Death Sentence

by Sharkey, Joe;

  “My assistant, Vicar Zerbst, had also stopped by the List home. I had the son Fred in my confirmation class and wanted to touch base with Mr. List on his absence from class. I also checked with Mrs. Bilden at Westfield Senior High School about the children’s absence. She informed me that they had not been in school since November 10th. Members of the parish did have close relationships with the family, and the fact that they were a noncommunicative family is not altogether true. Certainly not at church.”

  Then, in a move that deftly diverted attention from the month-long disappearance, the minister made what he called a “pastoral appeal” addressed to the confessed murderer: “John, as your pastor, I am still very much your friend who will always support you, stand by you, and help you. The Lord God whom you know and believe in will not forsake you in these most agonizing times. Please contact me. If you are prevented by other circumstances at this time, wait, pray and contact me when you can, any time, day or night.”

  Rehwinkle then added a fillip guaranteed to catch a tabloid editor’s attention. He read a what he called a “personal plea” from Brenda, John List’s stepdaughter, now twenty-five years old and living near Kalamazoo as a divorced mother of five children. “Daddy, you are all I have left,” said the statement the pastor read from Brenda. “Please call me.”

  Actually, the last thing Brenda wanted, a close friend explained later, was to hear from her stepfather. The FBI had asked to use her name in the statement in an attempt to flush the murderer out. After hearing of the slayings of her mother, Patty, John, Fred, and Alma, “she was absolutely petrified of anything and anybody,” said the friend from Kalamazoo, Portia Hageman. “She knew she was the only living one left from the family, and she was afraid he was going to come and kill her and her children. For a long time, the FBI was watching her, checking the place.”

  That kind of terror, the terror that stalks the sleep, was John List’s legacy to the few people who would call themselves his friends, and to what was left of his wife’s family.

  Though they kept their concerns among themselves, members of John’s congregation at Redeemer also worried that a man who could massacre his loved ones in such a manner might also have some twisted reason to come to the church with a gun. For weeks, eyes darted warily to the back whenever the church door burst open during services.

  Rehwinkle wasn’t without his own fears, said C. Frederick Poppy, the undertaker who handled the funeral. “He was really upset; even after the funeral we would talk about it, and he would say, ‘Gee, I hope he doesn’t come around with a gun on us, Fred.’ He was really into it. And his wife, like my wife, they were concerned. You’d hear a knock on the door, and you would worry: Who’s at the door?”

  The Syferts, when they got the phone call from the minister in the middle of the night, had been too stunned to consider the question of John’s whereabouts, and they don’t recall Rehwinkle’s having brought it up. In an era when Charles Manson still filled the television screens on many nights, they had assumed initially that the murders had been committed by an intruder. It didn’t even occur to Jean that John wasn’t among the victims until well after daybreak, when she received a call from one of their sons, who had begun making inquiries on his own after his father had called him with the news.

  “Mother,” he said when it became clear to him that she didn’t, “you know Uncle John is still alive, don’t you?”

  She was stunned. Then she felt a fear that didn’t go away with the passing of time. “I always was terrified I’d open the door and there would be John List with a gun,” Jean said quietly in the summer of 1989. “I never really got over that.”

  Nor, Jean added bitterly, did her mother. Before she got sick, Eva Morris had already made arrangements to arrive around Halloween of 1971 and stay with the Lists, where there was ample room and where her daughter’s illness seemed to require assistance, until after Thanksgiving.

  No one needed to spell out for Eva the fact that, had she not been sidelined with illness, she would have been the sixth body lying in the house on Hillside Avenue. This knowledge, combined with the grief from the murder of her daughter and grandchildren, preyed on the old woman’s mind for the rest of her life.

  Jean, who had barely turned forty when the murders occurred, knew that she could not spend the rest of her life hateful and embittered. But she knew she would never, ever forget the pain of seeing how her mother finally died, on August 8, 1988, crying and trembling in her last desperate minutes with visions of John List.

  In all, investigators counted and labeled about 150 separate pieces of evidence from the crime scene, ranging from the confession letter and blood-caked sleeping bags and spent bullets to the photo album of Breeze Knoll that John had left in the dining room to be returned to Jack Wittke.

  The last physical evidence that would be discovered turned up at Kennedy Airport on Thursday, December 9, when a Port Authority policeman making a routine check for stolen vehicles at the long-term parking area, Field 8, came across a 1963 blue four-door Chevrolet Impala with New Jersey tags. The car had caught the officer’s eye because it had an expired red inspection sticker on its windshield. He checked the license number, KBN-813, against his list, and found it there. It hadn’t been reported stolen, but the police were looking for this car anyway. It was John List’s.

  When Westfield cops came to pick it up, they found on the front seat the parking ticket indicating that the car had been there since early on November 10. Back in Westfield, the police tore the old car apart, but found no further evidence. The glove compartment contained only what one of the cops referred to as the “usual junk.” In a neat pile on the front seat, John had also left some cards, among them his membership in the University of Michigan alumni association and his annual registration as a certified public accountant.

