Death Sentence Read online

  The community they founded was called Frankenmuth, and for almost a hundred years it remained an enclave of German-speaking farmers and tradesmen, all of whom belonged to the conservative Missouri Synod branch of the Lutheran church. In the rural isolation of Frankenmuth, lives traditionally centered, with little deviation permitted, on God, family, obedience, hard work, and thrift.

  Both of the immigrant List brothers figure prominently in the history of the town and the church that was its center. But of the two, the older, Johann Adam, was the more renowned—a master carpenter who designed and built many of the community’s houses, farm buildings, and wooden bridges. He was also a folk artist whose drawings would be displayed in the local museum more than a hundred years after his death. More importantly, he became a towering pillar of his church and community, serving many terms as a treasurer of both.

  This man was Alma’s grandfather. Her father, Michael Johann, followed in his footsteps as a master carpenter. Michael was one of the designers and builders of the pride of Frankenmuth, the church of St. Lorenz, constructed on the site of the log cabin where the settlers first worshipped.

  Alma held her grandfather and her father up to her son, John, as role models.

  It wasn’t that the other side of the family were slouchers. It was just that they had ventured more boldly into a world outside the security of Frankenmuth, a world that Alma saw as morally perilous even though she lived in it. It is a small indication of the dichotomy that Alma now lies buried in Frankenmuth, and her husband in Bay City.

  Alma’s husband, John Frederick, was the son of the younger immigrant brother, Johann. As a young man, John Frederick struck out from Frankenmuth for a more exciting and prosperous life, which he found less than twenty miles away, in Bay City, where the Saginaw River enters the bay.

  In the late 1870s, when John Frederick came to town, Bay City was far removed from the austerity of his native Frankenmuth. Once an Indian trading village, Bay City had developed rapidly after the Civil War into the commercial and shipping center for a regional lumber industry that was expanding wildly to meet the needs of the growing population along the Great Lakes. When the burly young man arrived, there were thirty-six sawmills along the banks of the Saginaw. “Some of them,” according to a 1941 Federal Writers’ Project history of the era, “were among the largest in the country. The settlements constituted a one-industry town; the whine of saws biting into logs was heard ten hours a day, and the smell of fresh lumber was strong enough to flavor food. The lumber lined the banks of the river so solidly that the Saginaw appeared to flow between wooden walls.”

  Yet John Frederick avoided the commercial district on the east bank of the Saginaw, where whiskey-swilling lumberjacks caroused till dawn, and settled instead on the west bank, in a small German community called Salzburg. There, he worked diligently, in a general store and later a planing mill, and saved his money. By the turn of the century, he had married and fathered a son, and was prosperous enough not only to purchase fifty-six acres of good farmland just outside of town but also to start his own dry-goods business in a brick building on Salzburg Avenue with the name “LIST” chiseled in stone at the cornice.

  By 1925, John Frederick was comfortably into his sixties, a man well able to look back on his accomplishments and not particularly disposed to look forward, even with a new wife and an infant son at home.

  The house on Wenona Avenue that John Emil List grew up in was a substantial Victorian dwelling. During the early years of the Depression, his father had remodeled the upper floor into an apartment. Thrift, not pressing financial need, prompted John Frederick to become a landlord.

  With tenants upstairs, the Lists lived on the ground floor, which had a large kitchen, where Alma spent most of her time; one large bedroom; a bathroom; and a formal parlor.

  All of the time he lived at home, the boy had to sleep on the couch in the parlor, which had no door. In the daytime, before he hurried off to the Lutheran elementary school a few blocks away, or public high school in later years, young John had to put his sheets and blanket away, along with books, clothes, and other personal effects. The boy grew up with the understanding that he was not to leave a trace of his tenancy behind in his own home.

  “He was the neatest little boy I ever saw,” said Laura Werner, who rented the apartment in the List house with her husband for many years when John was growing up. “You never knew he was around.”

  It was an ability, or perhaps an affliction, that many people remarked on decades later when they had reason to discuss the odd character of John List. “He was there, but he just blended into the background,” said a school classmate.

  John Frederick, a stern old German, usually dealt with his son, whom he always referred to as “the boy,” through his wife. The boy was expected to be seen when necessary, and not heard unless invited. He was expected to excel in school and to reflect the family dignity in church. Aside from that, a largely disinterested John Frederick went about his business and left it to his wife to bring up their child.

  People who knew the family when John was growing up do not recall images of the boy and his father together except at church services, which were conducted in High German.

  Beyond his industry, his deep booming voice, and bristling black mustache, there are few things people alive today remember about John Frederick, except for the Halloween incident.

  This occurred shortly before young John went to high school, on a Halloween night, when a couple of neighborhood boys, unhappy at the fact that treats weren’t being passed out at the List house, rang the doorbell and ran away to hide and laugh in the bushes. After this happened several times, John Frederick, a man who despised Halloween as a satanic celebration, flew out the door in a fury and gave chase with such determination that one of the boys, his bravado in hasty retreat, stumbled into a gully and sprained an ankle. His wails of pain brought the neighbors out.

