Death Sentence Read online

  He wouldn’t fire the pistol again for twenty-seven years.

  Chapter Three

  John’s father had always salted his money away. A general store he owned on Salzburg Avenue had prospered with the regional economy; by World War I, when the lumber boom was largely spent, the speculators began fleeing Bay City. Across the river, Salzburg’s business district began a slow decline. But the thrifty people stayed and rebuilt an economy based on mining, fishing, and beet-sugar farming.

  The fifty-six acres of farmland the old man had bought for $900 in 1901 lay just to the west of town, precisely the area that came under cultivation for beet sugar with the decline of the lumber industry. Later, after World War II, the same area would be in demand for suburban development. Thanks to her husband’s prudence, Alma was able to live with a comfortable nest egg for almost the rest of her life.

  Home from the war and eager to set out on a career, John began making plans with his mother for college. Alma edged him into accounting, a field more suited to the sensibilities of her branch of the List family tree than to the entrepreneurial bent of her late husband’s. Accounting was stable. Given hard work and careful planning, an accountant had respect, position, an office with a name on the door and a receptionist out front, not like some dry-goods store with a screen door that anybody off the street could bang through.

  Because of its respected business administration master’s program and its proximity, Alma and her son decided on the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, a hundred miles south of Bay City. Tuition, room, and board were about $900 a year, covered by GI Bill benefits of $65 a month, augmented by savings from the army.

  John joined millions of other former servicemen in the trek to campuses in 1946, where their arrival was marked by two phenomena: Being older and, given the long deprivations of the war, more motivated, they tended to be serious students with little time for college frivolities. And, with their sheer overwhelming numbers, they effected a dramatic transformation of the American campus itself, especially at the state and other land-grant universities, where students on the G.I. Bill were flocking. Campuses reverberated with the roar of bulldozers and the clanging of hammers as new buildings—dorms to house them, classrooms to educate them, dining halls to feed them—rose in a profusion that would forever change the physical and even academic structures of most American colleges.

  “They were purposeful, serious-minded young men, and I say men deliberately. One occasionally looked over the class rosters at the beginning of the year and saw a woman’s name, but most of the students, the large majority, were men,” recalled Paul W. McCracken, who came to Ann Arbor as a young professor of economics in those postwar years, and who later would serve as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

  At Michigan, as at other business schools of the time, the teaching method was geared toward creating analytical ability. Case studies were the main tool—“solving a problem at Podunk Paper Company,” McCracken said. “Students were prepared to suggest ways of solving specific problems at companies, but were not prepared for interdisciplinary thinking and a good grounding in other, related fields.”

  Assessments like this, ironically, would be applied to John List throughout his later career. John, employers would later decide, was fine at solving problems step by step in a structured environment. But in the management environment he aspired to in a changing American workplace, John would later get poor grades from employers for his inability to adapt and move beyond the structures.

  In college, John projected the aloofness that had characterized him in high school. But while they were barely noticing him, he seemed to be paying careful attention to his classmates. In many letters from college to his mother and to a few other older people like Laura Werner who had gained his trust, he referred often to classmates by name, as though they were chums. Yet most of these people later had a difficult time remembering him. One of them, a classmate named Robert Clark, whose name John would adopt as his own in a later life, couldn’t recall ever meeting the man.

  At least once a month, Alma visited her son for the weekend, making the three-hour bus trip from Bay City to Ann Arbor on a Friday night. She stayed at a rooming house recommended by the campus Lutheran organization. On those weekends, mother and son spent all of their time together, usually going out for dinner on Saturday nights and always attending church services at the Lutheran center on Sundays. While together, they invariably found a quiet spot—in the student union when it was cold, on a bench outside in nice weather—to read and discuss the Bible.

  Like all unmarried students who didn’t commute, John was required to live in a dorm, in this case Wenley House in the West Quad. Still, his group activity was confined to the university’s Lutheran student organization, Gamma Delta. There, at least, John was well remembered, as a willing volunteer who was always on hand early to help set the tables and serve food for the weekly Sunday suppers, which began at five-thirty and were followed by a religious program. As many as a hundred students attended, and John was always among the first arrivals, to help set up tables. Moreover, when the volunteer work list was posted for cleanups and other chores, John’s name was always near the top.

  In his senior year, John joined the fraternity for business majors, Delta Sigma Pi, which had about fifty members. It wasn’t a social fraternity; most of its efforts were centered on corporate recruiting and on what, thirty years later, would come to be known as “networking.” Throughout college, John also belonged to the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps, in which students trained in uniform several times a week and spent an intensified period of summer training before senior year.

  In June 1950, John, a solid B student, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. Because of the ROTC, he was also commissioned as a second lieutenant in the army reserve. In early September, thanks to an accelerated master’s program in business at Michigan and the awarding of certain credits for army service experience, John and his mother stood beaming as he was awarded his M.B.A.

  Meanwhile, his networking at Delta Sigma Pi paid off. Ernst & Ernst, the prestigious accounting firm, hired him as a junior auditor in its Detroit office. The starting pay was $56.25 a week, a respectable salary for the time. Energetic and ambitious, he quickly qualified as a certified public accountant.

