Death Sentence

by Sharkey, Joe;

  For one, he was remarkably nice to Sandra, who had to handle myriad office duties and juggle the incessantly ringing telephone at the same time. Others would let the phone ring and ring when Sandra wasn’t at her desk until she scrambled back to get it. Not Bob Clark. Bob would drop what he was doing to come to her assistance.

  “He was very helpful to me. He always backed me up on the phone if I couldn’t get to it right away,” said Sandra, a woman in late middle age whose New York accent stood out in the laconic drawl of Richmond speech. Like many of his friends and associates who stopped later to recall him, Sandra gave a good deal of thought to the positive things about Bob. The man was diligent, solicitous, helpful, courteous. Once, when she had injured her wrist, he volunteered to take the office postage meter down to the post office to have it tabulated and reset, a tedious chore. Like many other mature women who became casual acquaintances of Bob’s, she initially liked him immensely. She even wished that her own husband would be as solicitous.

  “We had become pretty good friends,” Sandra said. “With just the two of us here so often, if we had free time we’d just stand around and talk.”

  But then, as usual, Bob started losing points. At tax time, when he moonlighted at H&R Block, he worked till ten o’clock at night and on Saturdays as well. Sometimes, when things were slow at the office, he dozed at his desk. Sandra studied his face on several of those occasions and realized that he was several years older than he claimed to be.

  As is routine when two people start to become acquainted, there are questions about background—not rude, intimate questions, just normal everyday conversation questions that human beings use to establish natural social reference points with each other. The parameters, invariably politely narrow, include general information about birthplace, family, social interest, likes and dislikes. But in such social interaction with Bob, those little red warning flags always got hoisted. It wouldn’t be sufficient to cause a person to remark on the misgivings at the time. Only in retrospect would people give voice to the vague signals that made them remember being slightly uneasy.

  “I once asked him if he had any children, and he got this funny look,” Sandra said. “He said yes, he had adopted his first wife’s child, but he was divorced from the wife.” His tense reaction caused her to drop that line of discussion quickly. “I guess he put me off,” she said. “I just didn’t continue in that vein. I guess what we talked about was current events or gardening, tips on good health, things like that.”

  There were other instances of behavior that were not quite remarkable, but odd enough to come to mind later. Bob received his personal mail at the office. And on occasion, when Delores would call, Sandra would engage her in friendly conversation for a few minutes before passing her on to her husband. Bob, she said, seemed “pretty nervous, for some reason,” when that happened.

  Then there was lunch. Bob didn’t go out to lunch with the other men. He brought his to work in a brown paper bag and left with it at lunchtime. As she went out for lunch herself, Sandra began noticing Bob eating in his car in the parking lot. Even with the windows rolled up, she could hear the music playing loudly.

  Twenty minutes before lunch hour was over, Bob would return to his desk to call his wife. To Sandra, this seemed sweet for a week or so, as he cooed “How was your morning?” and “I love you” into the phone. But after a while, she started wishing she wasn’t in the same room. “He would find out how her day was going, and then tell her every little thing that he was doing, every little piece of business that was on his desk,” Sandra recalled.

  Once he ended his phone conversation with his wife after only a few minutes because, he said, he needed to get a price on mulch for the garden. Sandra wasn’t paying much attention as he got out the Yellow Pages and began copying numbers onto a piece of paper. Then he started calling, asking each of the garden-supply stores that answered for its price on a fifty-pound bag of mulch. When he had called them all, Sandra was eavesdropping despite herself as he called two of them back to ask if that—the price was in the range of six dollars—was the best they could do.

  Bob then called home to proudly report the price he had found. Sandra began wondering about the man’s priorities in life. Some time later, although she still held to her belief that Bob Clark was a kind and gentle man whom she liked, she read a newspaper story that said that his first wife had had a problem with alcohol. Sandra suspected she had just the tiniest understanding of what might have helped drive the poor woman to drink.

