''He didn't take them down.'' Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement, and Your Privacy Choices and Rights (each updated 1/26/2023). Spooky landmark. ''I've seen him angry, really angry, only one time,'' he said. Of course, what List stated were his reasons/motives for the murders and what they really were (whether he was aware or not) could be different. He told Steve Reed, a vice president of the agency, Richmond Placements Inc., that he wanted to live and work in a more vibrant economy. Lists five-pageletter, addressed to hispastor, explained everything, including the way he murdered his family. Lists car, a green 1963 Chevy Impala, was found at John F. Kennedy Airport three days after the bodies were discovered. ''And I came in to the hotel from the mountains looking for something to do.''. He was a man who would never, ever stand out in a crowd, said Carole Burton, manager of the east Denver apartment complex where Clark lived from September, 1978, until November, 1985. On most weekends Mr. Clark gardened and watched television. On Nov. 23, 1971, List snapped creeping up behind his wife, Helen, as she was reading at the kitchen table and shooting her in the head. Delores Hall is an American stage and television actress who made her Broadway debut as a replacement in the ensemble of Hair. Another way of characterising them might be to state that he was sick of his mad wife (who some sources say was a public embarrassment to him by getting publicaly drunk and remarking on his lack of sexual prowess, etc), was indifferent to the children, had embezzled the mothers money and needed to off her, was losing the house, and had no job. Academic Background. Then he sat down and wrote a confession letter to his pastor explaining his financial problems. All rights reserved (About Us). Austin Goodrich, an ABCNEWS consultant who is writing a book with John List, contributed material for this report. Two neighbors, Joseph and Jacqueline Stefano, told reporters that Mr. Clark had a particular interest in World War II and Hitler. List then went upstairs and killed his 84-year-old mother Alma. Heleft the house everymorning,pretending to go to work when he was really whiling away time reading or sleeping in the train station. His salary rose to $490 a week. FF does the how they were caught: here we follow through on how they were punished, wherein the aforementioned politics/policys engaged. Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site. R. C. Miller is not in business there, and there is no evidence it ever existed. On Nov. 9, 1971, after sending his children off to school, List took his two handguns out to the car to load them, then walked into the kitchen and shot his wife from behind as she was drinking coffee. He defended himself saying that he was not mentally stable. In the 12 hours he spent in the house post murders, he probably relished seeing the deceiving, syphilitic bitch who ruined his life dead. What on earth has your comment got to do with the price of fish? Attorney David Baugh, who He was working the night shift and I cleaned the kitchen. WebTamon Pendergrass is an American celebrity, popular for being the son of renowned American singer Theodore Pendergrass. Attorney David Baugh, who represented List in Virginia, offers support.AP Photo/Steve Helber. The neighbor, Wanda R. Flanery, may have been the first person to harbor suspicions about Mr. Clark's identity. The Lindbergh Kidnapping: Forensic Files Lost Episode, Dawn Fehring: A Missionary Dies Too Young, Ron Gillette: An Air Force Man Who Didnt Exactly Aim High. Eventually, he took a decently paying job with a paper company at Kalamazoo, Michigan, and settled there with his family. Mr. Undiscovered jackpot? In the years after the methodical murders of his wife, mother and three children in New Jersey, John Emil List painstakingly created a new identity for himself in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Taking a Course and Doing Tax. In 1975, Clark joined St. Pauls Lutheran Church in downtown Denver. ''He was living meagerly, said he needed a full-time job,'' Mr. Oldson added. Although Helen reportedly suffered from the effects of syphilis contracted from her previoushusband, the family appeared stable and high-functioning to their friends and neighbors. He says he wanted to spare them the shame of losing their New Jersey mansion and to make sure they got to heaven. '', Mr. Clark, the friend added, showed no particular sensitivity about his past and tended to be even tempered. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? When asked about his family, ''he would make some allusion to Michigan or Minnesota,'' Mr. Bassler added. A 2005 Freddie Mac-Roper poll also flagged by the FDIC concluded that more than 6 in 10 homeowners delinquent in their mortgage payments are not aware of services that mortgage lenders can offer to individuals having trouble with their mortgage., Hardly atypical. So true extremism of any kind always seems to hurt some innocent people. A deeply tragic case. Mrs. Flanery did not call the police, however. Next he went upstairs, to where his 84-year-old mother was having breakfast, kissed her ("like Judas," he told Downtown), and shot her in the head. who writes: In 1895, he bought twenty-two acres of land a few miles northeast, and built a grand Victorian house atop a gentle knoll .. Wittke called his estate Breeze Knoll. She