The Megyn Kelly Show - The Annihilator: One At A Time — Ep. 3 | MK Confidential

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

“MK Confidential” opens with the words of a killer. John List narrates the morning of Tuesday, November 9, 1971, the day his carefully laid plans to kill each member of his family will become reality. By the end of it, his mother, wife, and three children will all lie dead on the floor of Breeze Knoll. Megyn Kelly steps through the day, piece by piece, as John bookends his day with murder — his wife and mother before breakfast, his children after lunch — and runs through a list of ordinary errands befitting a man about to leave town. He fields two unexpected phone calls and more resistance than he anticipated. He cooks, eats, and cleans up after dinner in the kitchen where he shot his wife. He writes letters detailing their deaths. Then, the next morning, he vanishes. Weeks later, the FBI puts out John List’s face across America, on a flier that describes a six-foot, gray-haired accountant, armed and considered very dangerous. Tips come back by the hundreds, with sightings from Oregon to England. Each one turns out to be somebody else. John List, who murdered his entire family and then slept soundly in his stately Victorian house, simply steps out of the known world. This is Episode 3 of the John List story. Home Title Lock: Go to https://hometitlelock.com/megyn and use promo code MEGYN to get a FREE title history report and a FREE TRIAL of their Triple Lock Protection. AquaTru: Head to https://AquaTru.com & use code MKC for 20% off your purifier and a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee. Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKelly Twitter: https://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShow Instagram: https://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShow Facebook: https://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow 
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I came back in, said a few words to Helen, and went into the front room. Then I came around back and shot her in the head. That is John List, the quiet accountant, the Sunday school teacher who put on a pressed coat and tie to collect his daughter from the police station at 2.30 in the morning. It is Tuesday, November 9, 1971. Before the sun goes down, John List will murder all five members of his family, one at a time. inside the house known as Breez-Knoll. He will not panic.

He will not flee, not yet. He will stop and make himself a sandwich. He will drive downtown and run his errands. He will sit down that evening to dinner in the house where his wife, his mother, and his three children lie dead. And afterward, he will wash the dishes and go to sleep. This is the day itself, hour by hour, how a careful, church-going man spends a Tuesday murdering his family and tells himself the entire time that he is saving them. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is M.K. Confidential.

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in front of him, waiting for his wife to come down and start the coffee. He has been planning this day for weeks. He had even settled on an earlier date and let it come and go. Now the new date is here. I kept thinking about it for several weeks, I'm sure, maybe even a month. And my final solution and those that if I would kill them, that would save them from any problems. Investigators were later able to piece together almost everything about the hours that follow from the evidence inside the house,

from the paper trail of the errands that List ran that day, and from the flat, careful account, List would give years later himself. This is the day they reconstructed. It begins quietly. The porch thermometer reads 28, degrees, and the sky is only starting to gray toward a sunrise John knows, because he has checked, will come at 636.

One by one, his three children come downstairs. Patricia, 16, the aspiring actress, still in trouble over the night the police brought her home. John Jr. 15, the family athlete, big for his age. Frederick, 13, the baby of the house. There is no real breakfast. The kids forage for themselves in the cabinets. Patricia opens the refrigerator looking for milk and finds none. One by one, they gather their school things and go out into the cold, off to their three schools the way they have on a thousand mornings before.

Their father does not sit with them. He stands at the window of his study behind a parted curtain and watches each of them go down the long driveway. By his own account, he gives nothing away. I tried not to act any different than I ordinarily would, No, so they wouldn't be suspicious. John List has already started clearing the way. Days earlier, he called to stop newspaper delivery to the house.

This morning, there is a note taped to the refrigerator in his own hand for the milkman, who by long habit lets himself in the back door to check the milk order Helen always leaves. This one says the family is going away and to hold the deliveries until further notice. A little after 8.30, the milkman reads it and drives off. At the window of his office, John watches quietly until the truck turns onto the street. Then he sits with the morning newspaper, the same New York Times his neighbors are reading, over their own breakfasts, and he waits. A few minutes later, Helen comes down.

