But in this kind of ugly situation, someone usually goes beyond the already liberal boundaries in cynical quest of the victim. The New York Post proved to be the one.
One afternoon not long after the arrest, Delores was driving with a friend from Richmond out to Midlothian when her maroon Toyota was cut off at an intersection by a car with a man who craned precariously out of the passenger window and fired off picture after picture of the terrified woman trapped in her car.
“They almost caused us to have a terrible accident,” said Delores, who didn’t know who was in the car or what they wanted. “I got hysterical.”
The next day, the New York Post, even then regarded as one of the most disreputable newspapers in the country, carried photographs of Delores in sunglasses, with a scarf pulled over her head, looking as frantic as a trapped bird.
Four months later, in Manhattan inc. magazine, an admiring article about the management of the New York Post incidentally mentioned this feat. Bill Hoffman, a reporter who had been in the car with the photographer, bragged: “We were so whipped up, we pursued her on a high-speed chase through the suburbs of Richmond and got her trapped at a traffic light. And we got pictures of her. We got her. No one else got her.”
The attention faded, of course. There were always new things to pursue. The suspect was in jail, protected by warders and lawyers from outside reach. Delores went home alone and began the process of putting her life back together.
The house would have to be sold, of course. She put it on the market, listing it with a real estate agent she knew from church. Delores never told Betty.
Betty understood. The church provided solace. The church did not give betrayal. The house in Brandermill, once a symbol of a new life, was now a monument to deceit, with a mortgage of $650 a month. It was sold quickly, without profit.
Late in August, Betty decided to make a farewell call on Delores before she moved to Maryland, where her relatives were. Delores had obtained an unlisted phone number, so Betty drove out to Brandermill unannounced. She was heartened to see Delores’s car in the drive. Someone’s dog had dragged a gnarled old beef bone onto the wooden front porch of the house and left it there. The front windows were open. A breeze rustled the sheer white curtains.
Betty rang the bell and waited with a friendly smile.
“It’s me,” she called into the window. “It’s Betty!” she called cheerfully. As she waited, she noticed that the paint on the outside of the house was cracked and peeling. It was long overdue for a paint job.
Delores unlocked the door and looked out. Betty was shocked by how thin she had become. There was an almost feral look in her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Betty. It’s sold,” Delores said. Then she slammed the door shut and snapped the lock in place, as if afraid Betty would storm in.
Betty was dumbfounded to be treated like a door-to-door salesperson. She bent to call in the window, “What? Delores? Delores!”
“It’s sold!” came the defiant cry from within.
“Hey, that’s not what I came here to talk to you about,” Betty said in a clipped, stern tone. “Delores, we’ll talk through the window if you want to.”
“No, Betty! We wouldn’t have been here if it wasn’t for you. This is all your fault.”
Betty figured that someone had to get the blame, and it was to be expected that it wouldn’t be Bob yet. “Delores, I don’t know why you’re so mad at me,” she said through the window screen. “I never did anything to you. I helped you.”
“Oh yeah?”
So Betty gave up. “Well, I wish you lots of luck,” she said. “Tell Bob hello for me.” There was no sound from inside the house. She waited a few minutes, but only the curtains stirred. With her head down, Betty, who had only wanted to be a friend, went back to her car across the street and drove away.
Chapter Sixteen
“We are not going to acquiesce on anything,” David Baugh, the suspect’s lawyer, said after the governor of New Jersey made a formal request on June 22 to the state of Virginia for the extradition of “John Emil List, also known as Robert P. Clark.”
“We are not putting up any resistance; we are only requiring the commonwealth to prove everything,” he said. “He has these rights and we’re not going to give them away.”
After the initial rude shocks of prison routine, the suspect had adjusted quite well to his new life in jail. Here was a prisoner who did what he was told, when he was told, and the other times kept his nose buried in a book. If there were promotions in prison, as there are in the army, this buck private would be in line for his stripes already. As it was, the guards bestowed what they could: Within days, the term “model prisoner” was pinned on him like a campaign medal.
Bereft, finally, of options, he was also released of expectations; free, for the first time, to submerge himself in what deMolinos had called “a confidence in God’s sovereignty, a detachment from all things.” A prison is a place obsessively devoted to the promulgation of the very virtues that were the bedrock of John List’s life: control, order, obedience, separation from the external. What to one man might be a horrible cage, to one so inwardly directed might be a monk’s cell in which to cleanse the soul in quietude.
In letters from prison to his friends, the suspect began to refer frequently, and at length, to the “Spiritual Guide” of the persecuted deMolinos, who had written:
The valley of our outward being is filled with suffering, darkness, desolation. On the lofty mountains of our inmost being, the pure sun casts its rays, inflames and enlightens. The believer is clear, peaceful, resplendent, serene.
This place of which I speak is the rich and hidden treasure, the lost pearl. Pray:
You are poor to look upon.
