THE MONTHS BETWEEN ARREST AND ADMISSION
The arrest on June 1, 1989, was not the end of John List’s insistence that he was Robert Clark.
Fingerprint evidence in a criminal case is among the most conclusive forms of identification that exists. The patterns of ridges and whorls on an individual’s fingers are unique to that person and do not change over a lifetime. When two sets of prints match, the match is not ambiguous in the way that other forms of identification can be.
The fingerprints matched.
John List’s lawyers — who presumably understood what the fingerprint evidence meant — faced the task of advising a client who had, for the better part of eighteen years, lived as someone else. The psychological difficulty of admitting to being John List after eighteen years of being Robert Clark may have been genuine, independent of strategic calculation. The identity he had built was the only identity he had experienced for a very long time.
Or the continued denial may have been strategic: every day that a defendant maintains their innocence is a day during which their legal team can explore every possible avenue for challenging the prosecution’s case.
Whatever the reason, Robert Clark — as he continued to present himself — maintained that he was not John List for approximately eight months after the arrest.
On February 16, 1990, John List admitted his identity.
He was extradited to New Jersey to face the charges that had been pending against him since 1971.
Delores Clark — his wife in Virginia — learned who her husband actually was. She had married a man she believed was Robert Clark, a Lutheran accountant from Colorado. She had known nothing of John List, of Westfield, of the five bodies in the ballroom at Breeze Knoll. By all accounts that emerged after the arrest, she was as genuinely shocked as anyone could be. She had not been hiding him knowingly. She had been married to someone she did not know.
The neighbors in Midlothian who had found Bob Clark to be quiet, pleasant, and unremarkable were similarly confronted with information that simply had not been visible from the outside. The thing about a man who is trying to be invisible is that he succeeds, until he doesn’t.