A week later she returned. Nothing had changed.
Meanwhile, Pat’s friends began asking themselves, what about that church she had to go to every Sunday? Her father even made her sing in the choir there, something that was so totally uncool that only Pat’s closest friends knew about it. Didn’t the church want to know what happened to the Lists?
And how about the cops, who seldom had anything better to do than hassle kids hanging out listening to music in the municipal park? The cops stuck their noses into everything else. Couldn’t they go up to the List house, just to check on things?
The kids didn’t know that Ed had already approached the police, in the first week after the call from John List. He phoned a friend on the department and told him he believed there might be a problem at the List house, where the family was so suddenly reported to have gone away. Could a patrol car swing by and maybe have a look inside?
The officer was sympathetic, but there wasn’t much the police could do. “Ed, nothing has happened,” the officer said. “What’s your evidence? We can’t just go into a house. We can’t even look in the windows. How can we do that?”
Even though Ed was reluctant to go over his friend’s head, a week later he phoned the police again. As he had expected, they weren’t interested in a drama teacher’s daydreams. Ed said he felt he was being treated like “the village idiot.”
The church was another dead end. The pastor, Rehwinkle, was a good friend of John’s, and John himself had called to explain where the Lists were going so suddenly. John was the head of that household, and if John said something, that was that.
The minister also made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with Ed Illiano and his theatrics. “Rehwinkle talked to me on the phone like I was a nut, a full-blown nut,” Ed complained.
Of course, Ed was getting increasingly agitated, and Rehwinkle had no reason to guess that he was being anything other than overly dramatic. “I was rather shrill,” Ed conceded.
Without confessing embarrassing detail about how he knew something was wrong—to do so would have been to reveal those long, intimate conversations with a teenage girl in a parked car late at night—he felt unable to proceed along routine channels.
On Sunday afternoon, December 5, he drove to the List house. Someone had hung a yellow advertising book on the door knob. He also noticed that the Lutheran minister had left his calling card in the mailbox. There was no sign of activity. He left.
But that night, after brooding through dinner, Ed decided he had to go in.
Ed had never broken into a house before. He was so rattled as he drove through Westfield that he inadvertently ran two red lights on his way to Hillside Avenue.
Ed and the members of the drama group weren’t the only ones concerned by now about the Lists. Neighbors on Hillside Avenue, who had already made note of the fact that the lights hadn’t gone out, had become suspicious now that the lights were blinking off, one by one, as they finally burned out.
Aware that the neighbors had begun to cast at least the occasional curious glance at the big rambling house at 431 Hillside, Ed parked his car on the street behind. Casually, he strode past the old outbuildings of the former estate and onto the List property to the place where, on occasion, he had stopped the car to talk with Pat before she slipped into her house through the back door.
Breeze Knoll loomed in front of him. He almost turned back when he saw how bright it was out back with those lights that still were on in the windows. The last thing he needed now was to attract the attention of a nosy neighbor and get collared crawling through a window—he could just see the headline in that week’s Westfield Leader: Local Teacher Nabbed as Cat Burglar. Yet he was determined at least to have a look inside, to assure himself that everything was fine. What he hoped and indeed expected to find, and as quickly as humanly possible, was a cold, empty house. Then he would sleep better.
He couldn’t explain the dread that weighed on him. He dismissed it as mere fright at the prospect of entering someone else’s house uninvited.
With a bright moon low in the sky, he was glad for the cover of long shadows cast by the tall hedges bordering the rear drive. He knew the house well, and headed for the ground-level windows in the back wing just beside the rear chimney. The screen came off easily because the wood frame was rotted on one side. The window wasn’t locked. Grunting, Ed got down on the ground and pushed it open, clambering down backward until his feet found the basement floor inside the house. He dragged in the small flashlight he left on the ground.
Ed’s account of that night was discounted by prosecutors eighteen years later when John List finally was brought to trial for these crimes. But Ed, who died in 2009 at the age of eighty-one, insisted this was what he did, and that he would always be ashamed of his cowardice.
What was he afraid of?
“Being charged with a crime, breaking and entering,” he confided many years later.
Was he also afraid that his relationship with the teenage girl might become a source of public gossip in Westfield?
“Yes,” he admitted.
“Did you ever touch her inappropriately or suggest anything sexually inappropriate to her?”
“No,” he said, his eyes welling with tears. “But I loved her.”
In Ed’s tortured account, he dropped down clumsily and stood motionless in the dark. His heart pounded. Then he heard the music upstairs. It took him a few seconds of cold sweating before he figured it out. Jesus, he thought, they left the stereo on!
Stepping carefully, he moved toward the light showing in the stairwell. The room through which he passed was the one John insisted on still referring to as the billiard room. Everyone else called it the basement. Ed noticed John’s stacks of strategy war-games on the shelves.
Like the ballroom just above, this room was dominated by a marble-fronted fireplace big enough to roast an ox. Above the teakwood mantel hung pairs of antique gas-globe light fixtures that had been wired for electricity. Everything seemed quiet in the room. At least he hadn’t stumbled across John List asleep on his mattress.
