WHAT WESTFIELD REMEMBERED
When John List was arrested in June 1989, the news was significant enough to generate substantial coverage. The case had not entirely disappeared from public memory in the eighteen years since the murders — it was the kind of case that became locally legendary, the story told about the house that burned down, the story about the family that was found in the ballroom.
In Westfield, the reaction was complex. The case had marked the community in ways that eighteen years had not erased. People who had been children in Westfield in 1971 remembered the discovery. People who had known the List family, or who had known about them through the church, or who had children who went to school with Patricia or John Jr. or Freddie, carried the awareness of what had happened.
Patricia List had been in the drama program at the local school. Her teacher, Edwin Illiano, had been the one who first raised concern about the family’s absence in December 1971 — who had pushed for someone to check on the house. He had known Patricia as a student, had known something of her aspirations, had been the one who, in the absence of any other alarm being raised, had become the person who made something happen.
There are people connected to that community for whom the case was not an abstraction — it was a lived event, a thing that happened in their neighborhood, to people they had known or known of. The arrest in 1989 was not just a news story for them. It was the closing of something that had been open for almost two decades.
The victims themselves — who they had been, what their lives had contained before November 9, 1971 — were, in many of the accounts that circulated in the coverage of the arrest, somewhat compressed into the role of victims. They were described in terms of their relationship to John List: his wife, his mother, his children.
Helen Morris Taylor List was forty-five years old. She had been a war widow before she met John List, a woman with a daughter of her own who had navigated loss before and built a second family. Her health struggles in the years before 1971 were real — the syphilis, the alcoholism — but they were her struggles, not her identity. She had people who cared about her. She had a life that was not reducible to her husband’s account of it.
Alma List was eighty-four years old. She had come from a generation that had survived its own upheavals. She had raised a son, had helped him financially in the last years of her life, had lived in the third-floor apartment of his house and moved through the last chapter of her own story in a place that her resources had helped make possible. Her son killed her.
Patricia List was sixteen years old and wanted to be an actress. What she might have been, what she might have done — the life that the theater could have given her or not — was permanently ended on November 9, 1971. She is remembered, in some accounts, primarily through the lens of her father’s disapproval. She was more than that disapproval. She had a drama teacher who valued her. She had ambitions. She had a future that she never reached.
John Jr. was fifteen years old. Freddie was thirteen. They were teenagers, at the start of everything. Whatever their personalities, their interests, their possibilities — all of it ended that day.
Brenda, Helen’s daughter from her first marriage, survived because she was no longer living in the house. She was the only member of the immediate household who outlived the murders. She had her own grief to carry.