THE FAMILY AT BREEZE KNOLL
The house at 431 Hillside Avenue in Westfield, New Jersey was not the kind of place you’d expect to be the site of one of the most shocking crimes in the state’s history.
It was called Breeze Knoll, and it was a nineteen-room, three-story Victorian mansion that had been built in an earlier era and had aged into a state of shabby grandeur. It was the largest and most impressive home on its block, set back from the street with grounds that suggested wealth even as the structure itself showed wear. By the standards of Westfield — an affluent Union County commuter town of manicured lawns and solid middle-class respectability — the house was an anomaly: too large, too Victorian, too much of a statement for the neighborhood it occupied.
John Emil List had purchased the house in 1965 with financial help from his mother, Alma. The purchase was aspirational in the way that overextended acquisitions often are — an attempt to project a version of success that the actual financial situation did not fully support.
John List had been born on September 17, 1925, in Bay City, Michigan. He was an only child, raised in a household his biographers describe as deeply religious — German-American, Lutheran, governed by rules and expectations and the kind of faith that translated naturally into a certain rigidity about conduct and propriety. He was not, by any account, a person who found it easy to be warm, spontaneous, or flexible. What he was, and what he remained throughout his adult life, was someone who needed things to be orderly. Who needed to be seen as competent and controlled.
He served in the Army during World War II, working as a laboratory technician. When the Korean War called reservists back to service in 1950, he was recalled, commissioned as a second lieutenant, and eventually discharged in 1952. During that second stint, he was stationed at Fort Eustis in Virginia — the same state where, decades later, he would be arrested.
At the University of Michigan, he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s degree in accounting. The credentials were solid. He was someone who would reliably find work in the postwar American economy, which had a broad appetite for people who understood numbers, audits, and the management of financial information.
In Virginia, during his second tour of military service, he met Helen Morris Taylor. Helen was a war widow — her first husband had died in the war — and she had a daughter from that marriage, a girl named Brenda. Helen and John married in December 1951.
The marriage was not, by any of the accounts that would emerge later, a simple or harmonious one. Helen struggled with health problems throughout their time together. She suffered from syphilis, which required hospital treatment between 1969 and 1970. She struggled with alcoholism. She was, by the late years of their marriage, not well — and the house at Breeze Knoll, where she lived as her husband’s financial situation deteriorated, was not the easy, comfortable life that the imposing exterior of the mansion suggested.
Together, John and Helen had three children. Frederick List was born in 1958 — he would be thirteen years old when he died. John Jr. was born in 1956, making him fifteen when he died. Patricia, the youngest child, was born in 1955, making her sixteen at the time of her death. Brenda, Helen’s daughter from her first marriage, had married and left the house in 1960, and so was not at home on November 9, 1971.
Alma List, John’s mother, lived in a third-floor apartment in the mansion. She was eighty-four years old when she died.
The picture the public would later receive of this family was shaped partly by John List’s own letters and partly by the accounts of neighbors and community members who had known them in Westfield. The Rector family attended the Lutheran church — the Family Redeemer Lutheran Church. John List was a Sunday school teacher there, and a leader in the Boy Scout troop. He was known as serious, perhaps overly so. Formal. Not someone who laughed easily or who invited intimacy.
Patricia, his youngest child, was developing interests that troubled her father. She was involved in her school’s drama program and had aspirations toward acting — a profession that her father, with his rigidly conservative view of propriety and sin, found deeply concerning. Several accounts suggest that he believed the theater was a corrupting influence and that Patricia was heading toward a life that, as he understood it theologically, was incompatible with salvation.
Helen’s attendance at church had become irregular. She was not well, and the deterioration of her health had affected her ability to maintain the routine of church attendance that John valued as a marker of the family’s spiritual standing.
John Jr. — sometimes referred to as Johnny — was fifteen, a high school student. Freddie, at thirteen, was younger. Both boys had their father’s quieter demeanor, at least by some accounts.
And over all of this — the family, the house, the church attendance, the Boy Scout meetings and the drama class — lay the weight of a financial situation that was approaching catastrophe.