Death Sentence

by Sharkey, Joe;

  In that instant she offered what he had never asked for, forgiveness. The hatred was gone. There was still injury. But the bitterness and resentment dissipated as he put his arms around her and lay his head on her shoulder.

  The top of her blouse was wet from his tears when he raised his head. He seemed mortified and frightened as he saw Gene Syfert, but then Gene reached out. Wordlessly, the two men shook hands. And then Gene hugged him.

  “I think that gave John the shock of his life,” Jean said afterward. “Gene grabbed him and hugged him. He really cried. I don’t think he was ever expecting that from Gene.”

  They were allowed to use a private room on the third floor of the jailhouse to talk. It was a small, windowless space, about six feet by eight feet, with a table and a few chairs, one of the rooms used for private conferences between inmates and their attorneys. Elijah monitored the conversation, which went on for over three hours.

  Not that it was a happy family reunion. The Syferts believed in mercy, but accountability was important, too.

  “Why, John?” Jean said, posing the question she had waited eighteen years to ask.

  He looked at her without emotion. “Because there was no other way,” he said.

  That was what he had written to her in 1971, nothing more.

  “Why wasn’t there another way?” Jean insisted. Why, instead of having to argue the matter in criminal court, hadn’t it been argued in its appropriate venue, divorce court, for God’s sake?

  But he was impenetrable. The arrogance hadn’t abated one bit. “It just had to be that way,” he said. Clearly, the subject was closed, and had been since 1971.

  Gene had memorized a short list of specific questions, and after a while he wasn’t gentle in asking them. But John didn’t want to talk about matters pertaining directly to the crime, and John still had a way of controlling any conversation he engaged in.

  Jean, who thought of the marijuana peril in the same light as the cult movie classic Reefer Madness, kept at it for a little while. “Did you know about Patty and the drugs?” asked Jean, who had found a small bag of marijuana when she went through Patty’s room.

  He seemed surprised by the question. “No, there were no drugs,” he said.

  That surprised her in turn. “Well, I think you’re wrong,” she said.

  He didn’t argue. It was clear to Jean, however, that concerns about drugs hadn’t been a factor in his determination to kill Patty. Nor, the wagging tongues of West-field aside, had her dabbling in witchcraft been a factor. Hearing about that, John was surprised, but not particularly interested.

  “No, I never heard about anything like that,” he said matter-of-factly.

  Jean was astonished. Could this man really believe he murdered those people merely to do them the favor of saving them? She had never believed that he was insane, not for one minute. If not insanity, what was it, then? Was she looking into the abyss of an arrogance, at the cold depths of which lay the very definition of evil?

  Why hadn’t he killed himself that night, then?

  Why could he live, but not the others?

  She wanted to demand an answer to that—Why didn’t you kill yourself, too, John?. But she was too polite to ask such a question to a man’s face.

  John was more at ease discussing things like D. B. Cooper. There was a palpable lessening of tension in the tiny room when the conversation turned to that, probably because it flattered his ego, Jean thought. While Jean had always dismissed as totally ridiculous the notion that John List was D. B. Cooper, Gene had believed that it was extremely unlikely, but just barely inside the limits of the possible. If a man has the audacity to dispassionately murder his family, one by one, what kind of a small leap of faith would it take to consider the possibility that he might be capable of hijacking an airplane fifteen days later?

  Asked directly about it, John laughed heartily for the first time. No, D. B. Cooper was definitely someone else, he said. In fact, he found the idea of John List having the nerve to parachute from an airplane into rough mountain terrain as amusing as Jean did.

  From that point, the conversation flowed more easily onto the subject of family. John asked about Brenda, and was happy to hear that he now even had step-great-grandchildren. He spoke happily of his own life with Delores in Denver. He asked about the Syfert family, about Eva Morris, Jean’s mother, who had died with her nightmares two years earlier, about the Syferts’ children. He didn’t, however, recall the Syferts’ oldest boy. That struck Jean as odd, since the boy had been the one closest to the List children. Like him, Jean thought, Patty and John and Fred would be in their middle thirties now.

