Howard Barton Unruh (January 21, 1921 – October 19, 2009) was an American spree killer who killed 13 people on September 6, 1949, in Camden, New Jersey, when he was 28 years old. Unruh is considered the first single-episode mass murderer in U.S. history. He died in 2009 after a lengthy illness at the age of 88.

Background

Unruh was the son of Samuel Shipley Unruh and Freda E. Unruh. He had a younger brother, James; he and Unruh were raised by their mother after the parents separated. He grew up in East Camden, attending Cramer Junior High School, and graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School in January 1939. The Woodrow Wilson High School yearbook from 1939 indicated that he was shy and that his ambition was to become a government employee.

Always a reserved man, he had turned into a recluse in the three months before his spree. The World War II veteran was unemployed and lived with his mother. During the war, he was reportedly a brave tank soldier, serving in the Battle of the Bulge, who kept meticulous notes of every German killed, down to details of the corpse.

He was honorably discharged in 1945, and returned home with a collection of medals and firearms. He decorated his bedroom with military items, and set up a target range in his basement. His mother supported him by working at a factory while Howard hung around the house and attended daily church services. He briefly attended a pharmacy course at Temple University in Philadelphia but dropped out after only three months.

He had trouble getting along with his neighbors, and his interactions with them deteriorated in the three months before his spree. He was considered a "mama's boy" and the subject of teasing. Unruh was harassed by neighborhood teens, who thought he was gay and used to make fun of him. He was reported to have been depressed about having had "homosexual liaisons" in a Philadelphia movie theater. He had only one brief relationship with a girl prior to his arrest.

Killings

Eventually Unruh became paranoid about his neighbors and started to keep a diary detailing everything he thought was said about him. Next to some of the names was the word "retal.", short for "retaliate." He arrived home from a movie theater at 3 am on September 6 to discover that the gate he had just built in front of his house had been stolen. This appears to have been the trigger; Unruh told the police, "When I came home last night and found my gate had been stolen, I decided to kill them all." After sleeping until 8 am he got up, dressed in his best suit and ate breakfast with his mother. At some point, he threatened his mother with a wrench, and she left for a friend's home.

At 9:20 am, Unruh left the house armed with a German Luger pistol looking for his first victims. In only twelve minutes he shot and killed 13 people with 14 shots and wounded several others.

Although in general the killing was premeditated, the victims seemed to be chosen at random. Unruh's first shot missed its intended victim, a bakery truck driver. Unruh shot two of five people in a barber shop, sparing the other three. One victim was killed when he happened to block the door to a pharmacy. A motorist was killed when his car slowed to view the body of a victim. Intending to kill a local tailor, Unruh entered his shop, but the tailor was not there; Unruh killed the man's wife.

Other intended victims successfully locked themselves inside their businesses (a tavern and a restaurant), and Unruh was unable to reach them.

When he heard the sirens of the approaching police, Unruh returned to his apartment and engaged in a standoff. Over 60 police surrounded Unruh's home, and a shootout ensued.

During the siege, Philip W. Buxton, a reporter from the Camden Evening Courier, phoned Unruh's home and spoke briefly with him. On a hunch, Buxton had looked up Unruh's number in the phone book. Buxton later recounted the conversation, which was cut short when police hurled tear gas into the apartment:

"What are they doing to you?"

"They haven't done anything to me yet, but I'm doing plenty to them."

"How many have you killed?"

"I don't know yet. I haven't counted them. But it looks like a pretty good score."

"Why are you killing people?"

"I don't know. I can't answer that yet. I'm too busy. I'll have to talk to you later. A couple of friends are coming to get me."

Arrest and incarceration

Unruh surrendered several minutes later. While Unruh was being arrested, a policeman reportedly asked, “What’s the matter with you. You a psycho?" In response, he said, "I'm no psycho. I have a good mind."

Unruh was later taken in for interrogation at the police headquarters, where policemen and Mitchell Cohen, Camden County prosecutor, questioned him for more than two hours.

He told police that he had spent the previous evening sitting through three showings of a double feature, The Lady Gambles and I Cheated the Law, and had thought that actress Barbara Stanwyck was one of his hated neighbors. He provided a meticulous account of his actions during the killings. Only at the end of the interrogation did they discover he had a gunshot wound in the left thigh, which he kept secret. He was subsequently taken to Cooper Hospital for treatment.

Charges were filed for 13 counts of "willful and malicious slayings with malice aforethought" and three counts of "atrocious assault and battery". He was eventually diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia by psychologists, and found to be hopelessly insane, making him immune to criminal prosecution.