turned pale and kept looking at it, saying, Oh, my! A couple of sourcesclaim that the ornate housecontainedaskylight made ofLouis Comfort Tiffany stained glass valuable enough to bail List out of his financial problems. I guess I was thinking, well Ive started, now Ive got to finish it.. Trivia. Im convinced hes just pulling my chain, Gluck recalled. We don't know if some of them are still It was one day out of all these many many years.'' This is a digitized version of an article from The Timess print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. ''Bob's job grew, but he didn't,'' Mr. Bassler said. He was a devout Lutheran layman and his fingerprints matched those of the fugitive John E. List. is delores miller clark still alive. Mr. Clark started doing work on the side for H & R Block. Internet research turned up a number of statistics that surely would have providedList with some consolation if he faced his sameproblems post-2000. Mrs. Stefano also recalled an evening at the Clark home when the conversation turned to the couple's origins. 'Been Through That Before'. Moreover, his wife was a heavy drinker and she had also contracted Syphilis from her first marriage. Oh, my! . She had married in her 30s, and John was her only child. Finally, with the prospect of foreclosure threatening to expose his financial failure, List made his terrible decision to kill his family but not himself. The job was for an entry-level staff accountant at a salary of $24,000. Breaths will not be held, I say *largely* irrelevant because Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal are more than tangential to some of the issues of justice that were interested in here. "I don't know whether it was only because he was still jerking that I wanted to make sure that he didn't suffer, or that it was sort of a way of relieving tension, after having completed what I felt was my assignment for the day," List said. In interviews in the last week, many new details have emerged about Mr. Clark's life over the last 20 years in Colorado and Virginia. Factor inregular maintenance like painting plusthe HVAC crises liableto befall a Victorian-era structure, and youre asking for some none-too-stately financial drama. They had been dead nearly a month, and by that time John Emil List was long gone. Because the records are accessible just to executives and are not discarded, ''Bob must have taken it out of the file when he left us,'' a vice president, Robert Bassler, said. Then he went downstairs, dragged his wife's body into the ballroom and began scrubbing up the blood so the children would not realize what was going on when they got back from school. He chose not tocommit suicide because he considered it a sin. The authorities couldnt find List despite a nationally publicized manhunt led by the FBI; the fugitivehad given himself toogenerous a head start. One doesnt need to like the man himself Perhaps the strongest illustration of this is the mismatch between media mores and voters: the overwhelmingly liberal (anti-Trump) media being vastly unrepresentative of the people as expressed in the popular vote: Biden 51.3%; Trump 46.9%. Mr. Clark also changed jobs at this point, becoming a cook at the Piney Country Club in Parker, southeast of Denver, where he helped Mr. Wetmore obtain a cleaning job. List might look now. Four months later, his wife joined him in Midlothian, a suburb southwest of Richmond. John List passed away on March 21, 2008, after suffering from pneumonia. He joined a Lutheran congregation and ran a car pool for shut-in church members. ''He was an introvert galore, if there is such a thing,'' Mr. Oldson said. Mr. Clark, he said, was living in a trailer park across the street from the hotel. Out of the marriage that he despised, out of the family responsibility, out to a new life. But as listeners heard in episode 7, when his second wife, Delores Miller Clark, came to visit him in the Henrico County Jail after his arrest, List admitted who he By 1971, he was still leaving for work every morning, but unknown to his family he was unemployed and unable to pay the bills. ''I learned not to ask people personal questions, or you get your head blown off,'' Mr. Wetmore said. He was born as the only child in the highly religious German-American household. Lists subsequent FBI arrest at his accounting office made for scintillatingnews around the globe and electrifiedAmericas Most Wantedratings. Moran said the first two killings occurred sometime in the morning. At the time, said Robert Wetmore, a 72-year-old retired ranch hand, Clark was working at the Holiday Inn in Golden, just west of Denver. Education. And I picked up a typewriter, and Bobby saw me. John Sr. drove over to his school and watched him playing in a soccer game. In a letter to Mrs. Flanery, her neighbor in Aurora, in December, Mrs. Clark wrote that the apartment ''is going to rob us of everything we own.''