With an air of resignation, the minister took charge. With inevitability, Jean resented it.
“John had told the preacher what he wanted done,” she said, recalling the unpleasant memories of making the funeral arrangements in Westfield. “Gene and I basically said, well, John has no rights at this point. But the preacher took over and did whatever it was that John had told him to do, where Mother List was to go, this and that.”
After the autopsies, which determined such things as the number of times young John had been shot in the back of the neck and the back and from what angle, the five bodies were delivered to Gray’s, where they were prepared for the funeral. Despite the serious deterioration of the corpses, “they had to be embalmed, otherwise we couldn’t have taken them into the church for any period of time because the odor would have been something terrible,” Poppy said. “Not only did we embalm them, but we had other agents that we use, drying agents that we put around the body, and then we encompass the whole body in a plastic pouch that you zip up, and put the powder in there to absorb moisture that’s still being lost out of the body.”
“There were so many shots and so many wounds,” he said sadly.
Already, a vigil of reporters and townsfolk had been established outside the funeral home. Rehwinkle decided against having calling hours. “Nothing happened at the funeral home. The only thing we did was prep the bodies and casket them,” Poppy said.
A half block down Broad Street, the drama group was gathered for its biweekly session in the Municipal Building. Ed Illiano tried to keep them busy, but all anyone could manage was a lackluster stab at a familiar scene or two. It was clear that more than the usual number of kids had come stoned, and some of them were more stoned than usual. The talk was thick with death and betrayal. Ed was glad to get out.
It was after ten o’clock when Eileen Livesey, Pat’s friend, walked with some friends past the park on their way home from the workshop. She was surprised to see a former boyfriend of Pat’s, whose name was Chris, slouched against a telephone pole, just beyond the glow of a street lamp. The tip of his cigarette glowed in the shadows as he dragged on it in the cold.
Eileen tried to engage him in conversation. He steadfastly ignored her. Someone suggested a cup of coffee at the diner. He didn’t acknowledge the invitation. “All he did was stand there and stare at the building,” she said. “He didn’t even seem to be aware that anyone was speaking to him. Later, someone said they drove by well after midnight, and he was still standing there. He wouldn’t budge.”
Meanwhile, Poppy thought it ironic that John would have wholeheartedly approved of the military precision with which the funeral was arranged. The church accommodated about two hundred people, and hundreds more were expected outside, where the television trucks had already staked out their positions on Clark Street. There wasn’t going to be a lot of opportunity for improvisation if order was to prevail.
Poppy wanted Helen buried in the center grave, with the children at her side. Alma, as John had instructed, was to be taken to Michigan after the funeral and buried in the cemetery of St. Lorenz. So Poppy had arranged the caskets in the appropriate order: Patricia’s was on the far left, with her mother’s to the right, followed by the two boys. Alma’s, on the far right, would be the last to be wheeled out of the church. Alma’s would be placed in the rear hearse, which would peel off from the procession when it passed the funeral home. There, a vehicle would be waiting to transport the casket to Newark Airport and the afternoon flight with connections to Bay City.
Pallbearers were a major headache. Even under normal circumstances, pallbearers personify an undertaker’s worst nightmare, which is having the coffin come crashing to the ground with the deceased tumbling down the church steps. At most funerals, one only needs to come up with a handful of able-bodied persons to carry the casket, and even when the pallbearers are borderline infirm, employees from the funeral home can be found to shoulder some of the burden. But this funeral required the services of more than three dozen pallbearers. Eight boys from the drama group carried Patricia’s coffin; her brothers’ caskets were borne by taller friends from school aided by a couple of adults from the congregation. Men who didn’t even know the family were pressed into service as pallbearers for Helen and Alma.
The members of the drama group not actively involved as pallbearers or ushers took up the first three pews on the left side of the church, which Rehwinkle had set aside from them. Ed Illiano sat in the first, next to the aisle and beside Pat’s casket. Across the aisle from him, in the first pew, sat Helen’s mother, Eva, and next to her the Syferts and Helen’s three brothers and their wives. No members of John’s family were present. None had been invited.
