“In a quiet, well-to-do suburban neighborhood, a family is found dead. This is not the kind of place where murders happen.”
“Neighbors have noticed lights burning day and night in the three-story Victorian mansion for the past month, but there’s no sign anyone is home.”
“The man responsible for the mass murder would elude law enforcement officials for almost 18 years. Meticulously laid plans allow him to successfully make his escape, but the ‘Boogeyman of Westfield’ would eventually be discovered.”
“The unsolved ones… we have to stand up and approach these cases in a way outside the box. Let the world know, those out there that did commit a murder, and there are people that are coming after you.”
“There’s just a lot of good people trying to do the right thing because it’s something that you have to be passionate about. Solve this, bring some peace to the family, at least—just doing my job.”
At 10:10 p.m. on the night of Wednesday, December 7th, 1971, police in Westfield, New Jersey, receive a call from a woman on Hillside Avenue. She hasn’t seen any members of the family or any activity at the house for a few weeks.
The bodies of Helen List, aged 46, and her three children—Patricia, 16, Frederick, 13, and John, 15—are discovered by police, laid out on sleeping bags in the ballroom at the back of the main floor in the three-story house. Helen is wearing a dressing gown. All three kids are wearing coats. They’ve all been shot dead.
“Oddly, religious music is playing over the house intercom system.”
A fifth body is found in the hallway of the third floor. Alma, John’s 85-year-old mother, resides in living quarters on the top floor of the house. She is shot in the bedroom. Her knees break as she falls to the floor before she’s dragged to the hallway on a carpet runner.
“Two slices of bread in the toaster of her kitchenette lead police to speculate her murder may have taken place in the morning.”
Lights are blazing throughout the 19-room mansion on this dark and rainy night as investigators comb the house looking for clues as to how this tragedy came to be. One person missing from the scene is John Emil List, the family’s 46-year-old father.
In a filing cabinet, police find two guns and a five-page letter handwritten on yellow lined paper. It’s addressed to the pastor of the Lutheran church the family belongs to. The letter to Reverend Rowinkle is confessional. It leaves no doubt to the fact that it’s List’s family laying on the floor in the ballroom. It’s dated November 9th—one month ago.
The family’s blue four-door Chevrolet is missing from the house. A 50-state alarm is issued, citing John Emil List as wanted for mass murder. It goes to every FBI field office, every post office, and to other law enforcement agencies across the country.
The investigation begins. Police interview relatives, friends, teachers, and neighbors. A portrait emerges of a family that has remained aloof from neighbors during the five years they have lived in the big white house with green shutters. John List was known to get irritable around small children and dogs. One neighbor recalls taking a pie to the house as a welcome gesture when the family moved in, only to be told by John:
“We are not a friendly people, and we do not like to get involved with neighbors socially.”
But a physician who lives next door to the Lists thinks the family seemed normal in a neighborhood where executives can move in and out without making friends. He recalls List playing baseball with the boys in the backyard and driving them to Little League games. To the neighbors, Helen List is the most mysterious member of the family—someone who’s rarely, if ever, seen outside, someone who’s been deemed an extreme recluse. The neighbor across the street tells police that she hadn’t seen Helen since the family moved in five years earlier. While the Lists’ neighbors may have varying views about the family, they would likely all agree on one thing: nobody really knew them very well.
The List children are popular and active in youth groups. 16-year-old Patricia attends Westfield High School where she’s a keen participant in drama productions and has had starring roles in school plays. But Pat, as she’s known to her friends, is frequently absent from school. They’ve heard it’s because her mother wants her to cook at home. They’d hear stories about Helen but never from Patricia herself, who would become silent when asked about her parents. Her brothers, Frederick and John, attend Roosevelt Junior High. It’s across the street from Redeemer Lutheran Church, the church the family goes to. The church is the center of their social lives. John List taught Sunday school there.
The List family moves to Westfield from Rochester, New York, in 1965. John has plans to restore the historic home that features marble fireplaces and a Tiffany skylight. The mansion’s ballroom held chamber concerts and, in recent years, an art gallery. But once the Lists occupy the house, the ballroom is virtually empty. In fact, the whole house is sparsely furnished. John List, an accountant by profession, was riding the crest of an economic wave when he purchased the $90,000 house in 1965. It’s an affluent neighborhood, home to executives and professionals. At the time, he is the vice president of the First National Bank of New Jersey, on an equal footing professionally with other homeowners in the neighborhood. The First Federal Savings and Loan Association of Westfield gives him a substantial mortgage, feeling he can handle it. List moves up the executive ladder, taking a position a short time later with the American Photographic Corporation of New York City. He’s making $235,000 a year—that’s equivalent to $160,000 today.
