John Emil List was model of devout propriety. The mild-mannered accountant lived with his family in a nineteen-room Victorian mansion in affluent Westfield, New Jersey. They included Helen, his wife, the couple's three teenagers and Alma, John's mother.

A strict Lutheran, John List worshipped the stern, unyielding God of his austere German-American roots and his life was dominated by his church involvement. Most people in the community saw John as the quiet patriarch of a house of faith and piety.

However, by 1971 List was privately battling a domineering mother, a marriage shredded by his wife's alcoholism and degenerative brain disease, and looming bankruptcy. The early 1970s was a tumultuous time for most Americans and List feared that the secular world's corrupting influence was slowly encroaching on his family's religious commitments. He was worried about his family's salvation.

On 9th November 1971, Westfield police responded to concerns that the List family had not been seen for nearly a month. At the mansion, they found the mummified corpses of Alma, Helen, and the three List children. Each had been shot in the head. In letters List had left in his first floor office, he expressed concern that his family had been moving further and further away from God and explained that he had no option but to kill a family he could no longer support financially. The letters were all that was left of List. For the next 17 years, he remained a fugitive.

That is, until May 1989, when the television programme ‘America's Most Wanted’ aired an episode on the List murders. A viewer recognised Robert Clark, a Richmond, Virginia accountant, in a forensic sculptor's bust of List that was featured on the show, and tipped the FBI. Clark was arrested, and once fingerprint analysis positively identified him as the missing John List, he was charged with five counts of murder.

The sensational trial, described by the New Jersey media as the biggest story since the Lindbergh baby, dissected List's personality and his rigid piety. His attorney claimed that List was a man fragmented by mental disease and that his condition was exacerbated by his strict religious beliefs. List believed he had acted to save his family's souls from a Godless world that no longer made sense to him. Prosecutors said List plotted the brutal massacre of his family for weeks and the coldly deliberate execution of his plan proved criminal intent.

On 12th April 1990, John List was convicted of five counts of murder in the first degree. Now serving five consecutive life terms in New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, New Jersey, in a rare interview, John List speaks to ‘American Justice’ about his desire and need to save the souls of his unsuspecting family.