Despite the bizarre discovery of Jeannette’s remains, Cardinal maintains that he and others in the fire and police departments had become somewhat calloused toward death and decay. Even the subsequent rumors of occult involvement in this teenager’s death did little to alarm the experienced firefighter. “You have to consider that, although the incident had already become ‘a story,’ the story focused more on the dog bringing home the arm rather than witchcraft,” Cardinal maintains. “Besides, I was more concerned with being the fire department’s photographer than I was with the overall story of this dead young woman. When you are on the police department or the fire department and you are dealing with incidents such as these, you have to move into a different framework or it affects your mind. There had been about a dozen rather gruesome deaths and accidents that I had witnessed up close and in real time by this point. I had also seen detailed photos that made me—still rather young person—shiver or recoil. There was a boy who had a car mirror jammed into his forehead, a girl who had died in a car wreck because of bald tires, a guy whose head had been crushed like a grape under a concrete truck and a man who was crushed and almost cut in half by a bus bumper but was alive and talking down to the last second. There had also been many deaths and suicides that we on the fire department had carried out of dangerous places, then cleaned up and washed the place down. This was all before Jeannette. You have to consider that all of us did not come upon this one incident as though it was the very first gruesome thing we saw. I am sure we all treated it differently for our own sanity.”
While it is obvious that no two people agree on what was and was not found around Jeannette’s body, numerous occult historians happen to agree on one matter: the items that were reported to be arranged around the corpse, while certainly strange, were not Satanic or related to witchcraft or Wicca in any way. “There is no pagan imagery here at all and none from any established tradition of ritual magic,” says Professor Ronald Hutton, one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of witchcraft. Professor Hutton, who teaches courses on contemporary paganism at the University of Bristol in southwest England, emphasizes that the crosses rumored to be placed around Jeannette were “of a wholly orthodox Christian kind. That is the only spiritual tradition here, which makes the comments of the media ironic.” Regarding the arrangement of stones that Donald Schwerdt observed, Hutton says that the stones have “no obvious esoteric significance and seem to be there only to frame the head.”
Dr. Jason P. Coy, a professor of history at the College of Charleston and a renowned expert in the field of witchcraft, also sees no occult connection. After being presented with a series of diagrams representing multiple witness accounts of the scene around Jeannette’s body, Dr. Coy says, “I do not see anything that indicates any ‘Satanic’ or ‘witchcraft’ activity. For starters, I do not think there are, or ever have been, any organized Satan worshippers who practice ritual murder, apart from the fantasies of Hollywood writers or sensational journalists. Witchcraft involving ritual murder is practiced in parts of the developing world today in places like Africa, but that does not seem to have anything to do with this case. Modern-day ‘witches’ or Wiccans have nothing to do with historical witchcraft and are generally peaceful environmentalists and feminists who practice a sort of New Age, neo-Pagan religiosity. Again, that does not seem to have anything to do with this case.” Dr. Coy has an even more unsettling assessment. “This looks more like the work of some psychopath with a type of religious fixation,” he says. “Crosses have appeared in the iconography of so-called Satanists in fictional works and on the covers of heavy metal albums,” Dr. Coy continues, “but they are invariably presented upside down. That does not seem to be how these crosses are oriented. In any case, if some killer or killers were deluded into believing they were carrying out some sort of half-baked Satanic ritual, I would expect them to employ the much more common upside-down pentagram motif.”
Dr. Coy finds the social climate of the early 1970s to be very relevant in regards to the media’s decision to declare Jeannette DePalma’s death occult related. “This seems like media sensationalism to me,” he says. “The early 1970s was a time of media concern with Satanic hippie cults. The press coverage of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966 is one example. The Rolling Stones releasing Their Satanic Majesties Request in 1967 is another. Furthermore, the Manson family murder convictions came down in 1971. Mike Warnke’s 1973 book, The Satanic Seller, a fraudulent memoir about his former life in a Satanic cult, launched a major panic among evangelicals in America—and just in time for the film The Exorcist, which appeared the same year.” With all of these considerations in mind, Dr. Jason P. Coy puts it simply: “I think this is a case of the media jumping to conclusions to sell papers amid the concern with Satanic cults that marked that era.”
To this day, Ed Kisch is still particularly incensed by the Newark Star-Ledger’s claim that the information regarding the occult items supposedly discovered around Jeannette’s body was provided in secret by law enforcement officials. He believes that the catalyst for these rumors getting out of hand lies with the John List homicide case and the overzealous behavior of the Westfield Police Department. “Once a month, the detectives of Union County would get together, and they would share, if they were honest, the types of crimes that were being committed in their communities,” Kisch says. “This was done in the event that certain criminals might possibly commit the same offenses in other neighboring towns. Just around the time that Jeannette DePalma’s body was found, the Westfield Police Department was working on an investigation, and that was the List homicide.”
