by Bill James
With all of these handicaps, it is to the credit of the prosecutors that they were able to obtain a conviction for these horrible crimes. Juan Corona went to trial, his first trial, on September 11, 1972. He was charged with 25 counts of murder. The case as presented by the prosecutors in the first trial was badly confused, almost un-intelligible. Corona’s attorney, believing that the jury had no basis to convict his client, elected not to put on a defense. Most courtroom observers were also convinced that the burden of proof had not been met, and were surprised when the jury returned with a guilty verdict. On the second day of deliberations the jury had voted 7–5 to acquit, but had gradually swung around toward guilty. One of the jurors, a dotty woman named Naomi Underwood, told reporters immediately after the case that she had been pressured to go along with the verdict, but did not agree with it in her heart. Juan Corona launched a series of appeals based on these circumstances, and eventually the state of California was forced to put him through another lengthy and expensive trial, with the same result.
Juan Corona has never admitted his guilt, and maintains his innocence to this day. He blames the murders on his brother, Natividad, who died in 1973. Natividad was a homosexual. Juan, who had a wife and four adorable little daughters, was sexually conflicted. It appears that he raped his victims or had sex with them, then murdered them immediately as a way to avoid coming to terms with his sexuality.
Corona, born in Mexico in 1934, had entered the United States in 1950, and had a green card that enabled him to bounce back and forth across the border. There was a flood in the Yuba City area in December, 1955, in which 38 people were killed. Corona, who knew several of the flood victims, had a mental breakdown, and was diagnosed as schizophrenic in January, 1956. Corona was intelligent, assertive, and he was a hard-working man, but he drank heavily, had what we would now call anger management issues, and had been committed to a psychiatric hospital as recently as May, 1970.
He killed 25 people in a period of six weeks—a rate of more than one murder every two days. This is unparalleled in American history—not the number of victims, but the pace of the killing, killing 25 people in 25 separate events over a period of weeks. Newspaper stories about the Corona murders often said that the victims, like Corona himself, were Mexican migrant workers. In fact, the victims were almost entirely Anglo; only one or two may have been Hispanic. Most (but again, not all) were derelicts, down-and-out alcoholics, with a high incidence of mental and physical debility. Many of them had been employed by Corona as migrant workers.
Victor Villaseñor wrote an outstanding book about the case, actually about the deliberations of the first jury in the case (Jury, Little, Brown, 1977). Villaseñor interviewed all of the jurors, most of them several times, some of them many times, and painstakingly reconstructed the eight days of deliberations that led to the conviction of Corona. The book, which is reminiscent of the classic 1957 movie 12 Angry Men, is written in a careful, understated way, with a minimum of interpretation and just enough factual support to avoid leaving the reader disoriented. The jury was disturbed for several days because they had confused the time sequence, and thus had Corona still burying one victim while the police were digging up the others, but you have to figure this out for yourself; Villaseñor doesn’t explain it to you. I recommend the book very highly.
John List’s life had caved in around him. A few years before he had been a high-salaried executive with a beautiful wife, a stunning home, and three wonderful children. Now he was almost un-employed and almost un-employable, thousands of dollars in debt, with a wife who drank, a nagging mother who lived upstairs, and a brood of surly teenagers. He had looted his mother’s savings to stall creditors; now that was almost gone. It was a matter of time until the bank called the mortgage, until the daughter got pregnant, until the mother discovered the thefts.
On November 9, 1971, John List did the only thing he could think of to do: he killed them all.
John List was a deeply religious man. I realize that, in view of his actions, this statement must seem deeply bizarre, but I’ll get back to that. List had called the kids’ school and told them that the children would be leaving town. It was weeks before their bodies were found, rotting in their large and beautiful house. List, having left notes “explaining” his actions, fled to Colorado, where he established a new life for himself under the name of an old classmate, Bob Clark. Like Kathy Power he learned to cook and became a professional chef, and like Power he was on the run for almost twenty years. He was finally captured after America’s Most Wanted did a story about him. The story featured a bust of John List, developed by a Philadelphia artist to show what List would look like after all these years. The bust occupies a central role in most re-tellings of his capture. The bust, which now sits in John Walsh’s office, is pictured on the front cover of Death Sentence, Joe Sharkey’s book about the case, and Walsh frequently tells reporters what an unbelievably good likeness it is.
What strikes me is that the bust
a) is not particularly good, and
b) actually played no role in List’s capture.
John Walsh is my hero; I’m sorry to piss him off, but that’s just the way it goes. List had a little “bulb” on the end of his nose. As time passed this bulb grew, making one of the most notable changes in List’s appearance. The sculptor completely missed this, and presented List with a sharper nose at age 60 than he actually had at 40. His guess on the hairline is all wrong, and he gave him a wrinkled, prunish face that not only doesn’t much resemble List, it doesn’t much resemble anyone. The only thing he really got right was the glasses; he guessed correctly what kind of glasses List would be wearing.
