THE DISCOVERY
For nearly a month, the house at 431 Hillside Avenue sat quiet while the lights burned inside.
In that era, before the systems of monitoring and communication that would later become routine, a family that appeared to have gone away on an extended trip was simply a family that appeared to have gone away on an extended trip. Neighbors in an upper-middle-class community were not likely to call police over a month of quiet. Mail could accumulate. Lights could stay on. The house’s curtains might remain drawn.
What eventually raised the alarm was a combination of small things: light bulbs burning out one by one, leaving sections of the house dark; a drama coach named Edwin Illiano who was concerned about Patricia, whose participation in an upcoming school production had simply ended without explanation; and the accumulated sense among those who knew the family that something was not right.
On December 7, 1971, twenty-eight days after the killings, police entered Breeze Knoll through an unlatched window.
What they found was a house that had been arranged for absence. The furniture in several rooms had been removed or covered. The lights that hadn’t burned out were still on. The intercom system was still playing music — it had been playing, by then, for four weeks, into empty rooms where no one would ever hear it.
The bodies were in the ballroom. They were in sleeping bags. Twenty-eight days of decomposition in a house with heating on had advanced significantly.
Investigators also found something that would complicate the subsequent search: John List had removed his face from every family photograph in the house. Not the photographs of Helen, or of the children, or of his mother. His face. Cut out, carefully, from every image in which he appeared.
He had left behind very little for investigators to work from in terms of photographic identification. A man who had anticipated what it would mean to be searched for had taken steps to make the search harder.
He had not, however, destroyed everything.
In several envelopes, addressed to people he believed should receive them, List had left letters.
The most significant was a five-page letter addressed to his pastor, the Reverend Eugene Rehwinkel of the Family Redeemer Lutheran Church. List wrote in detail. He explained, in his own terms, what he had done and why.
The letter was not a confession to investigators. It was an attempt at religious explanation. List wrote about his family’s spiritual condition as he understood it. Helen had not been attending church regularly. Patricia’s ambitions in the theater were leading her, in his view, toward a life of sin. The financial situation was such that he believed the family was heading toward poverty and the deterioration that he associated with poverty.
He wrote, according to the accounts of those who saw the letter and the portions that have been quoted in reporting since, that he had killed his family to spare them from a world that he believed would destroy them spiritually. He wrote that he could not kill himself — because, in his Lutheran understanding, suicide was a sin that would prevent him from ever being reunited with his family in heaven. He expressed the belief that the children, in particular, had died in a state of grace and would therefore reach heaven.
He ended the letter by asking for prayers.
The letter was delivered to Reverend Rehwinkel. It was eventually turned over to investigators. It became one of the most significant documents in the case — not because it established legally what had happened, but because it established, in List’s own words, the explanation he wanted on record.
Whether that explanation was complete, or accurate, or sufficient is a different question. Letters written to explain why you did something terrible are, necessarily, self-serving documents. They select the facts that support the explanation. They are written by someone who has already committed the act and is now constructing the account of it.
Investigators in Westfield were left with a crime scene, five victims, a set of letters, and a suspect who had vanished without a traceable flight record.
The search that followed was, by the standards of 1971, significant. But it was working against structural limitations that would, in the end, prove decisive.