She fills the kettle, sets it on the stove, and sits down at the kitchen table, waiting for it to boil. She has no idea that her husband is standing across. the center hall in his office with the Steyer M-1912 in his hand. It is the nine-millimeter Austrian pistol he brought home from the war. On the desk beside him lies a second gun, a small 22-caliber colt revolver that had belonged to his father. It too is loaded and ready. John crosses the hall, approaches Helen from behind. Helen appears to sense movement and begins to turn toward him. He fires. The first bullet hits her in the side of the face, not the back of the head as intended,

and knocks her out of the chair. He fires several more times, some of the shots going into the wall, one of them glancing off a radiator into the next room. Then the kitchen is quiet until the kettle begins to hiss on the stove. Helen lies on the floor by the chair in her bathrobe, and her blood runs out across the striped linoleum while the sun comes in. through the yellow curtains. Upstairs, John's mother has heard the shots. John climbs the back stairs to the third floor, opens his mother's door without knocking. Alma is in her small apartment kitchen, still in her nightgown, her white hair untidy from sleep, a plate with butter on it in her hand and her toast down in the toaster. She looks at her son and asks

and what the noise was downstairs. He shoots her once, in the head, just above the left eye. Two more shots go into the wall. On the counter, her toast pops up. In John's own telling years later with Bill Curtis on American Justice, there is one more detail, one the evidence on site cannot confirm. A kiss. She's out over and no greeted men.

Give me a kiss tonight. And she said, what was that noise? In that point, I felt like if Judas had, you know, kissed her too. And I said, oh, it must have been some noise out in the back. And if she got to the doorway, I killed her. In his account, she gets as far as the doorway. In the scene the police reconstruct, she never leaves the kitchen. He wants to carry his mother downstairs to lay her with the others, but he cannot.

She's too heavy. He drags her by a plastic runner into the narrow hall off of her kitchen and leaves her there. He makes one quick pass at wiping the floor with a damp piece of newspaper, then leaves it. It is not yet nine in the morning. Two of the five are dead. John List has most of his day still in front of him. The first thing he does is clean. Before the phone calls, before the errands, he goes back down to the kitchen where Helen lies,

and tidies up the way he has tidied up after himself his whole life. He describes it decades later in the same even tone he used for everything else. I was very surprised as the amount of blood that no drained out. And I think there was some shell casing and some of her pulse teeth had gotten broken and were out on both the table. Then on the floor, I cleaned all that up. Then with two members of his family dead in the house, John List does not fall apart. He works the day like a list of errands.

He calls the insurance agency he still sells for, timing it so the answering service picks up instead of a person and leaves word that a family emergency is taking the lists to North Carolina, where Helen's mother is gravely ill. It is a lie, of course, and it is the cover story. that will hold for weeks. Over the coming days, he will keep feeding it. A note to each of the children's schools, a phone call to Patricia's drama teacher

to say the girl will miss the next rehearsal. The mail, the milk, and the newspaper already stopped. Every loose thread that might draw attention to the house is snipped off in advance. He walks out into the cold and rakes the leaves. He comes back inside, makes himself a sandwich, and eats it at the kitchen. table. Thirty years later, Connie Chung will try to get him to explain that sandwich on ABC.

You ate lunch in the kitchen where you had shot your wife in cold blood? That's correct. How could you? I was hungry. Just the way it was. By his own account, once the first shot was fired, there was never a moment he considered stopping. Were you determined to kill them? Once I made the plan, yeah, then it's just like. Dida, you go in and you're, there's no stopping them after you start. The children are still at their schools, still alive. In his own mind, not one of them can be allowed to come home and find the two women gone.

I just felt that the ones I had started, it was incumbent upon me to kill all of the children so that not even one of them would remain and suffer the trauma. A little afternoon, the plan hits a snag. The one thing he did not schedule. The phone rings. It is Patricia. She has left school feeling sick and walked to Duke's deli, a luncheonette in town, and she wants her father to come get her.

It is the smallest, most ordinary thing, a teenage girl asking her father for a ride, and it makes her next. So John drives in and picks up his daughter, the one he has clashed with. the most. The girl who told her friends and her drama teacher that her father means to kill her. He brings her home and gets inside ahead of her. Patricia comes in through the back of the house where her father is now waiting. It's over in a moment. One shot through her left jaw at close range.

