Bender worked with a forensic mental health expert, Richard Walter. Together with Bill Fleischer, they had formed the Vidocq Society to look at unsolved cold cases. At Bender's studio, Walter read the newspaper accounts about the List murders and looked over the various photographs.
"The most important thing," Walter told me later, "was the crime scene itself. By the time I'd finished reading, I knew what it was about, and that took me about twenty minutes. There's a prototype for that kind of murder, so you already have built-in probabilities for certain behaviors. So I worked those probabilities and refined them, as well as shaped them to List's personality. There was a certain pattern already established in this crime, and there in the evidence was the amount of organization involved. Knowing particularities about the type of murder it was told me it was about anger and control."
To work it out, Bender and Walter went for a walk. They hoped the synergy of their diverse perspectives and expertise would give them some aha! moments. To create an accurate bust, there were certain things that Bender wanted to know, so he came up with one query after another.
"Frank was brilliant at asking the right questions,” said Walter. “We'd get to a corner, for example, and he'd say, 'Rich, how would John List stand here?' I'd think it out and then show him. Then we'd go on and he'd say, 'What would be the average expression on his face?' I'd show him so he'd know which muscles would stay tight and which muscles would lengthen. It was that kind of question that added the final touch."
They examined List's past habits and what others who'd known him had to say about the man. Then they decided which of his traits would remain consistent over the years, despite attempts to adopt a new identity. He would remarry, he’d work as an accountant, but he would not have had cosmetic surgery to change his appearance – not even to remove a scar he had behind his right ear.
"We dressed him down to his socks," Walter continued. "Given his history and rigidity, I figured the most modern he'd get would be to wear a striped suit. He'd always wear the white shirt and plain tie, probably striped. He'd also wear dark shoes and dark argyle socks."
They figured he'd have drooping skin around the jowls, deep worry lines, and a receding hairline. He'd probably still have financial difficulties and he'd be wearing glasses that he'd picked for a specific reason. Bender even identified the precise type of frame.
"My intuition told me he'd want something that would make him look successful and intelligent," Bender recalled.
They pondered the likely buildup of anger and despair, as well as thinking through how List would have planned his escape. Walter predicted that although he might initially travel a long distance away, he'd prefer to live near his former area and would be caught within three hundred miles of the crime scene.
Finally, the bust was finished. Bender gave it to the show’s producers. The episode on List was broadcast on May 21, 1989. John Walsh, the program’s host, introduced the segment as New Jersey’s most famous murder case. The story ran for ten minutes, to an estimated 22 million viewers.
Ironically, List himself generally watched the program, liking the challenge of figuring out the crimes (and perhaps seeing if they might ever mention him). However, that night, he and his second wife, Delores, went to a church social, so he missed the show. He caught only the tail end.
List’s former neighbor, Wanda Flanery, was watching. She’d seen the tabloid photos and had thought that “Bob Clark” looked a lot like John List. Seeing the bust impressed her even more. She had her son-in-law call the phone number provided on the show and give them the Clark’s new address in Virginia.
Over 300 calls came in about the List case that evening, fielded by FBI agents. Detective Barnard Tracy, from Westfield, was there, but he missed the crucial call. It was sent to the FBI, then forwarded to the Richmond office.
Ten days after Wanda’s call, agents entered the office where Clark worked and arrested him. He protested that he was not John List, they’d made a mistake. Fingerprints affirmed his identity and he finally admitted it. After the murders, he'd gone to Colorado and had lived there for seventeen years. He'd worked as an accountant, had remarried, and had joined another Lutheran church.
List was convicted of five counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
In March 2002, television journalist Connie Chung interviewed him for ABC's evening magazine show, Downtown. He'd lost most of his hair and appeared to have trouble with his teeth.
On the program, List described shooting his wife as he came up on her from behind while she ate toast at the kitchen table. After he dragged her body to the ballroom and cleaned up the blood, he sat down and had lunch – on the very spot where his wife had died. Chung was aghast.
