Such a declaration, in context, is not as odd as it might seem. One of the hit television situation comedies of the era featured a pretty witch who could do housework with the twitch of her nose. And teenage girls, especially those who perceive an inability to control their own fate, often fantasize about being witches, psychologists have found. Usually, they keep it to themselves.
Not Pat, with her newfound sense of the dramatic. Encouraged by several older members of the drama group who happened to dabble in witchcraft and the occult, Pat made such a point of her belief that it came to the attention of her counselors at a YMCA-YWCA summer camp on the Delaware River where she spent two weeks from August 22 to September 4 in a counselor-in-training program.
“Pat List thought she was a witch,” recalled Glenn Pontier, who was a supervisor of counselors at the summer camp. “Now, you can take that at a couple of levels. One level is, camp is a fantasy that you go to to get away from your life, from where you live. They had a camp persona that maybe was a little different than their real life, and that would be perfectly normal. So if somebody comes in and is a little into witchcraft or something, it doesn’t seem all that unusual to me. It’s part of camp.”
However, with Pat, he said, “I think she believed it at a more serious level. I think she was involved with people who took witchcraft seriously. Pat was a pretty confused teenage girl, confused and afraid.”
Because the purpose of the training program was to evaluate aspiring counselors as potential employees for the next season, Pat was given extensive counseling herself, he said. The result was disquieting. “This girl feared for her life,” he said. It was unclear, given the quasi-professional counseling of a summer camp, what the nature of that threat was, he said.
As to drugs, “Maybe she was using marijuana on occasion. Everybody was using marijuana then. But clearly, she did not have any kind of a drug problem that was noticeable at a level that would suggest intervention,” Pontier said. In fact, it was decided that Pat had qualified to be offered a job as a paid counselor the following summer, he said.
“I don’t recall her being a smart-ass or anything. Guys had crushes on her. What stands out is, she thought she was a witch! You really only noticed her because she was talking about real fear. That, and the fact that she was murdered shortly afterward, is why I remember her.”
In October of 1971, John List referred to his budget book ruefully. Among the frightfully mounting debts were three mortgages on the house, for $41,446.89; $6,513.16; and $1,562.75, all months in arrears. But the entries for, monthly income showed the grimmest news of all. So far that year, he had earned less than $5,000, selling insurance from home.
A sixteen-year-old girl and her thirteen-year-old brother with after-school jobs now accounted for the only regular paycheck being brought into the List house.
For John, the hill at last had become too steep to climb, at least with so much baggage.
He prayed and thought it through carefully. One could lighten the load. One could start the climb again, alone. Without the baggage.
On October 14, he walked into the Westfield police station to fill out an application for a gun permit. Routinely, his fingerprints were taken. But then, inexplicably, he never returned to pick up the permit.
A week later, Pat approached her father to ask if she could have a Halloween party in the ballroom for friends from the drama group. He looked at her and nodded, but she told a friend he didn’t speak.
About thirty teenagers, most of them members of the drama group, showed up in costume for the party on the Saturday night before Halloween. Pat had decorated the ballroom with luminous hobgoblins and other such Halloween festoons.
“Pat was dressed as a witch,” Eileen Livesey said. Eileen didn’t see Pat’s mother at all that night. “I just knew that she didn’t come out of the house very much and that she spent a lot of time in bed,” she said.
Pat had insisted that her two younger brothers stay upstairs during the party, which they did—to a point. Guests stepping into the center hall off the ballroom could see the boys hiding behind the banister on the second floor. The boys began writing notes on folded squares of paper and dropping them down. And as some of the guests scribbled friendly replies, young Fred would come scurrying down the double-winged staircase to fetch them and run back before his sister saw what was going on.
During what was remembered as a good party, with good music thumping from a record player on the floor, and lots of dancing, John List himself caused the only untoward incident. He had been seen from time to time during the night glaring down on the costumed partygoers from the upstairs landing. At one point late in the evening, John actually stormed down the steps to confront a boy sitting on the lower steps with a girl. It is not clear what incurred his wrath—perhaps the teenagers had a can of beer, or just a cigarette; maybe they were necking. Or perhaps a long suppressed shame from a long-ago Halloween darted angrily from the shadows of memory. Whatever, John took off after the frightened boy, aiming a kick that just missed him. He chased the boy out of the house.
John Rochat noticed one other unusual thing. Rochat’s grandparents lived next door, and he had been a regular visitor to the List house since he was in junior high school. “Where did the furniture go?” he wondered during the party.
“At first, I thought, hey, the old man’s worried that we all are going to do some damage,” Rochat said. But he saw that it wasn’t only the ballroom that was bereft of furniture, it was the center hall, where there had been antique high-backed chairs and area rugs, and the other rooms he could see. “Except for a few things like the kitchen table and chairs, and the file cabinets and desk, I didn’t see any furniture at all to speak of on the first floor,” he said.
