Each of the notes were placed in unsealed envelopes on which he had written the addressee’s name and placed a postage stamp. John tucked the envelopes into a big manila folder, on the outside of which he scrawled: “For Pastor E. A. Rehwinkle of Redeemer Lutheran Church.”
There was but one more letter to write, the most difficult of all. He wrote a confession to his minister on the thin lines of a yellow pad, dating it “11-9-71.” It was slow going at first, as if it required great effort to drag the pen across the page. But then the writing became easier, as wretched thoughts found their way into precise syntax in well-defined paragraphs of excuses for murder. This was John List’s account:
Dear Pastor Rehwinkle:
I am very sorry to add this additional burden to your work. I know that what I have done is wrong from all that I have been taught, and that any reasons that I might give will not make it right. But you are the one person that I know that, while not condoning this, will at least partially understand why I felt that I had to do this.
1. I wasn’t earning anywhere near enough to support us. Everything I tried seemed to fall to pieces. True: we could have gone bankrupt and maybe gone on welfare.
2. But that brings me to my next point. Knowing the type of location that one would have to live in, plus the environment for the children, plus the effect on them knowing they were on welfare, was just more than I thought they could and should endure. I know that they were willing to cut back, but this involved a lot more than that.
3. With Pat being so determined to get into acting, I was also fearful as to what this might do to her continuing to be a Christian. I’m sure it wouldn’t have helped.
4. Also, with Helen not going to church I knew that this would harm the children eventually in their attendance. I had continued to hope that she would begin to come to church soon. But when I mentioned, to her that Mr. Jutzi wanted to pay her an elder’s call, she just blew up and stated that she wanted her name taken off the church rolls. Again this could only have given an adverse result for the children’s continued attendance.
So that is the sum of it. If any one of these had been the condition we might have pulled through, but this was just too much. At least I’m certain that all have gone to heaven now. If things had gone on, who knows if that would be the case.
Of course, Mother got involved because doing what I did to my family would have been a tremendous shock to her at this age. Therefore, knowing that she is also a Christian, I felt it best that she be relieved of the troubles of this world that would have hit her.
After it was all over, I said some prayers for them all—from the hymn book. That was the least that I could do.
Now for the final arrangements:
Helen and the children have all agreed that they would prefer to be cremated. Please see to it that the costs are kept low.
For Mother, she has a plot at the Frankenmuth Church cemetery. Please contact
Mr. Herman Schellhas
Rt. 4
Vassar, Mich. 41768
He’s married to a niece of Mother’s and knows what arrangements are to be made. She always wanted Rev. Herman Zelinder of Bay City to preach the sermon. But he’s not well.
Also, I’m leaving some letters in your care. Please send them on and add whatever comments you think appropriate.
The relationships are as follows:
Mrs. Lydia Meyer—Mother’s sister
Mrs. Eva Morris—Helen’s mother
Jean Syfert—Helen’s sister
Also, I don’t know what will happen to the books and other personal things. But to the extent possible I’d like for them to be distributed as you see fit. Some books might go into the school or church library,
Originally I had planned this for Nov. 1—All Saints Day. But travel arrangements were delayed. I thought it would be an appropriate day for them to get to heaven.
As for me, please let me be dropped from the congregation rolls. I leave myself in the hand of God’s justice and mercy. I don’t doubt that He is able to help us, but apparently he saw fit not to answer my prayers the way I had hoped that they would be answered. This makes me think that perhaps it was for the best as far as the children’s souls are concerned. I know that many will only look at the additional years that they could have lived, but if finally they were no longer Christians what would have been gained?
Also, I’m sure many will say “How could anyone do such a horrible thing?” My only answer is it isn’t easy and was only done after much thought.
Pastor, Mrs. Morris may possibly be reached at:
802 Pleasant Hill Dr. Elkin—Home of her sister.
One more thing. It may seem cowardly to have always shot from behind, but I didn’t want any of them to know even at the last second that I had to do this to them.
John got hurt more because he seemed to struggle longer. The rest were immediately out of pain. John probably didn’t consciously feel anything either. [The murderer then crossed out the word “probably” and continued.]
Please remember me in your prayers. I will need them whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it. I’m only concerned with making my peace with God and of this I am assured because of Christ dying even for me.
P.S. Mother is in the hallway in the attic—3rd floor. She was too heavy to move.
John.
(Even in his confession, John lied. The autopsies of the bodies would subsequently make it clear that of the five, only Patty had been shot in the back of the head. For the others, their last vision in life clearly was that of John aiming a pistol at their heads.)
When he was through, his writing covered five pages. Without using an envelope, he slid the letter into the manila folder with the other notes. He found his checkbook on the desk and dropped that into the folder too.
Now he prepared his work space for the inevitable discovery of the carnage. He put the two pistols, along with an envelope containing extra bullets, into the bottom right-hand drawer of the file cabinet beside his desk. On the outside of that drawer he taped this note: “Guns & Ammo.”
On the drawer above it he taped another note, which said: “To Pastor Rehwinkle, Burton Goldstein and Administrators.”
