ROBERT CLARK: A NEW PERSON IN A NEW CITY
At some point after leaving New Jersey — the precise sequence of his movements in the days and weeks after November 10, 1971, is not fully documented in what the public record provides — John List arrived in Colorado.
He had taken the name Robert Peter Clark. Socially, he went by Bob. He had documentation for the name, obtained fraudulently. He had the skills of an accountant — skills that are portable, that require no particular local reputation, that can be practiced in any city in the country.
Denver was where he settled first. It was a large enough city to absorb a newcomer without too many questions. It was far enough from Westfield, New Jersey, that the local newspapers would not be running pieces about the List murders on their front pages. It was a city with a significant Lutheran population, which meant that a man who showed up at a Lutheran church and integrated into the congregation would not be unusual.
List worked as a cook for a period. He worked as a tax preparer. Eventually he found work as an accountant — his actual professional skill — and built a modest career under the Clark name. He was not trying to be prominent. He was trying to be invisible, in the particular way that a quiet, unremarkable, serious middle-aged man can be invisible: not drawing attention, not making enemies, not doing anything that would cause someone to look twice.
He attended Lutheran church services throughout his time in Colorado, which was consistent with the person John List had always been and, perhaps paradoxically, was also consistent with the explanation he had given for the murders. He had framed the killings in religious terms. He had framed his flight partly in religious terms. And now, under a different name, he continued attending the institution whose theology he had used to explain what he had done.
In the Lutheran church community in Denver, he met people. He built a social circle of the kind that a private, quiet, serious man builds: not wide, not intimate, but functional. He was known as Bob Clark. He was known as a reliable, somewhat reserved person who attended church, did his work, and didn’t make trouble.
He was not known as John List.
The decades passed. The 1970s became the 1980s. The case in Westfield, New Jersey, aged. The children who had been killed would have been adults by then. Patricia, who had wanted to be an actress, would have been in her thirties. John Jr. would have been in his late thirties. Freddie, the youngest, would have reached his mid-thirties. Alma List, had she lived, would have been impossibly old.
None of them were alive to age.
Back in Westfield, the house at 431 Hillside Avenue had been sold, and then sold again. It eventually burned down — the cause of the fire was never fully established, and whether it was accidental or deliberate was never determined. By the time anyone was asking questions about Breeze Knoll, the structure that had been the site of the crimes was gone.