History of Sorts

You just never know what goes around in someone’s mind or behind closed doors. You may look at someone in admiration because he appears to be such a good and wholesome human being, but deep inside lurks a monster.

John List was an outwardly normal and successful father. A Sunday school teacher and Boy Scout troop leader, List was a strict disciplinarian who insisted his children follow extremely rigid rules.

John Emil List (September 17, 1925 – March 21, 2008) was an American multiple murderer and long-time fugitive. On November 9, 1971, he killed his wife, mother, and three children in their home in Westfield, New Jersey, then disappeared. He had planned the murders so meticulously that nearly a month passed before anyone suspected that anything was amiss.

The larger world had never heard of John Emil List until his neighbors began to wonder why the lights in his family’s house in Westfield, N.J., were going…