He put the manila envelope containing all of the letters into the drawer, which locked in place after he shut it.
John then wrote another, unsigned, note and taped it to the top of his desk. It said:
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.
Having done this, he dropped the file cabinet keys into a desk drawer where they would be easily found once the authorities received the special delivery letter now being held at the post office, containing the key to the desk. The desk drawer also locked in place when he shut it.
The death sentence had been carried out righteously. Once more, in exhaustion, he fell to his knees on the cold oak floor and prayed.
He realized he was hungry. It was late, but he went into the kitchen and made dinner, which he ate slowly. Afterward, he washed his dishes and left them on the drainboard. Then he went to the billiard room and slept. He was up before dawn and ready to leave.
He remembered to turn the thermostat down to fifty degrees, high enough to prevent any mishaps such as the pipes bursting in an unexpected cold wave and drawing attention to the house from some helpful neighbor; low enough to make the fuel oil last as long as possible into the winter; cool enough to retard decomposition of a body. He went around the house switching on lights. Except for the ballroom, which was now dark, he left lights burning in every room.
He placed the three supermarket bags he had filled with bloody newspapers, paper towels and other debris in the kitchen near the back door where he had ambushed the children, as if waiting for one of the boys to take them out on trash night.
In a closet off the main hall was a stereo rec
eiver wired to an intercom system with speakers throughout the house. John never let anyone tune the radio to any radio station except WQXR-FM, the classical music station of the New York Times. And now his last unopposed imposition of authority over his family was to fill its death chamber with orchestral music, plus news on the hour.
As usual, he satisfied himself that the house was neat, clean, all hatches battened down.
With almost $2,500 in his wallet and a new lifetime on his hands, which were now scrubbed quite clean of blood, John gathered what little he intended to take from the inventory of the first half of his life—the suitcase with a couple of days’ changes of clothes, the briefcase with a few personal documents and a handful of motor club maps.
He left by the back door. The night was a little milder than the previous one; snow flurries were expected by morning. He walked into a chilly drizzle. There was a bit of fog in the glow around the street lights.
Luckily the old Impala started right up. He eased it down the driveway, his foot light on the accelerator to minimize the racket from the broken muffler that had caused it to fail inspection. As he pulled out onto Hillside Avenue, his house, Breeze Knoll, blazed behind like a ghost liner on a moonless sea.
Still exercising care not to draw any attention to the noisy muffler, he turned right onto Broad Street, and headed down into the business district, where the wet sidewalks glistened with the nightlights from closed shops. The marquee of the Rialto movie theater was dark. But the letters could be made out against the white panels. The feature movie was called Billy Jack. John wouldn’t have seen it as he drove by, but a poster in a frame near the ticket booth described the film as being about “a person who protects children and other living things.”
A block away, on Elm Street, he eased the car to the curb in front of the darkened office of KMV Associates where Patty and Fred worked. Casually, he got out and slipped the envelope with his letter excusing their absence under the front door.
With that, Westfield was behind him. He drove east, and soon could see the lights of Manhattan twinkling through the fog. But then these, too, faded as he headed more to the south, finally crossing the Goethals Bridge from New Jersey to Staten Island, and then the Verrazano Narrows Bridge over the bay, to lower Brooklyn. The road signs for Coney Island passed by in a blur through the rhythmic sweeps of the windshield wipers. Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach; across the inlet, the Rockaways. Once it reached cruise speed, the Impala hummed rather than rumbled on the rain-slicked highway along the cusp of Jamaica Bay.
Soon billboards appeared indicating that Kennedy International Airport wasn’t far, billboards depicting stewardesses and the salacious invitation “Fly Me!” But on this night, the airport offered far more than the lure of exotic locales. It offered anonymity to a man who needed it badly.
He followed the signs for long-term parking. The machine at the automatic gate spit out a ticket, which he placed on the seat. He headed for the most crowded section of the lot and edged his car into a spot between two others.
He turned off the engine and the lights, locked the doors and moved the seat back for comfort.
As dawn streaked the skies over Long Island, he removed his keys from the ignition, tucking them away from casual view just under the front seat. He made sure to lock the car door behind him.
He didn’t have much to carry, though his journey would be one that would last for eighteen years. In his loping gait, shoulders squared against the dawn, he made his way across the vast parking lot toward the lights of the terminals, a figure fading gently into the mist as it crossed the concrete island and blended in with the other faceless stragglers wading silently into the boundless transient sea.
Chapter Nine
Ed Illiano had the impression that the call had been meant for him. Since he had been sitting right there, he was a little put out. He wished she had just handed the phone over instead of taking a message.
“Who was that?” he asked when Barbara Sheridan put the phone down.
“Pat’s father.”
“Pat List? What did he say?” Ed was nervous whenever the subject of Pat List came up.
“He said he just put his family on a plane for North Carolina,” she told him. “They’ve gone to stay with Patty’s grandmother, who is sick.” She added that the caller had sounded strange. He wasn’t speaking in his usual monotone. He sounded “excited and out of breath.”