List was caught because the America’s Most Wanted show prodded into action someone who had identified “Bob Clark” as List two years earlier (and had attempted to convince Clark’s wife of this), but had vacillated about calling the police. When she saw the program about him she knew that she wasn’t wrong, Clark was List, and his crimes were so horrible that she had to act. She was in Denver and he was in Richmond, Virginia, but she had his address from a letter. She made the call.
An FBI agent made preliminary inquiries, hoping to avoid having to check out the report, but concluded that the man named Bob Clark had enough in common with List to warrant a look. By this time Clark was working again as an accountant. He drove to Clark’s address, fully expecting the trip to be a waste of time. He had done this a hundred times; it had never amounted to anything. Within a half-hour he had called his office, and told them to make arrangements to arrest Clark. Comparing recent photographs of Clark to the old photos of John List, he realized that they seemed to be the same man.
“Is your husband from Michigan?” he asked Delores Clark, List’s wife in his new world.
“Yes,” she replied.
“Is he an accountant?”
“Yes.”
“When did you meet your husband?”
“1975.”
“Have you ever met his family?”
“No.”
“Does he have a mastoidectomy scar behind his right ear?”
“Yes.”
“Does he have a scar from a hernia operation?”
“Yes.”
There is no precise point where circumstances move beyond coincidence; this is why the Lord gave us fingerprints. List was returned to New Jersey, where, after a brief trial, he was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder.
Much of the information in this article is based on Death Sentence. Sharkey did a good job of researching List’s early life, making a three-dimensional image of him, rather than portraying him as a one-dimensional criminal. This is not unusual; people who write crime books often do a good job of developing the background of the assassin. It contributes more to the book in this case because List’s life is not the familiar recitation of abuse and failure which is common among violent men. The criminal’s life is normally researched through parole officers, psychiatrist’s pre-sentencing reports, and
the odd interview with a relative or an early victim.
List, on the other hand, was perhaps a little too beloved, and too well-behaved. He was a mama’s boy, but there were many things about him that were admirable. He had genuine accomplishments before frustration and madness took control of him—and some after. Most murderers are but marginally able to hold a job. List rose to become head of accounting for Xerox.
Compared to the typical criminal, John List fell off the opposite edge of sanity. He was everything that murderers usually are not. Criminals are usually men who never learned the value of self-control. John List’s obsessive self-control cut off his options and constrained his vision, trapping him in an ever-diminishing box. He was the anal-retentive murderer. He was polite to the point of being obsequious. He was neat to the point of being peculiar. He was obsessed with order, consumed by details. Once, after agreeing to purchase a house, he called back repeatedly to amend the contract. At one point, he wanted to have the contract amended to specify that the previous owners would leave the shelf paper in the pantry.
Sharkey’s book is quite good, and I’ll recommend it (if I haven’t already). But I want to argue with him about one point, because he makes a mistake which I think is common in crime books, and which is commonly damaging to them, although more so in this case.
Crime books often write sympathetically about the criminal at many points in his life … well, hell, you can’t avoid it. Violent criminals are often people who are beaten senseless and dumped on a trash heap at age three, and if you don’t feel something for them, then you don’t really understand. But because crime writers must write sympathetically about the criminal at some points, they confront a later problem: how to convey to the reader that their sympathies are not with the criminal, but with the victim and the police. The good people in the story.
To get this message across, Sharkey begins to turn on John List, and to tell us repeatedly that List was a liar, that his religion was a charade, that he didn’t really believe the things that he claimed to believe. The problem is that, in my opinion, List believed exactly what he claimed to believe. He was not a liar, but a literalist. His set of beliefs was so rigid that it was a prison, and so deeply held that he could not escape from it.
List believed, according to the notes he left behind in 1971, that only by killing his family could he protect them from a dismal future. Without money, they would be forced to leave their beautiful home, to find lodgings in a trailer park or a cheap apartment. The family would be forced to go on welfare, causing them enormous shame. He, the father, would be exposed as a failure and a petty thief. Their place in the church would be forfeit.
His wife was within a year or two of death anyway, in the final stages of a long and painful illness. By killing her, he could end her pain. If he killed his wife, he knew, his mother would not want to live through the shame that would follow in the wake of the crime. She was in her mid-eighties anyway, and she was ready to meet her maker.
And as for the children … well, the children faced the bleakest future of all: they would lose their faith. His children, he believed, were still Christians. Faced with the trials of poverty and disgrace, they would fall prey to the temptations of a Godless society. They would face eternal damnation. By murdering them while they still believed, he could save them from an eternity of anguish. Of course, the church proscribed murder, and he himself would be damned to the fires of hell for his actions, but at least the children would be saved. He could sacrifice his own soul to save the souls of those he loved—and then later, he could repent, and go back to being a Christian. God would understand, and God would forgive him.
