“Somebody turn off that goddamned music!” the police chief shouted.
He was annoyed to see two civilians in the center hall, and further annoyed when he saw that one of them was the theater coach. One of the cops had brought in blankets for them to put over their shoulders. The temperature outside was forty-five degrees, but the house seemed colder inside.
Suddenly, Illiano realized he hadn’t had the presence of mind to make a full inventory when he looked at the bodies on the floor. There were only four.
“Something’s missing!” Illiano cried. “The old lady! She lives upstairs!”
Moran turned to the officers. “Did you search up there?”
One of them shrugged and looked at his shoes.
“Well, go look upstairs!”
Someone had located the radio in the front hall closet and turned it off. The officers made enough noise to frighten ghosts as they bounded upstairs with their guns drawn. They rummaged through bedrooms on the second floor, banging doors and drawers. When the second floor seemed secure, one of the cops dashed up the steps to the third floor.
A sudden shriek froze everybody in their tracks.
Then the man came running down, his face drained of color.
“Was she up there?” someone demanded.
He had literally stumbled over Alma’s grossly swollen body when he turned into a hallway in her apartment. All the cop could do was nod in response.
With the hideous 1969 murders committed by the Charles Manson cult still fresh in people’s minds—the trial had ended only in 1971 and its appeals were still in the news—the first chilling thought at the murder scene was that a stranger or strangers had come into this house and done this. But after a thorough search that included an inspection of the cistern, it was apparent that one member of the List household was not on the premises—dead or alive.
Down in John List’s office, the police chief knew why. Moran was reading the notes John had taped to the file cabinet beside his desk. With his appreciation of strategy games, John had apparently expected that the police would read the notes left in the open and then follow the rules of the game.
A cop with five bodies on his hands and no murderer in sight is not usually so inclined, however. While John evidently expected that the police would wait for their explanation until after they retrieved the keys from the special delivery letter which was now among 162 pieces of mail being held, by the murderer’s order, at the Westfield Post Office, Moran had no time for games. He wasn’t about to wait for business hours to begin at the post office, the delicacies of crime scene protocols aside.
“Open it,” he said.
An officer forced open the cabinet with a crowbar.
Years later, Moran explained his actions at the scene: “I had called the prosecutor’s office and the county medical examiner’s office to come up, done all the stuff you had to do,” he said. “There was a desk, and I started to search. I went through it. I pulled out a drawer and found an envelope, a sealed envelope addressed to the pastor of the Lutheran church, plus two guns that had been fired … in the drawer. They were left there to be found. I don’t know why he just didn’t heave them out in the back yard or something like that. He put them right in the drawer with the envelope. So I opened the envelope and I read it.”
After he’d read the confession letter, he phoned Rehwinkle at Redeemer. Around midnight, the shocked minister arrived at the List house and identified the victims.
“Who could have done this?” Rehwinkle said with considered sadness, overlooking what by now had become fairly obvious to anyone on the scene.
“The husband did it!” Moran told him impatiently. “It’s here in the letter.”
Moran let the minister read it, but he didn’t intend to let the letter out of his sight. With the police chief hovering eagle-eyed over his shoulder, Rehwinkle slumped at the dining room table and began reading: “Dear Pastor Rehwinkle. I am very sorry. … P.S. Mother is in the hallway in the attic—3rd floor. She was too heavy to move. John.”
“You finished with that?” Moran said.
“Why?” asked the minister.
“It’s evidence,” the chief grunted, holding out his hand.
“I’ll be finished in a few minutes,” Rehwinkle said. He read the letter through twice more. Then handed it back to Moran, who was fuming at the delay. The minister then told the police chief that he believed the letter should be kept “confidential” and asked him to use “discretion” in even referring to it. This was advice Moran neither needed nor welcomed from the clergyman. The chief knew what to do with evidence: You seize it and secure it. You don’t pray over it and hide it. In fact, Moran hadn’t even shown the minister the other letters in the folder.