When he was able to leave Cooper Hospital, Unruh was sent to the New Jersey Hospital for the Insane (now Trenton Psychiatric Hospital), to be installed into a bed in a private cell in the maximum-security Vroom Building. Unruh's last public words, made during an interview with a psychologist, were, "I'd have killed a thousand if I had bullets enough."

Victims

During his spree, Unruh killed 13 victims and injured three. Those killed are listed below:

• John Joseph Pilarchik, age 27;

• Orris Martin Smith, 6;

• Clark Hoover, 33;

• James Hutton, 45;

• Rose Cohen, 38;

• Minnie Cohen, 63;

• Maurice J. Cohen, 39;

• Alvin Day, 24;

• Thomas Hamilton, 2;

• Helga Kautzach Zegrino, 28;

• Helen Wilson, 37;

• Emma Matlack, 68; and

• John Wilson, 9.

Wikipedia.org

Howard Unruh, 88, Dies; Killed 13 of His Neighbors in Camden in 1949

By Richard Goldstein - The New York Times

October 19, 2009

Howard Unruh, who carried out one of America’s most infamous mass shootings, killing 13 people, three of them children, in a 20-minute, seemingly emotionless stroll through his neighborhood in Camden, N.J., in September 1949, died Monday at a nursing home in Trenton after 60 years’ confinement. He was 88.

His death was announced by Warren W. Faulk, the Camden County prosecutor. Jason Laughlin, a spokesman for the prosecutor, said Mr. Unruh had been in state custody since his arrest.

Mr. Unruh was found to have paranoid schizophrenia and never stood trial. He was confined to the high-security Vroom Building for the criminally insane at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital until 1993, when he was transferred across the grounds to less restrictive wards in a geriatric unit.

When Mr. Unruh gunned down his neighbors, the shootings were particularly shocking because no one could remember anything like that. And few of his neighbors, in the working-class Cramer Hill section of East Camden, had paid him much notice. An Army veteran who had seen extensive combat in Europe with the artillery in World War II, he lived in a three-room apartment in the 3200 block of River Road with his mother, Freda.

He had often accompanied her to St. Paul’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and was known to read his Bible frequently. A graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, he entered Temple University’s pharmacy school in the fall of 1948 but soon dropped out. At age 28, he was unemployed and supported by his mother, who was estranged from her husband and worked as a packer for a soap company in Camden.

On the morning of Tuesday, Sept. 6, 1949, Mrs. Unruh fixed her son a breakfast of fried eggs and cereal. Moments later, she was astonished to see him threatening her with a wrench. She ran from the apartment to a friend’s home.

At 9:20 a.m., Mr. Unruh, a slender 6-footer, wearing a brown tropical suit, white shirt and bow tie, stepped into the sun-splashed street and walked to a shoemaker’s shop on his block. He pulled out a 9 millimeter German Luger pistol he had purchased at a Philadelphia gun shop in January 1947 and pointed it at the owner, John Pilarchik, 27.

“I had leveled the gun at him, neither of us said nothing, and I pulled the trigger,” Mr. Unruh told a psychiatrist a month later. “He had a funny look on his face, staggered back and fell to the floor. I realized then he was still alive, so I fired into his head.”

Next, he went to a tailor shop looking for the owner, Thomas Zegrino, but instead shot the man’s wife, Helga, 28, who was there alone.

Then he entered a barber shop and shot Orris Smith, 6, who was astride a white hobby horse, getting his hair cut as his mother, Catherine, sat beside him.

The barber, Clark Hoover, 33, was the next victim. In his confession, Mr. Unruh told how the man had “dodged around the barber chair, making it difficult for me to get a clear shot, but I finally hit him, walked over and then shot into his head.”

Then Mr. Unruh approached a tavern, but the owner, Frank Engel, having heard the shots, locked the door and fled with his patrons to the rear as Mr. Unruh shot into the bar.

Next, Mr. Unruh fired into an apartment window and shot Thomas Hamilton, a 2-year-old, in the head. After shooting into a restaurant, he fired through the window of a passing automobile and hit Alvin Day, 24, a television repairman.

Mr. Engel, who owned a pistol, shot Mr. Unruh in the hip from an upper-floor window of the tavern building, but Mr. Unruh seemed not to notice the wound.

Having reloaded his pistol, he went to a drugstore owned by Maurice Cohen, 40, whose family had argued with Mr. Unruh over his using the Cohens’s gate to take a shortcut from his home to the street. As Mr. Unruh entered, Jason Hutton, 45, an insurance agent, was emerging. Mr. Unruh shot him in the head.

Mr. Cohen fled to the roof of his apartment above the drugstore as his wife, Rose, 38, hid in a closet and pushed their son Charles, 12, into another closet. Mr. Unruh shot Mr. Cohen in the back, sending him plunging to the street. He also shot Ms. Cohen, firing through the closet door, and Minnie Cohen, 63, the druggist’s mother, as she was trying to call the police from a bedroom. Charles Cohen was unharmed.

