THE COMMUNITY IMPACT
For the specific communities where John List had lived — Westfield, New Jersey; Denver, Colorado; Midlothian, Virginia — the arrest in 1989 had different meanings.
In Westfield, the arrest closed something that had been open for nearly two decades. The community had lived with the knowledge of what had happened on Hillside Avenue, had processed the story through its institutions and its collective memory, and had moved forward without a resolution. The arrest provided one. The conviction the following year provided a further completion.
For people who had known the List family — the drama teacher, the church community, the neighbors — the arrest meant that the person responsible had been found and would face the legal consequences of what he had done. This was not healing in any simple sense, and it did not restore what had been lost. But it was resolution.
In Denver and in Midlothian, the reaction was different. The people who had known Robert Clark were confronted, suddenly, with the news that someone they had regarded as an ordinary, quiet, pleasant person had a hidden identity and a criminal history of extraordinary magnitude. The cognitive adjustment required to accommodate that information — to integrate the Bob Clark they had known with the John List who had killed five people in New Jersey in 1971 — was significant.
These community members had not done anything wrong. They had taken at face value what Robert Clark presented to them, which is what ordinary community members do with people they meet in church or at work or in the neighborhood. The fact that what he presented was entirely fictional was not something they had means to detect.
But the discovery inevitably reprocessed the memories they had of him. The quiet, reserved accountant they had known was retroactively complicated by who he actually was. The church community that had included him was retroactively marked by his presence. The marriage that Delores had believed was a real marriage was retroactively marked by the fiction at its foundation.
Each community absorbed the information and moved forward. Communities do. But the information was genuinely disorienting in ways that were not erased by the arrest.