This set of beliefs causes no problems if one does not truly believe it. Sharkey calls it a rationalization, but a rationalization is used to make actions seem reasonable. List’s reasoning made no sense to anyone except John List. The problem was, he had no doubt that it was true. He had zero doubt that his children would move on to a better life—and from this lack of doubt, terrible consequences followed. As Bertrand Russell wrote in “Philosophy for Laymen,” “What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or of ignorance … when you act upon a hypothesis which you know to be uncertain, your action should be such as will not have very harmful results if your hypothesis is false. Suppose you meet a Muggletonian, you will be justified in arguing with him, because not much harm will have been done if Mr. Muggleton was in fact as great a man as his disciples suppose, but you will not be justified in burning him at the stake, because the evil of being burned alive is more certain than any proposition of theology.” The average man understands this intuitively, and moderates his actions to allow for the possibility that he is wrong—but List did not. List was the complete accountant. Everything added up perfectly in his own mind.
List was like Katherine Ann Power in this way: that their crimes derived as much from confused reasoning as from psychological disorder. Power reasoned from a belief system based on pacifism to a conclusion that she should help criminals steal guns and rob banks. List reasoned from a belief based on Christianity that he should kill his children. They were locked in to ways of seeing the world that twisted and spun upon themselves.
And, because List was so exceptionally literal, he had no ability to see options. The problem, in short, is not that he was a liar, but that he was crazy. His thinking had been disconnected from first principles. The tragedy of John List is that he was absolutely true to what he believed.
John List died in prison on March 21, 2008; he was 82. Robert Blake, who had played Perry Smith in the movie In Cold Blood, also portrayed John List in the 1993 made-for-TV movie Judgment Day: The John List Story. He was studying for his role as a murderer. Blake was an excellent choice to play Perry Smith, but a very poor choice for John List. He was too macho. List was a brainy, nervous man, not normally someone who would get into a shoving match at a bar, let alone someone you would think would kill five people.
Stanley Bond, Katherine Ann Power’s murderous boyfriend from Brandeis. On June 24, 1972, he was attempting to build a bomb, which he hoped to use to facilitate his escape from prison. The bomb went off, and his remains were carried out of prison later in the day. So that worked out well.
Five days after Bond set off a bomb in his own face, the Supreme Court did the same. On June 29, 1972, the Supreme Court attempted to finish off the American death penalty. The effort blew up in their face, and brought the death penalty back to life.
By 1972 the death penalty had been in decline in America for four decades, and was near to extinction. The same was true of abortion laws; both had been in decline in America for decades, neither had the benefit of any organized public support, and both, in the view of the author, would have died a natural death before 1980 had the Supreme Court simply stayed out of it.
Unfortunately the Court, now led by Warren Burger, couldn’t do that; they had to weigh in on the issue, and make a hash of it. In Furman v. Georgia (1972) the Court issued a 5–4 decision which can be summarized as “we sort of think the death penalty is mostly unconstitutional, at least as it is now.” Black Americans were executed for murder, statistically, at a much higher rate than white Americans convicted of similar crimes. The Supreme Court stopped short of saying that the death penalty was unconstitutional, but invalidated all existing death penalty laws. As the death penalty was near extinction anyway, the Supreme Court was trying to gently put it to sleep, but one or two votes short of being able to state clearly that it was unconstitutional.
For those of us who would like to get rid of not only the death penalty but the endless arguments about it, this was the worst possible outcome. Americans like to think of themselves as a democratic country, and they resent … we resent, as I should include myself in this … we resent being told by judges what we can and cannot legislate. Furman v. Georgia was interpreted by conservative Americans as an effort to dictate to us from the bench, and as such it engendered resentment, leading to resistance.
XXIV
At 12:30 AM on Sunday, November 28, 1976, Dallas Police Officer Robert Wood was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop. Detectives had almost nothing to work with, and the investigation stalled for a month.
David Harris, a gregarious 16-year-old from Vidor, Texas, began to brag to his friends about killing a cop. Word of this reached the police, and Harris was interviewed about the crime. He switched his story quickly. He had been a passenger, he said; this other guy had shot the cop.
This Other Guy was arrested and charged with murder. A young man from Ohio, working in Dallas just a few days, Randall Dale Adams had met David Harris on Saturday morning, about fourteen hours before the crime. His car had run out of gas; Harris had stopped to offer him a lift. The two had spent the day together, along with Adams’ brother, drinking beer and smoking pot. Harris and Adams had gone to the movies and then split up. Adams claimed he was home in bed at the time of the crime, didn’t know anything about it.