The bullet ricochets off bone and exits Patricia's left temple. John carries Patricia into the ballroom, laying her on the bare floor still in her coat under the big stained glass skylight. There are still two boys to come home and hours to fill before they do. So John List runs the rest of his errands. He drives into downtown Westfield. At the drive-in window of his bank, he cashes a check for $85 on the account he shared with Helen and enters the new balance in the checkbook, $24.14. At the post office, he mails a letter of addressed to himself, with a small key sealed inside that will unlock the desk in his study. List does not explain this move, but he does tape a note to the top of the desk, which reads,

To the finder, please contact the proper authorities. The key to this desk is in an envelope addressed to myself. The key will not surface for a month until the police dig it out of the family's held mail. By then, the police have forced the desk and filing cabinet. it open. At a second window, chosen as if he had just remembered one more errand, he files the form to hold that mail for 30 days. On his way out, he mails the notes to the children's schools. Then he drives back to the bank and cashes a second check, emptying the account he shared with his mother. At the main branch, a teller walks him back to the safe deposit vault, and he signs in at 137 in the

afternoon and back out at 157. 20 minutes exactly. In the safe deposit box are the last of Alma's savings. Government bonds worth a little over $2,000. The final piece of an inheritance, he's been quietly draining for years. More than $50,000 of his mother's money moved out from under her a little at a time. He cashes the bonds. With characteristic precision, he asks the teller to write down each bond in what it is worth, he says for his mother's records. His mother has been dead for five hours. At three o'clock, the youngest, Frederick, is at his after-school job when word reaches him that his sister has gone home sick. He telephones his father. A secretary who overhears the call never forgets the one thing the boy says into the phone. What happened to

Patty? His father drives down and picks him up. Once home, Fred does not get his coat off. He dies just inside the back door from a single shot and is carried in to lie beside his mother, his head set, so that it just barely touches hers. That leaves only John Jr. The only one of them who gets the chance to fight and the one who stands the best chance at it. It is so cold that afternoon that the boy's soccer practice is canceled, so he comes home early, walking up the long driveway with his gym bag over his shoulder. His father has to scramble into place behind the kitchen door. This time, it goes wrong.

John Jr. hears his father move behind the door. He does not walk in blind like the others. He sees the gun come up and he moves. The first bullet aimed at the boy's head catches him in the back instead because John Jr. twisted away. The next one does not kill him either. He goes down and tries to crawl across the floor, still wearing his winter gloves, while his father fires with both guns now.

And then John keeps firing the little 22 into his son until it clicks empty. John Jr. does not die immediately. By the time it's over, the boy has been shot ten times. The other children each died from a single wound. Later, John List will insist that sparing his children, children, any pain was the whole point. That was the one thing I was trying to burn rent. Was there feeling any wounds or suffering?

No, it's the last moment. The body of his 15-year-old son shot again and again and again as he crawled across the floor trying to save himself, says otherwise. When the boy finally stops moving, his father drags him along a smear of his own blood. out of the kitchen and into the ballroom, laying him at the far end of the row a little apart from the rest. By late afternoon, it is finished. Five people in one house in a single day.

Helen, his wife of nearly 20 years, Alma, his mother, whose little prince he had once been, Patricia 16, John 15, and Frederick 13. What settles over John List by his own account, is not horror, but relief that the plan went off without interruption. Did you know three out of four U.S. homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water? Even though contaminated water looks clear, it could put you at risk for devastating health issues like fatigue, hormone disruption, cognitive decline, and even cancer.

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Aqua True has been featured in popular science and named Best Countertop Water Filter by good housekeeping. Join 98% of customers who say their drinking water is cleaner, safer, and healthier. Go to aquatrue, true is spelled, t-r-u.com. Right now to get 20% off your purifier using promo code M-K-C for M-K-C confidential. Aquatru even comes with a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee. That's aquatruat-com, a-Q-U-A-T-R-U-U-com, promo code M-K-C. Now John List creates the scene the police will find four weeks later. He brings the family's forest green sleeping bags up from the basement. The Boy Scout bags with Be Prepared, printed along the lining.

The ones the boys carried on camping trips as he lays his wife and three children out on the ballroom floor, side by side. The children on their backs still in their winter coats. He covers Helen and lays a towel over her face. He moves her stiffening arm so that it rests across Freddy's shoulder. Whether he means it as a last gesture of protection or only as part of the arrangement, no one can say. From across the room, the four bodies appear to lie in the shape of a cross. Then John List kneels down beside them and prays over his family, each one of them by name.

