Wittke called his estate Breeze Knoll.
In 1965, nearly three decades after Wittke’s death, long after the estate had been subdivided and the big house itself had been sold by his grandchildren, long after Wittke’s art collection had been disposed of and his flower gardens and reflecting pools consigned to old photo albums, John Emil List arrived in Westfield and decided that he and Helen must have Breeze Knoll.
The house, which still had more than an acre of rolling ground fronting on Hillside Avenue, had been on the market for some time before John brought Helen to see it. It was a sprawling white edifice with green shutters that badly needed painting. Its nineteen rooms, with oak floors throughout, had among them a total of ten fireplaces, some marble, some with hand-carved teak mantels, and five baths. Wittke’s ballroom was thirty-three feet long and twenty-three feet wide, softly lit by a stained-glass skylight, said to be of Tirrany origin, which filled almost the entire ceiling. Underneath the ballroom was a billiard room. There were two living rooms, a dining room, a big kitchen with butler’s pantry, and a laundry room. The long hall on the second floor had five bedrooms off it. Upstairs, on the third floor, were servants’ quarters with two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen. Outside, great arching trees, among them a magnolia and an old silver maple, reminded Helen of summertime in her beloved North Carolina hills.
But, like most old mansions that had been sensibly sold off in the 1950s by heirs, Breeze Knoll had seen far better days by 1965.
An indication of just how badly in need of repair it was is that the house was carried on the local tax rolls with an assessed valuation of $100,000—but was on the market, and had been for some time, for only $57,000.
Yet what might have been one person’s white elephant became John and Helen’s dream house; a monstrance for their new status. Nervously they offered $50,000.
The offer was promptly accepted. A twenty percent down payment was required.
John took out the monthly budget book he had kept faithfully since college to do some figuring. Taxes were $1,040 a year. The oil for heating looked to be about $1,000. The mortgage would come in around $300 a month—assuming twenty percent down. But he and Helen had never managed to save. Even in flush times, they lived right at the limit of their income, if not slightly beyond. Where was the $10,000 down payment going to come from? John only knew one person what that kind of cash who would be willing to part with it for him. That was Alma, his mother.
She agreed to supply the money, but there was a catch, Jean Syfert recalled. “Mother List’s condition for the $10,000 down payment was that she have a place to live—there.”
Luckily for John, Helen’s reluctance to share any domicile with her mother-in-law paled by comparison with her longing to own Breeze Knoll, and the added virtue that the old mansion had a private apartment on the third floor. So it was that Alma, who had never lived more than ten miles from her birthplace in all of her seventy-nine years, came to spend the last five years of her life on the third floor of a ramshackle old mansion in Westfield, New Jersey, where she knew not a soul beyond her son and his family, and where even as simple an act as going to the grocery store required a ride in an automobile. In letters to friends before her death, Alma would confide that these were the unhappiest years of her life.
The town that the Lists moved to in the autumn of 1965 was an affluent, well-tended municipality with a population of thirty-three thousand. It had fifty-one police officers, thirteen public schools, fourteen churches—the Lists’ church, Redeemer Lutheran, was founded in 1930; at the other chronological pole, the Presbyterian church was founded in 1728. Its affluence was solid middle-class Republican.
In 1970, only three out of ten Westfield households had a woman who worked full time. The town was known for its regard for its young people. Westfield High School sports teams were often state champions; it was not unusual for ten thousand people to turn out for a high school football game. Besides an excellent school system, Westfield maintained a municipal recreation department whose budget was nearly half that of the police department’s. Its staff of 125 ran a year-round program of sports, cultural, and craft activities that was often cited by newcomers as one of the reasons they chose to move to Westfield. It was a town that prided itself on the quality of life available within its borders, and on its lack of strife.
Besides its position on the railroad line twelve miles southwest of New York City, Westfield’s history contains little of much note to anyone who doesn’t live there: The official history of the Echo Lake Country Club boasts that “the 17th tee appears to be the remnants of Indian mounds.” In 1910 and 1911, before the movie industry moved to California, the Biograph Film Company made seven Mary Pickford movies in town. Charles Addams, the famous cartoonist of the macabre, grew up in Westfield, where he studied the architecture for the Victorian perspective that would come to characterize his drawings.
Aside from the artist, Westfield’s most famous citizen, albeit a most transient one in a town where many students in the high school had the teachers who had taught their parents, would for a time be John List himself.
The scion of the Wittke family, Jack Wittke, lived with his wife, Dot, in the converted carriage house on a street about a hundred yards behind the main house. Soon after the Lists moved in, John sought Wittke out with a slew of detailed questions about the history of the house he had just bought.
“He asked me if I would supply him with a lot of the historical pictures of the house that we had kept in the family,” Wittke said. “What he and his wife wanted to do, he said, was put the whole estate, or what he owned of it, back to its former glory. Well, I didn’t think he had the chance of a snowball in hell of ever doing such a thing, but I was happy to lend him the pictures.” John and Helen would spend their best moments together in Westfield making plans with that photo album on their laps.
