Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  While Minnie made her bed, Charles pushed the screen out and looked down. Odd, he thought, there were no cars in the intersection.

  All he saw was Junior, the odd fellow who lived next door, walking in front of the store. Since coming home from the war, Junior had lived with his mother and didn’t work. He always walked around in a jacket, tie, and combat boots, carrying a Bible and blurting out gospel passages to anybody whom he passed, but people had stopped taking him seriously. Today, looking tidy as always in a light brown suit, white shirt, and a striped bow tie, he seemed to have more purpose in his step. His thin lips were tight, his face intent. And he wasn’t carrying his Bible.

  He had a gun.

  As Charles watched, Junior walked right up to Mr. Hutton, his father’s insurance man, who’d just emerged from the drugstore’s front door. They spoke a few words that Charles couldn’t hear, then Junior raised his lanky arm and fired his gun into Mr. Hutton. Then again …and again.

  The insurance man crumpled on the sidewalk as Junior then calmly walked through the front door of the Cohens’ drugstore.

  “Junior’s got a gun!” Charles yelled. He heard his mother scream.

  Minnie was stunned until she heard Rose running up the stairs from the store.

  “Hide, Charles, hide!” Rose screamed. “Mama, run away, run away!”

  As Charles scampered to his little room at the back of the house, Rose shoved him in his closet.

  “Don’t make a sound!” she ordered him before she hid in her own closet down the hall. But he could still hear his grandmother frantically dialing the police on the phone next to her bed.

  Howard Unruh didn’t just hold grudges.

  For twenty-nine years, he nourished and

  cultivated them like black orchids.

  “He’s got a gun!” she shrieked into the receiver. “He’s got a gun!”

  Charles covered his ears, but he heard a few rapid gunshots outside, then the sound of heavy footsteps coming up the stairs. His grandmother was still screaming into the phone, her fingers clattering the cradle as if the line were dead, trying desperately to connect to someone, anyone …

  Then a shot. And silence.

  Charles sucked in his breath and closed his eyes. He tried to make himself invisible in the dark at the back of his suffocating little closet as he heard the heavy footsteps coming down the hall.

  Three more shots rang out, then after a few seconds, a fourth.

  Before he could hear the footsteps fading away down the stairs, Charles fell into a terrified unconsciousness.

  When he awoke minutes later, his whole world had changed.

  AVENGING GRIEVANCES

  Howard Unruh didn’t just hold grudges. For twenty-nine years, he nourished and cultivated them like black orchids. He was a collector of wounds.

  Since he had come home from the war, he’d heard his neighbors talking about him. Sometimes behind his back, sometimes to his face. At the bus stop. In the dinette. On the street. He was a mama’s boy, they said. He was a queer, they said. He was a gangster because he carried a gun, they said. “See that guy?” they’d say when he walked past. “You can get him to stay all night with you.”

  The lying tailor told somebody that he saw Unruh going down on some guy in an alley. The shoemaker threw his trash in the Unruh yard. The barber dug his new cellar and purposely piled the dirt so that the rain flooded his poor mother’s basement.

  That kid who sold the Christmas trees—Sorg was his name—plugged his lights into an outlet in the basement and stole Unruh’s electricity. Sure, he offered to pay for it, but he never came around with money. He was a thief.

  And the druggist, Cohen, was the worst. Cohen and his whole family. They talked about Howard in their house. He could hear them through the walls. The Jew and his wife shortchanged people and kept the money. His son played that damn trumpet and the radio too loud and then made it louder if anybody complained. And Cohen’s wife. She bawled out Unruh in public for leaving her damn gate open because stray dogs got in the yard they shared and scattered the trash around. She said she could see by his eyes he wasn’t right. That’s why he built the new gate in the back—so they couldn’t embarrass him anymore by scolding him where everyone could hear.

  They were wrong about him. All of them. Unruh didn’t smoke, curse, drink, or run with loose women. He loved the sad, somber music of Brahms and Wagner—which they ridiculed, so he played it loud. He believed in God and loved his mother, and they hated him for it.