  As boys will do when misfortune follows a prank, they tried to convince their parents that old List, then in his seventies but still in robust health, had stormed violently out after trick-or-treaters who came innocently to his door. Since John Frederick was already regarded as something of a neighborhood crank—he was known for hollering at any youth who happened to cross his property line—there was talk of bringing assault charges against him. It required the intercession of the Lutheran minister to dissuade the injured boy’s outraged parents from having John Frederick arrested.

  The incident aroused enough bad will that it was remembered even fifty years later in the old neighborhood. One of the things people recall is that John Frederick’s son, who was never allowed out on Halloween night, bore the brunt of the residual resentment. For years afterward, other neighborhood boys taunted him with the nickname “Trick-or-Treat Johnny.”

  John grew up in a cocoon protected by his mother, whose warmth was in sharp contrast to her husband’s coldness. Where John Frederick went to work early in the morning and came home late, and liked to spend his scant leisure time in solitude, Alma had friends and liked to spend time with them, even if only to pass the time of day at the bakery or the butcher shops on Salzburg Avenue, a short walk from her house.

  As it would be for her son, the Lutheran church was the center of her social life. In Bay City, this was Zion Lutheran, affiliated with the strict Missouri Synod, whose traditions stressed the “inspiration, inerrancy and infallibility” of the Bible against the creeping liberalism of the modern world. Obedience to God and other responsible authority was stressed with clarion clarity. So firm is the bulwark against liberalism that even today men and women at Zion Lutheran each give different responses to the pastor’s invocation during services.

  When John was growing up, his father, continuing in the family tradition that Alma insisted her son eventually emulate, was the parish treasurer and accountant, and a church trustee.

  A picture many remember of mother and son together is their arrival with John Frederick at church. Usually, the b
oy and his mother, hand in hand, followed a few steps behind the father. On Sunday afternoons after church, Alma always cooked a hearty meal, which often would be attended by a few of her relatives or friends from church. As she cooked, John would sit in the steamy kitchen, reading. He wasn’t encouraged to go out and play with other children. Most nights, he and his mother read the Bible together.

  Said a relative, “His mother was afraid he would get a cold, or even get his hands dirty. She watched him like a hawk. After a while, as I recall, no one even asked him out to play.” One picture that persists is that of a boy bundled in layers of winter clothing with a wool scarf and shiny black galoshes, standing on the schoolyard sidelines with his arms dangling and eyeglasses slightly fogged, looking as if his protective bulk would prevent him from getting up again if he ever fell over.

  “She was careful of him,” said Laura Werner, the tenant, who would become a lifelong friend of Alma’s. “There were children in the neighborhood that she didn’t approve of for John. She didn’t let him go in the street, and she made sure he stayed away from the railroad tracks” even as an adolescent.

  The neighborhood was a commercial area where trains shrieked by on the Michigan Central tracks a half block away, so there was some reason for a degree of caution. But those who knew him all describe John as a boy who seemed smothered by his mother’s protectiveness, a boy whose idea of the world was defined by his mother as a place of disorder and potential peril and disorder.

  “Mrs. List reminded me of a queen,” said a former neighbor who is John’s age. “She stood very erect, with her chin up, and spoke precisely, like she was addressing a group even when it was only just you. It didn’t matter that she would say things like ‘chust’ instead of ‘just’ with that German accent. We thought she was like a queen. And Johnny, he sure was her little prince.”

  John was also recalled as a quiet, likable boy, with delicate, almost girlish features, with cupid’s-bow lips and soft, watchful brown eyes that projected, as did the submissive tilt of his head when being directly addressed, an eagerness to please, to be liked, to be of assistance, to be valued.

  High school provided John with his first small taste of independence. Much to his mother’s consternation, it required a daily trip out of the neighborhood, across the Lafayette Street bridge over the Saginaw River and into downtown Bay City. For a boy who was never allowed to venture far from the front porch, John figured out his bus connections easily.

  The bus took him along Center Avenue, the city’s finest street, where lumber barons and shipping magnates had built their mansions during the boom days. While in high school, John took a part-time job at the Sage Library, housed in what had once been a lumberman’s French Provincial mansion, with grounds shaded by towering trees. It was just the sort of elegant house, John told a high school classmate, that he wished to live in someday.

  At Bay City’s Central High School, despite his eagerness to please, John barely made an impression on his classmates, even though he would become the most famous graduate of the class of 1943. He had few male friends, and no girlfriends, and those people who vaguely remembered him recalled a tall, bookish, deeply religious boy, always snappily dressed, who never participated in group activities. The record shows he was a member of the school’s chapter of the National Honor Society. The yearbook had a section called “class prophesy,” but amid all the wisecracks—good-natured and jibes—no one apparently was able to come up with anything amusing to say about John. It was merely predicted that he would wind up in the army supply corps.

  Twenty-eight years later, when John’s mild countenance appeared on television and in the newspapers identified as a fugitive wanted for what the FBI flier termed “multiple murders involving members of his family,” stunned classmates had to dig out their high school yearbooks just to verify the connection.