Over the next few minutes, Mr. Unruh shot Helen Matlack Wilson, 37; her son, John, 9; and her mother, Emma Matlack, 68, who were in a car stopped at a red light. He also wounded Charles Peterson, 18, who had approached Mr. Hutton’s body outside the drug store, unaware that the gunman was still on the scene.

On his final stop, Mr. Unruh broke into a home and wounded Madeline Harrie, 36, and her son Armand, 16.

“Children screamed as they tumbled over one another to get out of his way,” Meyer Berger wrote in The New York Times in a 4,000-word account, based on more than 50 interviews, that won a Pulitzer Prize for local reporting under deadline pressure. (He gave the $1,000 prize money to Mr. Unruh’s mother.)

“Men and women dodged into open shops, the women shrill with panic, men hoarse with fear,” Mr. Berger wrote. “No one could quite understand for a time what had been loosed in the block.”

Mr. Unruh fled to his apartment. Some 50 police officers converged there and blazed away with machine guns, shotguns and pistols.

During an interlude, the assistant city editor of The Camden Courier-Post, Philip Buxton, phoned the house. Mr. Unruh answered his call.

Mr. Buxton asked Mr. Unruh how many people he had killed.

“I don’t know, I haven’t counted,” he said. “Looks like a pretty good score.”

“Why are you killing people?” Mr. Buxton asked.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Unruh replied.

After the police fired tear gas, Mr. Unruh came outside, his hands held high, his bow tie still in place.

A search of his room turned up 700 cartridges, a book called “The Shooter’s Bible” (he had used the building’s basement for target practice) and a New Testament Bible.

In his confession, Mr. Unruh said that the night before the killings, he made a list of people to be targeted: the shoemaker, the tailor, the barber, the druggist. He had nevertheless shot down strangers as well.

A psychiatric report found that Mr. Unruh had felt his neighbors were persecuting and belittling him, “that they were thinking of him as a homosexual.”

The report described him as “a master of suppressed rage” who harbored a “smoldering anger.”

Mr. Unruh’s brother, James, said later that “since he came home from the service, he didn’t seem to be the same.”

“He was nervous,” James Unruh said.

His father, Samuel, said Mr. Unruh had “built a shell around himself we could never penetrate.”

Moments after Mr. Unruh surrendered, a policeman said to him: “What’s the matter with you? You a psycho?”

“I’m no psycho,” Howard Unruh replied. “I have a good mind.”

Mr. Unruh’s years in confinement were largely without incident. In 1995, James H. Klein, the public defender who had represented him for two decades, said Mr. Unruh spent most of his time sleeping and watching television. For a while, Mr. Klein said, Mr. Unruh had collected stamps.

Berserk American Kills 12 People

The Auckland Star

Thursday 8th September 1949

NEW YORK, Tuesday. – A 26-year-old ex-serviceman went berserk in Camden, New Jersey, today and killed 12 persons and wounded four others. The ex-serviceman, Howard Unruh, killed five men, five women and two boys, and wounded a man, woman and two boys in a few minutes in the quiet residential section of Camden.

Unruh killed the people in houses, shops and in the street until police fire forced him to take cover in a house.

Barricading himself in a second-story room he exchanged shots with police until tear gas bombs forced him to surrender.

The police, reconstructing the shooting, said Unruh, armed with a .45 automatic Luger pistol, first entered a chemist’s shop, where he killed the proprietor, Maurice Cohen, as he attempted to escape.

Unruh then ran upstairs and killed Cohen’s wife and her mother with two shots.

Running into the street he killed a man with one shot. Then he walked over to a motor car, poked his pistol in the window and fired one shot, which killed a man at the wheel.

Next Unruh walked across the street to a barber’s shop, fired two shots and killed the proprietor.

Then he ran into a house and shot and wounded a mother and her son. Running back into the street Unruh fired at all persons in range, killing six and wounding one with 10 shots.

Police cars raced up the street, firing at Unruh, who ran into a house and barricaded himself on the second floor. The police riddled the room with bullets and then threw 25 tear gas bombs through the window.

Unruh returned the police fire for a few minutes and then staggered from the room calling: "I give up. Don’t shoot."

Stumbling down stairs, he fell into the arms of the police.

Unruh saw three years’ service with the American Army in Europe. He was described by neighbours as "very religious, even to the point of being a fanatic." He always carried a Bible.

The police had to resist an angry mob of about 1000 who wanted to lynch Unruh.

