A COLLAPSING LEDGER
The financial reality of the List household in the years before 1971 was far removed from the impression that Breeze Knoll gave to the street.
John List had held increasingly responsible positions as an accountant and financial officer. He had been, at various points, employed at significant firms. He had reached the level of vice president of finance at a New Jersey bank — a title that suggested both achievement and stability.
But stability was not what his employment record actually contained. According to the accounts that emerged after his arrest, List had a pattern of losing jobs — dismissed, in the characterization that appeared in later reporting, partly because of what colleagues and supervisors found to be a cold, difficult interpersonal manner. He was competent with numbers. He was not someone who navigated office politics easily or who left warm impressions on the people he worked with.
By 1971, he had lost his banking position. And rather than tell his family, he had not told them.
For months, John List got up in the morning, dressed as if he were going to work, left the house, and went to the Westfield train station. He sat there. He read. He waited out the hours of a workday that he was no longer being paid to work. And then he came home.
The mortgage on Breeze Knoll was behind. The $11,000 owed on the property — substantial in 1971 dollars — was not being met. The utilities were accumulating. The house was costing money that was not coming in. The family lived on whatever savings remained and on the financial resources that Alma, his elderly mother, had brought with her — resources that were depleting.
At some point during the summer and fall of 1971, John List began withdrawing money from his mother’s accounts. The accounts were being drained by a son who was managing those resources in a direction that benefited the household he was responsible for — or at least, that is one way to characterize what the records showed. Another way to characterize it is that he was taking money that his mother had, using it to sustain the illusion of solvency, and doing so without her full understanding of the situation.
In October 1971, John List applied for a firearm permit. He cited home protection as the reason.
By November 1971, the available evidence suggests that he had made a decision. The specific chain of reasoning — whatever process led from financial desperation and theological anxiety to five murders and a disappearance — is something that List himself tried to explain in letters he left behind. Those letters are historical documents. They are also a self-interested account from a person who had every reason to frame his actions in the most comprehensible possible terms.
Whether his stated reasons capture the actual causation of what he did on November 9, 1971, is a question that cannot be answered definitively from the outside. What can be said is that by the morning of that day, John List had a plan.
He had applied for a gun permit. He had canceled the family’s newspaper and milk deliveries. He had notified the schools that his children would be absent for an extended period — visiting a sick relative, he said. He had thought about what he would need to do before he left.
He owned a house that was about to be foreclosed upon. He owed money he could not pay. His wife’s health was failing. His daughter wanted to be an actress. His mother’s savings were gone.
What he did next would not be discovered for nearly a month.