  Although the financial strains continued under the burden of the mortgage, Delores found a job working Saturdays at a beauty parlor, and the Clarks, with the troubles of Denver fairly well behind them, seemed at ease within their small circle of new friends.

  Wally, like Gary Morrison before him, grew very fond of the couple, who often double-dated with Wally and his girlfriend, Judy. “They acted like newlyweds, holding hands and that,” Wally said. Wally took special pride in showing Bob and Delores around his hometown. They took the Clarks to a football game once, but Bob said afterward that he thought football was “too violent,” Wally said.

  Wally admired Bob for finding what he regarded as a fine wife so late in life, and he let him know it. Besides that, a wife like Delores, a refined and intelligent lady who was never “coarse,” who knew how to act in public, would also serve him well in business, once he started moving along on the path to promotion, Wally confided to Bob.

  “A wife is either a business asset or a liability,” Wally told him in a matter-of-fact manner. “You have an asset.”

  On the other hand, Delores didn’t always seem to relish the role of being a silent asset. In fact, she was beginning to come down on Bob. Among close friends, both Wally and Betty Lane independently mentioned it to her, especially after several minor tiffs sent Bob over to Wally’s house to spend the night on a couple of occasions.

  As John List had felt with Helen, Bob felt persecuted. “Sometimes Delores just isn’t fair,” he complained.

  “Delores,” Wally told her once, “you have got to let up on him occasionally.”

  Betty recalled, “I had talked to Delores once. I told her back then, I said, you ought to watch some of the things you say to Bob. Nothing’s ever right. He’s trying hard, he has a job, he’s making twenty-five thousand dollars a year. That’s not a whole lot, but it’s enough for y’all to have a nice life on. He’s trying, Delores.”

  Delores replied, “Well, I know he is, Betty. But, you know, I didn’t really want to get married.”

  “Well, you surely dated him long enough,” Betty said.

  Later, she took Bob aside and said, “You know, I told Delores how lucky she was to have a man who loved her as much as you do. I don’t think it’s right the way she puts you down. If I were you, I’d put my foot down.”

  “Well, Betty,” he replied, “I know you’re right, but she’s just a little insecure. Give her a little time.”

  But these were minor rough spots on the surface of the new life Bob and Delores had begun creating for themselves in Richmond, where they came into their own socially as a couple in a way they hadn’t been able to in Denver.

  On the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend 1989, Bob and Delores joined Wally and Judy on an outing to nearby Louisa County to watch a reenactment of a Civil War battle. The next day, a beautiful late-spring holiday Monday, they went into Richmond to attend the annual Heritage Parade in honor of war veterans. Wally was touched to see that Bob’s hand went over his heart whenever Old Glory was carried by at the head of a band. Once he noticed that Bob had a tear in his eye as the flag came past.

  What a cultured man, Wally reflected afterward in the backyard of his house where a couple of big steaks sizzled on the barbecue. A man of gentle and moderate mien, he thought. Bob, who had seemed happy but distracted throughout the weekend, was on a lawn chair nursing a glass of beer. Here’s to new friends, Wally thought, gazing at the reddening coals, the first barbecue coals of the new
season. Delores had made her tangy German potato salad for the occasion. The steaks were almost done. Happily, he looked at Delores and, beside her, the alert figure of Bob sitting there in the gauzy twilight of a day that smelled of honeysuckle in the promise of Virginia summer.

  Chapter Fourteen

  On the Friday before Memorial Day, Kevin N. August, thirty-one years old and an FBI agent for the past three years, was looking forward to the long holiday weekend as the afternoon drifted away lazily in the Richmond office. Everything on his desk was routine: a couple of warrants he had to make some phone calls about before quitting time, some incremental paperwork that needed to be sent to someone else’s desk one page bulkier, a batch of bureaucratic flotsam.