"I Have A Good Mind," Says Killer Of Twelve

The Auckland Star

Monday 12th September 1949

NEW YORK, Saturday. – Leading psychiatrists are co-operating with the police in an effort to find what caused handsome 26-year-old Howard Unruh to mow down neighbours in Camden, New Jersey. This soft-spoken ex-serviceman killed 12 people and wounded three in a shooting affray without parallel for sheer horror and meaninglessness.

Unruh, who is of German extraction and whose name means "unrest," showed no signs of abnormality under questioning.

On the contrary, he insisted, "I am no psycho. I have a good mind."

He clearly remembered every detail of his actions in the fateful 10 minutes of the affray and showed no trace of regret, except for the children he had shot.

"Strange Eyes"

His mother, however, who was visiting a neighbour while he was running amok, commented on how strange his eyes looked and how worried she was about him. A few minutes later the first shots echoed in the street.

Police found his well-worn Bible open at Matthew Chapter 24, predicting the destruction of the temple. Near it was a book entitled "Shooters’ Bible," and a pamphlet called "The Ten Commandments for safety in shooting."

Unruh, who was unemployed, apparently had not made any effort for months to get a job. He divided his time between Bible reading and target practice in the basement of his mother’s small house, in which he lived.

One man's massacre

On the morning of Tuesday 6 September 1949, in a modest, stuccoed house, jammed between a cobbler’s shop and a pharmacy in East Camden, New Jersey, 50-year-old Freda Unruh worked her way through a pile of ironing.

It was too early yet for there to be any warmth in the sun and Freda, a frail women, wore a thick jumper over her housecoat to stave off the morning chill. At eight o’clock, she abandoned the ironing to give her son, 28-year-old Howard, the morning call he had asked for in a note he’d left on the kitchen table the night before. She then set about making him breakfast. Howard, meanwhile, washed, shaved and dressed. Today was a big day for him and he chose his best dark suit, a white shirt and bow tie, which gave him an air of somber formality befitting the gravity of the occasion.

During the next hour, he ate a hearty breakfast, spent some time downstairs in the cellar, and finally returned to the living room where he switched on the radio. At quarter past nine, Freda entered the room. Her boy suddenly wheeled around, a heavy wrench in his raised hand. Freda drew away, pleading, "Howard, you can’t do this to me."

Then, as he stared at her expressionlessly, she turned and raced to the house of a neighbour, Mrs. Caroline Pinner. A few minutes later, gunshots echoed and re-echoed around the small Delaware River community and Freda cried, "Howard, oh, Howard, they’re to blame for this," before fainting in the Pinners’ front room.

Accounts differ as to the precise sequence of events during Unruh’s thirteen-minute rampage through the neighbourhood, but we know how his victims died – "I shot them in the chest first and then I aimed for the head" – and that a 27-year-old cobbler John Pilarchik was the first. Pilarchik was busy in his shop, at 3206 River Avenue. Shortly before 9:20 A.M. he glanced up as a shadow slid towards him across the shop floor, in advance of the tall, lean figure of his neighbour, Howard Unruh.

Pilarchik was a veteran of the Second World War, but had a long ago discarded any soldierly vigilance he might once have possessed. He simply stared in dumb bewilderment as Unruh, with the morning sunlight filtering past his silhouetted figure, raised his right arm to a horizontal position. The muzzle flash that preceded the roar of a 9-mm Luger pistol discharging in his face was John Pilarchik’s last mortal vision. Unruh about-turned and walked calmly back out into the street.

Other local shopkeepers met the same fate as the cobbler. Clark Hoover’s barbershop was two doors away. There was a white-painted carousel horse in the center of the shop, which Hoover used while cutting children’s hair, and a blond boy, 6-year-old Orris Smith, was seated on it, submitting to a shearing, when Unruh entered. "I’ve got something for you, Clarkie," Unruh said to the barber.

Orris Smith’s mother watched incredulously as the well-dressed young man coolly shot both Clark Hoover and little "Brux" (her pet name for her son) and then walked out of the shop as nonchalantly as he had entered. Orris toppled slowly from the carousel horse, landing on the floor with a thud. Mrs. Smith, still scarcely able to believe her eyes, rushed to his side, gathered him up in her arms and staggered out into the soft September sun. "My boy is dead. I know he’s dead," she cried, staring about her, dazed and confused.

Next, Unruh visited the tailor’s shop, at 3214 River Avenue. The tailor, Thomas Zegrino, was out at the time, but his wife of a month, Helga, was working at the back of the shop. "She looked at me and started to say ‘Oh no, no’ and I shot her more than once," Unruh later recalled.

