AI Summary
5 min readJohn List, a quiet accountant and Sunday school teacher, murdered all five members of his family on Tuesday, November 9, 1971, inside their home in Westfield, New Jersey. He shot them one at a time, then made himself a sandwich, ran his errands, ate dinner, washed the dishes, and went to sleep. He told himself the entire time that he was saving them.
The Day Itself
The morning began before dawn. John List sat at his desk in the dark with a loaded pistol, waiting for his wife Helen to come downstairs. He had been planning the day for weeks, even settling on an earlier date—All Saints Day—before rescheduling. When the children came down, they foraged for breakfast and went off to school as usual. Their father watched them from his study window, giving nothing away.
At 8:30, the milkman found a note taped to the refrigerator saying the family was going away. A few minutes later, Helen came down and sat at the kitchen table waiting for the kettle to boil. John crossed the hall and shot her in the side of the face as she began to turn toward him. He fired several more times. Then he climbed to the third floor where his mother Alma was in her small apartment kitchen, still in her nightgown, her toast in the toaster. She asked what the noise was. He shot her once above the left eye. On the counter, her toast popped up.
The Errands and the Children
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:55) **The Day Begins: John List's Morning Preparations** - John List waits in the dark with a loaded pistol as his family wakes up on November 9, 1971.
- 2 (06:01) **First Two Murders: Helen and Alma** - List kills his wife Helen and then his mother Alma in quick succession before 9 AM.
- 3 (08:53) **The Cleanup and Errands Begin** - After the first two murders, List tidies the kitchen and begins covering his tracks.
- 4 (11:43) **The Snag: Patricia Comes Home Early** - List's daughter Patricia calls from a luncheonette feeling sick, forcing him to pick her up and kill her.
- 5 (14:45) **Killing Frederick and John Jr.** - List picks up his youngest son Frederick from work, kills him, then struggles to kill his oldest son John Jr.
- 6 (17:12) **The Aftermath: Arranging the Bodies** - With all five family members dead, List arranges the bodies in the ballroom and prays over them.
- 7 (20:27) **The Letter to the Pastor** - List writes a five-page letter to his pastor explaining his reasons for the murders.
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
“MK Confidential” opens with the words of a killer. John List narrates the morning of Tuesday, November 9, 1971, the day his carefully laid plans to kill each member of his family will become reality. By the end of it, his mother, wife, and three children will all lie dead on the floor of Breeze Knoll.
Megyn Kelly steps through the day, piece by piece, as John bookends his day with murder — his wife and mother before breakfast, his children after lunch — and runs through a list of ordinary errands befitting a man about to leave town. He fields two unexpected phone calls and more resistance than he anticipated. He cooks, eats, and cleans up after dinner in the kitchen where he shot his wife. He writes letters detailing their deaths. Then, the next morning, he vanishes.
Weeks later, the FBI puts out John List’s face across America, on a flier that describes a six-foot, gray-haired accountant, armed and considered very dangerous. Tips come back by the hundreds, with sightings from Oregon to England. Each one turns out to be somebody else. John List, who murdered his entire family and then slept soundly in his stately Victorian house, simply steps out of the known world. This is Episode 3 of the John List story.
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