14. Guilty of not only matricide, John Emil List also committed filicide and uxoricide before going on the run for 18 years to escape justice
John Emil List (b. 1925 CE) was a mass murderer and one of the United State’s most wanted fugitives during his 18-year manhunt. Born in Bay City, Michigan, List served in both WWII and the Korean War before settling down as an accountant and marrying Helen Morris Taylor; Helen Taylor was a war-widow and alcoholic, with a child, Brenda, from her previous marriage to a deceased soldier.
On November 9, 1971, List murdered his entire immediate family. Starting by shooting his mother in the face and wife in the back of the head, List waited until his daughter and youngest son returned from school before killing them in an identical fashion to their mother; after making himself lunch, List then drove his eldest son home from soccer before shooting him repeatedly in the chest. Having written letters to work and his children’s schools saying that the family was going on holiday, providing himself with a months head start before the bodies were discovered, List carefully cut himself out of each family photograph in the house and disappeared.
Assuming the new identity of Robert Peter Clark, List remarried in 1985 before being finally apprehended on June 1, 1989, in Virginia, after a neighbor recognized him from a chance airing of List on the then-new television program “America’s Most Wanted”; after learning of his true identity his second wife, Delores Miller Clark, filed immediately for divorce. Charged with five counts of first-degree murder, List defended his actions citing financial problems and that his family was falling away from God; he contested that by killing them, he had ensured their souls a place in Heaven. Rejecting his defense of medical incompetency, List was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole; he died in custody at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey, on March 21, 2002.