But inwardly you are full of wealth.
You seem low,
But you are exceedingly high.
You are that which makes men live
A divine life here below.
Give to me, O highest Lord
A generous share
Of this heavenly happiness.
And true peace,
Which the world of the senses
Is capable neither of understanding
Nor receiving.
When he was not reading or praying alone, the suspect occasionally was permitted to spend some time in the day room with the general population, but he usually brought a book there, too. Twice a week, Delores came to visit.
Early in the morning of June 29, just before the extradition proceedings were scheduled to begin, Baugh made a surprise announcement that his client had agreed to be extradited on the condition, granted by the Union County prosecutor in an effort to speed things along, that he could go to New Jersey still stipulating that his name was Robert P. Clark.
New Jersey lost no time. The Union County sheriff, Ralph Froehlich, immediately took custody of the prisoner. Froehlich and a deputy accompanied the prisoner back to the Henrico County Jail, where he picked up some books and other personal belongings he had accumulated since the arrest. Froelich then hustled his prisoner off to the airport, where a Piedmont Airlines flight waited. Froelich removed the man’s handcuffs so he could read comfortably. The prisoner was in the middle of a Michener novel when he was extradited. During the flight, he also chatted amiably with his two captors, primarily about the Civil War and the Confederacy. Three hours later, handcuffed, wearing a light gray suit that was set off incongruously by new white sneakers, John List was taken off the plane at Newark Airport. For the first time since November 10, 1971, he was back in New Jersey.
On the flight, the prisoner did not object to being called John List. However, the sheriff cautioned those to whom he relayed this information not to make too much of it, for the prisoner was a most extraordinarily accommodating fellow. “I could have called him Mandrake the Magician,” Sheriff Froelich said.
The well-behaved Union County prisoner who maintained for so long that he was Robert P. Clark started to come to terms again with John Li
st late in 1989, with the summer gone and the initial burst of media attention spent, with the certain knowledge that, legally at least, he was now just another inmate stashed in an overcrowded jail waiting for trial.
The Union County Jail, in the back of the Greek Revival courthouse in downtown Elizabeth, housed a good many accused murderers in 1989, none of them as famous as John List, each of them crammed in among seven hundred prisoners, in cells with double and even triple bunks. Outside, on the sidewalk below the barred windows, prisoners’ girlfriends loitered during the daytime and held shouted conversations with their incarcerated lovers.
But John was lucky. While any common poor wretch who had merely murdered another poor wretch in a mutual drug-crazed rage on a bad Saturday night would find himself sharing a cell with two or three equally hapless villains, John list, by virtue of the heinous scope of his crime—five murders, women and children, all in one day—was accommodated in what was in effect a private room, a cell in the jail’s isolation unit, a room that had not bars but Plexiglas windows, situated in a section of the jail usually reserved for those with communicable diseases, informants, or others whom jailors wanted to separate from the general population.
John had little to fear from his jailmates. It is no longer true that inmates are hardest on those fellow prisoners who commit atrocities against the weak and vulnerable, such as children. All that is needed today to achieve respect is celebrity, and celebrity is measured in exposure on television minutes. To the inmates in Union County Jail, and some of the warders as well, John was a superstar. He was even accorded the deference of being referred to by his alias instead of the name stamped on his paperwork.
“Hey, Bob, you going to watch America’s Most Wanted Sunday night? Maybe you’ll see somebody you know,” was the sort of good-natured gibe that followed Bob into the game room, where fellow inmates usually made room for him near the television.
In New Jersey, John List, his meager savings now gone, qualified for a court-appointed attorney. Elijah Miller, the assistant public defender for Union County, took the case and, despite the fact that he also had five other active murder cases at the time, threw himself energetically into it. By the time pretrial hearings began in March 1990, Miller and his staff investigator, William Henderson, had retraced the steps of John List’s life, interviewing everyone they could identify who had known him either as John List or as Robert Clark. For a public defense, it was an enormous effort, designed to buttress a two-pronged defense strategy: One, to show that the defendant was an otherwise law-abiding citizen who could have committed the crimes he was charged with only under extreme mental anguish; and, two, to battle fiercely to hamper the prosecution’s case by preventing the admission of the state’s most important piece of evidence, the confession letter to his pastor that John List had left, locked in a file cabinet, on the crime scene. The defense would contend that the Westfield police, by their hasty and imprudent actions at the crime scene, had illegally obtained a privileged letter written by a congregant to his minister.
Miller, a young black attorney who had left private practice for the more stimulating legal challenges of a public defender, was vehement in his insistence that maintaining “an orderly society” dictates that “we touch all of the bases” in providing a fair trial, no matter how guilty the defendant appears to be in advance. “If it is done properly and fairly,” he said, “then all of us will be able to live with the results.”
Through preparations for the trial, the inmate spent his days in quiet study of the Bible or other reading, religious and secular. He spent many hours with a deck of cards and a notepad, calculating statistical odds. A Lutheran minister was a regular visitor. Several times he spoke on the phone with Delores, although she did not visit the jail.
