John List House

If you’ve heard enough about tragic family murders, maybe stop about here.

In November of 1971, John List killed his entire immediate family in their New Jersey home, including his wife, his mother, and two children.

He then proceeded to go watch his 15-year-old son play a soccer game, only to shoot and kill him when they got home. Then, he lined up all the bodies (except his mother’s) in the ballroom, which had a signed Tiffany’s stained glass skylight worth at least $100,000 at the time, tuned the radio to a religious station, turned on all the lights, cut out his face from a family photo, and fled.

The bodies and crime scene weren’t discovered until a month later when schoolmates, neighbors, and teachers started wondering where the family was.

 Meanwhile, List had settled in Denver under a false name, working as a controller at a factory and running a carpool service at his Lutheran church. He met a woman there in 1985 and married her, and wasn’t caught and arrested until 1989.

He never took full accountability. A new house was erected on the property a few short years later in 1974 after a suspected arson destroyed the original (but it honestly looks pretty similar to the original and is just an eight-minute drive to the infamous house threatened by “The Watcher”).

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