"I was hungry," he said defensively. "That was just the way it was." He admitted to kissing his mother before he shot her.
List referred to these murders as his “assignment.”
"Assignment?" asked Chung.
"Well, my self assignment."
Chung raised the question of suicide. List explained that suicide barred him from heaven. He had a better chance of going to heaven if he murdered his family and then sought forgiveness. In fact, he fully expected not only to see all of them in heaven but also that they'd have either forgiven him or would not be aware of "tragedy that had happened." He figured that in the afterlife, they’d all get along just fine. He expressed no sense of remorse.
I guess he’s found out whether his vision of the afterlife is accurate. On March 21, 2008, on Good Friday, John List died in prison.
The Demented Cobbler
POLICE RESPONDED TO A CALL ABOUT someone screaming at 124 Glenwood Avenue in Leonia on January 8, 1975. Edwinna Romaine, her feet bound, hopped from her house, screaming “gun” and “basement.” Two armed men had entered her home and taken prisoners.
An officer freed her and called for backup before entering the house. He saw overturned furniture and cut electrical cords. Someone’s hand came up from behind a couch. The officer readied his revolver and demanded that the person come out. A woman showed herself. Her feet were tied as well and all she could say was, “Upstairs.”
In an upper room, the officer found two naked women and a naked boy. Once freed, they said that a man had entered their home and threatened them with a knife and pistol. There was an adolescent boy with him.
In the basement was a bound young woman in a white dress and shoes lying near a wall. She’d been stabbed to death. Nearby, a man, also bound and gagged, was found alive.
But the perpetrators had left. From the reports of those at the house, the man and the boy had been strangers. They’d simply intruded on this family gathering, ostensibly to commit a robbery. They’d had a gun and a knife. No one in the neighborhood whom police questioned knew who they were, either. As the narratives unfolded, it was clear that this man had intended to rape one of the women as well.
The man told the women to lie facedown on the living room floor near the television, and Frank was to lie by the fireplace. He’d stripped them of their jewelry and watches, and tied their feet together with lamp cords.
When she heard the murder victim shout in the basement, Edwinna had begun to scream. She’d believed they were all going to be killed, one by one. She’d pulled herself loose and with her feet still bound, she’d made it outside, where her neighbor saw her and called the police. She had probably saved her family from being the victims of a mass slaughter.
In a nearby neighborhood, a woman walking her dog saw a scruffy man and boy run down a hill, bend over in a puddle of water to do something, and then run away. The man had removed his bloodstained shirt and tie and dropped them. The police confiscated these items. In the mud, they found a clear footprint.
It was easy, from multiple witness reports and discarded items, to trace the route of this strange pair. They’d gone to a bus stop. The police even found the knife, still bloody, and it was a match to the wounds the murder victim had suffered. Then th
ey found a .32 caliber revolver in some bushes.
Neither weapon could be traced, but the discarded shirt had been manufactured in Philadelphia. A laundry mark, difficult to decipher, revealed the letters KAL. The crime lab set to work on it.
Police learned about similar incidents in adjacent states. All reports agreed that the man had smelled funny. Their MO was to have the boy knock on doors and ask if someone named Jones lived there. If a young woman with a pleasing figure answered, especially one with children to be used as leverage, the man would force his way inside to rob the place, strip the woman, tie her up, and subject her to sexual assault.
Then on January 14, the team apparently showed up in Margate, New Jersey.
THE LAUNDRY MARK ON THE SHIRT, once cleaned up, read Kalinger. But no one named Kalinger had a police record in any of the relevant towns.
Detective Robert Roseman took the shirt with him to Philadelphia and discovered that the shirt’s maker sold to only one outlet, the Berg Brothers store on North Front Street. Roseman believed that someone there would recall a smelly man. But no one did. Roseman did discover that the name had been misspelled. It was Kallinger. And he had a police record. It was Joseph Kallinger, a resident of Philadelphia.