When John showed Helen the fat photo album with interior and exterior scenes of Breeze Knoll in its days as a grand estate, she was enthralled. In fact, the two of them began acting like newlyweds again, bubbling with enthusiasm as they planned a restoration they believed would be substantially complete within five years.
Jean Syfert remembered talking with her sister and John for hours as they described their dreams. “When they started out, they had such intentions,” she said, raising her eyes at what became her last happy memory of John and Helen’s marriage. “You just couldn’t shut them up about it. The first thing they did was, in the center-hall stairway that went all the way up, at the very top of it they put in an absolutely gorgeous chandelier, very expensive and massive. It was their project together. They saw such possibilities together in that house.”
John was especially diligent about tending the grounds, raking the leaves almost nightly in the fall, mowing the grass every week in the warm months. This activity, in fact, led to the first rumblings of what would later become a roar of gossip about the Lists. Neighbors, curious about the new family living in the biggest house on the block (and anxiously waiting for the new owners to paint the place) began noticing odd things about the man at 431 Hillside. Not only did he usually pretend not to see them when they were outside and waved or nodded a greeting, but the man always seemed to be wearing a coat and tie, winter and summer, night and day. On Hillside Avenue, where most people in fact hired workers to tend the grass, no one had ever seen such a curious sight as John List in a suit and tie, earnestly marching up and down his lawn behind his mower.
“They would laugh at him. He was becoming a joke up there,” said George Van Hecke, a longtime Westfield resident who heard about John List’s lawn-mowing sartorial habits from seven blocks away. “I guess he was the antithesis of a slob,” Van Hecke said, scratching his chin.
Friends of the List children thought there was something unusual about John. Brad West, a former friend of Johnny’s, recalled: “Every once in a while, we would be tossing around a football with John and Fred in this huge front yard they had, and maybe we�
��d get too loud or something, and Mr. List would come out in his suit and tie, ‘Don’t do that, don’t do this.’ He was always dressed like that. Always! It was always white shirt, dark suit, dark tie—come hell or high water, summer or winter.”
As the children started growing up, another dimension opened on John’s life. No longer toddlers who could easily be supervised and directed in their activities, the children were increasingly exposed, in John’s view, to outside influences beyond his ability to control. As they got older, he became stricter, more like the disapproving Teutonic presence that his father had been than the man who would take a stepdaughter ice fishing.
Indeed, there were grumblings even in the Sunday school class he taught at Redeemer, where John was becoming known as what one parishoner called a “pious grouch who treated those kids like they were in reform school.”
Van Hecke, a local teacher at the time, occasionally got to see John close up, and he bristled at what he encountered. Westfield’s various churches were active in sponsoring Cub Scout and Boy Scout troops, and not long after moving to town, John became co-leader of the Cub Scout pack that his sons Johnny and Fred belonged to at Redeemer Lutheran Church.
The various scouting organizations in Westfield often gathered, each with their own adult leaders, for parades or other civic events. Van Hecke recalled the first time that he and the other Scout fathers laid eyes on John List: “He had his kids marching in like little Prussian soldiers, while our kids would sort of saunter in,” he said. Alongside these spit-shined boys in their little blue uniforms was their tall, gawky, and mirthless leader practically goose-stepping in his own adult Cub Scout uniform.
“Jesus,” Van Hecke said. “We’d never seen anything like that.”
Once a year, the Westfield Cub Scout troops participated in what was known as the Pinewood Derby, in which individual dens would compete with tiny racing cars they made from wood. There were small prizes for the fastest, the fanciest, the most unusual. “It was just a fun event for the boys,” Van Hecke said. But John won the lasting enmity of other fathers with an attitude that was regarded as unseemly. “Here’s this martinet, this tinhorn tyrant, barking orders to a bunch of little kids! As if this event was an exercise in discipline,” sputtered Van Hecke. “He was a methodical son of a bitch with an arrogance that most people don’t possess. A right-wing nut, in my opinion, who stood out in a cosmopolitan town like Westfield.”
But, like anyone else who had known John, he was quick to add this counterbalance: “Now, don’t get me wrong. He was otherwise a complete gentleman. The Old World kind.”
On Sundays, John was proud to be seen with his mother, his wife, and his three well-groomed children at services at Redeemer. After services, while he taught his Sunday school class and the boys stayed with him, Helen and Patty usually got a ride home.
Predictably, Helen was the first to peel away from the little squadron. Though she liked Westfield very much, liked its cultural quality and its proximity to New York City, she was quickly put off by Redeemer.
“Helen told me she went to a church picnic when they were fairly new in town, and she got the cold shoulder from those people,” her sister Jean said, adding with a laugh: “With Helen, you only got one chance.”
