NOVEMBER 9, 1971
The documented sequence of events inside Breeze Knoll on November 9, 1971, is reconstructed from the evidence investigators found, from List’s own letters, and from what the physical evidence at the scene established. It does not come from eyewitness accounts, because the only person who survived what happened that day was John List himself.
List’s mother, Alma, was the first to die. She was in her third-floor apartment. She was shot above her left eye. She was eighty-four years old.
Helen, his wife, was shot in the kitchen — by some accounts, while she was having her morning coffee. She was forty-five years old.
The children were at school when their mother and grandmother died. List waited.
When his two older children — Patricia, sixteen, and John Jr., fifteen — came home from school that afternoon, they were shot.
The youngest, Frederick, thirteen years old, had soccer practice. List drove to the soccer field and picked him up. He brought him home.
Frederick was shot multiple times — in what would be described later as a particularly brutal series of shots, more than any of the others received. The evidence of multiple wounds at close range is part of the documented record of the crime scene.
After the killings, John List moved most of the bodies. He carried them to the ballroom on the main floor of the house — a large room that had been used, in some earlier period of the mansion’s history, for entertaining. He placed them in sleeping bags. He arranged them.
His mother’s body he placed in the attic. Some accounts suggest this was because she was too heavy to carry down to the ballroom.
He spent time in the house. He cleaned up where he could. He ate meals there. He slept there, possibly for a night.
He turned on the intercom system — the house had a built-in system that could play music through multiple rooms — and set it to play.
He left.
John List took his car and drove to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He left the car in the parking lot. If he boarded a flight, no record of the booking under his name was found. He disappeared.
Back in Westfield, the music kept playing through the intercom. The lights in the house stayed on. The newspapers that had been canceled didn’t arrive. The family didn’t appear at church. The children didn’t come to school.