  “John List just blended into the scenery,” said Ann Hachtel, a high school classmate who briefly dated him in college and even then did not recall him from her high school class.

  The class of 1943 had more on its mind than socializing, however. By the time John graduated in June, almost half of the boys in his senior class had already opted for early graduation to join the service.

  Always intensely patriotic, John itched to get to the action, and only his mother’s opposition prevented him from dropping out of high school early to enlist. Soon after graduation, though, he was in the service.

  So were sixteen million other American men as the war entered its final stages. With well-trained troops poised for major assaults in Europe and Asia, the immediate demand for cannon fodder had abated, and Private List unhappily spent his first year in the army in unglorious Louisiana. In letters home, he made it clear that army life, where the rules were almost as clear and inflexible as they were at Zion Lutheran Church, suited him fine.

  In his army life, Private List also exhibited some of the social characteristics that would cause some acquaintances to use words like “prissy” and “pious” to describe him later in life. For example, as he eked out his last few years of life in a New Jersey prison a half-century later, List recalled in a privately published memoir his disdain for fellow soldiers in basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, who cursed or exhibited other forms of what he regarded as unseemly or crude behavior. Among those at Fort Benning he remembered with disapproval was a “tall, red-faced hillbilly” platoon sergeant whose language offended young List’s more delicate ears. In the army, well-bred young men who were obviously “more intelligent, better-educated,” as he judged himself to be, “learned early on that rank had its privileges, and that higher rank did not necessarily correlate with either higher formal education or even proper upbringing,” he wrote in the memoir, a rambling, self-justifying, remarkably self-pitying paperback, privately published in 2006 under the morally abominable title Collateral Damage: The John List Story.

  But that all was far in the future for Private First Class List as World War II waned and he plodded and suffered through infantry training in the swamps of Louisiana, desperately homesick, listening to classical music or playing chess whenever he could find a suitable opponent. Then, on August 30, 1944, the base chaplain summoned John to inform him that his father, who had been seriously ill for a year, had died. He was given emergency leave to attend the funeral in Bay City, Michigan.

  “John came home all proud in his uniform,” said a relative. “But he seemed a little embarrassed about not being overseas.”

  The funeral—held in the front parlor that had previously served as his bedroom in the List family home before he joined the army—was one of the first occasions that would prompt people to remark on how cold and impassive John could be. Laura Werner, who lived with her husband in the apartment in the List house until 1941, recalled that Alma sent John over in his father’s car to pick her up for the funeral.

  “John was as nice as could be,” said the woman, who had just had her first child. “He held the baby.” But she noticed with a slight chill that John showed no sign whatsoever of grief. “It was as if nothing happened,” she said. After the funeral, John requested extra time at home “so that I could help Mother, but my request was turned down,” he recalled decades later in his memoir, in which he also wrote, with not the slightest apparent trace of irony: “Shortly before he died, Dad asked me to always take good care of Mother.”

  In February 1945, John was finally shipped overseas to Europe, where Allied forces were pressing their final assaults from both the east and the west into Germany, while German forces held out ferociously in the last-ditch Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes. John would later recall taking part in a final-stage infantry campaign across the German border in late March, where he said his unit took on German artillery fire. On the morning of April 11, 1945, as John recalled in his prison memoir a half-century later, he was part of an infantry patrol captured by German troops who threatened to shoot them as prisoners of war, but were not able to carry out the threat because
the Germans, evidently recognizing that the war was lost and would end within weeks, changed their minds and gave themselves up instead to the American soldiers that same afternoon. “For my brief stint as a P.O.W., I was put in for a Bronze Star award,” John wrote, without noting that the Bronze Star medal, devised as a troop morale booster in 1944, was unilaterally awarded to entire army divisions during the final stages of the war in Germany.

  Meanwhile, with the German surrender and the end of the war in Europe imminent by late April 1945, John and hundreds of thousands of other soldiers suddenly found themselves bound for the other side of the world, for the Pacific theater. But no sooner had that great wave of troops rolled toward Asia than the war with Japan was over, too. John’s unit, on a troop ship headed for a planned invasion of Japan in August 1945, was abruptly ordered to change course when Japan quickly surrendered after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  After the war, it took the bloated military bureaucracy almost as long to disgorge millions of homesick and now superfluous troops as it had taken to process them into war in the first place. On April 22, 1946, eight months after the Japanese surrender, and after a few months of postwar busy-work duty digging drainage ditches in the Philippines, Private First Class John List returned home to his widowed mother.

  Back in civilian life, John made a point of not discussing his overseas service, as if he were healing from a dark and painful experience, despite his limited time in actual war. As one older relative noted, he spent a total of only eleven months overseas, and a good portion of that in transit, or in waiting to be transferred.

  Like most soldiers, John came back from the war with a handful of routine campaign medals. Less routine, for a boy who had been so sheltered, was a new interest in firearms and the strategy of war. Among his proudly displayed war souvenirs was a pistol, a classic Austrian Steyr that he had purchased in 1944 and used to qualify for an Army sharpshooter’s badge in Europe.