  August, one of two special agents in the Richmond office who handled the fugitive cases, sifted through the small stack of forms. There was nothing that couldn’t wait till Tuesday, after the three-day weekend.

  Among the papers he scanned without much interest was a single one-page memo giving information that might lead to the arrest of one of more than ten thousand fugitives from federal felony charges believed to be at large and designated as worth maintaining at least some effort to apprehending.

  Attached to this form was the FBI circular with the picture of John Emil List, charged by the state of New Jersey in 1971 with five counts of murder and—this was August’s only official interest in the case—by the federal government with a single felony count of unlawful flight across state lines to avoid prosecution.

  August looked at the two photos of the murderer, which certainly stood out in the pantheon of glowering rat-faces who usually showed up on FBI circulars. This guy looked like Dennis the Menace’s father. He also noticed that the source of the tip on this eighteen-year-old case was a person who had telephoned a television show, America’s Most Wanted, the previous Sunday night, May 21. While the program had won grudging admiration in law enforcement circles for the surprising number of fugitives being apprehended as a result of tips from its viewers, you couldn’t prove it by Kevin August, who considered the show an annoyance.

  In the past year or so, he figured he had checked out fifty of these America’s Most Wanted television tips, and nothing had ever come of any of them. Like virtually every other fugitive tip, they required tedious checking that consumed hours of time and seldom added anything new to anyone’s files except another piece of paper. But you never knew until you checked, that was the point. Thinking no more of the matter, August slid the papers into his in-basket and made some phone calls to wrap up business.

  The fugitive tip that sat routinely on Special Agent August’s desk over the Memorial Day weekend had arrived at the Richmond FBI office as the result of a serendipitous combination of such disparate factors as Wanda Flanery’s reading habits and Frank Marranca’s disinclination to take no for an answer.

  Wanda made her initial thrust in 1987 after reading that supermarket tabloid. She retreated after being rebuffed by Delores. Captain Frank Marranca, in 1988 the recently promoted head of the homicide squad for the Union County, New Jersey, prosecutor’s office, made his in 1988. He, too, was rebuffed.

  Unlike Wanda, Marranca would not retreat. He would only bide his time.

  By the middle of the 1980s, in the Union County prosecutor’s office and in the Westfield police department, the List case had passed on to a second and, in some cases, a third generation of investigators who (considering that absolutely nothing new had been discovered since a policeman writing parking tickets had chanced upon List’s old Chevrolet at Kennedy Airport on November 10, 1971) were little more than custodians of the files and warders of the physical evidence—the moldy, blood-stained sleeping bags, the aging Rehwinkle letter, the weapons, the dog-eared crime scene photos and the rest—that was still locked up at the Westfield police station against the unlikely day when John List would be brought to trial.

  Which is not to say that John List had been forgotten. No, you could still get a conversation going on the List case, especially in Westfield, where the likes of it still hadn’t been seen again, especially among the cops at night after a couple of beers. But the theories were as weary and shopworn now as discussion of the New York Mets choking in the 1973 World Series against Oakland. Everything on the record had been exhaustively analyzed. Only the imponderables remained.

  By the middle of the 1980s, even the practical jokes had ceased. For years, every time certain wiseguys in the office went on vacation to some faraway place, there would be postcards—“Wish you were here. Your good pal, John Tamil List.” or “Having a ball. Nice to finally have a vacation without the kids! John E. List.” John List from Disney World. John List from County Mayo. John List from Barbados. John List from Santa Claus Village.

  But no one had sent one of those in a long while.

  Even the local papers, which for years could be depended upon to run what became known as “Remember John List” stories at regular intervals—the anniversaries of the murders and the discovery of the bodies were the most favored, but sometimes the stories, which faithfully rehashed the facts and added nothing new, seemed to run on an editor’s whim—even the papers had found newer anniversaries to commemorate. At irregular intervals, investigators would mail out batches of FBI circulars with a press release to newspapers to try to keep the List case alive, but these had begun to look like a waste of time and postage. The last mailing, late in 1986, was picked up dutifully by the Associated Press, but the bait only got one good bite, by a grubby little supermarket weekly, some poor cousin to the National Enquirer, that worked up a story headlined “The Perfect Crime.”