Three members of the Cohen family were killed in the pharmacy farther down the road. Maurice Cohen was climbing out of an upstairs window when he was shot in the back. He keeled over, bounced off the roof and plummeted headlong into the street. Maurice’s wife, Rose, and his elderly mother, Minnie, were also shot. Unruh fired three times into a cupboard where Rose was hiding, then opened the door and shot her in the head. In another room, Minnie was telephoning the police. Unruh walked in, pushed the pistol in her face and pulled the trigger. Then he went back downstairs. Hidden in another closet, 12-year-old Charles Cohen was the only member of the household to survive.

James Hutton, an insurance agent, lived in nearby Westmont, but was a familiar figure in the River Avenue neighbourhood, Like the shopkeepers, he had known Howard for many years; in fact, he was the Unruh family’s own agent. Hutton was in the doorway of the pharmacy when the killer sidled up to him, "Excuse me, sir," Unruh said, then shot him dead. He would later tell detectives, "That man didn’t act fast enough. He didn’t get out of my way."

Unruh also knew, at least by sight, his youngest victim, 2-year-old Thomas Hamilton. Tommy lived at 3208 River Avenue and was peeping out of a window when a bullet hit him between the eyes.

Not all Unruh’s victims, though, were known to him. Alvin Day, a visiting TV repairman, had driven into River Avenue unaware that it had become the arena for one man’s private war. Like John Pilarchik, Day was a Second World War veteran. One of his favourite remarks was that the Germans had never been able to find a bullet with his name on it. Unfortunately for Day, a fellow American citizen, Howard Unruh, had.

Helen Wilson, her 9-year-old son, John, and her mother, Emma Matlack, were also strangers to Unruh. They were in their car, waiting at traffic lights at the junction of River Avenue and Thirty-second Street, when Unruh spotted them. He walked up to the car and fired through the window. Mrs. Wilson, the driver, and Mrs. Matlack, the front seat passenger, were killed outright. Little Johnny clung to life for eighteen hours in hospital before succumbing to the bullet lodged at the base of his brain.

The occupants of another vehicle, two women and their daughters were more fortunate. They heard shooting but thought it was a car backfiring and they continued steadily on their way down the street. For some reason, Unruh completely ignored them. A bakery van driver had a narrow escape, ducking as a bullet whizzed by his ear, and a teenager, who was crossing the road a block away, was hit twice in the leg, but survived.

At some point during the rampage, Unruh himself was wounded. Frank Engel, who ran a tavern across the road from Unruh’s house, had bolted his front door at the start of the shooting and ushered his customers to the back of the room. Unruh had shot up Engel’s door but had not managed to get in, and had moved on down the street to Dominick Latela’s restaurant where he fired more shots, kicked in a glass pane, but also failed to gain entry. Frank Engel, meanwhile, rushed upstairs to his apartment.

He opened a window and took aim at Unruh with a .38-calibre pistol. He fired and hit, but Unruh simply walked on without even acknowledging he had been shot. Engel did not fire again. "I wish I had," he would later tell reporters. "I could have killed him then. I could have put a half-dozen shots into him. I don’t know why I didn’t do it."

After ten minutes of shooting, River Avenue was all but deserted. Shopkeepers – those not already lying dead – had locked and barred their doors; screaming parents had shepherded their children to safety. The emergency services were being flooded with telephone calls from frantic residents.

Unruh tried the door of the American Stores Company, a grocery opposite Cohen’s pharmacy, but it was locked. Earl Horner, the clerk, was crouched nervously behind the counter with his customers. Unruh fired several shots into the shop, but failed to hit anyone. He turned away, and headed off down Thirty-second Street where he entered a house that6 backed onto his mother’s.

In the kitchen, he found Madeline Harrie and her 16-year-old son, Armand. Unruh fired twice at Mrs. Harrie but missed both times. She began to shout and he fired again, wounding her in the shoulder. Armand tried to shield his mother and got a bullet in each arm for his pains. Unruh then struck him over the head with the butt of the Luger, knocking him to the floor.

Several neighbours saw Unruh leave the Harrie’s place and pause to spit on the doorstep. It had just turned half past nine. The sound of police sirens could now be heard and the killer, his gun empty, headed back to his mother’s house. He was inside by the time police cars and motorcycles screeched into the neighbourhood. Only thirteen minutes had passed since he fired he first shot: thirteen people now lay dead or dying; three more lay wounded. Young Charlie Cohen had come out onto the pharmacy porch and was screaming hysterically, "He’s going to kill me. He’s killing everybody."

As police officers surrounded 3202 River Avenue, they were fired upon from an upper-storey window. They returned the fire, pouring round after round into Unruh’s room, shattering the windows and riddling the walls. Unruh, by some miracle, was not killed in the dense mesh of lead, and a gun battle raged for some time. Meanwhile, a local newsman, Philip Buxton, of the Courier-Post, keen to check out what seemed like wild reports coming into his office, got hold of a telephone number: The phone was finally answered and Buxton spoke with a man.