The owner of Bright Sun Cleaners recognized the shirt from the distinctive smell. He also knew its source: a chemical that Kallinger used in his shoe repair business. Kallinger lived in Kensington with his wife and five children. One of his sons, Joey, had mysteriously died in 1974. The police suspected the boy had been murdered. Two years earlier, Joey and two of his brothers had come to the police station to accuse their father of abuse, including threats at gunpoint and blows from a hammer. A medical exam corroborated their story.
However, Kallinger and his wife denied everything. Forced to court, Kallinger was subjected to psychiatric exams that showed an IQ of 84 and several personality disorders. The doctors diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic and recommended commitment and supervision. Kallinger served a short jail sentence and then went home. Not long afterward, Joey was dead. His life insurance coverage, recently taken out, was for $45,000.
A wrecking crew came across the body in a sub-basement area of a building scheduled for demolition at Ninth and Market Streets. Broken bricks and rubble had covered him. The pathologist thought the boy had been buried alive. Kallinger filed for the insurance payout, but the company refused to pay it.
Roseman showed Kallinger’s photo to the various injured parties. The boy who’d accompanied him could have been either Michael or the younger son, James. Both were slender, with long, blond hair. They decided it was probably Michael.
On January 17, the police arrested Kallinger and his son for kidnapping, home invasion, and murder.
First, Kallinger was to be tried for crimes near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He and his son were suspects in a seven-week, three-state crime spree, including robbery and rape. Michael was sent to the Dauphin County juvenile detention center to await his fate. His fingerprints, along with his fathers, were matched to those found in the Harrisburg suburb home. The police searched the home and in Kallinger’s mother’s house next door found valuables connected to several of the homes that had been burglarized.
KALLINGER SAID THAT GOD HAD A MISSION for him: he was to assist people whose brains had been adversely affected by improperly made shoes. Yet he was found competent to stand trial. Dr. John Hume concluded that Kallinger suffered from antisocial personality disorder. He was faking insanity and amnesia.
The first trial in late spring 1975 ended in a mistrial. The second trial lasted eight days. Kallinger’s attorney said he suffered from “toxic derangement” from the chemicals he inhaled in his years of work as a cobbler. The jury took less than an hour to find Kallinger guilty. They had seen through his attempts to display psychotic symptoms. The judge told Kallinger that he was an evil, depraved man and sentenced him to 30 years.
Preparations to extradite him to New Jersey for his murder trial were already underway.
Kallinger realized he had to step up his pretense of psychosis. He threw excrement at guards, stopped up his toilet to ward off a ghost, and mixed his urine with plum juice and orange juice to pass it off as evidence of an illness. The mental health expert at the prison believed it was all a sham.
Kallinger’s new defense attorney, Paul Giblin, hired Dr. Irwin Perrs from Rutgers University Medical School. Perrs believed that Kallinger had schizophrenia. Yet he also admitted that “much of the behavior is not in keeping with psychosis…much of the behavior has had a …’game playing’ quality.”
KALLINGER DECIDED TO ENLIST SOMEONE WITH REAL CLOUT to speak for him. He wrote a letter to Flora Rheta Schreiber, an English professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of the bestselling biography about “Sybil,” the woman with sixteen personalities. Schreiber had worked with Dr. Cornelia Wilbur, Sybil’s therapist. Only later would one of Wilbur’s co-workers expose this entire charade as fraud. For the moment, Schreiber still had credibility. She was also on the lookout for another bestseller. This left her vulnerable to be manipulated. She would write Kallinger’s case into a book, The Shoe-Maker.
However, she was not a mental health expert. This didn’t stop her from making her own diagnosis. To shore up her notions, she accepted the hearsay gossip of neighbors, third-party reports, and Kallinger’s self-report. In her introduction, Schreiber compared Kallinger to Sybil and indicated that she was traveling the same territory. “Both were victims of child abuse and of destructive parental attitudes toward them. Both were denied a child’s right to self-realization.” Her book is an attempt to advocate for Kallinger. She presents him as a serial killer, responsible for the murders of Maria Fasching in New Jersey, his son Joey, and another boy.