  But there was a sudden career interruption. In June 1950, North Korean tanks rumbled across the 38th parallel; by the time John moved to Detroit, U.S. forces were being rapidly mobilized. He knew it was only a matter of time before his army reserve unit was called up.

  This occurred in November. With a leave of absence from Ernst & Ernst, burning once more with patriotism, John was back in uniform full time. But this time he had a status that he and Alma found more appropriate. Now he was a commissioned officer.

  He didn’t see action in Korea, either. Instead, he spent most of the Korean War in Virginia, eventually winding up at the large army base at Fort Eustis, situated among the jumble of military installations that sprawl along the peninsula of southern Virginia between the James River and Chesapeake Bay.

  This time, army life was significantly more pleasant than it had been in World War II. Korea was officially described not as a war but as a “police action,” waged entirely within the confines of one small country. Since the drastic demobilization that had followed World War II (the troop strength of the army alone plummeted from a 1945 peak of 8.3 million to a mere 591,000 at the beginning of 1950), the generals and admirals had been aghast at how emaciated their bureaucracies had become. Korea afforded a perfect opportunity to quickly fatten up the ranks well beyond the immediate needs of a fierce but limited military conflict.

  For young stateside officers such as John, this translated into ample time to pursue their own interests. As a dedicated number cruncher, John took advantage of various specialized army schools on the strategy and logistics of transporting people and material under both peacetime and wartime conditions. Off the
base, he passed up the surrounding towns with their noisy bars and credit jewelry shops in favor of touring the Civil War battlefields and other outposts of the Old Confederacy that dotted the Richmond area. An avid history buff, he often whiled away whole Saturdays poring over historical archives.

  Not that he was a recluse. He had begun to occasionally date women in college, usually at parties and outings sponsored by the Lutheran group. But in a military area swarming with hordes of lonely men in uniform, it was difficult to meet women who didn’t make their living in bars. So when he did socialize, it was usually with a small group of male friends from the post.

  On one such occasion, Saturday night, October 13, 1951, John and two other junior officers went bowling in nearby Newport News. One of them, whose name was Ted, soon began teasing two attractive young women bowling in the adjoining lane. The women were not good bowlers. Many of the balls they rolled wobbled down the gutter, giving the soldiers in the next lane ample opportunity to show off.

  Before long, Ted was paying great attention to one of the women, a thin and pretty woman who told him her name was Helen Taylor.

  Helen had reluctantly gone out that night with her sister, Jean Syfert. Just the day before, Helen had buried her husband, Marvin Taylor, a soldier who had been killed in Korea a full six months earlier and whose body had only recently been returned to the States. Widowed at twenty-six, with a nine-year-old daughter, the distraught Helen was living with her parents, Eva and Edward Morris, in Newport News.

  The funeral, of course, had reopened a wound. After the services Helen cried all day and all night. The next night, Jean took her bowling to help her get her mind off her misery.

  While Ted worked on winning Helen’s attention, John struck up a conversation with her younger sister, Jean, who quickly warned him that she was married and had a child. This seemed to relax John rather than put him off. Sensing that he was only looking for a friendly chat, Jean returned his friendliness. She liked him right off. She was impressed at how gentlemanly he was, and wondered to herself if he might be someone Helen would find interesting. They seemed so opposite, she thought. But still …

  It was too late. Ted had already managed to make a date with Helen.

  Ted and Helen saw each other two or three times, but then Ted let slip that he had a wife somewhere. Helen dropped him like a hot coal.

  The next thing she knew, John was calling.

  “To be truthful with you, I think the first time we met, John was interested in me,” Jean said many years later. “But I wasn’t available.”

  John began enthusiastically courting Helen, who welcomed the attention.

  Helen’s nine-year-old daughter, Brenda, recalled in a 1971 interview that her mother “was in bad shape then, really destroyed over my real dad’s death, and she had been seeing a lot of men. I guess she just settled on John.”

  John’s inexperience with women was actually a plus as far as Helen was concerned. Having left high school at sixteen to marry her first husband and knowing nothing else as an adult except marriage, she was anxious to find a new husband. So fine, John List wasn’t terribly exciting. So he had those quirky little mannerisms and seemed a little … well, prim. He was steady, well educated, courteous, and ambitious, with a future ahead of him after the army. He obviously was infatuated with her. John was as good a prospect as was likely to emerge anytime soon in Newport News, and Helen used his naiveté to her advantage. They were quickly in bed together.

  Jean and her husband, Gene, didn’t think much of him, for differing reasons. Gene, then a young officer in the air force, never took to John. He didn’t make any bones about it within the family then—and he didn’t need prompting forty years later. “I didn’t like him,” said Gene, a pleasant, soft-spoken man who would spend twenty years in the air force and then retire to a second career as an Oklahoma schoolteacher. “He wasn’t one of my favorite people. He had feminine tendencies, you see. I considered him a mama’s boy.” Gene thought that over briefly and added flatly: “I thought they had a loser from the word go.”

