I write a lot about conspiracies. And you can’t have conspiracies without conspirators. But I’m also interested in the pathological personalities that exist in every community, outside the influence of any shadowy and nefarious organization. Especially the ones who appear “normal” in every way. Until.
The case of John List is more frightening to me than all the 9/11s and JFK assassinations put together. List was a fine, upstanding member of society, a successful accountant who lived in a New Jersey mansion with his family, including his elderly mother. He was a devout Lutheran who also taught Sunday school. After losing his job in 1971, List didn’t tell his family, and pretended to go to work each day. He began skimming money from his mother’s bank account to pay the mortgage. On November 9, List abruptly shot and killed his three children, aged 16, 15, and 13, his wife, and his 85 year old mother. In an incomprehensibly grisly detail, List had gone to his older son’s soccer game, cheered for him, drove him home, and then murdered him. He left a note to his pastor, bizarrely thinking he would understand. List then vanished for eighteen years, before being found through America’s Most Wanted, living under another identity, with a new wife, in Virginia.
Another very religious person, Andrea Yates, committed the most horrendous murder I’ve ever heard of. Yates had supposedly struggled with “post partum depression,” one of those chic maladies no mother could ever have contracted until the late twentieth century. Despite this alleged illness that comes after having a baby, Yates continued to have children. On June 20, 2001, she paraded her five little children, one by one, into the bathtub, where she methodically held them underwater until they stopped breathing. This wasn’t a case where she snapped; the last one fought for his life, but she was bigger and drowned him, too. Then she laid them out neatly on the bed. Like List, she seemed to believe that killing them ensured their place in heaven. I guess she wasn’t worried about her place. Her husband was nearly as nutty, defending his wife, and acting upbeat at the funeral. Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity.
So how do the John Lists and Andrea Yates of the world lead normal lives, managing to avoid killing anyone for decades, then suddenly snap and murder those closest to them? Is this what the old timers meant by someone being possessed by a demon? How many incidents have happened where a child- almost always a son- suddenly goes off and kills his parents and siblings? A fourteen year old Alabama youth drunkenly phoned the police in 2019, to report that he’d killed his parents and three very young siblings. He’d apparently just found out that his mother was actually his stepmother. Seems like a bit of an overreaction. In 2024, a sixteen year old in New Mexico also drunkenly confessed to killing his family; both parents and two siblings. I suppose you have to get drunk after going full Satanic like that. There are so many cases like this. Knowing that makes even the best parents shiver a little.
Husbands have killed wives, and wives have killed husbands, after long and outwardly very happy marriages. Spouses kill each other for the most ridiculous reasons; like a $20,000 insurance policy. To free themselves to marry someone else. Why do you have to kill? Half of all marriages end in divorce. No one will ostracize you. And these are just the ones who get caught. Knowing how dim-witted the average police department and local FBI are, you have to think that plenty of criminals were smart enough to elude them. The D.C. snipers tried everything they could to get the attention of the authorities, calling the FBI tip line and being hung up on, even alerting them to a note they’d left tacked to a tree at one crime scene, which the CSI people- who as we all know from Hollywood screenwriters are incomparably brilliant detectives- had somehow failed to notice. They just kept looking for a phantom white van.
The D.C. snipers were eventually cornered at a highway rest stop. Not by the police, but by an alert trucker who managed to keep their vehicle blocked in, while notifying law enforcement. Which took so long to arrive that the snipers almost escaped. Remember when they locked Boston down, in a prelude to “COVID,” to search for the alleged Boston bomber? The patsy was only captured after an alert homeowner notified the Keystone Kops. So if a woman with “post partum depression,” or a former soldier with “PTSD,” or maybe some rich guy with “executive burnout,” is triggered to kill those closest to him, you can’t expect much from the authorities. So many missing persons cases remain unsolved, in large measure due to the incompetence of those entrusted to solve them. So it’s a pretty good time to be a serial killer, or some seemingly nice person that suddenly turns into a violent, demented caricature.
So what sends more chills up your spine; our leaders engaging in occult rituals under a giant owl at Bohemian Grove, or a nice, religious fellow who painstakingly kills his entire family one day? Secret yearly meetings at Bilderberg, or a mother leaving her two toddlers strapped in car seats, while she pushed the car into a body of water, like Susan Smith? The media, of course, was more concerned with her blaming a fictional Black guy than anything else. Is Bill Gates more terrifying than Andrea Yates? Who would you rather be stuck in a dark alley with; Henry Kissinger or Dennis Rader, the BTK killer? Rader had a family, and lived an entirely normal life. Except that every so often, he would viciously murder a random victim. We know that Gates, and George Soros, and the Rothschilds are evil. But are they worse than that co-worker in the next cubicle, who was well liked by everyone until they found the bodies in his backyard?