Ed edged carefully up on the wide, softly lighted staircase that led to landing at the entrance to the ballroom. Each step seemed to creak more loudly than the last. All of his senses of smell and hearing were alerted before his brain could evaluate the information. The house had an off, dank odor. And the classical music that he had heard faintly downstairs seemed to fill the ground floor.
At the top of the stairs, to the right, a heavy drapery was stretched across the entrance to the ballroom. Cautiously, Ed parted it and peered in. The moon hadn’t yet risen high, so not much illumination came through the skylight above the spacious chamber. An unmistakable haze hung in the air, like mist off a swamp. Otherwise, he noticed nothing amiss. He backed out to look into the library, which was deserted. To save on heating costs, John had installed a vinyl folding door at the entrance from the ballroom landing to the center hall. Ed opened it and gazed into the main section of the house. Except for the music and the chill in the air, nothing was unusual. There was no sign of recent activity.
He went back to the ballroom entrance and poked the flashlight beam into the gloom. Pat’s folk guitar lay in its case on a table just to the left of the entrance. A few stray decorations left from the Halloween party still were taped to a wall on the left. Dime-store hobgoblins, gap-toothed pumpkins, and good-natured witches leered in the light beam. He thought he saw some bundles of clothes dumped on the floor to the right, near the fireplace.
Then the flashlight fixed on a child’s face in the dark clutter on the floor fifteen feet away.
Ed snapped the switch off, as if that would erase the image he had just seen appear in the yellow beam.
Sick with fear, he came closer. He kept the flashlight turned off. At his feet, he could make out the body of Helen List, grotesquely bloated. The children were beside their mother, whose arm lay across one child’s shoulder.
Ed shouted “Pat!” into the unyi
elding gloom. Then he turned and ran—not the way he had come in, but across the hall and into the kitchen, and out the back door, which he shut securely behind. He fled to his car. He does not remember driving home the ten miles to Elizabeth. Nor does he remember what he told his wife when she asked him what was wrong.
Incapacitated by grief and guilt, he kept his discovery to himself. For two nights and days he lived in a panic, the cold depths of which he will carry to his grave. Later, the authorities would discount his story as a mistake in memory, owing it to the traumatic events that did ensue, perhaps a result of a personality given to dramatization, as Ed’s arguably was. But when pressed, Ed always stood by this seemingly incredible account, that he had entered the house before anyone and seen what he had seen, and then retreated into terrorized silence.
On Tuesday night, December 7, after he said he sweated through panic and sleepless nights, he returned. This time, he made sure the neighbors would notice his presence and do something about it.
Early that evening, some of the teenage regulars had got together at the municipal building where the drama group had its workshops on Wednesday and Friday nights. There was a lot of talk of Pat. Too much time had gone by. A couple of boys even suggested going up there themselves to see just what the hell was going on. Ed, looking tortured, did nothing to discourage this. “The kids used to go up there and walk around the place,” Ed said many years later. “But now there was talk of going in. By this time, every kid in my group was expecting me to go in the window any day anyway. They were going to go in if I didn’t. So what I did was—I made a loud report—‘Well, I’m the leader. I’m going to go!’” Barbara Sheridan, who also had been concerned about Pat’s disappearance, volunteered to come along.
With Ed behind the wheel, the two of them drove up to Hillside Avenue. Ed made a point of pulling right up the driveway with his bright lights on. Leaving the headlights on, he slammed the car door when he got out. It was about nine forty-five and dark, with a waning half moon hanging in the sky behind the clouds. Ed and Barbara stood in front of the house wondering what to do next. For the benefit of the neighbors, Ed talked as loudly as he could.
“Well,” he announced in a stage voice to his apprehensive companion, who stayed back on the lawn beside the car, “I’m going to go up and take a look.”
Next door to the List house, a very suspicious neighbor, Shirley Cunnick, heard this activity from her front porch. Shirley had lately begun paying particularly close attention to what was going on at 431 Hillside. It wasn’t just the lights burning out. It was also that battered white Pontiac cruising by and sometimes pulling into the drive. And here it was again.
Shirley had relayed her concerns to her husband, William, a physician. When he arrived home nights, he too had begun looking over at the List house. People might go away for one or maybe two weeks, he thought, but this long was very unusual. Still, his concerns had to do mostly with the potential for vandalism or robbery presented by such an evidently unoccupied house.
But there had been something else. His wife was one of the few friends Alma List had in Westfield. She liked the lonely old woman, who occasionally visited to chat, sometimes bringing with her a sheet of fresh-baked cookies. Late in October, on one of those infrequent visits, Alma had told Shirley that John was going to send her back to Bay City in November to visit relatives. Alma, excited to be going home, had even asked Shirley if she would drive her to the cobbler shop in town so she could have her shoes repaired. It bothered the neighbor that Alma, who had been so intent on having those shoes in their best condition, had disappeared without ever following up her request for a ride. That was not like Alma List at all.
