Criminal Minds (22 page)

Back downstairs, he dragged his wife forty feet into the ballroom. There he opened up Boy Scout sleeping bags on the floor, two side by side and a third perpendicular to them. He dumped Helen on the third one and tried to clean up the blood.

His plan was to wait for the kids to come home from school, but his daughter, Patricia, sixteen, phoned from school and said she was sick. List picked her up, then hurried to enter the house ahead of her. When Patty entered, he shot her in the back of the head. He dragged her by her feet into the ballroom and deposited her on part of the other two sleeping bags.

With time to spare, he left the house, did some banking, and mailed a batch of letters. Later in the day, he picked up his son Frederick, thirteen, from an after-school job. When they got home, List shot Fred before he had even taken his coat off. Fred was put in the ballroom with his mother and his sister.

John Jr., fifteen, came home from soccer practice earlier than expected and caught List unprepared. They struggled, but List managed to kill the boy, shooting him ten times. List put him on the sleeping bags, straightened everybody out, draped towels over their faces, and then knelt and prayed over his family. John List was a very devout man.

All that done, he sat down and wrote out a detailed confession, addressed to his church’s pastor, and put it in an envelope with other documents. He had already informed the children’s schools that they would be gone for a while, on a family trip to North Carolina. He ate dinner and slept in the billiards room. In the morning, he switched on all the lights in the house, turned on music that would play throughout the house on an intercom and cranked it up, and left.

Patty had told her drama coach that she was worried about her father and that if the coach heard anything about a family vacation, it would mean that her father had killed her. That night, her coach drove past the house, but seeing it all lit up, he decided that everything must be okay.

Nobody entered the house for nearly a month. On December 7, a neighbor noticed that the lights were burning out and that the place seemed abandoned. The neighbor called the police, and List, whose body was not present, was immediately the prime suspect, but he was nowhere to be found.

List had adopted the name Robert Clark and moved to Colorado, where he had remarried and started a new life. When his second marriage started to fray and his new life seemed to be disintegrating in much the way that his old one had, he turned to a neighbor for comfort. That neighbor was an avid reader of the tabloids, and in 1987 she saw a story about those long-ago murders in New Jersey, complete with a photo and a description of the missing man. She knew it had to be the man she knew as Clark, but she didn’t report him. When
America’s Most Wanted
ran a segment on the crime in 1989, she was again reminded of Clark, who had moved to Virginia with his second wife. The neighbor called the show, and soon some FBI agents had List in custody.

His life had fallen apart, List claimed in his letter to his pastor. His wife refused to attend church with him anymore, his professional life was collapsing, he was deeply in debt, and his daughter didn’t respect him. He couldn’t think of any other way out. At his trial he claimed that by killing his mother, his wife, and his three children, he was sending them to heaven, but he couldn’t kill himself because that would doom him to hell. On November 5 of that year—just four days before the murders—he had even sat them all down and asked them how they would want their remains handled in the event that they died.

It wasn’t much of a defense, and the jury found him guilty on all counts and sentenced him to five consecutive life terms. List died of complications from pneumonia on March 21, 2008.

 

 

THE EPISODE
“Children of the Dark” (304) also makes reference to another family annihilator: Mark Barton. Barton was different from John List in two ways: he didn’t confine his killing to his immediate family, and he murdered his family over a much greater span of time.

Barton, born in Germany to an air force family on April 2, 1955, was raised in South Carolina. He attended Clemson University and the University of South Carolina, earning a degree in chemistry in spite of an ongoing drug habit that he resorted to crime to feed. In Atlanta, Georgia, after graduation, he seemed to be settling down. He married Debra Spivey, and they had two children, Matthew and Mychelle.

But his life wasn’t as stable as it seemed. The family moved to Arkansas for Barton’s job. He became paranoid and distrustful of his wife, and he lost his job when his performance slacked. He sabotaged company data on his way out the door and served a brief stint in jail as a result.

Back in Georgia, Barton found a new job and a new girlfriend, Leigh Ann Vandiver, about whom his wife knew. In 1993, while on a family camping trip to Alabama, Debra Spivey and her mother, Eloise, were bludgeoned to death. Barton was a suspect, but since there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute him, he was never charged.

In 1995, he and Leigh Ann were married. Again he started acting strange, suffering deep depressions and paranoid delusions. He lost a big settlement from his wife’s death through day trading and ended up owing money instead of making it. After losing $105,000 in a single month, he decided the time had come to act.

