Chastened, the Westfield police then began pursuing Satan less aggressively. Nevertheless, some of them never abandoned the theory that the satanism was somehow involved in what they considered to be an otherwise inexplicable crime.
Aroused by the sensation surrounding the crime, however, the satanists did begin causing problems for Fred Poppy who, at the behest of both Rehwinkle and Jean Syfert, had accepted appointment as administrator of the List estate.
One night in January, dozens of motorcycles roared down Hillside Avenue into the driveway of the List place to make a pass around the mansion, as if staking a macabre claim. Later, on some dark nights, neighbors began noticing candlelight flickering through the cracks of boarded-up windows. There were odd comings and goings, stirrings in the bushes, cackles of laughter. Some people heard muffled chants. Gawkers in slow-moving sedans cruising by the crime scene were one thing. Bikers and devil worshippers using the house was quite another.
Poppy, who had the only key to the property, was furious, not only at the late-night trespassers, but at other local teenagers. It had become something of a dare locally to drive up to the murder house and break in. Poppy, by now extremely sorry that he had ever become involved, soon discovered that the intruders were getting in by climbing an arbor at the rear of the house and edging over a roof to the skylight atop the ballroom, then dropping down to the floor. Once inside, they couldn’t exit the same way, of course. Instead, a distressed neighbor told the undertaker, they crawled out through a cellar window in the back. The neighbor called him regularly, day and night, “as if I were the chief of police,” he said.
One Saturday the neighbor phoned him to report more intruders. Poppy, disgusted that the Westfield police department seemed to assign a low priority to protecting the List property, drove up there himself. He parked his station wagon out back with the bumper completely blocking the escape window. Then he called the police and asked “if they would see fit to stop by.” When they did, they nabbed four teenagers, a girl and three boys—all of them, it turned out, children of prominent Westfield residents. Against Poppy’s wishes, charges were not pressed.
He wasn’t worried much about theft. Souvenir hunters had already taken the mailbox, the house numbers from the door, the brass knocker—anything that could be removed, even the sideview mirror and other removable bits of John List’s old car parked near the municipal building.
The real threat posed by intruders, Poppy knew, was fire, especially from what he called the “devil crowd,” which favored Pat’s old bedroom on the second floor for their nocturnal gatherings. Poppy, who saw the witchcraft fad merely as a pretext for getting high, asked around about the empty aerosol cans of shaving cream that always seemed to litter the scene after one of the sessions, and was astonished when he was told the kids spread it over their naked bodies “so they could slide around on each other—the girls and the boys.” Poppy chuckled to think of how the good burghers of Westfield would react if they knew just how many of their well-educated, upwardly bound sons and daughters were “getting naked and dancing around a chicken,” vowing their buck-ass-naked loyalty to Lucifer himself, right there on fancy Hillside Avenue.
Poppy also found disturbing signs, candles and other paraphernalia, that the devil worshippers were gathering on moonlit nights at the grave in Fairview Cemetery. “The superintendent of the cemetery, when I would be coming up for other funerals, would say, ‘Look, the kids were here laying on the grave last night again.’ Kids would come up and lay on the grave!”
On August 30, 1972, nine months after the murders, Breeze Knoll burned down.
With flames leaping through the roof, the first alarm went in at three-seventeen A.M., and again Hillside Avenue was shaken from sleep with the wail of sirens. The house burned steadily until after seven P.M., and by the time it was over, only the front columns and a small section of the dining room area were left above the smoldering rubble. The blaze had started in the open center hall, which acted like a flue to spread the flames.
Poppy got a call early in the morning from the Lutheran pastor, who himself had been notified by a neighbor.
“Hey, Fred, guess what?” Rehwinkle said.
“I know, let me guess, it’s on fire,” Poppy replied with resignation. “All right, I’ll be right over.”
The first thing Poppy looked for when he went in, just out of curiosity, was Helen’s stove. It had crashed through the back kitchen floor and lay smashed under a pile of charred wood on the cellar floor.
The cause of the fire was apparently not what Poppy had expected, which was kids being careless with candles. Jack Wittke, then living in the converted carriage house a few hundred yards in the back of the old mansion, slept through the commotion. But when he woke early the next morning, he was struck by the sharp smell of kerosene that pervaded the neighborhood. The once beloved mansion was a smoking, stinking ruin. But the devil hadn’t done it, and neither had John List. For whatever reason, a skilled arsonist had burned Breeze Knoll down.
Almost as soon as they had come, the satanists lost interest. The gravesite where the Lists were buried began aging into its surroundings on the hill. Friends of the children, when they came home from college, sometimes visited and left flowers. Flowers, in fact, always bloomed at the grave. They were tended anonymously for over a generation.
In the summer of the second year, a handwritten note appeared among the red and white impatiens that blossomed at the base of the gravestone. In tribute to Pat, the message quoted a poem of François Villon, the fifteenth-century French vagabond and adventurer whose jaunty spirit had captivated so many children who grew up in the sixties. It was a single sad refrain from the most famous of Villon’s ballads, “The Ladies of Bygone Days,” which laments the death of lovely women:
Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?
