WHAT LIST SAID FOR HIMSELF
In the years between his conviction in 1990 and his death in 2008, John List gave various interviews and made various statements about the murders. He also testified at his trial.
His explanations were consistent, and they were consistently self-serving.
He had, in his own account, been a man overwhelmed by circumstances — financial ruin, a wife whose health was failing and who was not attending church, a daughter whose aspirations seemed to him to be leading her toward sin, a household that was collapsing. He had, in his own account, acted not out of selfishness or cruelty but out of a kind of perverted pastoral concern: he believed his family would go to heaven if they died in a state of grace, and he feared they were drifting away from that state.
He framed the murders as a form of protection. He framed his escape as a practical decision made by someone who could not turn himself in because he had children who would have needed care — which, given that the children were already dead, was an explanation that was impossible to evaluate as anything but a rationalization constructed after the fact.
He consistently denied that the financial situation was the primary driver of what he did — or at least, he consistently framed the financial situation as a secondary concern, something that made the family’s circumstances worse but that was not the fundamental reason he had acted. The fundamental reason, in his account, was always spiritual: he had been trying to save their souls.
Psychiatrists and psychologists who evaluated him disagreed about the precise nature of his psychological state. The court ultimately rejected the defense argument that his mental state at the time of the killings provided a legal basis for a different verdict than first-degree murder. The systematic planning was, in the court’s assessment, evidence that he had known what he was doing and had chosen to do it.
What the explanations cannot do — and what no explanation from List could have done — is close the gap between the stated reasoning and the experienced reality. Five people died. Whatever John List’s inner state during the days when he was planning and carrying out those killings, the experience of those five people was not one that any explanation he could offer made comprehensible.
The religious framing of the murders — killing the family to save their souls — was, whatever its internal logic, a framework that required treating the people being killed as objects of concern rather than as autonomous human beings with their own relationship to their own lives and deaths. Helen List was not someone who needed her husband’s intervention to determine the state of her soul. Patricia List’s relationship to acting and to faith was not something her father had the authority to resolve through violence. The children had no say in what happened to them.
The letters to the pastor explained what John List wanted explained. They did not explain the fundamental thing, because that cannot be explained from the outside: why a person decides that the people in their care exist for the purposes the person defines for them, rather than for their own purposes.