Never one for the subtle approach, Helen finally insisted to her husband that he go to the church office and formally have her name removed from the roster of the congregation. A mortified John meekly told her he had complied, but never actually did withdraw her name. Anyway, as if to further muddy the waters and let them know she could do as she pleased, a defiant Helen would impulsively decide on occasional Sunday mornings to go to church with her family again. But never two Sundays in a row.
In late 1971, with their father proclaiming his belief that he was murdering them to prevent them from drifting away from religion, Patty still sang most weeks in the church choir. Johnny drew almost all of his friends from the congregation. Fred was a member of the confirmation class.
John’s new job as a bank vice president and comptroller lasted one year.
The title had been somewhat misleading. What the job actually demanded was a person with the self-starting ability to seek out new business in the rapidly expanding suburbs around the old industrial cities of northern New Jersey. Social skills and the ability to follow through, to close the deal, were of paramount importance. John was fine with structures and procedures. But as a salesman, he plunged hopelessly in over his head. This time there would be no grace period to find a suitable new job. This time there wouldn’t be the salve of a warm endorsement on his résumé. This time, he was just fired.
Overcome with humiliation, he was unable to confront his wife with a truth that threatened to demolish whatever happiness they had managed to find in Westfield. Instead, he continued leaving the house each morning with his briefcase and his Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm. He got into his car and edged it around the house and down the long circular drive onto Hillside Avenue. He drove to downtown Westfield, parked the car, and walked into the train station. And he sat there, on cold days inside the building, on warm days in the little park outside, reading a book. For six months of 1967, this was how John spent every work day.
Occasionally, his face burning with shame, he would make a stop at the bank where both he and his mother kept their accounts. Using the power of attorney she had given him when they moved to Westfield, he began to make regular withdrawals from his mother’s account, loans that he believed he would pay back once he got on his feet again.
At night, he began confiding more in his mother. John would come home and excuse himself after dinner to go to Alma’s quarters on the third floor, where they read and discussed the Bible. To her he could confide his fears, his failures, and his troubles with Helen, who had become more demanding and contemptuous.
But he didn’t tell his mother about the money. And he didn’t tell his wife about losing his job until he found a new one.
This job, which came later in 1967, had the requisite cachet in its title: vice president and comptroller, with a firm called American Photographic Company in New York City. But the salary was $12,000, less than half of what he had made in his previous two jobs. And he was out of work again within a year, when the company decided to relocate. John said he was reluctant to part with the house in Westfield. “Nobody was sorry to see him go,” one official of the company said.
While John was still working at American Photographic, Helen was hospitalized, at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, where her condition of cerebral atrophy was diagnosed as a symptom of general paresis, a fatal disease.
The Syferts came to visit during Helen’s long recuperation and were shocked by the deterioration they found not only in Helen but in John, who looked puffy and unhealthy himself. There was nothing to do for John. But, after consulting with a local doctor who knew Helen, Jean recommended that he consider having his wife institutionalized. John wouldn’t hear of it, she said.
During this visit, while touring the house with John, Gene noticed for the first time the extensive collection of strategy games that his brother-in-law had acquired over the years. Gene also saw that John also had stacks of books on crime, criminals, and weapons in the room he called his billiard room. For a man who Gene “didn’t think knew which end of a gun the trigger was on,” this was surprising.
John also took his brother-in-law into the damp cellar beneath the main part of the house, pointing out the dark nooks and blind passageways. “Gene, a man could hide for six months down here if he had food and water,” John told him. Gene thought that was such an odd remark to make that he mentioned it to his wife.
In September 1968, feeling a real financial squeeze after Helen’s illness, John took out a loan for $4,000 at Suburban Trust Company, securing it with a lien on the house. Two months later, he got a $7,000 second mortgage on the house, and repaid the earlier $4,000 note.
After he left American Photographic, John found a new job
, this time in an entirely new field, selling mutual funds. He worked out of his house. For a time, though it did not improve markedly, his financial condition seemed to stabilize.
Helen, at least by Brenda’s account, did not, however. “Mom just couldn’t stop drinking, and she kept making Daddy buy her all these clothes,” said Brenda, who came to visit with her husband and children. Brenda also noticed that Helen was now voicing aloud what had been private complaints about John’s sexual abilities. “I don’t think John really satisfied her sexually,” Brenda said.
John’s instinctive reaction to buy his wife’s happiness now seemed to extend to the children as well, Jean Syfert noticed. “There weren’t many fights in that house,” she said. “But there were very unpleasant times when money was very tight. If Helen said the kids needed something, John went right out and got it, whatever it was she said they needed. Even in the bad times, he would always buy the best. I remember one particular time when we were there, one of the children needed eyeglasses. They cost like $250, and I’m sure he could have probably got glasses that would have been just as good for less money. But that just wasn’t John’s way.”
But now there was no money to purchase anyone’s happiness and love. The walls were closing in. An overwhelming sense of persecution filled his soul. In his despair, he prayed to a God who had forsaken him, pleading for a way out.
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