#john list

The Stepfather will be released on 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray on September 10 via Scream Factory. The 1987 psychological horror-thriller is loosely based on mass murderer John List.

Joseph Ruben (Sleeping with the Enemy, The Good Son) directs from a script by Donald E. Westlake (The Grifters). Terry O'Quinn, Jill Schoelen, and Shelley Hack star.

The Stepfather has been newly restored in 4K with Dolby Vision and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Dual Mono. Special features are listed below.

John List was the child of strict German parents, and grew up to be much the same with his own children and family. His three children were forced to follow strict rules, and faced intense disciplinary action if they disobeyed him. List was also a devout Lutheran, often teaching Sunday school and leading a boy scout troop. From the outside he seemed like an average employee and successful father, but he lacked social skills- often described as cold and aloof- and had a history of losing jobs. When he lost his position as an accountant once again, he refused to admit his failure and hid the family’s pressing financial problems for as long as he could. Eventually though, the family fell behind on their mortgage and faced foreclosure as they lived in an affluent neighborhood and could no longer afford to do so. John List’s shame around this matter contributed, in part, to the cold blooded killings he would soon commit.

List was the perpetrator of the one of the most notorious cases of familicide in the history of criminal justice. Familicide is a classification of murder in which multiple close family members, most often children, spouse, siblings, or parents, are killed in quick succession. On the morning of November 9th, 1971 John Emil List massacred his whole family in their home in Westfield, New Jersey. He had been harboring a deep resentment for his family and had reached his breaking point at last when his wife asked to be taken off the membership board of their church.

The fateful day began when John List sent his children to school and approached his wife, Helen, who was making a cup of coffee. He shot her once in the side of the head, killing her instantly. The murder spree had begun. Once his wife was dead, he moved on to his 84 year old mother Alma, who lived with the family upstairs on the third floor. He shot her in the head as well.

Then, as the sole surviving member of his family, John List arranged his loved ones deceased bodies, all except his mother’s, in a row in the living room. Before he fled the scene, List called the woman who helped drive his sons to school to tell her that the family was going on an extended vacation to North Carolina to visit Helen’s sick mother, cancelled the newspaper delivery, and told the Post Office to hold the family’s mail. He also wrote several letters. The most notable of these is that which he penned to his pastor, Eugene Rehwinkel of Redeemer of Lutheran Church, in which he stated that the 1970s was a time period full of sin and that the family was straying from god. List claimed his daughter and wife were the most troublesome, as his daughter expressed an interest in a particularly ‘sinful’ occupation: acting, and his wife had developed mental illness due to an advanced and incurable case of syphilis. To him, this meant that they needed to be killed, along with the rest of the family, so that their souls would go straight to heaven before they could fully renounce their religion. Not only was his crime one of the most infamous cases of familicide, but his letter to his pastor is considered one of the most incredible explanation letters in the history of criminal justice. Criminal profilers, including John E. Douglas, concluded that John List came up with his motive so as to put his mind at ease about killing his family.

Incredibly, John List had planned the murders and the following cover-up so meticulously that the bodies of his victims were not discovered until December 7th, 1971. This would be 29 days after the killings took place. List had turned the thermostat down so that the corpses would not decompose. He also took other precautions: setting a recorder to play classical music on repeat, only to stop if someone physically turned it off, as well as leaving all the lights on. This however, would be his downfall. By early December, neighbors noticed that the lights throughout the home had started going out one by one. Realizing that something was amiss, the authorities decided to check on the family residence. They were met with an unspeakably gruesome scene. The once average suburban home had been converted into a makeshift morgue.

When the investigation began, police immediately realized that they were working against the clock. The most important window of time in a murder investigation, known as the “Golden Hour”, is when investigators have the best leads and most uncontaminated evidence and therefore the best chance of catching the perpetrator. The clock starts ticking as soon as a crime is committed, and every minute counts. It is said that if a crime is not solved within 48 hours, it is much less likely to be solved at all. In this case however, the murderer had a 29 day head start. Which meant investigators were stuck with a dead end case. However, because the whole family was dead, and List was missing, investigators immediately honed in on him as a suspect. This was confirmed when they discovered his letter on the kitchen table. Knowing he was the one who committed the crime and finding him were two different things though. John List could have been anywhere.

At this point, List was the only living person left in the home and proceeded to wait for the chance to dispose of his children. He didn’t have to wait long. His daughter, unaware that upon arriving home she would be murdered, called her father and asked him to pick her from school because she had fallen ill. Continuing this pattern, List went to pick up his son, Fred, from his job and shot him as he walked through the threshold of the family home. Soon after Fred was shot, John’s son and final victim returned home and was shot multiple times. John Jr. was the only victim with multiple wounds.

It would be 18 years before law enforcement successfully located and arrested John List on June 1st, 1989. Wanted ads in magazines, tabloids, and newspapers had yielded no results. The first true lead in the investigation came when the television show America’s Most Wanted aired a special mentioning John List on May 21st, 1989. This sparked recognition in a Virginian woman. She called the police to tell them that her neighbor, “Robert Clark”, looked suspiciously like the infamous John List. Police, desperate for the case to be closed, immediately decided to pay a visit to the home of “Robert Clark” and confronted his wife. “Robert Clark” denied that he was John List, but fingerprint testing quickly revealed that he was lying. He had been living much the same life as he had before he murdered his true family, only this time under an alias.

As the trial came to a close John List was sentenced to five life terms in prison on May 1st, 1990, and died there on March 21, 2008 after serving 18 years. Michael Mitzner, former assistant prosecutor, summarized his feelings about the case with the quote “I don’t think he suffered a whole lot in the 18 years he was on the outside, and I don’t think he suffered a whole lot in the 18 years he was on the inside; And that’s the shame of it- because for someone who did what he did he should have had plenty of suffering.”

During his trial, John List’s criminal defense attorney claimed that not only should his letter to his pastor be kept private, but also that he only committed the crime because he was supposedly suffering from PTSD after serving in World War II. This was overturned when a psychiatrist concluded that the only thing List was suffering from at the time of the murders was a midlife crisis. One prosecutor in the case, Eleanor Clark, stated the only thing that could be worse than the evil John List had committed would be the denial of its existence. Furthermore, the judge ruled that the letter should be shown to the jury as an important piece of evidence. Dr. Steven Simring, the psychiatrist who interviewed List, asked him why he did not kill himself too after he stated that in killing his family he had done them a favor by letting them die in a state of grace. To this he replied “because suicide is a sin.” The terrible irony of his answer was not lost on Simring.

NOTE: I wrote this for a research project on criminal activity in school.

On November 9, 1971, John List implemented his meticulous plot to massacre his family within his New Jersey mansion. First, he shot his wife in the back of his head and his mother above the right eye. When his teenage daughter and son arrived home from school, they met the same fate. After making himself lunch, John stopped by the bank to close his bank account as well as his mother’s. Then he went to his eldest son’s high school to watch him play in a soccer game. After the pair went home, he fired at his head and chest multiple times, killing him. In a five-page letter dedicated to John’s pastor, he detailed his reasons for murdering his family—he saw too much evil in this world, and they were falling away from God, so he had to kill them in order to save their souls. After cleaning up the crime scene and cutting out his face in every family photograph throughout the house, he left. The family’s slain bodies weren’t discovered for another month, and a nationwide manhunt for John List was launched, but the man simply vanished without a trace.