So with the commotion on the front lawn on the night of December 7, William Cunnick decided to walk over to investigate. While he did, his wife went to the phone and called the Westfield police to report an intrusion at 431 Hillside.
On the front porch, Ed banged on the door and tried the handle. Then he lumbered up onto the veranda on the right side of the house, where he knew the tall ground-floor window offered easy access to the dining room. But as he was raising the unlocked window, he heard the siren of the Westfield patrol car boring in on the neighborhood. He hurried back to the car where Barbara Sheridan waited apprehensively.
Within minutes, the Westfield patrol car screeched into the driveway, blocking the Pontiac. Two patrolmen got out with their weapons at their sides. The ground was soggy from a recent rain and their shoes made a squishing noise as they approached. The officers, Patrolmen Charles Haller and George Zhelesnik, relaxed when the woman identified herself. “I’m Mrs. Sheridan,” she said.
Once the officers ascertained the identities of the intruders, and learned that they, too, were expressing concerns about the property, Zhelesnik began checking around the outside of the house, working clockwise from the front porch. Ed waited on the side porch for the officer to complete his inspection of the exterior, where the only thing that appeared unusual to Zhelesnik was a basement window he noticed ajar in the back, under the ballroom wing. Zhelesnik came around the house and found Ed on the porch by the open window. After a brief discussion the two men decided to go in.
As they eased over the sill into the dining room, Zhelesnik noticed a musty, offensive smell. There were aquariums near the window. In one of them, dead fish floated belly-up on the surface of the water. In the other tank, which had an automatic feeder, the fish were alive.
Music was playing loudly in the house. With Zhelesnik following him, Ed crossed the center hall past the staircase and led the way through the vinyl folding door that opened onto the landing beside the ballroom. Shaking, Ed led the officer to the ballroom. Zhelesnik shone his light in and gasped when it settled on the bodies.
Ed, meanwhile, ran to the front door and threw it open from inside. Barbara, Patrolman Haller and Dr. Cunnick hurried in from the porch.
“Something terrible has happened,” Ed said in a resonant voice. He led the three into the foyer and through the center hall, pointing to the ballroom where Zhelesnik stood rigidly beside the bodies.
The twenty-six-year-old Haller rushed up. Getting down on his knees, he took the woman’s arm. To his horror, he found it felt like a piece of wood. “Hey,” he said inanely. “Hey! Wake up!”
Someone snapped on the lights.
None of them would ever forget the sight. The children lay in their school clothes and coats. A towel covered Helen; when it was lifted, her stomach was horribly distended. The bodies were badly decomposed. Horrified, Cunnick, a specialist in internal medicine who was barely acquainted with the List family, knelt to examine the victims. It was apparent that the bodies had lain there for some time. He saw disintegration of the fingertips and toes. Small maggots swarmed on the bodies, all of which were bloated. As the doctor identified the dead as Helen, Patricia, John, and Frederick List, Haller rushed back out to the patrol car and grabbed the radio. The dispatcher logged the alarm in at ten minutes after ten.
Ed and Barbara retreated into the dining room as the officers, themselves stricken with shock and disbelief, searched the rest of the ballroom. The music swelled on the radio. Ed, who had studied at Juilliard and later at La Scala on a Fulbright scholarship, recognized the music readily as orchestral excerpts from Götterdämmerung.
With their weapons still drawn, the two cops quickly went through the adjacent rooms, although the deteriorated condition of the bodies was an obvious indication that the murderer was long gone. Haller found the phone and called Chief Moran, who was working late that night at headquarters to supervise departmental promotion tests. Moran could tell there was major trouble. Haller’s voice was a full octave higher than normal.
“Chief, you got to get over to 431 Hillside Avenue,” Haller gasped.
“What’s going on, Charlie?”
“Chief, there’s been a mass murder. There’s bodies all over the place.”
The statement sounded almost like a prank. Westfield hadn’t even had a
regular murder in eight years. A mass murder? Moran sped from police headquarters on Broad Street. He found the scene easily. Two other patrol cars were already in the driveway, red lights pulsing across the long, dark lawn. More sirens wailed in the distance.
Haller met him at the door and showed him inside, where the ground floor of the house had already taken on the grim routine of a crime scene. A Westfield detective was talking calmly on the phone. Outside, flashlight beams pried into bushes and dark corners.
Moran went to the bodies and was horrified to see that three of them were children. But it was the blaring music that made the next strong impression on the police chief. Moran, who didn’t know a concerto from a waltz, recounted later that he heard “funeral home music” filling the house when the police found the bodies. Other officers concurred. It was “somber” music, one said, while another referred to it as “liturgical,” and those solemn descriptions were dutifully repeated by reporters writing about the crime for many years, though none of them seemed to actually question the source of the music. But a check of the WQXR-FM broadcast schedule, highlights of which were published every day in the New York Times radio listings, confirmed Barbara and Ed’s musical knowledge. At the time the bodies were discovered and the police were swarming 431 Hillside Avenue, WQXR was broadcasting orchestral excerpts from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung—so “somber” was the least of it.
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