THE SECOND WIFE AND WHAT SHE KNEW
Delores Miller had married Robert Clark in 1985 without any knowledge of who he actually was.
This is not a claim that requires elaborate support. The evidence available — her response when his identity was revealed, the accounts from people who knew them in Virginia — consistently supports the conclusion that she was genuinely unaware. She had met a quiet Lutheran accountant in her church community, had come to know him over time, and had married him. She had no access to information about John List that would have told her anything. She had no reason to suspect that the man she knew was using a false name.
When FBI agents arrived at the accounting firm in Midlothian, Virginia, on June 1, 1989, and took her husband in for questioning, the chain of events that followed exposed Delores Clark to information that her marriage had given her no preparation to receive.
She had lived with a man for four years — and had known him for longer, through their church — without knowing the most fundamental fact about him: that he had killed five members of his previous family and had spent nearly two decades running from the warrant for his arrest.
What happened to Delores Clark after the arrest, how she processed what she had learned, what became of her own life — these are things that the public record does not extensively document. She had her own privacy, which she is entitled to. She had not done anything wrong. She had been deceived in perhaps the most fundamental way a person can be deceived.
Her situation illustrates something about the particular cruelty of what John List had done over those eighteen years: by building a second life, he had created additional victims at one remove — people whose trust he had used and whose lives his real identity would upend when it finally emerged.
The neighbors in Midlothian who had found Bob Clark to be pleasant, quiet, and ordinary had similarly been deceived, though in a less intimate way. The people at the accounting firm where he worked. The congregation at the Lutheran church. The community of people who had known Robert Clark was, in a sense, a community of people who had been used as cover.