  The encounter had a tinge of the surreal. On one side of the table sat the accused mass murderer, who still hadn’t yet conceded outside that room that he was anyone other than Robert P. Clark, innocent victim of mistaken identity. Chatting affably with him were two of the three closest living relatives of John List. Shortly before they left, the defendant handed Jean a ten-page letter. She noticed that sections of it had been blacked out by his lawyer. She also saw that it was signed “Bob Clark.”

  At no time was the word “murder” uttered that night at the table in the jailhouse. But when it wasn’t about family, the conversation was about murder. As they spoke, hampered by this awkward, unstated politeness that permitted only oblique references to the crime, Jean realized that she couldn’t decide at all just where John List ended and Bob Clark began. Afterward, comparing notes at their hotel room, she and Gene agreed that the man with whom they had just spoken with couldn’t either.

  “I still saw a deep arrogance in him, and there is so much that I don’t understand about why,” Jean said later, trying to explain that strange encounter. “But I have compassion, and I think you really have to know John and his life to understand fully why. As far as I know, he would never threaten those children and he never hurt them …” Her voice trailed off as she realized the irony of this. “I don’t think he really did think he hurt them, when you get down to the real nitty-gritty of it.

  “In many ways, Helen’s behavior contributed to the situation. How far can a person be pushed? If you didn’t have any money, if you didn’t have any way of making any more money, and you had all of these terrible problems staring you in the face, what would you do? Could you walk away?”

  The question hung in the air before Jean answered it herself. “Of course, I would,” she said softly. “I think I would just say, this is it, I can’t take this any more, and I would leave.”

  Months earlier, the Westfield police chief, James Moran, had posed almost the same sort of question, having himself been bewildered by the swift death sentence John List had carried out on his family. But he had none of the detached sympathy Jean Syfert had expressed; Moran was perfectly willing to talk about evil. “I know about husband and wife fights, long-standing things. I’ve seen them time and again. They happen. Bang. She gets him, running off. Bang. He gets her. And the mother? That was something else, but maybe he was doing it with some twisted reasoning that he was sparing her. Sparing her. But when I saw those three kids? If he was that desperate, that destitute, he could have just simply got in the car and driven off. Left them there. All of them! They wouldn’t have starved to death. They wouldn’t have died. He decided to have them die.”

  Another cop, Tracy, who headed the nearly abandoned investigation in its last years at the Westfield department, was more blunt. “Helen List was seriously ill and heavily medicated,” Tracy said. “She had cerebral atrophy. Where was his Christian compassion when he shot her to death? He didn’t show her Christian compassion, he showed her contempt.”

  Tracy added this personal assessment of the John List he had known about all of his adult life: “The guy is a mean, arrogant, selfish, hypocritical piece of shit.”

  Bob Wetmore said: “Some say Bob Clark was a wimp, but I never thought that. After a while I did begin to realize that he had a devious mind and was a cold, calculating son of a bitch. He was
intelligent. But I guess he wasn’t as intelligent as he thought he was.”

  But Gary Morrison said: “The man that I know is not capable of the atrocities that John List is accused of. As a friend, Bob helped see me through many rough times. He was a gentle man—he is a gentle man. If the legal system were to convict Bob Clark of being John List and there were ever a chance of a parole, my home is open to Bob. I would feel completely comfortable. The man has a home. There is just nothing that is going to come out and convince me other than that the man I knew was a gentle and kind friend, and my door will always be open to him.”

  Jean had heard all of the sentiments; indeed, she had subscribed to every one of them at various times. In one conversation in Oklahoma long before she saw John at the jail, she had scoffed at his presenting himself as “this religious person.” She wondered, “If John had been the person he said he was, why didn’t he just walk away? Nobody made him stay there. If there were problems or whatever the deal why didn’t he just walk away? He must have liked the way things were most of the time.”