Far more than the two hundred expected showed up for the service; Rehwinkle hadn’t realized until then that his church could accommodate so many people, more than three hundred in all by someone’s count. The estimated five hundred spectators massed outside the church were able to hear the service on loudspeakers that Poppy had set up on poles.
As the funeral proceeded, Pastor Rehwinkle’s invocation boomed from the pulpit and the outside speakers.
“We have been leveled, but God lifts us up,” the minister said in a firm voice. “We are not concerned here this morning about the unexplainable, illogical, irrational or bizarre behavior that led to this tragedy. We have all been leveled. Where are we at this very moment?
“All mankind is grass,” the pastor intoned.
At this unwitting allusion to a subject close to their consciousness, a few teenagers in the drama club pews snickered quietly and nudged each other. Ed stared them back into silence.
“They last no longer than the flowers in the fields.” Rehwinkle had taken his theme from Isaiah:
A voice says, “Cry!”
And I said, “What shall I cry?”
All flesh is grass.
and all its beauty is like the flower
of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades.
when the breath of the Lord
blows upon it;
surely the people is grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but the word of our God will stand forever.
To some who were not members of the Redeemer fold, the pastor’s choice of scripture seemed to skirt the overwhelming issues of the day, violent criminality, blame, and grief, and they would just have seen the notion of the blameless perishability of life left unexplored by the murderer’s confessor and proclaimed good friend.
Among the members of the drama club, who were well aware already of Patricia’s contemptuous attitude toward the very church in which they now were gathered, the sermon was especially rankling. Even Ed Illiano, a staunch Roman Catholic who would brook no show of disrespect toward any clergyman, was barely out of the church before he began referring to the Rehwinkle invocation derisively as the “We Are Leveled, O Westfield soliloquy.” Said Ed: “I just thought, my God, what is this guy doing? Doesn’t he know how much injury John List has caused these people and how pissed off they are?”
The day was cold and sunny, with a brisk wind that whipped over the low hills and stung the faces of the mourners gathered by the plot, where fresh red earth was piled beside four newly dug graves. The funeral procession had stretched the length of Westfield itself; when the last car was pulling into the line from the parking lot at Redeemer, the first had already made its turn off Broad Street and under the gray stone arch at the entrance to Fairview Cemetery. The graves were dug beside a large fir tree, on a hill where the western edge of Westfield begins a gentle ascent toward the Watchung range.
Standing among the mourners, Eileen Livesey, noticing the large number of automobiles parked helter-skelter on the winding drives near the grave, thought of Pat, being laid in her grave a month short of her seventeenth birthday. We’re all so sophisticated and mature, Eileen thought. She never even got to drive a car.
Hundreds of people were clustere
d near the white graveside tents that flapped in the wind. Muffled sobs mingled with the pattering snaps of the photographers’ shutters. Glassy eyes of television cameras searched uplifted faces for emotion. Some of the photographers and television camera people perched atop nearby tombstones for better angles into the faces of the crowd.
Gene Syfert looked around from his place under one of the tents. He had never seen so many people with cameras. He was also surprised to see the glint of gun barrels from the crests of some of the hills. He counted a dozen police riflemen on the hills, waiting for John List to show his face. Gene thought how bizarre they looked in such a setting.
Both the undertaker and the minister were glad, though, for the presence of police sharpshooters. Given the enormity of the violence both men had encountered, neither was entirely assured that the murderer’s business was finished. During the graveside service, Poppy recalled, Rehwinkle nudged him, and muttered out of the side of his mouth, “Hey, Fred, you look around to see if this guy is somewhere in this crowd up here. He’s liable to take a potshot at us.”