And he kept up a lively correspondence with the little network of friends who remained loyal to Bob Clark.
It must have been difficult for a proud, self-aware man who so craved status to have to address his friends on stationery with the address “Union County Jail” printed at the top. But he wrote frequently, invariably beginning with an apology of one sort or another, in a hand that appeared cramped by the confines of the lined jailhouse stationery.
To Betty Lane, he wrote a note that showed he was aware of Delores’s rebuff: “I am truly sorry for how you were treated when you went to see Delores. She has been under a great deal of stress during this period. Which is certainly understandable. Then she had further trauma in selling the house. She has since moved out of there and seems a great deal calmer …”
He didn’t neglect friends’ birthdays. Bob Wetmore got one letter in January 1990 that apologized for sending a belated birthday greeting and thanked his old friend for talking to the public defender’s aide, Henderson, who, he wrote, had been doing “a fair amount of traveling to talk to people who know me, to help in our defense posture.” A month later, Bob wrote again, stating that pretrial hearings were about to get under way and then, “the real action begins.” To an amazed Wetmore, it seemed that Bob was looking forward enthusiastically to the trial.
Wally Parsons in Richmond and Gary Morrison in Denver also received regular letters, which they came to eagerly anticipate. “The last letter I got from Bob,” said Gary, “you know he’s got a lot of time on his hands, so he plays a lot of solitaire, plus a little chess too. Well, he had developed a massive amount of figures for playing solitaire—how many times out of a hundred times through the deck would a king come up, the ace of spades come up, how many times out of a hundred tries would you make it all the way through the deck without having to back out? All kinds of variables. I got cross-eyed just looking at those figures.”
At no time did the prisoner concede in writing what even his most steadfast friends knew well, that he was John List. It was as if the rules of this game forbad conceding it.
But there were no protestations of innocence, at least, and a hint of self-righteousness began creeping into his correspondence. Early in the fall, a group of friends, including some of those he had played war-strategy games with by mail from Denver and Richmond, received a packet from Bob that contained photocopied pages from the religious manifesto of deMolinos, who had written:
“It is the nature of each of us to be rather base, proud, ambitious, full of a great deal of appetite, judgments, rationalizations and opinions,” one passage said. “If something does not come into our lives to humiliate us, then surely all these things will undo us.
“So, what does your Lord do? He allows your faith to be assaulted, even with suggestions of pride, gluttony, rage … even despair …
“Your Lord desires to purify your soul, and He can use a very rough file. Yes, He may even assault the purer and nobler things of your life!”
Yet for a long time after the arrest, the prisoner had had to actually confront the past only in the private fortress of his own mind. But on November 7, 1989, two days before the eighteenth anniversary of the murders of Helen, Alma, Patricia, John, and Frederick List, he came face to face with that past.
At the invitation of Elijah Miller, Jean and Gene Syfert flew from Oklahoma to New Jersey. From the day of the arrest, Jean had been determined to confront John one day and demand to know, “Why?” She readily took the opportunity when it was offered.
She was very nervous. Sleepless the night before the flight from Oklahoma City, she fortified herself with ten milligrams of Valium before she and Gene made their way from the hotel at Newark Airport to the jail in Elizabeth.
“What if I see him and pass out?” she asked weakly after they arrived at the courthouse.
“We’ll pick you up,” he replied.
The lampposts on the streets in downtown Elizabeth were already festooned with Christmas decorations. The Syferts arrived at the jail around seven P.M. It was an unusually cold night for early November, a day not unlike the one on which the List family died.
Jean had no idea of what she would say to John after she asked him why.
Her pulse was racing when she and her husband were ushered into a brightly lighted reception area, where they waited nervously for the prisoner to be brought in. Elijah Miller waited with them. In a few minutes, John came in. He hesitated, but then crossed the room in his familiar bouncy, awkward gait. In the harsh glare of the jailhouse light, the tall, straight-backed form of John List came into sharp focus at last across the haze of the years. Jean recognized him instantly, that slightly lopsided face, more jowly now, those almost girlish lips, and that odd way he tilted his head when standing before someone. He hadn’t changed all that much, really, from being the skinny, gawky young soldier she and her sister had met at the bowling alley near the army base, a lifetime ago. Now that he had come into her sight once more in tangible form, with substance and human dimensions again, she felt immediately at ease.
“How are you, John?” Jean said.
He nodded stiffly. She had forgotten how big a man he was, and was surprised by how haggard he looked. Standing there in his tan jail coveralls, he didn’t know what to do with the papers he carried. Finally, he lay them on the table and stared at the floor.
“John?” Jean said.
She took a step toward him, and as she did he looked up with an odd, nervous grin. Then Jean did something that surprised herself almost as much as it did John. Impulsively she hugged him.
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