In the evening, he writes out the why. five pages on a yellow legal pad addressed to Eugene Ray Winkle, the pastor of the family's own church, Redeemer Lutheran, the man under whom he had taught Sunday school. I guess I just felt closest to him and felt that since I was a member of his congregation, that he deserved a more complete explanation. He writes the note like a memo. There's no anguish in it.

There's no wildness in the handwriting. The paragraphs are orderly and neat. Here is some of that letter. He begins with an apology to the pastor, quote, I am very sorry to add this additional burden to your work, he writes. I know that what I have done is wrong from all that I have been taught and that any reasons that I might give will not make it right. But you are the one person that I know that,

while not condoning this, will at least partially understand why I felt that I had to do this. The reasons are numbered. One, quote, I wasn't earning anywhere near enough to support us. Everything I tried seemed to fall to pieces. Two, the lifestyle and shame of going on welfare was, quote, just more than I thought they could and should endure, end quote.

Reason three, quote, With Pat being so determined to get into acting, I was also fearful as to what this might do to her continuing to be a Christian, I'm sure it wouldn't have helped, end quote. And finally, reason number four. Quote, with Helen not going to church, I knew that this would harm the children eventually in their attendance. I had continued to hope that she would begin to come to church soon, end quote.

But when John mentioned the possibility of Helen speaking with a church elder, he writes that Helen, quote, just blew up and stated that she wanted her name taken off the church rolls. John cites the combination of these challenges as the justification for his actions. He writes, quote, So that is the sum of it. If any one of these had been the condition, we might have pulled through. But this was just too much.

At least I'm certain that all have gone to heaven now. He adds, of course, mother got involved because doing what I did to my family would have been a tremendous shock to her at this age. Therefore, knowing that she is also a Christian, I felt it best that she be relieved of the trouble. of this world that would have hit her. After it was all over, I said some prayers for them all from the hymn book. That was the least that I could do. He continues, quote, I leave myself in the hand of God's justice and mercy.

I don't doubt that he is able to help us, but apparently he saw fit not to answer my prayers the way I had hoped that they would be answered. As an aside, John writes Tursley, quote, Also, I'm sure many will say, how could anyone do such a horrible thing? My only answer is it isn't easy and was only done after much thought. Finally, John concludes his letter, quote, Please remember me in your prayers.

I will need them whether or not the government does its duty as it sees it. I'm only concerned with making my peace with God, and of this I am assured because of Christ dying, even for me. He gives instructions in the letter to simply and without emotion. He tells his pastor where his mother should be buried. back in Michigan, next to her own people, and whom to contact. He mentions almost in passing that he had wanted to do this a week earlier on the 1st of November All Saints Day, a day he thought fitting for sending souls to heaven,

and that some travel arrangements he still had to make had held him back. He had, in other words, penciled the murders of his family onto the calendar and then rescheduled them. The pastor is not the only person John writes that night. There are notes to Helen's mother and to his mother's sister and to his own boss at the insurance company. In the letter to his boss, John List, Ever the Diligent Employee, tidily describes his outstanding sales leads and reminds the man about a $500 debt, as though the accounts should be kept in order after he is gone.

No loose ends. In the letter, he also adds a line meant to soften what he has done. It may look cowardly, he writes, that he always shot them from behind, but he simply could not stand for a single one of them to realize in their final moments what was about to happen to them. It is the story he needs to be true, that none of them saw it, that he spared them that much, at least. The autopsies say otherwise. The wounds are on the fronts and sides of their faces, not the backs of their heads. Helen took hers turning toward him, his mother above the left eye, looking straight at her son as he murdered her. Patricia threw her left jaw the moment she stepped inside, Frederick, a single shot to the left temple from the side.

John Jr. took his first in the back, only because he threw himself out of the way. When the medical examiners are finished, the record is plain. Most of his family did see him. and the gun in the last second of their lives. They knew he was murdering them. So even here, alone with a legal pad, John List is not telling the truth, not to his pastor, not to God, most of all, it seems, not to himself.

At the very bottom of the page after his signature, comes one last line, in the tone of a man reminding someone to water the plants, perhaps. His mother, he notes, is in the hallway on the third floor. She was too heavy to move. John List goes back through the house gathering up or destroying the family photographs.

No one ever establishes what became of them. Then he cooks himself dinner and eats it slowly, then washes the dishes and sets them in the rack to dry. Asked years later how a man does that, he points to his time in the army. A war record he tends to exaggerate. Having been in combat, we were out filling and fighting, and then we come in and have something to eat. I think that's what allowed me to, you know, eat peacefully in the room that I had filled my family.