“Don’t worry,” the undertaker whispered. “I’m already looking. So if I see him and suddenly push you into that grave, you’ll know why. And I’ll be right behind you.”
Much to the relief of some county investigators, who were becoming increasingly testy over questions about the lack of progress in the case, the Federal Bureau of Investigation entered the investigation on Thursday, December 9, when a federal warrant was obtained in Newark charging John with the crime of unlawful interstate flight. The FBI published a standard wanted flier, which described the suspect as being 46 years old, six feet tall (he was actually an inch taller), and weighing 180 pounds, with “black, graying” hair, a fair complexion, brown eyes, and two distinguishing scars, a “mastoidectomy scar behind right ear” and “herniotomy scars both sides of abdomen.” The flier included this warning: “List, who is charged in New Jersey with multiple murders involving members of his family, may be armed and should be considered very dangerous.” Incongruously, it added this remark: “Reportedly a neat dresser.”
FBI agents on the case thought the flier was a dead cinch to locate their man. With his picture, full face and in three-quarters profile, he was an odd-looking fellow indeed in the pantheon of career murderers, cop killers and bomb-throwing revolutionaries then crowding the post office walls.
After looking into John List’s personality and recent history, the FBI was able to focus on two other approaches as well. Investigation turned up the fact that John suffered from severe hemorrhoids and was, one agent on the case said, a “heavy-duty consumer of Preparation H.” It was also learned that John was so badly nearsighted that his eyeglasses prescription had to be adjusted frequently. Fliers were dispatched to every pharmacy and eye doctor in the country.
More important, though, was John’s well-established religious devotion. Every cop who looked into the murderer’s personality was convinced of this: If he was in the country, John List would ultimately turn up in a Lutheran church somewhere, probably of the Missouri Synod branch.
But, astonishingly, those fliers never went out to the churches, even though all indications from his past behavior indicated that John List the fugitive would eventually find a church somewhere, and most likely one whose doctrine he was familiar with. It was the 1970s, and FBI headquarters was wary. Overtly asking the church in effect to become an agent of law enforcement was politically unwise, even though the Lutheran church itself had indicated to the FBI that it would have no objection to the effort.
Ironically, five years later, when a more relaxed FBI headquarters in Washington finally agreed to allow the Newark office to blanket the U.S. Lutheran churches with John List fliers, the Lutheran church threw up a roadblock. A Senate committee had recently turned up allegations that U.S. intelligence agencies had used missionaries abroad as informants, and the Lutheran church wanted no part of a public association with the FBI. “They told us thanks but no thanks,” said a former FBI official connected with the List case who remained convinced that if the fliers had gone out to the churches, they would have caught John List.
For months, intrigued with the conundrum of John List, the FBI exhaustively combed through what was then known of the man’s background. John List’s life never quite added up. The patterns eventually seemed clear enough: dashed expectations in a career leading to the edge of bankruptcy, and superimposed over these failures were tensions worsened by a hectoring wife and a zealous religious reaction against the mores of the 1960s. But it never quite pointed all the way to John List picking up two pistols and spending a well-planned day shooting his family to death.
Some minor details previously unknown about John List’s character did turn up, to the merriment of the cops. Like the private post office box the FBI found that John List had rented to receive girlie magazines. Also intriguing was the report of a married couple from the Westfield church who attended a weekend religious conference with John and Helen in the late 1960s. To save money, the couples shared a motel room. At night, with the lights out and each couple modestly tucked in their beds on either side of the room, John List began making sounds, obvious noises, the apparent purpose of which, it seemed to the embarrassed other couple, was to impress on them the fact that he was engaged in sexual activity with his wife.