Kallinger went on trial in Hackensack, on September 13, 1976 for the murder of Maria Fasching, the victim in Leonia, and numerous other charges related to his taking of hostages, assault, and theft of property. It took nine days to seat a jury. Kallinger had pleaded not guilty. However, he held something in reserve. If the state showed proof of his guilt, then he’d change his plea to insanity.
THIS TRIAL COVERED THE SAME ground as prior proceedings when addressing Kallinger’s state of mind, but the prosecutor, Larry McLure, also had the shirt and tie, along with a photograph of Kallinger wearing them. They had Michael Kallinger’s fingerprints on a broken piggy bank. McClure called the witnesses from the Romaine home who’d been held hostage and assaulted. Each assisted with linking Kallinger with the discarded bloody shirt. They had all successfully picked him out of a line-up.
During the testimony, Kallinger chirped like a bird, swept his arms over his head, kicked his feet, and kept shouting. This was clearly a pretense of insanity. The judge had him removed.
Medical men with strong credentials on both sides testified to opposing diagnoses. The jury took just two hours to find Kallinger guilty. He received a life sentence.
According to some reports, Kallinger set fire to his cell and was transferred to Trenton State Psychiatric Hospital for three weeks. He attempted to suffocate himself. Yet he also successfully argued before a judge to be allowed to defend himself in his fourth trial. Then he wrote so many letters to the judge and set yet another fire that he was barred from pro se representation. This trial offered the same experts and issues, and Kallinger was found guilty of armed robbery and breaking and entering. Apparently, Schreiber’s advocacy wasn’t having much impact.
The next year, he was moved to a hospital for the criminally insane in Waymart, Pennsylvania. He tried to kill another prisoner there. In 1996, he died from a seizure. Schreiber got her bestseller.
Among the items she included were potential influences from Kallinger’s childhood. According to her, his adoptive parents were cold and strict. At one time (by his self-serving account), they took him for a hernia operation and told him that the doctor had also fixed his penis so it would never get hard. This gave him a complex about his size. Without evid
ence to corroborate what Kallinger told her, Schreiber concluded that his parents had symbolically “castrated” his ability to grow up normally. This is what use a knife for his murders. (Remember, she was an English teacher.) Her analysis of his penis-fixation as a result of this ordeal is extensive, but essentially, she says, the knife transformed him from victim to victimizer.
His first marriage was bad as well, as his wife refused to take responsibility for their two children. Kallinger learned that holding a knife in his hand would help him achieve an erection for masturbation. He claimed that since the age of 15 he had hallucinations of God and the devil, and that these were responsible for the fires he’d set to burn down his building. (Schreiber ignores the fact that he gained quite a bit of money from insurance payouts.)
He detailed for Schreiber a long and complex history of hallucinations---which no one else had ever seemed to know about. By the winter of 1973-4, Kallinger believed he had a mandate to destroy mankind. He was supposed to kill everyone with a butcher knife, and he enlisted Michael as an accomplice. They would ride the bus to unfamiliar towns break into houses. Supposedly they successfully robbed dozens of homes throughout New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, although Schreiber fails to link a single incident to a police report.
Regarding the third alleged murder, one day in July 1974, says Kallinger, he spotted Joe Collazo on Fifth Street in Philadelphia. Kallinger and Michael took the ten-year-old to an isolated area in an abandoned factory, snipped off his penis, shoved shears into his rectum, and killed him. If Schreiber had bothered to read the newspaper reports, she would have discovered that Kallinger’s facts were inconsistent with the actual findings.
Kallinger told her that he and Michael had also killed Joey. She wrote that the jury had accepted what the prosecutor’s team of experts had said merely because there were more of them than on the defense. She did not seem to understand that psychosis is not equivalent to legal insanity. Even in his confessions, Kallinger seems to know that what he did was wrong. Thus, he was sane.
Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set) Page 4