Rehwinkle returned to his church office that night empty-handed.
As he left, the crime scene was bustling with police activity. A crime of this magnitude had never occurred before in Westfield, or even in Union County. Detectives arrived. So did the FBI, which would have shared jurisdiction if there were indications the murderer had fled across state lines. A police photographer knelt by the bodies snapping picture after picture.
Finally the ambulances arrived and took the dead away. The green sleeping bags lay on the ballroom floor blotted with dark stiff bloodstains. In the kitchen, someone noticed that a large skillet and some breakfast dishes had been washed and left to dry in a drainer next to the sink. Bananas had turned black in a bowl on the counter. Upstairs, in Alma’s own little kitchen, her toast was still waiting in the toaster.
Neighbors had gathered on the lawn, some of them with coats tossed over their nightclothes. Reporters, alerted by night city desks where scanners monitored police frequencies, were pulling up with their notebooks and measuring eyes. Photographers scurried around, buzzing as close to the windows as they could get. Inside the house, the phone jangled again as soon as someone put it down.
There was nothing more he could do. Early in the morning, Ed Illiano went to the Westfield police station and gave his statement.
Chapter Ten
Life in the ministry had prepared him for many things, but not for this. As John List’s confessor, as the man whom he had chosen to burden with the tortured reasons for murdering five human beings, the pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church was suddenly and quite publicly on the defensive.
Matters were very confused. Procedure was most unclear. And the press was pounding on the door. A well-ordered world at the helm of a quiet, conservative congregation in a sect built around the supremacy of immutable Scripture was suddenly under siege in the middle of the night. People were demanding answers.
The five-page confession letter would be nothing but trouble to everyone who came in contact with it. From the beginning, there were questions about a minister’s role in protecting the confidentiality of a congregant, even though this congregant was an admitted mass murderer. To some, Rehwinkle’s piety seemed to override his common sense. There were also questions about police procedure in opening a sealed communication and reading it on the crime scene, though these questions wouldn’t surface publicly with any force until eighteen years later at trial proceedings.
Rehwinkle, an energetic man with a shock of thick brown hair who had an unsigned contract with the New York Yankees farm system in his pocket when he chose the ministry instead, resolved to take charge of the situation before it took charge of him and destroyed his close-knit congregation in the process. But the confession letter was like a dog with its teeth sunk into his ankle.
At one o’clock in the morning, when he arrived back at the church office shaken and confounded, Rehwinkle spoke openly of having read List’s “confessional letter addressed to me,” according to one of the people who happened to have come to the office after a phone tree of calls alerted key members of the congregation. But then it appears that the initial problems with the letter as possible evidence had occurred to someone in authority. Two hours later, after meeting with police and an FBI investi
gator, Rehwinkle spoke to reporters clamoring outside the Municipal Building in Westfield, but he made no mention of the letter. The police, however, made it clear to the news media that John List, whereabouts unknown, was the only suspect in the heinous crimes.
By this time, the bodies had been removed to Sullivan Funeral Home, a county-designated morgue-keeper in nearby Roselle, where autopsies were scheduled for the next day.
There would be no sleep that night at Redeemer Lutheran Church. Parish records produced the name of a next-of-kin, and Rehwinkle made the call as soon as he got back from the Municipal Building.
It was two-thirty in the morning local time when the phone broke the stillness in the Syferts’ comfortable ranch home in Midwest City, in the suburbs of Oklahoma City. After Gene’s twenty years in the air force, from which he had recently retired as a lieutenant colonel, the Syferts were no strangers to urgent phone calls in the middle of the night. But this time, as Jean listened to her husband’s flat, emotionless tone as he spoke, she knew there was something terribly wrong. Her first panicked thought was that something had happened to one of their three grown sons. But her husband shook his head and motioned for her to wait.
Gene had taken the call in the dark. His wife got up to turn on the light and listen.