One bizarre theory that did keep police speculating for many years stemmed from a famous event that occurred on the night before Thanksgiving in 1971, two weeks after the List family was murdered but two weeks before the bodies were found in the ballroom. That was when a polite, soft-spoken man, described as dark-haired, middle-aged, six feet tall, and bespectacled, hijacked a Northwest Orient 727, forcing it to land and pick up $200,000 in ransom money and then, airborne again, parachuting out into the howling wind at ten thousand feet over the Cascade Mountains of Washington. While it was ultimately the firm belief of investigators that the famous hijacker, known as D. B. Cooper, could never have survived the forbidding terrain even if he had hit the ground alive, and although it was furthermore known that John List was utterly without athletic prowess, the strange coincidence of timing—and the fact that there was some slight resemblance to List in a police artist’s sketch of the mysterious D. B. Cooper—would be the subject of many a beery late-night bull session among cops whose experience had taught them that strange things can happen.
Wild theories aside, however, whatever chase there was quickly reached the point of obvious futility among the police in Westfield and Union County. There was nothing fresh to go on. Painstakingly, the FBI had run down the name of every passenger on every flight that had departed anywhere near New York on November 10 and immediately afterward, in the hope that a murderer who had so boldly killed his family, and left such a detailed account of it, would have had the concurrent audacity to travel under his own name. Every variation of John Emil List was looked at, to no avail. Photographs of List were shown to stewardesses, ticket agents, baggage handlers, and coffee counter clerks. But the task was impossible. If he had boarded a flight, he had been one of thousands of people, and tens of thousands more had passed by in the intervening month. Who would recall such an ordinary man over that span of time? With a month to cover his tracks, List had simply vanished.
Even the newspapers tired of the story, given the lack of any fresh angles to highlight, as evidenced by several editions of the afternoon Elizabeth Daily Journal the Tuesday after the funeral. “List’s Trail Cold; Hunt Left to FBI,” the newspaper’s main front page headline blared in an early edition over a story that began: “Police said Monday they have exhausted their leads to the whereabouts of murder suspect John E. List and are now relying on the FBI to locate him.” By the late edition, the “List Trail Cold” headline had been downsized and pushed near the bottom of the front page, which now lead with the headline: “U.S., France Agree on Devalued Dollar.”
Disillusionment was palpable. The same day, Michael Mitzner, the assistant prosecutor of Union Cou
nty, explained the situation this way, to the annoyance of the FBI: “We have not heard anything significant from the FBI to date, and if they have any clues, they are not telling us at this point.”
In Westfield, Chief Moran began telling people he was carrying the FBI flier with John List’s picture with him at all times. He would carry a copy of that flier with him for the next eighteen years. At regular intervals, Moran also dispatched officers to the cemetery, where they lurked behind trees and tombstones, waiting for John List to visit his family’s grave.
Despairing of finding the elusive murderer himself, some police decided to go after a more easily identifiable villain, the devil. Word of Pat’s fascination with witchcraft had spread quickly as some townsfolk groped for a plausible explanation for the murders. Hadn’t a Black Sabbath record album been found in the child’s room? For a time, from the tone of their questions, it seemed that some police were toying with the idea that a satanic cult, perhaps operating within the drama group itself, had somehow made its influence on his daughter known to John List, and that the deeply religious man had then snapped under the pressure.
Armed with this preposterous theory, investigators soon focused on a coven of satanists in a nearby town, Mountainside who appeared to have some connections to a motorcycle gang that was believed to be dealing drugs. While it seemed clear that members of this group had never heard of the sixteen-year-old Pat List until after the girl was murdered, the connection—murder and Satan—continued to appeal both to satanists savoring the ironies and to some stymied investigators who didn’t have anywhere else to look. Evil being much easier to accept when it has a leering, demonic face, and not the benign countenance of the man mowing his lawn, the devil became a prime suspect in some minds as an accomplice to murder.
One Westfield detective pursued this angle so energetically that he prompted an angry letter to the police chief and the mayor from a banker’s wife associated with the drama group. It seems the detective asked the woman, who volunteered to assist drama club productions, point-blank if she herself was a witch. Her letter protested “undue badgering of a private citizen.”
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