Motive
List had lost his job as an accountant and was suffering from financial problems before the murders. He would sit at the local bus station every day, hiding his unemployment from his family, and making believe he was traveling to his accountant job. He owed $11,000 on his mortgage and was skimming from his mother's bank accounts. He was also dealing with his wife's dementia, brought on by advanced syphilis contracted from her first husband and hidden from List for 18 years.
List was described by a psychiatrist as having obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. A psychiatrist who interviewed List testified that he saw only two solutions to his family's financial and health problems – either go on welfare or kill his family and send their souls to heaven. He was especially concerned about the soul of his daughter, Patty, who showed little interest in church. She was also active in the theater department, smoked marijuana, and was interested in Wicca. He was afraid that welfare would expose them to ridicule, show that List did not love them, and violate his own authoritarian father's teachings to always care for and protect the family.
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Famous quotes containing the word motive:
“If, in looking at the lives of princes, courtiers, men of rank and fashion, we must perforce depict them as idle, profligate, and criminal, we must make allowances for the rich men’s failings, and recollect that we, too, were very likely indolent and voluptuous, had we no motive for work, a mortal’s natural taste for pleasure, and the daily temptation of a large income. What could a great peer, with a great castle and park, and a great fortune, do but be splendid and idle?”
—William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863)
“In using the strong hand, as now compelled to do, the government has a difficult duty to perform. At the very best, it will by turns do both too little and too much. It can properly have no motive of revenge, no purpose to punish merely for punishment’s sake. While we must, by all available means, prevent the overthrow of the government, we should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“And I envy the intransigence of my own
Countrymen who shoot to kill and never
See the victim’s face become their own
Or find his motive sabotage their motives.”
—Louis MacNeice (1907–1963)