The fact was, as John List would have been mortified to have any of the neighbors know, he already had sold some of the furniture downstairs. It hadn’t amounted to much. He also sold the second car. Now he drove a nine-year-old Chevy, and it had a bright red sticker on its windshield that indicated it had just failed state motor vehicle inspection.
Helen was no longer drinking. But that was only because she was so ill, drifting in and out of lucidity, that booze no longer had appeal. To accept the increasingly apparent fact that his wife was mentally ill would have been impossible, even without the other terrible burdens that had piled up. To accept the fact that Helen was in fact dying, on the other hand, would have been inconvenient.
He spent long nights without sleep, and his tortured mind groped for rationalization. He wasn’t to blame. John never blamed himself for anything. Helen was to blame. And Patty was growing up just like her. And now he would act to save them for another world, and himself for this one.
For it was written:
Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!
It has become a dwelling place of demons,
A haunt of every foul spirit,
A haunt of every foul and hateful bird;
For all nations have drunk the wine of her impure passion,
And the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her,
And the merchants of the earth have grown rich with the wealth of her wantonness
And:
Render to her as she herself has rendered,
And repay her double for her deeds;
Mix a double draught for her in the cup she mixed.
As she has glorified herself and played the wanton,
So give her a like measure of torment and mourning.
And this:
Alas! Alas! though great city,
Thou mighty city, Babylon!
In one hour has thy judgment come!
After dinner on Friday, November 5, John List stood in the kitchen at the rear of the house. He told one of the boys to go get his sister and brother.
When Pat, John, and Fred were seated anxiously at the table, John looked reproachfully at them. He told them directly what he had been hinting at for several months. Sternly, with no equivocation w
hatsoever, he advised these children to be prepared to die, because they would do so soon. Would they prefer to be buried or cremated? he asked. “Buried,” the shocked children replied, one by one. Then he walked out of the room and calmly shut his office door behind him.
No one knows what the children might have said to each other that night, but it is evident at least that the two older ones, Pat and Johnny, now believed they were about to die.
Pat attended drama group rehearsal the same night. The production of A Streetcar Named Desire, in which she was to understudy the role of Blanche DuBois, was only two weeks away. Pat had memorized the play—not her lines, but the entire play, Blanche and all of the other parts as well: Stanley Kowalski, Stella, Steve, Harold, and even the minor parts. She knew every word of it. But she didn’t seem interested now. Her eyes were red from crying. She seemed to cling physically to anyone who came near her.
Worried, Ed offered to drive her home after the workshop ended.
Hearing her sniffing in the dark beside him, he stopped the car in the park right behind the Municipal Building and turned off the lights. Looking straight out at the path, he asked, “Pat, what’s the matter?”
She didn’t reply. She kept a tissue pressed to her nose.
Ed was uncomfortable, as he usually was when he was alone with her. It was after eleven o’clock at night, and he was in a parked car in the town park with a teenage girl who was in tears. “Was it something that happened tonight at rehearsal?” he asked.
She shook her head. Then, composing herself, she said calmly, “It’s my father.” She had stopped crying. “Mr. Illiano, my father is going to kill me. He’s going to kill me.” She began weeping softly again.
Ed smiled, aware that he had probably conveyed the same sentiments on occasion to his own teenage daughter.
In an avuncular tone, he assured her, “Nobody’s going to kill you, Pat.”
She looked at him as if he were an idiot.
Angrily, she repeated: “He said he is going to kill me. My brothers too. He said that, Mr. Illiano.” She pushed herself across the seat as far away as she could get. Her eyes glowed with resentment. “He said that!”
Ed looked straight through the windshield across the car’s hood, which reflected the street lamp. He drummed his fingers on the dashboard, lost for words. Pat was many things, but hysterical was not one of them.
“What are you talking about?” he said, lamely.
Her eyes were accusing. “He took us into the kitchen. He sat us down and he said, he flat-out told us we should be prepared to die.”
“He said he would kill you?”
“That’s exactly what he was saying. There was no doubt about it.”
Ed made a soundless little whistle with his lips. He wondered what time it was. He didn’t want to look at his watch. It was getting cold in the car. He turned on the engine, waiting for the heater to kick in. He could hear the girl beside him sobbing softly.
He tried middle-aged bravado. “Look, Patricia,” he said quite sternly. “I’m not going to let anybody kill you. Let’s get that straight.”
Her look said, What bullshit! It made him feel as if he was the child, not she.
“Listen,” she said, as if explaining something carefully to a six-year-old. “If he tells you he’s going to take the family on a trip for a couple of weeks, that’s it. That’s how he’s going to do it.”
“Do what?”
“Do it. He’s going to make it look like we went away.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes.”
Ed was dumbfounded. “Why would he tell you something like that?”
At this, she laughed. That was a good question, a very good question. The girl laughed at the patently ridiculous knowledge that her father had been so deliberate that he had told them, right down to the details. Maybe the man was simply out of his mind after all.
All she could say in reply to Ed was, “I don’t know.” She said it with a chuckle and a toss of her long blonde hair. Grinning in the face of the truth. She laughed, her eyes wet with tears. “I don’t know.”