  All of them. All of them were tearing him down, destroying his character, planning to gang up on him, to make him use his guns. They were building their shops too close, changing their money like the sinners they were …He could see them, all of them, as they walked past, and he knew that they were talking about him.

  For more than two years, Unruh kept lists of his grievances and secretly plotted to kill his enemies. He made pages of notes, recording what they said about him:

  C—See that guy? He’s letting his mother support him.

  M—Hay fever. Hope it gets him good.

  M—Wish he would drop dead in his tracks.

  CH—Loud noises—loud horn blowing for our benefit.

  L—Retaliated.

  M—You dirty bum. I wish you were dead.

  L—Let’s give him a lot of noise when his mother’s asleep.

  CH—Wanted to create trouble for me.

  Then Unruh began to imagine how he would even the score. He bought a machete to decapitate the Cohens. He bought a fountain pen that dispensed tear gas to protect himself in case he was jumped. He started collecting guns, and he built a shooting gallery in his basement and made his own bullets so he could kill the others.

  The brooding Unruh kept other lists, too. For three years in the war, as his unit rolled from Italy to Germany, he wrote down every Nazi he had killed, with details of where and how he’d done it.

  And he kept a secret list of the men he met on his clandestine nocturnal trips to the city.

  The broken gate was the final straw.

  After supper on Labor Day, Unruh took the bus to Philadelphia. At about 7:30, he bought a forty-cent ticket to the Family Movie Theater on Market Street, an all-night grind house and popular gay hangout after the war. A double feature was playing: the low-budget murder mystery I Cheated the Law and The Lady Gambles, the latter starring Barbara Stanwyck in a lurid morality play about obsessive gambling.

  But Unruh wasn’t there for the movies. He didn’t even know their titles. Whatever happened inside the dark theater, he sat through two showings of both films and left almost seven hours later, at 2:20 a.m., to catch a bus back to Camden. At 3 a.m., he got off the bus at Cramer Hill and walked to the alley behind his mother’s apartment, where he could use the new gate and nobody would know he’d been out. But the gate was broken.

  It enraged him. The gate was his independence, and they destroyed it to spite him. The time had come to settle his grievances once and for all.

  RETRIBUTION

  Unruh left a note on the kitchen table for his mother to wake him at eight and locked himself in his bedroom at the back of the apartment. He took the Luger and two spare clips from its wooden case. He laid out thirty-three bullets—plenty to do what needed to be done—and went to bed.

  But Unruh couldn’t sleep. He lay awake, their mocking faces flashing in his head, every insult catalogued, every indignity remembered. His fury wouldn’t allow him to rest.

  So he made another list: the ten people he must kill in the morning. Cohen …Cohen’s wife …Cohen’s mother …Pilarchik, the shoemaker …Hoover, the barber …Zegrino, the tailor …the tailor’s son …the man in the apartment next to the tailor …Latela, the dinette owner …the kid named Sorg.

  Then he chose the moment his retribution would begin. Nine-thirty. Their stores would all be open and he could walk right in. The money changers and rumormongers would die.

  List made, plans laid, so finally, Howard Unruh could sleep.
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br />   His mother called him at 8 a.m. on the dot. He shaved, brushed his wavy hair, and dressed in his best suit. He ate a breakfast of Post Toasties, milk, sugar, and fried eggs, but his mind was elsewhere. When he finished, he went down to his basement target range and reached up into the rafters where he’d hidden a length of lead pipe. He’d planned to lure the kid Sorg down here someday and bludgeon him with it. Now he needed it for something else.

  Back upstairs, he stood by the old console radio in the living room and called his mother from her ironing. First, she saw the empty look in his eyes. Then she saw the pipe in his hand.

  “Howie!” she cried. “Howie, what’s wrong?”

  He said nothing. He didn’t even seem to know her.

  “You’re frightening me!” she said.

  Suddenly, Unruh raised the pipe over his head, ready to crush her skull with it. His mother cowered, whimpering.

  “Why would you do that, Howard? Why?”

  In the moment he hesitated, she backed away slowly, then ran out the back door toward a friend’s apartment across the street. When the friend tried to calm her down, all she could say was, “Howard doesn’t love me anymore.”

