THE BROADCAST AND WHAT FOLLOWED
The America’s Most Wanted segment on John List aired on May 21, 1989.
The show’s format was built around the combination of dramatic reconstruction and direct appeal to viewers: here is what this person did, here is who they are, here is what they may look like now. Call the hotline if you have seen them.
The List segment included the background of the case — the murders of November 9, 1971, the disappearance, the nearly eighteen years of evasion — and it prominently featured the Frank Bender bust. The three-dimensional sculpture was shown from multiple angles. It was, in effect, asking viewers to look at that face and think: do I know this person?
Hundreds of tips came in following the broadcast. This was typical for a prominent America’s Most Wanted segment — the show’s reach was substantial, and any widely viewed segment generated significant call volume to the hotline.
Among the tips was one indicating that a man named Robert Clark, employed at an accounting firm in the Richmond, Virginia area, looked remarkably like the person depicted in the bust.
The specific origin of the tip — who placed it, their exact connection to Clark, what it was about the bust that triggered recognition — has been described somewhat differently in different accounts. Some accounts describe a neighbor who recognized the face from the broadcast. Others describe the tip as coming from someone in Colorado who had known List there. What the various accounts agree on is the general picture: someone watching the broadcast compared the clay face to someone they knew and made a phone call.
That phone call initiated the chain that ended the nearly eighteen years of Robert Clark’s existence.
The FBI field office in Richmond received information pointing to Robert Clark at a specific accounting firm in Midlothian. Eleven days after the broadcast, on June 1, 1989, FBI agents went to the accounting firm where Robert Clark worked.
They brought him in for questioning.
The man they had in front of them was sixty-three years old. He wore thick-rimmed glasses. He had gray, receding hair. He had the settled, somewhat jowly face of a man who had lived a sedentary life for many years. He looked, unmistakably, like an older version of the man in the 1971 photographs. He looked, with remarkable precision, like the clay bust that Frank Bender had built.
Robert Clark denied being John List.
He denied it when they first brought him in. He denied it when they showed him the evidence they had gathered. He had, after all, been Robert Clark for nearly eighteen years. The name had its own history, its own documentation, its own weight of accumulated identity. He had built a life under that name. His wife knew him by it. His employers knew him by it. His neighbors and his church community knew him by it.
He denied it, and he kept denying it.
The fingerprints settled the question.
John List’s fingerprints were on file from his military service. When the FBI compared Robert Clark’s fingerprints to those records, the match was definitive. The man sitting in that room in Virginia was John Emil List, wanted in Union County, New Jersey, for five counts of first-degree murder.
He was placed under arrest.
He continued to deny it for months.