Until 1971, life was best for mild-mannered accountant John List. He was vice president of a Jersey City loan company and had moved his mother, wife, and three teenage children into a nineteen-room home in Westfield, New Jersey. But everything changed when he dropped his job. Raised by his Lutheran dad to believe success meant being truly a great provider, List saw himself as an utter failing. Straining under economic burdens, the stress of hiding his unemployment, aswell as the fear which the free-spirited 197 about Loss of life Sentence: THE WITHIN Story from the John List Murders 0s would corrupt the souls of his children, List came to a shattering bottom line.

‘It was my belief that if you eliminate yourself, you will not head to heaven,’ List told Connie Chung inside a tv interview. ‘So eventually I got eventually to the stage where I felt that I possibly could destroy them. Hopefully they would head to heaven, and then maybe I’d have an opportunity to later on confess my sins to God and obtain forgiveness.’

List methodically shot his whole family in their home, managing to conceal the fatalities for weeks using a carefully orchestrated strategy of deception. After that he vanished and started over as Robert P. Clark. Chronicling List’s existence before and after the grisly criminal offense, Death Phrase exposes the truth about the accountant-turned-killer, like the information on his high-profile trial.