'He Just Fit Right In' - And That's How He Hid If Not For A Tv Show, John List's New Life Might Have Forever Remained A Secret.

Bob Clark had just run off a batch of photocopies and was heading back to his desk at his Richmond, Va., office when he collided head-on with his past.

He saw FBI Agent Kevin August, there to investigate a tip about a man accused of murdering his entire family 18 years earlier in Westfield, N.J.

What August saw was a tall, nearsighted office worker in shirt sleeves.

The man's cheeks were a little fuller, his hair a little thinner. But there was no mistaking that this pale accountant with the papers in his hand looked like John List, whose face had peered out from hundreds of "Wanted" posters in hundreds of post offices for more years than most convicted killers spend in prison.

"Mr. List," the agent began, "We're with the FBI. . . ."

*

Three hundred miles to the north, in New Jersey, the current and former police chiefs from the tidy, affluent town of Westfield were lunching in a roadside diner when the FBI found them.

The two law officers, Chief Anthony Scutti and his predecessor, James F. Moran, were probing the lengthy menu when Scutti's pager beeped, summoning him to the telephone. Moran was still reading through the list of broiled specials when Scutti returned to the table. Scutti grinned and extended his hand in celebration.

Then he said the four words he had wanted to say for more than half of his 30-year police career: "We got John List."

With the arrest on June 1 of the gentlemanly accountant in the Richmond office building, the FBI could cross its third-oldest fugitive case off the Most Wanted list.

Since 1971, John List had hidden in plain sight, living most of that time in Denver, and then moving to Richmond just over a year ago. Numerous interviews with neighbors, employers, friends and co-workers who knew him as Bob Clark reveal that he lived as a fugitive as he had always lived: a quiet, upright, unremarkable existence. He picked up his old career as an accountant; he was active in the Lutheran church. He even remarried in 1985.

And now August administered a simple test to determine whether Robert P. Clark was really John List, the only suspect in the notorious, systematic execution of his mother, wife and three children. August and two other FBI agents stood near the receptionist's desk as August ran through a brief checklist:

"Do you have a scar behind your right ear?" He did.

"Have you ever had an operation for a hernia?" He had.

"Are you John List?" No, said the accountant.

"You're John List, aren't you?" August said.