Nine months before the disappearance of Jeannette DePalma, John Emil List made national headlines after murdering his entire family and vanishing into the ether. A frustrated forty-six-year-old accountant, List lived in nearby Westfield in a Victorian mansion at 431 Hillside Avenue. The nineteen-room home, dubbed “Breeze Knoll,” sat only three miles from the DePalma residence. To those on the outside looking in, the List family seemed to have it all. The teenage List children—Patricia, Frederick and John—were even known to flaunt their supposedly opulent social status to their peers. On the inside, however, things were beginning to unravel. John List was a man apparently cursed with an awkward personality. A favorite subject of gossip amongst List’s Hillside Avenue neighbors was the supercilious man’s habit of wearing a suit and tie while performing mundane tasks, such as mowing the lawn.
These three diagrams illustrate the varying accounts of what was allegedly found near Jeannette DePalma’s body. These images were shown to several occult historians, all of whom agreed that no Satanic symbols or indicators of witchcraft were present. Diagrams by Dan Lurie.
List had difficulty making and keeping friends and had an even harder time securing and sustaining employment. By the autumn of 1971, the List family was in serious financial trouble. John had carefully hidden from his family the fact that he owed $11,000 on the mortgage, and during his many periods of unemployment, List could not bring himself to tell his wife, Helen, that he had once again been fired. Instead, he would wake up every morning, dress himself in a suit and leave the house as if he were going to work. In reality, he would drive to the local bus station and read until the early evening. Eventually, List was able to secure employment selling mutual funds for the State Mutual Life Assurance Company based in Long Island, but Helen, a lifelong homemaker, was still spending more than her husband could ever hope to earn. To make ends meet, List took out a second mortgage and stole money from his elderly mother’s bank account. A man of intense pride, John List could not face the prospect of losing his home. The possibility of having to rely on welfare to support his family was akin to torture.
Another serious issue was Helen List’s steadily deteriorating health. John’s wife of nearly twenty years had contracted tertiary syphilis from her previous husband, and the disease had slowly been destroying her mind and body ever since. Helen initially hid her affliction from John
until after they had wed. For John, this had become a source of great resentment toward his wife, along with the fact that she had lied about being pregnant in the hopes that he would quickly marry her. By the mid-1960s, Helen List’s syphilis had ravaged her brain to the point where she lost sight in her right eye and was experiencing severe neurological episodes that caused her to black out and fall. In addition, Helen’s personality had become a casualty of the disease. Once an attractive young woman, Helen List was now middle-aged, disheveled and hostile—especially toward her mother-in-law, Alma. In order to afford the down payment for this grand new home, John resorted to asking his mother for money. In return for this favor, Alma would be permitted to move into the small apartment on the house’s third floor. List’s wife and mother were constantly at odds with each other, often putting John in the middle. Doctors eventually recommended that Helen be committed to an asylum, but John balked at the idea.
In his eyes, List’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Patricia, was quickly becoming a serious problem as well. Once an average teenager, Patricia was now beginning to take an interest in theater and the occult—two attractions that deeply disturbed her father. List’s eldest child was also actively using recreational drugs such as marijuana and LSD. For most people, the idea of a teenager wanting to become an actor or actress while occasionally dabbling in drug use seems almost normal; the concept is conceivably tame by today’s standards. However, for John Emil List, a severely repressed man and stern Christian, the idea of his daughter now identifying herself as a “witch” in addition to her professional acting ambitions was simply too much.
The dark obsessions of young Patricia List may have inadvertently set off a wave of “Satanic panic” throughout suburban New Jersey in the early 1970s. Collection of the authors.
The beginnings of Patricia’s obsession with black magic began innocuously enough. One afternoon, Patricia’s father discovered the teenager and some friends using a Ouija board. List was initially unsettled, but Patricia assured him that she and her friends were “just playing.”
If Patricia List was “just playing,” it was not for very long.
Soon after, Patricia List began openly telling peers and teachers alike that she was a witch and belonged to a local coven of witches who practiced Satanism. Friends recall Patricia claiming to have had a secret altar located somewhere in Westfield. The teenager also owned a controversial book: Harry E. Wedek’s A Treasury of Witchcraft, which Patricia openly carried while roaming the halls of her high school. Patricia’s drama coach, Edwin Illiano, became concerned for his pupil’s safety and mental well-being. In addition to Patricia’s bizarre ramblings about witchcraft and the devil, the girl had allegedly told Illiano some disturbing things about her father. During a June 1989 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, Illiano claimed that shortly before her death, Patricia List had telephoned him to express concern that her frustrated father was planning to murder the family. Illiano told the newspaper that Patricia had asked him to pay a visit and speak with her father but that he was not able to make it to the List residence that particular evening.
It would be a decision that the forty-three-year-old drama coach would regret for the rest of his life.