"Is this Howard?"

"Yes, this is Howard. What’s the last name of the party you want?"

"Unruh."

"Who are you and what do you want?"

"I’m a friend and I want to know what they’re doing to you."

"Well, they haven’t done anything to me yet, but I’m doing plenty to them."

"How many have you killed?"

"I don’t know yet – I haven’t counted ‘em, but it looks like a pretty good score."

"Why are you killing people?"

"I don’t know. I can’t answer that yet – I’m too busy."

Unruh was indeed busy. Tear gas canisters had just been hurled into his room and he staggered to the window, eyes streaming and gasping for air. "Okey," he choked. "I give up. I’m coming down."

A minute later, with fifty police guns trained on him, he stepped out into the yard with his arms raised, Cops swarmed across the flowerbeds of morning-glory. "What’s the matter with you?" one of them demanded. "You a psycho?" Unruh gave the officer a level stare. "I’m no psycho," he said. "I have a good mind."

Howard's life

Howard Barton Unruh was born on 21 January 1921, the first son of Samuel Unruh, a dredge boat worker, and his wife, Freda. He was raised in the Delaware River neighbourhood of small businessmen, shopkeepers, traders and their families, which he would later decimate. His early childhood was unremarkable, except he was a little slow in learning to walk and talk.

In school, he was considered an average student, polite and reserved, who seemed to prefer reading his Bible to the company of his fellow. He inspired no great emotional response from his peers, one way or the other; in fact, people barley had reason to notice him, far less become a friend or enemy. When his parent’s separated, in about 1930, he was already rather introverted. He had a lot more affection for his mother than for his father and it was with his mother that he lived, along with his younger brother, James, when his parents went their separate ways.

By early adolescence, Unruh was a somewhat withdrawn and reclusive boy. He favoured hobbies that he could pursue on his own; he started a stamp collection and built elaborate train sets. He never tired of playing with his trains, even as an adult. He was mesmerized by the precision mechanics and engineering, by the critical track intersections and complex loco interaction – ultimately, by the supreme order and efficiency of the systems he constructed.

He developed his brain along the same lines. He went to considerable lengths to train his memory, and doctors examining him after the rampage were amazed by his powers of recall and by his obsessive attention to, and retention of, detail. "His mind is more in the nature of a systematized card file than a dynamic force acting on its environment," Dr. Harold Magee wrote in his notes. "Its chief intellectual function is the storage and reproduction of factual material."

The extreme efficiency and orderliness of the rational logical part of Unruh’s brain was in marked contrast to the great turmoil he was experiencing on an emotional level. There, his mind was a short-circuiting confusion of conflicting feelings and urges, involving his social isolation, his emerging sexuality and his faith in God.

Later, he was able to talk about some of the emotional conflicts that first began to torment him in his youth: "I get an erotic feeling in my penis that associates with my erotic feeling of having intercourse with my mother… I put myself in a fantasy condition; I withdraw and things do not seem as real as they should be. I am constantly tense and anxious, mostly when in population because I feel they are going to harm me or punish me… there is a conflict between my desires of having sex with my mother." This conflict (love and attraction versus guilt and resentment) would manifest itself no more clearly than on the morning when he set about, but could not carry through, braining his mother with the wrench.

Unruh’s Oedipus complex was not his only adolescent worry. In contrast to his sexual desire for Freda, he suffered, according to one doctor, "vague, half-conscious feelings… of fear, anxiety and disgust in his dealings with girls his own age." His brother suspected he was homosexual. He would later tell investigators that Howard once made advances to him while they were sleeping together. As if his anxieties about his sexuality were not torment enough, Unruh, the avid Bible reader, was appalled by what God might think. He can hardly have believed that his sexual desires pleased the Lord.

His thoughts – for all their sparking emotionality in the one hemisphere, and rapidly expanding store of factual information in the other – were rarely evident to those around him. Like Wagner von Degerloch, Unruh was a master of repression. His neighbours considered him a quiet, unremarkable young man, leading a quiet, unremarkable life. He accompanied his mother to St. Paul’s Evangelical Church every Sunday without fail, and attended Monday night Bible classes, where he was known as a keen student of the scriptures who would often mark his favourite passages for further study.

In 1939, he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School and got a job at the naval base in Philadelphia. He began dating a girl, whom he had met at church, and he treated her with the politeness and respect that folk had come to know him for. His belle, in fact, found him a mite too polite for her liking. Even kissing and holding hands were best avoided to Howard’s way of thinking. For him, the relationship was a charade. It was just another sacrifice to peer pressure, another component in the protective conformity capsule, which he had built around himself and which he now inhabited as a virtual prisoner. Later, after his rampage through the neighbourhood, he was questioned about his relationship with the girl and spoke of it with complete indifference:

"Did her kisses make you feel passionate?"

