THE VICTIMS’ REMEMBRANCE
Among the things that have come out of the decades of attention to the John List case is a sustained effort by some people connected to it to ensure that the victims are not lost in the story of the man who killed them.
This is a genuine risk in any account of a crime where the perpetrator is the most dynamic and documented figure. The perpetrator’s movements, choices, and eventual capture generate narrative momentum. The victims, who are gone from the story from the moment of their deaths, can become static figures — present at the beginning, absent from everything that follows.
Patricia, John Jr., and Freddie List were children. They were not simply background characters in their father’s story. They had their own lives, their own relationships, their own futures that were taken from them. The drama teacher who knew Patricia was not simply a plot device in the story of the delayed discovery — he was someone who had invested time and attention in a student he valued, and who had lost that student in the most definitive possible way.
Helen List’s complexity — the illness, the difficult marriage, the earlier widowhood, the presence of a daughter from a previous marriage who survived — deserves acknowledgment. She was not a minor character in a story about her husband. She was a person with her own history, carrying her own weight of experience into the last years of a marriage that had become untenable in ways she may not have fully understood.
Alma List, at eighty-four, was at the end of a long life — but a life that was still being lived, still in motion, still containing relationships and experiences. She was not simply “the mother” in an abstract sense. She was a specific woman who had seen a great deal and who died in a way she had no warning of and no say in.
The grave at Fairview Cemetery in Westfield marks a specific place where specific people were laid to rest. The marker is a physical object in the world, maintained against the erosion of time, a deliberate statement that these people existed and that their deaths matter.
The story of John List is not, fundamentally, a story about a man who successfully evaded capture for eighteen years. It is a story about five people who died, and about what it took to hold someone accountable for their deaths. The evasion is part of the story. The sculpture and the broadcast are part of the story. But they are parts of a story whose center is the five people who died in Westfield, New Jersey, on November 9, 1971.
They are not peripheral to their own story.