Murder and Salutations - By Elizabeth Bright Page 0,49

had a narcissistic selfishness, a will to survive, unmatched at any other age, and John Jr. wouldn’t quit. He crawled desperately away from his father in the parlor. List stood over him and pumped eight bullets into his oldest son. A ninth into the eye and a tenth through the heart were required before the boy would lie still.

List moved his wife’s arm to rest on Freddie’s shoulder, and as the fading light of late afternoon filtered through the stained-glass dome in a thousand colors, he knelt by his family and prayed for their souls. “Almighty, everlasting, and most merciful God, Thou who dost summon and take us out of this sinful and corrupt world to Thyself through death that we may not perish by continual sinning, but pass through death to life eternal, help us, we beseech Thee. . . .”

Walter studied the grainy newspaper photo of the ballroom crypt. “The accountant in him lined up the children by age,” he said to himself.

It was a busy evening for List, making phone calls and methodically checking off items on his planner.

At seven o’clock, he phoned his Lutheran pastor and good friend Eugene Rehwinkel, apologizing because he would be unable to teach Sunday school class for at least a week. He explained to the director of the high school drama club that unfortunately Patty would have to miss rehearsals for a while, and so would be unable to continue as understudy in A Streetcar Named Desire. On stationery from a failed business enterprise, John E. List, Career Builder, he wrote to Eva Morris, his ailing mother-in-law whom the family was supposedly visiting in North Carolina:Mrs. Morris,

By now you no doubt know what has happened to Helen and the children. I’m very sorry that it had to happen. But because of a number of reasons, I couldn’t see any other solution.

I just couldn’t support them anymore and I didn’t want them to go into poverty. Also, at this time I know that they were all Christians. I couldn’t be sure of that in the future as the children grow up.

Pastor Rehwinkel may add a few more thoughts.

With my sincere sympathy,

John E. List

Walter scowled at the faded words in the newspaper column. List wrote similar letters to his sister-in-law and to his mother’s sister. By now you know what has happened to Mother and the rest of the family. . . . Please accept my sincere condolences. John. List spent the rest of the evening explaining his logic for killing his family in a blizzard of letters to family and his pastor, but he had outlined his reasons for the murders in the first note to his mother-in-law. He had lost his job at the bank and, consumed by failure, spent his days at the library when he said he was looking for work. Despite his recent efforts as an insurance salesman, the family was in dire straits. The fear of going bankrupt, moving, and putting the children on welfare weighed heavily on him. But his greater burden was the fear his children would go to hell. Helen refused to attend church, and the children were growing cynical about God. Patty’s passion for acting indicated an immoral existence incompatible with a good Christian life. “So that is the sum of it,” he wrote to his pastor. “If any one of these had been the condition we might have pulled through, but this was just too much. At least I’m certain that all have gone to heaven now. If things had gone on, who knows if that would be the case.

“I know that what I have done is wrong . . . but you are the one person that I know that, while not condoning this, will at least partially understand why I felt that I had to do this.”

It was important to kill his mother, too, he added as an afterthought. “Knowing that she is also a Christian, I felt it best that she be relieved of the troubles of this world that would have hit her . . . to save Mother untold anguish over that result I felt it best that she be relieved from this vale of tears. . . . Originally I had planned this for Nov. 1—All Saints Day. But travel arrangements were delayed. I thought it would be an appropriate day for them to get to heaven.”

List added one more thing for his pastor. “It may seem cowardly to have always shot from behind, but I