"No."

"Did you ever have any sexual desires for this women?"

"No, but she did for me."

"Have you ever had sexual relations with her?"

"No."

"Have you ever had sexual relations with any women?"

"No."

Unruh was infinitely more interested in the developing war in Europe. He had always followed world events closely, particularly those involving large-scale destruction, but the Second World War was in a league of its own. He filled a scrapbook with newspaper clippings, which he read and re-read, methodically collating the mass of information before committing it to memory. Military equipment, weapons in particular, held not only a special place in his mind, but a special place in his heart. In 1942, he enlisted in the army.

As a soldier, Unruh discovered that he was quite a talented marksman. He earned the rifleman rating of sharpshooter, a peg below expert. It was a revelation and his interest in weapons grew immeasurably. His colleagues found it impossible to say which was his greatest love – the Bible he read with fervent ardor or the rifle he field-stripped and cleaned with religious devotion. When, after his training, he joined the war in Europe, it was with the Good Book in one hand and his M-1 carbine in the other.

In the midst of war, marksmanship was not an abstract talent but the very real power over life and death. For a young man whose impact on people had never been anything other than negligible, this was a heady power indeed. Unruh embraced it passionately. In his usual methodical way, he began to keep a diary, detailing Germans he shot: times, dates, places, and even how the bodies looked in death. In his three-year service with the 342^nd Armored Field Artillery, he reveled in killing.

His favourite job, apparently, was the number one cannoneer position on his unit’s 105-mm howitzer. He loved setting the sights on the target, which was usually within visual range, but most of all he loved firing the gun. He moved with his unit from Italy, through France and Belgium, and on to the finish in a shattered, post-apocalyptic Germany – experiencing firsthand a scale of destruction that previously he had only read about in his Bible.

When the war in Europe ended, H.B. Unruh, private first class, was honourably discharged from the United States Army and returned home to live with his mother in East Camden. He smuggled back with him the weapons and souvenirs he had collected as a soldier. He followed the final stages of the Second World War – combat in the Far East – at a distance but with great interest.

Meanwhile, he tried to pick up the threads of the life he had left behind in New Jersey in 1942. He was now 24 years old, six-foot tall, lean and fit, but to his mother and others in the neighbourhood, he seemed very much the same mild-mannered, quiet young man who had gone off to war three years earlier. As in the past, he accompanied his mother to church on Sundays and attended Monday night Bible classes. Behind the public persona, though, there was a growing bitterness.

Unruh had always been a nonentity in his home community. What had changed, and the reason he now found his lowly status hard to stomach, was the sense of self-worth he had discovered as a soldier. For the first time in his life, he saw himself as a man to be reckoned with. His neighbours, unfortunately, did not and he fiercely resented them for it. Who were they to treat him Pfc. Unruh, killer of Germans, as an inconsequential nobody? Had he not earned the right to a little respect, a little status? "Hey, you – can’t you be more quiet with that gate?" the pharmacist’s wife, Rose Cohen, shouted at him. What he resented most, he later revealed, was the use of the phrase "Hey, you."

People thought so little of him that they did not even have the common decency to address him by name. It was not fair and Unruh could not understand it. When he looked at his neighbour, John Pilarchik, for example, he saw a man the same age as himself, a man who, again like himself, had been away to war and returned home to New Jersey when the war ended. Pilarchik, though, had a place in the community, was well thought of by his fellows and had built up a successful business – in fact, he possessed all the things Unruh felt he himself was entitled to.

Unruh made one known attempt to achieve something within his home community that his neighbours could understand and admire. He took some refresher courses at Brown Preparatory School in Philadelphia, and then, under the GI Bill of Rights, went on to Philadelphia’s Temple University to study pharmacology – the trade of his highly respected next-door neighbours the Cohens. Unfortunately, he was not the least bit interested in the subject, found it impossible to concentrate, and quit the programme after just three months.

For sustenance, Unruh drew on his self-respect and his pride in his marksmanship. He surrounded himself with reminders of his army days. Apart from his stamp album and train sets, a book on astronomy and volumes concerned with what a detective termed "sex hygiene," his bedroom was a shrine to war and weapons.

The walls were decorated with crossed bayonets and pictures of armoured artillery in action; he had books on weaponry and military strategy, clips of 30-30 cartridges for rifle use, a pistol, ashtrays made from German shell casings and a host of other war souvenirs. In the cellar of the house, he set up a shooting range and practised regularly.