Ed took out his handkerchief to wipe off the steam that fogged the windshield. He put the car in gear and took Pat home. He waited until she disappeared through the door before driving away.
Two days later, on Sunday, Ed invented an excuse to visit the List house. He was returning a book he had borrowed from Helen several weeks earlier. He came early in the afternoon, without calling first.
Young John answered the door and let him in. Like his father, the boy was tall. But where the father was rigid, with squared shoulders that moved as if they had no joints, the boy was loose and relaxed, and usually quite animated. But this time, the boy couldn’t even manage a smile. He took him into the dining room, where Helen, apparently in good health that day, was seated at the table.
Pat didn’t seem to be anywhere downstairs. Helen beckoned to him from the table, where she had the big Wittke photo album open in front of her.
Helen was always glad to see Ed, and on this day she seemed particularly vivacious and in good spirits. She moved closer to him when he sat down.
“We’re going to start on the rest of the house as soon as John is better,” she said, showing him a photo.
Ed was surprised. “Is John not well?”
“Oh, he’ll be all right,” she said cheerily, expelling a short breath, as if to blow away a feather. “He’ll be back to work soon.”
Finally, still with no sign of Pat, he disengaged himself from Helen and her dog-eared black-and-white pictures and put his coat on to leave.
At the door, he was surprised to find young John waiting. Physically blocking the exit, the boy grabbed Ed’s arm in a tight grip and looked him directly in the eye. “Mr. Illiano, whenever you are in this neighborhood, please come by,” John said with a firmness that was unusual for an adolescent addressing an adult. “Please understand,” the boy said, choosing words slowly. “You are welcome here any time.” Then he let Ed pass.
“There was quiet hysteria,” Ed recalled years later. “That young boy was scared.” As he backed his car into the driveway, he noticed that a sheer curtain was parted in a window on the ground floor, in the room where John kept his office. “It was John List, looking daggers at me,” he said.
The next night, Monday, November 8, Pat phoned Ed at home. She sounded more sad than frantic.
“Mr. Illiano, you’d better get over here pretty quick,” she said evenly. It was almost in an “I-told-you-so” tone of voice.
“What do you mean? What’s the matter? I can’t do it. You come here to see me,” he replied, aware that he couldn’t come up with another plausible excuse to visit the List house. Ed was already on thin ice with his wife, from whom he would shortly be separated.
“I can’t,” Pat whimpered. “I’m having my period and I’ve got violent cramps.”
This was exactly the sort of thing that complicated the relationship with this girl, he thought peevishly. It was as if she meant to keep him uncomfortable. He was tired and annoyed at this. There was nothing he could do, not at eight o’clock on a Monday night.
“I just can’t come over,” he said flatly, putting an end to the conversation. “I’ve got a full schedule.”
Chapter Eight
In better times, John List liked to take out the monthly budget book and admire the columns of numbers he entered with his fountain pen. He was proud of the neat, nineteenth-century dress of the figures, the precision with which they marched down the thin blue lines, one after the other, squared off and squared away. He was proud of the fact that by the time the little figures hit the bottom line, every item would be accounted for, with assets sufficiently, even if sometimes just barely, in excess of liabilities. For years now keeping that balance just barely on the black side of the ledger had required the movement of certain future gains into the category of current earnings. This was a somewhat unorthodox accounting practice, but John could live with it. M
other’s estate was to be legally his upon her death anyway. He was only borrowing his own money. He had always assumed he would be able to repay what he had taken, in the unlikely event a woman in her eighties should decide she wanted it.
By the end of 1971, Mother’s money was all almost gone, too. The old woman didn’t know it, but she was now almost flat broke. In an accountant’s terms, those gains on John’s balance sheet were nonrecurring.
Now, in the pale, cold hour before sunrise, on November 9, 1971, John wasn’t dwelling on past accounts. With a pen, he drew an indelible line beneath the final set of figures.
It was only five-forty-five in the morning, a full hour before the children would stir upstairs, probably a good three hours before Helen would wander down to have her coffee and Mother would start puttering in her kitchen on the third floor. John adjusted his desk lamp for better light and glanced through the budget book, starting back in January and working his way up to October, where he had finally given up.
It was all quite hopeless. The oil bill was $1,072.76 and counting. He could hear the burner running even as he read. The mortgage, three months in arrears. On and on went the liabilities. The situation was irretrievably, irrevocably hopeless. His fate settled over his shoulders like a shawl. It had come to this. His pleas to God had brought him only to this. Now there would be detachment from all else. So be it. Amen.
He closed his budget book for the last time, putting it aside on the desk, beside his Bible. He twisted his class ring off his finger, Michigan 1950, and lay it there too.
From the red-covered Lutheran hymnal, the 1941 Concordia edition that was in use in the Missouri Synod, he read the words, humming softly as his eyes followed the verse:
The world is very evil,
The times are waxing late;
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