  Karl Asch, the county prosecutor and now the central figure in the investigation, didn’t have much information to give the increasingly restive press. The day after the car was found, Asch speculated that, since List had left the car at the airport after apparently fleeing Westfield with his passport (police had found Helen’s passport in the house, but not John’s), indications were that the suspect had left the country.

  Asch added that a grand jury was about to receive the case. “We probably have enough evidence to indict,” he said.

  An indictment was easy. The real dilemma confronting the authorities was that it had become abundantly clear that not one of them had the slightest clue as to where John List might be. And the trail, if there ever was one, was now a month cold.

  John had left behind instructions for the funeral and asked the pastor to supervise those.

  Sleepless since they had received the phone call, the Syferts made their plans on Wednesday to fly from Oklahoma to New Jersey.

  Tragedy seldom maintains decent calling hours, and it brings no dispensation from the quotidian demands of one’s life. It barged into an otherwise peaceful existence for the Syferts. When John murdered his family, the Syferts were crossing a well-made bridge from one stage of their lives to another. Gene was completing his master’s degree and was in the middle of final exams. And while the Syferts had already put three sons through college and were living comfortably, money and time happened to be tight in 1971.

  For living victims such as close relatives, unanticipated death brings more than profound shock and grief. In its most mundane manifestation, it also brings profound inconvenience. Even while still reeling from loss and anguish, the survivor is suddenly confronted with the necessity of making certain arrangements: house-sitters to engage, vacation days to be borrowed from, dogs to be boarded, airline tickets to be purchased at full fare. Clothes to press, accommodations to secure, food to buy, coffins and hymns to select. Even in households on well-managed budgets, there is a painful jump in expenses: The telephone bill soars; the undertaker and the gravedigger expect payment.

  “Besides the unexpected expense, it was a time when Gene really couldn’t af
ford to be off from school,” Jean recalled. “He had to take off during finals time. John just doesn’t realize the situation that he left us in.”

  Jean, who had always been fond of John despite the fact that her husband had not, was devastated by the murders. But she was also deeply injured by the cavalier manner the murderer—Mrs. Jean Syfert I’m sorry it had to go that way—had dumped the wreckage he had made of their lives and his right into her lap. The fact that he had left detailed instructions for the funeral flabbergasted her. For a man with all of $24.14 in his bank account, the practical Jean thought, that took a staggering amount of nerve.

  On Friday, the day before the funeral, Jean went to the house to sort through Helen’s and the children’s belongings in an attempt to restore some order. Jean was instructed only to concern herself with her sister’s and the children’s things. Rehwinkle was in charge of John’s and Alma’s property.

  Detectives were still combing through the mansion, dusting, sifting, looking into every dark corner. Jean was packing some of the boys’ things into boxes when she heard a bloodcurdling scream from the butler’s pantry adjacent to the kitchen.

  She dashed into the big pantry to investigate, only to find a policeman with a sheepish look on his face and a deep round box in his hands. He explained that he had seen the box on a shelf and decided to open it. Inside was a head with long hair—Helen’s wig dummy.

  “It scared the daylights out of him—he didn’t set it down, he threw it down,” Jean said. “You knew what he thought. It was just this wig that Helen had; when she didn’t want to go out and get her hair fixed, she would use a wig.”

  That eased the tensions somewhat. But in general, Jean was appalled by the conditions she found in the house that day. From the comings and goings still in progress, it was obvious that dozens of people, not only law enforcement officials but also town officials and others who had connections, had been allowed in for a look at the horror house. In the time since the crime scene had been secured, dozens of outsiders seemed to have been through the house.

  Souvenir-taking began. “Helen always had lots of family pictures around,” Jean said. “But I found picture frames with no pictures in them, which somebody had to take from that house. They took pictures right from the mantel! I like to have cried when I saw that. There were ten fireplaces in that house, and pictures over several of them, and you would find the frame empty on the floor.

  “Then you would pick up the newspapers and there would be Helen’s pictures just splashed all over,” said Jean, who had always exchanged family photos with her sister and had her own copies of most of the pictures missing from the mantels. “There was no one there to protect her things. I think they even went through the drawers.”

  She said she was surprised that no one had taken the stale cookies and black bananas she found in serving bowls where either Helen or John had left them a month before.

  For Jean Syfert, it was the beginning of a long process of disillusionment with the police handling of the investigation. “The whole thing was botched right from the beginning,” she asserted flatly.

  The funeral was scheduled for Saturday, December 10. Rehwinkle had chosen Gray Funeral Home in Westfield, across from the municipal park and not far from Redeemer. Fred Poppy, the general manager at Gray’s, was a good friend.

  The Syferts liked Poppy immediately. A plain-talking man who understood that people most closely involved in the arrangement of a funeral have unexpressed concerns that extend beyond the closing of the grave, Poppy took the job only because he liked Rehwinkle, and because Rehwinkle’s congregation were regular patrons of Gray’s.

  The funeral undertaking business is a unique blend of personal service of the most grim sort and show business of the most glib, conducted in an atmosphere that usually combines strong doses of commerce, grief, guilt, resentment, and, quite often, abiding recrimination.