  His wife had a different problem. She liked John fine. He clearly had a good nature, and seemed intelligent in most ways she could determine. But he was timid, which was the last thing anyone would ever call her impetuous older sister Helen. What’s worse, he already seemed to be deliriously in love, spending most of his weekly paycheck on a woman he had just met. This didn’t strike Jean as a propitious sign. Helen, she thought, needed a firmer partner, someone tough like Marvin, who had been able to keep a lid on Helen’s excesses—not the least of which was her propensity, in Jean’s estimation, to “spend money like it was going to be out of style by tomorrow.” She wondered how John, whom she had already seen as being unable to manage his own money, would ever be able to deal with Helen.

  Helen, for her part, was already pressing hard for marriage. Finally, John got nervous, especially after talking over the situation by phone with his mother in Bay City and realizing that she strongly disapproved of his liaison with a woman she hadn’t even met yet.

  Casting about, he solicited other opinions. Ann Hachtel, the Bay City classmate, remembered thinking how odd it was that John would write from Virginia to ask her for advice on marriage, years after they had last seen each other. “He was uncertain,” she recalled. Her reply was that if he really believed Helen was the right one for him, he should marry her.

  Sensing her boyfriend’s waffling, Helen promptly announced to anyone who would listen that she was pregnant. For his part, John didn’t make any more of a secret about this than Helen did. In fact, he seemed proud to let others know that he had scored.

  “Helen is pregnant; we’ve been intimate several times. What in the world can I do?” John told an army acquaintance one night back at the post. “We have to get married.”

  On December 1, 1951, with Jean and Gene Syfert as witnesses, John and Helen were married in a Lutheran church in Baltimore. It was eight months after Helen’s first husband had been killed in action, and less than two months since the newlyweds had met at the bowling alley. Helen wore a smart wool suit that her sister had helped her to choose, and John wore his army uniform. Before the wedding, Helen, a Methodist, agreed to John’s only condition, that she join him in belonging to the Lutheran church.

  To allow time for a visit to Bay City to introduce his new bride to his mother, John took only a few days leave for the honeymoon. They spent it in nearby Washington, D.C., with the Syferts along for the trip. One night, at Helen’s insistence, the four of them went to a swank nightclub and had a grand time eating and drinking, laughing and dancing. Gene Syfert ended up with the bill—he didn’t complain about it, but forty years later he still had not forgotten how much it was, either: seventy-four dollars, about a month’s salary for a young officer.

  Then, leaving Brenda in Newport News with Helen’s mother, John and Helen borrowed the Syferts’ car and drove up to Bay City, where Alma was polite but cool toward her new daughter-in-law. But she told a friend afterward that she was devastated at her son’s choice in a wife.

  John didn’t seem fazed when, shortly after the wedding, Helen told him that she had been wrong about being pregnant. He was, in fact, delighted to be married to such an attractive woman. In January 1952, after having been promoted to first lieutenant, the new husband wrote proudly to his boss back at Ernst & Ernst: “I spent three months at Fort Eustis, Va., attending transportation school. That is also where I met my wife. We were married before I left Virginia. I feel very well adjusted to the army regimen.”

  The military being regarded an institution that liked nothing less than to see its troops in stationary position for any length of time, John received orders soon after his marriage transferring him to an army accounting center near San Francisco, where preparations were being made to process back into civilian life the hundreds of thousands of returning troops who would begin flooding West Coast military facilities once the impending cease-fire took hold in Korea. John and Helen, set
ting off for what they knew would be a fairly short time in California, left Brenda behind in the care of Helen’s mother. But at the last minute, John decided to invite his own mother along for the trip. Mother, he explained, had never seen California and might never again have the opportunity.

  Helen didn’t especially care whether Alma got to see California or not. At the time, though, she kept her sentiments largely to herself, not fully aware yet that Alma would be a close presence in the List household throughout the remainder of her life as John List’s wife.

  Born on January 1, 1925, Helen was nine months older than her new husband and far more experienced. The third of five children, she grew up in Greensboro, North Carolina, where her father worked in a cotton mill and her mother rode herd on the household. One of the things Helen’s sister was most reluctant to discuss was this: “Helen was an abused child,” is all Jean would say. “Physically abused.”

  Helen had been agitating to get away from home when she married Marvin Everett Taylor, a twenty-three-year-old soldier stationed nearby who managed to overwhelm her with his brash charm and self-confidence. In 1941, when they were married, Marvin was about to be shipped overseas; he planned to make a career of the army, and Helen, wide-eyed with the dream of travel and adventure, was thrilled to be a part of it.

  It was a happy and well-balanced marriage, marred chiefly by several unfortunate occurrences that befell Helen. The first happened during Brenda’s birth in 1942, when an attending military physician accidentally splashed ether into Helen’s right eye, severely damaging the cornea.

  Helen was shattered by the accident, which not only affected her appearance, giving her a slightly walleyed look in one eye because it had lost some muscle control, but also seriously limited her peripheral vision. “On her right side, she wouldn’t be able to tell you were there,” Jean said. Yet there was no liability compensation, Jean recalled with a shrug. “With the military then,” she said succinctly, “if they cut your leg off by accident, you’d be just one leg short.”