THE COMMUNITY OF WESTFIELD
Westfield, New Jersey, is a town of approximately thirty thousand people. It is the kind of town that has its own character — its own history, its own identity, its own people who have lived there for generations and who understand it as a specific place rather than an abstraction.
The List murders happened in that specific place. The house at 431 Hillside Avenue was a Westfield house. The children attended Westfield schools. The family attended a Westfield church. Edwin Illiano, who was the first to push for someone to check on the family in December 1971, was Patricia’s drama teacher at a Westfield school.
When the case was resolved in 1989 and 1990, Westfield was where the resolution meant something particular. The crime had happened there. The people who had been connected to the victims — the drama teacher, the church community, the neighbors, the schoolmates — were there, or had been there, and the arrest in Virginia and the trial in New Jersey were not abstract events for them.
The house itself was gone — it had burned down years before the arrest. The lot where Breeze Knoll had stood was occupied by something else by 1989. There was no physical site to mark the place where the murders had occurred. The crime had left physical evidence — the bodies, the letters, the investigation — but the building was not there anymore.
In some ways, the disappearance of the building mirrored the larger challenge of this case: that the physical traces of what happened in November 1971 were harder to find, harder to see, than what a crime of this kind would normally leave. The house gone. The face cut from the photographs. The man gone under a different name.
What persisted was the warrant, the records, the memories of people who had known the family, and the file that remained open through nearly two decades of investigation that had, until 1989, run out of leads.