THE PROBLEM WITH PHOTOGRAPHS
The investigators who had been working on the John List case — both the original team from 1971 and anyone who returned to it in the subsequent years — faced a fundamental problem that time made worse with each passing year.
They knew what John Emil List had looked like in 1971.
They did not know what he looked like in 1985, or 1987, or 1989.
The photographs from the original investigation showed a man of forty-five. He was of medium build, with glasses, thinning hair that had been dark, and the composed, slightly blank expression that characterized the few images that existed of him. He had cut his own face out of the family photographs in the house at Breeze Knoll, so the surviving images were whatever had been gathered from other sources — perhaps photographs from his military service, perhaps images found at other locations, perhaps descriptions from people who had known him.
Whatever was available depicted a man who no longer existed in that form. By 1989, John List was sixty-three years old. He had aged eighteen years. Hair thins and grays. Faces change — the jaw, the cheeks, the brow, the texture of the skin all shift in ways that are predictable in general and somewhat unpredictable in specific, individual cases. The man in a 1971 photograph might or might not be recognizable as the man who would walk into a Virginia accounting firm on an ordinary morning in 1989.
If law enforcement simply circulated the 1971 photograph and asked the public to look for this person, they were asking the public to recognize someone whose appearance had changed substantially. A person who had known John List in 1971 might recognize him. A neighbor in Virginia who had only known him as Bob Clark had no photograph to compare against, and the 1971 image might not trigger recognition in anyone who knew the 1989 version.
This was the core challenge: closing an eighteen-year visual gap.
The solution that was brought to the John List case was unusual at the time, though it would later become more common as forensic methods developed and as law enforcement became more creative about the tools available to them.
Someone had to imagine what John List looked like now.