and made himself a sandwich, ate, then went to the post office, stopped the mail, wrote letters to the kid's teachers, explaining that they were going to be out of town with a sick relative for a while.. and he mailed those. He went back home to wait for the other kids..he said never feeling a bit of remorse, he knew he'd done the right thing.. and he also knew he had to kill the kids, he couldn't back out, cuz he didn't want them to have to live with the knowledge that he'd killed their mom and grandmom.
His daughter came home first, and as she walked down the hall, he sneaked up behind her and shot her in the head, then dragged her into the ballroom and lay her on a sleeping bag by her mom. He killed his middle son next, I think it was.. the same way.. and lay him beside his sister.. then instead of waiting for the youngest one, he decided to go pick him up from school. He said this boy was playing soccer, and played a good game, that the child had enjoyed it, and when it was over he drove the boy home. He shot him several times, because he said that while the others just "dropped" when he had shot them, that this last child had "twitched". The autopsy showed about 10 rounds in the last child.
He dragged him into the ballroom with the others, and then he said that he went to bed and got a better night's sleep than he had the night before. The next day, he said he turned the thermostat down to 50, and he turned all the lights in the house on, then turned the radio on to his favorite classical station. He then withdrew 2000 from his joint account he held with his mom, and he headed west.
He wasn't caught for 17 years. Of this, he said he felt like he was just doing his parole before his jailtime. He'd changed his name to Robert P. Clark, got a job out west as a cook and started his new 'free, burdonless' life there, eventually marrying again. When the fbi came for him, his new wife couldn't believe he was the John List they said he was. Can you imagine how that poor woman felt?
Can you imagine how forever after that she probably had to think very hard before she could even decide what she wanted to eat, doubting herself for her decision to marry him, when obviously she had no clue. I don't think I could make another decision in my life if I'd married someone who had done that, or could do that. I'd be terrified to think for myself again.
This List guy, the said on A&E was having financial problems, poverty was a sin and he didn't want his family on welfare, so he figured it was better to let them die and go to heaven.. but in his home, the skylights were made by Tiffany glass company and worth 100,000 dollars. I wonder if he'd known that, if he had known he could have sold them to get out of debt, would he still have killed them and just ran off with the money, or would he have changed his mind, or not thought about killing them at all.
Mercy. He says he's going to heaven. I'm wondering if he's going to get the same neighborhood there as Hitler and the ilk. Egads.