But things begin to take a downturn for him. The economy takes a nosedive, and Helen has a nervous breakdown that requires expensive treatment at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. List finds he needs a second and then a third mortgage on the house to put food on the table and keep up with all the bills. Dreams of restoring the house are long gone. List changes jobs again, going to work in January of 1971 for the State Mutual Life Insurance Company of America, but his salary is half of what he was making previously. His mother, Alma, has $200,000 in savings. He begins skimming money from her bank account to cover his three mortgages.
“$200,000 is a lot of money in 1971, close to a million and a half today.”
Despite all that money, she may not have even known about the situation. Desperate to save face about their financial difficulties, List keeps the grim reality of their circumstances from everyone, including his family. The principles of self-reliance and the Protestant work ethic he learned growing up in a strict religious home forbid him from showing any signs of weakness or failure.
“You could argue his psychology was reflective of the time. Rigid gender roles in post-war America called for the man to be the protector and provider for the family.”
By November of 1971, List is an independent agent for the insurance company he had begun working for in January. As such, it would be up to him to go out and find clients, but he’s been staying at the train station during…
“I also broke my finger.”
“And I said, ‘You got the cut and a broken finger in a fight? Was that during the murder of Cyrus?'”
“And he goes, ‘I don’t know.'”
“It wasn’t… no, it wasn’t, ‘I’ll tell you about the fight that caused this.’ It was, ‘I don’t know.'”
“Does that make him guilty? No. But all these things start piling up.”
Finally, Detective Duke moves on to the glove containing Littleton’s DNA.
“It was golden because he denies ever wearing a glove. He never saw a glove. Just a lot of, ‘No, it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it,’ that kind of thing.”
Detective Dugal has now caught Stacy in a lie. The DNA evidence proves that he did wear the glove, the likely explanation being to cover up any fingerprints. Given Littleton’s contradictory interview in combination with the new physical evidence against him, Detective Dugal is confident that Stacy Littleton killed Cyrus Jefferson.
Detective Dugal calls Cyrus’s sister, Cidra, finally with some good news.
“I called her and told her he was arrested, and then I asked her if I could go—come visit her and talk to her, and she was thrilled.”
“People sometimes go, ‘Well, why is a detective flying to the victim’s house? She was in Houston, Texas, why are you going to the victim’s family’s house?’ Well, she’s got information for me still. I have questions for her. I want more background on Cyrus. I want to know if anybody in the family ever heard of Stacy Littleton. A lot of questions, and I want to do that in person. And there’s a huge satisfaction in sitting with the victim’s family and saying, ‘I did this. I worked hard and we’ve come to a conclusion, and all of us should be very happy.’ She was thrilled.”
With the collection of new statements, including Stacy’s contradictory account, as well as new physical evidence in the case, the DA takes it to trial. On July 3rd, 2018, after a 2-week trial and 11 hours of deliberation over 3 days, a jury convicts Stacy Littleton of killing Cyrus Jefferson with a knife. Stacy Littleton is sentenced on August 6th, 2018, and receives a sentence of 25 years to be served on top of the sentence he’s currently serving for drug possession.
“I think he spent two years, three years, and he died in custody.”
“This case had the potential to be solved, obviously, ’cause I was able to solve it. That doesn’t mean that other investigators couldn’t solve this; they could. The reason it was solved was timing. Cedra’s determination to call the homicide unit, my availability to dive into the case because right after this case, genetic genealogy became a very big issue in the sheriff’s department and we changed our focus to the cold cases which had genetic genealogy potential. This one didn’t, so this one would have been—not pushed aside, but lowered on a priority because it wasn’t a genetic genealogy case. So Cedra’s right: God reached down and said, ‘Let’s solve this one.'”
Due to the tireless work of Detective Dugal and the DNA evidence found in the glove that investigators preserved for over three decades, Cyrus Jefferson’s family finally has justice.
“I want the families of victims who have cold cases to understand that there is a potential for solving the case in the future. I’ve solved many, and after that I’ve solved five more, so that’s very rewarding for all those people who had gotten no closure for many years.”
“And now the case comes to fruition, and they find somebody, or we know who the suspect is. Sometimes in cold case, your suspect is deceased—that happens, it’s happened to a couple of those five I saw—and sometimes they’re still alive and doing well, and you wouldn’t ever guess that they committed a murder 20 or 30 years ago.”