  Hadn’t John etched pain and grief into eighteen years of her life? Hadn’t John List assaulted her family’s psyche with the force of a tossed bomb? Why had she forgiven him?

  Jean wished she could be unequivocal. She was certainly aware, and quite satisfied, that John was likely to spend the rest of his life in state prison or a mental institution. He would die with his Bible and his arrogance to comfort him. That was more justice than he gave those children and her sister.

  In time, Jean was, in fact, embarrassed to admit to the compassion she had felt and the forgiveness she had offered. For hadn’t even Christ insisted that repentance must come first? John List had been anything but repentant. Still, Jean had said she made her peace with the person who mattered, with herself. Unto Caesar would be rendered that which was indisputably Caesar’s—John List would draw his last worldly breath in a New Jersey prison—and unto God would be rendered the final, personal, eternally unassailable judgment that she believed was the preserve of God alone.

  “Gene and I both feel there was reason why everything happened,” Jean said, apologizing for not being able to make herself more clear and for the shock her words might elicit from those who saw nothing but the face of arrogant evil in John List. “Not justification. But reason.”

  The day after she saw John, on a gray late afternoon, Jean went to Fairview Cemetery in Westfield for the first time in eighteen years. Oddly, after so many years, the tombstone still looked freshly chiseled. A clump of impatiens, the tenacious blossom of summer, had begun to wither in its well-tended bed at the base of the stone.

  She read the inscriptions for what she knew would be the last time. She had no reason ever to come back, nor would there be any further point in considering moving the bodies of Helen and the children to North Carolina. She knew they were now as immutable a part of Westfield as the stream that burbled deep and everflowing under Elm Street and the hills that rippled to the Watchung range out past the land where Breeze Knoll once stood.

  LIST

  Patricia M. 1955–1971.

  Mother Helen L. 1924–1971.

  Frederick M. 1958–1971.

  John F. 1956–1971.

  There is peace in the eternal valley. Psalm 23.

  The wind was brisk. A few lingering sparrows twittered in the trees in the meadow where the police had cordoned off spectators during the funeral. The birds and the wind and the leaves blowing on the road were the only sounds Jean heard as she read the names cut into the stone and tried to summon their memories to life.

  There is peace in the eternal valley. The absence of emotion troubled her at first, until she recognized it for a kind of peace she hadn’t known since before the phone call in the middle of the night in 1971.

  The memories wouldn’t come. This is just an old grave marker, she told herself. Nobody that I know is here.

  Resentment, anger, and fear all were gone. Only sadness remained. She gathered her collar against the wind and returned to her car in the waning light of the November day.

  Chapter Seventeen

  On April 12, 1990, after hearing seven days of testimony, a Union County jury found John List guilty of five counts of murder in the first degree. Since there was no capital punishment statute in effect in New Jersey in 1971, John was spared the death sentence he had summarily decreed for his wife, three children, and mother.

  On May 1, Superior Court Judge William L. Wertheimer imposed the maximum sentence, five consecutive life terms, thus ensuring that John would never be eligible for parole. “The name of John Emil List will be eternally synonymous with concepts of selfishness, horror, and evil,” the judge said with contempt as John stood at attention before him. “John Emil List is without remorse and without honor. After eighteen years, five months, and twenty-two days, it is now time for the voices of Helen, Alma, Patricia, Frederick, and John F. List to rise from the grave.”

  Well before the trial began, the defense dropped its insistence that the state would have to prove that Bob Clark was John List. Robert P. Clark disappeared unceremoniously in a flurry of defense motions that could only be made on behalf of John Emil List, among them unsuccessful petitions for a change of venue and suppression of evidence. And in his opening statement to the jury, defense lawyer Elijah Miller promptly conceded one other obvious fact—that John List had indeed done what the indictment said he had. After nine months of exhaustive work that had consumed a significant portion of the county public defender’s office budget and time, Miller told the jury that “John List’s long odyssey has come to an end.

