Children in Westfield were lying awake at night, worried that John List — who had vanished after killing his family — might be hiding in their attic or crawl space.
Rumors were rampant, but clues to his whereabouts were scarce. Police and FBI agents were searching desperately for any hint of where the mass murderer was hiding.
But the man himself? He was living the quiet life more than 1,500 miles away.
He would later say that life in Westfield, with the family he decided to kill, had been rather stressful. So he wanted to unwind, while at the same time reinventing himself, like “The Great Gatsby,” with a new life story.
In its latest episode, NJ Advance Media’s investigative true crime podcast, “Father Wants Us Dead,” explores the international manhunt for List, who meticulously killed his mother, wife and three children on Nov. 9, 1971. Before disappearing without a trace, he left a letter justifying his actions — right down to explaining that he left his mother crumpled in a storeroom in the attic because “she was too heavy to move.”
In the fifth episode of the podcast, available now wherever you get your podcasts, a psychiatrist who examined List reveals a mental health diagnosis that List himself didn’t understand, even as it shaped his twisted reasoning when he decided to kill.
Reporters Rebecca Everett and Jessica Remo will also take listeners along as they visit sites from List’s second life, meeting people who knew him in the ‘70s and ‘80s as Robert P. Clark, a quiet accountant who said his first wife had died and he had no kids.
Ironically, while List was hiding, his notoriety was reaching new heights: His crimes inspired a horror movie in 1987, “The Stepfather,” featuring a moralizing man who marries into and kills off each family that disappoints him.
While the movie came and went from theaters, List himself remained hiding in plain sight in a new marriage to an unsuspecting woman.
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.
The first five episodes of “Father Wants Us Dead” are available now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Google Podcasts, YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can subscribe on those platforms to be alerted when new episodes drop. Episodes, photos and other information are also available at fatherwantsusdead.com.
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Rebecca Everett may be reached at reverett@njadvancemedia.com.
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