Ed felt like he had just been punched in the stomach, but he didn’t say anything to arouse alarm. His mind raced. Maybe the girl had known about the trip last week. Kids project, dramatize their fears. But Pat’s tears hadn’t been an overwrought teenager’s plea for sympathy or affection. What had struck him most about the scene in his car four days earlier, aside from the confusion and nagging guilt over his own motives in being alone with her at all, was that Pat hadn’t been looking for consolation from anyone. Hers were tears of anger and frustration. At once, he knew that she had felt utterly alone and vulnerable.
“What do you mean, ‘kill you’?”
He saw her eyes burning through angry tears that spoke of betrayal.
He had become too involved, he told himself. He was a drama coach, not a social worker. Ruth Hill saw the thicket that could lay ahead, and had warned him. You are awfully close to some of them, Ed. He knew she meant Pat specifically, though she didn’t come right out and say it. And he knew she was right.
On the way home the night of November 9, he found himself driving down Hillside Avenue again. He slowed down as he passed the List house and tried to be inconspicuous while attempting to inspect it from his passing car. At the bottom of the hill, he made a U-turn and cruised by once more. Everything looked normal. Lights were on throughout the house. He had been there often enough at night to know the routine. When she was well, Helen would be in the kitchen, finishing the dishes or even cooking for the next day. If he wasn’t down in the billiard room, reading or hunched over one of his war games, John would usually be upstairs with his mother. They still read the Bible together most nights, Pat had told him once, rolling her eyes. The boys would be upstairs, doing homework or watching television in John’s room, where a long banner taped on the wall said “Let’s go Mets.” Down the hall, Pat would be studying. Schoolwork. Sometimes a script.
Ed couldn’t see anything amiss. The house at 431 Hillside looked still and quiet through barren trees.
Pat wasn’t the most popular girl in the drama group; she wasn’t one of the best known. In any repertory group, there are stars and workers, and there are comers. Pat was a comer, one of those who was watched with interest by group members, who often speculated on who among their number might actually make a stage career some day in New York. Pat worked like a maniac. She seemed to be getting better every week. She had the fire in her belly, as Ed called it. Some of the others believed she was just driven enough, and just screwed-up enough, to make it one day.
So her abrupt absence, during A Streetcar Named Desire rehearsals in which she was to understudy one of the most attractive female roles in the modern repertoire, was widely noticed, especially as the weeks passed without a word.
“Even when Pat went away for a weekend, she always was in touch with someone,” Barry Cohen said. “She wasn’t one to just disappear on a trip somewhere.” In one of the few traits she inherited from her father, Pat was in fact an inveterate letter-writer. Even on a short trip, she would send a postcard to stay in touch with her friends.
By November 20, when Streetcar was presented, no one had heard from Pat since the first week of the month. People were starting to worry.
The old white Pontiac, with Ed behind the wheel with his right arm draped nonchalantly over the seat so he didn’t look like a burglar scouting the territory, became a familiar sight coming down Hillside Avenue. Ed, sometimes accompanied by a few members of the group, began cruising past the List house almost every night on his way home from group workshops or from giving private lessons in the Sheridans’ music r
oom.
The Lists, like their neighbors, always kept a lot of lights on, so there wasn’t anything terribly unusual about the way the house was illuminated, since it was known they were away.
On several occasions, Ed parked his car in the drive and knocked on the front door, stamping his feet loudly, so that any neighbor who noticed him would know he wasn’t being furtive. He rang the bell and knocked, but it was obvious that no one was home. The mail had obviously been stopped. So had the paper.
Once he worked up the nerve to try the door. Unobtrusively, he jiggled the handle. He was relieved to find it locked. He didn’t know what he would have done if the door had opened. He thought he heard music playing somewhere inside the house as he turned to leave.
Without going into detail about the cause of his suspicions, Ed managed to convey his misgivings to some of the group. People recalled how distraught Pat had seemed just before she disappeared. This was a girl who had recently proclaimed herself a witch, so a certain amount of odd conversation might be expected from her. But now people recalled that she had spoken vaguely of fear for her safety in the week after the Halloween party. Of course, talk was cheap and eminently disposable, especially after a couple of joints, or even a bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine. But Pat never had seemed frightened before.
Reluctant as they were to turn to any authority, some members of the group suggested that the school was the right channel for inquiries into the whereabouts of Pat and her two brothers. Weren’t there truant officers who could come to the house and check? School authorities were quick to get on your case for everything else; wasn’t being absent for almost three weeks a good enough reason to intervene?
In fact, school attendance officials had made inquiries when the “few days” in John’s letters to them turned into a few weeks. In mid-November, the Westfield school district’s attendance officer, Mildred Kreger, looked up the List children’s records and noticed with some misgivings that these were not children with any history of inordinate absences from school. Worried, she went to the List house and rang the bell. When no one answered, she looked in the narrow windows beside the door. She saw no sign of activity. There was no mail in the mailbox. For some reason she decided to stroll around the house. The only thing even remotely unusual she noticed was that while all of the other curtains were tightly drawn on the ground floor, the one in the front-room window on the left side of the house—she did not know that this was John’s office—had been left slightly parted, as if someone had used it to keep watch.
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