  “Let there be no mistake,” the tall, thin lawyer declared. “John Emil List on November 9, 1971, killed his family.”

  During pretrial hearings a week earlier, Judge Wertheimer had rejected Miller’s impassioned arguments for suppressing the confession letter to Rehwinkle, which Miller contended had been obtained as the result of an illegal police search and was furthermore protected under “priest-penitent” confidentiality. With the confession letter in evidence and the jurors in place, Miller now had only a few avenues of defense left. While he long ago had decided against trying to argue that John was insane, Miller would attempt to show that John was hampered by a “fragmented” personality. He described his client, who sat calmly at the defense table, as a “tragedy of immense proportion” who was “not programmed to deal with overwhelming problems.

  “My client was clearly out of step with the times,” Miller said. On November 9, 1971, steeped in “Old World values,” aghast at the social upheavals roiling America, battered by severe personal troubles, fearful of what the future held for his children, “his whole world was crumbling,” Miller insisted. “On that fateful day, he slipped from despair into oblivion, and entered hell with his eyes open. For the salvation of his family, he acted as he did.”

  In the opening statement for the prosecution, Assistant Union County Prosecutor Brian Gillet read the Rehwinkle letter to the jury in a tone that was cold, with a trace of mockery. He went over John’s request for his minister’s prayers.: “I will need them whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it.”

  Gillet paused and gazed from face to face among the nine men and three women on the jury. This day, he said, the government intended to “do its duty.”

  He described John as “cruel, evil, and calculating,” a failure at marriage, fatherhood, and career who “literally closed the books and balanced out the accounts before taking on a new life” after slaughtering his loved ones on “a day of horror.”

  On the first day of testimony, the prosecution called seventeen witnesses, among them bank tellers and even the milkman who had come to the house on the day of the murders. Slowly, layer after layer of evidence piled up to persuade the jury that John had committed the murders with full knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, with premeditation, deliberation, willfulness, and malice—the definition of first-degree murder. The most indisputable eviden
ce came in fingerprints, ballistics reports, and autopsies. But the most persuasive, as the defense had known, was the letter to Rehwinkle, which depicted in such grotesque precision a crime that met every condition for first-degree murder.

  The defense used one last tactic to deflect the jury from the severest verdicts and perhaps lead it to the conclusion that John was guilty of manslaughter, at least as regarded Helen. Over objections of the prosecution, which deemed the information irrelevant and inflammatory, Miller managed to have entered into evidence the nature of the illness that was destroying Helen List: syphilis.

  This was what had sent her home from Korea as a medical emergency in 1947. She had gotten it from Marvin, her first husband, who was so fond of carousing with Seoul bar girls while his wife stayed home with Brenda. After an initial period of severe sickness—the only time it is contagious—syphilis typically lies deceptively dormant, sometimes for twenty years or more, before rising again to torture its victim to a painful death riddled with delusions and fever. Helen had managed to hide the disease from John until the late 1960s, when the deadly tertiary phase of the disease finally manifested itself, incapacitating her and driving her slowly mad. She had guarded her secret closely, even on occasions such as childbirth and other hospitalizations. In 1951, she had insisted to John that they be married in Maryland, where a blood test was not then required. Over the years, as the initial onslaught of the sickness faded into memory, she had even managed to convince herself that she was cured of it.

  When he learned the truth in 1969 after her last hospitalization, John was devastated. But he knew he could not have contracted the disease himself, and he knew the children had not. He told a minister at the time that he understood it “isn’t her fault,” and that Helen had been unknowingly infected by someone she loved and trusted.

  The testimony about Helen’s disease had no effect on the outcome of the trial. After the verdict was returned, it seemed clear that all the defense had accomplished was to underscore the tragedy of her life. Helen List, physically abused as a child by her mother, fled into two successive marriages. Her first husband, who died a war hero, gave her syphilis. Her second husband murdered her and three of her children.