John List, the real-life Keyser Söze who inspired ‘The Usual Suspects’
One cold night in the autumn of 1971, police forced their way into Breeze Knolls, an extensive 19-room Victorian home in Westfield, New Jersey. They had been called there by the neighbours who had noticed the lights in the house had burned out, and nobody had seen a single member of the List family for over a month. As the officers moved through the abode, which was cold as ice, they couldn’t help feeling unnerved by the eerie organ music playing on a loop over the intercom in every room. A bad feeling settled into the pit of each officer’s stomach, and it didn’t take long for their worst fear to be realised.
In the house’s main ballroom, four bodies lay still on the floor, encased in sleeping bags, their dead eyes staring up at the stained-glass skylight. The deceased were Helen List and her three teenage children, Fred, John Jr, and Patricia. Each victim had been shot once in the head, except 15-year-old John Jr, who had suffered a much grislier fate of being shot 10 times. Helen’s mother-in-law, Alma, was also found in an attic apartment with a single bullet in the head.
From the start, this gruesome family killing was no mystery. It was evident from day one who had committed the murders: John List Sr. The devout Lutheran accountant was nowhere to be seen, but had previously cancelled milk deliveries and announced the family was going on a holiday. More unsettlingly, he had also torn his face out of every family photo in the home and left a confession in his study, addressed to his pastor.
Within this missive, he admitted to losing his job and owing $11,000 on his mortgage. Stealing from his mother’s bank accounts hadn’t stemmed the flow, and he knew the bank would foreclose on the family home soon enough. So, he only saw one way out: killing his whole family so they didn’t have to live a life of poverty and shame because of him. By murdering them, he reasoned, they were going to a better place, and by the time he reunited with them in Heaven, they’d have forgiven him.
Police found List’s vehicle at Kennedy airport, but there was no record of him taking a flight. With no pictures of him to go on, the investigation quickly stalled, and it seemed like List had successfully pulled off his Houdini act. A year later, the house was mysteriously burned to the ground in an arson attack, and the trail went stone cold. Indeed, to use the parlance of Verbal Kint in the movie inspired by List’s mysterious case, “And like that, he’s gone”.
Fast-forward to the mid-’90s, and young screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie was faced with a dilemma. He had written an unproduced screenplay about a man who murders his family and then disappears off the face of the earth, inspired by List’s unnerving case, and he wanted to get it made. However, his moviemaking partner, Bryan Singer, had also devised an idea he loved: What if five criminals who didn’t know each other met in a police lineup?
Being an enterprising sort, McQuarrie simply decided to mash the ideas together, with his List-inspired screenplay eventually forming the basis for the unseen villain of his and Singer’s 1995 twisty crime classic, The Usual Suspects. In the film, Keyser Söze is a mythic figure in the underworld, described as “a spook story criminals tell their kids at night”. He was supposedly a Turkish drug dealer who gunned down his wife and children rather than let them fall into the hands of his Hungarian rivals, before exacting vengeance on that crew and disappearing into the ether, never to be heard from directly again.
Naturally, anyone who has seen the film knows that Söze’s true identity, or whether he even existed in the first place, is left up for debate. One thing is for sure, though: the shadow of List’s crimes loom large over the character for anyone who knows about McQuarrie’s inspiration. However, thank God for small mercies, because real life had a more concrete resolution to List’s case than McQuarrie and Singer’s open-ended Söze narrative.
In 1989, America’s Most Wanted took an interest in List’s case, and it was determined to finally find the man after nearly two decades of him in the wind. Amazingly, the show commissioned a bust of List, using age-progression technology to allow artist Frank Bender to imagine what the murderer could look like 18 years after his disappearance. The bust included his oversized horn-rimmed glasses and a distinctive surgery scar behind one ear.
Astonishingly, when it was shown on television, a woman in Denver, Colorado, phoned in to say it looked like her old neighbour Robert Clark, who had since moved to Richmond, Virginia. Clark was a happily married accountant who was devoted to his Lutheran church and was experiencing financial issues. Mind-bogglingly, List had created a whole new life for himself under an assumed name, but had repeated the same mistakes and found himself in the same situation that predicated the murder of his first family.
Clark adamantly insisted he was not John List for as long as he could, but when his fingerprints matched the ones on file, it was game over. He was sentenced to five life terms in 1990 for the five murders he committed, and he wound up dying from pneumonia in 2008 in a hospital near the New Jersey State Prison. He had outlived his family by 37 years, but insisted until his dying day that forgiveness awaited him in Heaven.