  Killing his mother had not been part of his plan, and Unruh didn’t even know why it had crossed his mind. But he had no such doubt about what came next.

  He shoved thirty-three bullets into his coat pocket and racked the first cartridge into the Luger’s chamber. The day of reckoning, a warm and slightly over-cast Tuesday, was about to begin.

  Howard Unruh shoved thirty-three bullets into

  his coat pocket and racked the first cartridge

  into the luger’s chamber. The day of reckoning,

  a warm and slightly overcast Tuesday,

  was about to begin.

  The shoemaker was first. Twenty-seven-year-old John Pilarchik, who had served four years as an Army medic in the Pacific without a scratch, was working behind his counter and didn’t even look up until Unruh was standing in front of him. Without saying a word, Unruh aimed the gun at Pilarchik and pulled the trigger. The gut-shot cobbler looked stunned as he staggered back and fell to the floor. Unruh stood over him and shot him once in the head just to be sure.

  Then Unruh went next door to the barbershop, where six-year-old Orris Smith was sitting on an ornate carousel horse, having his hair cut by barber Clark Hoover for his first day in first grade. When Hoover saw Unruh come in the door with a gun, he dodged around the hobbyhorse, but Unruh shot the little boy in the head while his mother watched in horror, then chased down the barber and killed him, too, with one shot behind the ear.

  WHILE THE EXACT PATH OF HOWARD UNRUH’S “WALK OF DEATH” REMAINS MURKY, THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER’S MAP ON THE NEXT DAY MAY HAVE COME CLOSEST TO TRACING HIS STEPS.

  Philadelphia inquirer

  From there, he went to the drugstore, where the insurance man, James Hutton, forty-five, was just coming out.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Unruh said, seeming not to recognize the man from whom he himself had bought a policy.

  Hutton was dumbfounded, frozen in his tracks.

  If Hutton couldn’t choose whether to live or die, Unruh would decide for him. He shot him point-blank in the heart. Indecision killed the insurance man. Later, Unruh would tell police, “That man didn’t act fast enough. He didn’t get out of my way.”

  The shot that killed Hutton startled Maurice and Rose Cohen, who bolted from their shop floor. Maurice sprinted out the back while Rose ran upstairs screaming at Charles to hide—and Unruh followed.

  Maurice was shot in the back as he fled and died in the gutter near his own garage. In the Cohens’ second-floor apartment, Unruh heard Rose whimpering in her bedroom closet and fired three shots through the door, wounding her. He then opened the door and fired a single shot into her head.

  Hearing Minnie trying to call police, Unruh went into her room and shot her in the face. She fell across her bed, the phone receiver still in her hand.

  Skipping Charles’s bedroom, Unruh went back downstairs and paused to reload one of his clips, intent on raising his body count out on the street, where he strolled mechanically, looking for victims.

  He killed a passing motorist, twenty-four-year-old TV repairman Alvin Day, who had slowed down to watch Unruh as he walked toward the tailor’s shop. Unruh casually stepped in front of the car and shot Day through the windshield.

  In his deadly hunt for the tailor, Tom Zegrino, Unruh spied the curtains moving in the window of a ground-floor apartment next door. He fired through the glass, killing a two-year-old boy who’d been trying to see the commotion outside.

  Nobody was in the tailor shop except the tailor’s new wife, Helga. They’d been married only one month, and she was working in the back. She screamed, “Oh no, no!” when she saw Unruh with a gun. He shot her.

  For reasons he couldn’t explain later, Unruh went back to the American Stores grocery, the little market across from the drugstore. He bore no grudges against the grocer but remembered he’d once quarreled with a clerk over his change. However, word of his rampage had already swept like wildfire through the street, and six people had locked themselves safely inside. So a frustrated Unruh turned to see two women and a child in a coupe at the stoplight on River Road. He walked up and shot them all.

  In twelve minutes, Howard Unruh had fired

  thirty-three shots. Thirteen people were

  dead or dying, and three were wounded.