Meanwhile, his loathing of those around him grew. Howard and his gun were worth any ten of them and one day he would prove it. He would have his revenge for the slights and insults that he felt were being aimed at him from all sides – for the great injustices that he felt were being done him by his neighbours.

The list of grievances he had against them was long and detailed: "I had trouble with the barber because in building his store next to our place he excavated for the cellar and spread dirt over the vacant lot to the rear which increased the rise of the land and prevented the free drainage of heavy rainfall, and as a result the water was diverted into our cellar, flooding it. Then there was the shoemaker who… not only buried considerable trash in the backyard close to our property, but also kept throwing trash over into our yard on many occasions."

The manager of the American Stores grocery "had always been nice to me, until a clerk that he hired had difficulty one time with me over some change and since that time forward the manager was never nice." The pharmacist, Maurice Cohen, "shortchanged me five different times," and Cohen’s wife, Rose, "was always talking about me and very belligerent towards me and seemed to take pleasure in bawling me out in front of people."

Just as he had during the war, Unruh started to keep a diary – not a death tally of German soldiers this time, but a list of the petty grievances he had against his neighbours. The diary entries were invariably followed by cryptic notes: "Ret. W.T.S." – an abbreviation for "Retaliate when time suitable." And "D.N.D.R." – "Do not delay retaliation." He was obsessed with the idea of retaliation; the word itself appears close to 200 times in the diary.

In the course of the painstaking interrogation of Unruh after the massacre, his reply to one of the least probing questions led to one of the most significant discoveries. He was asked if he had ever been sick or in hospital and answered that he had once been treated for gonorrhea. Prosecutor Mitchell Cohen (no relation to Unruh’s pharmacist neighbour), remembering his earlier assertion that he had never slept with a woman, asked him how he came to contract the disease. Unruh replied that he had been an active homosexual since 1946.

His first homosexual encounter apparently took place in a Philadelphia cinema when a man, whom he had never before met, masturbated him during the film. Thereafter, he became highly promiscuous and, with his customary attention to detail, kept a diary of his sexual encounters, listing names, dates and places. Although he confined his activities to Philadelphia, and even rented a room to ensure maximum discretion, he became convinced – just as Wagner had – that the people of his home community knew his secret. "The tailor… circulated the story that he saw me ‘go down on somebody in an alley one time,’ " Unruh alleged.

He also said that he had heard muttered comments from neighbours who passed him in the street: "You can get him to stay all night with you," and other pointed remarks. He began to fear that he would be physically attacked by his neighbours, and took to arming himself against the possibility. He claimed to have heard people plotting against him: "One time they said they were going to gang up on me." Another time, they said, "Let’s give him a chance to use his gun."

One of the psychiatrists who later examined him noted: "It must definitely be acknowledged that this patient has a very high index of suspicion, a very marked tendency to refer to himself apparently indifferent acts perpetrated by his neighbours and a general paranoid tendency to resent real acts which a normal person would pass off as harmless pranks or part of the everyday friction inevitable between families who live closely together."

As Unruh plotted his revenge, he endeavoured to maintain his public composure. His brother, James, by this time married and living nearby in Haddon Heights – thought Howard was a little nervous at that time but could not put his finger on exactly what form the nervousness took: "He just seemed changed." Neighbours who had once considered him quiet and polite now saw him more as quiet and moody – but that was all. No one was even remotely aware of the true complexion of the world inside his head.

Early in 1947, Unruh added another gun to his collection. It was a German Luger 9-mm pistol, which he purchased in Philadelphia. Later the same year, he brought a mail order machete from L.L. Bean’s, in Maine, after fantasizing about cutting off the Cohen’s heads.

By the spring of 1948, he was no longer accompanying his mother to church on Sundays or attending Monday night Bible classes. His years of study and what Dr. Harold Magee described as an "obsessive rumination concerning his relations to the Deity and his responsibility for right and wrong behaviour" had done little but awaken him to grand biblical themes of apocalypse – themes he could readily adapt to legitimize in his own mind his mass murderous mission.

On Monday 5 September 1949, he went into Philadelphia and spent the evening at the cinema, sitting through several showings of the double bill presentation, I Cheated the Law and The Lady Gambles. In the early hours of the morning of Tuesday 6 September, he returned home by bus, arriving at around three o’clock. Someone had removed his backyard gate from its hinges.

The time for revenge had finally arrived. He resolved there and then, he told the county prosecutor, to shoot the people who had "talked about me," and he figured 9:30 A.M. would be a good time to do it because most of the neighbourhood gossip-shops would be open by that time, instructing his mother to wake him at 8:00 A.M. Having made the decision to end his torment once and for all, he apparently enjoyed a good night’s sleep.

Rampage in Camden

By Katherine Ramsland - TruTV.com