Ten days after the murders, a policeman writing parking tickets at JFK airport found List’s old Impala, but the abandoned car raised no red flags. List had planned the murders so meticulously that nobody realized something was wrong at Breezy Knoll until police discovered the five bodies on December 7, almost a month later. The headlines trumpeted THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY. Overnight, List entered the upper echelons of twentieth-century mass killers that the media tracked like a home run contest.
Walter took a sip of cold black coffee and rubbed his eyes to focus. The newspapers described a massive, international manhunt for List that became an embarrassment to law enforcement.
No wonder they couldn’t find him, Walter thought. They didn’t know what they were looking for.
The FBI spent more than $1 million pursuing reported sightings of List across all fifty states, Europe, and South America. New Jersey police and prosecutors interviewed dozens of potential witnesses. The police catalogued more than 150 pieces of evidence. But the investigation went nowhere. Detectives resorted to black humor to overcome the shame. Vacationing police sent postcards to the department from Florida, Barbados, and elsewhere: Wish you were here. Your good pal, John Emil List. Having a ball. Nice to finally have a vacation without the kids! John E. List. The trail had long gone cold. The last significant evidence was the car discovered at the airport eighteen years before. In the police evidence room, mold grew on the dried blood on the victims’ clothes, and the garments were discarded.
Walter looked up from the yellowed newspapers, his concentration broken. He heard Bender’s voice and the voices of two women. It had only been an hour, but it felt like days had passed since he’d immersed himself in the case.
“How’s it going?” Bender appeared at the kitchen table.
“Quite well.”
The sculptor’s eyes gleamed. “What else do you need?”
There was a lot of digging Walter could do. He could talk to the police and FBI investigators who spent years on the case. He could study the police file, read the mountain of interviews, look over the hundreds of photographs and pieces of evidence, review the psychological evaluations of List. He could reinterview potential witnesses, praying their memories hadn’t evaporated.
Walter met Bender’s eyes and said he needed nothing else. The yellowing newspaper accounts were sufficient. The grainy old newspaper photographs of the murder scene were particularly helpful. He didn’t wish to read anything or talk to anybody. The killer had directly communicated to Walter all he needed to know.
“The profile is done,” he said. “He thinks he’s the smartest man in the world, and he pulled off the perfect crime, he’s fooled everyone,” Walter said. “But in point of fact he’s not difficult to read.”
List’s extraordinary confessions, thousands of words of admitted guilt, were elaborate, carefully constructed deceptions, he said. “List spouts ink like a squid, to obscure himself from his pursuers.” But unknowingly, he had left indelible documentation of the truth in a special language.
List had written out his motive and his fate in blood and bullets in the stone-walled rooms of Breezy Knoll.
CHAPTER 17. THE MASK OF THE INVISIBLE MAN
Sunlight and traffic noise flooded the dim studio, startling the gallery of grinning, frontal-nude blondes and somber heads of the dead. “Rich, let’s go for a long walk! It’s a beautiful day.” Bender stood in the open door, a hazy dark shape within the blinding halo of light.
“My dear boy, my exercise is inhaling. Do I look like a sophomore on the cross-country team? ” Walter chuckled from his chair, quite pleased with himself. The flexible lines of his mouth tugged downward around the cigarette-like tent stakes.
“C’mon, Rich!”
The thin man rose slowly. “Well, then. I suppose one could.”
They walked down South Street. They were an odd pair, the short, loud, muscular, tattooed man firing questions at the tall, blue-suited, balding gentleman with stiff Victorian airs.
Bender wanted Walter’s insights into List’s character-character that would have helped shape the contours of the killer’s face all these years later.
“I need to know what John List was like,” Bender said. “How would John List stand on this corner? What would be the expression on his face?” As if on command, the tall man in the suit stood rigidly and tipped his long jaw into a double chin, like a game of charades in reverse.
“Here, let me show you which facial muscles stay tight and which lengthen.” The thin man pushed his owlish black glasses back on his nose and appeared sterner than usual.
Bender’s voice rose a pitch. “Rich, what would his face look like? I mean, he’s sixty-four years old now. In his early forties, he had dark hair with a widow’s peak of M-pattern baldness. I see him almost completely bald now, with tufts of gray hair on the side.”
Walter nodded agreement. “Yes. And what little hair he has left will be carefully trimmed, very neat. He is still an accountant and careful about his appearance in a professional way.”
“We know he has a scar behind his ear from mastoid surgery,” Bender said. The artist had interviewed craniofacial surgeons at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School to document the aging process in the facial tissue, brow, eyelids, bone. Bender had also spent a few days in Westfield, watching the men of List’s generation on the streets, and in church. He studied the faces, eyes, and mouths, their paunches and how they treated their wives. He had already made a rough clay head of List and sent a photograph of it to Westfield police for comment.
Bender had learned from the Philadelphia surgeons that the mastoid scar, though softened with age, would still show unless List had plastic surgery.
“I figure he wouldn’t be the type to have plastic surgery,” Bender said. “Or the type to go to the gym and work out.”
“Exactly,” Walter said. “He was a meat-and-potatoes man and would remain one. He’s not from the jogging generation. He’s a very rigid personality. It’s the extreme rigidity, at a pathological level, that enables him to kill his family.”
“So he’ll have jowls now, a slackened jaw, and look much older.”
“Quite.”
They sat in a riverfront park crowded with its Saturday morning population of Frisbees, romping and sniffing dogs, young professionals, and homeless men. Walter lit a cigarette. Bender’s eyes wandered to a tall blond woman chasing a black Labrador, and came back into focus.
“Do you think he’s very religious? How will that alter how he looks or behaves?”
Walter frowned. “This has nothing to do with religion. Many terrible things are done in the name of God. It’s just a cover. Behind his Caspar Milquetoast churchgoing façade, he was a pure psychopath all about power. He was fed up with his dominating wife and mother, the little brats who wouldn’t listen to him, and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. He wanted a new life and he wanted it on his terms.”
The thin man’s eyes shone with excitement. “This is the typical personality type of a man who destroys his family. It’s a man who chooses a stronger, older woman who criticizes him so he will never have to take responsibility for himself. They can become quite pathological about it.”
“So he’s crazy.”
“Oh, no, not at all. He’s extremely rational. He’s something of a snob, feels quite superior to other people. He lives beyond his means, the world starts to collapse on him. His first move is to plunder his mother’s money, for years. No conscience. He deserves it, after all.”
Bender took a deep breath. “So what pushed him over the edge?”