  Leaving them all to die, he walked boldly down the middle of the street, popping gunfire at anybody or anything that moved. He fired several shots at some young men standing near the tap house and at the driver of a parked bread truck. Cramer Hill was mayhem. Up and down the street, people were screaming and shouting, “Crazy man!” One shopkeeper even shot back.

  On his final stop, Unruh broke into a home behind his apartment, beyond his broken gate, and wounded a mother and her teenage son. He would have killed them—and many more, he told police later—but he ran out of bullets.

  In twelve minutes, Howard Unruh had fired thirty-three shots. Thirteen people were dead or dying, and three were wounded. Three of the dead were children.

  “Why Are you killing people?”

  He was done, and he was pleased. He returned to his mother’s apartment, walked upstairs to his room, and laid the Luger on his writing desk. He crawled into his rumpled bed and pulled the sheet over his face.

  He wanted to sleep but couldn’t. A commotion arose in the backyard. Somebody was yelling. Unruh got out of his bed and looked out the window. Armed cops were everywhere, standing on the Cohens’ garage, hunkering behind the hedges, dashing around like blue cockroaches when the light is switched on. Some fired their pistols and tommy guns up at the building, while others trampled his mother’s morning glories and asters. And they were all hollering at Unruh.

  He backed into the hallway, away from the window. His plan didn’t provide for this. He wasn’t sure what to do.

  Then the phone rang. Unruh picked it up.

  “This Howard?” a man on the other end asked.

  “Yes, this is Howard,” he answered. “What’s the last name of the party you want?”

  “Unruh.”

  “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “I’m a friend,” the voice said. In fact, it was Phil Buxton, assistant city editor of the Camden Evening Courier. After the first police calls came in, he’d looked up Unruh’s number—Camden 4-2490W—in the phone book. He was astounded when Unruh actually answered, and even more astounded that he could hear gunfire in the background.

  “I want to know what they’re doing to you down there,” Buxton asked.

  Unruh thought a moment and replied calmly.

  “They haven’t done anything to me—yet. I’m doing plenty to them.”

  Buxton asked how many people Unruh had killed.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t counted ’em, but it looks like a pretty good score.”

  “Why are you killing p
eople?”

  “I don’t know,” Unruh said, his voice flat. “I can’t answer that yet. I’m too busy now.”

  The dogged Buxton didn’t want to lose the connection.

  “Howard! Howard! Listen to me,” he pleaded. “I want to talk to you.”

  “I’ll have to talk to you later,” Unruh said as he hung up. “A couple of friends are coming to get me.”

  At that moment, glass shattered. Police lobbed a tear-gas canister through Unruh’s bedroom window, but it was a dud. Soon, another canister came in, and the room filled with acrid smoke as the cops fired their guns at the broken window.

  Unruh thought about shooting back, but he had no quarrel with the cops. He wasn’t mad at them. All he could do was shout to them above the din that he wanted to give up, explain it all to them, and get whatever was coming to him.

  Then the shooting stopped.

  “Unruh, you comin’ out?” a sergeant yelled from the yard.

  HOWARD UNRUH WAS CAPTURED BY CAMDEN POLICE ONLY MINUTES AFTER HIS “WALK OF DEATH.” WHEN ONE ARRESTING COP ASKED HIM IF HE WAS “PSYCHO,” UNURH REPLIED, “I’M NO PSYCHO. I HAVE A GOOD MIND.”

  Associated Press

  The torn white curtains at the shattered window rustled and the long-limbed Unruh appeared to the police below.

  “Okay,” he shouted. “I give up. I’m coming down.”

  “Where’s that gun?” the cop hollered.

  “It’s on my desk, up here in the room,” Unruh told him. “I’m coming down.”

  Within seconds, a coughing Unruh appeared at the back door, his hands held high. While cops patted him down and cuffed him, angry onlookers cried out. “Lynch him!” they said. “Hang him now!”

  But Unruh remained impassive. He surrendered as serenely as he had killed.

  “What’s the matter with you?” one of the angry cops asked him. “You a psycho?”

  Unruh looked at the cop, his burned, dark eyes empty.

  “I’m no psycho,” he said. “I have a good mind.”