  It wasn’t the perfect crime, of course. Everybody knew who did it. But it seemed abundantly clear that it might have been the perfect escape.

  By the time Frank Marranca inherited it, the John List case was just the most famous of officially active, but long dormant, unsolved murder investigations that went back to 1958 in the Union County prosecutor’s office. And things had changed dramatically in recent years in the county. Comfortable, well-heeled towns like Westfield, where violent crime was still an anomaly in the late 1980s, stood in stark contrast to deteriorating cities like Elizabeth, the county seat, where drug squabbles had pushed the homicide rate to a level that was among the highest in the country.

  So there wasn’t a lot of free time to ruminate about John List in the Union County prosecutor’s office. But there was one last serious attempt to snare the man who had brazenly walked away from the five bodies of his family.

  When they first heard about it from friends, law enforcement authorities tended to scoff at America’s Most Wanted, a television program that Fox Broadcasting, a subsidiary of the holding company of Australian-born tabloid press baron Rupert Murdoch, began broadcasting in 1988. Each program featured dramatizations of serious crimes whose perpetrators were still at large. These dramatic vignettes were followed by pertinent information about the fugitives, the most critical of which were actual photographs of the criminal, who had just been portrayed by an actor.

  The program was a ratings success. It was also generating lively response from viewers, who were invited to phone in with tips on suspects. In its first six months, each weekly broadcast of America’s Most Wanted was eliciting an average of six thousand telephone calls.

  Most of the calls were from the ranks of the perpetually alarmed, people who, for example, are sure that their five-foot-seven mail carrier is in fact the six-foot-five ax murderer who has just been described to them in detail by an overly excitable television announcer. But many were not. Given the odds, an amazing number of the calls coming in were solid tips that were leading directly to arrests. In fact, the program was logging an average of almost one arrest for each broadcast.

  Detectives with frustrating unsolved felonies on their hands were starting to take notice. Among them were the investigators in the Union County prosecutor’s office.

  “When I first saw America’s Most Wanted, that’s the only thing I could thi
nk of—getting John List on the air,” said Marranca, a trim, dark-haired man in his early forties.

  It was obvious by 1988, he said, that “there was no way we were going to find him on our own.”

  Marranca wasn’t the only one who thought about John List and America’s Most Wanted. After the program started getting a reputation, other investigators in the office began dropping by.

  “Listen, can I look at the John List file?” one said. “I want to notify America’s Most Wanted.”

  “Hey, it’s already been done,” Marranca told him. “The letter went out.”

  The letter went out in the spring of 1988, but the reply came back: No, thanks. The case was too old, and the show was too new to take the chance on a hopeless cause. The show’s producers didn’t offer a lot of encouragement about the future. Maybe later, they indicated, after the show was more firmly established and could take a chance. Of course, the case wouldn’t look any less hopeless then. And it would also be older.

  Nine months later, Marranca heard a sergeant in the homicide squad say he was taking a few days off to attend a regional law enforcement conference in Wilmington, Delaware, at which Michael Linder, the executive producer of America’s Most Wanted, was going to speak.

  “I’m going with you,” Marranca said. He brought the List files with him.

  At the conference, they approached—“collared,” was Marranca’s word for it—Linder. Politely, the officers invited Linder up to Marranca’s room, where photos of the List crime scene were spread out beside several boxes of evidence, as if on display at a sales convention. Carefully, the two cops walked the television producer through the story, not missing any of the weird details.

  The details did it. The ballroom, the Sunday school teacher, the confession letter, Patty and the theater. Linder was fascinated. He took down their numbers. When he got back to work, he ordered a segment on List into the works. Even if the case was hopeless, it was good television.