John List on '20/20'
The movie was macabre; Robert Blake playing, strangely enough, a man who kills his wife and family. But the real-life case that "Judgment Day" was based on was every bit as grim.
Killer John List says, "Even as is was doing it, I knew it was wrong."
List gives a jailhouse meeting with "20/20 Downtown's" Connie Chung, his first-ever interview about the savage crime.
Back in 1971, List, a meek-looking Sunday school teacher, methodically murdered his three children, his wife, and his mother in their New Jersey mansion. Then he fled, and built a new life among unsuspecting church-going folks in Colorado and Virginia.
He was captured in 1989 after "America’s Most Wanted" revived the case. List is now 76 and serving five consecutive life sentences. He tells Chung his wife Helen was first to die, shot in the head as she had coffee in the kitchen.
Chung: "What was going through your head after you shot
your wife?"
List: "I guess I was thinking, well, I've started, now
I’ve got to finish it."
Then he went upstairs and shot his mother.
List: "And then it was lunchtime. I ate lunch."
Chung: "You ate lunch in the kitchen where you had shot
your wife in cold blood? How could you?"
List: "I was hungry. It was ... that's just the way it
was."
In the interview, Chung's last for ABC before she joins CNN, List tells how he killed his children as they came home from school. Words that give new meaning to the phrase, "list of shame."
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