PART TWO
Resurrection
Chapter Eleven
The December wind had a bite to it in the hour before the sun rose over the high plains that sweep up to the foot of the Rockies. Five inches of powdery snow lay on the ground from the night before. The man’s black rubber boots made a crunching sound on the path beside the road.
There wasn’t much traffic on the local street, but the whoosh of cars and eighteen-wheelers could be heard from Interstate 70 just up the embankment, where the highway began boring its way into the foothills. It was quite cold, not much above zero, but at this altitude, at six thousand feet, numbing early mornings often gave way to mild afternoons with the bright winter sun defining the jagged mountain peaks. By late afternoon, the snow would be gone.
Early each morning in the two weeks since he had found a place to live on the western edge of the city, the man walked the four blocks to a convenience store. There, among deliverymen warming their hands on cardboard cups of steaming coffee, he would select the two local papers, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News, from the rack where they were wedged in with the want-ad digests advertising used cars and cheap apartments. It was a morning ritual to walk back home and read the papers carefully in his little trailer in a mobile home park just off the interstate. He spent a good part of his time reading, historical novels chiefly, and of course the Bible. He bought the trailer outright for $1,500, and the receipt bore the name Robert P. Clark. No identification had been required, only the ability to produce the money. After a thorough cleaning, the accommodations were fine for his purposes: a bed, stove, small refrigerator, and table and chair. The tiny bathroom was just beyond, behind a door the size of those on airplane lavatories.
In time, he would buy a television set. Not far away, the Wal-Mart had thirteen-inch black-and-white models for $69. Also some decent cookware. Slowly, the accoutrements of an ordinary life would arrive in place.
He would need a job, of course. But the money would hold out for a while. Then he could find something, probably something menial, to cement him in a little more firmly to the landsca
pe. But not for a while. It would be a mistake to rush into anything. So far, he hadn’t made any mistakes.
To augment the Bible, he had begun drawing comfort from the words of Miguel deMolinos, a seventeenth-century mystic who was condemned for heresy, and who had written:
Your center is the Kingdom of God. Within you is a divine fortress, and that divine fortress defends, protects and fights for you … When you see your peace assaulted, retreat to that region of peace, retreat to the fortress … Do not leave that place while the storm is on. Remain tranquil, secure and serene within.
Serenity, faith, anonymity. Those were his imperatives.
The trailer park had about twenty small units arrayed about a circular drive. It was neat, cheap, convenient, and impersonal. The neighbors were apparent mostly through sounds—a hasty footstep on the gravel, a muffled cough, a car door slamming, an engine being coaxed to life. Faces displayed themselves only fleetingly. Judging by the license plates on the older-model cars parked beside the driveway or fit onto the scrubby slices of land between the trailers, everyone was from somewhere else. Many of the cars were from the Midwest, where the automobile industry was just feeling the first shivers of failure and had begun jettisoning ballast. Day-Glo swaths on one car identified a hippie couple from Massachusetts, evidently holed up for the winter before the last big push to the Pacific. The only eye contact readily available on the premises came from the occasional defeated child standing outside a trailer, hoping for a diversion.
Now, with little more than an alias that had its only firm footing in a new Social Security number, Bob Clark was prepared to drift passively for a while in the vagabond stream, unremarkable among the dispossessed, the displaced, and the desperate, the fugitives from child support, the hapless adverturers, the worried immigrants with questionable documentation and a desire to simply fit in, the laid-off and hopeful, the ambulant deinstitutionalized, the merely transient and determined, all bobbing just under the surface of American society by the beginning of the 1970s.
For he understood something very basic that had allowed John List to plan his escape with the assurance that, if it was initiated with cunning, a new life was possible. By the 1970s, most middle-class Americans actually believed that, more than any time in their history, they were a nation of citizens readily identifiable and accountable—as employees, taxpayers, credit-card users, voters, licensed drivers, candidates for jury duty—to an essentially benign but nevertheless monolithic record-keeping bureaucracy with the ability to spit out any person’s whereabouts and bona fides instantaneously, with the efficient tap of a computer key. They were not aware of the fact that the America they had known in their youths no longer existed for many people. Then, a man on the run from authorities was at routine risk. Even the most mundane daily undertaking, such as buying breakfast, required some form of social intercourse. But the society had changed. Now any person, especially a neatly dressed adult male with a few dollars in his pocket and no desperation on his face, a man with a penchant for keeping his mouth shut and lingering in the crowd, could get off any bus, come into any new area, with virtually no questions asked, with little fear of ever encountering the unexpected. Succor would be found without challenge in impersonal fast-food joints, K-marts, 7-Elevens, and chain motels arrayed across the land in utterly predictable pattern.
If only because he had stood against them so defiantly for so long, John List understood the raging social currents that had burst through at the end of the 1960s. Now, in this hour of his need, he was determined to tap into it. Like much of the rootless society that had evolved around him, he was resolved to keep his head down and, quietly, look out for Number One.