On the night of December 7, 1971, Illiano and a companion, Barbara Sheridan, sat in his car, parked in the driveway of the List home. Despite being told several weeks prior that Patricia’s father would be taking his wife and children to North Carolina to visit family for an extended period of time, Illiano had a feeling deep in his stomach that something was terribly wrong. For weeks, he had driven past the house to see if Patricia and her family had returned home from their trip. The first time he drove by, he noticed that all of the lights in the house had been left on. During each subsequent visit, he noticed that more and more lights were flickering out. By now, almost all of the lights in the List house had burned out.
One of List’s neighbors, Shirley Cunnick, noticed Illiano’s car—a car she did not recognize—sitting in the accountant’s driveway and called the Westfield Police Department. When they arrived on the scene shortly thereafter, Illiano told Officers George Zhelesnik and Charles Haller that he was concerned for the safety of the List family. He informed the two policemen that, while List had called to say that the family would be going away on a trip, they reasonably should have returned by now. He also expressed his concern that eighty-five-year-old Alma List might have been left alone in the home and suffered an injury. Zhelesnik and Haller decided to enter the house through an unlocked front window. Despite being told to stay put, Illiano and Sheridan followed close behind.
Inside, the four were greeted by a very unsettling atmosphere. The house was completely dark, necessitating the use of the officers’ flashlights. In addition, it was almost as cold inside the mansion as it was outside. Zhelesnik and Haller assumed that someone had turned the heat all the way down. One further detail made this situation all the more unpleasant. Via an intercom, classical music was being played throughout the entire house. The music reminded Zhelesnik of something that would be played in a funeral parlor.
Upon entering the List home, Zhelesnik, Haller, Illiano and Sheridan carefully made their way over to Breeze Knoll’s ballroom. Illiano had specifically requested that the ballroom be checked when the four were standing outside on the porch. Illiano’s acting troupe used to rehearse in this very same room. Slowly moving closer, Zhelesnik parted the closed curtain in the ballroom’s doorway with his flashlight. Hearing the word “ballroom,” the officers expected to find a grand, ostentatious nook of the house. Instead, they found a cold, bare space occupied by only a few vague shadows. In one corner was a small wooden desk. A cheap acoustic guitar was lying on top. Directly opposite this desk was a large ornate fireplace.
Investigators arrive on the scene only hours after the bodies of Alma, Helen, Patricia, Johnny and Frederick List were discovered. They had all been murdered by the family’s patriarch, John Emil List. Collection of the authors.
Illiano and Sheridan hypnotically watched as the officers’ flashlights danced down the fireplace, past a small novelty pool table and onto a series of lumps gathered together on the floor. Laid out on sleeping bags, these lumps were actually the decomposing bodies of Helen List and her three children. They had all been shot in the head. Judging by the large trail of dried blood leading out from the kitchen, it was apparent that Helen, Patricia, Frederick and young John had all been dragged into the ballroom after being killed. For a chilling final act, the List family’s assailant had individually covered the face of each body with a rag. Zhelesnik raced out of the room into his patrol car. He breathlessly radioed dispatch, “My God, there’s bodies all over the place!”
Over the next several hours, Breeze Knoll became a hotbed of activity. Investigators from the Westfield Police Department and the Union County Prosecutor’s Office swept the scene, while reporters from the Elizabeth Daily Journal took notes and snapped photographs. One such photograph shows a costume witch hat resting on a geographical desk globe only feet away from the bodies. It would later be discovered that Patricia List wore this hat to a Halloween party held in that very same ballroom only days before her death.
For Officer Zhelesnik, moving from room to room within the darkness of the List home brought to mind memories of the film Psycho. It would be quite a while before Zhelesnik would be convinced that no one was waiting behind a door or around a corner, clutching a weapon. As the investigators continued to search Breeze Knoll, they discovered John List’s office. Taped to a filing cabinet, along with a series of other letters, was an envelope addressed to his pastor, Reverend Eugene A. Rehwinkel of Westfield’s Redeemer Lutheran Church. It read:
11-9-71
Dear Pastor Rehwinkel:
I am very sorry to add this additional burden to your work. I know that what has been done is wrong from all that I have been taught, and that any reasons that I might give will not make it right. But you are the one person that I know that while not condo
ning this will at least possibly understand why I had to do this.
I wasn’t earning anywhere near enough to support us. Everything I tried seemed to fall to pieces. True we could have gone bankrupt & maybe gone on welfare.
But that brings me to my next point. Knowing the type of location one would have to live in plus the environment for the children plus the effect on them knowing they were on welfare was just more than I thought they could & would endure. I know that they were willing to cut back but this involved a lot more than that.
With Pat being so determined to get into acting, I was also fearful as to what this might do to her continuing to be a Christian, I’m sure it wouldn’t have helped.
Also with Helen not going to church I knew that this would harm the children eventually in their attendance. I had continued to hope that she would begin to come to church soon. But when I mentioned to her that Mr. Jutzi wanted to pay her an Elders call. (This is not a criticism of Ed) She just blew up & stated that she wanted her name taken off the church rolls. Again this could have only given an adverse result for the children’s continued attendance.
Death on the Devil’s Teeth Page 10