Just because someone is religious doesn't mean they're a good person or even a sane person. Here's an example: So, this guy, his name is Liss, and Liss has a lot going for him. He has a good marriage, he has three kids, and he lives in this huge 19-room mansion.
I mean, look at that place! Plus, he's got a sweet job as vice president for a bank, so bro is doing well. But most importantly, he's very religious; he and his family go to church every week, so you know he is a good person.
But one day, everything changes because, boom, Liss suddenly gets laid off from his vice president job at the bank. Liss doesn’t know what to do; he can’t tell anyone that he lost his good-paying job. That would be humiliating.
So he decides not to tell anyone. He doesn’t tell his family; he doesn’t tell his friends. Instead, he just keeps going.
He wakes up every day, gets dressed like he always does, and tells his family that he’s going to work. But instead, he drives to the train station and just sits in his car, reading the newspaper until it's time to head home so that his family thinks he's going to work and they don’t ask him any questions. Liss does this for a few months.
He just fakes going to work; I guess he’s hoping that during this period he’ll find another gig to keep him afloat. I don’t know; it doesn’t seem like a very good plan. Also, because he’s not working, he obviously has no income coming in, and his bills start stacking up, particularly his mortgage for that 19-room mansion he and his family are living in.
So after months of not working, he owes $11,000 on his mortgage, and this was 1971, so in today’s dollars, he owes about $87,000. That's a lot of money. Naturally, Liss starts freaking out.
What’s he going to do? Are he and his family going to go bankrupt? Is he going to have to go on welfare?
And remember, he’s still very religious. So Liss starts worrying that he’s going to lose everything, and that his family is going to get so poor that they’re going to turn their backs on his religion, and then his wife nor any of his kids will get into heaven. So this is a big deal for Liss; he can’t have his family not getting into heaven.
He comes up with this insane plan to make sure his family doesn’t get so poor that they turn their backs on his religion. Here’s the plan: First, he tells everyone they’re going on a big family trip, like a vacation, and he stops all the milk deliveries and newspaper deliveries to their home. Then, one afternoon, Liss is at home, and he gets a couple of pew pews that he owns out of the garage.
He goes back in the house and up to his wife, and he points one of them at her and blam! He unives her. Then he goes upstairs, where his mom is living, because I guess his mom lives in the mansion with him too, and blam!
He unives her as well. Then he goes downstairs to the kitchen and waits for his kids to come home from school. Once they get home, he takes the pew pews, and blam blam!
He unives them too. Then he sits down and writes a five-page handwritten letter to his pastor. In the letter, he explains in detail that he had to unive his whole family in order to save their souls and make sure they get into heaven.
Also, in this letter, he acknowledges that, yeah, he lost his job and he could go on welfare, but then he says he’d have to move out of that 19-room mansion that he loves so much and live somewhere that he refers to as undesirable. So this is not just about saving his family’s souls; it’s also that he doesn’t want to live in a smaller house. Anyway, then Liss goes to every family photo in the house and rips his face out of them so that police won’t be able to identify him from his photos.
Then he leaves all the lights on in the mansion to make it look like people are still living there. He packs up some of his stuff, flees, and travels by train from New Jersey over to Michigan and then all the way down to Colorado. He starts living there, and weeks go by.
Back in New Jersey, no one thinks much about Liss’s family being gone. I mean, they were supposed to go on a family trip, so they would be gone. But then about a month goes by, and in the house, light bulbs start burning out and turning off one by one, and the neighbors notice.
“Uh, I don’t think anyone lives there anymore. ” So the neighbors end up calling the police. The police come over, they enter the mansion, and they find Liss’s family’s bodies and the five-page letter he wrote, so they know who did this.
Except there’s no trace of him; they don’t know where he went, and they have no photos to go by. So they basically have no leads. Meanwhile, Liss has been in Colorado living a brand new life.
He changed his identity; he changed his name. He calls himself Bob now, and Bob works different jobs, mostly in restaurant kitchens, keeping quiet, keeping a low profile. Eventually, he ends up living in Denver, settles down there, finds work, and joins a local church because, you know, he’s still very religious.
And after about five years, Bob goes back to working in. . .
Finance again, I guess. He does bookkeeping for a carpet business or something, but that same year he meets a nice woman at a church gathering, and he thinks she is fine. They hit it off, start dating, and eventually get married.
Now, Bob obviously doesn't tell her or anyone else his real identity or that he murdered his last family; he keeps that a secret. But eventually, Bob and his wife move from Denver all the way over to Virginia, where they settle down and make a nice life for themselves. At this point, it's been around 18 years since he unalived his other family, and it seems like the world has completely forgotten about the list of murders.
Dude is never going to get caught until—alright, now, some of you aren't from the US. Well, in the US, there's a long-running TV show called America's Most Wanted, and on the show, they talk about criminals and people who are wanted by the feds for various crimes. Well, at this time, America's Most Wanted is brand new; it's in its first year, so everyone is watching it.
One night, boom! The show airs, and they do a segment talking about these unsolved murders of a family that happened back in New Jersey 18 years before. By this point, they figured out that the killer is List; they just don't know where he is.
Now, despite him tearing himself out of all those family photos all those years ago, they actually did find some images of him, so they know what he used to look like. On the TV show, they use those images and get a forensic artist to make a bust of what List would look like now, now that he's aged almost 20 years. And this freaking bust they made, if you compare it to List, it looks almost exactly like him!
Like, look at that! That forensic artist nailed it! So that night, there's this woman watching the show, and she actually used to be List's neighbor.
She sees this America's Most Wanted segment, and she's like, "Holy, that's Bob! That's my old neighbor! " I guess she calls the police or the America's Most Wanted hotline or whatever and reports that Bob might actually be this killer List.
About two weeks later, the FBI shows up to the accounting firm where Bob works, and bam! They arrest him. Here's his mug shot, and of course he continues to insist, "No, I didn't murder anyone.
My name's Bob! " The feds are like, "Yeah, sure, List. " But eventually, he confesses, and he's convicted of five counts of first-degree murder, and he's sentenced to life in prison.
Later, at 82 years old, List is in prison, and he finally passes away from pneumonia. So also, before he finally died, he said that he hopes to be reunited with his family in heaven. Good luck with that!