“Yes,” she could hear him repeat. “Oh, good God,” he said. “And you’re sure?” he said. “Oh, my God.”
Jean couldn’t bear listening to the monotone on her husband’s end of the conversation. She only knew that someone was dead. She went into the kitchen, where she couldn’t hear, and paced until she couldn’t stand it any longer. She went back into the bedroom, where Gene put his palm over the mouthpiece and told her briefly that Helen and the children were dead. He went back to his conversation with Rehwinkle without saying how they had died.
Jean lay on the bed in disbelief. When her husband put down the phone after a half hour of talking to the minister, “our lives had changed forever,” she said.
The morning after she found out what had happened, Jean was able to give words to certain misgivings she had felt for weeks about her sister’s family.
“Right before that, on Thanksgiving Day, we were watching television and there was a fellow named List playing in the Nebraska-Oklahoma game, and when we got through dinner, I said, ‘Gene, let’s call Helen and John.’ Because I had written three or four letters and had no answer whatsoever. I said to him, ‘Of course, you know they could be lying there dead and nobody would ever know it.’ And of course, it turned out, they were.”
A couple from next door who had been dinner guests even volunteered to call a close relative who happened to live in Westfield and ask him to stop by the house to check on the Lists. Jean demurred with thanks. “I said no, if it was me and someone did that, came by like that, it would kind of irritate me. Same thing with calling the police. We just kind of let it slide. But I had a strong feeling something might be wrong.”
After midnight, the property at 431 Hillside Avenue had begun to look like a small carnival that was just setting up. Floodlights cast a cold glow across neighboring lawns. Spectators milled around, behind police barricades that were starting to go up. Frustrated reporters had to hustle for what little information seemed to be coming from the police, who hurried to and from the house and their cars parked in clusters on the circular drive. Moran had ordered the lights turned off in the ballroom to prevent any enterprising reporter from getting a picture inside, which would have been a major accomplishment anyway, since the only windows into the big chamber were an opaque stained glass panel at the far wall and the skylight high on the roof.
The morning newspapers were past their deadlines anyway by the time the news broke. Among the reporters was Joe Buscaino, a veteran photographer for the only local paper that still had a deadline ahead, the afternoon Elizabeth Daily Journal. With that deadline fast approaching, Buscaino was determined to get into the house in time to take pictures for that day’s paper. But first, he decided to get rid of the others.
He began complaining loudly, to no one in particular. “These sons of bitches won’t tell us a goddamn thing,” Buscaino grumbled as the reporters milled behind the barricade the police had set up to keep them away from the immediate house. “We’ll be out here freezing our asses off all night for no reason. I know these Westfield bastards.”
Some of the others began squinting at their watches in the glow of the emergency lights and thinking of hot coffee.
“My boss is keeping me here, for Christ’s sakes,” Buscaino continued, really carrying on now in an effort to get rid of the others. “What an idiot. There’s nothing to do. We’re not going to get anything. It’s all over.”
This reasoning made sense to the others. As long as they all decided to leave, there wouldn’t be a problem. No one would be beat in the remote chance the cops might toss out a crumb of information. The others began drifting back to their cars, leaving Buscaino alone.
When they were gone, he rushed next door to call his desk.
“I alerted my night editor, who wanted me to come back in and put through some crap that I had shot of something else earlier in the day,” Buscaino recalled. “I said, ‘You’re crazy! I’m not going to leave here!’ I told him to try to hold the presses, and he did. I was taking a chance.”
Now he began working on Moran, whom he had known for some time. He confronted the police chief when he stepped outside around three o’clock.
“I had a hunch I would be able to talk Moran into it,” Buscaino said. “Knuckles Moran, they called him, because he used to be a boxer. I pulled every trick in the book. Crying, ‘My boss is a lousy bastard; he’ll fire me,’ and all of that stuff. Moran had known me for a while. I had always been square with him. I was very persistent that night. ‘Moran, jeez, come on, will you? Look at all the favors I’ve done for you,’ I told him. Every chance I had, I kept hitting on Moran.”