Then he goes down to the billiard room, in the basement directly beneath the ballroom where his family lies, and he goes to sleep. He later says he slept well. In the morning before it is light, John closes up the house. He turns the thermostat down to 50 degrees. degrees, cold enough as investigators later note, to slow the body's decay and delay the smell of it, reaching the street. He switches on the lights in every room but the ballroom, which he leaves dark. He sets the trash out by the back door, the way a family would on any ordinary night. He leaves the radio playing, tuned, as it always is in this house, to WQXR, the classical station

out of New York, piped through the intercom into every room. He has a reason for that. I felt that if some intruder wanted to get into the house, that they might back off if they've heard music and thought that people were in the house. That was another reason I left all the lights on, I believe, make it look like there were people there. Then John List walks out the back door into a cold drizzle,

slides into the family's old Impala, and drives away from Breeze Knoll for the last time. He drives down through, the empty business district, past a dark movie marquee, and points the card toward New York. He crosses the bridges out to Kennedy Airport and ditches the Impala in long-term parking, a nondescript car tucked into a crowded row. On the front seat, he sets a small, neat pile, his Michigan alumni card, and his accountant's license, the last tidy paperwork of a man named John List. Then he walks off across the lot toward the terminals.

In his own mind, he is not yet a fugitive. He is a man taking himself somewhere to rest. I just thought I would like to see the mountains and relax a little bit. Because I had been under a lot of strain. Behind him, back in New Jersey, Breeze Knoll stands with every window lit against the dark of a November morning, music drifting through its rooms, looking for all the world like a house,

where a family is waking up. By the time anyone learns otherwise, John List is gone. He stays gone for nearly 18 years. John List's plan works. For the better part of a month, the lie does exactly what he built it to do. Neighbors see the raked yard

and the burning lights and the family car gone, and they assume what he wants them to assume, that the lists are away, caring for a sick relative, just as the notes claimed. Twice, Westfield police officers come to the door on a welfare check and get no answer.

They look the place over and leave satisfied that nothing is wrong. When the police finally enter the house, discover the bodies, and open John's letter, they have a signed five-page confession that names the killer. What they do not have is the killer himself.

The police notice one more thing written on that letter, the date at the top, 11-9-71. Nearly a month passes before anyone finally gets inside the mansion and finds the family, dead and decaying on the night of December 7, 1971. John List has a four-week head start. His passport is gone. Helens is still in the house,

and investigators begin to believe that he may have already slipped out of the country. at Kennedy Airport, a Port Authority officer running a routine check for stolen cars in the long-term lot finally spots the family Impala, its expired inspection sticker, catching his eye. He runs the plate and it traces back to Breeze Knoll. John's stack of identification is still sitting neatly on the front seat exactly where he left it. The Union County prosecutor Carl Ash will say they have more than enough to indict, what they do not have and cannot seem to get is the faintest idea of where on earth John List has gone. It is a peculiar kind of nightmare for the men working the case.

They are not trying to solve a who done it. They know who did it and how. He has even left them his own explanation for why. They are only trying to find him, a mild, forgettable man who has had a month to become someone else, somewhere in a country of then 200 million people who slipped away before anyone even knew to start looking. It is a rare and staggering crime. In 1971, a man who wipes out his entire family in a single afternoon

and then simply disappears is unheard of. Westfield has never seen anything like it and neither have the people hunting for the man who did it. The FBI puts out John List's face across America on a flyer that describes a six-foot, gray-haired, 46-year-old accountant, armed and considered very dangerous. Most specifically, the flyer describes him as a neat dresser, which is not particularly helpful to the investigation, and so fits 10,000 mild, middle-aged men. The alert goes out to every state to police departments and post offices across the country. Tips come back by the hundreds with sightings from Oregon to England.

Each one must be run down. Each one turns out to be someone else. Within weeks, the trail goes cold. John List, who murdered his entire family and then slept soundly in his stately Victorian house, has simply stepped out of the known world. Next time on MK Confidential, the 18 years John List spends as a new man, or at least under a new name,

a quiet, church-going accountant, a new wife who has no idea, whom she is married to, and a sculptor who will one day give authorities the face of a vanished man they are desperate to find. John List gets away with murder until a TV show changes everything.