. He snapped at me, No family! Wetmore recalled. Its not a good read.full of his BS and tons of grammatical errors and misspellings. He lined up the four bodies in the ballroom (he said his mother's body was too heavy to move), put music on the internal intercom, and cleaned up meticulously. Bob West, said Clark became a pillar of the church during the 11 years he attended, and even served on the board. John was convicted of five counts of first degree murder in April 1990 and was imprisoned with five terms of consecutive life imprisonment. Mr. Oldson said he did not remember Mr. Clark's having references. ''There were just some certificates hanging on the wall from a staff accountant we used to have, but who is now deceased,'' Mr. Joyner said. . Mr. Joyner said Mr. Clark was a hard worker who often arrived at his office, in a two-story brick building in a shopping mall across from a J. C. Penney store, before 8 o'clock and worked straight through till 5, taking lunch at his desk. Thats all for this post. Mr. Clark took with him no furniture or personal possessions other than boxes of tax materials, a neighbor said. Little is known of Peggy, who stopped talking to her father in 1975 and hasnt spoken out about him since. That same year, Clark went to a church social Why are we still having these debates? He later moved to California, and then Detroit, where he worked as an accountant in a local firm. Tonights interview marks Chungs last appearance for ABC before she heads for CNN. On June 19, 1975, Mr. Clark joined St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Denver. I didnt meet him until he moved in.. She had been previously married and had a daughter. I have to say though the wife had it coming for duping him and belittling him throughout the marriage. He dyed his hair and changed his name to establish new credit accounts and a phony Social Security number. He was apprehended 18 years later in 1989 and was sentenced to five terms At a church singles party in 1977, Clark met Delores Miller, a 40-year-old divorcee. "I grew up with the idea that you should provide for your family and to do that you had to be a success in the job that you had or you're a failure, and that was not a good thing to be," he said. ''It's still not true.''. The morning of November 7, 1971 began in a usual fashion. John List met Helen Morris Taylor, a young widow of an American enlisted man who had died in the Korean War. He went on to wed again, join a new family and live in peace and anonymity for nearly two decades. List had sent word to school that he was taking his children to visit relatives, Moran said. Zealotry is a pejorative term: zealots, as fanatics, are necessarily bad. In 1989, America's Most Wanted featured List and a forensic sculptor's impression of how he would look then, 18 years after the murders. John Lists friend wrote a book where it mentions they divorced and she was living in poverty. ''The sign says, '35 miles an hour,' his foot comes off the pedal,'' the friend added. John Emil List was born 63 years ago in Bay City, Mich., the son of a wealthy German immigrant grocer who had married, for the second time, late in life. WebFrom 1979 to 1986, he was the comptroller at a paper box manufacturer outside Denver. He believed that it was his failure as a man to be unable to provide for his family. He later completed his masters degree in accounting and worked as an accountant in the military. Even now a chill runs through James Moran, Westfields retired police chief, when he recalls the scene in the sparsely furnished, 18-room mansion List had bought for $50,000 in 1966, using money from an inheritance. Delores Miller Clark (m. he met an Army PX clerk named Delores Miller and married her in 1985. John and I were classmates and were on the same baseball team. Instead she showed the newspaper to Mrs. Clark. He was 82. WebSearching obituaries is a great place to start your family tree research. Sometimes we ought to be discomforted to rouse us from complacency. At a church singles party in 1977, Clark met Delores Miller, a 40-year-old divorcee. "I remember talking about funerals and cremation and burials. In my 75 years of life, every overly religious person I have met, with a few exceptions, eventually show that they betray those around them in some form. He spent his days at the train station reading, napping, and wondering how to get his family out of their financial mess. ''I spent a lot of my life on skid row and in cow camps,'' Mr. Wetmore, 71 years old, said in an interview this week. ''Delores said it wasn't Bob,'' Mrs. Flanery recalled. In the afternoon, he killed his children as they came home first his daughter Patty, a budding actress at 16; then his youngest, 13-year-old Frederic; and finally 15-year-old John, his namesake and his favorite. That was low. I guess I finally decided the only way to save them from that was to kill them.. But even if it's all true, this is still not a man with a history of murder, but a man with a murder in his history. Additionally, the financial burden on the family was increasing, causing him severe psychological distress. And he yelled, 'Put that thing down before your eyeball falls out.' Wertheimergave him life without parole. While List wouldnt meet the legal threshold for madness, he was unquestionably deeply disturbed: mass murder as well as a later life of lies and deceit. But the wife was face up (albeit with a cloth covering placed later), indicating contempt. I told my son-in-law to call the FBI and give them Bob and Delores address in Virginia.. By then, he owned a 1974 Volkswagen and had gotten an accounting job "I'm sure that if we recognize each other that we'll like each other's company just as we did here, when times were better.". He recollected that Mr. Clark wore ''things that didn't match'' and seemed to have been ''living hand to mouth, doing bookkeeping work. Her illness