THE SECOND WIFE’S STORY
Delores Miller Clark — who had become Delores List when her husband’s true identity was established — occupied a position of almost unimaginable difficulty in the months following the arrest.
She had married Robert Clark in 1985 in good faith. She had known him for years before the marriage through their shared church community. She had no access to any information that would have told her who her husband actually was. His criminal history, his previous family, his fugitive status — none of it had been visible to her.
When the arrest exposed the truth, she learned simultaneously that her husband was a wanted criminal, that he had killed five members of his previous family nearly eighteen years earlier, and that the name she knew him by was not his real name. She had been married, effectively, to a fiction.
Her response — whatever its details, which are not extensively documented in public sources — was presumably one of profound disorientation. The normal anchors of a person’s life — the name of a spouse, the history of a marriage, the basic identity of the person you live with — had all turned out to be fabricated.
She was not charged with any crime. She had not known. The investigation that confirmed List’s identity also confirmed, implicitly, that the people around him in Virginia had had no meaningful access to the information that would have made them complicit. The concealment had been thorough.
She had, in a sense, been a victim of the same general mechanism that had victimized the investigation for nearly eighteen years: John List’s capacity to create and inhabit a plausible alternative identity. The investigation couldn’t find Robert Clark because it was looking for John List. Delores couldn’t know she was married to John List because she only knew Robert Clark.