  From the onset, Poppy, who was also a wary businessman in a field where, even under ordinary circumstances, emotion could run high enough to spin off into orbit, spotted the extraordinary number of pitfalls presented by the List funeral. Not only were there five deceased, three of them were children. Furthermore, each of the deceased had been shot to death by the next of kin, and left hidden, under the most tragic (and, for an undertaker, least appealing) sort of circumstances, for nearly a month. Not to mention the fact that there didn’t appear to be any money to pay the funeral bill.

  From the beginning of the process, which was the physical handling of the bodies themselves, to the end, which was committing them to the grave—not to mention in between, which was to do it all in the blazing glare of publicity surrounding the biggest mass murder in New Jersey history—Poppy realized that this particular job would be a thankless one.

  The Gray Funeral Home undertook the List proceedings in good faith that was nurtured by the knowledge that Rehwinkle’s congregation, good solid Lutherans who paid their bills, already accounted for about fifteen funerals a year at Gray. Besides, Poppy pointed out to his boss, the publicity value was substantial, and the church was already planning to cover a number of costs, such as purchase of the burial plot. The undertaker was instructed to keep costs to the absolute minimum.

  The first matter of business, then, was the expenses. The next-of-kin himself being expansive in his directions but conspicuous in his absence, who was going to pay to carry out his instructions? Under the circumstances, it was a particularly touchy question. For a man who sold insurance for a living, John List had left behind what Poppy regarded as a sorry mess of a personal insurance portfolio. Although the murderer himself had a decent policy, with a $225,000 death benefit, with State Mutual Life Assurance, there was only one policy in effect for any of the deceased, a paltry one on one of the boys worth $2,000.

  And there wasn’t any estate value worth mentioning. The bank accounts were drained.

  Poppy made a visit to the house and his discerning eye told him there wasn’t much there. The furniture wasn’t junk, but it wasn’t the sort of stuff people buy second-hand. The family car, the 1963 Impala that now sat in the township lot, was just an old junker. It hadn’t been worth the cost of towing it back from the airport. But even if it had been a Rolls-Royce, it wouldn’t have mattered, given the reality that its owner was apparently still alive and, so far as the New Jersey motor vehicles department was concerned, unfettered by any court judgment whatsoever. To a dispassionate businessman, the assets were not an impressive collection.

  “There was some furniture in this place, but it was very sparsely furnished,” Poppy recalled. “The man was struggling. I called in two different used-furniture people, to give me a bid on all the furniture. The highest bidder offered $550. That’s all I got.”

  Inside the house, there was nothing of value left except a fancy kitchen stove John List had bought for Helen in 1969. Poppy figured the stove, in excellent condition, was worth over $1,000, but he never expected to see that. “It was a chef’s stove, the kind of thing a pro would use,” Poppy said. But he found there wasn’t much demand for a used oversized stove, particularly if the buyer has to pick it up at the scene of a mass murder. And legally, even that was still John List’s property.

  “The only thing I had legal custody of was the deceased,” said Poppy, who would always regard the List business as the worst ordeal of his professional life. “To me, John List was nothing but heartache.”

  Successfully putting together a cut-rate funeral that didn’t look cheap was one of the few positive aspects about the ordeal for Poppy, who, like most people in Westfield, had never met any of the Lists.

  “It wasn’t a big bill all told. I had cut it right to the bone,” he boasted. “Each and every one of the deceased was placed in a metal casket with an eggshell crepe interior. These caskets were presentable. They weren’t lavish. They were inexpensive. But they were presentable.” The bill, less than $2,500, was paid in full, covered by the one insurance policy in effect and the money from selling the
furniture.

  Rehwinkle and Poppy agreed to proceed with as much dignity and as little outside disruption as possible. On Friday afternoon, Poppy and several employees used a non-descript station wagon, not a hearse, to transport the five bodies from the funeral home on Broad Street to the church, about a half-mile away.

  “We had made a decision that around four-thirty in the afternoon, when everybody is busy coming home from work, going to the store, the kids coming home from school, here’s the best time for us to move,” Poppy said. “We made five trips back and forth in the station wagon.” The bodies were taken in the back door of the church, wheeled in one at a time on dollies, four of which Rehwinkle had borrowed from other churches in town. The pastor also had to borrow four extra palls, long white funeral cloths with green crosses on them, to drape over the coffins.

  On Friday night, for the second time, the bodies of Helen, Patricia, John, and Frederick List were arranged in symbolic repose, with Alma beside them now.

  Given the intense media attention, maintaining order at the funeral was a challenge made difficult by the fact that the survivor’s instructions had the effect of placing his pastor and his sister-in-law in conflict. As the closest member of Helen’s family, which obviously included the three children, Jean considered herself the interlocutor for the deceased, the victims, as she saw them. But because of the civil and spiritual burden he had been handed, Rehwinkle was unfortunately cast in some eyes as the agent of the closest surviving relative, the absent next-of-kin, the presumed (but not yet officially charged) murderer himself. Like his comrade Poppy, the minister was well aware that John List had handed him a very thankless task.