THE VICTIMS, REMEMBERED
It is easy, in any account of a case like this one, to spend most of the narrative time on the perpetrator. He is the active figure. He is the person around whom events turn. He is the person whose actions require explanation, whose disappearance creates a puzzle, whose arrest resolves it.
But the story of John List is, before and after anything else, the story of five people who were killed.
Helen Morris Taylor List had built a life through difficult circumstances. She had lost a first husband to the war. She had raised a daughter. She had married again and had more children. In the last years of her life, she was not well — the syphilis, the alcohol, the slow deterioration of health that comes from untreated illness. She lived in a mansion that was mortgaged beyond what her husband could pay, married to a man who was deceiving everyone around him about the most basic facts of their financial situation. She died at forty-five years old in her own kitchen.
Alma List was eighty-four years old. She had lived through the kinds of upheavals that a life extending from the 1880s to 1971 necessarily contains: the First World War, the Depression, the Second World War, the postwar prosperity, the social changes of the 1960s. She had supported her son financially, had come to live in his house, had tried to help her family hold together. Her son shot her in her apartment on the third floor.
Patricia List was sixteen years old. She had a drama teacher who believed in her. She had aspirations. She had the particular bright, forward-looking energy of a teenager who knows what she wants even if the world has not yet confirmed that she can have it. Her father disapproved of her ambitions. He killed her for reasons that included, in his account, concerns about the direction her life was taking.
John Jr. was fifteen. Freddie was thirteen. They were teenagers, in school, still at the beginning of everything that a life can be. They had father and a household that was under enormous strain, but they also had school, and friends, and the particular unformed promise of early adolescence. They did not survive to find out what they would become.
These five people were not props in their killer’s story. They were not abstractions representing a failed marriage, a failing faith, a financial collapse. They were specific people with their own histories, their own relationships, their own claims on the future.
The fact that John List killed them and then had eighteen years of what passed for normal life — a job, a church community, a second wife who cared about him, neighbors who were pleasant to him — is not something that can be morally assessed in the language of justice and injustice without keeping those five people clearly in mind.