He always read the papers carefully. Lately, however, he had more than a detached interest in the news. On a snowy day, December 10, he would have finally found what he was looking for, buried on page 15 of the Rocky Mountain News, where a headline read:
Police Seeking
Accountant in
Slaying of Five
The story was only ten paragraphs long, frustrating in the paucity of the information conveyed. There was Moran, the police chief, saying the two unloaded pistols had been found in a desk drawer. The story didn’t say much more of interest; more important, it didn’t signal any cause for alarm. The bodies had been found Tuesday night—it was Friday by the time the story made its way to the one Denver paper that had been interested enough to run it. Interestingly, it had taken twenty-eight days to find the bodies. And it was apparent that the police didn’t have a clue as to where the murderer might have gone. How could they? He hadn’t left one.
In the serenity of that first dark winter, John List receded from mind and Bob Clark bundled himself in a renewed sense of order. He began to establish a routine. Simple meals cooked on the gas stove in trailer kitchen, or eaten quietly out of a paper bag on a table in McDonald’s with the other hungry strangers. He had no car yet, of course. A car was expensive. More to the point, a car was dangerous. A car required documents that would be scrutinized. Worse, a car was the easiest place for a law-abiding person to come into direct, inadvertent contact with that most capricious of interlopers, the police officer. A car could wait.
The bus was simple, anonymous, and convenient. There would be no problem learning the schedules and connections. So life wasn’t bad. Besides order, there was a newfound sense of self-esteem starting to emerge. Even a middle-aged man set in his ways could adapt to a new life once he put his mind to it, once the reference points started to fall into place.
By the second half of 1972, a man of more distinct dimensions could be seen making his way in the first light of day across the parking lot of a Holiday Inn. He walked around the big tractor-trailers that idled in the rear of the parking lot, under the big green-and-white sign that blazed toward the interstate. He would look both ways before crossing the street to the trailer park, where he would read the newspapers, and then the Bible, before retiring.
Bob Clark liked the night shift for its quietude. He also had come to realize with some irony that all of those unhappy evenings coming home from work and having to rustle up dinner for three hungry children hadn’t been wasted. For he had found work as the night-shift cook at the Holiday Inn West, along Interstate 70 where the suburbs of Denver had stretched all the way out to Golden by the 1970s. Among the lively bunch on the night shift—waitresses and waiters, the bellhop, the helpers and cleaning people—Bob Clark was regarded as friendly but taciturn, a man more likely to bury his nose in a book than chat during lulls in the routine. But one could see a bounce to his step again, a sense of diligence and purpose as he worked at the big stove or rummaged in the refrigerator with a hamburger hissing on the grill.
Night work in a kitchen not being an endeavor given to long tenure, it was not long before steady Bob Clark was one of the senior employees on the shift.
The Holiday Inn West was strategically situated. With the popular ski resorts of Vail and Aspen less than two hours away, westbound travelers could stop for the night to take advantage of the reasonable rates and still be on the slopes before lunch, or beyond the Rockies by dark. For the eastbound traveler coming in from the mountains, it offered a haven before the urban glut of Denver and the long, dreary drive across the plains. As a result, people were coming in at all hours, and the kitchen was busy day and night. By mere dint of his diligence and ability to keep things organized, Bob Clark was quickly promoted from the sink to the stove, where he developed a reputation as a deft short-order cook who never ruined a meal and won the respect of coworkers, some of them transients who wandered in for a month or two of work.
As he added shading to his new form, Bob Clark made his first genuine friend in the unlikely personage of a cowboy who had grown weary of working the ranches and ridges of the high country and drifted down to Denver to find comfort and steady work.
At fifty-five, Robert Lavner Wetmore had spent his last winter in the high elevations of the North Park of the Rockies, where he
had a small fence-mending business that supplemented the money he earned as a cowboy. It was a decent business. The federal Bureau of Land Management and the Colorado Forest Services department often had work for him. But it was feast or famine, and it was work better suited for a younger man. Sometime before the winter of 1972–1973 managed to get a frigid lock on the high country, Bob Wetmore piled his things into his pickup truck and came down.
“I figured I would wash dishes or something, and study,” said Wetmore, who had begun devouring books on Eastern philosophy during the long winters in the mountains. “So I came in and got me a room downtown, in the old Skid Row, which was a wonderful part of town then. Then I drove out to the Holiday West, where I knew the old chef.”
As they spoke, he told Bob Clark’s boss: “I’m sure glad I no longer have to work four head of horses and take a saddle horse along for salvation in a blizzard, seven days a week.”
“Hey, but what you going to do with yourself now?” the chef asked.
“Well, I come in to study. But I got to get me a little spending money, of course,” Bob said, and waited.
The chef dried his hands on a towel. He looked around the place. “Well, this kitchen’s a bitch to keep clean. You want to work cleaning it up? Night shift, of course.”
“Well, I don’t care about working nights,” Wetmore replied.
The cowboy became a kitchen helper on the night shift.
At first Wetmore didn’t take much notice of the night cook, a tall, gangling man who seemed to keep pretty much to himself. But Wetmore liked a man who always seemed to have a book going. He and Bob Clark soon discovered their mutual interests in history. Wetmore noticed that Bob was a good listener, if not much of a talker.
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