The Murder Room

He wrote to Burton Goldstein at State Mutual Life thanking him for his support, and listing the four “best prospects for a quick sale . . . maybe Paul Greenberg can follow up on some.” All the letters, the two guns, an envelope with the unused bullet, went into the filing cabinet into locked drawers labeled TO PASTOR REHWINKEL, BURTON GOLDSTEIN AND ADMINISTRATORS and GUNS & AMMO. He taped a note to the top of his desk:

To the Finder:

1. Please contact the proper authorities.

2. The key to this desk is in an envelope addressed to myself.

3. The keys to the files are in the desk.

Walter reviewed List’s extensive documentation of the reasons that led to the massacre. It was an extraordinary record to be left by a killer. And it’s all bullshit, he thought to himself.

Walter felt he knew the killer better than the murderer knew himself. That evening List quickly grew tired. He’d had a long day. He made a light dinner and once again ate at the table where he’d murdered his wife that morning, then washed the dishes and put them in the drainboard. He slept in the billiard room in the basement, beneath his murdered family. Though there was no information on it, Walter wagered that he’d slept very soundly. He said that for List, “It had been a wonderful day.”

In the morning List packed his suitcase with two days’ worth of clothes and a briefcase with an assortment of motor club maps, and tidied the house as if preparing for vacation. He turned the thermostat down to fifty degrees and put three supermarket bags stuffed with bloodied papers and cloths neatly by the back door. He switched the lights on in every room except for one, the ballroom crypt. Finally he turned the radio to the only station he had allowed the children to listen to. Classical music, good for the soul, filled the house as he drove away.

Ten days after the murders, a policeman writing parking tickets at JFK airport found List’s old Impala, but the abandoned car raised no red flags. List had planned the murders so meticulously that nobody realized something was wrong at Breezy Knoll until police discovered the five bodies on December 7, almost a month later. The headlines trumpeted THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY. Overnight, List entered the upper echelons of twentieth- century mass killers that the media tracked like a home run contest.

Walter took a sip of cold black coffee and rubbed his eyes to focus. The newspapers described a massive, international manhunt for List that became an embarrassment to law enforcement.

No wonder they couldn’t find him, Walter thought. They didn’t know what they were looking for.

The FBI spent more than $1 million pursuing reported sightings of List across all fifty states, Europe, and South America. New Jersey police and prosecutors interviewed dozens of potential witnesses. The police catalogued more than 150 pieces of evidence. But the investigation went nowhere. Detectives resorted to black humor to overcome the shame. Vacationing police sent postcards to the department from Florida, Barbados, and elsewhere: Wish you were here. Your good pal, John Emil List. Having a ball. Nice to finally have a vacation without the kids! John E. List. The trail had long gone cold. The last significant evidence was the car discovered at the airport eighteen years before. In the police evidence room, mold grew on the dried blood on the victims’ clothes, and the garments were discarded.

Walter looked up from the yellowed newspapers, his concentration broken. He heard Bender’s voice and the voices of two women. It had only been an hour, but it felt like days had passed since he’d immersed himself in the case.

“How’s it going?” Bender appeared at the kitchen table.

“Quite well.”

The sculptor’s eyes gleamed. “What else do you need?”

There was a lot of digging Walter could do. He could talk to the police and FBI investigators who spent years on the case. He could study the police file, read the mountain of interviews, look over the hundreds of photographs and pieces of evidence, review the psychological evaluations of List. He could reinterview potential witnesses, praying their memories hadn’t evaporated.

Walter met Bender’s eyes and said he needed nothing else. The yellowing newspaper accounts were sufficient. The grainy old newspaper photographs of the murder scene were particularly helpful. He didn’t wish to read anything or talk to anybody. The killer had directly communicated to Walter all he needed to know.

“The profile is done,” he said. “He thinks he’s the smartest man in the world, and he pulled off the perfect crime, he’s fooled everyone,” Walter said. “But in point of fact he’s not difficult to read.”

List’s extraordinary confessions, thousands of words of admitted guilt, were elaborate, carefully constructed deceptions, he said. “List spouts ink like a squid, to obscure himself from his pursuers.” But unknowingly, he had left indelible documentation of the truth in a special language.

List had written out his motive and his fate in blood and bullets in the stone-walled rooms of Breezy Knoll.

• CHAPTER 17 •

THE MASK OF THE INVISIBLE MAN

Sunlight and traffic noise flooded the dim studio, startling the gallery of grinning, frontal- nude blondes and somber heads of the dead. “Rich, let’s go for a long walk! It’s a beautiful day.” Bender stood in the open door, a hazy dark shape within the blinding halo of light.

“My dear boy, my exercise is inhaling. Do I look like a sophomore on the cross-country team? ” Walter chuckled from his chair, quite pleased with himself. The flexible lines of his mouth tugged downward around the cigarette-like tent stakes.

“C’mon, Rich!”

The thin man rose slowly. “Well, then. I suppose one could.”

They walked down South Street. They were an odd pair, the short, loud, muscular, tattooed man firing questions at the tall, blue-suited, balding gentleman with stiff Victorian airs.

Bender wanted Walter’s insights into List’s character—character that would have helped shape the contours of the killer’s face all these years later.

“I need to know what John List was like,” Bender said. “How would John List stand on this corner? What would be the expression on his face?” As if on command, the tall man in the suit stood rigidly and tipped his long jaw into a double chin, like a game of charades in reverse.

“Here, let me show you which facial muscles stay tight and which lengthen.” The thin man pushed his owlish black glasses back on his nose and appeared sterner than usual.

Bender’s voice rose a pitch. “Rich, what would his face look like? I mean, he’s sixty-four years old now. In his early forties, he had dark hair with a widow’s peak of M-pattern baldness. I see him almost completely bald now, with tufts of gray hair on the side.”

Walter nodded agreement. “Yes. And what little hair he has left will be carefully trimmed, very neat. He is still an accountant and careful about his appearance in a professional way.”

“We know he has a scar behind his ear from mastoid surgery,” Bender said. The artist had interviewed craniofacial surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School to document the aging process in the facial tissue, brow, eyelids, bone. Bender had also spent a few days in Westfield, watching the men of List’s generation on the streets, and in church. He studied the faces, eyes, and mouths, their paunches and how they treated their wives. He had already made a rough clay head of List and sent a photograph of it to Westfield police for comment.

Bender had learned from the Philadelphia surgeons that the mastoid scar, though softened with age, would still show unless List had plastic surgery.

“I figure he wouldn’t be the type to have plastic surgery,” Bender said. “Or the type to go to the gym and work out.”

“Exactly,” Walter said. “He was a meat-and-potatoes man and would remain one. He’s not from the jogging generation. He’s a very rigid personality. It’s the extreme rigidity, at a pathological level, that enables him to kill his family.”

“So he’ll have jowls now, a slackened jaw, and look much older.”