In the process, Buscaino was gleaning information that no one knew except the police. He heard about the confession letter, for example, and alerted his night editor to send a reporter to the church, where the reporter was when Rehwinkle returned to his office and casually discussed the letter, the existence of which the police and prosecutors subsequently wished had remained secret, and might have, had Buscaino not learned of it.
“Around three o’clock, I got the biggest shock of my life,” said the photographer. “Moran came down and he says, ‘Stick around.’ So I knew to stick around.”
Buscaino called his desk to have a reporter come back to the scene. A short time later, Moran allowed them into the house under strict orders not to touch anything.
They complied. “I was really surprised that he gave me the okay. I promised Moran I would be very careful. I didn’t want to overstep my bounds; they were very touchy about the whole thing. I knew we weren’t really supposed to be in there,” said Buscaino, who used a floodlight to take pictures of the bloody sleeping bags on the ballroom floor and of the disheveled mess in Alma’s kitchen. “I got in there before the prosecutor’s men even arrived on the scene.
“We had everything. It was a big, gloomy house. To me it looked like a big mausoleum. It had the smell of death. Besides the death scenes, all I remember is this guy seemed to have a lot of paraphernalia for a house that was sparsely furnished.”
Buscaino’s paper proudly printed his crime-scene photographs the next day. Then, after the county prosecutor raised a ruckus, the same paper promptly threatened to fire him for the enterprising venture, a threat that Buscaino’s labor union ultimately thwarted.
“The next day, the prosecutor was really pissed off—pissed off at me, and pissed off at Moran,” Buscaino said. “Moran says to me the next day, ‘Jesus Christ, you got me in a lot of trouble.’”
Eighteen years later, the confusion and commotion at the crime scene in Westfield hadn’t been forgotten at the Union County prosecutor’s office.
“A lot of people were on the scene … so many lay people,”
Eleanor Clark, a deputy prosecutor who had inherited the List case, said pointedly. “It was very bad police procedure, I will tell you that.” She didn’t discuss Ed Illiano’s role except to say that he was “emotional.”
Given a full day to look for new angles before their stories would come out, the newspapers came up with the obvious one. How could a well-regarded family, active in its church, with three children in school, one of them fully involved in a theater workshop, have been missing for a month without generating some sort of an inquiry? If the Lists had essentially disappeared from the face of the earth on November 10, where were the authorities in the month that had passed? Didn’t school authorities want to know why the children hadn’t returned? Wouldn’t police in a small town have some inkling that something seemed amiss? And if the family was as intimately involved with its church as it appeared from the descriptions of the murderer’s religious bent, why hadn’t the minister sensed something was wrong?
It was becoming clear that the perpetrator of this mass murder had had the benefit of a month to get away.
Chief Moran irritably took several questions along those lines. There just hadn’t been sufficient reason for anyone to suspect something was wrong, he said. In fact, the police chief said, school authorities and an employee of the office where Patricia had worked had made “routine” requests to police to look into the absence of the children, Moran said, and on two occasions in mid-November, patrolmen were sent to the house, “but left when no one answered the bell because everything appeared to be in good order from the outside.” There was no logical reason to investigate further, the police chief said, “especially in view of the arrangements made by List on November 9.”
Finding himself also uncomfortably on the defensive, and anticipating a church funeral that he knew would form the center ring of a media circus, the pastor felt compelled to hold a press conference.
“The matter of ‘no one knew where they were’ or ‘why didn’t someone check up on this’ because ‘something was not right,’ is not the case,” Rehwinkle said in a statement he spent a long time writing. “We were informed by Mr. List that he had put his wife and children on a plane to North Carolina to visit the ailing and perhaps dying grandmother … I had personally stopped by the home a number of times, called by telephone at various times with no answer, and finally on December 3, at 5 p.m., I left my calling card asking Mr. List to contact me.
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