left astronomical medical bills, he'd tell me. It especiallybothered him that his eldest, 16-year-oldPatricia, was interested in becoming an actress. For the first time, she has her own tour bus. Although he sincerely believed in heaven and that his dead family would be saved, his own survival is proof of false consciousness. JoJo Siwa View this post on Instagram Delores had mixed emotions about leaving, recalled Flanery, who said they had been neighbors and friends for five years. You understand what I'm saying? List was a member of the U.S. Army during the Second World War. He was a religious man. Any prospective John Lists of the new millenniumsurely could see that their problems were shared by countless homeowners around the U.S. and the world. In a statement, she said: ''I hope this is not true, and if it is, that he was so stressed out that something snapped. '', Mr. Clark formed his own consulting firm, Robert Clark Services. That was the only time I ever saw Bob show any anger.. WebJohn List may refer to: John A. If it werent for the mother and kids, Id feel a little sorry for him. List died in 2008, a one-of-a-kind killer who disposed of his family amidadilemma that seems fairly prosaic in light ofthe last decade or so. 24/7 coverage of breaking news and live events. The couple had three children together, while Helens daughter Brenda left home in 1960 after her marriage. Delores called me on this past Mothers Day, Flanery said. He says today he felt he was letting the family down. (Although largely irrelevant to this blog, I regard the US media as overwhelmingly anti-Trump, simply unable to acknowledge that he achieved anything positive, which he certainly, objectively, did. I was in despair, List says. Obituaries can vary in the amount of information they contain, but many of them are genealogical goldmines, including information such as: names, dates, place of birth and death, marriage information, and family relationships. Jeanne, thanks for the kinds words and the research! The Undoing 'Most Wanted,' A Favorite Program. The pastor, the Rev. Worse still was that List, an avid churchgoer, was not immediately caught. Still more ironic, if List had become President, he could have Xed even more people, and got paid to do it. He was 82 years old at the time of his demise. Bustthe case. Moran said List had told people that his wife was an alcoholic spendthrift who nagged him constantly. There were more problems. In the depressed economy around Denver, Mr. Clark did not do well on his own. WebDelores E. Clark Richmond, Virginia Oct 27, 1930 Jan 21, 2017 Plant Memorial Trees Not the right person? She started working one day a week in a beauty salon. Ten days after a creepy, glass-eyed bust of John List was shown on Americas Most Wanted, Westfield residents had not heard of a single promising lead. At this point, five years after the murders, Mr. Clark took the step of seeking full-time employment in his own field. He stayed around the house, and ''Delores told me a couple of times that if Bob didn't go out and get a job, she'd go crazy or leave him,'' Mrs. Flanery recounted. Of course, facts can be used selectively. Perhaps if Listknew back in 1971 that, 45 years in the future,an American who filed for bankruptcy protection four timeswould nonetheless be electedleader of the free world, he could have sucked it up, started over,and eventually made the Listfamily great again. They were married a month later. Not sure what youre saying here. WebView the profiles of people named Delores Clark. He insinuated that it had been a bad experience.''. Maybe not. The bodies of the three children were positioned face down, usually indicating some degree of shame or discomfort. Based on information gleaned from dozens of interviews and hundreds of pages of police and FBI documents, Father Wants Us Dead is an in-depth and chilling narrative from two reporters with more than 25 years of combined experience. What a sorry attempt at humor using President Trump at the end. He even had turned the thermostat down to 50 degrees to preserve the bodies.. Its first entry is R. C. Miller, a business he said was in Wheatridge, Colo., a suburb north of Denver. '', Mr. Clark is deeply religious and law-abiding. The FBI says that Clark is the alias List developed when he fled to Colorado after the Nov. 9, 1971, slayings in Westfield, N.J., an affluent suburb 15 miles west of New York City. Dr. Sheldon Miller, who examined List after his arrest last year, described him Friday as a man who had already been hit by the loss of his job and then learned that his I did what I thought was best, she said. ''I dismissed it because I felt it was not true,'' she said. The article had a sketch of how List might look now, and it was a dead ringer for Bob. 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All content you upload or otherwise submit to this site do n't know some., who represented List in Virginia, offers support.AP Photo/Steve Helber, contributed material for this.. When he was a heavy drinker and she had married in her 30s, John! When the conversation turned to the couple had three children were positioned face down, usually some... In Virginia, offers support.AP Photo/Steve Helber 2008, after suffering from pneumonia otherwise submit to is delores miller clark still alive site in and... Of first degree murder in April 1990 and was imprisoned with five terms of life!