THE LIMITS OF EXPLANATION
One of the recurring features of accounts of the John List case is the attempt to explain what drove him to do what he did on November 9, 1971.
The financial pressure was real. The house was mortgaged past what he could pay. He had lost his job and had not told his family. The savings — including his mother’s — were depleting. Foreclosure was coming.
The religious dimension was apparently genuine, in the sense that List genuinely held the beliefs he described. He was not cynically invoking religion as a post-hoc excuse. He appears to have had a sincere Lutheran faith that was, by multiple accounts, more rigid and more anxious than what most people in his congregation would have recognized as typical. He genuinely worried about the state of his family members’ souls.
But genuine belief is not the same as explanation. People face financial ruin all the time without killing their families. People hold rigid religious views without concluding that the appropriate response to a daughter’s acting ambitions is homicide. The gap between the stresses John List experienced — which were real and in some cases severe — and the specific action he took in response is not bridged by noting that the stresses existed.
What the psychiatrists who evaluated him found, and what the evidence from the planning and execution of the crimes supports, is that John List was a person who needed control and who experienced the loss of control as an existential threat. His identity depended on the image he projected: successful, orderly, competent, religiously observant, financially stable. Everything in the fall of 1971 was threatening that image. The job was gone. The money was gone. The house was going. His wife wasn’t going to church. His daughter was going to be an actress.
In one reading, the murders were a form of control — the ultimate control, the one control that remained available when everything else had slipped. If he could not maintain the image, he could at least determine the ending.
But this reading, too, is a reconstruction. It is an interpretation built from the outside, using whatever evidence exists of List’s behavior and mental state. The inner experience of a person in the grip of whatever it was that John List was in the grip of on November 9, 1971, is not something that can be reliably reconstructed from documents and expert testimony.
What can be said, with confidence, is this: the explanation he offered — the religious explanation, the financial explanation, the explanation that framed the murders as a form of concern for his family’s wellbeing — was not accepted by the jury that convicted him. It was not accepted by the appellate courts that upheld the conviction. It is not an explanation that satisfies anyone who thinks about what happened to five specific people on a specific day.
The explanation he offered was his explanation. It is not the explanation.