Posted on 03/25/2008 11:15:40 AM PDT by Borges
John List, the devout Lutheran who killed his family, left the bodies in his New Jersey home and spent 18 years as a fugitive, has died at 82.
The state Department of Corrections said that List died Friday in a Trenton hospital. He had been an inmate at Trenton State Prison since he was given five consecutive life sentences in 1990.
List, an accountant and one-time Sunday school teacher, lived in Denver for years after shooting his wife, mother and three teenage children, returning to his previous occupation under an alias and marrying a woman he met at a church picnic. By the time of his arrest, after "America's Most Wanted" aired a segment on the crime, he was living in Richmond, Va., with his second wife.
In a five-page letter left for his pastor, List said he wanted to keep his family close to God. He also covered his tracks, telling his children's schools the family was going to be out of town. The bodies, laid out in the Victorian mansion he owned in Westfield, were not found for a month.
I remember driving by there too, after the murders. Eventually someone burned the place down...
A lot of people would be happier if he was Mormon or Catholic.
Not attempting a thread-hijack or anything, but I don't think those two things are contradictory. Here's my list for God, pick two:
He apparently snapped. He was in a high-pressure job (insurance sales) where he allegedly tried very hard to get ahead. However, he had such a repulsive personality that he alienated his customers and bosses and got fired. At the same time he had an ailing mother whom he owed money to, a wife who was pretty disappointed with his incompetence as a breadwinner and his endless sermonizing about morality at home, children who were losing respect for him and the looming prospect of paying for college educations for three high school children.
After he killed his whole family and ran away, he took a low-stress job as a bookkeeper and married an older woman who was not interested in starting a family and had her own job.
A complete change in lifestyle.
I guess no one thought to check the IRS for his whereabouts
For the most part posters have their evaluation of John List correct. That is based on my reading of an unpublished autobiography by John List which he could not get published. In that book List still tried to justify the murders and had no remorse of any kind. He professed to believe that he saved his family from hell by killing them before they fell from grace and that the entire family would be reunited in heaven as he was sure he had Christ’s forgiveness. He truely was a strange dangerous man who should have been in prison much sooner.
FEAST OF THE DIVINE MERCY, NEXT SUNDAY
in the made-for-television movie, his mother was horrible... not that that excuses him... she was portrayed as a very controlling, manipulative icky person... and poor Beverly D'Angelo was the wife... Robert Blake played the husband/father/son...
He lived under an assumed name.
He had apparently told one of his colleagues at his previous job how easy it would be to create a whole new identity if you knew enough about accounting.
If you’re omniscient you know exactly how you will get ‘involved’ from now till the end of time. That means you can’t change your mind. That means you’re not omnipotent. This strictly mortal logic of course.
A special hot spot in hell, I hope.
That doesn’t answer if God knows what will happen, does it? I’ve always believed and been told that God does know what will happen.
HT/ John Walsh
He certainly went out of his way to avoid paying child support. Self-righteousness and perfectionism is very hard to live with. Sometimes women (and men) probably need to acknowledge to themselves that an anal retentive “religious” personality may just be fatal in some cases.
Also, some “pastors” are also in the control freak column and push the “attendance” requirements in sermons very hard for fear of a declining collection plate.
Dimensions crossing into each other (Which God created and operates outside those confines) seem to say it is logical.
Can't conduct a proper testing playground if your confined.
Of course I am talking about the Biblical God which I believe in. Feel free to keep making your own conclusions if you so choose.
If He knows what our freewill choice is going to be and what we will do, why does he create people like this? What is hard to understand about that?
List was long past his fry-by date.
Satan awaits his arrival.
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