That’s the truly chilling thing; those of us who are “awake” to all the corruption pretty much know who the bad guys are. But what about your quiet, unassuming neighbor who always exchanges polite greetings? And then one day, ends the lives of all his closest loved ones? Remember the guy who laced Tylenol with poison many years ago, killing several people? That’s certainly a less direct, but perhaps even less understandable brand of evil. Or if those urban legends are true, and some smiling, cookie baking mothers really did pass out apples with razor blades in them to trick or treaters. I guess the old radio show, that used the tagline, “who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” knew what it was saying. I just know there seems to be a lot more of these kinds of psychopaths than there are, for instance, kindly millionaires secretly giving money to those in need. Like John Beresford Tipton on The Millionaire.
You’d think that the Illuminati- or whatever they call themselves- would be interested in these twisted characters. Maybe even they’re afraid of that kind of ticking time bomb. My friend Victor Hugo Vaca claims that there is a renowned surgeon in Baltimore, whom he has fearlessly named, that is a genuine serial killer. This is a more disturbing variant on all the patients killed by non-serial killer surgeons. Or anesthesiology nurses like Bill Clinton’s mother. Presumably, they don’t do it on purpose. This guy does. So who knows how many others there could be? They’ve caught nurses and other hospital workers who had been piling up victims. They would claim “mercy” killings, as opposed to the List-Yates types, who attribute it to their very confused religious dogma. And then there was Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Lovingly nicknamed Dr. Death by his fellow interns. Millions thought of him as a hero.
Because law enforcement often doesn’t get its man/woman or they/them, I sometimes wonder if the guy with an odd look in the store, who holds his stare a little too long, might be one of these murderers who got away with it. There’s bound to be plenty of them out there. I do have quite an imagination. That’s the novelist in me. Jack the Ripper was never caught, although most of us who have studied that subject believe this was because of some kind of Royal Family connection. I don’t think The Boston Strangler was Albert DeSalvo, and after he was conveniently murdered in prison, we’ll never know. Or all the recklessness, which unintentionally ended lives. My elderly in-law was killed by a hit and run driver walking home from the store. Manslaughter, to be polite. They never found the culprit. I don’t know how you live with something like that on your conscience. Just driving away and going on with your life.
So many individuals cross the ultimate moral line in the sand, that it seems obvious they don’t fear ever being judged. I don’t mean by our supremely flawed earthly injustice system. I mean by God. Some of the most horrific killers, such as List or Yates, were supposedly faithful Christians. They couldn’t really have believed in God, could they, and committed patricide, matricide, or whatever you call it when you eliminate your entire family? It’s like the priests molesting altar boys. Do they still tell themselves they are faithful apostles of Christ after doing that? I saw one of those Investigation Discovery programs, where a friendly married pastor was caught having an affair with a much younger girl. She became pregnant, and he killed her. What else was a pastor to do? Then went right on with his sermons, lecturing others. I think he buried her body in his yard, and helped look for the killer. These true psychopaths often do that; help search for the person they murdered. What can explain that?
I sometimes fret that there is a real Room 101, which in Orwell’s 1984 represented the place where they took you and confronted you with your greatest fear. I think Winston Smith’s greatest fear was rats. But I think my greatest fear is being involved in one of these mind boggling tragedies. I don’t know- were other husbands whose wives wound up murdering them for a pretty modest insurance policy any more naive than me? Of course, I don’t think my wife would ever plot to knock me off, but those other husbands (and wives) probably didn’t think so, either. I am haunted by what those List children, or Andrea Yates’ young kids, were thinking when the person they trusted the most in the world suddenly turned into a demon. My father was a bitter drunk who was angry at the world, but I never could picture him murdering us. Those parents who did commit such an unspeakable crime don’t appear to have been angry drunks.
We’ve all met people that we wonder about. In the back of our mind, we can imagine them having killed someone, or one day killing. We wouldn’t be surprised if they found something while searching their house. I probably would have been suspicious of John Wayne Gacy, but then again I’ve always found clowns to be creepy. Ted Bundy fooled everyone. It’s not like the super villains we all know and love. I can easily believe that Hillary Clinton, for example, was recorded torturing a child on Anthony Weiner’s still unavailable laptop. We know there is international child sex trafficking, what the late Dave McGowan dubbed the Pedophocracy. So if you’ve gone that far, to exploit and rape frightened children, then is it that hard to accept that you’d be willing to kill them? Snuff films are popular with someone. Okay, I admit that those who produce and “cast” snuff films are worse than the random ticking time bombs.