He woke early on July 27, 1999, and bludgeoned Leigh Ann to death in her bed. The next night, he did the same to Matthew and Mychelle. He covered them with blankets and left notes on their bodies, and on July 29 he went to the downtown offices of the company he worked for, the All-Tech Investment Group. He chatted with his coworkers for a while, then said, “I hope this doesn’t ruin your trading day,” pulled out two pistols, and started shooting. After killing four people in one building, he calmly walked through the police lines into another building and opened fire again, killing five more. Then he passed through the police yet again and vanished.

The police eventually searched for Barton at his home and found the bodies of his family members. In a note Barton left behind, he denied responsibility for the deaths of his first wife and her mother.

An intensive manhunt ensued. Five hours later, Barton threatened a young girl. She ran away from him and called for help, and once more the police were on his trail. When his van was spotted, the police followed him into a gas station in Acworth, Georgia. Surrounded, Barton ducked back into the van and shot himself, elevating that day’s total to thirteen dead at his hands. We will probably never know if he also murdered his first wife and his mother-in-law. But the real question that will always remain is this: Did his second wife know whether he had killed his first wife?

 

 

ALTHOUGH THIS FINAL
pair has yet to merit a mention on
Criminal
Minds
, it seems remiss to close out a chapter on families killing together, and family annihilators, without at least a passing reference to a pair of brothers who famously teamed up to murder their parents.

On the night of August 20, 1989, film and music executive Jose Menendez and his wife, Kitty, were dozing in the family room of their Beverly Hills mansion, with the James Bond flick
The Spy Who Loved Me
playing on their TV. Two men came into the room bearing 12-gauge shotguns. One fired two shots at Jose, then held the barrel to Jose’s head and finished him off. The commotion woke Kitty, who tried to run. A shotgun blast savaged her leg and knocked her down. She tried to get up, but the blasts kept coming. Before it was over, Kitty had been shot ten times at close range. Finally, each victim’s kneecaps were maimed, gangland style, presumably to make the whole event look like an organized-crime hit.

A few weeks earlier, Kitty had confessed to her sons’ psychotherapist—who was treating them as part of their sentence for some burglaries they’d been convicted of—that she feared her two sons were psychopaths.

Before the year was out, the sons, Lyle and Erik, had spent more than a million dollars of their inheritance. Erik, eighteen, confessed the double homicide to the brothers’ psychotherapist, who initially kept quiet about it even though Lyle, twenty-one, threatened him, thereby technically releasing the therapist from the bond of doctor-patient privilege. The doctor’s girlfriend overheard one of their sessions, however, and she went to the police, fearing for her boyfriend’s safety. When the police arrived with arrest warrants, the doctor told them everything.

The Menendez brothers had been worried that their father would cut them out of his will. They’d been in trouble for various crimes, and relations were tense. They claimed—although there was no independent verification—that their parents had abused and molested them all their lives. Erik was in Israel when Lyle was arrested, but when Erik flew back to Los Angeles, the detectives met him at the airport.

Their first trials ended with hung juries, but the brothers were tried again, found guilty of first-degree murder with special circumstances and conspiracy to commit murder, and sentenced to life in prison, where they remain to this day.

SO FAR WE’ VE BEEN
discussing male criminals almost exclusively, except for those women who act as part of a couple or a family. The reason for this is simple: most serial killers and mass murderers are men. Women tend to murder people they know, family members or acquaintances, and they ’re more likely to choose poison over other weapons.
Most
is not the same as
all
, however, and the balance depicted on
Criminal Minds
is pretty close to the balance in real life.

One of the show’s notable exceptions is Megan Kane, the high-priced call girl in the episode “Pleasure Is My Business” (416). Megan is not exactly the fictional cliché of the hooker with a heart of gold, but she does focus her murderous impulses on men who avoid—as her father avoided—their parental responsibilities.

Referenced in that episode, as well as in another with a female unsub, “Jones” (218), is a hooker whose heart was anything but gold—and who, in her professional life, was anything but high-priced.

 

 

TWO YOUNG MEN
looking for scrap metal along I-95 in Volusia County, Florida, made an entirely different sort of discovery on December 13, 1989. They came across a male body, wrapped in a carpet runner. The victim, shot three times in the chest with a .22, was identified as Richard Mallory of Clearwater, who was last seen thirteen days earlier. Mallory owned an electronics repair business, but he didn’t have any regular employees, so when he vanished, no one paid much attention. He had a habit of vanishing anyway, taking off on liquor-and-sex binges for days at a time. He had a fondness for booze, pornography, strippers, and hookers. The police had few clues, and the case went cold in a hurry.

Six months later, another corpse turned up. This one, a nude man identified as David Spears, had been missing for a couple of weeks after vanishing during a drive to Orlando.